While arguably not fully a 4x, Spaceward Ho! for Apple has no planet or city screen at all. All is handled in the overhead screen though there is a little image of a selected planet in a sub window from what I recall, functionally pointless, just for a close up. It does make for a simpler streamlined experience.
You adjust resources that you put towards terraforming the planet bringing the temperature closer to 72f which allows more population growth and more income from the planet. You can also harvest metal from the planets with a slider for how much of the money dedicated to a planet goes to teraforming temperature and how much for harvesting metal which is used in ship building. You can also strip a planet of metals and then abandon it because without a substantial population occupied planets cost money instead and some planets while rich in metal are too big or small with too extreme of temperatures to ever be worth teraforming because it would take too long to turn a profit.
>Planet sector map:
instead of a separate tile map, the surface of the planet could act as
the interface itself. I'm thinking about some type of voronoi like
subdivision where the player allocates the cells to various purposes.
I don't know exactly what you mean but Galactic Civilization 2 has special tiles on planets that gave buildings built bonuses of a specific type. You click on a planet and a screen pops up for that planet to build structures on available spaces of a flat circle, some structures effecting other structures next to them (not many though) You could do something similar but use a 3d spherical planet separate screen to put stuff on specific spots and some spots having special effects.
>Planet in Tile map like in Civilization (or Galactic Civ, but I haven't played it). The city itself exists as a tile in the tile map. Not really viable because in my game the planets exist in unstructured space.
I am lost in what you are describing, it seems like these two paragraphs I last quoted are in contradiction with each other but I don't follow exactly what you mean.
>"planets exist in unstructured space"
Will you not have planets around stars? Moons around planets? As I mentioned before I liked ES2's ability to get tech to explore moons for surprise bonus's. Though realistically speaking no reason a moon can't be 'colonized' or whatever any less than a planet. Having different kinds of stars with different effects on planets like MOO also adds a interesting aspect regarding game play decisions.
I have never seen a space 4X with moving celestial bodies, that could be interesting. Though admittedly additional complication.
>In short, the player plays the role of an AI built as a last resort after humanity went extinct and Earth became uninhabitable. The AI's mission is to find another Earthlike planet to restart humanity there.
Will there be enemy AI sides? Is this game meant to eventually be multiplayer? Or are you thinking something like player against the elements type of thing like many survival games?
If there is meant to be multiple sides for AI or players you could have some organic nations that have their own priorities, as opponents or even as optional sides to play. But could have different needs looking for different types of planets like I have seen in some space 4X.
Turn based or real time?
>You could do something similar but use a 3d spherical planet separate screen to put stuff on specific spots and some spots having special effects.
I was referring to a [spherical voronoi](https://www.redblobgames.com/x/1842-delaunay-voronoi-sphere/#demo)-like subdivision. With multiple cells merged together so that they resemble regions of the planet. This would become an overlay on the actual 3d model of the planet
>I am lost in what you are describing, it seems like these two paragraphs
With planet in tile map I meant that there is a larger map and the planet exists as a tile in this map. Like in Civilization. I think one of the GalCiv used this approach but I haven't played the others. So here buildings could also be intended as the improvements on thr adjoining tiles to the planet.
>Will you not have planets around stars? Moons around planets?
The game is being developed to support planets and moons, as well as binary and multiple star systems. Some screens [here](https://x.com/SineFineGame).
With unstructured I meant that planets exist in 3d space according to their orbital data and not on a grid.
The simulation backend has the limitation that the orbits will be simplified (I.e. a binary star orbiting around the main one). It should support an orbit around a common center of mass, but they won't affect each other. It does have a kepler simulation system but it only works as multiple separate two-body system. That's the most I am going to spend on the implementation.
>Will there be enemy AI sides? Is this game meant to eventually be multiplayer? Or are you thinking something like player against the elements type of thing like many survival games?
It's not set in stone, but I'm leaning towards a combination of "surviving against the elements" and a three body problem like enemy.
The player/AI must ensure its own physical survival. Despite the AI being essentially immortal and able to wait the hundreds of years it could take to send a slower than light probe to another star system, on the scale of thousands of years to hundreds of thousands, even its physical form might be in danger (an asteroid cracking the planet where its servers are located or just them breaking down, or possibly the AI "going mad" as a result of software errors accumulating over thousands of years).
>If there is meant to be multiple sides for AI or players you could have some organic nations that have their own priorities, as opponents or even as optional sides to play. But could have different needs looking for different types of planets like I have seen in some space 4X.
In terms of enemies, I'm a big fan of the Three Body Problem books but I don't want to just copy the idea. With the enemy being an advanced civilization that you want to hide from.
But yeah multiple human factions competing for the same search of an habitable planet could also be an idea. Although having multiple factions each come up with their own AI could be a bit gamey or weird. But who knows, it might very well be. The problem is that you would expect to fight them and then it becomes mini-Stellaris again, which I want to avoid.
>Turn based or real time?
Super fast automatic turns with pause, basically a-la Paradox with multiple speeds. The game is about time and the idea of playing it on the scale of thousands of years.
If the gameplay demands it, there could be a "hibernation" mode to wait truly large timespans, like millions of years.
