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[Il Palazzo]

About trading:
Are you willing to create an open market-sort of mechanics, where each nation decides on the amount of resources they want to buy/sell and at what minimum/maximum price. Then the game would weigh all these "offers" and move goods accordingly. Such trading would go automatically and anonymously, without specifying a recipent. Simply the best price wins.

If NPC factions would be allowed to participate in trade, they should use the same system, placing bids each turn.

Additionally, to reflect trade pacts, each player could sell resources at a fixed price to a specific house.

This would probably work only if the amount of resources available in the game isn't going to be too numerous, as otherwise it could devolve into micromanagement feast.


On general political outline.
This is pretty much a deviation from the standard free-for-all system of most 4X games out there. It's also just a bunch of barely connected ideas at the moment, as I'm still working on tying them all up together in a meaningfull way.

I was thinking of creating a system where each player is a part of already existing republic, as opposed to being de facto autonomous entities like in EoFS.

The central part of the game's political side would be the Senate.

There would be a number of voting options available, among others: deciding on who's going to be a consul(s); branding a faction an enemy of the state; deciding on a minimal contribution to the republic's coffers.

Each house would be required to contribute some hard cash to the coffers each "period". The size of contribution would determine the influence in the senate(voting power).

While each house would be able to own a private army, the main force of the republic would consist of Consular Army - rised and supported from the contribution pool.

No house could attack other any other house without having the senate proclaim the target an enemy of the state.

Lands(planets) conquered by the Republic's Army would become provinces, whose governors would be choosen by the senate.

The governors could choose to keep the provincial income to themselves, at the risk of being dismissed/branded an enemy of the state.

The goal of the game would be to become elected a permanent consul, a de facto Emperor.

Apart from the house's own demesne, no faction would actually own most of the Republic's territory.

(more to come, you get the general idea, I hope)

AI factions.
I thought of introducing a (Dune's)Guild-like faction of Navigators.
These would provide an alternate way of moving troops/goods across the galaxy(the primary being stargates).
By paying a (large)sum of money, a player could get his troops transported to any location in the galaxy within a turn.
Influencing(bribing) the Guild could make other houses unable to use their services.

[Lap]

About trading:
Are you willing to create an open market-sort of mechanics, where each nation decides on the amount of resources they want to buy/sell and at what minimum/maximum price. Then the game would weigh all these "offers" and move goods accordingly. Such trading would go automatically and anonymously, without specifying a recipent. Simply the best price wins.

I thought of introducing a (Dune's)Guild-like faction of Navigators.

Response:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

These are similar to some ideas in the design doc. Navigators was touched on in page one or two of this thread I think. No set in stone decisions yet.

I am extremely wary of letting anyone declare someone an enemy of the state. Even in a relatively even game being unlucky enough to be declared an enemy of the state means you have the majority of players attacking you in a hopeless situation. Since you can't be at war with someone unless they are an enemy of the state everyone is pretty much going to be vultures waiting for the first person unlucky enough to be picked. This would likely spell a game over for that player as well as not being very fun for anyone involved. If you're going to be a beacon of hate for the whole galaxy I want it to be that player's decision.

I would much rather see everyone able to be at war with each other, but let the senate be able to force peace between two factions.

I would also prefer to have money given to the senate as an investment rather than something that resets every "period", otherwise spending a lot of your money, but being just shy of being the majority leader could mean game over for that player.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make a working system where most of the provinces a player has are assigned by the Senate. I keep running into problems.The imperial army will likely be fighting on a far off planet and there's not much anyone can do with one or two provinces on a far off planet, especially when there are so many other factions who would likely be awarded provinces immediately next to you. It might be a good mechanism to force player interaction though.

The other option is to wait until a large portion of land is captured before actually assigning it all to a single player,  it might put that first person to get it way ahead of players who invested tons into the senate, but just got outbid. They'd be down lots of money with nothing to show for it until the next mass of land was captured.

I've got a system for incoming messages down and I made a customizable filter so you can choose to ignore things like "production of unit complete at..." type messages or whatever. I also have been doing a lot of client- server stuff and it's really coming together to a playable game. There's not much content, but the framework for the game is getting pretty close.

Here's the things that I can't progress to until more decisions are made:

-Production/recruitment limits per province? How is production determined?

-Is there a limit of buildings per province and is it the same for all provinces?

Fog of War

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

What determines what a player can and cannot see? Do you need a single unit on a planet or in orbit to see the whole planet?

