Building Economies - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 211

basic economic Structure
Figure 9.10 shows the basic economic structure of Lunar Colony . It is a color-coded
and turn-based diagram. Mine Ice and Mine Ore are interactive nodes that pull these
resources from their respective pools when clicked. ( Mine Ice is a gate, while Mine
Ore is a converter for reasons we'll explain in a moment.) Buying the technology
upgrades for ice and ore mining improves their productivity: Fast Ice Mining causes
the Mine Ice gate to pull two ice resources instead of one. Efficient Ore Mining does
not cause Mine Ore to pull two ore resources; rather, it causes the Mine Ore node to
turn one incoming ore resource into two, which has to be done with a converter
rather than a gate.

FIGURe 9.10
The basic economy of
Lunar Colony. This
diagram requires
additional details
to work in the
machinations Tool.

NOTE Figure 9.10
has a register labeled
Actions. in a turn-
based diagram, a
register with that label
can be used to change
the number of actions
a player can take every
turn. in this case, it is
used to increase the
number of actions as
the player builds more
stations.

Once ice and ore resources have been mined, they go into a common pool labeled
Resources . From this pool, ore is used to build stations, ice is used to produce energy,
and both ore and ice are required to expand a station. The diagram also includes
a very simple mechanism to simulate the fact that resources are distributed across
the tabletop in the real game. The player starts with limited access to resources—he
can use only the ones in the Accessible Ice and Accessible Ore pools. By building extra
stations, he has a 50% chance of making more ore accessible and a 25% chance of
making more ice accessible. These probabilities are taken from the density of the
resources on the table, which was established during the setup phase.