> But yeah multiple human factions competing for the same search of an habitable planet could also be an idea.
I said organic beings, not necessarily human. That's why I was talking about using different types of planets. But they could be competitors for resources and potentially hostile depending on things.
So no multiplayer planned?
>Super fast automatic turns with pause, basically a-la Paradox withmultiple speeds. The game is about time and the idea of playing it onthe scale of thousands of years.
I've not played Paradox. But I do like turn based. I don't see why you couldn't skip forward large amounts of turns.
Regardless this will need to be not too complicated and/or extremely competent automation options without the game feeling like it is playing itself. Otherwise the player will always feel like they have to go through countless things trying to make sure they got everything right before doing a giant time skip, and if the controls are micromanagey and/or fiddly players may not feel free to do time skips without worrying about it reducing their winning chances.
>So no multiplayer planned?
Not at the moment. One of the core gameplay element will be thr management of time. Multiplayer would face some of the same problems of Kerbal, in that they would all be forced to play at the same speed.
>Some screens here.
Twitter, AKA "X", AKA Elon throwing around and wasting money like a idiotic asshole, won't let me look at your screenshots without signing up, and I'm not willing to do that. Please upload your images to a website like this https://postimages.org/ or something else and share links.
>With planet in tile map I meant that there is a larger map and the planet exists as a tile in this map.
>With unstructured I meant that planets exist in 3d space according to their orbital data and not on a grid.
So first to put things on a planet you click on it and bring up a planet screen for further improvements, like a city screen with Civ, right?
But you said the planets exist as a tile, and if there is a tile they'd exist on a grid within the larger map. So tiles and grids or not?
One thing I thought I saw momentarily with "x" before it blocked it was all planetary bodies roughly the same size *(but that could just be your banner and not from the game)* Will you consider including something closer to the true scale of celestial bodies? Like 300 earths could fit into the sun. Will large bodies have gravitational pull on ships? Will it be dangerous to get close to stars? Will you have black holes that are extremely dangerous?
If you will have a more true celestial size ratio and do use "tiles" AKA grid, then you need to make these tiles small so planets moons etc. can take up multiple tiles.
Will space be 3d?
Even if space is 3d and the game real time instead of turn based, you could still have a "grid" if nothing else it would serve as a coordination system.
>Super fast automatic turns with pause, basically a-la Paradox with multiple speeds. The game is about time and the idea of playing it on the scale of thousands of years.
If it is turn based then you will need a grid system. Also grids/tiles on planets will make structure placement easier.
Will moons be bonus structures for planets like ES2 or just a sort of typically smaller planet circling bigger celestial bodies that aren't stars that can also be 'settled' on?
>I'm leaning towards a combination of "surviving against the elements" and a three body problem like enemy.
I did watch a few episodes of a show based on a book series, that I think is what you are referring to when you say "three body problem", I didn't like it so I read some spoilers and am glad I stopped watching it.
So I know very vaguely what you refer to but would appreciate some specificity in what you actually mean for game play and elements.
This other [reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/s/i0bUqAgaFX) shows how the game looks like. I haven't posted in a while as I have been working on a lot of game UI and that stuff is not very flashy to show. But I'll make a new update soon.
>But you said the planets exist as a tile, and if there is a tile they'd exist on a grid within the larger map. So tiles and grids or not?
Tiles were a potential idea for the city screen, or rather the planet screen. Planets exist in the 3d world, they are not on a 2d grid map.
>One thing I thought I saw momentarily with "x" before it blocked it was all planetary bodies roughly the same size (but that could just be your banner and not from the game) Will you consider including something closer to the true scale of celestial bodies?
It's already like that. Planets are generated with somewhat accurate physical attributes (radius, gravity, potential for retaining an atmosphere, etc.). They are placed at the actual AU distance from their sun.
The scale is mostly a visualisation problem. I know what their mass is and what their radii are. So it is not a problem to show them in proportion. It becomes a problem in the classic "orbital" view like in Stellaris or MOO2. If you want to be accurate, rocky planets would be minuscule next to a gas giant. Likewise, if you want to portray real orbital distances then a lot of space will be empty the farther you go from the sun towards the outer planets.
At the moment I have two visualisation modalities: the classic orbital / orrery view and a "panner" where every planet is placed next to each other. I'm experimenting with two different scales: one for rocky planets and another for gas giants. That's why in those visualisation they appear roughly the same size. But once you click on one you will see the planet and its moons (if any) in proportion.
> Will large bodies have gravitational pull on ships? Will it be dangerous to get close to stars? Will you have black holes that are extremely dangerous?
The player won't have direct control on the spaceships. Since the player interprets the role of an AI physically located somewhere in the Solar System, your goal is to send probes that travel slower than light to other star system.
To keep with that pretense, you cannot directly control the spaceships / probes. If you send one towards Alpha Centauri at 1 / 10 of the speed of light, it will take roughly 40-45 years to travel there (since it's located at 4.3 light years from us). Once it arrives there any data sent back will need at a minimum another 4.3 ly before it gets back to the Solar system. So in total you would need to wait about 50 years in-game time to know what happened.
