Hi! My name is Filip. In this devlog, I want to explain some of the core gameplay concepts behind Agrocracy.
Agrocracy is a turn-based game. Each turn represents two weeks of in-game time.
This length fits nicely into the rhythm of agriculture: planning, maintenance, seasonal work, and longer-term decisions. It also keeps the game grounded in a believable pace.
Making the game turn-based instead of real-time allows it to be played more calmly, while still rewarding good planning and efficient resource usage.
All resources in the game are spendable and are used to pay upkeep from turn to turn. Most resources refresh every turn with one important exception:
Money is the most important resource. Almost everything can be bought with money, and it's also the only resource that can directly end your game.
If your balance stays negative for several turns, you go bankrupt, and it’s game over.
Besides money, the game has three resources that represent time:
Action Points (AP) - time spent on physical work
Enterprise Capacity (EC) - time spent on office work
Temporary Action Points - short-term manual labor
Each point is roughly equivalent to 30 minutes of work.
Action Points (AP)
AP mostly represents your ability to do things "in the field", manual work, operating equipment, hands-on tasks, etc.
Enterprise Capacity (EC)
EC represents all the non-physical work required to run a business like paperwork, insurance, permits, construction planning, HR, logistics, and administration.
You can hire people into your enterprise, and workers are divided into three groups:
Physical workers
Office workers
Temporary workers
Temporary workers represent seasonal labor. They work differently than regular employees.
Firing regular workers costs money,
Temporary workers are automatically dismissed after a month, for free.
Temporary AP can be spent on anything that is manual work, but temporary workers cannot do tasks like driving vehicles.
Having negative AP or EC can affect many areas of the game, creating penalties and bottlenecks. On the other hand, if you have a surplus of points, you can invest them into things like:
repairs,
learning new skills
researching technologies.
That's it for today's devlog. Thanks for reading, and see you next time!