Zero Resource Production game idea

[geoschmo]

We have the high tech start for a zero research game, and someone mentioned a zero population growth game with your population fixed at the begining of the game. That got me to thinking about a zero resource production game.

There are two ways it could be done. The first is to fairly simple. I call it a "Fixed-Income Game". You just edit the Minimum Empire Min/Org/Rad Generation settings in the settings.txt to what ever you want. The higher the better. Then you remove the resource generating facilities from the faciliites.txt file, and viola! Every empire is now on a fixed income for the duration of the game. Your military power is limited only by your research, intelligence, and construction capacity. You still need to expand an build colonies for reasarch and space yards, but you never have to worry about building resource facilies.

The scond way would be with a finite resources game. This way is a bit more complicated, but I think a bit more interesting as well. I got the idea from something Mensch said in the Scortched Earth thread. Curently I am calling it a "Half-Life game", but only because I can't think of anything better.

First you raise the minimum empire point storage to some really hign number. Then you raise the plr planet values to really high numbers. This controls the resources on your homeworld. Then you raise the resource generation values for the level 1 resource faciliites to really large numbers. The values you are looking for is what ever value will max out your empire storage, and deplete your home planet value within a couple turns after the game start. Then you raise the cost to build new resource faciliites so that noone could ever build one.

The result of this is a couple turns after game start all the empire reach their max points in storage, and then for the rest of the game you live off that. This effectivly puts a time limit on the game, but not in number of turns, but in the amount of construction you do. It would add a lot of dynamics to the game. You would need to balance your fleet maintenance and not have more ships around then absolutly needed to get the job done. You'd want to really try to capture enemy vessles and planets, cause that would save you fom having to spend the cash to make them yourself.

Comments?

Geoschmo