Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[LordArchibald]

Hi, I'm an inide game dev and in a typically game dev manner I make games The newest of them being a 4X strategy for PC.
I look for feedback, comments, etc.

EDIT: The game has been released in December 2016. Thanks for all your help and feedback!

EDIT: Sequel in development: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177657.0

Basics
Name: Stellar Monarch (former: Pocket Space Empire)  EDIT: name changed
Platform: PC (planned release March 2016)   EDIT: Released
Theme & Genre: Space empire builder, 4X, Grand strategy
Mechanics: turn based, singleplayer

EDIT: PreOrder & Early Access (please read the disclaimer, that version is not very playable yet!) http://www.SilverLemurGames.com/stellarmonarch


EDIT: Those screens are super outdated!
First some screens (prototype, some gfx is temporary programmer's art):






And now a wall of text
(the design goals)


1) Feel like the Emperor, not like a logistics officer

I find it annoying that, while I have played so many strategies,
I never felt like a real Emperor, sure there are cool decisions to make and everything but...
Where are audiences? As an Emperor I surely should grant audiences!
Where are the assassination attempts (does everyone love me?),
where are the true rebels that want to overthrow me
(not just people who rebel because they are unhappy and starving, I mean real rebels,
usurpers to the throne and other scum I should crush).
Why can't I appoint governors and admirals (and I don't mean
"having mere 4 heroes that can be governors/admirals", I mean selecting
governors for *each* planet and commanders for *each* military formation).
Instead I'm presented with choices like "what building to construct on planet X"...

My first goal is to "fix" these.


2) Fast paced, no micomanagement yet an epic scale

I know many people would disagree, I guess it is a personal feeling, but I HATE micomanagement
And no, I don't find "automated AI governors" a viable solution.
Also I don't want to limit the game to a dozen of planets.

So, I'm making a game where you are the Emperor of hundreds of planets
(during testing I always start with 50 planets to get the feel of the bigger empire)
and yet the game does not drag on. I made some controversial choices to achieve this,
like you can't build any infrastructure on planets directly (with minor exceptions)
also you can't move around individual ships (you operate with formations: fleets and squadrons).


3) Asymmetic gameplay, truly alien aliens and challenging non cheating AI

I don't intend the AI and aliens to simulate the human player. Aliens are aliens.
They have different goals, they do not "play the game" nor try to "prevent the player from winning".
They just live in the galaxy and do their stuff (which frequently is an obstacle to the player, but not always).
They also play by different rules (like some alien races having no ships at all and just use big rocks
launched from their worlds as a transporter carrying insanely strong warriors that take the enemy planet
from the ground - if these are not shot down upon approach).
And so on, so on (think of these aliens more like of
"forces of nature that prevents you to establish the galactic Empire".
Note: you don't need to wipe out the whole galaxy to win the game.

There are also some special scenarios, for example one
where you start with 200-300 planets and try to crush the rebellion.



EDIT (added obligatory links):
* Homepage: http://www.silverlemurgames.com/stellarmonarch/
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/SilverLemur
* Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StellarMonarch
* YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCps-DZqxTNj7vrTMvSfml1A
* Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/blcMDr (only announcement about release/greenlit, etc - best for people mildly interested who don't want to forget about the project)
Geez, I hate that nowadays a poor dev has to create so many of weird thingies like thatr instead of focusing on making the game...

[Zrk2]

This looks interesting, but Toady usually frowns upon Devs advertising their own games on here. You might want to talk to him.

[Karlito]

This looks interesting, but Toady usually frowns upon Devs advertising their own games on here. You might want to talk to him.

Really? We get this sort of thing all the time. I rather like it.

[LordArchibald]

This looks interesting, but Toady usually frowns upon Devs advertising their own games on here. You might want to talk to him.

Oh, I thought it was allowed on the "Other Games" section (I thought I have seen topics about other people's games here?) I will PM Toady. Thanks.

