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[Mephansteras]

This sounds quite nifty! Posting to watch how it develops.

[Lap]

Spent a lot of time trying to make a UI for the galactic market, which now is functioning. In the end the simplest suggestion for how the market should work has won out for now. Basically this means:

-There is no bidding on resources. There is only a price that must be paid.
-Resources purchased can be used on the same turn. Similarly, resources sold provide instant payout.
-There is a limit on the amount you can buy or sell a turn, limiting someone from profiting too much off a single turn sale.



I've also coded in the system for having technologies, traits, and events modify galactic or faction specific:

-Sell Price
-Buy price
-Maximum amount a player can buy or sell per turn.

So already I can do some interesting events like that can artificially limit just the price or availability without these things being entirely based on supply. It also allows for factions that may be good specifically at selling, but not buying and vice versa. If it needs to be simplified at some later point that is not a problem.

Work is coming along nicely on a graph widget that will be used for displaying score/stat changes over time. It will also be used to show players price changes of resources.

The graph widget itself isn't too difficult, but getting the resource prices to behave is a huge pain in the ass. Achieving the correct feel to how prices should change from turn to turn is a lot of trial and error and formula tweaking. At this point most of the tests I've run have prices a little more volatile than I would like with graphs looking like this (100 turn simulation):



There's a lot to tweak to make everything look prettier, but at least the system works and I can move onto another roadblock to a more playable build.

[Servant Corps]

Always glad to have more people willing to help. So far I've got a fairly extensive tech tree mapped out. I thought the hardest part was making techs that converged back to an idea that was related to the two previous prereqs, but the actual hard part is going to be making a lot of these technologies worth researching. It is very hard to make rushing all the industry/military less appetizing.

Here's the current tree:

https://www.lucidchart.com/documents/view/4b73928c-50fc-8a8b-b530-29920a005798

If anyone else wants to monkey around with it let me know and I'll send you edit links. If you want to propose entirely new ones be warned that with the amount of time I've spent on this one I'll be unlikely to totally scrap it at least until it is gameplay tested and proven to suck .

Can't you just make all techs industry/military? You can justify it by saying that there are a lot of loyalists to the Emperor who likes the Empire's cultural advances and would only support a faction if they too develop said cultural advances as well and surpass the Empire's own culture.

I mean, you had Indoctrination causing the invention of a military unit, so why not make every tech have either a military unit or industrial upgrade associated with it?

[Lap]

I have been thinking about the way armies move simulanteously. Every round, things get harvested, produced, and players have their orders executed. All players put in their orders at the same time and then things get done when everyone is ready.To deal with who gets somewhere first I have an initiative system.

Currently armies are assigned an initiative value that is based on how "fast" the army is. So heavy artillery would move later than mechanized cyborg infantry. My inital thoughts were that at least you wouldn't have to think too much about the initiative thing, since units you think would get somewhere faster probably would. However, it still isn't the most intuitive thing in practice.

If players have 3 different armies they will probably have three different iniative values, which means they might not all arrive at the same time. I can see this causing frustration when players wonder why their lone scout car attacked the enemy "by itself." I would have to make a system so that players could have have all their attacking armies arrive at the same time (moving with the initative of the slowest army). This would mean more hotkeys, more ways of visualizing that armies are moving together, and some way to inform players of the system in general.

Because of this I was considering switching to systems I often see with board games, where all of a player's units move at the same time, but the player order can change every round.

Alternative idea #1:

Basic Premise
-Each turn players bid for turn order.
-Armies now all move at the same speed

Benefits
-Much easier to understand that all your units move together on your turn.
-Adds another strategic elment

Disadvantages
-May be difficult for players to judge how much resources they should be putting towards this. Overspending could easily ruin new players.

Related Decisions
-Should players bid for turn order in the current turn, with results unfolding immediately or should players bid a turn ahead (i.e. should players know their position for the next turn?)
-What other factors, if any would go into turn order? Would it jus be money bid? Should it also incorporate certain bonuses, technologies, empire power, etc. Penalizing massive empires with initiative penalties may be an interesting way to simulate the difficulty of governing such large swaths of land.

Alternative Idea #2

Instead of bidding turn order is known and is based on certain factors like bonuses, technologies, empire power, random number generator, etc. Turn order would be less mobile than above and may result in one faction going first for the duration of an entire war. This might be too frustrating for the player always going later though.


Thoughts?

[darkflagrance]

In Crusader Kings 2, the player has to manage various stacks of units moving around at different speeds while trying to catch their enemy. Generally, as long as you can reorganize your units into as many or as few stacks as you like, I think it's easy enough to imagine that each stack has the initiative/speed of its slowest unit, with your intent being for the stack to attack simultaneously. If you want to stagger the assaults for some reason, then you'd create multiple stacks with different speeds/initiatives that arrive at the battle as appropriate.

[Lap]

So most of the game is spent looking at a Civilization style board. There are cities/regions and they can continue a certain amount of buildings each (about 6 max). One question I have is how to represent the type and amount of buildings in icon form.

One option is to have each building actually shown in a small cluster. This can get kind of cluttered, but it does allow you to see much more information without using an infobox to look closer. This method also depends on mostly perfect information (no fog of war).

[Click for enlarged]



Another option is to have a single icon represent all the buildings. In this method I would make some system that would judge how industrial a place was as well as how many buildings are there. The icon displayed could also be increased in size to represent a more developed area. This method is harder to see what is in a region.



At this point in this project I have dozens of little decisions like these I need to make. So if anyone is up for letting me run a bunch of ideas by them let me know.