[Campaign] Alternative to gold mines

[Grey.Knight]

I know this topic has been brought up before i was thinking what are other methods of providing the player with a steady income without the gold mine, people have told me to set up a salary system where based upon performance the player gets x amount of gold every y minutes as long as z enemies are destroyed, however I was looking for a more creative solution, what do you hivers think? List as many solutions as possible

 

[ArchDuke]

For steady income here are some ideas:

Gold bonus ability - An ability that works once every 120 seconds and grants the player 1000 gold

Alchemy building - Like a gold mine, but generates funs at a much slower rate

Lumber economy - if there are no gold mines on the map you can cut down lumber and trade this in for gold, the trade can go however way you want for instance 10 lumber for 10 gold, or 10 lumber for 50 gold, this is your choice

Water Mil - Build these structures in shallow water and they in turn generate gold

I might edit this post and add other things.

 

[Grey.Knight]

Nice, however what about developing some sort of magic-exploittiion where you can have units or a structure casting a spell within a a specified region and in turn creating gold

 

[nedio95]

There is a book where mages can turn anything into gold (mages being mages) so they were prohibited by a royal decree to use anything but copper coins for trading around So, you could have items like iron ore or copper ore or gold ore or just some item. Mage grabs it and then uses an ability to turn it into gold. This is more suitable for RPG though...
You could automate the process like making it a building that has certain capacity & limits.

Don't forget the pillage ability People often forget about this as one of the two native ability based resource incomes. (Alchemist transmute, is there anything else?)

to be honest, you don't really want to have the player engulfed in resource gathering mechanics for a melee map... Would you mind sharing what type of map we are tinkering about? Obviously, some ideas would be viable only for RPG maps others would be viable only for strategy, and some would not be applicable for either.

Regards
-Ned

 

[Banelingline]

Take the Factory dummied out ability, make it generate "units" with costs based on your desired rate of resource production, then use either Pillage or Transmute set to some form of automateable trigger to make it so that you have a regenerating supply of resources.

 

[cleavinghammer]

Trade: Allied caravans regularly spawn at the edge of the map and head towards a building (town hall, market, control point...), giving gold and lumber once they get there (amount increases with distance traveled). Killing enemy caravans causes coins and lumber to drop, though not as much as they give to their trade partner. Same thing with trade ships and shipyards. Upgrades increase movespeed, HP and amount carried.

Crafting: Workshops that automatically manufacture low-level items (potions, scrolls) and have an option to automatically sell them. In effect, you set them to either create items or give gold every X minutes.

Slavery: Every 5 enemy workers killed/every worker with low HP targeted with an Enslave ability spawns a neutral slave at your base. Every few minutes the slaves leave for the edge of the map, giving gold once they reach it (increases with distance traveled and per slave), but will escape if not accompanied by at least one of your units (rebellion occurs when the sum of guard HP is lower than the sum of slave HP). Enemies that attack the caravan can rescue some of the workers, the others escape.

Ransom: Using the Enslave ability on a non-worker unit with low HP turns it neutral. The owner can use the Pay Ransom ability on the unit to get it back, giving the captor a low multiple of its gold cost (1.1 to 2x).

Control points: A standard control points system with different amounts of income, with each point able to generate income-boosting buildings (lumber mill, mines, market, guard post, etc.).

Bandit King: Pays a large amount of money up front in order to get money every time a creep kills a unit.

Taxes: Generates income based on the number of food structures/current max food/current food used/number of workers.

Corruption: Lowers an enemy's income and increases your own.

 

[Oliver]

Investment: You buy shares, more shares = more money per period of time (money tick)

Complex Investment: you buy shares in a team. The amount of money you get per tick depends on how many shares you have in a team and how well (or how many buildings/units) that team has.

Sponsor a hero: Similar to shares but amount per tick depends on the heroes level with bonuses for feats performed by the hero - eg killing an enemy hero

Tree tending - Buildable building. Every tick (say 60 seconds) you count the number of trees near the buildings and award gold based on that number.

Tax collector - Similar to the tree tending but instead of trees it requires neutral passive villager units.

Animal farming - You must capture animals, grow them to maturity, breed them and then sell their produce.

