Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURe 11.19
The Settlers of Catan
with the
Seafarers
extension.
Photo courtesy of alexandre
duret-Lutz under a creative
commons (cc BY-sa 2.0)
attribution license.
Figure 11.20
represents most of the economy of
The Settlers of Catan
, though cer-
tain mechanics, such as the extra points scored by building the longest road and
by playing the most knights, have been omitted. Figure 11.20 is turn-based and
uses color-coding to distinguish among the five resources in the game. The produc-
tion mechanism reflects the fact that both cities and villages generate a chance to
produce a resource every turn, while every city increases the chance that the pro-
duction rate is doubled. We advise you to play around with the online version of
the diagram to fully grasp the way the game's internal economy works.
The economy of
The Settlers of Catan
is dominated by a
dynamic engine
that is also
subjected to a
engine building
pattern and that interacts with a
trade
pattern. The
game manages to avoid the typical gameplay signature associated with a dynamic
engine by creating several options to invest and by having all these investments add
to the game's progress. The simple accumulation of resources is not the point of the
game. Another side effect of using an indirect measure of progress is that it's not
trivial for players to accurately read the state of the game. Although it's fairly easy to
see how many cities, villages, and resources each player has, because of the indirect
way that points are computed, it's hard to guess who is actually closest to winning,
especially because the number of available building sites is limited. A player might
need just one extra village to score the extra point, but if all building locations have
been taken by other players, it will be impossible. The player will need many ore
and wheat resources to build a city, and those resources might not be easy to come
