GAME MECHANICS HOARD

UPKEEP COSTS

Recurring costs for what you own — army wages draining the treasury each turn, building maintenance eating city income, supply consumption per unit, the standing costs that make holding assets a continuous decision rather than a one-time purchase.

Strategy tradition runs deep: Total War armies cost more to keep than to raise (peacetime military as economic bleed — demobilization becomes strategy), StarCraft's supply and Warcraft's upkeep tax growth itself (Warcraft III's escalating upkeep brackets deliberately punished max-army play, forcing timing decisions), Anno and city builders charge building maintenance that makes over-construction insolvency, RimWorld-likes eat food per colonist per day, and MMO territory (EVE's sovereignty bills) charges rent on empire. Designers charge upkeep because it converts wealth from a high-score into a flow problem: without recurring costs, economies only accumulate (every purchase is forever, and the late game drowns in surplus), but upkeep makes ownership itself a spend — the treasury is a balance of flows, expansion carries permanent price tags, and the question shifts from 'can I afford to buy it' to 'can I afford to keep it', which is a strategically richer question (the army you can raise but not sustain is a timing window, not an asset — and reading that difference is the genre's skill). Upkeep also creates the death-spiral texture that gives strategy stakes (losses that cut income while costs continue force real triage) and acts as a natural rubber-band: the biggest empire pays the biggest bills, so overextension punishes itself without scripted catch-up mechanics. Key decisions: upkeep scale relative to acquisition cost (cheap-to-buy, dear-to-keep economies emphasize timing; the reverse emphasizes accumulation), what happens on non-payment (desertion, decay, shutdown, rebellion — graceful degradation versus cliff-edge collapse, and cliff edges need loud warnings), upkeep visibility in decision moments (the recruitment screen must show the recurring cost, not just the sticker price), and exemptions as design levers — free-upkeep units, maintenance-free tiers, and peacetime discounts all encode strategic statements. Pitfall: upkeep as bookkeeping without decisions — when recurring costs are trivially covered and never force a choice (the interface deducts, nobody notices), the system is accounting theater; upkeep earns its ledger when players sometimes decline assets they could buy because of what keeping them costs — that declined purchase is the mechanic working, and if it never happens, the numbers are decoration.

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