[My Name is Immaterial]

AFAIK, it's somewhat frowned on, but as long as you don't just use this as an advertisement and then forget about it, you'll be fine.

Also, this looks very cool. Is there a test build we can play with?

As for feedback, just looking at the screenshots, I have a series of questions about the map. How does intersolar travel work in this universe? Warp Gates from a precursor civilization? Hyperdrives? If it's the first one, then the map makes sense, but I don't really see hyperdrives having such a limited travel path.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly, this is the sort of thing I don't mind seeing. It's not a little "Here's my Kickstarter link, support pls," waste of a thread, and the premise itself is both relevant and, I think, rather interesting. That, and Archibald's looking for feedback, and this is probably in the top five forums to check as far as 4Xes go.

I'm curious as to how exactly you plan to implement your no-micromanagement system. Is it still going to be micromanagement, just bumped up to a higher level (that is, giving directional orders to planetary governors or sector governors regarding how they should  direct their efforts), or is it going to be something like setting sliders similar to how Europa Universalis tech works, except with policy areas rather than fields of research, where raising the level of investment in one slightly lowers it in others?

How does fleet combat work? Is it just the simple Neptune's Pride/Battle for Atlantis/&c. style where bigger numbers win, with defensive advantage and maybe some "terrain" modifiers? There's both merits and issues associated with that -- namely, it's vastly simpler to implement, but it's also vastly more simplistic, if you take my meaning.

[Zangi]

...  So... is it going to be CK2 in space?  I'd totally be into that. 

Ya know, people have families and all that. 
EDICT suggestion: The emperor is magnanimous, hosting a prestigious and well guarded academy for the brightest minds of the empire.  It would be foolhardy for any official to not send their children to this academy...

1. Will you have the option to personally see to affairs? (micro)
1a. If so, is the scope limited?  Or full on?
2. Is their any incentive whatsoever to appoint corrupt or disloyal officials?
3. Will there be means to keeping appointed officials in line?  Meaningful options other then assassination or the gamey push-to-rebel for the casus belli?
4. Are the loyalty and corruption rating of officials that easy to see?
5. Will there be personalities/traits archetypes for officials you appoint? 
5a. For example, you have a planet on the border of some Xenos.  If you want to gear up for war, you appoint officials who have a military bent/warmonger/xenos hater.
5b. If you want peace, you dirty xeno lover you, appoint officials who are more diplomatic/xeno-lovers.  Their policies will be toward increasing relations with the xenos.
5c. Alternative way to peace is appoint officials who like money/have an economic bent.  Their policies will increase trade between your empire and the xenos.  Which has the knockdown effect of more peace... and profits for the officials, the empire... and the xenos.

[Zrk2]

Honestly, this is the sort of thing I don't mind seeing. It's not a little "Here's my Kickstarter link, support pls," waste of a thread, and the premise itself is both relevant and, I think, rather interesting. That, and Archibald's looking for feedback, and this is probably in the top five forums to check as far as 4Xes go.

You're probably right. It's been a while since I posted here consistently, and OP seems a lot more interested than most people that link-dump.

[MonkeyHead]

Posting to follow so very hard. So very very hard.

[LordArchibald]

Also, this looks very cool. Is there a test build we can play with?

For now I prefer to not release it yet

As for feedback, just looking at the screenshots, I have a series of questions about the map. How does intersolar travel work in this universe? Warp Gates from a precursor civilization? Hyperdrives? If it's the first one, then the map makes sense, but I don't really see hyperdrives having such a limited travel path.

Hmm, an interesting question, I don't know Haven't thought about it... Well, storyline/theme wise probably anything will do, so if you have interesting concepts why/how starlanes work, post.

I'm curious as to how exactly you plan to implement your no-micromanagement system. Is it still going to be micromanagement, just bumped up to a higher level (that is, giving directional orders to planetary governors or sector governors regarding how they should  direct their efforts), or is it going to be something like setting sliders similar to how Europa Universalis tech works, except with policy areas rather than fields of research, where raising the level of investment in one slightly lowers it in others?