Do players see the actual units of spotted enemies or do they see a more vague indication of how many troops or there?

I was initially thinking of some system where any orbiting ship or satellite would have relatively low chances to spot specific units anywhere on the planet each turn, as well as automatically giving a very rough estimate of the army strength/number of all provinces on the planet.

Provinces adjacent to yours would automatically get a very vague estimate of army strength/numbers. The only way to reliably see what types of units are in a province would be to move spies into the province or use special satellites. Any thoughts on what should be included in FoW and how it should be revealed?

[Il Palazzo]

I haven't noticed you've been updating the files at googledocs - it still says "last updated on may 6th" or something like that. My bad for posting redundant information then.

As for production limits: I'd say, one legion/unit per factory building. Wouldn't that be enough?

Building limits: if you're going to stick to urbanisation mechanics, then I'd say no limit at all. We'd just need to make the buildings costly or time consuming to construct, to prevent sudden spammage of megacities.
Unless you're going to use the suggested "building slots" mechanics, which while less cool in my opinion, has the great advantage of making it remarkably easy to asess provinces at a glance. Gives rise to easily recognisable "production provinces" and "farming/mining provinces".
In such case make it easy and put limits varying with elevation: mountains 2 buildings, hills 4, plains 6; or somesuch.

Fog of War:
My proposition is this: any ship in orbit ucovers all units and buildings on the planets' surface, unless a "jamming" building(not viable if you're going for just a few building slots per province) is present. In such case, only sending in a spy can yield information on this province. A spy should be able to get caught.
Other than that, armies and provinces should provide some information on the neighbouring provinces and armies - less specific than orbital surveillance or spying, though. Maybe only the size of an army and the number of buildings present?

Spoiler: Now, regarding the politics: (click to show/hide)

I understend what you mean by mentioning the idea of "investment" in the senate. However, with it comes the problem of mellowing out the competition between players. There would hardly be any sudden changes and surprises in the voting part of the game, as you could always see how much had each player invested already.
If you'd make it reset each voting period, then the game should prove much more interesting, imo.
Remember that contributions to the senate would increase your voting power, but never(or hardly ever) as much as to let you pass a vote on something without a support from other players.
Now, it wouldn't be a completely chaotic lottery of "who's gonna be the most powerful voter this year", as the players could still guess who's able to contribute a lot of cash - who's controlling the richest provinces, who hasn't contributed(saved his money) for a while now etc.
Besides, players woldn't likely skip on contributing without a good reason, as getting the Republic's Army to command would be the best way to get richer by conquering new lands/planets.(this would assume that the army commander is the default governor of newly conquered provinces, until he's stripped of the command and a new governor can be elected).
Being able to get some money from the governed provinces would mean that army commanders wouldn't keep their troops idle, as sending them to action means more gold for the general(assuming a successful campaign).

As for the enemy of the state:
This should be in game in some form, as it represents all the non-player influences in the Republic, who are not keen on having a civil war.
The best way of handling this still eludes me though, I know that it shouldn't be a ganging-on-somebody mechanics. What I'm thinking of is more of a situation where the general of an army refuses to hand over the command of the army and the governorship of the newly conquered planets and the senate can either swallow the insult or name him an enemy and fight agaist him and the army he still commands.
In other words, there should be a possibility of rebelling which actually has a good chance of success, if pulled out at the right time(e.g. the houses were skimping on contributions, so the only strong army is in the hands of the rebel).
In this fashion, there would be two forces at play: one would be the players feeling the need to protect themselves from the possibility of a rebellion - keeping one or a few armies at home to react if needed be, the other force would be the need to get rich on conquests - vying for army commands and taking those armies to faraway worlds.
The armies should be very expensive to maintain - this way houses won't be putting a prefference on building up their own household armies. The wannabe rebels won't be so hot on rebelling either, unless they've managed to store some serious cash to maintain the army from their own pockets.(or are willing to plunder the land)

[mainiac]

The enemy of the state idea sounds like it should be designed to have a limited impact.  Instead of affecting an entire house, it should only affect one general and his troops or one planet or region or the like.  Using it indiscriminately would backfire.  So if every five turns, you declare a general from a different faction an enemy of the state, everyone will be willing to shrug that off.  But if you target three generals in five turns, keep picking on the same faction, or declare an entire faction renegade, you'll be starting a civil war.

