Try Aurora 4X. "The Dwarf Fortress of space." It ain't much to look at, but if what you want is pure economic management, then this is where to look. There are a few let's plays of it running right now, which has resulted in greatly increased popularity and a very active subreddit. Best of all, it's free, so you can give it a shot without having to spend anything but time.
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Economic strategies
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Having thought a little about it, I realised that what is probably at issue here is that it's bloody difficult to write a decent economic AI, OTC gives as good an example of that as any, the AI must have catastrophic advantages to be competitive.
(February 14th, 2016, 11:32)Bacchus Wrote: Having thought a little about it, I realised that what is probably at issue here is that it's bloody difficult to write a decent economic AI, OTC gives as good an example of that as any, the AI must have catastrophic advantages to be competitive. My shot at a short description: Big Pharma is a game where the player designs and manages their own pharmaceutical manufacturing company, they must discover new ingredients, research new machines, and then design and build the production lines to produce drugs to meet scenario goals. Scenarios are varied and include maximum cashflow, advanced drugs, high quality drugs, and getting out of crippling debt. In this case, the dev gets around the AI issue by having them play an abstract version of the game. Effectively, they're there to flood the market if you try and run level 1 / 2 cures in mass form.
Played a bit of Big Pharma, knocking out a couple of Beginner challenges with easy "Expert" wins (all win conditions are ranked Basic/Expert/Master, the more you complete in an allotted time, the more you get). I have somewhat mixed feelings, and the game isn't worth its current list price, but it's fun and pleasant enough.
The closest analogy is Factorio, with the difference, that instead of time as your sole resource, you have cash. You spend cash to set up a production line, which consists of a series of machines, linked by conveyor belts, and then spend cash to buy ingredients, process them through your line, and sell a refined product, getting some cash back. The resource transformation is quite fun in principle -- there is only one quality that gets transformed, the ingredients' "concentration", which can range from 0 to 20(?), and most machines either decrease it, or increase it. Each ingredient has up to 4 "qualities", which can be beneficial (cures) or harmful (side-effects). Each quality has a specific active range and only has an effect, if the ingredient's current concentration falls in that range. All this is procedurally generated, so every game ingredients, their qualities, starting concentrations and active ranges are different. The basic idea is to get the ingredients to the concentration where their cures are active and the side-effects aren't. This is further complicated by the ability of cures to be "upgraded" -- if the ingredient is at the right concentration, and is run through the right machine (mercifully explicitly named), its level 1 cure (say, "Soothes Rash") can become a level 2 cure (say, "Antibiotic"), and then a level 3 cure. Really, this is all very straightforward. Most "difficulties" come from many machines having awkward geometry -- each has a specific entry slot and exit slot, forcing your conveyor belts, say, take 90 degree turns, making sequences and tiling somewhat awkward. Then, there is the "market" aspect. Cures have a price, which is again procedurally generated, and a market size. Expectedly, as the market floods, the price tanks. The problem is that there are so many cures, that you can always aim to be a single producer and avoid worrying about saturation at all. Some prices also have a seasonal component, which is nice -- "cures cold" is in more demand in winter, and "soothes rash" in summer. For reasons below, none of this really matters. All you need to do is see which cure is valued highly, and which ingredients are cheap to buy, and off you go. For all purposes, you are a small producer and a price taker. Next aspect is "development". Players start with a limited number of ingredients and limited number of machines. Both need to be researched, requiring appropriate specialists -- explorers and scientists respectively. This is your "workforce". Amusingly the machines don't require any labour to operate or maintain, all you pay for is "processing charge", a fixed cost of running 1 ingredient through the machine. Strangely, explorers and scientists cost a lot to hire -- several times as much as a basic machine. They then require a constant salary, giving you the only source of overheads in the game apart from loans. This is a very strange twist -- your machines in this game are actually "labour", a variable cost that easily scales with the size of production, whilst your "labour" are the capital, with a high up-front investment and continuous upkeep. Explorers give you new ingredients, scientists -- new machines. All players have access to the same ingredient selection and technology tree, but obviously its up to you how to proceed down it. When the staff are not assigned to achieving a specific unlock they generate generic "points", which can go to improving existing ingredients/machines. "Improving" is a bit of a strong statement to be fair, all these points do, when invested, is decrease the purchase cost (for the ingredients) or the processing cost (for the machines). The points are unrefundable, so over the course of the game you form a unique factory profile, as particular recipes become considerably cheaper due to prior investments. If there were actual opponents, this would serve to further decrease competition, as everyone would specialise, but there aren't. Finally, there are loans. As with everything else, these are procedurally generated from three characteristics: term, volume, interest rate. They are pretty much always worth taking in "normal" games, as return on investment is enormous. The greatest failure of the game is a complete lack of a model of health. The best example can be given by the "alleviate insomnia" cure and the "causes sleepiness" side-effect. You'd think the two are linked, right? Not a chance. There is no link at all between cures and side-effects, each is a standalone entity, not even pretending to have some sort of comprehensible effect on human body. "Causes sleepiness" is a side-effect and that's the end of it, you cannot sell something that causes sleepiness as an insomnia cure, because, well, under game terms it's not a cure. Even worse, you could actually have the "causes sleepiness" side-effect penalize the value of your "alleviates insomnia" drug, and it will penalise it just as much as when the "causes sleepiness" side-effect is present in, say, "alleviates erectile dysfunction". Obviously, all this breaks immersion a lot and makes you think you are playing Clicker Heroes. Similarly, you can benefit by piling on completely unrelated cures. I made the most money on a drug which treated diabetes and was a female contraceptive -- pretty sure having a market value of 0 in the real world. Second greatest failure is the lack of strategic interactions. You are not taking moves in anticipation of counter-moves, you are just optimizing on a set of inputs. In game-theoretic terms, this isn't even a game -- a general problem for "economic" games, aside from OTC. However, as an acocuntancy/geometry puzzle it's quite fun, the graphics are very cute, and watching your 50-machine factory work away is a joy.
I think you have an overall good sense of the game.The accountancy/geometry as you put it really hits a good spot for me. There's a little more texture as the tech tree expands and some more interesting upgrades appear (shakers, drug packers, syringe makers, sequencers, patents, and industrial espionage all have non-efficiency based upgrades), and it gets a little hairier as more AIs are brought into the game and force the cost of drugs down and the cost of ingredients up, but the lack of human-health model doesn't change.
Locomotion is the upgrade of TTD. Has building mechanisms of rollercoaster tycoon re track building etc. It's a good upgrade on a classic. On steam too!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/356430/ |
![[Image: FIRS1.0.png]](http://blog.openttdcoop.org/files/blog/2013/04/FIRS1.0.png)