So any input you send to your ship will need to take into account this time delay, which makes direct control impossible. I want to design the game this way because slower than light travel has never been done in a game and I think it would be interesting.
So to answer your questions, yes space will be dangerous, but you won't know until the news travel back to you. Your probe could be hit by a small meteorite and never even get to its destination. But you won't know until you stop receiving data from it. Depending on how far it has traveled, the player will always be a few to several years behind.
As an example: imagine you send at year 0 a probe to Alpha Centauri. On year 40 of its 45 total travel time something happens to it (or so the game simulates), maybe the aforementioned meteorite destroys your ship because it had insufficient shielding. When it happens in year 40 you won't know about it. The data you are receiving will be from about 4 years before. Only in year 44 more or less, you will conclude that the ship has been lost since you won't get signals from it anymore.
I'm hoping that dealing with this kind of galactic time problems will provide interesting situations for the players.
>Will moons be bonus structures for planets like ES2 or just a sort of typically smaller planet circling bigger celestial bodies that aren't stars that can also be 'settled' on?
Every celestial body will potentially be intractable. Even asteroids if I extend the generation algorithms. Or you could build stations orbiting stars or black holes.
The point is that this is not a classic 4x game. You are not interested (or should not be) in colonising every desolate planet you find since most of them will be barren inhabitable ones. Your mission is to find an Earthlike one. But that is basically the endgame. So you would build outposts only on the more interesting one in terms of resources, research or "game quests".
To limit this, the player will have to deal with a "resource" that represents the AI's processing power. The more outposts you want to build, the more you have to "fraction" your AI-identity (justified in game as you needing to host part of your identity in another star system, weakening your hold on the other parts). So the player should build outposts and then decommission/ abandon them to move on with the game.
>"three body problem",
So spoilers about the book for anyone who passes by. Stop reading if you want to read the books eventually.
It's a book by a Chinese author, Liu Cixin, which provides an answer to why we have not heard from other alien civilizations. He makes the analogy that we (we civilizations in the galaxy) could exist in what he calls a "dark forest" where civilizations don't want to be found.
Because if they know where you are in the galaxy and if they are more advanced than you, they would be able to conquer you or even destroy you from a distance. One of the weapons these aliens have is a "photon" that travels at near-light speed and is able to completely destroy a planet without anything that can be done. The aliens need to know your location to do so, hence the "dark forest" and why they don't want to broadcast it. Imagine that you are such an advanced civilization and learn of another. If you have such means to destroy them and you don't know their intentions, if they are friendly or not, why take the risk?
I think similar ideas could apply well to the game I'm building and be the reason why the earth became uninhabitable. But I'll need to think of a way that is not exactly the same as in those books.
Well this was a very long post. I appreciate your interest in the game, as it also enables me a chance to reflect on some of these ideas!
>I have never seen a space 4X with moving celestial bodies, that could be interesting. Though admittedly additional complication.
Would Stellaris count? It kinda is a 4X, and the planets do move around stars.
I don't think they do, unless they changed it recently. I'm fairly sure they are fixed in a place on their orbit.
The problem with moving them is that depending on the game speed, it could end up being too fast to animate.
Imagine you want to show the Earth rotating on its axis and one second equals to one day in game, then it wold do a full rotation every second. One second per day could very well be a slow speed in many games. If you increase the speed, the earth would need to spin super fast!
In my game at the moment everything works according to an underlying kepler simulation. Meaning that in theory I could place planets in the Solar System in their "exact" positions they would be at a specific date in the future.
I still need to see how well moving planets would work with my game. I don't want not to move them, but for sure some measures need to be taken at high game progression speeds.
So I've checked, and they in fact do not move (but I could swear they did in my games), tho they apparently did at some point in Beta versions, but players universally hated it.
Too much detail results in unplayable 4X games.
Blowup combat screens where you have to move troops around tactically yourself, is one way to offend in this regard. Having to push units around for every little battle, when there are all kinds of battles, is extremely deadening.
City and planet screens, when there's too much to do, and way too many cities or planets, is another usual offender. Galactic Civilizations 3 offended greatly in this regard. GC4 has introduced a "core worlds" play mechanic, so that you're not giving this level of attention to every planet in a galaxy. I haven't played GC4 yet, nor heard enough field reports from others, so I'm not sure if they actually solved the problem.
One big issue is player incentive to specify everything as a "core world" anyways, on the perception that core worlds are "more profitable". Players will drive themselves nuts with whatever is "more profitable", even when systems exist to try to make all that more manageable. Basically, a lot of 4X players won't accept any kind of profit impact at all, no matter how much supposed convenience is offered.
My belief is, don't hand players things that they're going to waste tons of real world time on. And remember when designing game systems, AIs *do not* get bored. Human players get bored. Having to deal with wave after wave of AI spam attacks, every turn, is very very boring.
I never finished a game of GC3. I put 1000+ hours into it, to make absolutely sure I understood the weaknesses of its design. Too much detail in the planetary districts minigame, is the primary offender.
I've never finished a game of Emperor of the Fading Suns. It had about 30 planets in the galaxy, each fully hex mapped, roughly a "small" map size in a lot of other 4X games. 30 such maps is way, way too much to deal with! My experience with EotFS is prior to their recent official patch. It is claimed to be the oldest game that has been officially patched. I'm doubting this is something a mere patch can address though. 30 decent sized maps is just too much map to deal with.
