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[LDiCesare]

C is not a solution to the problem. If all players bid the same, you're in the same situation as initially, namely you don't know what to do, so C alone doesn't work.
I'd favor a mix of B and C. Basically, it's C, namely highest bid, but in case of equality of bids, use option B: If players a and b both put bids of 100 for respectivelly 100 and 60 units and there are only 100 units, then give 50 to both of them (or 63/37 if you want to respect the proportions of the bid amounts, but that seems complicated).

[Lap]

I guess another option to alleviate ties would be to give it to the person who was also requesting the most and then using either random or proportional splitting only if they bid the same price and amount.

[Lap]

I'm getting fairly close to having all the basic framework completed. The last non-UI related stuff that's not in game are technologies. The decision is between having research simply being something you poor money into or something you have to build labs for (or possibly something more complicated). Once the technologies are in I think all the basic parts of the game are complete.

This means I will be transitioning to content creation. This should be the most fun part for everyone as it's a rare occasion to have your ideas directly implemented in game.

Share your ideas for units, events, buildings, super/secret projects/wonders, technologies, etc. The more detailed the better.

[Il Palazzo]

So, you're done with that trade system then? What did you decide on in the end?
I was kind of hoping you'd be willing to try and do something crazy with that, like make a global goods market dependent on players' actions. E.g., you can buy only what is produced in the galaxy, so if I'm the only one producing singularities, that production would be all that's available on the market(I was trying to think of a more concrete way of presenting that idea, but if you're already done with it, then I shan't bother).

As for what you want now, we really need you to shine some more light on the mechanics you've got in place. We can hardly decide on what types of units can be there, if we're unsure how the combat works. Same with events, and the rest of the stuff.

[Chutney]

Could you by any chance release a semi-playable demo showcasing the mechanics relating to what you want us to suggest. Say for combat start us out with generic Light Medium and Heavy units or something, because as Il Palazzo said we need a little more idea on the mechanics before we make suggestions unless you just want stuff like "Laser tank - tank that shoots lasers"

[ChairmanPoo]

I was thinking that i would like to play an EFSish mod of Freeciv. How hard is it to mod the game?

[Lap]

but if you're already done with it, then I shan't bother

I'm done with nothing and I can't even think of something I wouldn't be willing to change at this point. Most things I've "done" are mere simple skeletons that exist simply so that I can push out a demo. Current trading with a simple bidding system is what is in now. Player sales and purchases will definitely affect the amount available for sale, but I don't know if that is going to be 100% of where resources come from.

As far as the vague request for content I just gave...Yes, it will be much easier once a basic alpha comes out. However, there are still tons of things that require almost no knowledge of the setting outside of it being a space 4X. There's also a lot of flavor text that anyone can contribute. Best piece of advice I can probably give is to have you think of something you wanted in another game that didn't exist. If you ever wished there was some unit/building/tech/etc in another sci-fi game I can probably make it happen.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

Events - 

These can be as simple as, "Solar Flares" - "Some weird space anomaly is blocking our comms" [No diplomacy for X turns]

or as elaborate as

"Scouting Probes" - "Word is spreading around the galaxy that strange devices have been crash landing onto various planets. They don't appear to be related to any known designs or factions and their purpose is unknown. Are they simple probes from an alien race? Is it one of the Great Houses trying to spy on us or is it something even more sinister...like a weapon?"

[One probe crash lands on every known planet in the galaxy. Whoever first occupies the region it crashes into is given a choice, with extra bonuses for each extra one past the first he finds]
1. Study it- Bonus to research. Chance of random negative effect.
2. Scrap it- Resource bonus. Chance of random negative effect.
3. Destroy it- Very small risk of catastrophic explosion or a negative diplo effect if the sender ever surfaces.
4. Leave it be- Possible link to a later effect or event many turns down the road.

Without needing any specific numbers I've got an interesting event for the player. I didn't need to know much about the universe either. If a submitted idea ends up including something that isn't canon to the story (which also isn't decided), it is trivial to tweak basic ideas to become canon so don't worry too much about stuff like that. Extremely complex choose-your-own-adventure type events are totally possible and not hard to do here.

