This looks pretty awesome. It really looks like the kind of Space 4x I would make if I had the ability (both in game design and programming) to make it.
Note that because of the aforementioned lack of game design and programming abilities, take everything I suggest with a pinch of salt. These ideas come from someone experienced with playing 4x games, but not making them.
This actually started off a simple starfield generator that I would use to make maps for a forum game. I ended up scrapping the forum game concept but keeping the code around and started messing with the code, adding some organization, building a UI template for future games, and so on. Big ideas start off small.
For the FTL-travel bit: I think it would be really nice if the distances between star systems would be significant not just for numbers but for gameplay. Make interstellar travel, even at higher tech-levels, an epic undertaking! I think it's interesting to ponder over how distance (in travel time) affects colonial undertakings, trade and economic patterns.
That was the intent. A lot of my inspiration comes from Count to a Trillion, where
An expedition to an antimatter star (to mine antimatter, of course) takes decades to get there and back. When the ship returns, it uses the antimatter it collected as a weapon, and takes over Earth establishing a world government. At least until the antimatter runs out.
Some interesting ideas include the fact that the ship relied both on an acceleration laser from the solar system and on a braking laser from a self-replicating drone network sent to the destination system in advance.
The timescale might be hard to get right, but I think that it is plausible for a near-extinction of humanity to result in slowed research and scientific progress, so for the first century or so, you might have the scientific institutions just trying to rebuild the practical knowledge that was lost, and a population that isn't even past the one billion mark. I think it would be reasonable to have the game operate on a scale similar to the Paradox Interactive games like Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis, where a ''game'' might last for a few centuries, and the general progression of time when playing is at a Day/Second scale. One thing I really dislike in Star Ruler and Stardrive is how the time systems are so decoupled from the world: Stardrive just has ''Stardate'' that ticks up with turns, Star Ruler is even worse, it has actual real time as the time system! So a Dreadnaught might take 90 seconds to build and a game takes a few hours to complete. I really dislike this.
The current scale I'm considering is one second of real time = one hour of game time. This is enough that orbits are noticeable, but binary stars and moons don't orbit too fast. Low orbits for spacecraft will still be pretty fast onscreen, but visible. Obviously a fast-forward function would be ideal for those parts of the game where you just want to sit back and watch your minions do everything.
Still, medieval level societies (human, alien, and in-between) are something I'd like to have for gameplay purposes. When your colonists consist entirely of human embryos grown and cared for by robots, you get a lot of variance in the societies you find.
Also, one thing I really dislike with a lot of Space 4X games is how small and insignificant each system is. In a lot of these games, a typical system might be: One useful planet with resources, two barren ones, and a gas giant, maybe. Instead, I think it would be really nice if solar systems were realistically modelled, with a huge amount of various bodies with different compositions and so on.
Don't diss barren worlds.
Mars, Venus, and Mercury are all sufficiently different with their own opportunities (cloud cities on Venus, mining and solar power on Mercury, Mars is probably the least interesting out of the three).
You are indeed correct however in noting that ingame systems tend to be smaller than real systems. This could be in part due to bad science, and also due to hardware/performance considerations. It is regrettable because there is a lot of interesting stuff that could happen in our solar system, and in a lot of games you might as well replace nearby stars with planets and their planets with moons and you'd still get the same gameplay. But that's the "space opera" syndrome, as I like to call it, where authors use space as a backdrop rather than a plot device.
In Aurora, you have the realistic amounts of bodies right, but the resource system in that game still makes it all pretty arbitrary. Planetary bodies that would be useful to colonize in reality (because of Arable land, water deposits, metallic deposits, strategic location, etc.) usually aren't in that game if they don't have the MacGuffiny ''Trans-newtonian'' resources.
MacGuffinite is a sad reality in a lot of SciFi settings, mainly because authors just want to have pretty backgrounds rather than use space as a true setting. The Martian is a great example of SciFi done right, as are a lot of older stories written during the golden age of sci-fi.
