This is why computers were invented, simplification of complex systems.  You write software that allows you to type up, print, fax, email, etcetera, a document you once had to hand write with a quill and ink for each individual copy you needed, then physically send them to their destinations.  Abstraction is the lazy way of automating a complicated process.  You skip the work of creating a resourcing structure.  It's not any easier for the end user to manage unless it's just plain brain dead.  It's automation that you need a computer for, how complex your automation is just depends on how much time you can spend coding it, not hot much time your end user can spend using it.

Balancing the current economy is hellish work.  If you call bullshit, you're brain dead or full of it, one or the other.  Trying to find the sweet spot just between materials and gildar is like pulling teeth.  Perfect utilization is just wishful thinking, your whole dynamic changes with every upgrade.  So you spend ten minutes combing through your options, current draw, and possible usage, poof, 20% more gildar from your top city, now you've got too many materials again.  Back to the drawing board.  It's a bleeding mess, you have no work flow.

A top to bottom production system has flow, you're balancing usage against income.  It's vastly simpler to manage the base inputs as a result.  You're not saving for 50 turns to build a horrendously expensive unit that takes all the wrong amounts.  You don't have an end cost, you have end products.  With a dynamic UI that shows the load of the inputs and outputs as you look at a context related item, you can immediately know the affect of building your new swords on their base components, and your supply of swords.  Overdraw your production and you waste manpower at idle forges.  Underdraw your production and you have iron stockpiling and fewer weapons and armor than you could have.  Set up the proper UI for the task, and your nightmare scenario of hundreds of resources from start to finish is simpler than what we have now in terms of time needed to manipulate it.

Caravans aren't even complicated, they can be manually controlled and you can spend five hours out of a game futzing with them, or they can be automated.  It's programming time in exchange for player time.  The better they set up the automation, the less work it will be.  If caravans automatically generate at need, you obviously no longer have to deal with creating them.  If they have flexible pathing that can be pulled by mouse, control over where they roam is simple as well.  You'll have less work creating them than you do now, as a result of not creating them.  You'll have less work guarding them as well, because losing one wont be such a pain in the ass.  You wont have to find the city it was taken from and replace it, you just have to hunt the looting bastards down and stop the resource bleed.

You only burn them down when you don't have the time to steal them.  Burning someones supplies isn't nearly as good as capturing them for your own use.  This should be self explanatory.

A "Torch it" button would be the most you'd need here.  That's only if you want captured supplies to become their own enemy caravan that tries to run back home.  Personally, I'm game for it, I'd like supply lines to feed armies above foraging density as well.  Not because I like realism, but because it solves various tactical and strategic problems presented by stupid game design.  No more steam roller super stack, no more need for stack limits, any of that nonsense.  The more concentrated the army, the easier it is to cut the supply line off.  The automated resourcing system need not actually do this though.  You don't even need to be able to capture caravans at all, resources in cities on the other hand really need to be capture ready.

Well now that the Computer Science Lessons have concluded, thanks for that btw, it still seems reasonable to allow Caravans "attachable protection" as well as route selection via whatever means would be the lesser of 2, apparently overly complex, evils.

As to how resources are created or distributed, the DEV Team will decide. The more complex, as in, real Inter Faction City based trade, and if not based using an on-demand system, should at least have some usage based on what each specific town or City produces as its "specialty".

Otherwise, any talk of "Specialized" cities, is just a smoke and mirrors based way around actually providing it in the game proper.

P.S. I am not a fan of the auto generating Caravan idea. If they are to be an integral part of the game, in some meaningful fashion, then you should have to look after any and all supply lines you set up. Is it really "you" or the computer that is running the bleeding Empire.

Click and forget is never good, or should be considered acceptable behavior in any 4X based game imho.

I should say that I am not a fan of completely auto generation of caravans either, but I think that some auto generation here would be beneficial. Currently, a trade route is simply the path traveled by a singular caravan from his source to his destination, and the death of the caravan means the death of the route. Here is what I think would be a bit more interesting. Consider a system where trade routes are started the same way they are now, but killing one was not as simple as destroying one caravan. The idea would be that a trade route would spawn new caravans every few turns after the death of the existing caravans, but would collapse after a few respawns due to "dangers of the road". This would reduce the overall frustration of a lucky mob looting a lone caravan, but would still add the inherent dangers of leaving unguarded trade routes. It would also minimize this idea that your all powerful king would be worrying about each and every caravan along each and every trade route.

Right now, the player has incredibly limited ability to "specialize" his cities. The path most cities take is fairly dictated by the resources in the cities influence. Even the level up bonuses which should add more layers of specialization tend to be lackluster simply because only three of the four are even worth choice and of those two are only selectable in cities with that particular resource. However, the two research upgrades actually are a moderate waste since you will ultimately get to a point where both research paths become meaningless. This simply leaves the gold level up bonus, which stands out as far superior to the three others.