Buildings

Geothermal Borehole (like the one from SMAC)

"By drilling deeper than any ever before we can reach previously unreachable veins of rare minerals and isotopes. If we drill deep enough, we can even tap into the almost limitless supply of heat energy closer to the core. Drilling projects of this magnitude are extremely costly and not without theoretical risks."

[An extremely expensive building that generates vast quantities of minerals and energy for the player. Each one the player has on a planet increases the chance of random earthquakes, volcanoes, and lava flows on that planet.]


Technologies

Not as much to work with here as most of the work with these involves the flavor/description text, but there's still room for novel ideas.

Extreme Condition Drilling

"Advances in blah blah blah...."

[Allows construction of the special geothermal borehole building as well as provides a bonus to metal yields]

Units

Most of the units seen at the two links below

http://website.lineone.net/~rwein/nova/unit2-3.htm and from http://hyperion.twarriors.com/reference.html

will be replicated at least in terms of the roles they fulfill.  So you will definitely be seeing some sort of hovering tank, some form of sub, etc. So what I'm mostly looking for at this point are any roles that might have been missed or units with some special ability as almost none of the current units have any. Alternatively, if you can think of a good backstory for something like for a special elite mercenary group that appears of the market that would be good also.

The units will be a lot easier to deal with when you can play around with the combat sandbox....

Combat Sandbox

I made a really basic version of this before, but it had no user interface so there was a lot of text editing if you wanted to change stuff so here's the plan for the new one:

-You click 'combat sandbox' from the main menu and then you are shown a list of all units in the game and their stats.
-Units can be dragged into the attacker or defender side to make things easy.
-You can also click and modify the quantity of any units.
-There will be a separate toolbox for modifiers. If there's a modifier for being ambushed or having low morale, you'll see it here.
-Similarly, the terrain can be chosen as it affects combat.
-Players can choose to watch the detailed battle step-by-step of a single battle or to run X number of trials to see which side wins.

I was thinking that i would like to play an EFSish mod of Freeciv. How hard is it to mod the game?

Are you talking about how hard it would be to make it in this game or in Freeciv? Freeciv is open source and there's a lot of community dedicated to it so it shouldn't be that hard if you know how to code. Modding my game is so simple that anyone can do it.

[Lap]

I've had some more time to work on the combat sandbox and I've been having some fun testing armies against each other. I'm convinced that this sandbox is going to be vital to all future game balance. While it obviously helps me identify unit matchups that clearly need tweaking, it turns out that I'm noticing a lot more subtle results than I thought. For example, I knew that a tank would clearly win 1on1 versus a militia unit, but I was amazed at how little damage it took even when it was outnumbered 10 to 1. Being able to notice stuff like that early on stops these problems from snowballing later down the road.

New Combat Sandbox Features & Stats:

-Average Combat Rounds Taken
-Per Unit Average Route vs. Killed
-Total resource cost of each army
-Average total resources lost on each side.
-Average resource efficiency of each army.
-Per unit average times targeted
-Per unit average times dodged.
-Average time unit was able to ambush

I can't think of any other stats that would be useful at the moment. I'm also on the fence about implementing a generic "Combat Power" stat that is used only to estimate the power of enemy forces.

I'm also looking for opinions on the generic expectations people have for combat. Things like, how many dirty militiamen should it take to kill a tank? Should they even be able to? This will of course depends a lot on how much things end up costing resource wise, but I'm considering balancing resource costs after the feel for a unit's power is better tested.

[Lap]

I got hung up on a bug with the resource and supply system, but everything is working great again now. I also implemented estimates of future production so you can gauge how many resources you should get. It can estimate based on a single region, planet, or the entire galaxy. Also, I added the ability to turn off buildings like factories in case you don't want them eating your resources and producing more than you need.

[Virex]

Here are some ideas for specialized units you may consider:


First of all, GEV's, or Ekranoplans as some know them, might be an interesting addition. They can only operate on sea or in relatively flat, sparsely forested regions (might be confusing without a clear indication of the areas they can enter) but are significantly faster then ships or hovercrafts, while still having a carrying capacity slightly lower then hovercrafts.


