Follow TV Tropes

Following

Command & Conquer Economy

Go To

In most civilization- and city-building games, nothing ever gets built unless the player specifically orders it. While it is simpler to depict the resource management in this way, it is very unrealistic to, for example, have to build "state" stables and "state" smithies in order to recruit knights in a medieval-themed game, or have to specifically order a resource extraction operation rather than have an autonomous agent do it in response to increased demand.

In general, the rules of this simplified tactical economy are:

  • The cost of your units and buildings may vary, but it's within certain boundaries: usually from 100 to 5000 specific units (cash, or resources). Yes, that uber-technological Doomsday Device superweapon costs just 50 x the price of your cheapest infantry, and that's the biggest difference many games go for (most hardly risk making it 10 times). The reason for it is pretty obvious: make the gap too wide, and the expensive units will fall into the Awesome, but Impractical territory where the equivalent cost of simpler units is just much more effective.
  • All of the buildings are built rather quickly (1-2 minutes tops) once you pay for them, order their construction and specify the location (plus get your builder units there, if any). Similarly, your units are "trained" at their respective building for a short time, then are ready for action, popping out of said building instead of traveling from outside the map to you. Some games Hand Wave this by saying that those troops were actually pre-trained or pre-manufactured elsewhere and are only delivered to you on call.
  • The technological tree is also simplified, if intuitively logical: i.e. you need to build a laboratory to make more technologically-dependent units, or an armory to build advanced infantry. Many games also go for "tiers" system where you can upgrade your base to next level by building an expensive structure that will unlock the whole next generation of options. Or maybe upgrade an existing one with the same result, traditionally up to 2 times.
  • The resources or cash may be obtained from the battlefield in a variety of ways, but 99% of the time by sending harvesting units into specified resource nodes, immediately usable once delivered to a resource depot building. This way, you have to constantly look out for more resources, but don't overcomplicate your income methods beyond "train extra workers and place a delivery depot as close to the node as possible".
    • Usually only one, maybe two resources are available; in fantasy games, it's usually gold and something else like wood or gems, in modern/sci-fi games it's usually money and some form of minerals or fuel.
  • The maximum size of your army and/or base is only limited by some Arbitrary Headcount Limit like food or energy, which is not actually produced/accumulated but maintained: you either have enough limit left to build another unit/tower, or you don't and must Construct Additional Pylons.
  • Once purchased, the unit usually does not require supplies/ammo to be delivered to frontlines, so it's a one-time payment. Even if there is an exception, it's just that: an exception to underline that these particular bombs (or whatnot) are worth purchasing them for resources every time.
  • All resources are universally available; i.e. harvesting them on an opposite edge of the map does not prevent you from immediately using them to produce your units elsewhere. Easy Logistics at its finest.
  • Similarly, if you upgrade your units in some way (say, research a new fancy Cool Sword for them to use), all of these units, no matter how far, will immediately gain the benefit. Otherwise sending them back to the base would be little fun but a lot of clicking.

Of course, this grossly unrealistic Command Economy mechanism in games like Command & Conquer is often one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality; 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. And tinkering with everything yourself requires, as noted, a simple enough system that one can manually operate it with ease.

Also, it is obviously more difficult to create an AI that could simulate the dynamics of city or civilization development in a reasonable manner, or (in case of tactical decisions) maintain all those dozes of supply lines for ammo, provisions, reinforcements and other stuff, especially when those supply lines must be defended from the enemy. Some games, like the later Total War and Civilization games, avert this by allowing you to let the AI manage cities autonomously. Even then, experienced players rarely use that feature when it's available, because they don't trust the AI to make smarter decisions than a human.

It also prevents poor AI from sapping all your resources into pointless crap.

This is why You Require More Vespene Gas. Compare Easy Communication, where it's your units who require an unrealistic amount of instruction from the player. Contrast A.I.-Generated Economy, where the game handles the economy, and Factory-Building Game, where automating resources is the entire point of the game.


