I get this and agree to a point, but I just believe that I should have a wood resource to be able to craft bows or spears, or stone to build walls, or iron and coal to craft steel plate mail.  I'm fine with the individual resources converting to 'materials' in a global pool on a conceptual level, but I would like to think that the horses and wood from my caravans came from * somewhere and something * with which a citizen of mine was involved, or alternately via a trade agreement my sovereign has bargained with an outside faction. 

Global pool, ok, but how about a resource list?

I think what makes having different resources begat new resources fun is the feeling of progression... pure and simple.   We want to see our cities go from using Bronze swords to Steel or Adamantium or whatever.

But like several people already pointed out,  doing that can really make things tedious rather than fun.   Why not keep Ore as ore but give research options that improve the quality of gear or what not made from that ore....  in otherwords an UPgrade to Ore as a resource.   Lore wise that could mean anything.... Alloys,  better forges, etc...   How to actually implement something like this idk.   Might even be more difficult than easy.

But I'd like to see something like this done instead of adding refined resources and what not.   Being able to say, upgrade your blacksmith shop and give all your weapons +1 dmg so long as they're made within that city would make things specializing cities that more interesting to me.  FAct even better would be upgrade paths.  Otherwords you can make your Mill upgrade to produce food faster (a % increase) or Matierials.  But you can only choose one.  Fewer buildings that are upgradable to more specialized functions seems like a simpler solution than needing a whole new building to process Iron into Sheets or Ingots.

Just my two cents though.

I'm all for economic supply chains... those are my favourite types of games. Phooey to those who think that makes things tedious. Refining systems can be made wonderfully complex and fun. There'd need to be a much better trade system in place, though, to make this useful.

Am I the only one who starts to think of Colonization with all this talk of people as a resource and turning mind resources into refined resources?

I used to like the old multi-step resource system with various levels of refined goods, back when we were talking about local resources you'd have to transfer between cities. But the more I think about it as it would fit into the current game with global resources, the more pointless it seems. As an example (you could apply this to any refined resource), let's just say we introduce a "steel" resource, which requires you to research a technology, build a building (let's call it a blast furnace), and now each turn you can convert 1 ore (presumably iron) + 1 material (presumably flux or fuel) to create 1 steel. So now instead of our old iron sword that takes 8 iron ore, we could make a steel sword that takes 8 steel.

But.. why not just have that technology unlock a "steel sword" that takes 8 ore and 8 material? The only difference is whether you need to build that blast furnace. Now in the old old system discussed in early beta, where resources were stockpiled in each city, this building requirement would be meaningful. You'd have to transport ore from your mining cities to wherever you had the blast furnace, and then you'd have to either make steel swords on the spot or transport your new steel yet again to wherever you plan to forge it, and then perhaps transfer it yet again to wherever you intend to train troops. This makes placement of mines and blast furnaces and such very important.

But forget all that, we've got global resources now - this reduces it to: 1.) build a mine somewhere 2.) build a workshop somewhere 3.) build a blast furnace somewhere 4.) combine ore and material into steel. The need to build this furnace somewhere is a meaningless choice, it doesn't matter where you put it, it's just another no-brainer step in the process: "Oh look I've researched steel, time to build some blast furnaces somewhere." And if you remove that building requirement, then there's absolutely no difference between an 8-steel sword and an 8-ore 8-material sword.

Now I'm all for introducing more depth to the items, especially with more items that combine resources in interesting ways - I would love to see that "steel" sword that combines ore and material into something superior to the old ore-only sword. I'm just saying that there's no point to mashing ore and material together to make a new "steel" resource, when you could just have your steel sword require both ore and material to start with.

Note: I deliberately chose something slightly complicated, the combination of two different resources to create a third. The same argument applies to simpler refining processes, such as transmuting one resource (iron ore) into a second resource (iron bar) - it would be interesting if we had to transfer the ore and bars between cities depending on where we built mines/smelters/forges, but with global resources it gets reduced to 1.) build mine somewhere to get ore 2.) build corresponding smelter somewhere to create bars from ore .. this seems pointless, we're just forced to make the no-brainer "choice" to create a smelter for every mine.

Here's a different approach:

Have all mines, camps etc provide a generic Materials resource.

When hiring units / building buildings, the build time is shortened for each of the right type of resource source you have.

For example:

Castle requires stone. If you only have lumber mills, no stone quarries, it's going to take a long time to build the castle and you suffer a material cost penalty. If you have one stone quarry (perhaps has to be in the vincinity of the city you build in?), the build time is lowered to a reasonable time and you pay the normal material price. If you have an army of stone quarries, you will be able to build the castle a lot quicker. Build cost is not changed, since you're going to get more materials from more quarries anyway.

That way you don't have to keep track of all sorts of resources, you can always build anything but you're going to be building a long time if you don't have access to certain resources. It's also easier to balance but maintains pretty good complexity in building options.

With this system the resources you'd have would be People, Gold, Materials, and whatever additional resources you want for magic stuff.

Here are my two cents:

I don't think resource chaining just for the sake of resource chaining is the greatest idea.  That's fine in the settlers games, or in like Dawn of Discovery, but the difference being that for those games, the core game element is creating the resource chains.  There are already quite a bit other concepts going on in the game (magic, technology, quests, diplomacy, combat, etc) and while they may not be complicated or fleshed out yet, I'd prefer they get expanded upon before more concepts get added.   Adding it just for the sake of "depth" doesn't make it immediately better and has a very large chance of just making it tedious or bogged down. 