Secondly, a list of units that would be used by the military engineers of a real war machine.
Combat engineers/sappers: infantry units that can provide your army with all kinds of backup options. Several options are detailed further down, though you're free to come up with your own of course. These actions would take some time to preform and maybe even resources if that isn't too much of a headache. Else, you can handwave that by saying they use local resources and stuff they brought with them.

Spoiler: engineer options (click to show/hide)

Lay mines: An option for combat engineers. Deploying mines in a province increases the defensive bonus for your units, at the cost of production capacity, population growth and happiness for an extended period of time, depending on the amount of mines placed. Is seen as a minor war crime and reduces your standing in the senate accordingly.


Entrench: Option for combat engineers that increases your armies defenses but reduces their mobility, meaning less bonuses from terrain features and less likely to fire first. Subsequent entrenchments increase these two effects further up to a certain amount (depending upon your tech level perhaps?)


Erect makeshift airfield: Engineer option that enables air units to land and refuel in provinces that lack a proper airport and also increases their effectiveness. Doesn't help heavy bombers and heavy fighters because they can't land on unpaved runways.


Erect makeshift harbor: Engineer option that enables you to repair ships at a reduced rate from a province that doesn't have a proper harbor and acts as a save haven to protect them from storms and enemy attacks.


Destroy bridges: engineer option that significantly increases the defensive bonus rivers give, but makes it more difficult to cross them for your units as well, meaning your units will get a penalty when attacking from this province. Also decreases production and income from the province.


Field hospital: Engineer option that enables you to heal infantry units or increase the rate they heal at if they regenerate naturally. Also protects against the effects of chemical and biological weapons and radiation-infected provinces (if they are planned)


Motor pool: Engineer option that enables you to repair land units at a reduced rate. Also increases the effectiveness of land units during combat in and from this province by a minor amount.


Slash and burn: Engineer option that destroys a large part of the provinces infrastructure. Is seen as a war crime and will reduce your standing in the senate.


Prepare to breach fortifications: Engineer option that decreases the enemies defensive bonuses gained from entrenchments, bunkers, mine fields and other upgrades by a certain percentage. Extra turns spent preparing would reduce the defensive bonus further up to a certain amount determined by your tech levels.

Deployable landing pads: Basically either a land or amphibious unit that enables space vessels to land on it as if they were landing on a starport. This could also serve as a carrier unit so airplanes can refuel here. Amphibious version could be a more expensive version of the normal land-based unit if you go that route. Could require transport or come with their own.


Deployable bunkers/shield generators: Reduce the damage dealt by bombardment and long range attacks but is vulnerable to short range attacks. Could either be mobile themselves (especially when going with shield generators) or require transport units. Early versions would only protect a few units while more advanced ones could provide superior cover to an entire army. This does come at the cost of mobility.


Bridging vehicles: An assorted collection of these and these Significantly reduces the advantage defenders get from rivers and small bodies of water. Mitigates the "destroy bridges" action combat engineers can preform. This may be a bit of a micromanagement headache though, so I am not sure about this one.


Armored Bulldozers (I'm tempted to call them tankdozers): These guys. Essentially works as a tank version of combat engineers and always reduce the defenders defense bonuses by a certain percentage when attacking, even if it didn't prepare to do so. Preparations will still reduce it further though. These extra capacities are compensated by the fact that they take longer and more resources to build and require more transport space.


Deforest: Option for some bombers. Would convert a significant part of a provinces forests to plains (or wasteland), thereby reducing the advantage defenders get from the forests. Decreases the population growth and production capacity of the province for an extended time as well. Is seen as a minor war crime.

[Lap]

Although I'm sure many of you have seen the newer project "Crimelike" that I've been working on I have not abandoned this. I just needed a break.

The new version of the Love engine came out and they were kind enough to implement a few of the features I've been requesting. Most importantly, how text is drawn, which is a big deal to this game considering how much text is displayed all over the place. I converted the code to the new engine.

From here on out I'm going to focus on getting a working demo out so players can experiment with things.