Examples

    open/close all folders 

    Action Adventure Games 

  • The Assassin's Creed gradually evolved into part stealth/action and part city management game as time went on.
    • Assassin's Creed II starts us off by having the player able to repair and build houses in Monteriggioni. The player can pay to build shops, churches, barracks, mines and even a brothel. Your own mansion also improves in appearance as you do this, as your sister will have more money to refurbish it.
    • Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood took this to the extreme where the player must personally fund for the building of (almost) every shop in Rome.
    • Assassin's Creed III sees the player in-charge of a small homestead in frontier America. The player must find skilled laborers to bring to hamlet but they build their own home. You do however have to instruct them in what products they have to make, secure their resources and charter your own ship to make deliverers, in a rather complex (given it's completely optional) economy mini-game.

    Four X  

  • In the Civilization games, no city will build any improvements or units or develop their own surroundings unless the player or the player-appointed AI specifically orders it. This is particularly notable in the later iterations of the series, and the related game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where the player can declare their nation to be operating under free market economics. Presumably justified by the idea that there's a lot of economic activity separate from the government projects that are presented to the player—the improvements available tend to either be publicly owned by necessity (e.g. a military barracks or a courthouse), require government resources and/or permission (e.g. a harbor or broadcasting tower) or tend to be backed by government money at the beginning and transition to private operation later (e.g. a marketplace or stock exchange)—and of course, only the government can (or should, anyway) raise military units or major-infrastructure work crews. Also, in Alpha Centauri, one can set a base to operate under a Governor, and define things a governor can and can not do, allowing the AI to run each base according to the priorities you set and you to intervene when necessary.
    • In the first game, every time a city built a new city improvement, it would be displayed in the city. Later sequels dropped that, but you could still go to the "city view" option, which shows that the city is building houses and roads without any player interaction. Also, the whole "corruption" game mechanic could be viewed as the cities spending their resources on things that you haven't asked for.
    • Also, each turn your city will "drop off" several of everything: gold, production, food, etc. This could very well reflect everyday doings in the city: because people are working the farms you get food, because they're trading you get money from taxes.
    • From Civilization III onwards, you can automate workers to build improvements around cities by themselves.
      • Other late entries include AI Governors who will manage construction in cities for you, allowing you to focus on national issues.
    • Civilization IV plays with this with the cottage line of tile improvements; you can build cottages directly like any improvement, but in order for them to upgrade and give a higher commerce bonus, a citizen from the nearest city has to work the tile for a certain number of turns. Since only the biggest control freaks micromanage every single citizen, this usually has the effect of urban sprawl emerging organically over time. Reflecting this, the more democratically-inclined civics (Universal Suffrage, Free Speech, and Emancipation, namely) are all geared towards improving cottage economies.
    • Civilization V has a new mechanic that gives you a choice when conquering an enemy city: annex it (i.e. making it yours) but suffer unhappiness and culture penalties or make it a puppet city. It's still your city, but you can't affect its management in any way. It'll never build units, but can still mess up your economy by building structures with a high maintenance costs or structures that use up limited resources (for example, puppet cities just love building nuclear power plants that eat up your valuable supplies of uranium). You can't do anything about it except annex the city. Many players lament that you can't withhold limited resources from puppet cities.
  • The Colonization games, spinoffs of Civilization, justify this trope by virtue of establishing you as a viceroy governing the overseas colonies of an empire during an era when mercantilism was the accepted school of economics. You're expected to manage colonies that produce raw materials for the Mother Country's industries.
  • The first Master of Orion 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.
    • Master of Orion II moves to a Civ-esque model and plays this trope straight.
    • Master of Orion 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 bad enough to prove why this trope is indeed one of the Acceptable Breaks from Reality.note 
  • Sword of the Stars 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.
    • In the sequel, colonies will automatically build mining stations, design and construct prototypes and build defensive fleets when their economy is robust enough to permit it. But you still have to order research and pretty anything else. And because the game is in a state of semi-permanent beta, the effect doesn't always work as intended.
