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Designing Material Types

Material types are the simplest to define. They have only a few properties of their own; most of the time they just index tables along with the other types. Materials do not act on their own in any way; instead, players manipulate materials as part of doing other actions. For instance, you can specify that movement, combat, and even a unit's very survival depends on having a supply of some material, or that some material is ammo and consumed gradually when fighting.

The use of materials is pretty much up to you. You don't have to define any material types at all, and game designs with materials are usually more complicated. However, the increase in realism is often worth it; with materials you can limit player activity and/or make some actions more "expensive" than others.

As with the other types, you can define up to about 127 material types, but that would be enough to model the entire global economy accurately! (and take all week to compute a single turn...) 1-3 types is reasonable.


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