Mechanic Design 101 - Resource Management

[@mathmagician517]

I like the way Dark Deity handles its resource mechanic. Money is used for everything, and you get some at the end of every map. And more importantly, the game communicates this very clearly right from the start. So the player doesn't suffer from a scarcity mindset and feel the need to hoard.

[@iridium137]

I feel like something that doesn't get talked about a lot, is that hoarding is often a symptom of the game being too easy. After all, the main purpose of hoarding is saving for a rainy day, and in some games, that rainy day never comes. For example, in Fire Emblem games, I often encounter situations where I can use an Iron Sword to two-round an enemy, or use a Silver Sword to one-round an enemy. But the enemy is also weak enough that two-rounding doesn't have any meaningful consequences, so in that case, why waste a valuable resource for basically nothing? I find that when I play harder games, the hoarding tendency goes away pretty quickly.

[@ElusiveEllie]

Good job, I've seen many of your ___ 101 videos so far and this is by far the most interesting one. Feels much less of an overview of "This is how Fire Emblem did this over all their games" and more a look into *why* certain decisions might be made. I'd love to see more like this!

[@MythrilZenith]

@@ElusiveEllie Thanks! It was a hard subject to try and tackle and I'm not sure I really gave any one aspect enough time to really unpack it, but maybe in the future I can give some more focused deep dives.

[@emotional_st0rm]

I totally feel the dichotomy of player tendency. I used to be super conservative with items, never using them even in the most appropriate situations. Now I've overcorrected and if an item seems even marginally useful I'm like "fuck it we ball" and use it lol.

[@MythrilZenith]

@@emotional_st0rm it's hard to describe how or why it happens, but yeah it's a trend I've noticed in myself as well. Consumables feel good to use!

[@something1558]

Better to have used it than to not use it at all is a good way to think about it

[@linhasxoc4546]

Limited resources are especially tricky because on as a player doing a blind playthrough, you don’t really know exactly how limited resources are going to be. Even if you seem to have enough of an item, there’s always the worry that you won’t get any more or that you’ll miss your chance to get more

[@Laezar1]

I'm very much a hoarder despite trying really hard not to be. To me it's a combination of multiple things : 1) Having no clue what I'll need later. Or how easy something will be to obtain again. Like, how am I supposed to know how many potion I'll need if I don't know if I'll get more or how many fights I'm supposed to get into? 2) Not needing to use the ressources. If I can solve a situation without consuming any longterm ressource then I will. Cause why would I use a ressource if I don't have to? In practice it often just makes my experience miserable cause the games are just more fun if you use everything at your disposal. But it's still hard not to do cause it's just sound logic in term of optimizing. Like, if I could solve the situation without consumable it's effectively equivalent to just throwing the item away. Charge system really helps with 1) because instead of having to consider the entire game I only need to consider the next section and it's much easier to make an informed decision then and easier to adjust my ressource consumption on the fly too. For 2) I find the most useful is to make it so I will always have to use limited ressources, I just have to balance which one. I think path of radiance bonus exp is actually great here because it encourages you to solve the maps efficiently (sadly you are never told in advance what the objectives are making it a pretty limited incentive), you might end up using extra ressources because you know solving the map quickly will reward you with higher quality ressources anyway. Villages and time constraints in general are also a good source of tension between hoarding your ressources and trying to obtain more. And permadeath is also obviously a very good incentive, cause hoarding a silver sword use when it's possible it leads to your unit dying is not good ressource management (especially when the unit death also means losing that sword anyway. Honestly I think replenishable ressources tend to be better unless complete failure is part of the intended experience. Charge system just lends themselves better to thinking tactically about situations without worrying about hoarding. I think longterm ressource management is more interesting in games that are intended to be restarted and failed like roguelikes and arcade game. Fire emblem is in a weird in between where a lot of it's system only make sense if you already know what's coming but at the same time they're way too long for it to be reasonable to throw challenges at the player that might just lose them their entire run and force them to restart so players end up flooded with ressources that they do not want to use.

