How do these Game Mechanics Sound? (Strategy/Survival)

Hi everyone,

After finally finishing the introduction to my game I'm starting to integrate the core mechanics into it and I wanted to get some feedback on how they sound. Please be honest with me, are they too simple? Too complex? All feedback is worthwhile.

I've also spent a lot of time designing those, so please don't just copy paste them if you're also making a strategy game  >_>  

Core mechanics:

Population:

You start the game with 10 creatures, of which 4 are automatically assigned to food production, 4 are assigned to being a general worker, 1 is assigned to the guard role and 1 becomes your first explorer. The higher your hygiene is, the more often new creatures will be born.

You might be wondering now, what is an explorer? Well, in this game your base is located on a small island that wasn't hit by the attacks (Backstory) as badly as the other locations. This means that you'll be building all your buildings on this island while the rest of the world will be explored by your explorers - you'll find blueprints and rare items there. 'Exploring' is essentially playing a normal RPG game, but the levels  and classes don't do much. It's more about key fights and looking for secrets.

Food:

Every 'food worker' (I need a name for this job) produces 3 Food units a day. Every basic Food building (A farm, a hunting lodge etc.) produces 2 Food a day (Can be improved with technology and improvements), but only as long as there are more workers than buildings. Otherwise they produce 1 Food a day. They also supply you with resources, such as furs and pearls which can be traded or used for something else. 

Every citizen eats from 1 to 3 Food units a day, it's up to you how much you give them. More food will improve ''hygiene'' and happiness, less food will reduce those. 2 Units a day is the normal setting. Given the harsh atmosphere food will decay on a daily basis, unless you discover a way to store it somehow.

Production:

Every 'general worker' produces 3 Production Units a day. Workshops, woodcutter camps etc will further improve the production and this will work just like food does. ''Productivity'' can boost this value up to a 150% total.Ending a day will use up all your Production Units. You can use those to build things, produce equipment and helpful consumables.

Other things:

This game's main feature is choice - you can create a militaristic society, a democratic paradise or anything you can come up with. You'll be given choices very often and whatever you choose will affect your entire society. Your choices (And the buildings you build) will affect the following variables which in turn affect almost everything else

• Hygiene VS Pollution
• Happiness VS Unrest
• Research
• Entertainment
• Danger VS Security
• Education (Productivity)
• Wealth
• Militarism VS Pacifism
• Communism VS Liberalism VS Fascism

Thats it right now, I'm just planning things and adding them whenever I need something new. I've been thinking of making one called 'Faith' but I think that it can be broken down into other ones.

Those are pretty much the very basics of my game, I want to finish and polish them before adding other tribes etc.

I also have to work on ''Research'', but right now Im not sure how I want to do it. I'm sure that eventually I'll come up with something, if you have any ideas feel free to post them here.

So, what do you think?

Thanks!  :)

Well, you didn't go into much detail - and that "core" is how things were done in dozens of games two decades ago, you might want to look for a game named "Master of orion 2" for a really good example (the first part of that series was OK, the third (and last) part one of the worst games ever, but the second "Master of Orion" was widely known as the best 4X game for an entire decade).


So if you see something similiar, don't worry, its not copied from your game, its copied from MoO ;-)


You might also look for "Master of Magic", the not so successfull (average) Fantasy-Spinoff from the SF "Master of Orion".


That said, a lot will depend on the details how you implement that principle - as the Master-series shows it can be very good or you could create a really bad game, both based on the same principle as you described.