History Main / CommandAndConquerEconomy

** Several mods, such as ''Real Recruitment'' and ''Byg's Grim Reality'' for ''Medieval 2'', try to avert this trope and RidiculouslyFastConstruction by instead giving you a virtually fixed number of units. These can only be sent out of their home province through great exertion, unless led by legendary-quality generals. This is arguably very realistic, but it does make waging the titular Total War nigh-on [[FakeDifficulty fake difficult.]]

* Provides an amusing contradiction in ''{{Tropico}}'', which features a Capitalist faction that complains if the titular island's economy is not profitable or diverse enough, but don't seem to mind that the player, as President, controls the wage rate, hiring policy and pricing of every business on the island, as well as the building of every structure larger than a shack. Some justification may be possible by assuming that wages and prices are actually abstractions of the effects of taxes on the businesses in question - but doesn't begin to answer the question of building placement or hiring policy. Of course, some capitalists are more capitalist than others.

* In ''[[Outpost 2]]'', you get to build structures and vehicles, something the citizens of the base will not do on their own. You also get to build structure kits, satellites, launch vehicles, and interstellar starship parts, all of which have to do with the story.

* In ''Outpost2'', you get to build structures and vehicles, something the citizens of the base will not do on their own. You also get to build structure kits, satellites, launch vehicles, and interstellar starship parts, all of which have to do with the story.

* In ''Outpost 2'', you get to build structures and vehicles, something the citizens of the base will not do on their own. You also get to build structure kits, satellites, launch vehicles, and interstellar starship parts, all of which have to do with the story.

* In [[{{Outpost 2}}]], you get to build structures and vehicles, something the citizens of the base will not do on their own. You also get to build structure kits, satellites, launch vehicles, and interstellar starship parts, all of which have to do with the story.

* In [[Outpost 2]], you get to build structures and vehicles, something the citizens of the base will not do on their own. You also get to build structure kits, satellites, launch vehicles, and interstellar starship parts, all of which have to do with the story.

* The Sims in ''TheSims''. If you don't micromanage their lives, they're likely to burn down the house, pee their pants, and forget to go to work. And that's if you're lucky. If not, they'll just stand in one spot until their tiredness meter hits max, pass out,

-->''[[ButThouMust You must]] {{construct additional pylons}}.''\\

** ''MasterOfOrion III'' is largely based on an attempt to revolutionize this trope: the sorts of direct orders you can give are heavily limited, and the management of your empire is very much ''management''. You do not get to actually do much at all, aside from give generalized orders and hope the AI carrying them out doesn't manage to foul up the details as they trickle down. Not at all coincidentally, this entry in the series was [[WallBanger bad enough]] to prove why this trope is indeed one of the AcceptableBreaksFromReality.

Of course, this grossly unrealistic mechanism is often one of the AcceptableBreaksFromReality; many players would find it less fun to put down some infrastructure, set certain policies and watch the results rather than tinkering with everything themselves. Also, it is obviously more difficult to create an AI that could simulate the dynamics of city or civilisation development in a reasonable manner. Some games, like the later ''Total War'' and ''Civilization'' games, partially avert this by allowing you to let the AI manage cities autonomously.

[[DontExplainTheJoke The trope title is a play on "Command and Conquer" and "Command Economy"]].

-->''You must {{construct additional pylons}}.''\\

* ''DwarfFortress'' uses this, but it makes sense because the leader of the fortress would most likely be pissed if his dwarves were tunneling like crazy without his permission. [[spoiler: And considering what [[SealedEvilInACan said dwarves might find...]] ]]

* As the [[TropeNamer title]] says, ''CommandAndConquer.'' Granted, these are invariably military buildings, and you're typically the first military presence to enter the area.
** ''Emperor: Battle for Dune'' (by the same creators) tried to reduce some of the FridgeLogic by (a) stating that mined spice was ''traded'' for money, (b) showing the Construction Yard drilling and mining for resources to build the buildings with, and (c) including a Spaceport that allows you to buy units from corporations instead, delivered by freighter. Of course there's still some FridgeLogic - you can only buy the same units your side already builds, for example.
*** Well, the sides probably have contracts with different corporations. Can you imagine the US in WWII contracting Mitsubishi to build them a squadron of Zeroes?
*** It didn't really try to reduce anything, (a) and (c) were simply already in ''DuneII'', the game ''CommandAndConquer'' is a spiritual sequel of, and ''Emperor: Battle for Dune'' is a remake of. It's ''CommandAndConquer'' that tried to reduce the fridge logic by making the mined resource the universal material used to build everything.
** Justifiable in that local mining operations close to the battlefield, while contributing nothing to defense (indeed, increasing your need for defense) would be more expedient than shipping the raw materials and manpower to the front. Even more so in the Tiberium universe, as the eponymous substance makes mining as easy as collecting the crystals and getting them to a smelter.