Caravan system - use code to establish trade routes between 2 town centres. Special units are assigned to these routes. Further the distance = more money per trip. Done by assigning an integer to each caravan unit that integer indexes to 2 arrays, one for the "start" of the trade route and one for the "end" of the trade route. Each time the caravan comes close to its destination you are given some money, the caravans destination is changed and the caravan is ordered to the other destination. (I realise this is very similar to the post above but I based this off of rise of nations)

 

[cleavinghammer]

Investment should have a chance to fail the more money gets put in/the bigger the returns.

Maybe have these systems be passive (as in, 3 upgrade levels of sheep farming, 3 levels of logging, etc.) that increase income but don't require actually watching over the sheep (or only require it at the first level, and the upgrades begin once you hire someone to do it for you).

 

[Oliver]

Investment should have a chance to fail the more money gets put in/the bigger the returns.

Maybe have these systems be passive (as in, 3 upgrade levels of sheep farming, 3 levels of logging, etc.) that increase income but don't require actually watching over the sheep (or only require it at the first level, and the upgrades begin once you hire someone to do it for you).

For the investment you could make it have diminishing returns. Like if you have 2 or so goldmines try to have the max investment income tend toward that. To stop crazy snowballing. Unrealistic but better for gameplay.

 

[Oliver]

Maybe just have randomly generated quests/tasks and reward gold for them. Stuff like kill this creep, destroy this building, take this unit there, aquire this item, get to level 5, amass 1000 wood

 

[cleavinghammer]

Export weapons: Receive money from another player, giving them an upgrade you have researched or the ability to produce a unique unit.

Mercenaries: Targets an area containing allied units. Transfers ownership of units to the casting player, former owner receives 1.1x the unit's cost from the casting player's resources.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Arcane energy Harvesting - Have a special structure that if captured provides an income of around 300 gold per minute

Alchemy factory - a factory that produces a certain amount of gold per minute if captured

 

[nedio95]

Sacrificial Pit (Building) - Sacrifice a unit to activate. The building operates for time scaling with current HP of sacrificed unit. Generates resources based on operation time and sacrificed unit hp.

Sacrifice Pit (Neutral Building) - Same as above. Enemy players can sacrifice a unit to interrupt your sacrifice, so you have to fight for control over it.

Arcane Ritual (Building / Ability) - Imagine it like Undead Goldmine a bit. A number of mages can perform a ritual in this... thing... draining their mana and conjuring resources. When they run out of mana the building starts draining their HP with increasing rate.
It could be like a ritual circle with some slots. Also, mage units could have an ability to place one themselves.

Conjure (Ability - Passive/Auto-cast) - Mage conjures a random item that could be sold. Usually just cheap junk comes out that is sold immediately.

@Grey Knight we still don't know what map you are having in mind?
Obviously, a Mage would find it very hard surviving among spaceship slugging around with lasers and a hacker would find it troublesome cracking the firewall of a Tree of Ages.

regards
-Ned

 

[Oliver]

Mana crystal trader. Neutral buildings with a consumable item which have a slow replenishment rate. When purchased by a hero it converts the heroes mana into gold. The replenishment rate creates scarcity forcing players to fight over the control of neutral buildings which sell them.

 

[disruptive_]

Some nice and creative ideas. I laughed a bit with the shares or stocks thing. You can make an entire game out of that.
In my opinion (just a trivial and surely incoherent monologue), and presuming the thread starter is talking about a melee or altered melee campaing, the economy aspect of the game should'nt be too flashy and rather be mechanical or atleast with options to make it somewhat automatic. Most of the ideas given here can be automated with a building that repeats the respective economical action, with some space to provide adaptation options. Aren't gold mines just a building that, providing minor interactiveness, give you the money?.

Just like most RTS, in which you just click the respective "economical subject", usually a worker or dedicated unit or a building, then proceed to click again or do something with a lot less juice than for example invading a base, and thenenjoy the dollars.
Should be noted that there still should be a margin for meanginful choices (read: players can mess things up) in this economical aspect of the game, otherwise there is no real point to make a resource system and design scarcity. Time could also be tweaked to become scarce, ie. turn system.Talking about scarcity -where?-, in an usual W3 melee game, this aspect almost never kicks in. One can only guess what will happen if gold mines have half the gold, or if massing mortar teams to deforestate were a viable strategy.