[Virex]

Another option is to make war decelerations limited to ultimatums and, linked to that, casus belli, like in Europa Universalis. If you've got a good reason (An impromptu blockade for example) and the ultimatum is same (No "give me your capitol planet because you assassinated a province governor on a random backwater planet") then the senate could back you in your decision. If the one you're attacking offers you peace on favorable terms (Usually a bit more then the ultimatum and repayment for your losses) the senate will usually back his proposal and continuing the fight will get you into trouble. (Perhaps a vote would be an option for the council decisions instead of an arbitrary yes or no, but that could turn out ugly as well)


A similar method could be used to declare someone enemy of the state, in which case the enemy of the state has to abide by an ultimatum from the senate or everyone else will declare war. Once a specific goal has been reached, usually similar but more severe then the ultimatum, the mark of enemy of the state will be lifted and anyone still in war with him would be honor-bound to accept piece and the offered repayment. If you feel you need a higher repayment you can bring it up in the senate, but taking it yourself could be reason to declare you enemy of the state instead.

[Il Palazzo]

The basic Idea for the Senate I've got at the moment, is that it's composed of, say, 3 senators per player, plus twice as many independent senators as there are players.
The independent senators would be residing on some Byzantium-like planet, and could be bribed/asassinated.

I'm rather inclined not to include any mechanics which would force any player to act in some way. The enemy of the state type of mechanisc would simulate the independent senators' "free" will.

I.e. any human player would be free to attack any other player/entity within the Republic, but doing so without the Senate's consent would brand such a player as a "rebel", and all the independent and unaligned(not bribed enough) senators would vote for him becoming the enemy of the state(which would take away his voting rights and name him as a viable target for Rebublic's army action).

Otherwise, all unaligned senators would always vote NO for branding someone enemy of the state.
(they don't want no civil wars)

Attacking another player/entity wouldn't then automatically trigger other players ganging up on somebody - with sufficiently bribed independent senators, and friends in another house(s), the notion could be turned down.

This way, you'll have total freedom for the players - they can technically attack whomever they want and vote in whatever fashion they desire, while still having a buffer of independent senators to act as the general will of the Republic.

[ChairmanPoo]

I liked EOFS a lot, despite it's faulty AI, and the bad workings of some gameplay aspects (such as planetary inventories, or game politics). It was a really neat concept.

I also liked Dominions 3 a lot, despite it's faulty AI.


IŽd be interested if you pulled this up

[Il Palazzo]

I've prepared a somewhat 'nitty-gritty' political schematic for you to browse.
I realise that I'm writing in a board game-manual style, and I'm not sure if it's laid out clearly enough.

Spoiler: Loooots of text (click to show/hide)

1.Senate

1.1.General information.
The Republic is governed by representatives of various rich and influential families, called Senators. The place where the senators gather to decide the fate of the Republic through voting is called the Senate.
Players represent families or factions, who faced with the dangers of alien emergence and the Republic's decadence, posses the will to challenge the old status quo and carve a new, stronger political entity: an Empire.
The Senate is located on a "Capitol Planet"(to be named later), where the Senators gather for voting sessions.

1.2.Composition of the Senate.
The size of the Senate is variable, depending on the number of players.

Each player begins the game with one senator, as well as some "nobles" who can replace the current senator in the case of his/her death.
There is an additional number of independent(neutral) senators, equal to the number of players at the start of the game(or equal-1, for uneven total votes).
I.e.50% votes starts neutral.
Each senator, be it player or neutral, owns(governs) a planet or a province of the Republic.
The starting map is generated to accomodate senators, according to the initial number of players.
I.e. 5 player game would require 10 planets, or ten provinces(either on the "Capitol Planet" or, alternatively, on planet(s) surrounding the Capitol), each housing one of the senators.

[The game would need to be able to generate the galaxy map accordingly, I sure as hell don't know how hard would it be. The planet or province per player needs to be decided according to the required scale of the galaxy. It would be neat if there was an option to choose between these - or maybe even how many provinces per player, and let the game distribute these according to the proximity to Capitol.]

1.3.Senators.
Heads of the Republic's influential families, who have a right to vote in the Senate.
Each one posseses a strenght of 1 vote.
There are two types of senators: Player-controlled and Unaligned(neutral).

1.3.1.Player senators.
Through them, each player can present a notion to be voted on during the next voting session(initial assumption: every 4-5 turns).