[@finaldusk1821]

Valkyria Chronicles is fascinating case study here, as a tactical strategy series that seems all but immune to hoarding and overspending habits. You get slightly bigger rewards for going out of your way to kill all enemy officers and destroy all enemy tanks, but the biggest prize by far is how few turns you take to finish the level, which can more than DOUBLE your end-of-battle rewards with an elusive A-rank. Like with Dark Deity, hoarded resources mean slower level completion and fewer total resources, pushing players to spend everything ASAP to enable more resource acquisition. And the games are designed such that overspending can't handicap you later. Experience points are spent manually on levelling up whole classes (not individual units), while money is spent to unlock new weapons, armour, and tank upgrades (with each unlock getting mass produced for ALL units of the relevant class to use at no further cost). You also can't buy higher quality gear until you've unlocked the preceding versions, so no point saving up to 'skip' middling equipment since it's all a required investment for the good stuff anyway. The pressure to perform well on every level, the lack of individual purchases and the everlasting benefit of EVERY purchase (given that you need all five / six classes and often all available tanks to win consistently), all comes together in a system that always rewards aggressive spending with no counterintuitive incentive to save / hoard. And worst comes to worst, I can speak from experience when saying that you can beat these game even if you're taking terribly long to finish every level; while playing slow and safe makes things much harder, you'll never be outright soft-locked. For those who are somehow TRULY stuck, optional and endlessly repayable skirmishes are an option. Not every game can accommodate systems like Valkyria Chronicles, much less the unique combination involved, but this has allowed the series to almost entirely eliminate a bane of many other series in its genre and some notes can certainly be taken from this success.

[@MaddMoke]

I feel much better as a player when its made clear what design choice the programer made. FE is one of the few games I replay multiple times so yes its funny for early NPCs to say"dont use that right away its rare" when ive already mapped out how it will be used. But way better than forgetting an item until hours later and finding I have 5 accumulated or vice versa used something on a character i dont want long term

[@ritachikorita6916]

Surprised you never mentioned Dark Souls for metered uses. The fact that your main healing option refills at bonfires along with your spell casts incentivizes using them smartly. Later games also added inventory limits for consumables and other mechanics that all but beat over the player’s head that resources are there to be used.

[@MythrilZenith]

@@ritachikorita6916 tons of games I could have mentioned but either got cut or spaced my mind when writing. Could be worth a deeper dive later on.

[@jierdareisa4313]

I love ALL MythrilZenith videos!!!! ❤

[@Venomdrad]

Resource management can be tricky to balance, especially in Fire Emblem. As a general rule, in FE resources are limited whether is weapons, gold, or XP. The exceptions are the games that have some sort of grinding like Awakening. Others are stingy with resources like Conquest. Gold is really surprisingly tight in FE Engage especially if you start donating to countries. Now with the DLC bonuses, you get a bunch of gold early on and if you don't feel like using it to preserve the original balance... you can just donate it. Some games shower you with gold like FE9, but you at least have something to use it on thanks to forging. In FE4 you need gold to repair weapons and legendary weapons are pricey to repair. Tonics in Awakening/Fates encourage spending some gold on them to boost up your units to a point. FE12 has the drill grounds: spend some gold to fight for XP. FE5 has the capture mechanic so you can just strip enemies of everything they have. Thieves can steal pretty much everything they want. Side-effect is that while gold is limited but also not as important outside maybe buying some wind tomes and stamina drinks. The late game secret shop sells stat boosters, which is not very impressive to me in a game were stats cap at 20 and you have growth-boosting scrolls. Also, that members card is so tedious to get especially given the other chapter side objective is recruiting Xavier. FE6 was interesting. Shops often have good weapons like killer weapons you can buy in bulk. You start getting some legendary weapons fairly early, but they had limited uses and they can't break otherwise you don't get the true ending. So, you have to play conservative with them until endgame. As for gold, it's limited but there is a secret shop later on that sells a bunch of stat boosters including boots. You are encouraged to save up gold so you can go nuts at the secret shop. Some promotion items are rare so buying them is quite useful too. Another shout-out to the romhack FE Vision Quest: during Part 3 you switch perspectives to a new party that does not have access to any shops or armories. Basically, you are forced to use everyone and use up whatever weapons they come with. New items and weapons are limited to enemy drops and chests. It's a difficulty spike for sure but it did change the flow. Also has a late game secret shop with stat boosters though this one is one-chapter before the final. It's just insurance in case you have units that got RNG-screwed and can't hold up anymore without some help. PS: For the next unit class analysis, I might I recommend the soldier class? It's a surprisingly rare class for just being a lance foot unit. I got some thoughts on it.

