The forums here and at Steam are littered with threads bemoaning the current state of PC's management, particularly criticism of the arbitrary and “unfun” mechanic of ride aging introduced with the last patch. I see no point in rehashing all the arguments about either the tacked on feel of management or the aging mechanic here, rather I want to discuss the PC meta-game, and what can be learned and hopefully incorporated from another, ostensibly quite dissimilar game, Banished.
For those who don't know it, Banished is a survival game, remarkable in that it is entirely crafted by a single, lone, unique developer. One person created this entire game, folks. That in itself is extraordinary, but the game does not look or play like a basement project; it is handsome and highly polished, plays beautifully, and is extremely well-balanced and a challenge to master. Inevitably, it has also spawned numerous imitators, as its creator has crafted a simple but organic and compelling meta-game.
What is the game? In short, you start on an empty map with a a small band of young families and, depending on the difficulty level, a varying amount of food, necessities and perhaps shelter to get them started. The peeps must then build a self-sustaining settlement in the wilderness, with only, eventually, a trader which comes periodically by boat to offer various resources at high cost.
Primary resources – trees, iron ore and stone – lie scattered on the map and are to be collected and transformed into tools and structures. There is nothing to unlock; even the most complex building can be built from the outset, but of course that is impossible; to build a chapel or a market, first you must build basic housing and establish food and materials production.
By default, children will begin work by age 10 or so, but schooling them until 17 increases their capacities and effectiveness, so at a crucial early point you must forsake a growing workforce for nearly a decade. Some buildings like a chapel or tavern are resource-intensive to build but bring needed happiness to the settlement; a hospital is also a huge early investment but it will also save a young settlement from epidemic devastation. Food is assured first by hunting and gathering, and later by trading resources for seeds and livestock, thus establishing agriculture and animal husbandry, just as with civilization itself.
Eventually, if all goes well and the peeps survive the harsh winters, occasional epidemics and tornadoes, and food is gathered efficiently, the settlement begins to thrive. The population ramps up and it can become a challenge to employ everyone; at this point, the settlement can quickly collapse from famine or disease or both, as growth outstrips capacities. You must learn to manage population so as not to fall victim to success and end up with an empty settlement after several hours of gameplay.
That in a nutshell is Banished. It has been so successful and widely imitated because its meta-game is clear, simple, organic, challenging and compelling. It has no gimmicks, no obviously arbitrary game mechanics, and success or failure is largely determined by careful strategic planning for managed growth.
Someone on the forum recently remarked sarcastically that PC is simply too happy; there was no sex or death in the game, and this was why so many people had become frustrated with it. In a way that is quite true; what PC lacks is an organic connection between growth and risk. Right now, there is no risk; only arbitrary impediments to the amassing of vast fortunes. And once the fortune is assured, nothing threatens that income and so the game is effectively over.
And there is a very real question of just what exactly one is supposed to be managing, and how those decisions impact the success of your park. Many here say it's the peeps, but I think in many ways, there is far too much focus on the peeps and not enough on the staff – the idea that one is managing the peeps, ultimately, and not the park. In actuality, the peeps are equivalent to the resources in Banished, and should be viewed as such. One is exploiting them, mining them if you will, but not managing them. The staff is where the challenge of the game should lie, comparable to the population of Banished.
First off, in PC staff is entirely expendable. They come and go, complain and leave, shut shops when fed up and just walk off. And it simply doesn't matter; you just hire another trainee and reopen the shop with even less overhead than before. No. No. No. This mechanic is fundamentally flawed and I believe staff should never be fired, ever. Staff should act like your population does in Banished, and it is what you are trying to grow, educate and keep happy, because it is the means to your success.
Conceptually, PC should be moved from a highly free-market economy to a highly socialist country with stringent labor laws. If too unhappy, poorly paid or under-trained, the staff should not quit but rather go on strike, closing portions or the whole of your park and threatening you with bankruptcy. If you hire too many staff or you train them too much too early on, you must pay them in any event and your income suffers, so you had better manage them judiciously. Likewise, shops once plopped can only be moved, or removed by paying a penalty and relocating the employee. And staff will also take three-month paid maternity leave or paid sick leave from time to time. Right there, staff becomes meaningful and important, and managing them becomes integral to success.
Likewise, where is adversity in the game? Banished, a game with one lone developer, has fully modeled seasons where winter forcefully impacts gameplay and must be planned for and endured; why aren't seasonal highs and lows also modeled in PC? Winter should hurt on the deciduous map and be a boon on the tropical map. Guests should ebb and flow, and you can try to lure them with discounts and promotions.