  • Everything in the Space Empires 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.
  • In Star Ruler you need to manually order the construction of ships, but you can set Governors to automatically build structures on the planets you colonise. Military-oriented Governors will also hastily build small ships to defend their planets if an enemy enters their system. Star Ruler 2 has automated building production based on "pressure" from imported goods; raw materials like metal will spur the creation of factories, luxuries builds up markets, et cetera. Megascale Imperial projects require the player to place them; most are the size of multiple cities and early on they can take your entire budget.
  • Played straight in Galactic Civilizations. Each planet has 2 build queues: one for structures, and one for ships. Nothing will happen unless you, the leader of an interstellar empire, tell it. The sequel adds planetary governors, which add a level of automation.
    • The exception to this is research. If left to its own devices, once you start on a research tree, the game will continue researching along that tree, picking the topmost option on the display if it branches, until it reaches an endpoint; excess research points from the current technology are automatically applied to the next one along the path. This can lead to incredibly rapid technology advances if there's something you didn't get early-game but need now; for example, a late-game power with heavily upgraded research structures can get the first three or four technologies in a weapon tree they haven't invested in yet within a week of giving the order to research guns. The flipside is that this auto-research is not very contextually aware. You might get, for example, points auto-applied to Barren World colonisation even if there isn't a barren world for light years and three Toxic worlds in the first two systems you encountered.
  • Noticably averted in Distant Worlds. The universe contains a vast and thriving private economy that the player cannot control. This economy does many things that other games abstract out. Examples include the transport of resources from one point to another (be this within your own economy or trade with other civilizations) and tourism. These are then taxed by the player's government. Therefore, it is financially beneficial to arrange things so that a private economy develops, even if you can't control the details. In addition, one can delegate large swathes of gameplay to the AI which will automatically manage it, or so that the AI will make suggestions of the player, asking for only a thumbs-up.
    • A major source of income comes from private entities using your unused spacedocks to build their starships. Interestingly enough when things go poorly and pirates and enemy factions start ripping into your empire, the constant need for private fleets to replace their losses can be a huge boon to your treasury. That is, until your economy starts to suffer for it.
    • Interestingly, the game allows the degree of control the player has to vary. The standard play style allows the player to build things like spaceports and mining stations if the civilian economy isn't doing so in the way they want (such as targetting valuable but distant resources). Changing to a more centralised, dictatorial government type makes play more like a standard 4X with a heavily restricted civilian economy. On the other hand, changing to a free market society actually prevents the player from interfering in the economy at all, limiting their role almost entirely to dealing with the military and diplomacy.
  • Stellaris attempts to avert this with the sector mechanic; emphasis on "attempts". An empire can only control a certain amount of star systems directly without suffering penalties to just about everything due to inefficient logistics. If you have more settled systems than your core world administration can supervise, you can establish semi-autonomous sectors and outsource your surplus systems to them. The sector AI will then run these systems according to the guidelines you set for them, and transfer up to 75% of their resource production to the core sector (read: to you). It's a nice idea in theory that comes with two problems. First, unhappy populations on your planets can go rogue, instigate a rebellion and potentially take the entire sector they're in with them if they manage to secede. Needless to say this is highly annoying at best, absolutely devastating to your economy at worst if that sector was particularly large and wealthy. Second, despite many improvements over the course of several patches, the sector AI is still sorely lacking when it comes to constructing fleets and especially buildings. It's not uncommon to witness it tearing down unique, irreplaceable structures and erect some bottom-tier garbage building on the smoking ruins. The sector system is thus quite a matter of contention among players, with a large portion preferring to scrap it entirely in favor of managing all planets manually, even if it means having to rifle through long lists with dozens, sometimes hundreds of worlds.
    • While this demonstrates why this trope often falls in Acceptable Breaks from Reality, it also shows why efforts are often made to avert it. A large empire in the late game can easily have upwards of 100 planets under their control, which can make micromanaging them all a real chore.