Of course, it would be realistic to have some bodies just be a bunch of cold silicates.
The further out you get, the less likely you are to get cold silicates and the more likely you are to get ice worlds/giants. I think the inner systems of a lot of stars will look much like ours: a close mercury-analogue, a farther Mars analogue, maybe a Venus-like world or a more benign desert-type planet in the slots between. Earth-twins might be rare, though, and some of them might even be ocean worlds rather than habitable Earth-like planets. I'm not sure how the weight of a global ocean would affect plate tectonics.
Past the frost line you can get lots of interesting stuff like mini neptunes, gas giants, giant ice worlds, Titan-analogues, and maybe planets with exotic features like ammonia or liquid nitrogen seas.
For the timelag: I think it's a better (not to mention simpler) solution to simply have the player embody all decision-makers in the nation: You're not just grand emperor, but also fleet admiral and colonial governor at the same time. With that said, I think it would be interesting to simulate lightspeed-lag by having things like colonial decentralization, where you get less control and authorithy in far-away colonies. Maybe in extreme cases you could even have colonies acting as independent nations, and once they build up a strong enough economic and industrial base, they could even go and explore, colonize and even wage wars on their own. This would, I think, be an interesting inversion of the ''traditional'' 4x structure, where you start with a number of ''civilizations'' that start out on roughly equal terms and then compete, and ultimately eliminate each other. Here instead, the ''mid-game'' would maybe look a bit like the paradox games, with a lot of nations in various states (some independent, some are subjects, some are doomed, some are on the rise). Maybe as the technology progresses, and faster ship drives leads to better communications and more centralization, you get to some kind of ''end-game'' where all the fledgling colonial nations, separatist states and other small independents get united into large interstellar empires.
An EUIV-style control approach works well for these kinds of games, although I predict that systems will be highly independent of each other from the beginning. It's rather hard to order someone around when it will take decades to get there. I'd expect early "Empires" to be like-minded groups of systems with shared cultural backgrounds under some sort of non-aggression agreement, rather than a typical Endless Space or GalCiv start. Conquests could happen, although each participant would have to carefully weigh the resources they expend rather than faceroll neighbors. You would probably see a lot more proxy war or indirect conquest (such as immigration) rather than full-on invasions, although there is room for a highly developed civilization to send fleets around bullying people.
How is ship movement going to work? Are you actually doing newtonian simulation and all that, or are you going aurora-style ships with top speeds?
Orbits are already in, elliptical ones at least. I had a go at hyperbolic trajectories in the past, and it wasn't extremely successful, but when I get time I can try to implement them again. It's not hard to calculate orbital elements given a starting velocity and position, so it'll be mainly two-body orbital transfers early on, and later you can get brachistochrone straight-line trajectories with a strong enough drive.
How is ship design and contruction going to work?
I don't like how a lot of 4X games require you to spend time designing ships rather than playing the game. While nifty, StarDrive's system is very time consuming, for example. Endless Space does it in a simple and elegant way, although I long for a system where you can just check some boxes, tweak some sliders, and have your subordinates crank out a ship that meets the specifications. Forcing players to manually place individual parts just seems wrong for a game like this, although the intent (increased customization) is noble.
How is time going to work? Turn based? Full Real Time? Europa Universalis-style pausable 24 hour ticks? Aurora-style selectable increments?
Pausable RTS seems like the best way to go, perhaps with a "pseudo turn-based mode" as a toggle that pauses whenever there are important decisions to make.
Will it be possible to modify game parameters? Things like making our own maps, or designing starting scenarios?
So far a lot (most of the game's code) is in external files, but everything is procedurally generated. Even planet maps are remade every time you reload the game and click on it, so there is little room for a scenario editor or the like, although I plan to have an EU4-style system where you can choose any existing faction to play as. That way you could use a savegame as a custom starting scenario.
It's currently just a world-gen engine right now, although I'm at a point where I can start adding gameplay features in the form of planetary settlements.
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Topic: Space colonization/exploration game (title pending) (Read 6912 times)