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[tiagocc0]

Interesting prospect, hope you can carry it through!

How will you handle diplomacy? IMHO that is where most 4X fail miserably and my understanding is the AI is hard to code. I'd love a game where the diplomacy seems plausible and interesting, while each species has a personality of their own.

Our way to do war will be quite different from most 4x and like Hoverdog explained we are taking a more Paradox way of doing war.

I'm keeping an eye on ATG:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonshafer/jon-shafers-at-the-gates

It looks like they are developing an interesting diplomacy system.

I also want to discuss further with Hoverdog about a different ways of doing diplomacy, for example let's say you want to make peace with another race.

When you select the 'Make Peace' option you have also to select your real intention.
1.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you are actually planning on regrouping and attacking again.
2.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you're planning on stealing their technologies 'again'. (Maybe that's the reason the war begun)
3.You could just want to 'Make Peace' and start trading agreements.

This intention will actually give you bonuses to your goal. But your have to keep your intention going, if you 'break' your own intention then you might get penalties.
And now if you would choose option 1 or 2 you may want to hire more spies to defend your empire, because the enemy can actually learn your real intention if you are not careful enough.

I think with this diplomacy will make much more sense.
Your intention actually dictates how you will communicate and plan with your own race as to meet your goal.
So it's not that difficult for a spy to infiltrate your government and actually learn your true intention.

You can have however a hidden intention, one that you do not communicate even to your own empire, if you choose option 3, get the peace bonuses, you can then wait the necessary turns until you don't have to keep peace anymore and make a war. So you don't get bonuses to actually prepare for war, but you did it anyway.

EDIT: Ops, sorry for double posting, I was actually planning on adding this bit on the post above.

[Majestic7]

When you select the 'Make Peace' option you have also to select your real intention.
1.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you are actually planning on regrouping and attacking again.
2.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you're planning on stealing their technologies 'again'. (Maybe that's the reason the war begun)
3.You could just want to 'Make Peace' and start trading agreements.

This intention will actually give you bonuses to your goal. But your have to keep your intention going, if you 'break' your own intention then you might get penalties.
And now if you would choose option 1 or 2 you may want to hire more spies to defend your empire, because the enemy can actually learn your real intention if you are not careful enough.

I think with this diplomacy will make much more sense.
Your intention actually dictates how you will communicate and plan with your own race as to meet your goal.
So it's not that difficult for a spy to infiltrate your government and actually learn your true intention.

That's a very intriguing concept! It is actually something I've wanted in strategy games. Something like having a chance of a spy learning that nation X is planning a war against you. However, such things would be difficult in multiplayer or against a human player, as the game can't read his mind. That mechanic sounds like an interesting way to portray it in the game. Now I'm definitely interested.

I hope you can find a way to put intelligence gathering regarding other movements inside the game too, like colonization plans or attack/defense plans while at war.

[Nosaneinme]

So I Wondering if We going to Have Custom Race Choice that we make our own

[tiagocc0]

I hope you can find a way to put intelligence gathering regarding other movements inside the game too, like colonization plans or attack/defense plans while at war.

It will be quite easy to do this in a war too.
You won't be able to move ships freely to attack. You can however position them to defend your stars or put them in stars that have no colonies.
They will actively patrol their position. So when someone wants to attack you they will choose which ships they want, regardless of where they are and choose where you want to attack and how you want to attack. (too spread out ships will take more time to attack).
For example, you have 20 ships, you choose 10, pick your enemy homestar and then you can choose what you want to do there.
Attack and retreat, attack and bombard, attack and capture a ship, attack and invade, attack and blockade.
The game will tell you how many turns it will take for your fleet to get there.

Now you have a chance to discover they are attacking you, by having lot's of ships on your border and/or on the star they are attacking, by having active radars and also by spying on them.

If you do discover they are attacking you, then you can make a plan to reinforce that star, or maybe even intercept them before they reach there. Just like an attack plan you will be able to choose which ships you want to send and your plan.

