Empire/War boardgames --Why are they all so stupid?

Which others? Your topic indicates that you think ALL war and empire board games are stupid. How many have you actually played?

It's really a question of what a game is simulating. For example, in a game where each turn is a year, then the resource supply could be considered to be "the annual harvest", and there's no reason that should run out. At the level of two countries at war, finding resources to fund the army probably isn't that much of a problem, either. Of course, a country may be diverting funds from other needful things, and I suppose you could simulate this if you wanted to, but added realism doesn't always result in added fun or added playability.

I'm actually in the early stages of a game about the 30 years war, which ravaged the German countryside, and in that game, economic decline, and thus, an increased difficulty to pay your army, will be a factor. But I wouldn't expect every game to incorporate this effect.

Sure, but that doesn't make these games better; only different. For one thing, WarCraft is an operations-level game, not a "grand strategy" game, and this kind of consideration may be more reasonable in such a game. And additionally, there are of course potential pitfalls in a depleting resource game; if, as you say, the richest player wins, is this a war game or a game about racing for resources?

It may be; try your hand at designing such a game! But don't call an entire genre of games "stupid" just because they happen to abstract one aspect of reality that you think should be included. Instead, view it as an opportunity to create a unique game that incorporates these effects.

-Jeff

Struggle of Empires has an interesting economic mechanism: you need money to make attacks. Money is available from a number of sources, but can also be obtained to an essentially infinite degree by taxing your own population. But taxing makes you accumulate "unrest" (which can also come from other sources), and too much unrest can cost you victory points or even lose you the game outright if your nation collapses in revolution.

In addition to gold and unrest, you must also manage your population level, which is another form of resource which can run low.

In A Game of Thrones you must manage your supply level, which controls how many armies you can field and how large they can be. You must also manage your "political power," a currency used to maneuver for strategic advantages and to obtain the support of non-player forces to hold regions you have taken after your troops have left.

So there are definitely wargames that feature limited resources. But I also agree with Jeff: a game designer's #1 job is playability, not simulation. I'm not very fond of Risk, but that's not because I think it's a poor simulation. I just don't think it's a very interesting game.

One good way to start a discussion on a topic is to say, "What do people think about X?" or "I'm confused about the lack of X in Y. Why doesn't Y have X?"

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Natural resources never run out. They just get more and more expensive as more and more sophisticated means are required to extract the resource from the environment.

For example, in America the ores from which metals are derived used to contain a great deal of metal per unit mass. This isn't the case now, but we've got a lot of technology in place to get metals out of what is essentially just a little better than dirt.

Along the same vein (no pun intended) we will eventually have to get really good at getting oil from the Earth's crust. And when it gets too expensive to do that, we'll switch to alternatives (unless the rising costs of oil cause everything else that depends on it for transport to become more expensive, depressing the world economy and making it such that we don't have the wherewithal to build the infrastructure for oil's replacements... that would be, um, interesting).

I think it's possible to make an interesting game that incorporates these economic realities, but I would make the game *about* economics. If I were to include war in such a game, I would like the idea of giving war a back seat to economics, where wars simply induce changes in economies.

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Re: WarCraft, etc.:

In WarCraft III, the more troops you have, the smaller the amount of resources collected that actually goes into your coffers (the rest goes to an upkeep cost).

My RTS experience is limited to Blizzard games (the WarCraft games and StarCraft (when are they going to give me my sequel?!)) but in those games, there is no land over which you have clear enough dominion to levy taxes on.

Incidentally, it would be a bad idea to plan out every last troop expenditure in those games- there is always the threat of a surprise attack that would invalidate your plans. You also don't know the real extent of the resources you can secure- maybe you'll be able to take the next bed of resources before it's depleted, or maybe you won't. So they aren't really puzzle games.