I think my concern with option C is the required interface behind it, essentially all Option C does is create a temporary unit design so that the player doesn't have to.

What I want to know is how temporary, if I lose a resource needed to build a unit it will ask me if I want to continue building it, but what if I click yes and close the build window then reopen it, and build a second of the unit, will it ask me again? what if I change to a different city will it have to ask again? or will it assume that I want to do the same thing in each instance (of particular importance if resource levels differ between towns). What if I take back the resource later in the turn, will it continue to build the worse unit or detect that the resource is back and upgrade them again?

Additionally, part of me suspects that the drawbacks of Option A are being overstated, if we take the Dread Knight\Twilight Honey example then the likely hood is that throughout the game, as I acquired new resources and technology that I have already created about a dozen precursor units to the Dread Knight, so rather than framing it as a Dread Knight minus Twilight Honey, it would simply end up being a unit I had probably already designed.

Given that as a thought, I suggest allowing players to create "timelines" of units, so to speak, so that if a resource is lost you can simply revert it back to the unit it was upgraded from, so that you don't have to worry about whether it is a "Dread Knight" or a "Dread Knight -1" it is simply a "Black Knight" or whatever you happened to name the previous unit.

As an aside, Please allow the creation of separate unit lists for custom races, by which I mean If I create a "Knight of Good" for my Good faction I don't want them turning up each time I play as my Evil faction, especially if it involves having to delete each and every variation of them that existed as technology improved.

I think it kind of depends on how resources are handled in the game. Do you harvest the resource and stockpile it (or the products made from it), or do you simply have it available and use it on demand? Does each city need their own resource for making gear for units from it, or is it empire-wide or regional?

The next question is how easy/hard is it to lose that resource? Are resources generally located far from the cities that use them? How likely are you to lose a resource in the first place; does an enemy need to invade deep into your territory to capture the resource or is it located so far from cities that guards/reinforcements will take a long time to get there in the event that the resource is lost? If it's deep in your territory odds are that either it's a raiding party you can somewhat easily deal with,or it's a part of a larger invasion and capturing the resource is merely a part of hampering your ability to reinforce your lands.

What I'm trying to say is, the amount of "hassle" that comes with losing a resource should be somewhat related to how easily it can change hands to begin with. If an important resource is likely to change hands quickly and often, the impact on unit design should preferably require as little micro-management as possible, and preferably it should automatically change to a backup-design or something. This is doubly important if losing one resource impacts multiple cities, since a resource changing hands often resulting in you manually changing building orders for multiple cities every other turn is a recipe for tedium. Mulitply that with the number of different resources a unit can depend on.

If losing a unit resource is a major thing that is unlikely to happen very often, then some micromanagement is less of an issue since there's likely several actions the play will need to take anyway in order to deal with the issue.

Hmmm, that was very general and uninformative. Sorry, I'm better at playing games than designing them

Honestly, why not make it that that if you have mithril which should be rarer than Iron you can research the ability to use it, and each round you stockpile an amount of the resource and as long as you have it stockpiled and researched you can use it, and by research, one to mine it, another for armor etc. 

That way if you find it early you can start mining it, even if your economy is not up to building such units yet.  That way geographic luck play in, as well as your decisions on when to start collecting a resource through research, I mean its a vital decision research the ability to collect said resource or to research that gives you a more immediate bonus, but one that is not near as useful later on.  It all depends on 2 things Brad, how detailed you want to go into an economic model, and how much housekeeping on the programming side there is.  

Personally I think lots of resources and requiring a stockpile or active collection of said resources is a good thing.  It forces the player to create defensive positions around important resource collection areas and not just go well I will use it while I got it, or in you .1 collection idea of just waiting forever to buidl a few powerful units.  One nice thing about stockpiling like that is say you lose a city, you have two options on how stockpiles are handled, either it is distributed throughout the empire so each city has a % or the cities that actively collect it stockpile it and losing that city means the enemy collects that stockpile

It makes exploring in the early game useful, and exploring in the early game could be extremely dangerous depending on the number of monsters in the world +AI etc.

Anyway just my two cents, and I would like to say that other than issues that other people have reported, I am having a wonderfully stable experience on Windows 7

Luke

Option C is more work for Stardock but other then that I can't see a downside.