1.3.2.Neutral senators.
These fellas, as long as they remain unaligned, will either abstain from voting, or vote for specific resolutions, depending on triggers.
E.g. will always vote against declaring a faction "enemy of the state", unless it's rebelled(refused to give up the Army command, attacked another faction without permission), in which case they'll always vote FOR.

In general, they will not present any notions for voting, with an exception of declaring a rebelling faction "enemy".

1.3.2.1.Influencing a neutral senator.
For each of the unaligned senators, there exists an allegiance track:

[ U]naligned<->[ I]nfluenced<->[F]riendly->[A]llied

The track is divided into a number of "ticks", each representing a "gold piece" spent, with each consecutive level of allegiance requiring twice as high an investment to reach.

(e.g.: each '.' is one gp.
unaligned ..... influenced .......... friendly .................... allied)

Each level of allegiance changes the neutral senator's default voting choice on a variety of options.
E.g. an unaligned senator would abstain from voting on anyone to become a general of one of the Republic's armies, while "Friendly" senator would vote according to his "friend's" choice.

A senator can be aligned to only one faction.

Should more players than one invest in a single senator, the highest amount minus the next highest is used to either raise or decrease allegiance level.
E.g. players 1,2 and 3 try to bribe a senator X, who is "friendly" to p1. p1 invests 10gp, p2 - 20, p3 - 15. The effective investment is 5gp(20 of p2's -15 of p3's), which is used to lower allegiance level for player 1.

1.3.2.2.Changing allegiance.
As the game progresses, the independent senators can be influenced(bribed) and upon reaching "Allied" status, join the player's faction, allowing their new controller to interact with their provinces and armies.(the unit's and provinces ownership technically remains tied to the Allied senator)
Once in the same faction, only asassination(or, a special event of sorts?) could remove the allegiance.

1.3.3.Asassinations.
A senator who has been asassinated, and the asassin's identity undiscovered, is replaced with an unaligned senator, effectively removing the control of his possesions from the player.
Should the asassin be discovered, the new senator will have exactly the same level of allegiance as the previous one.
An exception is the original player's senator, who gets replaced with another family member(a noble).

A discovered faction's asassin leads to all neutral senators influenced by this faction, except for "allied" ones, to become unaligned again(the player loses all investment).

After a neutral senator is asassinated, or otherwise killed, it takes two turns until the replacement arrives.
E.g. t1 - asassination, t2 - seat vacant, t3 - replacement arrives.
As the voting sessions are likely to take place in between the turns, the above would mean that there would be two possible voting sessions during which there would be no replacement ready - at the end of t1, as well as at the end of t2.

Player senators must be replaced by one of the nobles getting shipped to the Capital. The seat remains vacant until then. (more nobles can be staying on the Capital for that purpose)

1.3.4.Generals.
Each and every army needs to be led by a noble or a senator assuming the role of a general.
A player's senator or allied senator can be chosen(voted on) to lead a Republic's army.
Faction's own troops can be led by any of the Nobles, including the senator.
A senator leading an army cannot vote.

This places a limit on the number of Republic's armies that can be led, equal to the total number of senators's seats in game.

1.3.4.1.Rebellions.
Any general leading the Republic's army can refuse the Senate's order to hand down an army command. In such case, as long as a single non-allied neutral senator is present, he puts up a notion of "declaration of the enemy of the state" for voting during the next session.
Any faction attacking non-enemy, will be marked as a rebel, and the above rule applies as well.
Enemy of the state faction cannot use their own, or their allied senators' votes - they're barred from entering the senate. They can still use diplomacy and influence neutral senators(but not to the 'allied' status) to get their status revoked.

[There might be additional penalties involved, like a loss of some influence the rebel had investen in non-allied senators]

1.4.Voting
Initially, let's assume that any notion needs over 50% of votes cast(not including abstained) to be passed.
Whenever somebody proposes to vote on something, the game should inform all the players of the fact, allowing them to cast votes according to their will. Players failing to specify their choice would automatically cast an "abstain" vote.
Due to the simultainous nature of the game, the voting needs to take place in between turns. For the same reason, there is a one turn delay between proposing a notion and casting a vote.
e.g. t1 - p1 proposes to vote on X; t2 - the game informs all the players of the proposition, who then cast their votes; at the end of turn 2 the votes are calculated; t3 - the results are presented.
Alternatively, to prevent spamming of propositions, votings always take place every 4-5 turns(or more), with players required to propose their notions no later than a turn before the scheduled session.