Depends.

Planets: Abstraction. I do not believe in automatization also I'm not too fond on "layers". Basicly you appoint the governor and that's it. You can alter it a bit by setting the specialization of the planet or making some edict ("make more farms"), etc, but overall you don't deal with planets on individual level.

Fleets: Removed logistics & automated movement ( http://silverlemur.tumblr.com/post/110151975596/fleets-squadrons ), here I basicly removed everything that was not fun (moving units between formations, refit, replacement of combat casualities) and/or moved it to higher level (you operate on fleet/squadron level, can't issue orders to individual ships (these move around the galaxy on their own, based on higher level orders). It's implemented and works.

Exploration: automatization and abstraction and limits, basicly scouts are a completely different category than military (military is not allowed to even enter unexplord system). Implemented and works, I *love* that one

BTW, you might want to read that blog, it has nice non standard concepts (I agree with like 50% of it, which is a lot
http://www.big-game-theory.com/2015/02/the-snowball-and-steamroller.html

How does fleet combat work? Is it just the simple Neptune's Pride/Battle for Atlantis/&c. style where bigger numbers win, with defensive advantage and maybe some "terrain" modifiers? There's both merits and issues associated with that -- namely, it's vastly simpler to implement, but it's also vastly more simplistic, if you take my meaning.

Combat is only barebone now (ships shooting at random at each other) since I wanted to make the strategic level first. I'm open to discussing how it should work (I will implement that one quite late I think, so it's still time).

How formations work: http://silverlemur.tumblr.com/post/110151975596/fleets-squadrons

...  So... is it going to be CK2 in space?  I'd totally be into that. 

Ya know, people have families and all that. 
EDICT suggestion: The emperor is magnanimous, hosting a prestigious and well guarded academy for the brightest minds of the empire.  It would be foolhardy for any official to not send their children to this academy...

1. Will you have the option to personally see to affairs? (micro)
1a. If so, is the scope limited?  Or full on?
2. Is their any incentive whatsoever to appoint corrupt or disloyal officials?
3. Will there be means to keeping appointed officials in line?  Meaningful options other then assassination or the gamey push-to-rebel for the casus belli?
4. Are the loyalty and corruption rating of officials that easy to see?
5. Will there be personalities/traits archetypes for officials you appoint? 
5a. For example, you have a planet on the border of some Xenos.  If you want to gear up for war, you appoint officials who have a military bent/warmonger/xenos hater.
5b. If you want peace, you dirty xeno lover you, appoint officials who are more diplomatic/xeno-lovers.  Their policies will be toward increasing relations with the xenos.
5c. Alternative way to peace is appoint officials who like money/have an economic bent.  Their policies will increase trade between your empire and the xenos.  Which has the knockdown effect of more peace... and profits for the officials, the empire... and the xenos.

OK, one thing straight first, it's a 4X above all. All the other elements, while important and everything, are an addition to it. These can not overshadow the 4X part. Just one thing to keep in mind

No, it won't be CKII in space. For two reasons.
1) CKII is a very good game, I don't see how I could improve it, and I see not much point to remake an existing flawless game to another theme.
2) CKII is more like a noble simulator (you can be a baron, count, duke, king) while I want to make an emperor simulator. Sure, it overlaps in some places, but in the end being the Emperor and being some noble is very different. Like audiences for example, as a noble it's not much of an issue, but if you are a ruler of hundreds planets and the power is centralized you start to be bogged down by how many people want to visit you. You can't keep up, you need to appoint helpers bureaucracy starts to pile up, corruption goes rapart because you can't oversee everything amnd they all steal when you are not watching That's the kind of mood I'm trying to convey.


