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[mainiac]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vdHCmP0WVNZmJUYVNwTjJfUzg/edit?usp=sharing

So yeah I'm still working on this remake and progress is coming pretty steadily along.  Ask for features and I'll probably implement them!  Go on, ask.

Also, if anyone has any suggestions for graphical resources that are freely available, that would be very much appreciated at this juncture!

Spoiler: "original post" (click to show/hide)

Only runs if you have python (3.x) installed.
contains an exe that runs in 64bit windows.


So this is all pretty crude and early and whatnot.  I've been teaching myself to program through working on this project and it's pretty damn ugly.  But I nearly lost it to a harddrive failure yesterday so i really, really wanted to put this on the internet to be safe and I figured I might as well share it since I know there are a few grognards around who might be interested.  I haven't learned how to make executables yet because I've had other priorities.  It does run and you can even look at it's guts...  it's chaotic, chaotic guts.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, so far it does let you select armies, get them to kill each other's units (although it only does that in the command prompt and doesn't erase the stacks, just empty them) and has a combat system that will allow me to duplicate the feel of the combat in the original system which is pretty neat.  You can go to a simple 'star map' and select other planets, although they don't have anything interesting going on yet.  Right now I'm working on under the hood stuff related to ownership and reading more data from text files so it'll be a while before any cool new developments.

Going forward my philosophy is to stay close to the concept behind the original game, it's combat, economy and balance.  I want to do elections, imperial ministries, a church that you can bribe, invading aliens and chains of economic production.  I'm not planning on doing technology or space battles as I felt like they didn't seem like good things in the original game.  I'm also planning on tweaking the economy to make things more "hydralic" (like Arrakis or Caladan from Dune) and make city sprawl prohibitively expensive.  So far I've been working since the summer and I think I'm about 25% there.  So that puts the ETA... July of 2015?  Actually it'll probably be a lot faster as I've learned a lot since the summer and things go faster now.

So yeah Imma stop typing now.

[Aqizzar]

remaking Emperor of the Fading Suns

How much longer must this game torment us?

So freakin' cool by the way.

[mainiac]

How much longer must this game torment us?

If it was up to me, the heat death of the universe.

[Karlito]

I've been thinking that something like this would be a good project to break out on a rainy day. Glad to see someone going out and doing it.

[extropic-engine]

Awesome! I don't have Python installed so I can't try it out, but I love the idea. You should throw it up on Github or something once you've got it a bit more fleshed out.

[Servant Corps]

How would this be different from Echoes of Imperium? Will you be taking inspiration from that (doomed) project?

[Svampapa]

You mean EoI isn't dead yet? Last time I checked there hadn't been any activity on that forum for months.

[Servant Corps]

EoI is dead. That why I mentioned it as being doomed". I really do want to see an EoFS remake, but at the same time, I don't want it to go down the same road as EoI did.

[mainiac]

How would this be different from Echoes of Imperium? Will you be taking inspiration from that (doomed) project?

I think the problem with EoI and the other remakes is that they added too much in.  They ended up with games far more complicated then EoFS.  I'm actually shooting for a game with fewer features then EoFS, with technology removed (doesn't fit the theme well and a good economic balance simulates technology better), space combat and travel abstracted to a simpler level and economic micromanagement greatly reduced.  I do want to put a few tidbits in, like bribing the church.  But I really feel that the game needs to focus on the core.  It's a 4X with a king-of-the-hill victory condition.  The election mechanic compliments this king of the hill gameplay and the economic system is designed to be a race to make cool units to duke it out.

Where I want to depart with the original is tweaks around the edges, not changing that core.  For instance cities won't be built by engineers but will be available to be built (at great cost) by a palace holder only once every few turns, declining in frequency as the number of cities on a planet goes up.  Advanced cities will be costly to maintain, to avoid spamming of the highest tier units.  I feel these small tweaks will help capture a dark age feel.  Space travel will be restricted to starports and expensive (guild transport costs) one off invasion landings because the planet hoppers didn't fit the setting and led to weird tactics.  Players won't buy transports but will instead just pay the guild for shipping costs.  I feel like none of these changes are putting me at risk of mission creep because they're a simplification that is meant to streamline the core, hex based 4X gameplay.