My guess is that "we" -the players- are all too aware of the importance of amassing resources, but in the very end the fun is obtained by spending them.
In the end i'm saying this strictly because i enjoy more the beatdown, let's say the militar aspect, than the economy aspect. But hey, maybe someone likes to amass resources, as an end in itself, isn't greed good after all. Was it AOE II that had a mode consisting precisely in winning by gathering X resources?, i'm also aware that some games allow for a better equilibrum (in all aspects, incluiding the juicing) between the militar and economical aspect, making them both equally meaningful to win.


TLDR; design diffent buildings, some more general, some more specific, that do some of the given ideas, as a repeating and hopefully automated effect. Add some SFX (ie. transmutation on death effect), text tags, etc, so players are aware that they are getting rich.

Some buildings ideas (new):
- Bank, this one just provides gold as periodic income, and has mana. It has an active ability (that's why the mana) called "Speculate" (or "Modify Interest Rates" w/e is more themed), that increases all gold gains by other buildings by X% for X minutes.
- Shipyard/Port, this one periodically creates ships -what else-, up to a maximum. Created ships just wander around the building, but every X seconds, the building grants the player X gold based on the number of ships. Ships can be of course be killed, but can also be captured. Upgrades can increase the maximum ships controlled, gold per ship granted, and gold income time rate. Sometimes, instead of a ship an "awesome ship" is spawned instead, this ship gives more stuff... etc.
- Work Post (this is inspired by the concept, "salary system", already mentioned by Grey Knight), this building has mana. It starts with 3 or 4 different abilities. Each ability has the structure: "Whenever the player does X, it gains Y gold". Each antecedent is different. The thing is that whenever the player switches between abilities, as each cost full mana points, he actually needs to wait to do the switch. Use mana regeneration to control the wait time. Make each ability be based on Channel, to allow different order ids, with 360000 follow through and 0 cooldown and suddenly it appears as if you are toggling between abilities. Triggering this might be tricky, since you might want to make this building be able to be builded many times.

 

[TheLordOfChaos201]

Populous the beginning had an interesting concept for magical resources, instead of harvesting gold your mana increased according to the number of people in your community.

This would be like collecting tax. The more people you have the more money you generate. When war strikes that number decrease as people die, adding strategy into the game as there will be now greater risk economically and socially, to war. You could further influence this currency by adding moral, when your troops are winning your cash flow increases, but when they lose it now costs more to hire new troops as they are now unwilling to join the doomed effort of war.

Or like populous

The more of the enemy you kill, the more your currency goes up, the more men you lose the more your currency goes down

 

[Oliver]

Populous the beginning had an interesting concept for magical resources, instead of harvesting gold your mana increased according to the number of people in your community.

This would be like collecting tax. The more people you have the more money you generate. When war strikes that number decrease as people die, adding strategy into the game as there will be now greater risk economically and socially, to war. You could further influence this currency by adding moral, when your troops are winning your cash flow increases, but when they lose it now costs more to hire new troops as they are now unwilling to join the doomed effort of war.

Or like populous

The more of the enemy you kill, the more your currency goes up, the more men you lose the more your currency goes down

I really liked populous. The way you had to train braves into other types of units, the way the land was all deformable, the way you could deplete the resources, the way the braves would sort of "auto" behave (like upgrading houses automatically, putting wood in piles etc) Solid game. Wonder how much work it'd take to remake in Wc3

 

[TheLordOfChaos201]

I really liked populous. The way you had to train braves into other types of units, the way the land was all deformable, the way you could deplete the resources, the way the braves would sort of "auto" behave (like upgrading houses automatically, putting wood in piles etc) Solid game. Wonder how much work it'd take to remake in Wc3

I don't think populous can be recreated

It was a game Devined by Gods and gilded by angles

 

[Rem]

How about "magic wells" whoever captures these structures receives some sort of income from transmuting arcane energy into gold.

Also an economy that lets say you get paid 2000 gold for every 3 minutes of gameplay

An economy where you get rewarded gold for destroying the enemy (enemy buildings)

Lastly an economy where where gold is rewarded for controlling certain structures (etc.)