[@rekenner]

Using Terraforming Mars on Tabletop Simulator as your board game example. My man. :D

[@MythrilZenith]

Hey, gotta rep one of my favorite board games!

[@NolenJacobson]

If a game intends to balance around its finite resources being used one solution for player hoarding is changing a resource from a consumable such as a stat booster to a one time event like a shrine which raises stats. If you have to use the resource then and there or miss out altogether players will make a choice. From a FE game balance perspective there are some flaws however; such as units with high movement being even more centralizing by being the quickest to get to these buffs or already strong units being the only ones capable of easily getting to these buffs making them less flexible than consumables.

[@finaldusk1821]

SoV has shrines like this and works around the issue by having them be accessed outside of immediate combat (albeit usually in dungeons with occasional combat). That said, if you want to have such buffs be obtainable on battle maps, you could allow any unit to 'retrieve' the buff, then tell the player choose ANY of their units (whether just the deployed ones or absolutely any of them) right then and there to be the recipient.

[@dragonarrow5525]

I'm surprised you didn't mention games that make resources more common or of greater volume when you are low on that resource like Metroid or Signalis. It's a pretty perfect way to encourage the player not to horde without punishing them for using consumables too much. Replacement units from the DS Fire Emblem games technically fall into this but it has the key distinction of being a bad mechanic.

[@MythrilZenith]

@@dragonarrow5525 Resident Evil 4 making ammo drops more common for weapons you are actively using is my go-to example but yeah, it's definitely a huge incentive to get players to use things, particularly in game genres (or in RE's case series) which have historically incentivized Hoarding far more. There are so many games I wanted to talk about but didn't find the time to, like Doom Eternal's chainsaw, but I felt like the video was meandering enough already and I was on a crunch to get it out. Maybe good material for a follow up.

[@armorbearer9702]

To lessen player hoarding, perhaps one of the characters in the party can comment that the party is approaching a market soon or something along those lines. It will not say which exact chapter is going to have a market, but it will give players some confidence to use their supplies.

[@SaberToothPortilla]

In my experience playing and watching people play, the best solution to the hoarding problem is indeed to simply make it impossible to do so, through inventory caps for example. Of course, this requires you to tailor the inventory caps based on how regularly you expect players to find/use each individual resource, but it really pushes players to use the items because it makes clear that *not* using it presents a risk of clear and immediate waste. The other is tweaking "difficulty" i.e. some aspect of the experience that demands more from the player. This is part of why more stringent demands push entirely different play styles, because you're essentially forced to use everything available to you to have any reasonable chance of succeeding. This is especially true in non-action games where no amount of personal player skill can overcome hard numerical advantages. Biggest way to encourage use of consumables is to make it fairly clear that they basically *must* be used.

[@vhms123]

Man, I think it was Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark (a Final Fantasy Tactics kind of game) that made me think the most of this kind if Design decision. In that game, every battle you have a pool of items at your disposal to use. So at the beginning, you have like, 3 normal potions, maybe a MP heal, and the like And between missions you can use resources, like loot from enemies in order to upgrade that pool. That makes so consumable items, and the Item command in general can become really powerful, unlike in FFTA, for example, where usually a player will discard the item command the second they change classes so they can use some other classes command. I think this choice if making them upgradable but still limited hits the right spot for me.

