Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
In the meantime, players need to build granaries, markets, and warehouses to dis-
tribute all these goods effectively over the growing city.
One of the advantages of studying
Caesar III
is that it makes most of the resource
flows visible. The player has to build roads to connect farms to markets and to con-
nect houses to workshops. She can see people in the game carry goods from one
place to another. New citizens flow into the city from a particular edge of the map
and leave the city on a different side. In
Caesar III
, the structure of the economy
closely resembles the map of the city.
Figure 9.3
represents the basic economic relationships among some of these ele-
ments. The consumption of trade goods in residences triggers the production of
wealth. More wealth has a positive effect on the amount of labor generated and
money generated through taxes. At the same time, wealth drains quickly, creating
an ever-increasing need to supply residences with high-quality trade goods.
FIGURe 9.3
Basic economic rela-
tionships in
Caesar III
,
with different colors
indicating the flow of
different resources
In the game, the actual connections between all these elements are flexible: A farm
might deliver its crops to a granary, warehouse, or workshop depending on the
needs and the distances to these locations (
Figure 9.4
). The challenge of
Caesar III
is to utilize space effectively and build a smoothly running economy. Players gradu-
ally build this economy as they see it, but it will invariably be dominated by the
positive feedback loop that involves production, consumption by citizens, and tax
