I, too, have spent idle hours thinking about how I would set up a game if
I were running one, with farms, etc just as Rob says.
(Being who I am, of course, my game would also have a built-in poliical
system -- an "Imperial Court," as well as a Church and world-wide colleges
of magic, each with their own hierarchy of offices that wield real power
and are achievable by players through various means. Plenty of room for
politics and back-stabbing!)
Getting back to farms, though, and giving more thought to them, I've begun
to see a problem in any such system.
As I understand it from reading the literature, most long-running,
multi-player pbms and pbems before Olympia had the same problem. This was
that they allowed for some kind of "investment" system, whereby you could
put some of your resources into something which would get you a return of
something else. That sort of thing is vital to most boardgames, of course,
which are often based around who can invest and guard their resources most
efficiently while obtaining offensive power to steal the resources of
opponents.
But in open-ended games, ANY system that allows investment can be abused.
I don't care how careful you are, someone will get onto an upward resource
spiral, inflation will set in, and the game will crash. In g1 it was only
a few small slip-ups that doomed the game, but you ended up with every
single AOO member out there breeding dragons.
Olympia is designed for long-term stability. Thus, I think that anything
that disrupts that stability may have risks that are difficult to foresee.
IM