[@cyndit9054]

I personally believe that no stat boosters should ever be used before the last map. (except for boots, which go on the dancer, and then on either the lord or a favorite unit). I really like Fates' tonics since they are so cheap and I can decide which one(s) to buy for each unit based on each map.

[@Xertaron.]

It's a good practice to mix limited resources with unlimited ones. Like if you have limited healing potions in rpg, while healing magic can be used as long as you can cast it. Or how Chrom's Falchion has unlimited uses, so even if you manage to break all other weapons, you still have means of finishing the map. I don't use things like stat boosters for an entirely different reason - it helps me evaluate how each unit does on their own merits, without giving them favoritism. The only time I do use them right away are boots on Marth, because he has to do by far the most walking out of any unit in his games (and in FE11 especially he needs all the help he can get).

[@quickpawmaud]

Technically pretty sure every FE game does have unlimited experience. Just gotta boss abuse lol. Also yeah I think hoarding is a huge issue in game design. I have always wanted FE to experiment with map limited resources rather than unlimited or finite across the entire game with weapons for example. So like that powerful weapon rather than have 40 uses for the entire game would have 5 uses per battle. This would incentivise players to use them strategically without causing them to hoard them. Basically like how magic works in 3 Houses but with weapons.

[@ashleythompson801]

It's more or less how Engage does resource limits too, it's not a strict X/map limit but your engage bars filling up as you fight enemies or stand on sparkle tiles is a form of map-limited resource. Can't speak for everyone but I find engages infinity times more cool and fun and satisfying than breakable legendary weapons or early game silver lances for that reason, and the thought of playing some Engage hack that gives you a flat 20 lodestar rushes per playthrough but lets you do them all back to back if you want fills me with existential dread.

[@quickpawmaud]

@ashleythompson801 I absolutely hated Engage for different reasons, though. I think Fates and Engage are the only Fire Emblem games I played that I just absolutely did not like which ironically are the only two that change up the durability system but that doesn't have anything to do with why I don't like them. Engage seemed really similar to SoV in how it handled weapons (which I love that game) but I just didn't like the other mechanics and I also don't like FE9 which is similar to Engage in that the mechanics incentivise you to put all your resources into just a couple units and ignore the rest.

[@ghable23]

What if I don't want to spend currency on something because I feel/know they're going to give/release a better option later? This has gacha games and droppable items from enemies on RPGS in mind, in particular XC3.

[@MythrilZenith]

Yeah the relative uselessness of money is another factor I didn't really talk about, but can definitely exist. There's often at least ONE money dump that always has value to the player, but I can definitely agree that Xenoblade games in particular suffer a lot from an initial drought of money followed soon after by having more money than you will ever be able to spend.

[@Venomdrad]

I know in XB2 there are some side quests that require spending quite of a bit of gold. That one core crystal you can buy that has Sheba, a unique blade. Only way to get it but it’s pricey. While gold isn’t a much of an issue in late game, core crystals are always valuable. It’s very unlikely to get every rare blade unless you grind like a maniac for core crystals.

[@ghable23]

@@Venomdrad Yeah. I think I got them all as a post game task, except DLC because I didn't buy it.

[@ghable23]

@@MythrilZenith I wanted more to point out there are games in which items are temporary or rather they become outdated/useless. You talked about using them when there's a good use. Here, the use is minimal to the point there doesn't seem to be a benefit spending money on items that could get replaced in less than an hour whose benefits aren't noticeable.

[@OverusedBrush]

I think experiences is not technically a "resource" because there is no expendable action on it. Or i guess you can calk it a resource because you "gain", giving incentive for the player over that said resource.

[@ussgordoncaptain]

I find it really depends on if the player is playing blind on their first playthrough or if they're playing on a higher difficulty in a later playthrough if you're on your second or 3rd run of a game you know so much about how the game plays out that you know when to hoard those silver lance uses and when to go "fuck it we ball". Though tbh as I got better and better at FE I basically went to "fuck it we ball" because FE is too easy of a game to warrant thinking too hard about resource management, just assume the game designer will give you stuff later