* The Sims in ''TheSims''. If you don't micromanage their lives, they're likely to burn down the house, pee their pants, and forget to go to work. And that's if you're lucky. If not, they'll just stand in one spot until their tiredness meter hits max, pass out,

* {{Averted}} in the ''SimCity'' games: While you are responsible for plopping all the infrastructure and public service buildings, homes, shops and industry will appear on its own in the appropriate zones after you designate them. And although having cities building and running their own power plants is not entirely unrealistic (power production in many countries is run directly by the State, but usually not by city/municipal governments), it's still rather unrealistic that every single city must produce its own power, when power plants in the real world are usually scattered around the countryside.
** ''SimCity 4'' does avert the last one: you can place your power buildings in one single town, and send power through the entire region via neighbor deals.
*** But the you're still the one who pays for it. Apparently people in SimCity don't get electric bills.
**** Obviously, [=SimCountry=] has a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy social market economy]].
***** They don't get electric bills but they get taxes.
** ''SimCity 3000'' does it to some degree: you can buy your services from your neighbors, but doing so is crushingly expensive, and thus building your own infrastructure is encouraged.
** ''SimCity Societies'' reverts to this trope straight by requiring the player to even build the houses. The player just picks what style they want the city to be in and starts plopping things down accordingly.
*** Granted you still need knowledge society energy if you want the nicer structures to benefit your power production.
* ''CityLife''. You must manually plop every single house, work place, service and utility building. And by "services", Monte Cristo means malls, supermarkets, hospitals, schools, parks, police and fire stations, community centers, ''and even leisure businesses''. (Sounds awfully like ''Societies'', but the social class system makes it BetterThanItSounds).
* In the ''CityBuilder'' series, the citizens show even less initiative than in most games. Not only do you have to build everything for them except housing (which you merely designate plots for), they do not even go to the market themselves to buy food and goods; a peddler has to walk past. Owing to the vagaries of the walker system, you risk losing a lot of workers to an entire street being deserted due to a priestess failing to walk down it sufficiently often.
** Made worse by the fact that the first few games didn't feature road blocks, which meants that priestesses were often providing spiritual care to your farms instead of your workers.
** And alluded to in the SpiritualSuccessor ChildrenOfTheNile, where the citizens have to go buy their goods... and can occasionally be heard speaking of a golden age when a market lady brought pottery and linen right to your doorstep.

* The ''{{Cultures}}'' series takes this to absurd lengths. Your citizens will not build anything, begin gathering materials, get a place to live, get a job, bring resources to and from stockpiles, buy anything, marry, or even have children without you telling them what to do. You can even order them to eat and sleep (admittedly realistic for troops, but?).
* The first ''MasterOfOrion'' averts this by virtue of simplicity: The city-equivalent is a planet, which is represented by a handful of numbers such as the total amount of factories, and managing one consists entirely of allocating its output with six sliders. The player feels like he's encouraging industrialization instead of placing individual installations. Notifications when significant limits are reached and the option to set all planets to implement newly discovered advances mean that most planets can be left to plod along on their own. The upshot is that the player still has to decide on everything, but "everything" is abstract and painless enough to make sense.
** ''MasterOfOrion II'' moves to a [[{{Civilization}} Civ]]esque model and plays this trope straight.
** ''MasterOfOrion III'' is largely based on an attempt to revolutionize this trope: the sorts of direct orders you can give are heavily limited, and the management of your empire is very much ''management''. You do not get to actually do much at all, aside from give generalized orders and hope the AI carrying them out doesn't manage to foul up the details as they trickle down. Not at all coincidentally, this entry in the series was [[WallBanger bad enough]] to prove why this trope is indeed one of the AcceptableBreaksFromReality.
* Provides an amusing contradiction in ''{{Tropico}}'', which features a Capitalist faction that complains if the titular island's economy is not profitable or diverse enough, but don't seem to mind that the player, as President, controls the wage rate, hiring policy and pricing of every business on the island, as well as the building of every structure larger than a shack. Some justification may be possible by assuming that wages and prices are actually abstractions of the effects of taxes on the businesses in question - but doesn't begin to answer the question of building placement or hiring policy. Of course, some capitalists are more capitalist than others.
** It is possible (at least in the ''Tropico 3'' expansion pack), to privatise many of your buildings. Though even then, you still have the option to demolish them.
* ''DwarfFortress'' uses this, but it makes sense because the leader of the fortress would most likely be pissed if his dwarves were tunneling like crazy without his permission. [[spoiler: And considering what [[SealedEvilInACan said dwarves might find...]] ]]
** Highlighted by [[http://www.threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2009-07-21 this]] ThreePanelSoul.
* This was a huge annoyance to many players of ''BlackAndWhite'', where the pisswig villagers can't even do so much as build a single hut without divine intervention. Though the frustration may have had more to do with the game's awkward controls...
** ''BlackAndWhite 2'' made things slightly easier (emphasis on the slightly). Villagers will do whatever is required at the time without direction, such as gathering food or building a building, but they tend to vacillate between the available options frequently. The player has the option of "divinely guiding" a character by assigning them a task, as which point they will do nothing else for the rest of their lives.