While that would work, why not simply allow me to create more than one Caravan per Town/City, (the same # as it would take for a route to collapse say) then select the route and even add some form of protection (limited as seen balanced) and then the Wizard King could go off and do his thing knowing that his Caravan scheme will have some longevity based on his input.

Sadly your words ring to true in that regard. But, given the word that 1.1 will allow multiple buildings, those choices should become more feasible, if still viciously limited until the later levels.

Any bonus that goes from 1.0 to 1.1 after a level up is rather disappointing and leaves a bad taste over all. Given that, it is not hard to understand why "most" players would pick the one resource (Gildar) as the defacto default (I have begun doing it now as well) with the few exceptions where a random spawn may actually keep a town/city somewhat safe, for at least the level in question, rather than take a severly weak upgrade for the first 2 level increases at least.

The current situation sprinkles some buildings to only some Towns (Granary's, Irrigation, Great Mills and Farming Guilds) being some/most of those that come to mind early to mid game. I guess it comes down to not enough of both of those 2 items. Not enough specialized Buildings (per level) or selections come Level up time.

Breaking down even those few into smaller components (Wild Wheat, Barn, Silo, Granary) (Pond, Well, Pumps Irrigation) etc etc.

I think I have just crossed over into Expansion land so will end this post now.

I think this entire post has been in expansion land, and more than likely fictional expansion land. The most likely scenario is that this entire post will go the same way as the camps before it. I think once the devs give us more control over how caravans work, modders will be able to take some of these ideas and add different resource systems which cater to every side.

You may know something about programming, but you have zero grasp of logic.  Even analog computers were for simplification of complex systems, the abacus and slide rule were to simplify arithmetic.  The Z3, the first Turing complete modern computer, was designed to analyze wing flutter on fighters, the ENIAC was for flight path mechanics on ballistic weaponry.  Complex calculations, simplified down to button presses and punch cards instead of spending hours at a chalk board for every design iteration.  This should have been self evident from the time you picked up your first calculator.

A more applicable situation, Warhammer requires rolling handfuls of dice repeatedly, and the manual movement of dozens, perhaps hundreds of little figurines.  You have to write down information to keep track of equipment and damage levels on your units.  Warhammer on a computer would move the individual figurines at the click of a button, showing allowed movement range, firing range, damage numbers, equipment, the whole works, all without ever requiring you to write anything down.  A complex system, almost entirely automated into simple mouse clicks.

Please don't give any more lessons, the world has too many over educated idiots that can't think for themselves already.

I fire and forget my workshop, why the hell not?  Thinking like this is why so many people start shitting bricks when someone mentions an actual economy as the foundation for a war game.  You already have a bunch of abstracted, utterly irrelevant shit built all over the map that you never pay a second thought to.

The game isn't lacking in tedium, in need of a huge shot of pain in the ass to get it going.  It lacks actual resources that can be stockpiled locally, refined products ready for use.  It lacks supply lines that allow for strategic depth in deployment, as your almighty stack of doom has no counter but another stack of doom or, some retarded counter added in a pathetic attempt to fix a broken mechanic in some way other than the obvious.  They don't need to be a pain in the ass to provide depth of strategy , they just need to exist.

Automation doesn't mean you can ignore them either.  Caravans carrying your actual resources would lose those actual resources when your enemy raided them.  If you don't keep your trade lanes clear, you're fucked.  The whole point of a supply line isn't to make you build wagons and send them to your army.  It's so you have something to cut off.

When your Workshop starts moving around between cities and can be destroyed by roaming monsters, give me a shout.

I am/have always been in favor of a true Economy Model for E:WoM. You should stop cherry picking entries and read the background associated with those statements.

This is probably one of the best points I've seen on this thread so far. In my humble opinion, the point of a well-implemented economic system is to provide another layer of depth to the pursuit of warfare. So, the arguement that goes something like... "I'm sorry, the title is WAR of magic" doesn't really carry any water to me. Supply lines add a defensive element (that, admittedly, is reduced with teleport) and an offensive element that lends variety to your strategic options, if nothing else.

Having said that, I'm not sure how manually recreating each destroyed caravan is fun. I think GC2 found a happy medium- one destroyed caravan wouldn't wreck your network, but continued raids would kill the route.

I think this underscores a really important point that needs to be clarified. What is the game and what is the focus? The answer to these questions will dictate what is and is not ok to simply abstract away. Some have said the game is a war game, and if so, then focusing on suppies and weapons would make sense. Some have said that the game is a mixture of genres but the focus is the sovereign, which would then make focusing on complex resources systems a bit out of place as this would shift the focus from the sov to these systems. Personal, I think of Elemental as a fantasy world simulator, and the focus should be on expanding the stories of the sov and his people. I think this ultimately makes the most sense as it encapsulates all the various aspects of the game. Yet under this idea, a complex resource system would be like having multiple chapters in LotR about mining and smelting ores.

Okay, knock it off.  It's no longer helpful; it's just being argumentative.