[Lap]

Now it's Crimelike's turn for a time out. I've been working on this again for the last couple of weeks and it has been going well. I've spent a lot of time trying to hunt down new art assets. The hardest part is actually keeping track of the asset authors so I don't forget to give credit to them.

It's annoying, but the planets and the test galaxy I have set up now look much prettier! Here's a list of some other progress:

-Construction queues now work on client and server.
-Lots of UI optimizations.
-Dom3 style unit ordering implemented.
-Landing and launching of units to/from orbit works well and now has working UI to support it.
-All the text is better placed and tooltips will always expand to their correct size now. Hooray for new engine update.
-Fixed a bug that was causing UI windows to randomly disappear (so many hours wasted).
-Changed the title screen to something more appealing:

(Click for full image)


Next up, recruitment queues.

I need help trying to figure out the best way to display information.



On the left are the current selection panels for armies. If you click a region and an army is there, that is what will pop up. It is very close to what Dominions does.

What I'd like to be able to display there in some fashion:

1. Current order of the army
2. Movement points
3. Type of army/movement (hover, naval, air, space, etc)
4. Relative strength of the army or estimation of units within.
5. Maybe a name? (haven't decided about allowing army naming or not)

The order is easy and will probably remain at the bottom. I could do something like "MP 1/2" or "MP 1(2)" for the movement. Type I'm thinking can be a little icon somewhere in the box.

The strength is probably the hardest part. I have no idea how to represent that. I could try to make very tiny unit icons that you might be able to see each unit in an army at a glance. Another option is to just estimate the overall strength and display that as an icon or number. Lastly, I could try to sort the types of units inside the army and visually represent them. So if there was 1 tank, a militiamen, a commando unit , and 6 varied pieces of artillery in an army you'd see 1 little tank icon, 2 little infantry icons and then 1 big artillery icon (representing 5 pieces of artillery), and 1 smaller one.


Even harder than displaying the army stats in that window is displaying armies on the map. I am really at a lose for a good way to do this. In the last image, the right side shows an selected region. The only thing I have there is a circle surrounding it, indicating selection, and a generic infantry icon indicating that at least one army is there.

This really provides way too little information to the players. How can I represent an approximate of the amount, type, and strength of the garrisoned armies? How would I indicate unknown armies and give a strength approximate? (Dom3 uses increasingly large "boxes" to represent more troops stationed somewhere)

[Il Palazzo]

Glad to see you still working on it. I must say that I'm feeling somewhat guilty for not showering you with ideas(of dubious quality, but still) anymore.

As for army strenght indicators on the map - how about having a small icon representing infantry(as in your picture), another one for armour, and so on, for each type of troops, with a number over/next to each icon showing actual strenght?
Enemy armies of uncertain strenght would show either just troop-type icons, or rough estimates(e.g. I >50, or I 100-200, etc.).
Alternatively, instead of numbers, there could be some other graphical representation, like e.g. a star, or a flag, or a bar, for each 10(or whatever) troops, and stacking as the numbers grow.

Another option is to have just a flag representing an army stationing in a province, without any direct indication of composition, while overall strenght would be represented by scaling the flag sprite. To view the army with detail, you'd have to open a separate "army viewer window".

[Lap]

Glad to see you still working on it. I must say that I'm feeling somewhat guilty for not showering you with ideas(of dubious quality, but still) anymore.

I can only expect people to write so much before they start to need a more tangible product to play with. In fact, the exact same thing is happening with Crimelike, as predicted. A flurry of ideas and effort, but that can't be sustained for very long without something like a gameplay demo. Odd that both projects are kind of at the same stage. Anyways, you've done more than enough.

Another option is to have just a flag representing an army stationing in a province, without any direct indication of composition, while overall strenght would be represented by scaling the flag sprite. To view the army with detail, you'd have to open a separate "army viewer window".

Where would this flag be in relation to that city icon? Would it just be behind it? On top of it? Offset somewhat from it?

[Il Palazzo]

Oh, I suppose you could place the pole on the side of the city, with the flag itself "waving" over it.
The flag could actually bear some additional information, apart from the size - like experience(stars on the flag), or army name(generic 1st army etc, or given name if allowed).