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[Virex]

You can keep proscribed tech in the game by making the inquisitions attack planets on which proscribed units or buildings are present unless and until they repent. So if someone's producing Plague Bombs on Cadavus, they can expect a visit of the inquisition to that planet unless they disband all plague bombs and pay an apropriate amount of FBs. Of course the Church can only react to proscribed techs that it has detected, so if you can keep your labs hidden from their eyes and the eyes of those who might want to tip the Church off, you can get away with it.

[Aqizzar]

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?

I think randomly generated maps can be more trouble than they're worth to get to the point that they're playable.  EoFS had the freedom to be unique with it's map, where it had a collection of statically-designed planets, but you could choose to have them (and their special goodies) scattered around instead of the predetermined map.  With enough planets, just shuffling them around like that sufficiently randomizes the map to keep the game fresh for human players.

The one hitch I guess is the starting planets, since those are obviously the ones every player is always going to be familiar with.  I don't see this as a problem, since choosing your faction is largely a question of which starter planet you want anyway, especially with technology removed and the option to choose your traits.

Speaking of technology, you might go for a route like Imperium Galactica, where you don't really have to "research" technology, instead you have to build enough tech-structures to directly represent the economic development needed to build stuff, beyond just the material cost.  Advanced assembly lines aren't free after all, just having the materials to produce a Megatank doesn't mean you have a factory that can build one.

I also love the idea of interplanetary transport being made with structures instead of the crazy Pony Express shit you could do with EoFS transports, and the way it's impossible to blockade stuff from leaving a planet.  However, I do think it should be within the player's power to transport units themselves - you have to pay the Guild to taxi you around until you can afford to build your own freighter network.  But the question is, how do you determine where your guys will land?  And if you follow my idea of eventually having your own transports, how do you pick your guys back up at will?

[mainiac]

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?

I think randomly generated maps can be more trouble than they're worth to get to the point that they're playable.  EoFS had the freedom to be unique with it's map, where it had a collection of statically-designed planets, but you could choose to have them (and their special goodies) scattered around instead of the predetermined map.  With enough planets, just shuffling them around like that sufficiently randomizes the map to keep the game fresh for human players.

The one hitch I guess is the starting planets, since those are obviously the ones every player is always going to be familiar with.  I don't see this as a problem, since choosing your faction is largely a question of which starter planet you want anyway, especially with technology removed and the option to choose your traits.

That's good to know.  I didn't actually realize that was how EOFS randomize worked.  It fits nicely into the hex format I'm using for space since it's easy to randomly assign locations on a grid.  The jump routes thing is definitely out, that was hella ugly.  Unfortunately my foray into map making so far has proven that it's quite slow.  Hopefully that wont be so much of a problem beyond earth where the maps will be smaller (no need to fit 5 players into the eastern hemisphere while leaving the sacred continent unsettled) and won't need to reflect earth landmasses.

Speaking of technology, you might go for a route like Imperium Galactica, where you don't really have to "research" technology, instead you have to build enough tech-structures to directly represent the economic development needed to build stuff, beyond just the material cost.  Advanced assembly lines aren't free after all, just having the materials to produce a Megatank doesn't mean you have a factory that can build one.

I feel like the production chains can do that, balanced correctly.  I intend for basic production (farming and mining) to be the reliable sources of money.  Basic production (ceramsteel, electronics) will have a maintenance cost that means it's only slightly profitable if you sell to the guild, you only want these for your own personal uses.  Advanced production (monopoles, singularities, wetware) can't even be sold to the guild for enough to pay for the maintenance costs.  But the guild will only offer each player a small trickle of these goods, making their production viable if you or another player wants more than that trickle.  The costs of maintaining these expensive industries are what simulates higher or lower tech levels.  It's all supported by a large rural resource base like a feudal empires where the artisans were far outnumbered by the peasants.

I also love the idea of interplanetary transport being made with structures instead of the crazy Pony Express shit you could do with EoFS transports, and the way it's impossible to blockade stuff from leaving a planet.  However, I do think it should be within the player's power to transport units themselves - you have to pay the Guild to taxi you around until you can afford to build your own freighter network.  But the question is, how do you determine where your guys will land?  And if you follow my idea of eventually having your own transports, how do you pick your guys back up at will?

Landings I am thinking are either done at a friendly spaceport or done anywhere for hazard payrates.  Launches are always from spaceport.

