Let say you have a game where you can spend money of different 3 different kind of stuff. If your income is 10$, you will spend in average 3.33$ on each of the 3 elements.
Now let say you want to make an expandable game and you add 2 new categories of stuff to buy which are as important that the 3 previous ones. Now the average money spent on each element would be 2$.
So adding stuff, split the player's resources which will change and slow down the behavior of the game. I found a way to make sure that you could add stuff indefinitely to the game without having ressource split problem.
A simple example: each character as a wealth level. If you allow the character to buy an item, he can take any item where the price is equal or lower to the character's wealth level.
With this method, money does not tell you how much you can buy but rather what is the highest quality you can acquire.
I was thinking to implement this in a civ game. For example, your economy level could determine what you are allowed to place into play.
An idea I had is to have for example a production level, which gives let say a base production of 3 point from various infrastructure. Then you could use money tokens to increase these levels for the turn. For example, you could add 2 coins in production to boost you production level for this turn to 5.
So you could en up with a situation where you could control your spending in various categories without having to calculate income and spendings. You could have for example 3 different level.
Civil
Military
Court
Each would have a basic level according to your empire's infra structure and you could split money tokens between those 3 values. this will determine the levels for the turn, which will give you access to different things. (Ex: a high military level allow you to maintain higher quality units)
From that, the notion of flexibility comes in. You can either have little base value with lot of money, that allows you to adjust your levels more easily. OR have high base values and little money , which gives you less way to manipulate the levels.
It might be a bit hard to understand, but I am a bit in a hurry, so I cannot develop more.
In general, do you like the idea?
I have been toying with the idea. I have a hard time to make the core of the economy work. I tried so many system so far. Here is a summary of what I have done.
I first thought of using 3 level (CIty, Military, empire) and then make them progress through the game. But an idea I found really cute would be to have a small city design (3x3 grid) where you can place buildings. The design would represent the configuration of your whole empire. You could flip some buildings to upgrade them. This would reflect more the theme of the game.
But it leads to many other problems like player using an optimal pattern of buildings and repeating the same pattern in every game.
I first had an idea like in endeavor, you take 1 building per turn. This means the player will progress as the game evolves but even if they lose half of their empire, they do not lose their building config. So there will still be advanced buildings in the remaining city. It reflected how city worked in the civilization video game, the older are the cities, the more buildings there are.
I was not sure if I should go for 3 abstract values, or many buildings to add more unique details. For example, I could say that if you want ships, you city level needs to be level 2. That is the plain abstract method. OR I could make a port building to place in your city template that will unlock ships. I find this much more elegant, but every building will have a somewhat unique effect rather than raise a value. Requirements will require a certain building rather than a level, unless some buildings add levels.
The other unfortunate thing is that I realized that even if spending money can be problematic, as illustrated in the first post, it is fun to spend. So I am thinking either to have real money that can only spent on unique stuff (rather than regular empire management). OR every turn, you have a wealth level that varies from a turn to another(Economic system), and if the player has enough wealth, he can buy it.