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Refining Resources: Difference between revisions
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* ''[[Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun]]'' has 47 different types of resources. A lot of the basic ones are required to create the more advanced ones. (culminating in something like 4-5 steps for the most "high tech" stuff like Radios and Tanks) Due to the highly complex market mechanic, and to represent the situation in the time-period depicted, it's not always most profitable to immediately produce the high-tech stuff though, since demand for basic resources like lumber and Iron will be very high at the beginning of the game.
* At least the older ''[[The Settlers]]'' games runs on this trope, first games added complexity by requiring roads to
* ''[[Imperialism]]'', similar to Victoria above had resources that needed to be gathered, then in factories refined to better stuff.
* ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' mostly revolves around this, directly or indirectly.
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** Tame animal/killed wild animal (Butcher's shop) --> animal hide <ref>also Fat, Meat, Bone, Prepared organs, Skull, Scale, Hooves, Ivory, Tooth, Hair, Wool - depending on the animal</ref>; Chalk <ref>or Calcite, Limestone, Marble</ref> (Kiln) --> quicklime (Ashery) -> milk of lime; hide + milk of lime (Tanner's Shop) --> parchment sheet; wood (Craftsdwarf's Workshop) --> book binding; sheets (Craftsdwarf's Workshop) --> quire (Library <ref>originals by scholars, copies by scribes</ref>) --> written quire; quire with writing + thread + book binding (Craftsdwarf's Workshop) --> Book.
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**** Often players gamble on anvils being available later via merchants and don't take one, and instead bring only ready tools to focus on building up all necessary non-metal industry and basic security first - which is likely to be longer than it takes the first caravan to arrive... or the second... Food and drink industry aren't as complicated as clear glass, but things add up. The upside is that by the time you are ready for smithing, you may be able to produce enough of trade goods to pay for your anvil and then some.
**** While you can keep most goods on the floor, proper use of containers saves a lot of space and time, and containers have to be made. Logs/stones can be cut to 4 much lighter blocks that are interchangeable with them as a building material; this uses a job, but you need to gather less of raw resources, it saves time later because blocks are easier to transport and allow 10x more dense storage (in bins), and it gives the carpenter/mason some practice.
*** One shortcut is to not use fuel, but only magma-heated furnaces. Naturally, you'd need to make sure that the creatures who can swim in magma won't have access to your workshops... which involves some extra items made of magma-proof materials. Luckily, most of these can be cut from stone in one job, and you most likely will have some heat-resistant stone long before you'll dig to magma. Also, magma is used to produce obsidian by mixing with water - the process you need to set up, rather than order as a job, and then dig the solid obsidian out - giving you unlimited stone of a fairly high value (thus natural choice for trade goods).
** Refinement also affects strategy of spending embark points. Low-grade resources are ''much'' cheaper. From humble willow logs, you can make light containers and training weapons soon after building a carpenter's shop, even if there are no fitting trees on the map, or they are guarded by giant badgers. If you have thread, you'll have your own cloth, rope, bags and more as needed, so it may be a good idea... unless you want to keep woolly cattle - then as long as you keep a safe pasture, you'll have a steady supply of yarn and milk (which can be turned into cheese). Plants are easier to protect from local fauna, however. Leather will be messy to make on your own, but if you already have it, many items that are fairly expensive in ready form (like quivers and light armor) are but one step away. And so on. You also can spend points on starting skills - there are skills you don't want to learn by trial and error (like medical ones), but skills that you can train may be worth some points too: if dwarves work faster, they'll save time to do some other job - which speeds up development and allows to catch up on making the goods you don't bring with you.
** Every process is a job that keeps some dwarf occupied, which reflects in optimization. E.g. many jobs go faster if done by trained and/or talented workers, but you won't have 1 dwarf for 1 job for a long, long time - for one, because you'd need to provide materials fast enough - and then there's [[Wax On, Wax Off|"cross-training"]].
