Raw Material & Industry idea

[enricoix]

[font="Verdana"]This is a great game with fantastic depth and some brilliant details however there is a lacking point for a game like this in my opinion :
Raw Material (RM) variety and industrial products (and buildings) that go with it.
Here is my suggestion which wouldn't bring much complexity but would add more strategy, even more depth and increased decision making.

Metals (or mines if you will) to be divided : Iron Ore, Coal, Aluminium (for aluminium, new research : Aluminium processing)
Rare Metals to be divided : Gold & Silver (or even diamond per planet type)
New RM : cement

NOTES :
- Cement to be plentiful in the nature. Thus concrete to be an early product - or already existing in easy games - which almost every building would need.
- Smelters to be clicked on to choose what to smelt. (i.e. switching from iron ore to aluminium or gold to silver possible)
- All industrial buildings to consume energy. I have only written down which ones would need more.
- Industrial buildings to decrease Health at some point.
- Uranium could also be included. (for power generation or to bolster units. And for Nuclear Plants. Leak or meltdown could bring additional flavor to the game)
- Machine Parts factory could use comparatively high amount of manpower to operate. (current workshop producing MP to be obsolete)
- Hard attack units may need even limited manpower but MP to build.
- Units or buildings would still need manpower or IP etc to be built. I didn't go into that here.

I believe this could be a base and developers can bring excellent additional ideas to improve it for sure.
But to repeat myself again : I certainly believe that a game like this which requires deep strategic mind needs to be improved for this side. (RM variety & extended industrial setup) [/font]

[Nexira]

Im not a particular fan of this unless its a full resource rework with much more economic complexity and variety from it. EX: if there were alternate approaches to building and solving problems based on what metals you have access to. If my lack of finding mineable gold for some reason means i cant build lasers, that would be really annoying when IRL theres hella other shit that can be used for it. The current abstraction of resources allows for there not to to be any weird or negative situations because of world gen. Such a halfway to complexity resource model change would also just be murder on an already very rng pbem.

Edit: what im saying is if the path the resources take you on is still just as linear, more resources dont add anything but more micromanagement and chances to get screwed by RNG.

[enricoix]

I love city/empire building games, so a much complex economic system would be very welcome. But I don't think that is in the cards.
Shadow Empire is labelled as a war game first. As a matter of fact, it feels one also.

I am not saying my proposal has to be instantly applied but the approach would change path the game would lead.
What already is a great game would have some elements of 4x genre. And that will spice things up, I think.

Also, I do not agree with you regarding the lack of resources and the luck behind it. First of all, this is how it is. People didn't have an idea what oil is but nations/tribes were already siting on it. But more than that regarding the game aspects, if you don't have a resource which will potentially make you a great power, it makes you move towards it no matter what. For survival or for power. And that will bring extra challenge which is always interesting.

As I have said previously, this is already a great game. It's like I have a Ferrari with a brand new engine, excellent tires, interiors, shiny paint and all. I feel like driving a Ferrari and it feels good. But the gearbox, I can see it is 2 generations old but I am still happy with my car regardless. My plea is not a top notch part right away but at least make an improvement. Or let's say a start.

Current setup (for RM and industry) is based on a very very general level unlike any other side of the game. And it is very open for improvement in my opinion.

[Nexira]

I agree that its open to improvement, but what you are proposing is a reduction in abstraction, an increase in complexity, and a change to mechanics and gameplay for what is no gain.


For example:
Why does smelter just straight produce iron, and not steel? Iron is a useless resource. Why does the steel factory need coal when you can also use oil IRL, or any other carbon material. So now we also have to mine the useless material coal, which is only useful for one thing, when we already have access to the technology to just make the resource we could be using instead out of farms and bio fuel refinery, in order to make the thing another useless building made useful. If there is no off branching of the product, ex: if theres nothing that needs iron or iron ore, then whatever it is youre dealing with is just a waste of time. This is an entire rework of all buildings, the economy, unit production costs, and changes to the world gen to add a few extra steps to doing the same thing for no functional gameplay change other then "more clicks"

That is just the gameplay example of how this harms gameplay. It also harms the believability of the game. Why is aluminium, IRL the much more complex material to work with and produce, so much easier and less steps than steel? the IRL ancient metal that is much easier and cheaper to produce. "rare metals" in game includes a lot more than just gold and silver, which arent exactly rare metals. Given how they are used in game, we are talking industrial rare metals, which gold and silver arent exactly.