Now, about the officials and why you can see their competence/loyalty/corruption stats.
First the scale. At the early game you will have 50 planets (1 governor per each), probably 3-5 fleets (1 admiral per each) each of these consisting of several squadrons (20-40 commanders). If we add to it the imperial court, ambassadors, etc it will be 100+ officials (early game . So... you will need to deal with that quickly and in bulk Also too many trait probably won't work here. Which also means you can't think whom to appoint where exactly (the player's brain would shortcut). Most likely, you will just have and option to fire an official (can't move it to another position) and then next turn the imperial court will appoint some new one (which you can fire again and again - each turn the planet/squadron would be without governor/commander which is not good for efficiency).

The three stats are a choice. You can go for competent officials (good for economy/combat), for loyal officials (will not betray you, good for preventing rebelions) or for non corrupted ones (good for economy/population happiness). So frequently you will have choices like "he is an idiot and steals all the time, be he would never betray me, should I fire him?" or "disloyal & honest genius that hates me, should I appoint him the captain of the imperial palace guards?"

Probably there will be 2 separate "casts" of officials: governors (which could be promoted to imperial court) and officers (who will only serve in the military).

[Flying Dice]

Oh, yes. If the fleet AI works (and the civilian management AI as well I suppose), color me very interested.

I'm also curious about your plans for alien AI -- are they a number of set races with their own behaviors a la Galactic Civilizations (incidentally an excellent example of competitive AI that doesn't rely on cheating or various multipliers to beat the stuffing out of you), or are you going to set it up so that races are randomly generated with different assortments of goals, traits, characteristics, &c? Obviously a set of predetermined races are easier, but one of the big problems that you run into with 4Xes where the AI is either homogenous or static-differentiated (i.e. different between races but always the same for each race) is predictability, which in turn hurts replay value as you quickly learn how the AI will behave, which makes countering it trivial as long as you're halfway competent.

[Sergarr]

The IMHO best choice to combat the "steamroller" approach is not to limit force-sizes or other crap that was discussed in that article - that just makes the process more slow and feel more artificial.

What you need is to couple each permanent negative effect you inflict on the enemy (like a military defeat, losing his troops and ships) with a temporary positive effect for him (like a temporary buff for existing troops), and make the effect of a temporary positive effect be stronger than the permanent negative effect.

That way a military defeat will actually make you stronger in the short-term, which you can then exploit to make a powerful counter-attack (which he can then counter-counter-attack, leading to a duel of counters...). But it won't actually give you a permanent advantage over your enemy, so it won't snowball out of control.

[Flying Dice]

One way to do that would be to have a steady decrease in bureaucratic efficiency scaling with the size of your forces, both individual fleets/armies/whatever, and your total military arm. Same with commercial-side stuff. That way, when you lose a big chunk of ships or planets, the ones left respond sooner, travel faster, fight better, produce more and more quickly, &c.

Obviously larger-scale mechanisms are more efficient purely economically, but with a distributed imperial command system full of incompetent and corrupt officials, smaller systems are going to be more efficient because it's harder for things to be overlooked, the distance both spatial and bureaucratic for orders to travel is smaller, &c. At least, that's how you justify it in the fluff.

[Sergarr]

Yah it's basically the same thing: bigger forces are stronger in general, but smaller forces can get stronger in specific circumstances. The lack of any mechanism for that in many 4X strategies is why the snowballing effect is so strong. It's also really easy to fix as long as you remember what causes it (positive feedback looping into itself) and take measures to prevent it, by either limiting the rate of positive changes (boring variant, force limits are like this) or giving temporary negative feedback (awesome variant).

Actually, Civilization 4 has used the "temporary negative feedback" for it's city expansion system - new cities actually decrease your profits before you build them up to a proper level. Because of that, "infinite city sprawl" has been annihilated from Civ 4 as a class of strategy. Seems like a good example of how to do it.

[Zrk2]

So are you aiming for an Emperor of the Fading Suns clone, but without the micro?