A bit of preface to this one, since it's just a copy-pasted design document I was working on for my own personal benefit: There's a game called Black and White. The premise of the game is that you are a god. You can do miraculous god things for your people, or you can do miraculous god things to your people, which will make you either a benevolent god or an evil one. Also, there are other gods out and about, and you have to convert their villages either by terrifying them into obedience or converting them through your benevolence.
No one liked it. It was clumsy and hard to figure out, and managing your villagers is frustrating whenever you try to play as a good god. When they get hungry, you give them food, so they decide to start having kids. Then they need wood for new houses once all the kids grow up and need to move out, so you have to miraculously provide that as well, not to mention overseeing the actual construction. And then the newly expanded population won't have enough food, requiring you to miraculously drum up some more.
So I decided to redesign it. The beginning of that design document is listed below. If people like it, I'll finish it. If not, I'll burn your house down and steal your goats.
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Godly Resources:
Prayer Power, which comes from worshipping villagers or sacrifices. This allows you to excercise your most powerful abilities, your miracles. These include the ability to strike people dead, unleash a pack of wolves upon the unsuspecting, strike with lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, or blizzards, temporarily bestow an animal with intelligence, lend strength to your villagers in their farms or soldiers on the battlefield, bless your people with a bountiful harvest or curse them with fallow fields, and even rain down fire from the heavens as you bring about armageddon.
Prayer Power is also steadily consumed by the presence of your godly Avatars, beings that directly carry out your divine will, and it's a significant drain as well, making it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain more than two or three of them at once. Avatars can be Heroes, Prophets, or Monsters, and each acts differently from the others.
Every action you take drains Prayer Power. Making a villager into a disciple requires prayer power in the form of sending them the feeling to become a disciple. Telling the villagers to build a new building requires spending Prayer Power to influence the village leaders into positioning the building there. And so on, and so forth. If it changes the mortal world, it requires at least a little bit of Prayer Power.
There are a number of secondary resources. Food is raised on farms, ranches, and fisheries, and is steadily consumed over time based on the population of the village (villages drain only from their own stockpile, they do not drain from the stockpiles of other villages you control). Wood is used to build things and is harvested by cutting down trees. Stone can also be used to build things (it's interchangeable with wood), takes longer to gather, but the quarries produce much more stone than a single forest. Gold is used to make shiny things for your villagers (including things that don't actually make sense as coming from gold, like silk clothes and lamp oil, because forcing the player to harvest each luxury item individually would make the game much more complicated than it needs to be). Finally, metal is used to make tools, weapons, and armor in order to make the other jobs go better, and to make your soldiers both safer and deadlier in battle.
More later. Maybe.
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