Which brings me to re-iterate my previous point, because i think you missed it. For how massive of a change to the games code adding in your suggestion would be, it doesnt add enough to the gameplay to be worth it. The benefits you seek from this increase in complexity would require it be even further complex, and most importantly: adaptive. Your system is equally as abstract as the games current systems, but makes less sense logically. In order to make it logical, and less abstract, would require dozens of new buildings and unit assets. Aluminum armor that costs no steel, plastics industries, etc.

Reducing abstraction and a better economy would be fantastic, but this is a deep dive level change and would take at the dead minimum if everything went perfect, a month or two of full time work. For the full level of complexity it would probably take in the range of 4 to 6 months. However, making the changes and improvement youve proposed doesnt mean the full upgrade later will be any easier. So if the dev commits months to one, it should be the final version not a bandaid or toe in the water.

Personally, i would rate shadow empire as being one of the best empire builders ive played. I absolutely dont play this game like a wargame and if there was an "automate the armies, but with specific directives" option, i would click that thing real fast.

Edit: or i could have just used your analogy and spared myself some words. Why pay the price for a slight improvement on the gearbox, that might actually cause problems with an already working car, when a brand new one thats much less likely to cause problems just costs twice as much?

[enricoix]

I don't believe that I have missed your point which was suggested several times indicating the additions would bring less but require too much labor for YOUR point of view.
I haven't missed it but I didn't agree with you on that neither. Because I was talking about progress here. Progress for the game for a better sense (in MY view)

Now I want to mention something that you may have missed. Well, you go deep into my suggested roadmap above but I have said more than once that my idea is just a suggestion.
The big picture here is to extend resource & supply area and combine it with an interesting/attractive/challenging industry mechanism. I see that you don't agree with me which is perfectly fine. Because reading your word, it seems that you want either perfect dynamics (who can argue with it IF plausible) or make it stay like it is. That is the fundamental point of this post and I disagree.

Right, regarding your comments on my suggestion : my agenda was built putting more emphasis on energy. Right now it is quite generic also. You have something as a start, you can either find an energetic city to increase the number or build another generic building to increase. Coal is not used only for steel production but energy also. (btw, I agree with the fact that you can produce steel at smelter or use fuel - which would theoretically be much more expensive - during the process)
Also I wanted to put importance to steel (which is behind every military mechanic but doesn't exist) and machine parts. Iron ore and iron is not useless as you suggest, iron is used to produce steel and steel is behind a lot of stuff which basically makes iron behind a lot of stuff.

Well, rare metals. I think you want to believe that it is titanium or adamantium if you will but on the other hand I use them only to make money, that's it. So they have one single use - money making. That's why I put rare metals under gold/silver group.
I wanted to introduce Aluminium to enforce late military unit types some distinction and increase resource variety. I thought about plastic supply chain as well but it started to turn out to Anno 1800 so I decided against. You see the difference in our expectations. I wanted the system to be improved even with step by step but you want a finished output right away (or no change)

I see that you start the post with a sentence saying you agree that there is room for improvement but you put nothing on the table. What you keep saying that you either want a perfect mechanism (and you suggest that building that mechanism will take only twice my suggestion and potentially work awesome with everything introduced as bulk) or you want nothing at all.

And btw no matter how great this game is, it is a war game as the moment you click the first click.

[zgrssd]

Depth and Complexity are often mistaken for one another.
The goal is to have a solid Depth without adding too much Completity.
This would be adding Complexity without gaining any depth.

There are also a bunch of faulty asumptions. For starters:
"Oil" actually represents all forms of Fuel
- I seriously doubt we are digging raw oil out of ruins. More likely this is draining any fuel stores that are still viable in those patches of former civilisation
- Methane Synthesis creates fuel, without involving any oil
- back in GR days, there was also the stuff called "Liquid Energy". Wich I asume is some way to store electical (solar) energy into a liquid form
- I found 0 Indication that my fuel Deposits are not coal deposits, that are dug up and then put into a Coal to Liquid Fuel process. The process germany in WW2 used almsot exclusviely for fuel production