Further, advertising should be meaningful. If you market to families, for example, certainly you are doing it for a reason. You've built things like carousels and Ferris wheels and teacups, and it goes without saying that the peeps should then favor such family-oriented rides – something they manifestly do not do at the moment. They will also need more restrooms and benches for the toddlers and crave family passes for the savings. They should not all rush to log flumes and coasters as they do now, with the rest of the peeps. Currently, none of this matters hardly at all.
And where are disasters? Here I do not mean giant meteors or Godzilla attacks, or even floods or tornadoes. In keeping with the integration of staff with meaningful management, poor or neglected maintenance should lead to broken rides which do progressively more than strand customers; the breakdowns should become serious enough to actually injure guests and severely impact park reputation. They can rise to be severe enough to close the entire park for outside inspection, with a corresponding income and reputation collapse.
Food shop trainees left without training can and should cause guest complaints and lower park reputation, and also cause real damage from food poisoning from ignorance, which would also bring strong hits to income and reputation and warrant a week's closure as health inspectors examine all food stalls. You didn't bother to plop a (very expensive) first aid station, hoping to save some money early on? Sorry, with the first outbreak of food poisoning, it quickly spreads through the guests and your park is fined and closed by the board of health for a few weeks. Tough luck.
Scrap research. You can build it all from the get-go, but you have to be able to afford it and have the infrastructure to run it successfully. High income-generating rides such as coasters and flumes should just cost much much more, and may even require investment funds be set up to pay for them.They age naturally and require periodic refurbishment, which takes time to carry out and costs a fair penny, but boosts reliability and appeal higher, though never as high as when new. Eventually the refurbishment cycle ends and the rides either achieve heirloom status or are forgotten by the crowd and must be replaced. You never know which will occur.
So, you overcome these hurdles and your park is humming along, but at a certain point it should not simply keep generating money but rather it eventually becomes too crowded, too popular, and guests start to leave and reputation drops from degrading ambiance, overcrowding, and lengthy queue lines. Your unfireable staff strikes from overwork (happens all the time in the socialist paradise where I live). Like the perverse death spiral in Banished, a reversal of fortune is caused by quick over-expansion. You need to revamp, expand, enlarge and beautify to keep up.
I think there is much to learn from this elegant little game that can be borrowed and adapted to enrich the overall gameplay of PC – and most of all, to integrate the game with the simulation.
For those who don't know it, Banished is a survival game, remarkable in that it is entirely crafted by a single, lone, unique developer. One person created this entire game, folks. That in itself is extraordinary, but the game does not look or play like a basement project; it is handsome and highly polished, plays beautifully, and is extremely well-balanced and a challenge to master. Inevitably, it has also spawned numerous imitators, as its creator has crafted a simple but organic and compelling meta-game.
What is the game? In short, you start on an empty map with a a small band of young families and, depending on the difficulty level, a varying amount of food, necessities and perhaps shelter to get them started. The peeps must then build a self-sustaining settlement in the wilderness, with only, eventually, a trader which comes periodically by boat to offer various resources at high cost.
Primary resources – trees, iron ore and stone – lie scattered on the map and are to be collected and transformed into tools and structures. There is nothing to unlock; even the most complex building can be built from the outset, but of course that is impossible; to build a chapel or a market, first you must build basic housing and establish food and materials production.
By default, children will begin work by age 10 or so, but schooling them until 17 increases their capacities and effectiveness, so at a crucial early point you must forsake a growing workforce for nearly a decade. Some buildings like a chapel or tavern are resource-intensive to build but bring needed happiness to the settlement; a hospital is also a huge early investment but it will also save a young settlement from epidemic devastation. Food is assured first by hunting and gathering, and later by trading resources for seeds and livestock, thus establishing agriculture and animal husbandry, just as with civilization itself.
Eventually, if all goes well and the peeps survive the harsh winters, occasional epidemics and tornadoes, and food is gathered efficiently, the settlement begins to thrive. The population ramps up and it can become a challenge to employ everyone; at this point, the settlement can quickly collapse from famine or disease or both, as growth outstrips capacities. You must learn to manage population so as not to fall victim to success and end up with an empty settlement after several hours of gameplay.
That in a nutshell is Banished. It has been so successful and widely imitated because its meta-game is clear, simple, organic, challenging and compelling. It has no gimmicks, no obviously arbitrary game mechanics, and success or failure is largely determined by careful strategic planning for managed growth.