+1 vote for Option C

Sammual

I'd want to see something like Option C.   The way I'd want the units to be kept to a minimum is have a system that holds what is a direct upgrade of something elser (you might have to send some time early on, or just use a few pre-made sets)    If you have mithril helms on all your guys once you gain access to mithrel,  (because all I'd want is the cheapest armor, leather oc icot, and the best armor, mithril, adamantine, oricalcum, ect.   I'd only use bronze or steel when thats my best option most likely)    So it wouldn't bother to show all my middle ground guys if I have access to better upgraded forms of them.

I kinda thought this question was tied up in the resources part of the game.  My understanding was that since caravans were moving resources from mines/bee apiaries all the time, there was at least some of a given resource heading to a town at any time.  Those resources would start into motion when you made a build, that would (invisibly to us) start to move iron/bees/etc toward the town in which the unit was being built.  The upshot of this was, to deny a player building the Honeyed Warrior O' Doom you think he's building, you need to control the mine, the apiary, AND hunt down and kill his caravans before they get to the city.  You can't build any more once the resources are depleted, of course, but there's a time lag between when you take control of an opponent's mine and when they truly can't build a unit requiring resources from that entity, because some of the resource is alread enroute to his cities.

Am I just woefully behind the times on the thinking now?  I know we chose (at least initially) a simplified economic model in the other thread on economics (Stardock Dainty Underthings Made Public, or some such thread), but I thought that caravans still were part of the game, moving resources around between towns.  Heck, I've even seen the little wagon wheels in the build we have. 

Option C seems the better option imo. I could live with option A but it might be a pain when you loose a ressource to have to reorganize everything.

Imo the dream option would be the unit gets created with everything available if it reaches 150% of its regular build time without getting the ressource. You then have a resuply option as suggested by elkoba.

This resuply option could be managed by a list and avoid micromanagement for example the available resuplies: 10 troops waiting for mithril swords with the options replace all and resuply all (eventually greyed out). and some popup window prompting you to resuply if there is available equipement for troops . Eventually the same two buttons on individual troops for micromanagment addicts.

I agree with Draginol that option C is the best, but the above point should be addressed: IMO the incomplete Dread Knights should "run around" with a marking that makes the player realize their weakness, but should also be auto-upgraded as long as the resource is recovered by the player and kept for a certain number of turns. (having them go back to a city to upgrade would be more realistic but quite tedious IMO, I hated having to do that in MOOII with starships).

Option C works for me, keen to playtest it and see how it flies.

Are we doing different training types in unit design? Examples: Anti-cavalry, phalanx formation, long range accuracy etc? Pre-reqs can be research & specific barracks add-ons etc

What about traits bestowed by buildings? Morale bonus for church, big one for cathedral etc?

P.S. Go dreadknights

So from my understanding of how resources will work, you can build warehouses in cities, and use them to stockpile resources (that is how it's going to work, right? That's what I remember, anyway)

Assuming that's how it will work, then I think you should be able to build the unit so long as you are producing/mining the necissary resources, or you have them stored in warehouses. If you have been stockpiling mithril since the beginning of the game, but then you loose your mithril mines, you can still build units using mithril, at least until you run out of stockpile. If/when you run out, I'd go with B or C.

I definitely prefer option C, but I also like the idea of a short lag between when you loose a resource and when you can no longer produce units using that resource. I also think that any unit that started production should be able to finish it (even if it's past that lag time mentioned above) - since the way I see it, the time building a unit involves training it and building its equipement but all the needed resource have already been brought in.

^ The above idea means that I would run in and steal a rare resource for as little time as possible and then queue up as many units using that as I could before retreating. Seems less strategic and more gamey to me.

I'm thinking we need warehouse buildings to stockpile resources and such.  It is this value that will be used when constructing units instead of a requiring to have access of the resource at that time.  

I for one am going to be a deviant and say that I am in favor of Option D. What is option D? Every resource has a cost in gold. If you don't have the resource available to you, you simply pay the cost for it instead. This would represent scavenging stuff from the environment/buying it from trades and/or third parties.

I am really in favor of this. It would mean the economic model would have to switch over to a more quantitative model - which I am also hugely in favor of. So if you have five mithril mines for 40 turns and your warehouse has 200 mithril stored up then you should use it from stockpiles if you lose the mines. You could also trade for quantities of different resources, and if SD wanted to really go crazy there could even be some fluctuations in price based on supply and demand. It would really open up possibilites such as cornering a market, making money by playing those fluctuations... (but that would entail making the AI know how to do the same..) I really prefer the quantitative model for resources though.