Well I was thinking that players could make their own transports for reasons of secrecy, no hazard pay and blockade running.  They would however be more expensive then guild transport normally, making them a luxury, not a standard thing.  The notion is that the guild specializes in transport, you can't do it better then them.  If you want to make your own transports you are intentionally subsidizing a more expensive alternative for some reason.  But I see this as a stretch goal, it's something to work on after the game is up and running, not before.

You can keep proscribed tech in the game by making the inquisitions attack planets on which proscribed units or buildings are present unless and until they repent. So if someone's producing Plague Bombs on Cadavus, they can expect a visit of the inquisition to that planet unless they disband all plague bombs and pay an apropriate amount of FBs. Of course the Church can only react to proscribed techs that it has detected, so if you can keep your labs hidden from their eyes and the eyes of those who might want to tip the Church off, you can get away with it.

That's a good idea.

[Servant Corps]

I know it is already too early to be talking about this, but when will you be allowing people to suggest the "lore" for your game? I ask this because it is the "lore" that makes reading game logs interesting. I already got some ideas stemming from your proposal to have The Church's orders serve as ministry positions, but actually developing those ideas might be a waste of time better spent waiting for the game to be developed first (and seeing what is finally accepted).

[mainiac]

I know it is already too early to be talking about this, but when will you be allowing people to suggest the "lore" for your game? I ask this because it is the "lore" that makes reading game logs interesting. I already got some ideas stemming from your proposal to have The Church's orders serve as ministry positions, but actually developing those ideas might be a waste of time better spent waiting for the game to be developed first (and seeing what is finally accepted).

Oh I have hella lore man.  For me dreaming up lore is a nice relaxing activity it's figuring out the damn coding syntax that's hard.  Not to say that I'm not open to suggestions.

[Servant Corps]

Got it. I'll just post this idea then so I'll get out of my mind, but you're free to ignore...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Your mention of the Church's orders being integrated into the Empire as being ministries suggested to me that the Church is heavily integrated into the Empire. Much more integrated than in EOFS, where the Church is its own, autonomous entity that can crack down on proscribed techs. Of course, you may choose to have the Church have some autonomous military forces, but I'm more interested in the forces that the secular nobility are allowed to control.

Assuming this game is set in a pretty similar universe to Fading Suns, the here's two possibilities that I could think of.

1) This game could take place in the aftermath of a EOFS game where the Holy Writ was signed by whoever won the Emperor Wars. The Holy Writ essentially granted the Church major powers and influence within the Empire, and it's something the Church really wants...But the writ must have backfired by corrupting the Church and making it more involved and beholden to royal politics. There's not much point to have de jure power and influence if you don't have the de facto power and military that the nobility can provide. The Church has became so dependent on the Royal Houses for support that it started electing members of the royal families as their Patriarchs (a fancy title meaning that you control the Church's votes and decide the Church's budget for spending on ministries).

You can still have "proscribed techs"/inquisitors* by having a puritan sect outside the control of the Church and the Empire monitor the Royal Houses closely. This sect could either be Brother Battle (an elite fighting order) or Temple Avesti (religious fanatics that are quasi-Inquisition). This sect does not care about whether the Royal Family they're fighting against is the Patriarch, and the only type of negotiation you can do is to give them maps. If you want them to stop attacking you, you stop violating divine law.

2) The game takes place in an alternate universe where the Second Republic was not formed by an alliance of merchants and The Church, but instead an alliance of The Church and the Royal Families. Here, the elected government is just recently formed, and it is trying to reconquer the whole universe after the First Republic was fractured (justifying the 4X). The Guild would be the previous rulers of the First Republic and was only tolerated because they have the ability to transport people through space.

The government system of electing Regents (or Doges?) is intended to be permanent, but it is possible to try to seize supreme power and abolish the voting system (declaring yourself Emperor) to centralize power into your hands.

I do like this idea too, but it might be harder to justify, and since I know very little about EOFS, it's possible I might deviate a bit too heavily from canon. There's also the fact that The Church's attitude towards technology was much more liberal during the Second Republic, so you don't have proscription. It's only during the collapse of the Second Republic that you see the Church banning technologies and supporting the establishment of the feudal order that we know of today. So it might not be an ideal solution if you want proscription to still be in the game, but if you don't want proscription, it's an idea to consider.

*On a related note, I'm not sure whether having a "NPC proscription agency" is even necessary if the agency needs to find the tech violation. Without a magical power to know where violations are taking place, the "NPC proscription agency" has just as much power as the players to stop things like Plague Bombs. It would make more sense then to have proscription would be handled by the players themselves, as they probably know the dangers of a player having too advanced tech.

[mainiac]

I'm not really comfortable stealing Holistic's universe wholesale, they're still around and publishing books.  It's just not a very polite thing to do, legality aside...