Heroes could be given the ability that they will generate 500 gold if a certain number of enemies are killed

Lastly just an economy where gold mines are just small sources of income and the rest comes from capturing bases, destroying enemies, etc.

 

[Lord Aiden]

If you want a long game, just have gold mines with 200,000+ gold

Otherwise youre in for a quick game

 

[Rem]

yes, that's the only thing that works, but u could also start off with 50,000 gold mines and have a special ability that adds 10,000 gold, it makes the game much funner

 

[Lord Aiden]

Sounds like you're playing that dream map too much

 

[Rem]

 

[Lordlycan]

- Fishing
- Oyster harvesting
- Farming grain -> milling flour -> baking bread
- Milking animals -> Churning butter -> making cheese
- Meat collection/Hunting
- Herding npc units towards and area
- Blood sacrifices,(Charm+suicide at building=gold)
- Lumberjack and goblin merchants
- Trading
- Pillage
- Thieving
- Creeping
- Corpselooting
- Graverobbing (digging up a cemetery=gold)
- Building roads, levying taxes on the toll roads
- Alchemy/transmute
- Carpentry/Real estate Building selling.
- Privateering
- Mana battery
- Caravans

 

[Lord Aiden]

I think something similar to this has already been proposed, but basically allow a worker to build a special structure on top of a arcane point, this structure will generate a small amount of gold per interval (50 gold/30 seconds) this seems really resonable to me, like the "vorpol tower" from the ascension campaign.

 

[Rem]

those are some good concepts. thanks you guys <3

@Lord Aiden ; I believe Blake or Siler, or someone else in our group had developed something similar, essentially if a worker goes near a certain location the computer gives him the ability to build a special structure and cause him to build that structure in that location, then removes the ability, I don't know what this was called, but it builds a structure that generates a small amount of gold every minute.

 

[Lord Alyx]

@Rem

I have used something similar in my maps. You would have a circle of ruins, my techtree had mages instead of priests and they had this ability called meditate, which would normally just cause the unit to pause in place and recover hp and mana at an accelerated rate, but if the meditate ability would be used while the mage in inside a circle of ruins it would cause the mage to channel and a trigger would activate which would give the owner of the unit 120 gold for every minute the mage was channeling inside of the circle of ruins.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Just out of curiosity, how many of these circles would appear in your maps on average?

 

[Lord Alyx]

Well. First off not all maps had them, and it depended entirely on the map, the most circles that appeared was 5, and this was only in 2 maps, because these were long tedious missions which required the player to play for maybe 3 hours or so, if gold mines should run out or run low these mechanisms were designed to allow the player to keep on going. But I always put large amount of gold in the player's mines. I believe I put over 200,000 gold in mines for longer missions and that's quite a lot.

 

[Lord Aiden]

For steady income here are some ideas:

Gold bonus ability - An ability that works once every 120 seconds and grants the player 1000 gold

Alchemy building - Like a gold mine, but generates funs at a much slower rate

Lumber economy - if there are no gold mines on the map you can cut down lumber and trade this in for gold, the trade can go however way you want for instance 10 lumber for 10 gold, or 10 lumber for 50 gold, this is your choice

Water Mil - Build these structures in shallow water and they in turn generate gold

I might edit this post and add other things.

The lumber economy is actually a good idea, with wisps around you can basically make it into a system with unlimited, although slow income, I've never throughly thought about this before as I've encountered only a very few missions where this was done (e.g. Wanderers of Sorceria Book 2 Family reunion) but this type of system creates more active participation by the player (you have to go and trade the lumber) and allows for a very long mission (with thousands of trees in an accessible area on the map there would be no worry of resources running low).

 

[Lordlycan]

The kalimdor world domination map. The aftermath. Had their orc's work on a lumbering economy that meant they would gain goblin shredder that literally removed all the trees on kalimdor if they got out of hand.

 

[ArchDuke]

The lumber economy is a nice idea, but as Lordlycan pointed out the whole map will get deforested (unless wisps are used) but I guess you can also have some sort of trigger system that would regrow trees.

