Wargame vs "Living world"

[Veraphim]

Since this is a living world. Do the mines get deeper?, Do the mines get depleted of resources? If they are depleted, what sort of 'base' does the mine become? or is it abandoned all together and opposing forces can move in to plan future attacks?

EDIT: Slamz beat me to it.

I could envision doing something like this:

Option 1:
Randomly, your NPC "prospectors" would randomly locate a mine, which "spawns" at that time. The mine has a certain number of resources that can be extracted. How fast that happens depends on how many miners your faction can allocate to mining it, as well as how often they get interrupted by attacks - lending to reasons to patrol it.
Once the mine runs out of materials, there is a "Cave-in" event, which closes the mine. Other random events may be that you uncover a balrog, after which defeating it nets a small amount of rare resource (Mythril/Adamantite/whatever), followed by the Cave-in" event.

Option 2:
The mines are always in the world, as underground caverns which can be hunted/patrolled in a PvE sense(Your NPC guards will also need to escort the miners). The income from the mines is unlimited, but trickles in slowly. Since the mine never moves, enemy factions always know where they need to make raids to secure a certain type of resource they need to get their hands on.



In either case, the type of resources in the mines should probably be tied to the local area instead of purely random, so as to promote conflict between different territories ("We need to attack The Red Clan's mines, because they control the only territory with Copper!"). If resources randomly move around, then different clans wouldn't be motivated to attack each other. "Hmm, we need copper, but instead of attacking The Red Clan, lets just wait until the resources shift next week".