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Resource management and corruption

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Sat, 01/31/2015 - 19:33
fayinsky
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Joined: 08/02/2014

Hi all, this is the first time I post on BGDF. I'm designing a strategic game with the intent to teach some basic concepts in Chemistry, and there are two types of resources involving in it - money and research.

To encourage people to use resources as many as possible each round, I want to eliminate research stock as a whole (which means that if you can't spend all research points you have, they will be taken away from you) and introduce corruption to money stock (you'll lose a portion of your money stock every round).

Does this make sense or it will drive players away?

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Sat, 01/31/2015 - 20:14
#1
questccg
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Joined: 04/16/2011
A few thoughts

Why don't you have a THIRD resource which converts the other two to it according to "variables".

Let me explain:

So firstly let's say you have 5 Research points and you want to conserve them... For each 2 Research points, you get 1 Reserve point.

At a later point in time, if you want to use Reserve points, it would cost 4 Reserve points to get 2 Research points...

If you do the math, 4 Reserve points would cost 8 Research points and you would only get 2 Research points.

Alternatively is to convert all unused Research points to money. Again using the same principle I mentioned above. You could also IMPOSE a TAX Percentage each round making it even hard to stash your cash.

For example the tax rate could be 3 points for each 5 money points you have. So you would end up with only 2 points (if you had 5 money). This might make for a simpler solution - that would sort of do what you had initially in mind...

The tax rate could vary each round and players could have ways of affecting the tax rate (such as "tax return" -> you gain 5 money), etc.

Note: Not sure how your Chemistry game works, but you could add things like "You get a government grant" +8 Research, "Tax Break" 0 Tax this turn, etc...

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Sat, 01/31/2015 - 21:34
#2
fayinsky
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Joined: 08/02/2014
Marvelous!

Thanks Questccg, I thought about converting those unused research points into other stuff but I'm still testing all possible options that I could think of, and you certainly helped to make that list longer :D

In my chemistry game, each player will act like a government leading a country, and that's why instead of "taxing" I think I have to use "corruption" if I want to reduce the money stock. It is kinda weird to tax a government. But I do have a level mechanism in place to make the effect of corruption fluctuates a little bit for more fun.

I like your suggestion of reserve points, as it has so much potential other than just converting them back to resources. Currently my research points can only help players research some basic chemistry concepts, but by converting them to reserve points, I'm thinking that these points can be accumulated for temporary boost on other aspects of developments (even military strength) as well.

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Sun, 02/01/2015 - 21:35
#3
firstcultural
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Joined: 09/11/2014
if you're modeling a national

if you're modeling a national economy, the way I see it is:

Research points = available scientist time. Makes sense that if a scientist isn't working this year, that time is lost.

Money points = equipment and materials manufacturing capacity. sure, you can make more gadgets this turn and stockpile them, but some may be obsolete in the future.

In this situation I'd rename Money stock to Equipment stock.

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Sun, 02/01/2015 - 23:34
#4
radioactivemouse
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Joined: 07/08/2013
The first thing I had in mind...

I don't know if this will even fit with the mechanics, but I was thinking each increment of money and research would be represented as cards. On one side is the actual resource, on the other is a random printing of a corruption symbol. At the end of the round, you would shuffle your resources and flip over one of your resource cards and it will show how many resources you "lose".

This is kind of like the damage/critical cards from games like X-Wing.

That should create a nice random corruption mechanic, while making it simple and keep it streamlined.

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