    Real Time Strategy  

  • Cepheus Protocol: Money can be gained by seizing strategic points and setting up the logistical structures. While base-building is largely done by air-dropping mostly-finished buildings directly on-site.
  • As the title says, Command & Conquer. Granted, these are invariably military buildings, and you're typically the first military presence to enter the area.
  • Dune II was the Trope Maker. Spice was gathered for cash, and 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.
  • In the Total War games, feudal warriors like knights or samurai must have player-built buildings representing armouries, weaponmakers and stud farms present in order to be recruited. It would of course be more realistic to have them equip themselves from the income of their estates, train offscreen and show up when obliged to fight.
    • Medieval II: Total War balances between the two. A big castle with no stables can still build knights, but only a few of them. France, the most heavy-cavalry-oriented faction in the game, even has a specific knight type, "Noble Knights", who are identical to another type except that they're available from a castle instead of a stable and cost more in upkeep.
      • At the same time it is also good for simplifying things. If MTWII was that historically accurate then theoretically any of said estates or group of estates could rebel against the central government (the player) if the king ever did something they didn't like. By having the player handle all of it the game cuts out a lot of what would have taken more computing power and time to resolve.
    • Several mods, such as Real Recruitment and Byg's Grim Reality for Medieval 2, try to avert this trope and Ridiculously Fast Construction 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 eponymous Total War nigh-on fake difficult.
    • Starting with Napoleon: Total War, the mechanic for replenishing troops has changed to simply "refilling" depleted armies with money to waiting a certain number of turns (depending on supply lines) until the reinforcements trickle in. Still played straight with ships, though. Carried over to Total War: Shogun 2.
  • Exception: The game Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun from Paradox had a complicated world market that meant that one did not necessarily have to make all of the various goods (such as paper, canned food, telephones, etc.) you might need yourself. The expansion, Revolutions, allowed you to create Capitalists, who, upon having enough extra cash, could build factories and railroads for you. Depending on your government, you might even be prevented from building factories or railroads yourself.
    • The sequel, Victoria II, zig-zags this trope depending on your ruling party's economic policy: Under Planned Economy it's played completely straight as you have to manually order the construction of everything from factories to railroads. Under State Capitalism it's downplayed, as you can build everything manually but there are also capitalists with limited ability to build stuff on their own. Interventionism takes this further by not allowing you to initiate the construction of factories but still allowing you to fund projects started by capitalists and subsidize factories after their construction. Finally there's Laissez-Faire which completely averts it by putting the economy firmly in the hands of the capitalists and only allowing the player to indirectly affect it through national focuses.
    • Victoria 3 makes this a game rule. Directly-Controlled Investment means that the player gets to control all construction. Their people still generate an "investment pool" representing private investment, which can be spent on various non-government buildings depending on economic laws. Meanwhile, in the case of Autonomous Investment, the player reserves a certain percentage of the country's construction for their use (paid for with tax money) and the rest is run by the AI. In either case, a Command Economy plays this straight; everything is owned and built by the state and all dividends are paid in with no private investment.
  • Majesty averts this trope - no heroes get hired or guilds/guardhouses/marketplaces built without your royal order, but most of the infrastructure of your city - houses, sewers, graveyards, and places of ill repute - is outside your control, and can interfere with your municipal/strategic planning (not to mention spawning sewer rats and undead). So is the control of the heroes themselves, who must be incentivised with bounties if there's any particular place or monster you want them to discover or slay.
