Power/resource networks
Buildings must be connected to and supplied by a distributed resource grid — electricity, water, oxygen — that the player builds out and balances. Factorio's power grid and Oxygen Not Included's electrical and gas networks make infrastructure a first-class system: production capacity, distribution, and consumption must stay in balance or the whole base browns out. Designers use resource networks to add an infrastructure-management layer, to create scaling challenges (every expansion strains the grid), and to force planning around capacity and distribution. Key decisions: whether the network is spatial (wires and pipes that must physically connect) or abstract, generation-versus-consumption balancing and the failure mode of shortfall (brownout, shutdown, priority load-shedding), storage and buffering, and legibility of the network's state. Pitfall: network management that's all bookkeeping and no spatial or strategic decision becomes a chore — the interesting version ties the network to geography and growth so that supplying power is itself a design and expansion puzzle, not just a number to keep positive.
- Dev effort: Medium
- Timing: Real-time
- Common in: automation, colony-sim, city-builder