Nations
When a nation cannot pay a required resource, what is lost and in what order?
The designer endorsed the step-by-step worked example and adopted it into the FAQ.
Pay what you have. The short type costs 1 VP, and the unpaid amount costs Books, one per missing unit. Books that cannot be paid come from other resources, with no further VP. Each type costs at most one VP a round, and once a type's VP penalty is used, any further shortfall in it costs nothing more.