Help me design a strategy game

Cafe Society
21

Customization and personalization. Don’t force me to play under a certain name or identity. One of my pet faves of the Civ series is the ability to create my own culture. I get a kick out of naming things. It involves me in the game more when I can play as the Deadheads, rather than the Persians.

Another thing I’ve liked about the Civ series, is the ability to attempt to live by a moral code that I’ve set up, not that’s been imposed on me by the parameters of the game. I play Civ as a peace loving country, I don’t start wars, I focus on culture rather than power, etc. There are advantages to this, and disadvantages. If you go to the trouble of having a trade or diplomatic system, don’t make victory only possible (or easiest) through military means.

Having said that, if you could create a need for military tactics, that would be quite cool. I mean, instead of pressing the correct arrow key over and over again to attack their units, it would be neat if flanking maneuvers, or something like that could have an effect.

And galleys should NEVER EVER be able to destroy a Battleship, no matter how much damage the battleship has taken in a previous fight.

Count me as another beta tester!

22

As long as you get the AI to handle most of the course setting, I don’t see why orbital dynamics should cause too much trouble. You can set the destination, select a preference for fuel usage/time, set some points you want to pass through if neccesary and the computer can handle the rest. Still, if you don’t want to deal with that can you at least make them accelerate/decellerate properly, even if they ignore gravity for the most part?

I’ve been brainstorming with my brother, and here’s what we’ve come up with:

When you build something, you need two things: Resources and parts. You should be able to tell the AI to requisition the appropriate parts if you have them, or the capability to construct them, but otherwise you must get the parts some other way. To start with you you would have a fair supply of parts, but not much ability to create new ones. As parts and devices are used, they suffer from wear and tear and will have to be repaired or replaced to avoid decreased performance and higher chances of failure; a repaired part will never be as good as new, but will at least function without exploding. As the game goes on a priority should be to develop the ability to create parts, or at least to form trade alliances so that you have a guaranteed supply of those you need.

When you build ships you can have pre-built designs, but they can also be customised to fit needs and availability - e.g. if your standard miner needs a fusion drive, but you’re all out of those, you can substitute an ion drive for it with some extra fuel tanks to make up for it. Every time you build a new design it goes into your database until you choose to remove it.

You do not neccesarily research specific technologies. You research in a general area (biotech, high energy physics, whatever) and this will come up with a concept, which you can then devote research into developing. Also, research is not a global thing - you have to build (specialised) labs, and assign research to specific labs. The AI would be able to handle things on the lab level if you wished, but you probably wouldn’t need to do that for a while - you wouldn’t have any labs to start with, and after that you would probably keep a small number until you got more important issues out of the way.

There would be a variety of resources. The tentative list, which probably needs a lot of editing, we came up with were as follows:

Light metals, such as aluminium. Needed for the bulk of ship construction.

Heavy metals: Needed for sturdier devices, armour, reactors, etc.

Radioactives: Needed to make RTGs, nuclear reactors, atomic weapons, etc. Neccesary for early deepspace power sources.

Light elements: Carbon, sulphur, silicon, etc. Needed for organics and a lot of complicated electronics and devices. Particularily solar panels.

Exotics: Generic rare elements, used for more complicated electronics.

Organics: Generic hydrocarbons, sugars, etc. Needed for rocket fuel, hydroponics, etc. Can be produced by recycling organic waste from the population, or processed from light elements.

Volatiles: Water, solid carbon dioxide, etc. Mostly used as reaction mass and as a base for hydroponics and life support.

Food: I think this is fairly self explanatory.

I thought of an elaboration on my original idea of keeping track of individuals. The computer would store all the individuals under your command (which would be a reasonably small number), with some basic statistics - age, gender, intelligence, physical fitness, training in various fields. You wouldn’t be able to access this list directly, but you could ask the computer to come up with a group of people subject to various criteria and it would draw from this pool. If you like a particular person’s stats/skills you could then allocate a name to him/her and be able to call him/her up for later missions.

Rather than building specific educational institutions, if you want to train someone the information would be in the habitat databases. You can then instruct the computer that you want people to be educated in physics, or whatever, and it will sort that out.