* In ''[[Minecraft]]'', the [[I Was Told There Would Be Cake|Cake]] has one of the most complicated crafting procedures in the game. The end result is a food item that can almost fully heal you. It requires 3 buckets of milk, 2 sugar, 1 egg and 3 wheat. While some ingredients are, although somewhat uncommon, relatively simple to obtain (i.e. eggs are laid by chickens, sugar is refined at the workbench from sugar cane, which grows near water), others are a bit more complex:
** Wheat - Grown using dirt, a source of water, a hoe, and seeds. The last one is initially obtained by smashing tall grass.
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* ''[[Anno Domini]]''. The iron cycle is rather similar to the Outpost example, with wood or charcoal added for fuel. Alcohol can be made directly from wine or with a still from sugar. Food can be made from fish, deer, cows (with a butcher) or grain (with a windmill and then a baker). And so on. There's some nice diagrams in the manual.
* ''[[Achron]]'' has a strange variant of this trope. All three factions can convert QP (Quark-gluon Plasma) into LC (Liquid Crystal), which is tantamount to converting the more "advanced" / rare resource into the more "basic" / common one... inefficiently to boot - but [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|it stands to reason that a player should be able to convert a more refined version of a resource into a less-refined variant in case of an emergency]].
* In ''[[Sid Meier]]'s [[Colonization]]'', the economy is built on this trope. In theory you ''could'' just sell raw materials to and buy manufactured goods from Europe, but it's much more beneficial in the long term to build your own industrial base in your colonies, especially considering you'll have to fight your mother country in the endgame. Of course, advanced resources mostly are still traded away, but for a greater profit. The only refinements consumed in your own colonies are Ore -> Tools <ref>spent in production of ships, cannons and non-basic building, or used to equip units and then spent by [[Worker Unit|Pioneer]] jobs</ref> -> Muskets <ref>used to equip units</ref> and Food -> Horses
* The ''[[Hearts of Iron]]'' games require refining of crude oil into refined fuel. Metal, rare materials, and energy are also "refined" by your industrial capacity into supplies, based on how much of the IC is allocated to producing that resource.
* ''[[
* ''Emperor of The Fading Suns'' - Food and sometimes Exotica are gathered by Farms, Metals, Traces and sometimes Gems by Mines and Energy by Wells, the rest is produced from them. You can purchase stuff, but merchants are kind of cutthroats and also will start trouble if they'll ever accumulate enough of money. You can get extra income early on from selling excess of Trace from mines and sometimes Exotica that farms give whether you want it or not, but you usually get more from refined stuff, thus Electronics and Chemical may be among the first towns (after Farms, because [[You Require More Vespene Gas|you always need more and more food]] as you build units, and ''a lot'' for Engineers to create all those buildings, and possibly Wells, because <s>oil</s> Energy is used to produce ''anything'' else). The first two add 150 Fb of value and Fusorium adds 4455 Fb (!) per turn. However, the Bioplant runs at a loss of 50, and Cyclotron at a loss of 1000 Fb of possible profit... yet while it's possible to buy these resources from the League, with their markup it would be ''even more'' expensive - assuming the nearest Agora will have enough for your needs at all.
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** Cyclotron: 10 Energy + 10 Monopols + 7 Gems -> 1 Singularity (jump-capable spaceships).
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** Wetware plant: 10 Energy + 10 Ceramsteel + 10 Biochems -> 10 Wetware (ditto).
* When ''[[City of Heroes]]'' introduced bases for super groups, the mechanism for creating improvements involved extracting or combining "ordinary" salvage to create any of about half a dozen special components, which were then combined using randomly-dropped recipes for the various items with which one could outfit a base. The process was complicated, tedious, and quickly abandoned by the developers for a somewhat simpler, more streamlined scheme that didn't involve any "refining".
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[[Category:Money Tropes]]
[[Category:Strategy Game Tropes]]
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