Someone on the forum recently remarked sarcastically that PC is simply too happy; there was no sex or death in the game, and this was why so many people had become frustrated with it. In a way that is quite true; what PC lacks is an organic connection between growth and risk. Right now, there is no risk; only arbitrary impediments to the amassing of vast fortunes. And once the fortune is assured, nothing threatens that income and so the game is effectively over.
And there is a very real question of just what exactly one is supposed to be managing, and how those decisions impact the success of your park. Many here say it's the peeps, but I think in many ways, there is far too much focus on the peeps and not enough on the staff – the idea that one is managing the peeps, ultimately, and not the park. In actuality, the peeps are equivalent to the resources in Banished, and should be viewed as such. One is exploiting them, mining them if you will, but not managing them. The staff is where the challenge of the game should lie, comparable to the population of Banished.
First off, in PC staff is entirely expendable. They come and go, complain and leave, shut shops when fed up and just walk off. And it simply doesn't matter; you just hire another trainee and reopen the shop with even less overhead than before. No. No. No. This mechanic is fundamentally flawed and I believe staff should never be fired, ever. Staff should act like your population does in Banished, and it is what you are trying to grow, educate and keep happy, because it is the means to your success.
Conceptually, PC should be moved from a highly free-market economy to a highly socialist country with stringent labor laws. If too unhappy, poorly paid or under-trained, the staff should not quit but rather go on strike, closing portions or the whole of your park and threatening you with bankruptcy. If you hire too many staff or you train them too much too early on, you must pay them in any event and your income suffers, so you had better manage them judiciously. Likewise, shops once plopped can only be moved, or removed by paying a penalty and relocating the employee. And staff will also take three-month paid maternity leave or paid sick leave from time to time. Right there, staff becomes meaningful and important, and managing them becomes integral to success.
Likewise, where is adversity in the game? Banished, a game with one lone developer, has fully modeled seasons where winter forcefully impacts gameplay and must be planned for and endured; why aren't seasonal highs and lows also modeled in PC? Winter should hurt on the deciduous map and be a boon on the tropical map. Guests should ebb and flow, and you can try to lure them with discounts and promotions.
Further, advertising should be meaningful. If you market to families, for example, certainly you are doing it for a reason. You've built things like carousels and Ferris wheels and teacups, and it goes without saying that the peeps should then favor such family-oriented rides – something they manifestly do not do at the moment. They will also need more restrooms and benches for the toddlers and crave family passes for the savings. They should not all rush to log flumes and coasters as they do now, with the rest of the peeps. Currently, none of this matters hardly at all.
And where are disasters? Here I do not mean giant meteors or Godzilla attacks, or even floods or tornadoes. In keeping with the integration of staff with meaningful management, poor or neglected maintenance should lead to broken rides which do progressively more than strand customers; the breakdowns should become serious enough to actually injure guests and severely impact park reputation. They can rise to be severe enough to close the entire park for outside inspection, with a corresponding income and reputation collapse.
Food shop trainees left without training can and should cause guest complaints and lower park reputation, and also cause real damage from food poisoning from ignorance, which would also bring strong hits to income and reputation and warrant a week's closure as health inspectors examine all food stalls. You didn't bother to plop a (very expensive) first aid station, hoping to save some money early on? Sorry, with the first outbreak of food poisoning, it quickly spreads through the guests and your park is fined and closed by the board of health for a few weeks. Tough luck.
Scrap research. You can build it all from the get-go, but you have to be able to afford it and have the infrastructure to run it successfully. High income-generating rides such as coasters and flumes should just cost much much more, and may even require investment funds be set up to pay for them.They age naturally and require periodic refurbishment, which takes time to carry out and costs a fair penny, but boosts reliability and appeal higher, though never as high as when new. Eventually the refurbishment cycle ends and the rides either achieve heirloom status or are forgotten by the crowd and must be replaced. You never know which will occur.
So, you overcome these hurdles and your park is humming along, but at a certain point it should not simply keep generating money but rather it eventually becomes too crowded, too popular, and guests start to leave and reputation drops from degrading ambiance, overcrowding, and lengthy queue lines. Your unfireable staff strikes from overwork (happens all the time in the socialist paradise where I live). Like the perverse death spiral in Banished, a reversal of fortune is caused by quick over-expansion. You need to revamp, expand, enlarge and beautify to keep up.
I think there is much to learn from this elegant little game that can be borrowed and adapted to enrich the overall gameplay of PC – and most of all, to integrate the game with the simulation.
