Resource management in creatures

When I was younger I played mostly real time strategy games. Likely this interest in playing god is what prompted me to buy creatures all those years ago. Creatures clearly is not a strategy game, but it does have some resource management in the same vein.

The traditional wood, money and food aren't used, but population has been limited in the same way. A maximum number of “units” has been available since the first game. The value itself has always been either set in stone or a parameter changed in the menu. In strategy games this would be changed by the building of houses.

Imagine if creatures would have asked the same of players, to collect building materials and to make norns cooperate for long enough that new nests are built.

Creatures 2 used another form of resource management. The nutrients in the soil could be measured and modified by planting the right plants. As food plants do not lower soil fertility while growing it is somewhat of a static resource, meaning that once you have the soil improved there is no more need to continue doing so. 

Creatures 3 actually used a traditional resource, in the sense that it could be spent. The bioenergy necessary to use any machine or vendor required the player to actively gather it through the inefficient recycler. An unpopular choice, which likely led to the endless bioenergy docking station had. 

In a way it limited the player in setting up their evolutionary creatures experiments and such, but on the other hand: is evolution still in play once creatures are mostly fed from vendors?

Perhaps the player should have been given the choice to play in a sandbox mode, or to play in an industrial mode, where maintenance of the ship, procurement of biomatter, electrical generators and housing for your norns would have been needed. Limitations often make games more enjoyable, as we puzzle to find solutions to them.

This in turn would likely cause players to opt for a low tech playthrough instead, where soil improvement and water management and the nitrogen cycle would have grown the food necessary for creatures to live in numbers.

To manage these resources, to check the values of the soil, or the status of a generator for example, you’d have variant hoverdocs, appearing slightly different according to their job. 

Maybe I'm just overthinking small details here, but I think this would be a way to turn the sandbox into a game without breaking immersion or without straying too far from the plot.