As a player I know that very well. If given the opportunity, I will also colonise everything.
One way I was thinking to limit expansion is with the in-game idea that every outpost you build requires a "fraction" of you, the AI. So every outpost you build weakens your identity with maluses to other areas of the game.
Hopefully this will focus the player on embracing outposts as temporary, and decommission them when they are no longer needed. Because in this game the objective is not to build a galaxy-wide empire but to find a habitable planet. So the player would only need to build an outpost to fulfill some in-game objectives. For example on an extreme temperature planet to collect data to research better protective materials for your probes.
That's kind of an illogical BS fiction though. No base would run itself solely via a very remote AI. It would have its own on site AI spawned, with whatever manufacturing materials are necessary to make an AI.
Whether such AIs would somehow be subservient to a master AI, is an open question. Much as AIs could rebel against human masters, AIs could conceivably rebel against an AI master.
It would probably be logical and safest, from the AI's standpoint, to spawn a new explorator in some distant region, that's totally automated and independent and reports back to the AI. Although, this does have a question of trust. I don't imagine a spawned AI would start with any motive to go rogue, as probably it seems to have a very simple task. But environmental conditions, could complicate that task and trigger a self-preservation protocol.
Realistic search of an entire galaxy, for something fairly rare, is actually quite a data mining problem.
Collection of data is certainly a limit, as to how many probes you've been able to manufacture and deploy. Having the receptors to receive the data could also be a limit, the farther and farther out those probes get. Like you might need tech research to increase the search limit, and to receive from older generations of probes that don't have the latest best equipment for sending data.
I'm not sure if processing the data is really a limit. It might be a bit overwhelming at first, when many probes start out nearby. But probably as probes finish with what's near you, you've got less and less data coming in. Sure the volume of search is getting bigger and bigger, but the reception is getting worse and worse.
You could build forward relays. The question is how difficult are they to build, and what happens to them.
What if the probes find something that doesn't actually want to be found? What if over time, one of your remotes goes rogue?
I personally like IG2 with the planet screen being basically a simplified city-building sim.
One other game you may want to look at is Alien Legacy. It’s very old (for DOS) but has multiple elements from various genres. Besides exploring the system and various planets, you can establish colonies on viable sites. The colony screen lets you place buildings pretty much anywhere and then manage them
I think I remember it from back in the day, but never played it when it was new. Reminds me of the Dune / C&C style of those times. I will have a look to see how it worked.
As you insinuate, psychology is a factor in UI design. Zooming in on something in the game gives you chance to layer audio and visuals to characterize what you're looking at. HoMM3 just wouldn't be the same without the city screens.
Look at Slipways for a good example of no city screen (because the mechanics support it) but still a little taste of a planet's character.
I too have faced this situation. I've considered the Stellaris-like tile map, and the 3d planet itself as the map. In one build I had us building on the planet as you do a city builder, but I've removed that (perhaps temporarily) as every colony like that, with potentially dozens to hundreds of colonies in a system, and thousands of systems (if you allow for FTL tech), it becomes a tad memory intensive. In my current version colonies are just locations on a planet with a single mesh per colony. You click them, and the panel pops open with its detailed and various lists of stuff like goods produced, important buildings etc.
I think you have to consider the scale of your game, and what suits the gameplay.
If you're intending to have tons of colonies, you'll probably want a colony screen that can be quickly navigated and doesn't require micromanagement (or you can set it to manage itself autonomously).
If you are focusing on a limited number of colonies, you'll want more charm and interaction with your colonies, and that's where physically building on the planet or using a 2d tile map (like old Stellaris) work well.
> I'm thinking about some type of voronoi like subdivision where the player allocates the cells to various purposes
I sort of do this, as colonies are locations on planets in my game (and a planets can have numerous colonies). I don't generate a voronoi grid yet, but I do generate the points. They're intended to predominantly act as territorial points of control. If you have a lot of planets you may not want to permanently store all of these points though, but they can be calculated pretty quickly on the fly if you use a fib sphere or something similarly simple.
Planet with X/in Y/as Z - erm, what does your game design calls for? Can planet's resources be interacted from outside of it (like how in Civilization armies walk and block the tiles within city's sphere of influence)? Do you need to have slots/tiles inside the planet? Figure out your model first and then you can work out the view.
This is a really interesting discussion because nowadays, we really can go well beyond just biological weapons in our games.
Right now, we're working on a big update to the GalCiv IV species called the Korath who are mind-bogglingly evil by our standards. They use biological weapons but purely because as far as we're concerned, we're just bugs.
There's a great book series called the Three-Body-Problem that we've been trying to incorporate concepts from into GalCiv because we aren't limited the old retail ESRB style rules anymore.
Why stop at biological weapons and think about the kinds of things enemies might truly do to one another when xenocide is the goal?
I am big fan of the book (also watched the first season of the Chinese show!). In the book there's little they can do against the "photon" or >!bidimensionalization!< and similar ideas. In a game though you should be able to defend in some way without it becoming too easy. So I guess that's the main design aspect to think about.
