[Malorn]

If the soft-cap is "realistically" 40, then make the hard cap a little under that and call it a day. It's effectively the same and a lot easier to balance.

Gotta keep the resource system simple so resource management isn't a chore.

What's the purpose? That should be the question you ask.

Nobody is being "punished" for saving if a hard cap exists. You can save. You just can't save forever. Resources aren't meant to be saved forever. They're meant to be spent. Ideally you spend roughly as much as you bring in but i the absence of that a low cap on the total number of resources ensures you never feel like you have enough.

It is vitally important to the game that resources remain something people care about and always feel like they need more. That is what will drive people to


The purpose of a stockpile is so you have a cushion to where you don't actually have to worry about income for a bit and can survive without it. The larger you make that stockpile the more people you will have operating without a limit.

And the AFK bot issue is something that will come up without a resource cap and they'll have to have quite a few designs built on top of that to combat the problem. As long as resources are paid out as dividends you're going to have people sitting around leaching them. If you have no limit on the amount they can leach it's going to be a widespread problem. You'll have people that play all day, then turn on their AFK bot to farm resources on some continent while they sleep or are at work/class. Then they'll come back and not care about resources again because they have this huge stockpile. Worse, they ate resources from people actively on the continent at the time doing things and reduced active population. A cap won't completely eliminate this problem but if the cap is reasonably low there won't be all that much benefit to doing it so motivation will be low. If there's no cap or a soft cap that allows you to stockpile significantly more resources then that's what they'll do.

There's more options to the developers for balancing, it's simpler to balance, and motivation for resources stays high with a cap. It's pure win.