[Consim-l] Declining resources ?

[Markus Stumptner]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Mircea Pauca wrote:
>   Do you know any well-designed board, computer or other
> civ-style games (economic,social,military,diplomacy) set in
> an universe of declining usable resources, brought by both
> natural forces and player's decisions ?
>   I've received a pointer to "Emperor of Fading Suns" (1996) on PC.
> But it may be too about Easter Island, deforested Greece etc.
>   Some scenarios of Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3 on PC had very unstable starting 
> situations - poor existing operations, finance etc.
> and the challenge was to turn them around.
>
>   Yes I know most people find Growth more fun, but just
> survival and preservation of what's currently good is worthwhile !

As fate would have it, I played SPI's After the Holocaust for the first 
time about a week ago. It's not strictly a declining resource game - the 
goal is the reconstruction of society after a limited nuclear war (and 
victory is measured by the consumer goods output meted out to people in 
the various sectors of the economy). However, it is certainly a strongly 
resource restricted game, to the degree that survival likely requires 
cooperation between the players (and the design notes make it clear that 
that was the main goal in design).  In fact, study of the tables makes it 
clear (and the design notes warn of this in great length) that it is quite 
possible, by not playing cautiously and getting some negative effects, 
eg., bad harvests or lots of unemployment through unwise labour 
allocation, to put your economy into a death spiral from which you won't 
recover in the timespan of the game.  Waste of resources and unemployment 
leads to unrest which can result in already pacified areas (including 
those you start the game with!) dropping back into anarchy and eroding 
your economic base. Interestingly, it is apparent that one of the quickest 
ways in that direction is to engage in a military buildup on your fragile 
base - military spending is described as something that is almost doomed 
to fail and apparently done only as a desperation effort.

I was quite surprised to find how quickly the game started moving after we 
had gone through a few turns so that the mechanisms were feeling more 
natural.  I had seen comments that led me to believe this was a near 
monster game, and the amount of markers that you deploy at the beginning 
of the game did reinforce that fear. However, as we started playing, we 
got the hang of things.  We all definitely want to play again when the 
opportunity arises and we do think this might be suitable to get through 
in an evening. (I later found the average playing time listed on the box 
is 3 hours, and this is one case where I'd be inclined to believe it.)

Another, rather unlikely, candidate is Avalon Hill's Merchant of Venus. 
This, in case you don't know it, is a SF game on trading between different 
star systems. It is patterned after the 17th century spice trade, with the 
property that it is essentially impossible for a player to go bankrupt; if 
you get into difficulties the typical effect will be that your operations 
will slow down (you may have to sell equipment to get cash etc).  In 
practice, I've never seen that happen in the normal game.  However, there 
is an optional rule where the galaxy is infested by a race of xenophobic 
militaristic worms, the Hastur.  You can try shooting them out of the way, 
but they get stronger over time.  Essentially, your access to the next 
deal gets more expensive/slower as time progresses, potentially to the 
degree that players might team up to get rid of the Hastur.  I have not 
played this scenario though since the standard game is so much fun that 
we've never progressed past it.

I know that Richard Berg once worked on a game called "Confederate Rails", 
patterned on some of the popular 19th century railroad empire building and 
operating games out there, but with the twist that the game takes place 
during the American Civil War and so you have to do with gradual attrition 
of the available rolling stock, cannibalising of materials for war 
purposes (guns and armour), loss of tracks to raids and eventual outright 
conquest.  The reason I'm listing it at the end is that it's presumably 
hard to find - it was dropped off GMT's P500 program and published in 
limited numbers as a DTP game.

Finally, as a generic comment, pretty much any game worth its salt on WWII 
in the Pacific (Pacific Fleet and Pacific War come to ming) will place the 
Japanese in a situation where their resources constantly diminish by the 
ravages wrought on Japanese merchant shipping. Of course that is true only 
of one side. :-)

Markus


Last 3 games played: Blitzkrieg '41, Alpha Omega, After the Holocaust
--------------- http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ ---------------
"Bakayaro! Bakayaro!"  ("Stupid Bastards!  Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral 
Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942