  • Averted in Patrician 3: while town councils will not build additional houses and facilities, your AI competitors will.
  • Used in Rise of Legends, but somewhat handwaved as a matter of desperation, not careful and brilliant planning. The heroes aren't making a slow-and-steady push to grind their enemies down, they're running (and often flying) like mad to important sites to outmaneuver their enemies there, and have to build up anything they need from what's available instead of dragging a gargantuan army plus supply lines after them. Each mission map is technically a whole province with multiple cities, so they're also trying to establish a command economy that works just enough to keep them supplied and leaves the province sufficient once they're gone. Men thus come from the cities you build up, and mechanical (or magical) units are built in factories (or conjured on the spot) to save from having to transport an army of slow, heavy equipment all over.
  • Warcraft games have the player assigning peasants to their tasks and building farms and lumber mills as well as more military kinds of facility.
    • Naturally, StarCraft games being from the same company, have the same economy model. Just substitute lumber with minerals, gold with vespene gas, and food with supply or psy (for humans and the alien races, respectively)
  • Partially averted in The Settlers games. The player decides what buildings should be built where, and what enemy building should be attacked, but from that point on your peasants/soldiers just take care of it. Additionally, once you've built something like a woodcutter, sawmill, farm, etc, it will cheerfully continue to run itself as long as your economy can provide it the necessary resources.
  • Total Annihilation and its successor Supreme Commander 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. Compared to other strategy games, this example has justification beyond Acceptable Breaks from Reality: there is no economy present in the battle scenarios, nor any reason to want one, nor even any humans to make use of a free market (especially true for Total Annihilation, where no such things as civilians exist). Everything that is extracted and built goes toward waging war, so it makes sense that resources mined would go directly into the factories without having to pass through an autonomous economic system.
  • Supreme Commander features a slight aversion in that if you order a support commander to assist a bunch of buildings, he will automatically rebuild any that are destroyed. But you do have to tell him which buildings to protect first.
  • In Age of Empires and it's spinoff Age of Mythology, construction and research has to be ordered, however villagers will automatically gather nearby resources if they have constructed a drop off point that corresponds to it, and military units will automatically attack nearby enemies (often getting themselves killed in the process).
  • Played straight in Achron. The buildings are purely military installations, as tends to be the case in most real-time strategy games.
  • In Company of Heroes, the player's capacity for resource gathering expanded automatically when new territory was captured. But the player has to micromanage other aspects of infrastructure, including upgrades to individual units.
  • 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 Knights of Honor villagers collect the available raw resources from the province automatically, but the player has to manage all other infrastructure per castle.
  • In rymdkapsel, you have to designate rooms to be built and assign workers to jobs. They'll handle them automatically, but you need to keep reshuffling their allocations.
  • Averted in Crusader Kings, on your own holdings you have to order new buildings to be built but your vassals may construct their own improvements without your prompting. And unless you decide to use retinues you don't directly train troops, mostly your holdings' levies slowly build up to the maximum they can support on their own.
  • In They Are Billions your workers harvest the resources automatically but you are in charge of deciding what gets built and where.
  • Forged Battalion, being a game created by the original creator of Command & Conquer, naturally follows this trope.