There is one pretty radical idea that I have been kicking around after playing Space General from SSI.  Dividing the game into "land" and "space" turns could potentially streamline things.  The neat thing would be that many planets would only have one player on them at a time.  So there would be several land turns between the space turns during which they'd be assured of planetary supremacy on that world.  So they could just go through and play all of those land turns at once, without waiting for the PBEM saves.  And if there is a war going on, it will usually just be two players duking it out.  So you would allow just those two players to pass the save back in forth, making it much easier to keep things going.  Then after the set of land turns you bring all the saves together to create the space turn.  Then you hold the elections and take care of the space side of things.  It could be a neat idea, but I'm dubious of it because of fear of mission creep.

[Servant Corps]

I'd say that you should save the multiple turns idea until after you finish making the game. You did convince me that you are starting off on a sounder footing.

I particularly like the idea of the Guild controlling space travel. Seems fluffy and pro-gameplay at the same time.
---
Here's some suggestion of sorts (please disregard if it is bad though). If the point of the economic system is to create better units, then the point of gaining control of the Church should be to create better units as well.

In EoFS, the Church had access to Inquisitors which can burn down labs violating the Church's proscriptions on certain technologies...but as you're getting rid of technology, the Church can't really proscribe them. But I think they can still keep Inquisitors, and whoever can gain control of the Church (possibly through bribery) can create Inquisitors that can attack the other Houses for, well, really any reason whatsoever. If you lose control over the Church, you keep the Inquisitors you already built, but you can't build any more until you regain the Church again.

...or you could go the boring (and easier) route and give the Church controller a boost to combat morale, to represent religious zeal and the Church providing rhetorical justification for fighting.

[mainiac]

I like that idea very much but I'm not sure what exactly the mechanics for controlling the church would be.

[Servant Corps]

Neither would I, so the sensible option is to drop it and maybe add it in later on. But...since I'm not that sensible...

Spoiler: An Idea (click to show/hide)

The only option that I could think of is using the EU3 Curia system before HTTT overhauled it.


In that system, there's a list of cardinals, and you can influence them to support your country. You influence them by essentially bribing them. If you have the most cardinals, then you take over the Papacy. (There's also a cooldown period after each successful bribe, so a cardinal you bribed doesn't immediately get bribed again...this ensure some stability within the Curia.)

Now, sometimes, old cardinals can retire and new cardinals get generated based on territorial control (so if you control 25% of the Catholic world, you have a 25% chance of a cardinal spawning that automatically supports your country). But these new cardinals can be influenced fairly easily, again through bribes. If there's a tie, then the previous controller keeps power.

Now this picture doesn't show France taking over the Papacy even though it controls the most cardinals. That's because France is excommunicated, so their cardinals don't count. Barbant was also excommunicated, so Sweden (with its lone cardinal) takes over. But I would suggest not having excommunication, to ensure everyone can still be able to compete in the Church.

This EU3-cardinal system should probably just be streamlined by having different Church "sects" that can be influenced through bribes (that does not get replaced), whoever owns the most sects controls the Church, and that ties mean nobody controls the Church.

[mainiac]

It is a very nice system, especially for a turn based game but it's got problems where the rich have the most provinces and the most money so they win and then win again.

Maybe the tithe system from the original game could be relevant.  You set your tithe slider which determines which fraction of your income goes to the church.  The church then spends that income funding the three holy orders (i.e. ministries) who's size increases thanks to these contributions.  You accumulate church influence based not on the overall size of your contribution, but on your church slider compared to everyone else.  So a weak player could jack up their tithes and get in the priests good graces and control their votes and decide how the church spends it's money.  But the absolute size of the contributions matters too because veterans of the holy orders retire and return to the players who funded them not the player with church influence; so the more you give the church the more awesome paladins and inquisitors you get a few turns down the line.

[Servant Corps]

That idea works too. I didn't even know that there is a tithe system in that game...but that's probably because I haven't really played EOFS (I couldn't get it to run).

[mainiac]

I think that there is some dll file that you need to download and put in the game folder to make it run on modern versions of windows, that could be your problem.  If you search through the EOFS threads on this forum I think I made a post in the first page of one of them explaining it.

How important do people think randomly generated maps are?  Right now I'm doing a setup where the game reads maps from text files, should I continue along these lines or should I go for random maps?