Building Economies - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 198

mines to increase production of buildings and units. Players must find locations to
construct upon that best suit their strategy. A player who wants a strong military will
need to produce more raw materials, while building close to rivers can speed up
trade, wealth, and scientific advancements. The player must consider both long-term
and short-term issues: Cities whose population grows fast will eventually produce
more resources than cities that are located close to interesting resources but far from
fertile soil, which is needed for population growth. Civilization is default mode of
play randomly generates a landscape ( Figure 9.1 ) for every game the player starts.
Players must make the most of the land they have discovered.
FIGURe 9.1
Civilization V
The diagrams that we used earlier to represent StarCraft and similar real-time strat-
egy games took into account only a single base in which players build every type of
building only once. In reality, players often construct the same building multiple
times. They also start new bases set at different distances from vital sources of gas
and minerals. You can add these options into a Machinations diagram, but that
would complicate it a lot without actually making the structure of the game clearer.
Using the Machinations framework to model more complex games like Civilization
or SimCity in their entirety is daunting. Although many of the individual mechanics
can be easily captured using Machinations diagrams, different sessions require dif-
ferent diagrams because players effectively hook up game elements differently every
time. It simply is impossible to try to make one big Machinations diagram that
manages to capture all these options. To understand and design economy building
games, we need a more flexible way of using Machinations diagrams. To illustrate it,
we'll analyze one game in more detail: Caesar III .