The unit can't be built until everything that is needed is in the town. so indirectly yes.

I am going to have so much fun raiding caravans.

Sammual

P.S. Brad, if I raid the caravan containing magic swords for my opponents griffin riders can I use them even if I don't have the tech to make them?  Can I use them to gain that tech?

Can you click to produce a unit in a city without the proper resources in store, and then have to wait while some caravans come to drop the resources off, or will you have to tell the caravans manually to stop by that city before you can start producing? The former would be great, as long as there were some estimates on how long it's going to take even before you click. It would remove some unneccesary micro-management.

I've always liked the Settlers mechanic (the original game, I haven't played any of the sequels) for resource distribution.  You've basically got supply sites and demand sites.  So, for example, say you have a city that harvests Wood.  If there is no demand for Wood, it just gets stored.  However, if a different city has a demand for Wood, such as constructing a unit/building that requires it, the resource would automatically start being shuffled towards that city.  The user doesn't need to do anything, it just starts happening as soon as there's a supply/demand imbalance.  If there are two cities requiring it, then it gets shipped equally to both.

If you have a city that doesn't currently require Wood, but you know it will soon, then perhaps you could click a toggle in the city's warehouse to create an artificial demand for it at that city.  It would act just as though the city had an immediate demand, and the Wood would begin shipping there.  Wood stored in warehouses where there is no demand would also act as supply sites until the warehouse was empty.

Perhaps infrastructure, which is what would spawn these caravans automatically, could also be finite.  There can only be a certain number of caravans out dispatching the resources at any given time.  You could invest more in building up your infrastructure, thus allowing you to have more caravans.  If your infrastructure is low (few caravans) and your roads are poor (they move slowly) you could easily overload your empire's ability to redistribute resources.

I don't think it would add too much micromanagement, as it would all be handled automatically by the game in order to satisfy any demand in your empire.  All that would be required for the player would be a single screen listing all their cities so they can toggle on the demand for particular resources at the city warehouses, as well as an empire-wide setting for investing in infrastructure.  The player should also protect the caravans of course, as the loss of one would lower the number of caravans available until the player invested more in infrastructure.

Sounds very very nice and I hope it will work out well.

I guess something like that would need to be included at a minimum to make the system work.

When implementing such a system (which in itself sounds pretty nifty by the way) you should be careful to change the usual system of production queues. You have to make sure the item on top can't block everything just because one resource is missing. So production should be parallel and not sequential (with the possibility to emphasize perhaps) although then you have to avoid the possibility of a production item on lower priority "stealing" a limited but needed resource from the higher one. Maybe all needed resources for an item could be reserved until that item is finished. But then you could encounter another unneccesary delay in your production because reserved resources, which are although limited but obtainable at a higher rate than the "critical" missing resource of the high-priority production queue items, might hinder production of further items. Also under this system it should be possible to create masses of untrained clubwielding townfolk provided you have the enough population and big sticks.

I don't know if anyone can make sense of the gibberish abouve - I doubt I can after a good night's sleep - but the message I tried to convey is if you make these ambitious changes to the "usual" 4x economy it's mighty fine by me - just think it through please. And if it turns out to be realistic but no-fun-at-all, don't hesitate to throw the idea out of the window. There are to many half-baked good ideas in some games which sound nice but ruin gameplay (MOO3, anyone?) But I tend to trust your instincs on this one, anyway.

Sounds cool. Providing the combat stats weren't so rigid as GalCiv. With the laser vs shield and missile vs PD etc. Hopefully it won't be sword vs armour type A and bow vs something crazy else.

One option I would really like to see is when you have a unit design in the list of available units a city can produce, have an option on that unit's info in the build options list to divert the necessary items for that unit to the currently selected city (and emphasize their production if they don't exist yet, so you get the swords you need instead of a bunch more plowshares, but only if the swords will otherwise hold up production) and start training men if you can without the other items so that you can build up, say, enough materials for 15 elite guards for you to recruit in a hurry, and something that would go hand in hand with this is being able to design units using tech a step above what you have, so if you know that you're going to be able to make steel swords in a few turns but already have steel mining, the mining town will send steel to the foundry so that it won't be held up. This last bit is just an idea, but it would be nice to have your economy primed for what you know is coming without having to do it manually.