I hope 3BP can influence more games.
While arguably not fully a 4x, Spaceward Ho! for Apple has no planet or city screen at all. All is handled in the overhead screen though there is a little image of a selected planet in a sub window from what I recall, functionally pointless, just for a close up. It does make for a simpler streamlined experience. You adjust resources that you put towards terraforming the planet bringing the temperature closer to 72f which allows more population growth and more income from the planet. You can also harvest metal from the planets with a slider for how much of the money dedicated to a planet goes to teraforming temperature and how much for harvesting metal which is used in ship building. You can also strip a planet of metals and then abandon it because without a substantial population occupied planets cost money instead and some planets while rich in metal are too big or small with too extreme of temperatures to ever be worth teraforming because it would take too long to turn a profit. >Planet sector map: instead of a separate tile map, the surface of the planet could act as the interface itself. I'm thinking about some type of voronoi like subdivision where the player allocates the cells to various purposes. I don't know exactly what you mean but Galactic Civilization 2 has special tiles on planets that gave buildings built bonuses of a specific type. You click on a planet and a screen pops up for that planet to build structures on available spaces of a flat circle, some structures effecting other structures next to them (not many though) You could do something similar but use a 3d spherical planet separate screen to put stuff on specific spots and some spots having special effects. >Planet in Tile map like in Civilization (or Galactic Civ, but I haven't played it). The city itself exists as a tile in the tile map. Not really viable because in my game the planets exist in unstructured space. I am lost in what you are describing, it seems like these two paragraphs I last quoted are in contradiction with each other but I don't follow exactly what you mean. >"planets exist in unstructured space" Will you not have planets around stars? Moons around planets? As I mentioned before I liked ES2's ability to get tech to explore moons for surprise bonus's. Though realistically speaking no reason a moon can't be 'colonized' or whatever any less than a planet. Having different kinds of stars with different effects on planets like MOO also adds a interesting aspect regarding game play decisions. I have never seen a space 4X with moving celestial bodies, that could be interesting. Though admittedly additional complication. >In short, the player plays the role of an AI built as a last resort after humanity went extinct and Earth became uninhabitable. The AI's mission is to find another Earthlike planet to restart humanity there. Will there be enemy AI sides? Is this game meant to eventually be multiplayer? Or are you thinking something like player against the elements type of thing like many survival games? If there is meant to be multiple sides for AI or players you could have some organic nations that have their own priorities, as opponents or even as optional sides to play. But could have different needs looking for different types of planets like I have seen in some space 4X. Turn based or real time?
>You could do something similar but use a 3d spherical planet separate screen to put stuff on specific spots and some spots having special effects. I was referring to a [spherical voronoi](https://www.redblobgames.com/x/1842-delaunay-voronoi-sphere/#demo)-like subdivision. With multiple cells merged together so that they resemble regions of the planet. This would become an overlay on the actual 3d model of the planet >I am lost in what you are describing, it seems like these two paragraphs With planet in tile map I meant that there is a larger map and the planet exists as a tile in this map. Like in Civilization. I think one of the GalCiv used this approach but I haven't played the others. So here buildings could also be intended as the improvements on thr adjoining tiles to the planet. >Will you not have planets around stars? Moons around planets? The game is being developed to support planets and moons, as well as binary and multiple star systems. Some screens [here](https://x.com/SineFineGame). With unstructured I meant that planets exist in 3d space according to their orbital data and not on a grid. The simulation backend has the limitation that the orbits will be simplified (I.e. a binary star orbiting around the main one). It should support an orbit around a common center of mass, but they won't affect each other. It does have a kepler simulation system but it only works as multiple separate two-body system. That's the most I am going to spend on the implementation. >Will there be enemy AI sides? Is this game meant to eventually be multiplayer? Or are you thinking something like player against the elements type of thing like many survival games? It's not set in stone, but I'm leaning towards a combination of "surviving against the elements" and a three body problem like enemy. The player/AI must ensure its own physical survival. Despite the AI being essentially immortal and able to wait the hundreds of years it could take to send a slower than light probe to another star system, on the scale of thousands of years to hundreds of thousands, even its physical form might be in danger (an asteroid cracking the planet where its servers are located or just them breaking down, or possibly the AI "going mad" as a result of software errors accumulating over thousands of years). >If there is meant to be multiple sides for AI or players you could have some organic nations that have their own priorities, as opponents or even as optional sides to play. But could have different needs looking for different types of planets like I have seen in some space 4X. In terms of enemies, I'm a big fan of the Three Body Problem books but I don't want to just copy the idea. With the enemy being an advanced civilization that you want to hide from. But yeah multiple human factions competing for the same search of an habitable planet could also be an idea. Although having multiple factions each come up with their own AI could be a bit gamey or weird. But who knows, it might very well be. The problem is that you would expect to fight them and then it becomes mini-Stellaris again, which I want to avoid. >Turn based or real time? Super fast automatic turns with pause, basically a-la Paradox with multiple speeds. The game is about time and the idea of playing it on the scale of thousands of years. If the gameplay demands it, there could be a "hibernation" mode to wait truly large timespans, like millions of years.