I think that planets probably shouldn’t be usable - it would change the feel of the game a lot. You might be able to trade with them, or establish small bases on them, but they should probably not be inhabitable - gives you too many resources to play with.

One tentative idea I thought of is why not have yourself represented by an actual person in the game? You could send yourself on missions, etc. and a priority would be to keep your character alive else you lose. After a point this would require you to research longevity, upload yourself to an AI or something of that nature. Just a thought, one which I’m not too sure about.

I’ll second the request for customizability. It’s a very important feature if you want your game to have replayability.

In terms of strategy, I reccomend it would be in the form of giving pilots certain orders and letting the AI handle it. Things like “Be agressive”, “hang back and support this ship”, etc. Strategy within actual combat is difficult to implement in multiplayer. Besides which, if you’re going for realism it’s not that neccesary - most fights will be two ships passing eachother at high speed and offloading as much firepower as they can at the other before they’re out of range. (To then be supported by a salvage mission on the destroyed ship).

As you can probably tell I like coming up with ideas. :slight_smile: If you’re looking for an official think-tank for the game, I’d love to volunteer.

23

Is the setting decided already, then?

Because what I’d really really really like is a post-nuclear strategy game. Playing as the leader of a little community and trying to survive in harsh environment. Sort of like Fallout, but a strategy game, not a FPS. Gameplay would be something between Civilization and Kings of Dragon Pass - in other words, there’s heavy emphasis on story, characters in your community and all kinds of random events to spice up the game. Discover new communities, deal with raiders and mutants, explore decaying cities. Yeah.

24

Umm…

How about the part right after that where you seconded a non-military win option? Or the many mentions of factions? Or the mentions of diplomacy? Technology trees? Resource collection? Grouping military units? Automating certain functions of units? The AI’s “scriptable hierarchical fuzzy state machine”? Other factions making war on each other?

All in A.C.
The setting’s in the future in space. The only difference is that in AC, you’re on a planet, and you colonize it instead of different asteroids or whatever. That does add a new and interesting dimesion, but I was only pointing out that there already is a game that’s based in space in the future and that has many of the features that people say they want to see, not that a new good one couldn’t be made.

25

Umm, ok. You play it on a computer as well, so there’s another huge similarity.

What you seem to be saying is that we’re talking about a science fiction strategy game, so we’re basically talking about alpha centauri - all of the similarities you’ve mentioned are pretty common features of strategy games.

Even were the only difference that alpha centauri is set on a planet and this isn’t, that’s an unimaginably huge difference. It changes the game almost completely.

26

I haven’t played many strategy games, let alone science fiction strategy games. I assumed since people were asking that these features be included, they were either ones that people had thought up that might work well, or they were ones that stood out in another game someone had played.

I didn’t assume that people would name qualities that were in every run-of-the-mill sci-fi strategy game. My bad.

I’ll concede the point that since this isn’t set on a planet it’d be different. I’d definitely love to see a game with the orbital dynamics, mobile colonies, etc.

Random game feature thingy: Don’t have enough fuel to get to a planet or asteroid? If you include orbital dynamics, the planet or asteroid could conceivably be closer to you next turn. Either that or maybe you could try a slingshot maneuver (one thing NASA looks at when planning a shot for the far planets or outside the solar system. Also a way that the Apollo missions that didn’t land on the moon conserved fuel, I believe).

27

I don’t think people were really saying ‘include these features’, more ‘you need to pay special attention to this area because it’s often not done very well’. It’s what I meant at any rate. Certainly technology trees are very common, and diplomacy is almost always found in some form or another. The others are also pretty common, if not entirely standard.

By the way, I may have overdone the sarcasm in my previous posts. If you were offended, I’m sorry. I have a tendency to do that at times.

I agree the slingshots and varying positions of habitats could be very interesting. The problem is that it could also get quite complicated in game… It would probably be a good idea to let the AI handle it automatically when you try to plot a course, although if you can ask it to slingshot of particular planets/asteroids it would be helpful. Although I don’t know if an asteroid has enough mass for a slingshot… I’ll have to check that.