Short version: I want to be able to say that I want to be able to recruit a given number of a unit and have the computer emphasize making the requisite items available to that city over mundane production, and even unit production in other cities, but in the second case only if it will not slow down the actual order. If I'm making a bunch of elite footmen with swords but want to gather the resources for sword cavalry in case a second enemy attacks, I could tell the computer to get the resources for the cavalry together as quickly as possible without worrying about its impact on the footmen production, because it will only send swords to the cavalry city when it knows that another sword will be produced before the next footman is trained. That would be an amazing feature, and add a lot of flexability.

EDIT: Wahngrok, I think I get what you're saying and have already emphasized it in my idea. You want to be able to set a priority queue for all production and have the computer try to get the first unit out first, but if it is waiting for a resource that won't be available for a long time, send the other needed resources to lower priority projects until doing so would cause a different resource to delay production, which boils down to seeing if the resource will be the last one to arrive for that particular project/instance of the unit order, and if not, seeing if sending the turn's production elsewhere would delay the higher priority order. I think I explain it decently in the paragraph above this one.

I also want to have the game use the caravan travel patterns to determine what would speed up deliveries the most so I can see what effect building a certain road would have would be nice.

Make it so things trickle down, with 'reservation' on a percentage basis.  E. G. I'm making:

10xSwords at 2 iron 1 leather each;

15xLeather Armor at 2 leather each;

5xSpears at 1 Iron 1 Leather each;

If I have an income of 2 iron and 2 leather per 'turn', and production is instant once resources are available (probably a bad idea overall, but just think of it as having the hands to handle 5 of each on each turn -- so I've got an excess of production to resources).

Anyway, at the indicated resource rate I'd be able to make 1 sword the first turn, with one spare leather.  I have the resources for a second sword on the second turn, and 2 spare leather for a leather armor.  So I have

1 Sword

1Sword 1 Armor

1 Sword

1 Sword 1 Armor

...

Untill I'm done.  Then the armor takes up ALL the leather untill its done, while iron builds up.  Then work through spears.

Although there won't be 'N units', I assume the real meaning is there won't be some arbritary scale (like civ3) where a knight is 45 units, a horse man is 20 units etc..  But instead the player free-form designs a unit, and the sum cost of all it's abilities determines the cost, which the economy then produces at whatever rate it is able.

But will there be a scaleable and realistic sense of economy though?  For instance can I get a city with 3x economic capacity of one of my designed units, and result in 3 units made per turn? Will different unit abilities consume different resource stockpiles, and are there varied, limited ways to specialize the economics of the city to generate the varied resources?  For instance, by a combination of location, infrastructure,  building, and training can I get one city to be the iron capital, while another city will be the agricultural capital, and another city would be the military capital (basically a fort and armory) for training and equiping the troops?

Most 4X games abstract the economy as distracting from the war and diplomacy and city-building, and usually they stick with the 'N units' compromise to do so. So will Elementals have a strong supply-side economic model?

those are some odd sounding swords, I must say, and the spears sound even wierder.

now for an example of my idea with a bit extra because I realized that keeping a decent reserve stock of items that are being produced in surplus in all cities that will need them is good because of the possibility of declining production or raids:

Priority queue:

10x armored sergeants - 1 sword, 1 shield, 1 armor, 2 weeks training

20x footmen - 1 sword, 1 shield, 1 week training

10x knights - 1 lance, 1 shield, 1 armor, 1 horse, 3 weeks training

100x cavalry archers - 1 bow, 1 horse, 1 week training (a lot, but the example needs them to be produced constantly)

Weekly production - 2 shields, 1 sword, 1 armor, 1 lance, 1 bow, 1 horse

Production would look like this at first assuming all resources can be shipped in a week:

1 footman, 1 cavalry archer, both are sent their required materials. The town producing armored sergeants is shipped a shield, and the town producing knights is sent a lance in case supply is cut off (it's the only place that needs them, but if the resources for the lances can be better used elsewhere, no lance is made yet)

1 armored sergeant, 1 cavalry archer. The surplus shield is shipped to the town making footmen so it also has a backup stock, and the lance is sent to the town making knights.