* The Koei line of ''RomanceOfTheThreeKingdoms'' video games (as in, the ones named for the series, not DynastyWarriors), you are a warlord that has to manage an ever-growing series of cities; fortunately, you can create districts and delegate your officers to do most of the micro-managing.

* While not requiring the player to build the necessary buildings, the ''AdvanceWars'' series requires the player to capture buildings on the map in order to build an economy and produce units. Never really explained why the armies couldn't bring everyone, although justified and handwaved in the latest DS game, Days of Ruin in that the world has been decimated and humanity almost wiped out, while the units produced by automated factories are useful only in a close proximity to their factory of origin, presumably that particular map.
** In ''Dual Strike'', one particular CO has the ability to [[GameBreaker build units out of cities]] for half the cost. How this is done is even more inexplicable than the "build from factory" functionality.
* WarCraft games have the player assigning peasants to their tasks and building farms and lumber mills as well as more military kinds of facility.

* ''SwordOfTheStars'' works this way. The player is responsible for designing every single ship type and ordering the construction of every new ship, while all the infrastructure is built automatically. Given that most of the species in ''Sword of the Stars'' have authoritarian governments where the head of state holds (theoretically) absolute power, it's mostly justified.
** Actually, there are free aspects. Like the fact that industry and population develops on their own on the planets (you just set priorities). Seeing how making a relatively small starship takes the whole industrial production of a single planet for at least a year, it quite makes sense to be controlled by the government.
* ''Imperialism'' requires the player to approve every import, every commodity offered for export, the headcount in every factory and even the numbers of workers who get trained as experts or specialists. In RealLife, even the Soviet Union didn't centralize all of these decisions, and in any case the game is set in the Nineteenth Century, the high point of the free market in most countries.
* In ''TransportTycoon'', the towns will automatically develop over time, without your assistance. This includes the building of roads, but you can assist in doing so if you want to coerce the development of a town in a specific way. You can accelerate, but not control, the growth of town buildings by dealing in Passengers there.
* Averted to some degree in the Amiga game ''Global Effect'': While you had to micromanage most things like power and sewage and such, the game would build residental areas on its own as demand increased. Sadly, this was actually ''detrimental'', as not only did it take energy (the standard resource you use for everything) from your own supply (thereby keeping you from completing more essential constructions), but it built them completely at random next to anything else you've built. So if you built a long sewage pipe leading waste far away from your planned residental zone, to keep people from getting sick? Surprise, now you have people living right in the middle of the sewage-plant area, or halfway along the pipe in the middle of nowhere. And they want you to provide power and water and roads. Presumably you could change this in the options menu, but due to a genius in the game's design, ''accessing the options cost more energy''.
* TotalAnnihilation and it's successor SupremeCommander have this as a central part of the setting as well as a core gameplay mechanic. Thanks to nanotech, a single construction unit can build an exponentially-growing base and army limited only by local resources.

* In {{Cybernations}}, ''nothing'' gets built without player say-so. Justified in that in {{real life}}, maintaining armies and infrastructure ''are'' the purview of the government, but you'd think that technological research could be handled by private labs...
* In the ''Caesar'' games, citizens will build their own houses (in areas you designate), but you have to place everything else in your city: Markets, farms, granaries, workshops, etc. They'll run themselves as long as they have labour and raw materials, though.
* Everything in the ''SpaceEmpires'' series has to be expressly ordered by the player. Planets are useless if you don't set up the various facilities for them to generate income and build ships.

* The Sims in ''TheSims''. If you don't micromanage their lives, they're likely to burn down the house, pee their pants, and forget to go to work.
** If you're lucky. If not, they'll just stand in one spot until their tiredness meter hits max, pass out, and subsequently die.
** This was meant to be fixed in ''The Sims 3'', but sims will still struggle without a little help
*** Isn't intervening in your Sims' lives ''the whole point of the game''?

Play on "Command and Conquer" and "Command Economy".