1.4.1.Voting options.
Let's consider a few:

- "Raise the contributions to the Republic's coffers." Forces all factions to contribute a specified amount of cash each "period", whatever that is - could be every turn, otherwise the Republic's army upkeep might get difficult to balance.
The [ U]naligned vote: abstain, the [ I]nfluenced and higher vote as their patrons.

- "Raise another army to defend the Republic." By default there will be just one, two, or some formula which ties the number of starting armies to the number of players. Having more armies will mean that more senators will be able to command one of these. Also, another army at home will be able to counter any potentially rebellious commanders.
Neutrals vote same as the above.

- "Prepare an expedition." Each player specifies a senator he wishes to become the general. All [ U] abstain, all [ I] and higher vote as the influencing player. Three options for voting here: "Choose senator X", "abstain", and "Keep the army at home". The senator with the most votes is chosen. Unless he received less votes than "keep the army at home" did, in which case nothing happens.

- "Revoke command." Generals keep their positions as an army commander for as long as this notion isn't passed. All [ I] and higher vote as their factions, all [ U] abstain.

- "Declare enemy of the state." As mentioned earlier, gives the rest of players a permission to attack the faction without negative consequences(i.e.without becoming a "rebel"). All non-allied neutrals vote against. Exception: when a rebel emerges, all non-allied vote for. In such case an emergency voting session is called, regardless of the sessions schedule.

- "Revoke the stigma(couldn't find a good name)." Cancels the above. [ U] vote against; [ I] absta in; [F]riendly vote as their factions(including the branded one). The faction itself, including their [A]llied senators cannot vote, as they're banned from the senate.

- "Grant governorship." The lands conquered by an army are initially governed by the General and his faction. After his army command is revoked, he keeps his conquests under governorship, unless this notion is used to select a new one. [ U], [ I] abstain. [F] and [A] vote as their factions.

1.5.Consuls

[I'm not sure if to include them at all. All of the above points omitted any notion of consularship. The reason against is: the senate might be already too complicated without them; for - being elected a "consul for life" would be a way of winning the game. Right now, without consuls, I'm not sure what could substitute for winning condition.]

The following modifies all of the above where applicable.

The Senate is led by two Consuls, elected each 4-5 turns(each voting session).

Each consul has the right to veto any piece of legislation the senate tries to pass.

Each consul's vote count as double.

Consuls can lead armies, just like the regular senators.

1.5.1 Winning.
A consul can be elected "(cool name-insert here)" (called a'pretender' from now on), as long as 2/3 of voters are FOR. The other consul can veto this, unless he's away with an army or killed.
If passed, all players who voted FOR, and all unaligned senators(i.e. not Allied) have their forces and provinces transferred to the pretender.
All other factions are declared "enemy of the state". Further senate sessions are suspended.
The game enters a state of total war, with either opposition ending up eliminated by the pretender's forces, or the pretender being killed - at which point the game returns to the state from before the coup. The now-deceased pretender's faction becomes neutral.

[additional rule to consider: if at the time when the game would declare pretender a winner there is more alien owned provinces in the galaxy than provinces in the Republic(now Empire), the game is considered lost. The new Empire proves to be too weak to stand ground against the invading aliens.
This assumes that there will be some sort of aggressinve aliens in game]



Other thoughts:
Consider a mechanism to be implemented: whenever a human player decides to leave the game, his senator and posessions become unaligned, and can be influenced just like the other neutral senators. Also, should an additional player want to join the game during it's run, he could take over one of the neutral factions.

[Lap]

I haven't noticed you've been updating the files at googledocs - it still says "last updated on may 6th" or something like that. My bad for posting redundant information then.

Haven't updated it in some time, but it was still in there somewhere, not that I blame you; those things are huge.

The new system for building:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I had to take a step forward and just pick something so I went with what would be easiest for me to code and for players to understand. It's not so core that it can't be changed, but something needed to fill the hole so actual testing can begin. I choose a system probably most similar to GalCiv 2. Each region has a certain amount of space to build buildings. This is currently determined solely by the tokens on a province. So all provinces have the same base X amount of space that is then reduced by things like mountains or swamp. The last few blocks of each region begin to require more money to utilize. So if you have a province that is 7/9, the 8th slot will cost you maybe 5000 gold extra and the 9th slot will cost 10000 gold extra. I could switch it to being the last 33% instead of being the last X squares. We'll have to see how it plays out.