1 footman, 1 cavalry archer, shield is sent to the town making knights (or should it be footmen, keeping stocks proportional to the number queued?)

This continues until the town making armored sergeants has enough shields stockpiled to continue the production run, at which point all shield shipments cease and it keeps building on its stockpiles (because the newly made shields are better off being used to ensure that knights and footmen can be made).

When all armored sergeants are produced, knight production begins and training has been started so once the materials are available, knights are produced (will you be able to train a unit before the prerequisite items arrive, and will you be able to have a trained unit sit around and wait until their equipment arrives? These will change things slightly). Shield production drops in priority for resource allocation once production is guaranteed.

Next, once 100 bows have been built up, bows also drop in resource priority and other items that need wood are produced in greater quantity. This raises the question of what should be done with production after the item is no longer needed. Should it still be produced in enough quantity that another production run wouldn't be delayed or just remain silent? I think that production going silent after reestablishing a minor amount of stock is the right idea so that materials aren't wasted on producing obsolete items.

I'm pretty sure that that's the case, that you will have resources to extract, which are then shipped to the production centers where they are made into items that are then sent to where they can be combined to form a unit. At least that's the impression I got.

What I'd like to see, that's missing from most every PC based game, is the hidden economy that's part of a lot of board games, which is "actions points" or "command/ruler points" or some such. Many board games give the players X actions per turn and it's those actions that are your most precious resource.

In PC games, you can pretty much give an order to every single unit and city every turn, which means the player can feel obligated to micro manage to squeeze out every inch of efficiency. I'd love to see a more limited command activation (some wargames have this). So, I might have 50 armies in the field, but as monarch I only have enough time and commanders to activate 15 of them. The rest would defend, but I just don't have the intelligence and logistics infrastructure to be ordering them all around every turn. I could choose, perhaps, to hire heroes or commanders that improve my actions per turn. HoMM has this, but in too extreme a form, where only heroes can activate.

For the pure underlying economy, I like the idea that what a town can build is restricted somewhat by size. I don't think I want to babysit caravans, but the idea of the time it takes to build a unit varies with the distance to resources. Or, if you have "logistics points" you could spend those to hurry it. Or perhaps towns could invest in people and/or improvements that would improve such transit times (dedicated quartermaster, or magic portals connecting 2 towns, etc).

In a nutshell, it boils down to opportunity cost with logistics as well as resources. You not only have to decide where to spend your gold/mana/iron/wood/etc, but also have to decide how much of your infrastructure it'd take to do that build. Producing yet more stuff has dimishing returns if you don't have the infrastructure available to use that stuff.

gah, reminds me of my experiment with kriegspiel. Very interesting game, but even a massive advantage was hard to exploit because of the limit to the units you could move. It's very frustrating when you can't take advantage of a superior strategy. I do like the economic ideas, though. Roads become highways become magical portal networks, sounds fun. From what I'm getting from this, that's what it'll be like, where you need to figure out how much to prioritize infrastructure.

Ii works well in wargames because it makes them more fluid. But each unit has its own agenda, and even if you don't give orders to them they should be able to do ather things than "stay here and defend".

But an action point system would be interesting because it would limit the maximum size of your empire. And why not spells/research that would raise the logistics? (and then have an upkeep. Oh wait .. it reminds me something ) then commands as "patrol" or "go raze that ennemy city" would be really important cause you wouldn't need to ask again each turn to the unit what they need to do.

Will it be as easy as "create the unit WXKFZ I just designed" and then the game calculates everything or do I have to manually send caravans to that town?

I think the full supply side system should be modeled in the game as well as the demand side and things should accounted for to the individual item with an option to have a simplified economy if the gamer so chooses. The real issue will be in how the AI would handle both systems. I don’t like hidden economy systems and all the bullshit that goes with them to be honest. I want the full system out in the open with detailed records and stats with an option to automate things at my leisure via governors or administrative assistances.

I would also like to be able to enhance or create custom items for my units. For example if a standard sword takes 2 metal resources if I want to give it a +1 physical effect I should be able to create an enhanced basic sword with a cost of say 3 metal resources.