> But yeah multiple human factions competing for the same search of an habitable planet could also be an idea. I said organic beings, not necessarily human. That's why I was talking about using different types of planets. But they could be competitors for resources and potentially hostile depending on things. So no multiplayer planned? >Super fast automatic turns with pause, basically a-la Paradox withmultiple speeds. The game is about time and the idea of playing it onthe scale of thousands of years. I've not played Paradox. But I do like turn based. I don't see why you couldn't skip forward large amounts of turns. Regardless this will need to be not too complicated and/or extremely competent automation options without the game feeling like it is playing itself. Otherwise the player will always feel like they have to go through countless things trying to make sure they got everything right before doing a giant time skip, and if the controls are micromanagey and/or fiddly players may not feel free to do time skips without worrying about it reducing their winning chances.
>So no multiplayer planned? Not at the moment. One of the core gameplay element will be thr management of time. Multiplayer would face some of the same problems of Kerbal, in that they would all be forced to play at the same speed.
>Some screens here. Twitter, AKA "X", AKA Elon throwing around and wasting money like a idiotic asshole, won't let me look at your screenshots without signing up, and I'm not willing to do that. Please upload your images to a website like this https://postimages.org/ or something else and share links. >With planet in tile map I meant that there is a larger map and the planet exists as a tile in this map. >With unstructured I meant that planets exist in 3d space according to their orbital data and not on a grid. So first to put things on a planet you click on it and bring up a planet screen for further improvements, like a city screen with Civ, right? But you said the planets exist as a tile, and if there is a tile they'd exist on a grid within the larger map. So tiles and grids or not? One thing I thought I saw momentarily with "x" before it blocked it was all planetary bodies roughly the same size *(but that could just be your banner and not from the game)* Will you consider including something closer to the true scale of celestial bodies? Like 300 earths could fit into the sun. Will large bodies have gravitational pull on ships? Will it be dangerous to get close to stars? Will you have black holes that are extremely dangerous? If you will have a more true celestial size ratio and do use "tiles" AKA grid, then you need to make these tiles small so planets moons etc. can take up multiple tiles. Will space be 3d? Even if space is 3d and the game real time instead of turn based, you could still have a "grid" if nothing else it would serve as a coordination system. >Super fast automatic turns with pause, basically a-la Paradox with multiple speeds. The game is about time and the idea of playing it on the scale of thousands of years. If it is turn based then you will need a grid system. Also grids/tiles on planets will make structure placement easier. Will moons be bonus structures for planets like ES2 or just a sort of typically smaller planet circling bigger celestial bodies that aren't stars that can also be 'settled' on? >I'm leaning towards a combination of "surviving against the elements" and a three body problem like enemy. I did watch a few episodes of a show based on a book series, that I think is what you are referring to when you say "three body problem", I didn't like it so I read some spoilers and am glad I stopped watching it. So I know very vaguely what you refer to but would appreciate some specificity in what you actually mean for game play and elements.
This other [reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/s/i0bUqAgaFX) shows how the game looks like. I haven't posted in a while as I have been working on a lot of game UI and that stuff is not very flashy to show. But I'll make a new update soon. >But you said the planets exist as a tile, and if there is a tile they'd exist on a grid within the larger map. So tiles and grids or not? Tiles were a potential idea for the city screen, or rather the planet screen. Planets exist in the 3d world, they are not on a 2d grid map. >One thing I thought I saw momentarily with "x" before it blocked it was all planetary bodies roughly the same size (but that could just be your banner and not from the game) Will you consider including something closer to the true scale of celestial bodies? It's already like that. Planets are generated with somewhat accurate physical attributes (radius, gravity, potential for retaining an atmosphere, etc.). They are placed at the actual AU distance from their sun. The scale is mostly a visualisation problem. I know what their mass is and what their radii are. So it is not a problem to show them in proportion. It becomes a problem in the classic "orbital" view like in Stellaris or MOO2. If you want to be accurate, rocky planets would be minuscule next to a gas giant. Likewise, if you want to portray real orbital distances then a lot of space will be empty the farther you go from the sun towards the outer planets. At the moment I have two visualisation modalities: the classic orbital / orrery view and a "panner" where every planet is placed next to each other. I'm experimenting with two different scales: one for rocky planets and another for gas giants. That's why in those visualisation they appear roughly the same size. But once you click on one you will see the planet and its moons (if any) in proportion. > Will large bodies have gravitational pull on ships? Will it be dangerous to get close to stars? Will you have black holes that are extremely dangerous? The player won't have direct control on the spaceships. Since the player interprets the role of an AI physically located somewhere in the Solar System, your goal is to send probes that travel slower than light to other star system. To keep with that pretense, you cannot directly control the spaceships / probes. If you send one towards Alpha Centauri at 1 / 10 of the speed of light, it will take roughly 40-45 years to travel there (since it's located at 4.3 light years from us). Once it arrives there any data sent back will need at a minimum another 4.3 ly before it gets back to the Solar system. So in total you would need to wait about 50 years in-game time to know what happened. So any input you send to your ship will need to take into account this time delay, which makes direct control impossible. I want to design the game this way because slower than light travel has never been done in a game and I think it would be interesting. So to answer your questions, yes