Building Economies - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 206

An important aspect of these economic components is that they can be hooked
up in various ways. Olive farms and markets both need to tap into the general
flow of labor resources to function. Farms produce resources that are stored at the
farm and in that way are made available for other components in the economy.
Another point you should note is that all these components have inputs and out-
puts, expanding the number of ways they can be hooked to other components and
creating more opportunities to create long economic chains and loops. This way,
the player is free to create many different constructions in the economy. For certain
games, this might even mean there are different dominant economic structures
that the player can build from its components.
phases oF proGression in caesar iii
Games in which players build an internal economy clearly fall into the category of games
of emergence. still, playing these games does offer some experience of progression.
Caesar III for example, provides a series of scenarios, each with its own particular
challenges and goals, and within each scenario there are a number of scripted events.
But even without these events, the process of building a city goes through a number of
stages. in the initial planning stage, players still have enough money to build anything
they might need. Later they find themselves managing crises or the city's defense and,
finally, fine-tuning the city's economy to reach tough economic goals during the end
stages of the later levels.
an important mechanism that contributes to this sense of progression is that, initially,
wealthier residences increase labor output, but after a certain point the labor produced
by a residence actually decreases as its inhabitants grow wealthier. This means that be-
yond a certain wealth threshold the city starts losing labor, reducing the effects of many
production buildings, which could destroy the economy. This creates phase transitions or
barriers in the city's growth that are hard to negotiate.
Caesar III , as many other games of emergence, has its own rhythm and progression that
partly emerges from its dynamic game economy and partly from the scripted events that
are unique for every scenario.
Designing Lunar Colony
In the second part of this chapter, we will take the lessons learned from analyzing
Caesar III and apply them toward designing a new economy building game called
Lunar Colony . Lunar Colony is a multiplayer tabletop game that can be played with a
set of poker chips, a few playing cards, and a single (six-sided) die. You don't need
a board to play; any flat surface will do. You can also use any other set of tokens as
long as they are all of the same size (for one play test we used LEGO blocks, and that
worked just fine). Depending on the number of colors of tokens you have access
to, you can play with any number of players. You will need to keep track of each