Survival Management Gameplay

There are four basic attributes that your caravan needs to manage in the game world:

• Food - your company requires subsistence daily.
• Currency - you buy and sell goods in currency and pay for services, retinue and just about everything using this.
• Supplies - you use up this to traverse the terrain and the cost is dependent on the tile type you traverse.
• Weight - you are limited in what you can haul in terms of tonnage but also in your inventory space.

Against all this time advances in the game world by the hour and gameplay is divided into days. From these base conditions we end up with derived statistics and mechanics. I will go over my initial thinking for each of these four components in detail.

Weight

The foundational fact in the game is that everything has weight and almost everything is affected by weight - this includes the supplies and food you carry along with the goods you haul, the speed at which you move across the game world and the wear and tear your caravan suffers in its travels. So managing a trading route involves balancing your cargo weight against your inventory weight. The current idea is that inventory and cargo weight are separate. You carry personal items, food and supplies in your inventory while you carry your trading goods in your cargo. The cargo tonnage can be expanded by upgrading your caravan but at the expense of speed or supplies.

In keeping with the idea that there is no free lunch, increasing your cargo haul capacity, not only requires expending currency, it also means accepting a lower travel speed and/or increased supply consumption. 

This triangular trade-off forms one of the basic components of the gameplay loop that the player should understand early on and needs to be carefully balanced to not be tedious but actually stimulating.

Currency

The second major component is currency. Initially when I first conceived of this game I had some ambitious ideas around currency, namely 

• In an anarchic world like Macrocosm each city-state issued its own currency and these currencies would not only trade for goods but also trade against one another.
• Currency comes in different forms, hard currency such as coins have physical weight and take up inventory space and tonnage while promissory notes are promises to pay but have counter-party risks.

For the time being, currency functions abstractly as a attribute (I may return to these ideas down the line!). The denomination of currency in Macrocosm is the sestertius (taken from Roman history), currency is used to purchase trading goods along with survival supplies - food and supplies. In addition repairs and upgrades and modifications to your caravan are paid for in currency. Finally any retinue you hire, such as guards, scouts and other domain experts need to be paid a daily wage. 

The price of goods and services in each city is relative to the economic condition and terrain adjacent to it, goods expensive in one city are cheap in another and this forms one of the basic components of the game - identifying promising trading circuits.

Currency is the determinant of progress in the game - running out of currency implies game over (much the same as running out of food or supplies), while growing the treasury enables the player to take on more ambitious contracts, haul more goods and operate a grander caravan and trading company. The open ended nature of the game means that the player achievement is ultimately determined by the size of the treasury they have amassed.

To that end one consequence I am trying hard to avoid is in-game inflation of the currency. It's often the case in RPGs and simulations, city-builders that currency because increasingly worthless as the game progresses and in the late-game the player has vast amounts of money with nothing to do with it. 

In a sense Macrocosm can be thought of as a scarcity simulation, and currency, representing value in the world, should be proportionally scarce and hard to come by and constantly spendable.  What I mean by the last term is that the player should never lack means by which to spend the currency his trading efforts bring in, otherwise the gameplay loop stagnates. 

Food

The final two mechanics are food and supplies. Food represents expenditures in time, one cannot pass time in the world without nourishment while supplies represent expenditure in space, as one cannot traverse without supplies. In addition, any retinue, such as guards you take onto your caravan also needs to eat and will consume proportionally. 

In the current implementation, food is lasting and does not spoil. This is one of the first mechanics that will be implemented - right now only one representative food type is implemented (pork chops):

additional game assets will be created and eventually I expect there is a spectrum of foodstuffs that supply different levels of nourishment and spoil at different rates. Their cost will also differ. From a flavor and stylistic perspective, food stuff descriptions also offer an avenue for in-game lore tidbits. 

Supplies

Supplies represent the tools and upkeep of your caravan as travels the game world. Traveling on roads should be easy-going on your caravan but exposes you more to long routes, potential highwayman while traveling off road is more expensive. 

Supplies are purchased like foodstuff and are subtracted per tile moved. The plan right now is to let supply consumption be governed by the type of tile traversed and the amount of weight the caravan is hauling. 

In the current prototype running out of supplies implies game over but technically it could really just represent unable to move or only being able to move if the player is willing to abandon its cargo and caravan (abstractly traveling on foot). 

Putting it all together

Over the course of the next few months I will be putting in a lot of effort in fleshing these mechanics out in greater detail and implementing them into the existing engine and balancing them for gameplay. It's going to be a interesting time frame as the game starts to slowly form out of the engine.

-K