In this way it is possible for someone to make a mountain province a city, but it will be more expensive and probably still a little less of a money farm than a metropolis on plains (to compensate the mountains would have way better defense and probably more production).

How money is gained still hasn't been decided yet. Whether buildings will hinder the overall amount of production is also undecided. The current block system can allow for any mixture of previously suggested ideas to work out and none should be hard to implement.

I do kind of want to avoid having to attend to the building needs of every single province all the time. I would rather players occasionally build a new building somewhere instead of trying to keep every province constructing a building at all times. There's a lot less micro this way and a lot less mindlessly queuing up the same build orders you do for every similar province.

Resources:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've been thinking about the amount of resources and how they are accessed by the players. By almost any strategy game's standards I would say there are a lot of resources. The tooltip system I'm working on resembles the old efs way of doing things (good tooltips like these were especially rare back in the day).



With a simple hover over you know how much your producing/consuming here and galaxy wide, what the resource is used for and exactly how it is created.

I also know that some people will absolutely hate moving around resources so I think I'm going to make it easy on everyone at let any not blockaded planet automatically share with any other with a starport. This way you can still cut off people's resources, but no one has to fiddle around with manually moving stuff if they don't want to. If it's too simple, it won't be too hard to add some trade ships you have to invest in that automatically abstract this job, but still require you to spend money on it.

Tons more coding got done. The mutiplayer is fully functioning, which was by far the biggest feat yet. The actual seperation between client and server data and the transfer between them is the foundation of the game and it prevents cheating. This was a HUGE step.

It isn't fully featured yet. It transfers data perfectly and can accept an essentially infinite number of players. There's nothing preventing the engine from literally having 100 people playing the game simultaneously on the server I have running right now. Each player claims a faction, makes up a password and begins playing. If the server desires, players can even play multiple factions at once.

The main missing feature is that I haven't completed the scheduler. Hosts are going to be able to determine when their servers process turns. So if you only want your server to process turns every 10 minutes on Friday and Saturday between 8:00pm and 9:00pm you can. By being able to save/load and determine when turns are processed we solve the main problem with these long multiplayer games.

Some other stuff that I've recently implemented:

-Combat Logs (soon to come, combat animations to "play" the combat log for you)
-Better scrollable text boxes for large amounts of text
-Extensive tooltips for units.
-Basic Fog of War
-Basic Building Construction
-Second and third tier resources
-Harvesting/Production estimates
-Estimates of enemy armies (not shown in below screenshot. Need a visual way to represent the size/strength)
-World switching. You can now switch to the galaxy map and then move to any other planet with a double click!

The whole UI is able to support user skins so if you don't like the colors you can change them. I haven't tooled around with any colors at all and am using a generic black and white. I believe I can even support textured backgrounds for the UI, so there are a lot of ways to make it not so plain and boring.

***SCREENSHOT ALERT***

Here's a screenshot of me looking at an army and examining a unit:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In this pic you can see:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-The basic window structure for the army selection window (the box to the middle left). This is currently the ugliest due to the black background on that picture. Basically for each army in a region, another box will be there that will have the name of the army, a picture of the general unit and an indication of which army(ies) you have selected (by darkening the button).

-I implemented nameplates for all the regions so that the text would be readable even if the background was pure black. These nameplates will probably be colored according to who owns each province.

-North America is highlighted. The current highlighting just draws a circle around the area and I can't think of a much better way to depict this selection.

-The little unit icon next to North America is a placeholder to indicate that the region contains an army. I am looking for a better way to represent what kind and how many armies are in each friendly province and am open to suggestion.

-The red arrow indicates the selected army will attack Central America next turn. You can toggle a button to see all orders at once.

-The army examiner is the biggest window. I'll put a title in here or something and not have it be so big for small armies. The purpose of this window is to rearrange units into, out of, and in between armies. It's not finished, but I'd like for each army in a province to have their own little section and you will be able to drag and drop units into different armies here. You can also see the health of each unit at a glance by the red health bar.

-The window above shows the unit stats and has a place that will be filled with a unit description and any help about the unit as well as possibly including the production cost. I might leave this more for the actual production window, which isn't very fleshed out at the moment.

-The small window you see at the top is a tooltip window that appears when you mouse over any of the stats. There are a lot of stats and players need to be able to quickly know what they represent.