    Roguelike 

  • Dwarf Fortress might meticulously model every detail of the dwarves' mental lives, but they still won't build or dig anything without orders from the invisible omnipresent player. Highlighted by this Three Panel Soul. The third-party utility Dwarf Foreman was created to automate manufacturing, automatically dispatching work orders to create more of an item should your stocks fall below a certain amount. There was an attempt at an A.I.-Generated Economy that activates at a certain point, but it was Dummied Out for being highly dysfunctional.
  • Downplayed but still played mostly straight by Rimworld. Colonists won't gather resources or manufacture anything on their own initiative but once you've set quotas and fine-tuned their job priorities a fair amount of tedious supply-chain fiddling can be automated away. Several game mods take this even further.

    Role Playing Games 

  • The settlers of Fallout 4 won't bother to build or do anything. If you manage to recruit a full settlement of 20 settlers, they'll all wander around complaining there's no food, no water, no beds. You the player have to plant every last crop, build every last house, every settlement defense, down to the individual beds and chairs. If there are no critical food/water shortages, they'll even refuse to take jobs until you assign them. There's a Game Mod that changes this, such that you simply designate zones for certain types of buildings and resources, and the settlers build them when you're not looking (meaning they simply appear with suspension of disbelief assigning credit to the settlers)

    Simulation Game  

  • Banished - Your citizens won't build anything without an order.
  • The Sims in The Sims. Without player guidance, they cannot buy furniture, get jobs, get married, etc. (Some non-player Sims will get jobs or marriages on their own in The Sims 3, but they'll still only have the furniture that came with their house, and the Sims in the active family still won't.) They can still do basic actions such as cook, sleep, use the toilet, and so on if free will is turned on, but in the first two games (and even the third to a lesser extent) they tend to be rather stupid about it. Turn free will off and they'll just stand in place until they starve if not explicitly told to do otherwise.
  • 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 you're still the one who pays for it. Apparently people in SimCity don't get electric bills.
    • Obviously, SimCountry has a 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.
  • City Life. 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 better than it sounds).
  • In the City-Building 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 meant that priestesses were often providing spiritual care to your farms instead of your workers.
    • And alluded to in the Spiritual Successor Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile, 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?).
  • Provides an amusing contradiction in Tropico, which features a Capitalist faction that complains if the eponymous 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.
    • Averted with basic houses; if you don't provide affordable housing to your citizens they will build their own shacks. Beyond that the game is a planned economy where everything is built, owned and operated by the state.
    • Later sequels and expansions -from Tropico 3 onwards- gradually introduce some form of private enterprises such as privatization and foreign deals and business that pay the wages to their workers and a fee to the treasure to operate (they don't pay for raw materials though) but the profits are marginal compared to the ones you'd get by exporting yourself the goods. Though even then, you still have the option to demolish them.
  • This was a huge annoyance to many players of Black & White, 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... Black & White 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.
  • In Transport Tycoon, 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. This is necessary in some cases because towns will only pay for Goods once they build enough high-rise buildings, which only happens once they reach a certain size. The alternate climates in the Deluxe version have additional restrictions. Arctic towns above a certain elevation have to have Food delivered before they grow. Tropical towns in the desert require Food and Water.
  • In Cyber Nations, 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... Might be Fridge Brilliance for techs whose benefits are military in nature - if the government isn't doling out large amounts of money for such projects, there's pretty much no demand for them in the market.
  • Spore eventually has the player managing an entire interstellar empire. There are no structures the player doesn't build, there is no trade the player doesn't initiate, the only war the player doesn't wage is brought by rival computer-controlled empires, and the player has to physically travel to any place where something needs to be done.
  • The third Railroad Tycoon averts this, not only there are other rivals companies building their own transport networks but the game itself implements an alternative method; unpicked goods and materials are gradually moved from their production sites to the places where they are needed, following a supply and demand logic and price curves. This process is usually very inefficient but depending on the relative locations it can actually feed industries on its own; the cargo moves very slowly inland (even more so in mountain terrain), but faster via rivers and other bodies of water.
  • In Hamurabi, the player control the amount of bushels of seed eaten by the citizens, sowed in the fields and stocked, and can also decide to spend it for buy farmland - he can also sell land.
  • Most games in the Story of Seasons series follow an An Economy Is You model: the success of your farm spurs on the growth and success of your village. Then there's Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness, where the island's re-development doesn't happen if you don't explicitly order and pay for it. note  New roads, bridges, expansion of the local hotel - if you don't pay for it, it doesn't happen.

    Turn Based Strategy  

  • The Koei line of Romance of the Three Kingdoms video games (as in, the ones named for the series, not Dynasty Warriors), 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 Advance Wars 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 build units out of cities for half the cost. How this is done is even more inexplicable than the "build from factory" functionality.
  • 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 Real Life, 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.
  • 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 residential 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 residential 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.
  • In the Heroes of Might and Magic series the most backwater towns don't even get a tavern until a Hero coughs up 500 gold pieces. Also, towns and cities not controlled by a player will be in a perpetual stasis until they are claimed.


Top