As far as for other alternative economy systems you could have a salary system where the player is given a period of gold per a given time period, I think this was used in the black company campaign (im not too sure since its been ages since I last played it) but this provides a steady unlimited income.

Other ideas:

>Special structures that generate revenue if captured.

>Buildings you can create where you place peon-like units that will generate more income as more units are placed inside (basically like a factory, this may require heavy triggering but I've seen it used in a map)

>Start the player off with a large amount of gold

>Have a specialized unit (limit this to one or a few) which you could put next to a fountain of mana and this will generate income

>Destroying enemies gives you large bounty

>Give your castle an ability that gives the player some gold every time it is used, but make sure it has an appropriate cooldown

 

[TheLordOfChaos201]

another possibility is to use the appropriation of land as a currency

the more land you have under control, the more money you make.

if an enemy takes your land away... you have less money

that way every building lost will really hurt your gaming wallet

 

[Lord Aiden]

I think somebody mentioned this before but basically it would be some sort of structure that if captured generates a small but steady income. Now these structures could be destroyed or captured by the enemy, so it might change the gameplay depending how how this is implemented;

For instance if you have some sort of "Alchemy Tower" - The structure has like 600hp and can be destroyed, or captured; if a peasant or peasant like unit uses a special ability on it (e.g. "Capture" ability) then the structure will be captured, will now belong to the owner of the peasant who performed the capture ability and will generate income for that particular player.

 

[ArchDuke]

I've seen that type of mechanism used in several maps; you bring a unit (usually a hero) close enough to a specified structure, the unit begins channeling and in a minute or two the structure is yours, along with whatever income it generates.

A creative take on this would be to make the player capture several structures before being provided with a steady income.

Also one thing I came up with while drinking tea just now would be to have a special bonus ability that your castle/fortress/citadel/tree of ages once a certain amount of time has elapsed, in other words you would receive extra financial help once the battle exceeds a certain duration. - I think this may come in very handy.

 

[Lord Alyx]

Two idea also come to mind when reading this thread:

Water turbines; I've actually implemented this in a mission, the concept is simple you're allowed to build a couple of these, they must be build in shallow water and they will generate revenue depending on how many you build.

Converter; the concept here is that you build one of these close enough to a fountain of mana and its able to convert a certain amount of mana into gold (this structure cannot regenerate mana on its own, although I've never fully tested the idea I know that a unit with brilliance aura will make this structure regenerate mana, so it unless there is no units with brilliance aura in the game or the idea is reworked its essentially flawed.

 

[Lordlycan]

A hessian economy could be interesting, where you're in control of a group of mercenaries that fight for whoever pays the best. But switching sides comes at the risk of having your former boss turn against you.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Ok I was bored during class so I came up with a few things:

Mineral harvesting facility - Basically a structures that generates income over time, although not as much as a gold mine but it never runs out of income, this structure cannot be build, it can be destroyed, but it can also be captured, so by capturing these things you will have adiditional income

Meteors - Well the idea here is that meteors land all over the field and if you can collect one and sell it to a mechant you will earn significant profit.

Mercenaries - Basically you get paid to destroy a unit ( think this has been mentioned before)

Ritual - This is unique, basically once you have killer x units a special button appears on your city hall, and you're able to do a ritual that gives you 2000 or more gold

What do you guys think, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[cleavinghammer]

Ritual should give a fraction of the total value of the killed units, so defeating an army gets more than just raiding worker lines.

 

[Lord Alyx]

In a campaign I was making I've had this speciallunit called Scorpio, there was a build limit of like 6 of these so the player can't spam them. Ii Was a 700hp giant with envenomened weapons, shadow strike, and wind walk, as well as resistant skin. This unit had the "peon" classification so we made a special structure for it, basiclly you could fit up to 5 scoprpios in a structure; the more of them in there the more money the structures makes at the same time the more scorpios you have in there the less on the battlefield so its a trade- off... but I thought I would let you guys known about this.....this could come in handy

 

[Lordlycan]

Ok I was bored during class so I came up with a few things:


Meteors - Well the idea here is that meteors land all over the field and if you can collect one and sell it to a mechant you will earn significant profit.

Ritual - This is unique, basically once you have killer x units a special button appears on your city hall, and you're able to do a ritual that gives you 2000 or more gold.

