Game economy of Premium games using the example of PC 4x strategy
How to design an economy for your game? This is a question that may take a short series of lectures or articles to answer. The fundamental difference in approach is based primarily on the monetization model: F2P or B2P. The second thing that determines the approach to developing an economic system is the genre of the game. In this article we will look at the case of designing a B2P (premium) game economy for a game that does not involve making money from microtransactions.
Konstantin Sakhnov
game designer
Definitions
Let’s start with terminology. It will help you understand the difference in approaches to developing the economy of games of different genres.
According to the balance of resources, the economy is divided into:
surplus – they give more resources than needed
Balance – resources are given as much as the player spends
Deficiency – they provide consistently less resources than needed
I think there is no need to explain that almost any F2P project has an economic model based on the scarcity of one or another resource. But this is a topic for a separate article. In premium PC and console games, this division also takes place. My favorite example is the Resident Evil and Dead Space games. The lack of resources shifts not only the balance, but the entire feeling of the gameplay and almost the entire genre into horror. While the surplus of ammo and first aid kits makes it more of an exciting action game.
In terms of resource exchange, the economy is divided into:
Closed – there is no free exchange of resources between players
Open – you can trade and exchange some resource
Where to begin
From the game loop. An economy is a mathematical model with formulas and resource flows, and in order to design it, you first need to know all the game mechanics. Designing game loops is a huge task in its own right. But part of it is the economic cycle. Let’s look at an example.
What we see in the UML diagram:
Gray – game mechanics and entities
Violet – scenes other than the main one (planet surface)
Green – resources
Beige – objects on the surface
4x strategy is a very difficult genre. The economic diagram does not depict many mechanics that participate in the economic cycle, but do not have a key impact on it: quests, random events, location exploration, anomalies, etc. If you try to depict everything, the diagram will be overloaded. Therefore, we focus only on the most important elements of the economy.
Resources are the basis of the economy
From Figure 1 we see that there are certain basic resources (energy, stone, metal) obtained from springs and simple buildings. They are spent on retribution and improvement of these buildings, sources and infrastructure buildings (all sorts of protective and other buildings).
We also see that the game has second-level resources – advanced ones. What are they needed for? You can answer this question that, judging by the diagram, they are needed to improve buildings and terraform the planet. This is absolutely true, but it is a consequence. The basic task is interesting gameplay. We could simply create more basic resources and give some to some buildings, some to others. But second-level resources are an analogue of crafting mechanics. Consider the wildly successful indie strategy game Against the Storm.
An important part of the gameplay is the processing of some resources into others. This creates additional fun and challenge and allows the developer to control the production of rare resources due to the shortage of more than one of their components. Let’s say that to produce copper ingots you need fuel, for example, wood, and copper ore. We usually have plenty of wood, but we’ll have to hunt for ore on many maps. We took the same approach.
When designing the economy of premium strategies, developers usually include several types of resources that perform different functions:
Basic – easily obtained, most often in surplus
Advanced – produced from basic or more complex prey
Limited – limit mechanics that depend on the economy, for example combat
Special – perform a specific narrow task
So, using the example of Sid Meier’s Civilization, we can say that points of culture, faith, science, food, money and production are the basic resources. There are usually always enough of them and their production is most often constantly growing. Their advanced resources are luxury resources that increase the happiness of the population. Limited – rare resources necessary to create an army. Special ones include city loyalty scales, the number of available corporations (there are no 6 corporations in the basic version of Civ), etc.
Similar work can be done using the example of most 4 strategies, for example, Endless Space II. You will also find the complete set here.
In our case, the resources necessary to create and maintain an army are limited. Unlike most strategies, our troops do not consume gold, but a rare resource. If it runs out, the combat unit will turn off and will not be able to move or fight.
And so the general principle of working with resources in premium strategies:
We highlight the basic resources that are most likely to be provided in surplus or balance
We compile a list of mechanics that consume and produce basic resources
We are compiling a list of mechanics that depend on the economy, but which should not fly into space when the economy grows
We tie them to limited resources, and not just to basic ones
If the strategy is focused on long slow sessions and tactics, it is convenient to introduce secondary – advanced resources
All incomprehensible situations are covered with special resources, but we try not to overdo it: remembering that stone, metal, energy and other resources work the same way for the player is quite easy, but understanding the mechanics of each special resource is difficult – this complicates the logic, interface, and training
Another important point is the logical types of resources. They can be:
Currency – can be received, can be spent, usually greater than zero, can be fractional
Example: gold
Resource – can be received, can be spent, the value is integer, cannot be negative
Example: logs
Scale – has a minimum and a maximum or at least one of these limits, often has a dimension (degrees, percentages, fractions, g, etc.)
Example: oxygen supply
The ones described above are usually enough for me, but in some cases more unique types of resources appear.
Mathematical model
It is difficult to imagine economics without mathematics. But the approach here is generally clear. For each type of resource, we develop our own consumption and production formula. Let’s say basic and advanced resources are produced by sources at 1 for each source. In fact, such formulas are much more complicated. Let’s see an example from the same game.
Oddly enough, the mathematics in economic systems is usually not the most complex. It is much more difficult to formulate the logic behind it. Let’s look at an example.