I'd like to see something akin to the alchemists guild in MOM fleshed out.  The alchemists guild was required for that city to build +1 to hit weapons or to take advantage of mithril or adamantium.  This could be applied further to all types of weapons/armor/horses etc.  There could be a base set of weapons available to all cities, but prerequisites for more advanced/special equipment.  Want to build kickass bowmen? They must be built in a city with an advanced lumber yard.  Superior swordsmen? Advanced smith or some such thing.  Rather then have it be a resource chain that must be constructed have a it a building and/or resource prerequisite (i.e. lumber yards can only be built in cities with old growth tiles).  Specialists can also be required to require planning of what units you want to be produced where.  This adds re playability because it'll require adopting your military strategy based off of what resource tiles become available to you.

Furthermore, you could take it further and have unique buildings for specific factions that add new types of equipment available only to a faction.  Then you could throw a wrinkle into city capturing, by allowing other factions that capture a city with that special building to utilize it.  This would then change how your entire kingdom/empire gets defended, and could be taken advantage of by the AI (looking at you frogboy ) as well as the user.

I have trouble deciding if it's a good thing or not.

resources like mounts would be great because they would be quiclky usable with a stable. It would help giving character to your faction. I have horses and wolves. I choose to use wolves (slower but have a better attack value). Too bad I don't have my bear cavalry like that other player. Hey, he won't have them long though. Some more powerful mounts might require techs.

Now other resources such as raw materials, metal, wood can only lead to crafting. I'm not sure I want those chains and resource transformations a la Anno or Settlers. But believe me, I love Anno. But it is its core gameplay. If it helps define and make my faction special, I'm all for it. If it's just an hassle everyone has to go through... Meeeeh.

I would instead use 'recipes' that can be discovered with research. The more higher the tech the more requirements for the recipe, the greater rewards.

Metal + Fire shard + blacksmith = fire weapon

Metal + Fire shard +  blacksmith = fire resistant armor

Ultimately, it makes for very powerful items but you can't have all resources (Hum... not too loud but CIV V succeeded in preventing a user collects all resources, they are somehow grouped on the map which is a good counter argument to those who said in the beta that a player who has all resources and a large empire is sure to win). Having the possibility to craft the Bane sword of death that raises killed people as zombies should be rare and a defining characteristic of a faction.

Elementium + Earth shard + some rare quest item (so that item remains rare) + sorcery tower + tons of gold + a hero that has a special feat and present in the city when creating some item = bane weapon (I want to be able to choose axe, etc...). You could even add some recipes combinations for +1 to hit and so on...

It would make an interesting use for resources and there goes your crafting a la MoM (which was one of my favourite features).

Difficult to say if available for units or for heroes only. You know some items are too dangerous for a king to give to his soldiers... Aaaargh, maybe both would be great. Lesser item-recipes for commoners, higher quality recipe-items for heroes. You have almost that with the shop option (you could offer those items in that screen).

These were my 2 cents. hope it helps...

I am absolutely against increasing the complexity of the resource pool at the moment. All the economic refinement games wind up feeling WAY too complicated, and punish early game carelessness dramatically in the end game. Not a good thing when you ALSO have to worry about military issues.

The Wood/Metal/Gold/Crystal setup is great for pretty much all our needs. I would not mind seeing some nodes which provide modifiers the local cities, such as Stone speeding up building of advanced buildings, flux speeding up military units with advanced metals (steel and such).

What would be pretty cool though, is to allow an advanced "one per faction" building which allowed the siphoning of one pool of resources into another at time of generation. A sort of "Central Market" where you could tell your faction that despite generating 15 materials per turn, you only want 5 of those, and you want to siphon the remaining 10 directly into an abstracted global marketplace, in exchange for iron. The return shouldn't be all that great, but let's be honest, once you get about 2000 materials you cant ever find anyone to trade it with for useful stuff, and you sure can't ever actually use it all. Similarly, it's pretty common

As an applied example:

Have a "Market" screen with a slider representing each of the resources you are generating, which is activated upon building this advanced market. Center of the slider is set at the amount of goods that you are actually producing. In order to bump a slider to the right, you have to move another slider to the left ("selling" some in exchange for another commodity).

From there, its just a matter of setting base exchange rates (how much wood equals a metal) and then throwing in some multipliers based upon which resources are being most or least drawn from the market across factions.

Finally, if you have portions of wood production not being traded out for something, you have that generate a small portion of gold as the remainder.

The benefit here is that you lessen the impact of having a bizarre starting point (3 old forests and no iron for miles), while still rewarding those who have a balanced starting point. You enable the strategy of short term function on deficit by means of cutting your resource income. You increase the number of game play options without creating needlessly complex refinement systems, which leave some players to ignore substantial portions of the game play.

I agree with this logic.  Enhance the 'recipes' for more varied items, damage types and defenses etc. through more technologies.  Maybe add in a tanner, or forge to the production area.  Game play would be enhanced by adding more variety and meaning to the units that are the ultimate benefactors of all the material endeavors.  

I like Malsqueek's idea.

What about having each type of resource node have a low chance to spawn a special resource that can be used in equipment design.  Eg a developed Forest has a 1 percent chance of creating a Heartwood Tree that can be used to make a good bow... something like that.

I think it could make the game interesting, but I don't think it is a priority.  I would rather see so many other areas worked on first.

Please don't go overboard with the refining concept.  I could maybe handle one step of refinement, but I don't want to go through a 6-step process just to get a weapon or piece of armor.