Spoiler: "my planned lore" (click to show/hide)

My plan was to duplicate the feel of the universe by making it so that humanity went to the stars without ever having an industrial revolution and all the political shifts that came with it.  So the older despotic and feudal orders endured, even the ancient religions are still around, coexisting with the church of the prophet.  The POD is around the 5th century when an alien intelligence starts communicating with humans, trying to make them more enlightened and preventing the trend of religious wars that historically started around then.  Humanity isn't just given tons of technology but the chosen prophet of the "sky spirit" does get divine like powers so that she can spread the sky spirits lessons safely.  But a century of this (the prophet never ages), the sky spirit dies unexpectedly, betrayed by other great spirits according to the prophet.  The prophet wants blood and remembers all the things that the sky spirit left in her mind and puts them to use, teaching humanity how to start making weapons to exact her vengeance.  She mobilizes a huge army, organized around the empires of the day the Song, Gupta, Sassanids and Romans ('Byzantines') which are four of the banners of her army.  The fifth banner is lead by a general from the sacred lands she is from (western hemisphere).  Being more then a century old, the prophet has descendants kicking around and these people of the divine blood become the leaders of the five banners.

A holy war follows where the prophet exacts her vengeance on the ones who killed the sky spirit.  They aren't a very numerous race and get wiped out.  However they had serving them another, more primitive alien race that humanity dubs the daemons who are far too numerous to wipe out.  The prophet decides to wage a long war against the deamons, gradually driving them from their worlds to punish them for serving the betrayers.  But this will be a slow process and the prophet is tired of the world and wants to rest for a while.  She returns to the sacred lands and leaves control of the great host to her five marshals who elect from themselves the king of kings

The daemons are in chaos, they had served the spirits for many millennia and can hardly organize themselves with their leaders gone.  Humanity carves out an empire by conquering the daemon worlds until the empire of the betrayers is completely absorbed.  The many nobles of the various peoples of humanity carve themselves out petty feuds.  The prophet is sleeping in the sacred land and offers no wisdom.  She only seldom wakes and mostly just communicates by projecting her thoughts to nearby people as she dreams.  With the war complete and the prophet sleeping humanity looses it's drive and the many petty lords turn to petty squabbling among themselves.  They still send the required honor guards to their bannerlords but there is no economic or political bonds really holding them together.  The lessons that the prophet taught to humanity becomes more and more obscure and poorly taught because there is no scholarly or scientific foundation on which they are built.  The prophet taught the master craftsmen to build a jump drive but never taught them the physics that makes it works.  The fields blessed by the prophet grow less and less every year and new, less prosperous lands among the stars are turned to more and more.  This is the first great dark age lasts for centuries as the banners decay and more and more is forgotten.

Things are shaken up after a few centuries when the remnants of the daemons finish licking their wounds and organize themselves properly.  They want vengeance of their own and launch an invasion of earth.  The prophet wakes from her slumber and sees that her mighty host from before is little more then a memory now.  She commands the creation of a new army, organized under the five banners as before but also organized under three orders that serve the banners but belong to none of them, the fleet, the guard and the eyes.  These three orders answer to men but serve the will of the prophet and are her church, something she had always eschewed in the past.  She sees that humanity can't even build proper ships any more and imparts her wisdom one last time, teaching a new generation of master craftsmen who go on to become the guild.  With this new host the battle for earth is eventually won but not before it becomes severely depopulated and irradiated.

The prophet retires from the world yet again and humanity fears another dark age with her gone.  But while her second coming did not bring back humanity to it's former glory, her second rest did not bring such a deep fall as the first.  The guild and the church help the five banners and the king of kings to keep the worlds from completely loosing track of each other.  Humanity starts to discover things the prophet never taught them, gunpowder, mathematics to predict the movements of ships when computers fail, farming rotation techniques for the many farmers who's fields don't have the prophets blessings.  It's not a shift that upends the galaxy but where before it seemed humanity was falling without the prophet, this time humanity is rebuilding.

Then the prophet starts to speak from her dreams more clearly.  The visions she grants to people are more clear, there is a great change coming.  She sees a new path that is possible for humanity where a worthy successor will arise who can rule humanity in their own name, not the prophets.  A golden age will come and the sky spirit who was killed by the betrayers will return to life.  As these prophecies slowly come to be agreed on, the powerful among the stars take them to note.  The five banners stand strong, they are the bloodline of the prophet and clearly the successor must arise from among them and unite humanity.  The church is likewise strong but answers to no one but the prophet.  But if it is the will of the prophet for this prophecy to be fulfilled there are those among the church who say they decide who is righteous and support them in their cause.  And finally there is the growing heresy that rejects the wisdom of the prophet, humanity is possible of moving beyond the prophet and we should reject the prophet's golden age and make a new age for ourselves.  The numbers of these heretics are thought to be few but every scholar is suspected of their teachings.