Maybe you should have an observatory screen, in which you can zoom forward to see where habitats, etc will be on future turns?

Another idea I forgot to include in my previous post - sensors. Sensors shouldn’t be perfectly accurate - they should give a rough estimate and an expected error, the error increasing as the distance increases. I was thinking that you would have specialised sensors. Basic ones would be radar and optical. Radar would give you size, position and velocity to a reasonable degree of accuracy. Optical would give you more information - a rough idea of components, etc. but the accuracy would drop off much faster with range. You could add improved telescopes, imaging lasers, mass sensors, etc. as your technology and engineering improved.

Also communications are important. Because the time scales would probably be reasonably long (maybe a month per turn), the quality of communications probably doesn’t matter too much, so you could just assign a range to them. However for certain purposes - e.g. sharing research between different habitats - you would need a higher quality communication. So perhaps each communication array would have a quality associated with it, representing bandwidth and error loss, and you’d need a certain quality of communication for various purposes? Quality would presumably drop off with distance depending on the communication system involved. Actually that would probably be a better way to handle communication with ships - they can’t recieve orders or send information if the quality drops below a certain level.

28

Speaking in general terms, a good strategy game is simple. Consider the board game Go, which is really the ultimate in strategy game. The whole thing is abstracted out, all pieces are equal, and there are three rules to the game. Yet it is deep.

I forgot who said this:

I think the word is “orthogonal.” Take a few rules and make they work everywhere in the game. Make no special rules, exceptions, and such. That’s why <em>AD&D</em> (at least the first edition) is a poor RPG system, because it is filled with special rules and exceptions. <em>Champions</em>, on the other hand, is much better. it is cleaner, simpler, and more elegant.

Along the same lines, <em>SMAC</em>'s unit workshop is better than the multitude of units in <em>Civ 3</em>, and that’s why <em>MoO</em> is better than <em>MoO 2</em>.

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I think that this thread on video game development should be put in Cafe Society.

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Step #1

All research should be a chancy thing. No one is assured of getting discovery “X” by spending “Y” amount of time and “Z” amount of money. You may (and probably will) pass by several cool and useful discoveries and may pick up some nice ones other people have.

There is a tech tree of sorts, but only in the sense that you need basic prerequisite technologies. You do not always go from A to B to C, however. You mgiht find C fist, then purchase B from someone, and then later on notice someone else has technology A, and then develop it.

I have divided it into the Pre-Science and Post-Science section. However, remember that the difference is one of vast cultural change. In other words, the scientific revolution was not assured, and so you may not want to take this route. Mankind did pretty well for all of history leading up to that. In both this style and the folowing one, nearby cultures with which you have trade links improves your chance of sharing technology - you might accidentally pick up his technologies, or he yours. Also, your philosophers can more easily borrow other cultures’ ideas than they might develop them.

Primitive Era-> Age of Enlightenment

Simple: You have a culture score. This score is an element that grants random discoveries. Include all sorts of Philosophy in this. In fact, I’d say that philosophy and religion might be most of the thing.

Modern Era->Futuristic Eras technology
Offer the player the ability to buy various cultural traits.

I suggest you do away with traditional tech trees. Instead, have monetary allocations to University (Pure Science) study, Corporate-Military research, and Public Medical Research. Of the three, Unversity offers the most long-term bonuses, but is not very usefull. All it does is come up with nifty ideas. You get a pretty picture and “WOW! YOUR SCIENTISTS LEARNED ABOUT QUANTUM FLUX SUBSPACE WPRMHOLE THEORY!” Make sure to include many social theories (which may grant you useful things to build or programs to implement - in the game, the distinction between program and building is arbitrary).

There are also several other science fields, but you can’t directly give them money. These include Corporate-Engineering, Corporate-Coputing, and Corporate-Materials Science, Private-Medical, and WildCard-Anything. The first three (Corporate) are raised by having a strong economy and reasonable taxes. Certain traits (that support economy) have a strong effect on this. Private-Medical is supprted by having a strong economy and not having socialized Medicine. :slight_smile:

WildCard is a real mystery. Players with a strong WildCard score will find themselves picking up a bunch of random, but often useful applied technologies, or, more rarely, pure science discoveries. “Lucky” traits will add to this score. Science-oriented traits will add to this score. Having a strong economy will add to this score. But mostly, it comes down to chance. This score basically changes every so often.