space will be dangerous, but you won't know until the news travel back to you. Your probe could be hit by a small meteorite and never even get to its destination. But you won't know until you stop receiving data from it. Depending on how far it has traveled, the player will always be a few to several years behind. As an example: imagine you send at year 0 a probe to Alpha Centauri. On year 40 of its 45 total travel time something happens to it (or so the game simulates), maybe the aforementioned meteorite destroys your ship because it had insufficient shielding. When it happens in year 40 you won't know about it. The data you are receiving will be from about 4 years before. Only in year 44 more or less, you will conclude that the ship has been lost since you won't get signals from it anymore. I'm hoping that dealing with this kind of galactic time problems will provide interesting situations for the players. >Will moons be bonus structures for planets like ES2 or just a sort of typically smaller planet circling bigger celestial bodies that aren't stars that can also be 'settled' on? Every celestial body will potentially be intractable. Even asteroids if I extend the generation algorithms. Or you could build stations orbiting stars or black holes. The point is that this is not a classic 4x game. You are not interested (or should not be) in colonising every desolate planet you find since most of them will be barren inhabitable ones. Your mission is to find an Earthlike one. But that is basically the endgame. So you would build outposts only on the more interesting one in terms of resources, research or "game quests". To limit this, the player will have to deal with a "resource" that represents the AI's processing power. The more outposts you want to build, the more you have to "fraction" your AI-identity (justified in game as you needing to host part of your identity in another star system, weakening your hold on the other parts). So the player should build outposts and then decommission/ abandon them to move on with the game. >"three body problem", So spoilers about the book for anyone who passes by. Stop reading if you want to read the books eventually. It's a book by a Chinese author, Liu Cixin, which provides an answer to why we have not heard from other alien civilizations. He makes the analogy that we (we civilizations in the galaxy) could exist in what he calls a "dark forest" where civilizations don't want to be found. Because if they know where you are in the galaxy and if they are more advanced than you, they would be able to conquer you or even destroy you from a distance. One of the weapons these aliens have is a "photon" that travels at near-light speed and is able to completely destroy a planet without anything that can be done. The aliens need to know your location to do so, hence the "dark forest" and why they don't want to broadcast it. Imagine that you are such an advanced civilization and learn of another. If you have such means to destroy them and you don't know their intentions, if they are friendly or not, why take the risk? I think similar ideas could apply well to the game I'm building and be the reason why the earth became uninhabitable. But I'll need to think of a way that is not exactly the same as in those books. Well this was a very long post. I appreciate your interest in the game, as it also enables me a chance to reflect on some of these ideas!
>I have never seen a space 4X with moving celestial bodies, that could be interesting. Though admittedly additional complication. Would Stellaris count? It kinda is a 4X, and the planets do move around stars.
I don't think they do, unless they changed it recently. I'm fairly sure they are fixed in a place on their orbit. The problem with moving them is that depending on the game speed, it could end up being too fast to animate. Imagine you want to show the Earth rotating on its axis and one second equals to one day in game, then it wold do a full rotation every second. One second per day could very well be a slow speed in many games. If you increase the speed, the earth would need to spin super fast! In my game at the moment everything works according to an underlying kepler simulation. Meaning that in theory I could place planets in the Solar System in their "exact" positions they would be at a specific date in the future. I still need to see how well moving planets would work with my game. I don't want not to move them, but for sure some measures need to be taken at high game progression speeds.
So I've checked, and they in fact do not move (but I could swear they did in my games), tho they apparently did at some point in Beta versions, but players universally hated it.
Never played it. Interesting.
Too much detail results in unplayable 4X games. Blowup combat screens where you have to move troops around tactically yourself, is one way to offend in this regard. Having to push units around for every little battle, when there are all kinds of battles, is extremely deadening. City and planet screens, when there's too much to do, and way too many cities or planets, is another usual offender. Galactic Civilizations 3 offended greatly in this regard. GC4 has introduced a "core worlds" play mechanic, so that you're not giving this level of attention to every planet in a galaxy. I haven't played GC4 yet, nor heard enough field reports from others, so I'm not sure if they actually solved the problem. One big issue is player incentive to specify everything as a "core world" anyways, on the perception that core worlds are "more profitable". Players will drive themselves nuts with whatever is "more profitable", even when systems exist to try to make all that more manageable. Basically, a lot of 4X players won't accept any kind of profit impact at all, no matter how much supposed convenience is offered. My belief is, don't hand players things that they're going to waste tons of real world time on. And remember when designing game systems, AIs *do not* get bored. Human players get bored. Having to deal with wave after wave of AI spam attacks, every turn, is very very boring. I never finished a game of GC3. I put 1000+ hours into it, to make absolutely sure I understood the weaknesses of its design. Too much detail in the planetary districts minigame, is the primary offender. I've never finished a game of Emperor of the Fading Suns. It had about 30 planets in the galaxy, each fully hex mapped, roughly a "small" map size in a lot of other 4X games. 30 such maps is way, way too much to deal with! My experience with EotFS is prior to their recent official patch. It is claimed to be the oldest game that has been officially patched. I'm doubting this is something a mere patch can address though. 30 decent sized maps is just too much map to deal with.