What do you guys think, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

(random spawning rune hunting) -> meteor screen shake animation to tell people a spawn has been done
"Wanted" killing a tribe of bandits

 

[Lord Aiden]

For this to work a meteor needs to be an item which has no uses, but a high cost.

We've tried this before by basically setting up coins as meteors what we found out is that only heroes could get them and instantly earn the gold.

With anyone else it needs to be a useless item which can be sold to the merchant for 750 or 1000 gold

 

[Lord Alyx]

I've tried that before, it may actually fuck up the gameplay somewhat.

Anyway other ideas and things I have implemented (or tried to implement) : get 2,000 gold for taking care of a enemy hero
Get gold for elimating a neutral hostel base.
Get gold for bringing a caravan to safety.
Get gold for basically constructing fortifications around an area and making sure none of the infected units/wild animals get out. Get bounty for destroying dragons. Use charm on a particular unit than lead the unit to a ritual circle, pay the player good amounts of gold.
Activate aigis defense - Basically you have to go around the map activating towers in 8 (I believe) locations (by repairing them from 8% health to 100%) when the towers are repaired you are given a great amount of gold, wood, units, and you no longer have to worry about air raids.

 

[Lordlycan]

^ Looking at that i wonder how it would work if you have like a regular melee match. But you share the sidequests with your enemies, the first to complete them wins the reward.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Interesting stuff man, you should really finish your campaign if you're still working on it.

Here's what I will contribute:
Windmills, make an area on your map with heavy wind, if any player build a windmill close by they will slowly generate some income
Heat converers - basically if you got an area which is extremely hot and has lava flowing nearby, you could build some sort of generator which somehow (using magic) converts this heat into gold

Maybe not my best ideas, but I've tried.

 

[Lord Alyx]

Heat converters are actually a nice idea, imagine playing on a volcano like map, and your only source of gold are like 3 or more converts, that would be a different game, especially so if you would try to capture more converters in order to supplement your income as the game progresses

The windmill idea is also neat, basically have these field where you generate gold if you construct a windmill within (basically you just gotta know how to use regions as well as trigger to accomplish this.

This is how you would set up the triggers for the heat converter

• Heat Converter
  • Events
    • Time - Every 15.00 seconds of game time
  • Conditions
    • (Region 000 <gen> contains Heat Converter 0000 <gen>) Equal to True
  • Actions
    • Player - Add 25 to (Owner of Heat Converter 0000 <gen>) Current gold

You could have a economy where you are periodically paid a wage by fight but you can make the wage go up by killing lots of enemies.

Lets see:
You could actually create (using triggers) where if your gold mine runs low, you can take over the base of someone else, and again using triggers convert their townhall/keep/castle into a gold mine, I actually tried this once and it was successful.

Have this "sunlight capturing devise" and as long its in the sunlight (the one you can manipulate within the editor it arcanes creates gold.

Final idea is to get a unit that can dig for gold, basically you would need to get special patches but this unit will get some gold by digging, I think my partner did this.

 

[Lord Aiden]

Very interesting, you're awesome, do you have any other advice pertaining to this particular subject?

 

[Lord Alyx]

I may be in a possession of a list which states the various alternatives sources of income, this list was written by my partner and I'm not sure how implementable these things are, but I can tell you this: imagination is everything, if you want passive income I suggest you use a system where capturing certain structures yield it, I think that's probably the best thing I can state, but there are many alternatives out there just as I showed you, I can come up with a few more in your like :

A ship that gains extra coins by being in a particular enviroment

An airship that you can send to a windy sector that gains coins as it stays there

An ability that gives you gold

An ability that destroys a sector of a forest but pays you 50 for every tree

A procedure that extracts gold from an area

An ability which gives gold to the player when his is below a certain threashold

Large amounts of gold are given when you destroy enemy bases

An ability to "sprout" a gold mine at a particular location

 

[Lordlycan]

selfpillage: You can attack your own buildings for resources and getting to 10% health would give you nice additional resources but at the cost of having very squishy buildings

 

[Lord Aiden]

True, but that's not really a strategy

What you could do is have a bunch of old structures around your base that you could pillage for extra resources, I believe this was done in at least one campaign I've previously played