Ours has a population living on the planet. The planet is divided into zones. Each zone accommodates an average of 6 population units. We need people, elves, orcs, demons and undead for a simple purpose: so that they pray to us, bringing spiritual essence, and die, giving their souls. The souls charge the void generator and it produces more nanoswarm, a resource used to create an army and cast spells. Spiritual essence is needed for crafting in order to enhance basic resources with its help, turning them into advanced ones.
And so we have 3 basic resources, which means that in each zone it is logical to build at least 3 buildings that consume 1 of each and 1 spiritual energy in order to produce 1 advanced resource. The production scale in units was chosen for the convenience of the player. Also in our game you can improve buildings, and after improvement they will produce and consume more resources. This means that one zone with 6 inhabitants consumes 3 + 3 = 6 spiritual essence. It turned out conveniently: 1 resident on average should produce 1 spiritual essence per turn. Constantly fighting orcs do not have time to pray, which means they will give up less essence and more souls when dying in battle, while more devout elves will praise you and die less often. But on average, the increase in souls and essence will be around 1 per turn per population unit.
Our next task is to understand the charge scale of the generator scale. How much is this anyway? From -100 to 100? It is logical to take 0 as the starting point. All that remains is to find the maximum. Let’s take as an introductory assumption that we want the generator to be fully charged by the middle of the gaming session. In our case, we planned a session of approximately 200 moves, which means the maximum will be around 100 moves. How many souls will the population create by this point?
If at the beginning there is 1 population in the zone, and the average growth rate is 1 in 10 turns (orcs are faster, elves are slightly slower), then in the first 10 turns 1 population will give 1 soul per turn. In the next 10 turns, when the second unit is born, we will receive 2 souls per turn, etc. up to 100 moves. We get the arithmetic progression:
We find that the maximum charge of the generator should be around 550. For the convenience of the player, we will round up to 500.
Let me remind you that we need to charge the generator with souls so that it produces more nano-swarms per turn. After this, we have to calculate how the charge scale is converted into nano-swarm production. To do this you need to choose two things:
Set the scale of values: how much production will be at the minimum of the scale and how much at the maximum
What will be the nature of the dependence of production on charge
For convenience, I took the values:
I think those who are familiar with powers of two have already understood that as a curve defining the nature of the dependence, I decided to take the base 2 logarithm. Having looked at what we get when the generator is fully charged (500), I realized that I wanted to see the numbers a little more. The logarithm is suitable in this case, because it solves several problems at once:
at the beginning, swarm production is easy to increase
the further we want to build it up, the more difficult it becomes
when we have reached the maximum, we can pump in talents for resources, because… by this point the player has probably already accumulated a surplus of resources
After playing with the numbers a little, I found a suitable coefficient: the logarithm base became 1.75 instead of 2.
Above I described only one small part of the work on the mathematics of the economic model of a specific game. Of course, many readers reasonably expect the article to provide universal logic on how to make the economy of any premium game. Unfortunately, it is impossible to formulate a universal algorithm: the games, their goals and the approaches of the developers are too different. And this, in my opinion, is wonderful.
Playtests
I’m sure you noticed that I made a number of assumptions above. For example, about the fact that you want to fully charge the generator by about 100 turns. Such assumptions are called introductory. Without them, it is almost impossible to design a gaming system. Why does a level 1 miner produce 1 resource per turn? Yes, simply because this number seemed convenient to the game designer for calculations and understandable to the player. Thus, we set the scale of the entire economy, consciously or not.
In the same way, we select progression coefficients: population growth by 1 in 10 moves, the average cost of a building is 5 units of resource, a coefficient of 1.75 in the logarithm of nano-swarm production… All these are also assumptions. And they are called economic balance coefficients.
And no matter how long we work on the economy, it is difficult to foresee everything. But the main thing is that this is not necessary. We must record all inputs and all balance coefficients in order to know what we will change when balancing the economy. Everything else – logic and connections between formulas and resources – is the economic model.
To make sure that the economy we designed in theory works, there is only one way – to implement it in the game. And play a lot in order to work out as many situations as possible that a player may encounter.
The general principle of balance here is simple. If the model works, then we adjust all the elements that do not suit us in the game by changing the coefficients. We play it out again and decide whether we need to adjust further. You should not change the formulas themselves, break the logic, and especially add new entities that complicate the economic model until you are sure that the problem is not poorly chosen coefficients. If the current model doesn’t work, why would a more complicated model with an addition work and not just be a plug? I admit that in our work, game designers, and I too, pressed by deadlines and budgets, often insert plugs where it was necessary to test the balance longer. This is forgivable for small studios, tied hand and foot by investors. But when we see such problems in AAA games with huge budgets and deadlines, the question arises: maybe this could have been avoided?
Tools
In conclusion, I would like to note that sometimes many game mechanics can be at least partially tested on prototypes or in special services for game designers.
Most people probably know about Miro, Figma and other services where it is convenient to draw gameplay diagrams. But little is usually known about economic design services.
I can’t help but recommend https://machinations.io/ – an online platform where you can make your own economic model. I wasn’t able to prototype everything there, but many things, in particular testing taking into account randomness, are very convenient to do there.
If you are interested in diving deeper into game design, I would be glad to see you in my courses. In November 2023, I’m just launching new ones on the following platforms:
https://edverest.ru/mip/ – cool 6-month program on game project management with marketing, system design, game mechanics, management, team management, analytics and technical development fundamentals
https://wnhub.io/ru/academy/gdessentials-1 – a short course, where only I will be, dedicated to game design
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