Construction and Management Simulations - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 539

DESIGN RULE Avoid Runaway Profits!
Never let a player buy low and sell high as often as she wants without further expenditure
or the passage of time. She'll use it to rack up runaway profits. See Chapter 10, “Core
Mechanics,” for further discussion.
Hybrid Games
The Civilization , Dungeon Keeper , and Settlers series are all hybrid games, each one a
cross between a CMS and a war game. In addition to their economic challenges, all
feature exploration and conflict challenges. The military aspect of The Settlers is
quite simple, as it must be, because the economic aspect is exceedingly complex.
Dungeon Keeper begins each scenario with construction and management of a dun-
geon complete with semiautonomous denizens. In the later stages of the scenario,
the player takes his army of creatures into battle, and the construction activities are
finished. Control in Dungeon Keeper is a curious hybrid of direct and indirect con-
trol in that creatures have a distinct behavior model but obey orders as long as
they're happy. (Unhappy creatures disobey or even desert.) However, Dungeon
Keeper retains its economic challenges throughout: It's one of the very few games
in which the troops have to be paid, fed, and given a place to sleep.
If you're going to design a hybrid game, design the economic simulation first
(unless it's really simple) and then add the other elements afterward. Because the
other aspects of the game usually depend on the underlying economy, a mistake in
the economic design can easily ruin the rest of the game. For example, a war game
that includes an economy for weapons production might lose all its strategic chal-
lenge if the player can produce weapons too quickly. The player will exploit his
economic strength and overwhelm the opposition with sheer numbers rather than
strategic skill.
Core Mechanics
Chapter 10 introduces the concepts of resources, sources, drains, and converters.
Much of that material applies specifically to CMSs, which use more kinds of
resources than any other genre.
Resources
In many CMSs, the primary resource is money. Money is usually treated as an
intangible resource; it is seldom seen in physical form. ( Dungeon Keeper is an excep-
tion: Gold has to be mined and transported back to a treasury, and the player must
expand the treasury when it gets full.)