-The two smallest buttons in the top right represent the incoming message button. Each of these buttons will have their own little icon. Left click zooms you to the province in question as well as brings up any choices you need to make. Mousing over them tells the jist of the message and right clicking them removes them. They slide up with a nice animation and will fill in gaps as you delete messages.

-Lastly we see the stockpiles window on the bottom. None of the resources are finalized and right now they are all using the old efs placeholder graphics. It shows the amount of resources that are available to any given province and you can mouseover to see the resource tooltip, which is similar to the screenshot previously shown. This also has a nice animation as it slides up and can just as easily be hidden away.

As we get closer to the content addition stage I realized that I'll soon be needing a lot of sprites. There's not that many good futuristic sprites out there and I can't count on just ripping all the graphics from other games.

If anyone out there can draw or knows someone who can please let me know.

Holy mother of wtf that's a lot of text Il Palazzo. Who writes that much!? *looks up* Oh right. I need to post this before my browser crashes or something and I cry, but I'll read it over now.

[Il Palazzo]

(Screenshot broken. Doesn't load for me.)

The simplified building system looks good. The one I've proposed before was going nowhere, I admit.
I'd say skip the reduction of production outputs with increasing number of buildings altogether. It makes little sense in this scale.

I'm not so sure about the resources being shared between planets automatically. It's going to look weird when you need ten turns to move your fleet to the border zones, while all your resources are already there.
On the other hand, it'll be an interesting mechanics in some ways. A player will "raise" an army on a chosen planet(there's always enough recruits to be found on a whole planet), instead of shipping bits and pieces around the galaxy.
For most intents and purposes, resources will act as money, allowing "purchasing" of armies.

Perhaps raising an army could take one turn only, regardless of size and composition(except for spaceships)?
A player would chose the commander, a province with correct infrastructure(fort for infantry units, factory for armour-types), pay the required amount of resources and the next turn an army would be ready.

[mainiac]

I think there is a very simple way you could make your pooled resources unless blockaded system involve transports.  When you pay for a unit you pay it's resource cost and you pay it's transport cost, the transport cost being the number of merchant vessels you have to commit for a turn to transporting any resources gathered off world.

An interesting effect of this is that if you balance the game accordingly, it could make a system that supports you making advanced units in central locations and making cannon fodder in the boonies.  You could balance it so that advanced units use small amounts of expensive resources (made on different planet types), which it makes sense to ship to advanced production sites before building units.  Lowly troopers on the other hand would use large amounts of crude resources (which can be found on the same planet), meaning that it makes sense to build the training facility where the resources are.

It could even be refined into a multi-tiered system:
Provincial: made from bulk resources, probably all on-world; representing local levies
Core: made from bulk resources, probably all on world, but also requiring a small amount of advanced resources, such as might be shipped; representing professional troops
Advanced: made from small amounts of diverse, valuable resources, probably not found on same world; representing small, high tech cadres

[Lap]

I haven't done anything to the post, but a page refresh still shows the screenshot isn't broken.

I haven't implemented any interplanetary resource sharing yet and I'm going to hold off on the idea until I have more time to think about it. I really don't like the side effect that was brought up. That side effect being that it would allow you to build elite units that require rare resources at almost any location in your empire.

There should be distinct differences between border planets and central worlds. Using resources as money kinda seems silly considering we already have money, so I'm just going to try to brainstorm some more solutions here.

-Some sort of trickle system where resource slowly become available to other distant worlds.
-An system where X % of resources are shared to nearby worlds.
-Some sort of expensive production facilities that build more advanced units.
-A system where you can manually send any resources you want through a menu. The resources "disappear" and take X turns to magically arrive based on distance. If the destination planet is blockaded you are given a choice of whether to turn back or try to take losses breaking the blockade. Maybe there would even be a chance to lose some resources randomly to pirates.
-Exact same micro intensive manual loading/unloading as in EFS.
-Some sort of way to create trade routes that queue up movement and loading/unloading orders. These still tend to be pretty micro intensive in games I see them in.
-Resource system as suggested by maniac.

I really don't mind moving around a single transport fleet every so often, but I want to avoid having to micro so many so often. In EFS the transports held enough that one of them could usually support 3 or so planets, but it still required moving it every turn.

Maniac's idea has some merit. One thing I wonder is how it would be possible to lose merchant vessels so they don't just build up infinitely? Maybe this infinite build up isn't so bad because they are expensive or something. Would this system impose any delays to account for resources being transported or would the resources instantly be transferred/deducted. I'm open to this idea, but it needs to be fleshed out more.