Let's try to summarize what we can agree on, instead of bickering.  Depth is okay, as long as it isn't too distracting.  It needs to be a little distracting, though, that's the point of it, to split the player's attention away and try to trip them up.  Depth should come with purpose; the benefit of having to do more work is to get a better outcome than what the computer could do for you in automation; I think that's also largely agreed upon.  I also think that waging war against an opponent's economy by targeting trade networks, rather than resources like most other 4x games do, seems to be something that everyone generally likes the idea of, as it represents a step forward in the genre; I think we differ in the specifics of the implementation.  I think the other, unwritten/unspoken fear is that any AI governor for the economy will be a travesty, and will require human intervention anyway to make it run anything like it should.  That's a separate and perhaps valid fear, given previous 4x governors, and it s subject I think FB will have to address directly.

Juggling many things means having to split attention between various tasks in order to optimize those aspects of gameplay that lead to a winning strategy.  So, let me ask a more fundemental question:  How many economic "balls in the air" do we wish to juggle?  Sounds like there are a few: Trade networks for resources, resource refining, resource acquisition, land use (tiles, in this case), production from refined resources, trade for processed goods, protection of trade lanes (not strictly economy, but is a strong factor); there are likely others as well.  Would it make sense to discuss with the devs having AIs that handle each PIECE of this economy?  That way, if we don't want to manage a specific aspect of this, we can turn it over to  a governor, understanding that it will do a suboptimal job to an attentive player.  We just don't care about it enough to give it a piece of our attention.

One of the better things about Elemental is it feels like a RPG/4X crossover.  There have been relativly few of these in the past - Lords of Midnight (on the Sinclair spectrum), MoM, HoM&M.  My view is that the game should capitalise on these strengths.

Making the resources significantly more complex may not produce the right results I think it would push it too far to a 4X basis - perhaps a bit more complexity basic materials (wood/stone/metal/crystal/food) plus some advanced materials e.g. (Enchanted wood/Marble/Elementium/shard fragments/Herbs).  These would all be empire wide and transported behind the scenes.  The advanced materials would unlock the capability to produce some advanced items and buildings (more impressive palaces for prestige, better bows, sharper swords, healing potions, magic weapons)

We do also have items though (drops from monsters and items used only by champions) These are individually transported.  It would make a big difference if these could be

1) converted to resources - not just cash
2) made from resources - not just bought 
3) made from resources and other items

These then give the flexibility to people who want to do a bit of resource management but it feels more like a fantasy novel, its the Hero who does all the leg work and tracks down 3 cloves of kingsfoil, 2 vials of troll blood and a partridge in a pear tree.  For someone else to convert into a potion to rescue the princess/magic apple of deadly poison/flaming sword of smiting.

What I am saying is an adventuring and crafting system is a better way of tieing the economy together than a production and logistics system.

Hey, Kenata, help me get a handle on this; I thought I was presenting both sides!  Sorry to misinterpret what you are after here.  It seemed to me you were after a more streamlined economy, where choices made had value, and forced you to give up some things to get other things (ie, you can't have it all).  You seemed okay with the idea of depth and complexity, as long as it was automated (or automatable).

Is the issue one of not having resources refinable to other goods?  In other words, is it this?

population+raw materials+time=units  is okay

population+refined materials+time=units

refined materials=raw materials+time+buildings+transport  these two add needless complexity?

Transporting goods seems to be something a lot of folks want, if only to give them an economic target (which seems to be why everyone wants it).

As it is now, resources are global, so ore produced by one city goes into a global pool, that can be used by any city with the right buildings.   If the economy were in such a state that in a city with an ore mine, the buildings and people needed to produce enough ore to be useful precluded that city from also being a major unit producing facility, then the ore itself would need to be transported to a city that could use it to produce units; that would still force transportation of goods, but not require the refining of the materials (ie: the first equation still holds).

psycloak seems to be the most vocal for the camp of multiple refining steps to the finished unit (the bottom two equations).

My interest, frankly, is in making it difficult, very difficult, to get to end game units, so that they are things that are rare and very difficult to produce in mass numbers.  Certainly, the second set of equations puts more roadblocks in the way of that, and could be a path to that.  I don't necessarily buy the argument that there are no end game units, since you can always do more research to improve them.  If there's a final resource set and a final point on the tech tree in how to use that resource, then application of that tech and that resource to a unit makes them, by definition, the end game unit.

This is the tried and true method and I think it is a good method. In my ideal world, most resources would be local and would require transport to get them to other places. So if you had a city with a mine producing metal and another city with unit producing buildings, you would have a caravan transporting from the metal city to the unit creation city. I think this would add an incredible amount of depth and complexity and would give caravans a real infrastructural role. That way, during a war, one could attack a factions infrastructure in a way that actually effected the enemies war effort.

In many posts on this forum, I have expressed my dislike for the idea of end units in general. I think that having some super final unit that is just better than every other unit is both unnatural and unfun. I prefer units with combat roles that can be upgraded along some path to produce better and better units for their role. So you are not rushing for end units in the traditional sense but are instead moving towards creating combined arms of the highest caliber.

Thanks for the insights john.