To colonize a world you won't send a colony ship and there it is, you will actually select a planet, tell your intention of colonizing it and then it will slowly get colonized as people move there, you can however spend more money to get it faster.
Civilians will also colonize planets on their own, which you can later pay to upgrade a civilian colony to a military colony where you can control.

So spies can also discover your colonization plans.

So I Wondering if We going to Have Custom Race Choice that we make our own

Yes, definitely. This is the part that I love about 4x games.

[Mephansteras]

I also want to discuss further with Hoverdog about a different ways of doing diplomacy, for example let's say you want to make peace with another race.

When you select the 'Make Peace' option you have also to select your real intention.
1.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you are actually planning on regrouping and attacking again.
2.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you're planning on stealing their technologies 'again'. (Maybe that's the reason the war begun)
3.You could just want to 'Make Peace' and start trading agreements.

This intention will actually give you bonuses to your goal. But your have to keep your intention going, if you 'break' your own intention then you might get penalties.
And now if you would choose option 1 or 2 you may want to hire more spies to defend your empire, because the enemy can actually learn your real intention if you are not careful enough.

The only problem with this set-up is that it assumes a binary situation. If you have 4 AI factions to deal with, you're going to be doing many different things and responding to many different situations, and I'm not sure how the game would actually deal with recognizing those facts. After all, how is the game going to know that you're building up your fleet to attack AI #2 but really do want to have nice trade agreements with AI #1 who you're doing diplomacy with?

The idea of having 'true intentions' that are used to make your empire work towards your goals is a neat idea, though, and I really like the concept. I'm just not certain exactly what would need to be done to make it mesh well in a 4X game.

[werty892]

Needs bad jokes, and PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DONT STICK IN BLACK/WHITE MORALITY IN HERE.

[Demonbutter]

I'm deeply interested in the development of this and not because the coder shares a name with me.

[FritzPL]

This is one of those games that I am actually going to buy and play, in that order.

[tiagocc0]

I also want to discuss further with Hoverdog about a different ways of doing diplomacy, for example let's say you want to make peace with another race.

When you select the 'Make Peace' option you have also to select your real intention.
1.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you are actually planning on regrouping and attacking again.
2.You could want to 'Make Peace' but you're planning on stealing their technologies 'again'. (Maybe that's the reason the war begun)
3.You could just want to 'Make Peace' and start trading agreements.

This intention will actually give you bonuses to your goal. But your have to keep your intention going, if you 'break' your own intention then you might get penalties.
And now if you would choose option 1 or 2 you may want to hire more spies to defend your empire, because the enemy can actually learn your real intention if you are not careful enough.

The only problem with this set-up is that it assumes a binary situation. If you have 4 AI factions to deal with, you're going to be doing many different things and responding to many different situations, and I'm not sure how the game would actually deal with recognizing those facts. After all, how is the game going to know that you're building up your fleet to attack AI #2 but really do want to have nice trade agreements with AI #1 who you're doing diplomacy with?

The idea of having 'true intentions' that are used to make your empire work towards your goals is a neat idea, though, and I really like the concept. I'm just not certain exactly what would need to be done to make it mesh well in a 4X game.

If you have for example two AI races.

One (Race A) you make peace and states your intention as preparing for war.
Another (Race B) you make peace and states your intention as true peace, want trade agreements.

If you start to build a fleet, you are going to make the two races uneasy. Since they don't know your true intentions.
But building a fleet won't break a intention because it could be as well as for defense.

What you cannot do to Race B is attack them, if you do you break your intention and get penalties.
If your intention was to attack Race A but after a X number of turns you don't, then you break your intentions and get penalties.

The game will tell you all about how it's going, warn you that you should attack or that you shouldn't.
One screen will show all your current intentions.

I can't really control everything, but with intetions there are some well defined actions that I can take into consideration.

EDIT: Thanks everyone for your support! I really appreciate it.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm. Ok.

My only problem with that, then is the penalties. Why do they occur, from an in-game perspective? And what kind of penalties are they?