A problem with the trickle or spreading resource ideas is that they still give border worlds access to some really rare resources and it might be silly to see a super hyper mega fusion robots coming out of the boonies. Currently, the only thing that determines what units you can build is your tech and resources. I haven't thought too much about requiring advanced factories and such. It's the obvious choice that a lot of games choose, but I don't want to choose that method just because it is popular. I'm not against them, I just want to see all the options.

[mainiac]

I personally favor advanced factories for this game.  There's a strategic trade off because they use up a valuable build spot and because it sounds like construction is a biggish investment.  It fits the setting to have some places hyper advanced and specialized while other places are primitive.

[Il Palazzo]

I personally favor advanced factories for this game.  There's a strategic trade off because they use up a valuable build spot and because it sounds like construction is a biggish investment.  It fits the setting to have some places hyper advanced and specialized while other places are primitive.

Plus, when combined with resources being automatically available on a galactic scale, the players will still need to ship the more advanced troops from more developed regions to the frontier-y ones. If those factories will be expensive, it's unlikely that anyone will put them on outer - more vulnerable planets, just so that he can save a couple turns on troops shipping, neither will anyone waste money on spamming advanced factories on every planet he controls. This way the frontier worlds will be easily able to draft low level troops(build a barracks and you can levy as much militia or basic infantry as the resources let you). Also, blockading a well-developed planet, with high-tech infrastructure would have a sensibly grave effect on it's capacity to churn out tanks and whatnot.

In short, I like the idea too, especially when combined with the galactic resource availability.

As for my slightly overdetailed post on politics, since noone seems to be willing to comment, I assume it was too long/detailed to read/comprehend. Here's a summarized form:

In general, I envision the political side of the game to be the main money sink. Players would have to balance planetary development(expensive to very expensive buildings), house army upkeep(very high troop upkeep cost), duties to the republic(medium-sized contributions to the Republic's coffers, but growing with time) and manipulation of non-player senators(the more invested, the higher chance of success).

I'd like money not to be almost useless commodity, like in EoFS, but be the basis of Player's power.

The main way of getting rich would be to be given one of the Republic's armies to command. Those armies would be built and maintained from the compulsory contributions from all the players, so they could be much stronger than the faction's own.

Players would either make deals among themselves(non-enforced, just the general reputation among other players would be at the stake when deciding to break any agreement), or spend money to "convert" some of the neutral senators to back them up.

Those neutral senators could be "fully converted", i.e. enter "allied" status, which would effectively let the player control associated provinces and troops, as well as gather taxes etc.

The neutral senators would be a representation of all those parts and population of the Republic which are not controlled by players, and so, most of the rules concerning the senate would focus on governing the non-player senators' reactions to player actions.
In other words, the neutral senators would be the general will of the Republic. SPQR and stuff.

Players would be able to interact freely between themselves, making generally unrestricted deals(so the game should be able to facilitate exchange of ANY commodity - from cash to technology to whole planets and units), while the non-player part of the senate would present some much needed resistance to some more radical player behaviour(like resisting declaration of enemy of the state on non-rebelious factions).

The reasonin behind making the political this complex, instead of simply allowing war/peace/alliance/vote for ministry command, as in EoFS, is that having more important, while limited goods to fight for(army command, governorships, senator's allegiance), as well as more ways to pressure other players, and subvert their actions, is more conductive to sparking conflicts, crazy deals and betrayals and backstabbing, which is the best fun there is. Otherwise you'll get just a total war between factions, either with armies or economical.

With the Senate system, players can rise to power, but can be easilly toppled. Players can easily lose their leading position, but are hardly ever removed from game, or denied the ability to influence the events, and eventually regain their status.

Also, a small note re.money.
I'd like to see small denominations. No 5000gp per building constructed, more like 50. 2+ gp upkeep per unit. 100gp to convert a neutral senator, 25-50gp income per planet, etc.
Of course, we'd name it appropriately, instead of credits or gold pieces. Talents or somesuch.

(this is could use tl;dr itself. Anyway, some feedback?)

[E. Albright]

Il Palazzo:

I fear to admit I TL;DR'd your political outline, but I've very limited net access at the moment. Can I safely say that neutral Senators would be behaving/influenced a lot like, well, neutral Senators in that other much-beloved Holistic Studios game, Merchant Prince?