Economic system

You are correct that the economic system of this game is simple (in that it uses simple addition and subtraction and no difficult concepts are involved), but from your description it is clear that it is going to be very high in fiddliness and take a long time to play.

If decreasing the game play time is one of your goals, here are some ideas about how you might accomplish this.

1. Reduce the number of resource types.
In comparison to other games out there, 6 is on the high end for number of resource types. There are a bunch of games out there which have up to 5 resource types, but these games typically revolve entirely around their economic system. That is, manipulating the economic system _is_ the game. If in your game you want the economic system to be just one aspect of the game, rather than the entirety of it, you'd be looking at something substantially simpler.

2. Change from an accumulation economy to a supply economy.
It sounds like your game involves collecting resources every turn based on territories owned, then spending these resources on upkeep, buying new armies, etc. This is pretty much guaranteed to be fiddly and time consuming for humans to play. (This kind of economy works fine on computers because the computer takes care of all of the number crunching and the physical manipulation of components.) A different option for an economic system is supply based. By this I mean the territories determine the supply of resources available each turn, but you never actually collect the resources. Anything not spent during the turn is lost. For example, say a territory supplies 3 iron and each army requires 1 iron in upkeep. If you only have 2 armies, you don't get to keep the excess iron; it is lost. If you have 4 armies you must remove one at the end of the turn because you can't pay its upkeep. This style of economy would still require a degree of counting every turn, but would remove much of the fiddliness.

3. Stagger the collection of resources.
Counting up and dealing with 6 different resources every turn is always going to be time consuming and tiring. Could you stagger the resource collection so that each turn you collect only one type of resource? This cuts out 5 sixths of the counting and collecting. It could be a fixed pattern of resource collection (use a turn counter with the 6 resources in a circle, and progress a marker around the circle each turn), or it could be random (roll 1d6 to determine which resource type is collected), or each player might get to choose which one he wants (so player A collects iron, while player B collects wood).

These are just some ideas to think about -- hopefully you find something that works for your game.

Regards,
kos

Because there's the type of complexity that comes from the number of things to consider, the different combinations of thing, and having a wide decision tree as a result. This type of complexity usually isn't the type that makes a game very interesting.

Suppose each turn a player must perform two different actions which I will call A & B. The player may determine the order in which to take the actions. These are the possibilities:

AB or BA (2*1=2)

Add one more action (C) in the mix, now the possibilities are:

ABC,ACB,BAC,BCA,CAB,CBA (3*2*1=6)

By adding just one type of action, the decision tree has tripled. Adding a fourth action would make for (4*3*2*1) 24 combinations. It's easy to make a game complex that way, but it doesn't make a game more interesting, necessarily. It would just make a player's turn some sort of puzzle, figuring out the combination that gives the most optimal outcome.

For example, if CAB results in 5 victory points and all the others result in less VP, then CAB is clearly the best order of taking the actions. Figuring this out might have been a complex process, but it doesn't result in an interesting decision.

Now suppose CAB instead results in 5 VP and 3 gold, while ACB results in 2 VP and 6 gold and BAC results in 1VP and 8 gold (all the other choices being inferior). That may be an interesting choice if it isn't clear how gold translates into VPs.

So, I hope that makes clear why adding complexity doesn't result in a more interesting game. The reverse may be true, by reducing complexity, you might actually introduce more difficult decisions - which is a different kind of complexity, more interesting.

Now, that doesn't have much to do with your problem of the upkeep phase being a bit too cumbersome ;) But it is still a good idea to think about this kind of stuff, because complexity adds up very quickly.

One way to reduce the work would be to track only the surplus production. You can have a track for each resource that indicates how many you earn that round. Then you add a token of the type to the track when you increase your production. When you create a unit with an upkeep you remove the right number of upkeep tokens from the earning track; when that piece leaves play return the token to the track.

Example:
- I have 1 gold per round production; so there is a token on the gold production track
- I build a gold mine which increases my production to 2 gold per round, I add a second token to the gold production
- I build a knight which requires a gold upkeep, so I remove a token from the gold production track and place it under the knight

Now as long as the knight is in play, I never have to think about its upkeep.

Actually thinking about it some more, you could just increase the production track based on set values when a particular piece is removed; no need for the extra fiddly bit I had first described. Doing it that way, you should only need a single tracking token per resource.

Edited to add: I'm a space cadet, this is essentially what you outlined in your initial post as your alternative. Therefore, I must think it is a good approach :)

I like what was suggested by BENagy. It basically encapsulates the law of diminishing returns. There comes a point where not matter how much cash you throw at something, it just won't give you that same return. By putting this into unit cost like BENagy said, will help eliminate the need for upkeep. You do still need to count the number of units though and that is where the complexity and time consuming part of it are...so perhaps it's not the best solution. It does eliminate the need to count up resources and pay them everyturn though, so nevermind, it does help.

The income tracker thingy is brilliant and it should be added to your game for sure no matter what you decide to do. It could be a simple track, and then you can have another track where you keep track of how many you do have.

In other words, it would be more like, an army takes 3ish food for upkeep.

How about only doing the resource stuff every few turns. Like a season. So every three turns or so you fiddle with the resources. I'm guessing there is going to be some troop movement and combat? What are you doing with these things you build or purchase? Is it just a placement kind of thing? If this game does have a combat element, then that gives more time for movement and combat. So if the element of the economy is just meant to be supporting a larger picture, it won't overshadow/bog down the rest of the game.

Also how complex do you want this game to be. Not all games need to be fast paced. There are games out there have done well as being a slow methodical game.