I Will Ask You Questions - Now with MORE fantasy ecology!

Imagine that you are asked to consult for a fantasy strategy game as an adviser on how to make the actions of players impact the ecosystems of the game. What features and game mechanics would you suggest for the developers to implement in order to create a reactive ecosystem? You may use any fantasy setting as the basis for the game.

Adding extra complexity/"realism" to a game system is obviously going to give a player something additional to think about, which makes you have to ask why you're bothering to add it. Realism's well and good but I assume you'd want to add an ecosystem to demonstrate your foster civilisation's connection to the world and its ecosystem.

For instance in a role-playing game, carry limits are featured in most systems to limit the tools a player/character has at their immediate disposal when faced with a challenge. It's an utterly arbitrary limit set, and it might be to make the early game a challenge (compared to the later game when you can either increase your carry weight or pay other things to carry your stuff or whatever), to generally highlight your character's vulnerability, etc.

Strategy games in general require the gathering of resources (material resources plus territory) and depriving "enemies" of said resources, assuming said resources are finite or have some manner of cap in their production. You'll use those resources to more efficiently extract/secure resources from the environment, until you "win" at some point. Fantasy (as I think of it) heavily features themes of exploration and expansion, whether you're a village in a fertile valley or a young space base on a new planet.

The easiest way to show interactions would be the effects of changing land use as you exploit the land for the basic resource, food. Food could immediately have consequences if you control units at the individual level; for example in a patch of forest you could choose to harvest mushrooms/nuts/fruit (subject to seasonal availability), or hunt herbivores. Altering the amount of "food" in the forest would also influence "predator" numbers; a depletion of herbivores may run the risk of the local predator switching to attacking your units. If it's an apex predator, you might have the option of destroying its habitat and hoping it moves elsewhere - strategic clearcutting might allow you to isolate it if killing it might yield rewards, or funneling it out of your territory through natural corridors.

You could do this in non-forest habitats, too - fish stocks can be modelled pretty easily and yield could decrease over time in response to over-fishing (little fish get tossed back; the population adapts over time so fish that are genetically predisposed to be large a likelier to get picked off. Over time, catching the same number of fish yields less food).

Converting wildland to farmland also offers the possibility of diminishing returns as soil productivity drops, forcing you to extract "productivity" from other areas, again potentially displacing megapredators (dragon dung is a superior fertiliser, but you run the risk each time of losing adventurers to a territorial dragon!)

All this works pretty well for a non-magical medieval setting, but toss magic in and things could certainly get interesting. If you had leylines woven across the world in a state of equilibrium at gamestart, and Wizard Towers or other nodes of magical activity would disrupt them, the weave could shift and a previously magic-starved valley full of innocuous owlcats could have a spontaneous griffin infestation (which then shuts off a key trade route, or I dunno I'm spitballing). If the core mechanic of the game was about the mastery of the world's magic, these infestations could be attributed to random events until the player "researches" enough to begin mapping leylines and eventually being able to predict their response to added magical nodes. Actually, a grid-based game where you toss a bunch of towns and mountains and animal populations, randgen some pre-existing leylines, then mess around with wizard tower placement sounds pretty neat - kind of like Go meets Catan with more dragons. Someone should get on that.


Another, please!