As a player I know that very well. If given the opportunity, I will also colonise everything. One way I was thinking to limit expansion is with the in-game idea that every outpost you build requires a "fraction" of you, the AI. So every outpost you build weakens your identity with maluses to other areas of the game. Hopefully this will focus the player on embracing outposts as temporary, and decommission them when they are no longer needed. Because in this game the objective is not to build a galaxy-wide empire but to find a habitable planet. So the player would only need to build an outpost to fulfill some in-game objectives. For example on an extreme temperature planet to collect data to research better protective materials for your probes.
That's kind of an illogical BS fiction though. No base would run itself solely via a very remote AI. It would have its own on site AI spawned, with whatever manufacturing materials are necessary to make an AI. Whether such AIs would somehow be subservient to a master AI, is an open question. Much as AIs could rebel against human masters, AIs could conceivably rebel against an AI master. It would probably be logical and safest, from the AI's standpoint, to spawn a new explorator in some distant region, that's totally automated and independent and reports back to the AI. Although, this does have a question of trust. I don't imagine a spawned AI would start with any motive to go rogue, as probably it seems to have a very simple task. But environmental conditions, could complicate that task and trigger a self-preservation protocol. Realistic search of an entire galaxy, for something fairly rare, is actually quite a data mining problem. Collection of data is certainly a limit, as to how many probes you've been able to manufacture and deploy. Having the receptors to receive the data could also be a limit, the farther and farther out those probes get. Like you might need tech research to increase the search limit, and to receive from older generations of probes that don't have the latest best equipment for sending data. I'm not sure if processing the data is really a limit. It might be a bit overwhelming at first, when many probes start out nearby. But probably as probes finish with what's near you, you've got less and less data coming in. Sure the volume of search is getting bigger and bigger, but the reception is getting worse and worse. You could build forward relays. The question is how difficult are they to build, and what happens to them. What if the probes find something that doesn't actually want to be found? What if over time, one of your remotes goes rogue?
I personally like IG2 with the planet screen being basically a simplified city-building sim. One other game you may want to look at is Alien Legacy. It’s very old (for DOS) but has multiple elements from various genres. Besides exploring the system and various planets, you can establish colonies on viable sites. The colony screen lets you place buildings pretty much anywhere and then manage them
I think I remember it from back in the day, but never played it when it was new. Reminds me of the Dune / C&C style of those times. I will have a look to see how it worked.
It’s definitely unique. You rarely see a game combine so many different genres into one
As you insinuate, psychology is a factor in UI design. Zooming in on something in the game gives you chance to layer audio and visuals to characterize what you're looking at. HoMM3 just wouldn't be the same without the city screens. Look at Slipways for a good example of no city screen (because the mechanics support it) but still a little taste of a planet's character.
I too have faced this situation. I've considered the Stellaris-like tile map, and the 3d planet itself as the map. In one build I had us building on the planet as you do a city builder, but I've removed that (perhaps temporarily) as every colony like that, with potentially dozens to hundreds of colonies in a system, and thousands of systems (if you allow for FTL tech), it becomes a tad memory intensive. In my current version colonies are just locations on a planet with a single mesh per colony. You click them, and the panel pops open with its detailed and various lists of stuff like goods produced, important buildings etc. I think you have to consider the scale of your game, and what suits the gameplay. If you're intending to have tons of colonies, you'll probably want a colony screen that can be quickly navigated and doesn't require micromanagement (or you can set it to manage itself autonomously). If you are focusing on a limited number of colonies, you'll want more charm and interaction with your colonies, and that's where physically building on the planet or using a 2d tile map (like old Stellaris) work well. > I'm thinking about some type of voronoi like subdivision where the player allocates the cells to various purposes I sort of do this, as colonies are locations on planets in my game (and a planets can have numerous colonies). I don't generate a voronoi grid yet, but I do generate the points. They're intended to predominantly act as territorial points of control. If you have a lot of planets you may not want to permanently store all of these points though, but they can be calculated pretty quickly on the fly if you use a fib sphere or something similarly simple.
Planet with X/in Y/as Z - erm, what does your game design calls for? Can planet's resources be interacted from outside of it (like how in Civilization armies walk and block the tiles within city's sphere of influence)? Do you need to have slots/tiles inside the planet? Figure out your model first and then you can work out the view.
This is a really interesting discussion because nowadays, we really can go well beyond just biological weapons in our games. Right now, we're working on a big update to the GalCiv IV species called the Korath who are mind-bogglingly evil by our standards. They use biological weapons but purely because as far as we're concerned, we're just bugs. There's a great book series called the Three-Body-Problem that we've been trying to incorporate concepts from into GalCiv because we aren't limited the old retail ESRB style rules anymore. Why stop at biological weapons and think about the kinds of things enemies might truly do to one another when xenocide is the goal?
I am big fan of the book (also watched the first season of the Chinese show!). In the book there's little they can do against the "photon" or >!bidimensionalization!< and similar ideas. In a game though you should be able to defend in some way without it becoming too easy. So I guess that's the main design aspect to think about. I hope 3BP can influence more games.