And so the succession wars begin.

[Servant Corps]

Your lore is actually very plausible and interesting. I like it. I particularly like the fact that even though the Prophet means well, she is fallible and makes mistakes from time to time.

[mainiac]

New version up which has a lot of useful but not very obvious work involving exporting data to text files where it can be modded and making it so maps are less graphically wasteful and prone to crashing.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vdHCmP0WVNMnQzTFpGMUVIdWM/edit?usp=sharing

I figure next thing I'll try to do is get this thing into an executable so people without python 3.x installed on their computers can run it.

[mainiac]

Finally managed to make an executable!  Yay!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vdHCmP0WVNWU5iT3R0d3hOTzg/edit?usp=sharing

Just unzip and run the exe file.

[inEQUALITY]

Finally managed to make an executable!  Yay!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vdHCmP0WVNWU5iT3R0d3hOTzg/edit?usp=sharing

Just unzip and run the exe file.

I got an error message on trying to run it saying that it's not compatible with the version of Windows I'm running (32-bit Vista). Presumably, this was - unintentionally or not - compiled to be played on machines with a 64-bit OS. Or else the compiling just went wonky. 

[Servant Corps]

I got it to work, and I do have a request that the battle report is a bit more...clearer on what side is fighting what. All I get is reports about Militias shooting Militias until the stack is emptied (presumbly because I killed them all). I'm assuming you're working on that too.

Also, is map meant to be a demo or the final size of a planet? Small planets (each possessing one or two key resource points) might actually be fairly interesting as it will encourage people to start shooting each other, but I could see you having difficulty reflecting Holy Terra's geography in only a few hexes. You do have the excuse, however, of the lore. The Demons could take over Terra and prevents the Guild from travelling there.

Still, I'm impressed with the combat system, the movement point system, and terrain system. Well, I shouldn't be, but the fact that it exist is shocking for someone who follows game projects occasionally and never see them release anything.

EDIT: Also, the empty "stack 1" disappears after being empty after a turn or so.

[mainiac]

Finally managed to make an executable!  Yay!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vdHCmP0WVNWU5iT3R0d3hOTzg/edit?usp=sharing

Just unzip and run the exe file.

I got an error message on trying to run it saying that it's not compatible with the version of Windows I'm running (32-bit Vista). Presumably, this was - unintentionally or not - compiled to be played on machines with a 64-bit OS. Or else the compiling just went wonky. 

I did assume that most people would be on 64 bit systems.  I'm not really sure how to compile a 32 bit exe on my 64 bit system.  If you were really interested you could always install python and doubleclick the .py file but tbh the program isn't all that urgently interesting yet.

Also, is map meant to be a demo or the final size of a planet? Small planets (each possessing one or two key resource points) might actually be fairly interesting as it will encourage people to start shooting each other, but I could see you having difficulty reflecting Holy Terra's geography in only a few hexes.

I've actually got the game set up to handle different sizes of map.  I was thinking that Holy Terra would be one of the large planets while most planets would be small, centered around a few resources (and have low populations.)  Then there would be a few quite large planets that would be most useful as industrial bases since they'd have the most cities.

I got it to work, and I do have a request that the battle report is a bit more...clearer on what side is fighting what. All I get is reports about Militias shooting Militias until the stack is emptied (presumbly because I killed them all). I'm assuming you're working on that too.

I was planning on getting different player colors and unit interactions (dont shoot your own) next but I can do battle clarity after that.

[inEQUALITY]

I did assume that most people would be on 64 bit systems.  I'm not really sure how to compile a 32 bit exe on my 64 bit system.  If you were really interested you could always install python and doubleclick the .py file but tbh the program isn't all that urgently interesting yet.

Will 3.3 overwrite 2.7 when I install it?

[mainiac]

It wont but you'll need to use the command prompt and specify 3.3.

Or use this 2.7 version I have sitting around: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vdHCmP0WVNYTBXdEQ2dlF5akU/edit?usp=sharing

-------------

I realized that I forgot to update all parts of my code to a change in the graphical handling that I made.  As a result you couldn't see units when switching back from starview.  Now fixed:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3vdHCmP0WVNLVFaVUFZSWRicVU/edit?usp=sharing