After all, if I was going to attack Race A but don't because Race C did a sneak attack on the southern frontier and my forces are needed there, well, that seems a bit harsh to then throw penalties on top of the new war. Or maybe I was going to attack Race A, but then we noticed that they had a new class of weapons on their ships and we're now outgunned and need time to refit our ships to deal with them.

Internal political penalties make some sense...but you're still punishing the player for things that may be beyond their control.

Maybe instead of penalties for failure, instead provide bonuses and penalties in general depending on what your true intentions are.

For instance:

Your true intentions with A are to make war on them. Your government 'knows' this, and therefore you will have an easier time actually declaring war on them in the future but you get a penalty when doing other types of diplomacy/treaties with them (because your ambassadors aren't *really* trying).

Hmm. It'd be nice to be able to change your intentions towards a nation. It'd probably have a lag time for the change to really take effect, but it could mean that you're on a cold-war footing with a nation for a while but eventually a new threat pops up and it makes sense for you to drop that and really start being peaceful with them. Or maybe even allies. Think England and France, who went from long-term enemies to fairly close allies over the course of history.

Speaking of nations, it'd be interesting to have different Races be able to have multiple factions. I've always found it kind of interesting and naive that most Space games that involve aliens seem to assume that every species is going to drop internal political divisions and become large monolithic empires once space-faring is possible. The possibilities involved with having, say, 3 major Human Factions, 4 Alien A factions, 2 Alien B, and maybe a single Alien C faction are rather fascinating.

[BlindKitty]

Well, I was just going to write about factions myself, Mephansteras. But! One thing at a time, my dear developers. While having factions could be incredibly fascinating (for starters, imagine that the public opinion - faction Alpha - is longing for revenge war with A, because they invaded one of mankind's colonies before; at the same time, your administration - faction Beta - wants a war with A, but they want it because newly captured planets would require more officials to command; and faction Charlie, the military, wants the same war - well, military always want more wars and more money; and you know that they have a secret weapon that would put you to the big disadvantage is this war, therefore you can't start it...), I would much rather see a (beta?) game with this concepts actually introduced, and without factions, that a half-finished, non-working projects with factions and additional million of features. And guys - your tech-tree idea is very close to mine. Actually, as close as it could get without going into DF-level of complications with it.

Keep up the good work! I really want to see this done and working.

[tiagocc0]

The penalties occur because you have put your goverment and maybe factories, troops and even more things into one state of mind/doing something specific and in turn you do something else. You break plans, everyone's expectation and some other stuff.

You really have to plan your actions, you can't just have an true intention of attacking another empire, coordinate everyone towards it and then you don't and expect everything will just go on as nothing happened.

The penalties won't be massive but you sure don't want them to accumulate. They won't last long either.
However they need to exist as C&C. You can't just play around with your intentions, you have to make an effort or pay for it.

But expect other races attacking you when you have an intention to attack another. Since they can find out your intentions.
You can also find that Race A plans to attack Race B and take advantage of that.


True, we have to be careful with factions, but our plan is that they start united, for some races they will live peacefully, with others they won't. They will tell you what you should do, but it's up to you to do what you want.
If you piss one of them too much they may try to break free.

But we won't develop factions right now, they need to be in after the mechanics are in place and working.

[Brotato]

How much are you guys planning on charging?

[tiagocc0]

How much are you guys planning on charging?

About 20-25$
But we take quality very serious and we will also release a demo with lots of stuff so you can check most of the game before you decide to buy it. For Kickstarter however we won't be able to show too much since we are still on an early prototype.

We also plan on releasing the source code after the game is launched.

[Hoverdog]

Needs bad jokes, and PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DONT STICK IN BLACK/WHITE MORALITY IN HERE.

We have no intention to; while races have different personalities (aggressive invaders, peaceful schemers and so on), none of them are inherently good or bad. Those world-eating Krom, for example, though universally despised by other races, are a peaceful race.