Depending on your own tastes, you can create a philosophical tech line for the mdoern era play. This should take a few of the cultural traits you’ve chosen, check what stuff you learned in the primitive era, and select some philosophical ideas that roughly fit them. The culture can change, too, but you can’t really predict how. Certain basic numbers affect it: constantly fighting defensive wars tends to produce paranoid, racist cultures. Conquering territories and forcing them to bow to your will creates aggressive, racist cutlures. And so forth.

31

I beg to differ, for two reasons. What you say is definitely true in board games - As you say, Go is a wonderful game (which I happen to be pathetic at, but that’s a seperate issue. :)).

The problem is that you don’t want a computer game to be that deep, as you should be able to play casually withotu having to devote vast amounts of mental resources to play. I’m not saying that joe idiot should be able to play after a couple pints of beer, but you shouldn’t need to be super alert and of naturally high intellect to play a strategy game (maybe to master it, but that’s a seperate issue).

So, if we don’t want a game to be too deep then simplicity rapidly becomes boring. It doesn’t need to be bursting to the seams with details and gizmos, but you have to get variety in somewhere; complexity is a good way to achieve that.

Secondly, the reason that good board games are simple is that they allow you to focus on the strategy, not the mechanics. For a computer game you have a computer to deal with the mechanics for you, so you don’t have to (for example) calculate the orbital path of your space ship by hand.

Certainly you don’t want your game to be unwieldy, but a better way to achieve that is to come up with lots of ideas and trim it down. Possibly more work for the programmers, but hey - I’m not doing it. :wink: No, seriously. It helps to have an excess of ideas to start with, because it lets you see how things fit together and gives inspiration for ways of making things work, even if a lot of the ideas don’t make it to the end result.

Actually, orthogonal means ‘at right angles to’. Are you sure you don’t mean minimal?

That I can agree with. Being able to design things from a smallish number of basic principles is better than having big lists of things, and rules should be universal; but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of rules. :slight_smile:

By the way, what are the <em> tags supposed to be?

32

You should check out Europa Universalis II. I think the general game mechanics there might suit orbital dynamics better. Instead of turn-based, it is real-time. But it is completely different than what is generally called Real-time strategy.

I’d love to see a game where every object realistically orbits the sun, and every moon realistically orbits its primary, and every spaceship follows orbital mechanics. But the player shouldn’t have to plan burns and such, that should be taken care of by the computer in its role as navigator for a ship. You select the ship, then click the destination. The navigator should plot a course and tell you how long it will take to reach the destination, or tell you that you don’t have enough delta-v, or that your life support will run out.

The game should be real-time, but with the flow of time controllable…you can set it within the game so that 1 minute=1 day, 1 week, 1 month or one year, so that you can crank down the flow of time to handle battles, but you can also set up a long-term program and have it chug to conclusion quickly.

On the setting, planets should be colonizable, but the trouble with planets is the huge amount of delta-v required to get up out of the gravity well. And fleets above the gravity well have a huge advantage over planetary forces, it should be easy to drop an asteroid on a planetary colony if you have local space-superiority.

Another thing. I always hate technology trees where everyone develops the same things. Make players make choices in technology. If you develop higher impulse rocket engines, you aren’t going to be able to spend time researching genetic engineering, or computers, or lasers.

Also, I’d really like it if you kept to semi-realistic rocket technology. If you allow ships to fly around with unlimited delta-v you are going to have a very different game than if delta-v is the key limitation. Limited delta-v means that wars have to be planned, you can’t just launch from Mercury with a fleet and bombard Pluto next week, you have to plan transfer orbits that might take years, you have to have supplies, etc, the game scale might be hundreds of years rather than dozens.

Every faction should be different, not because of inherent values given at the start of the scenario, but because of choices that they make during the game. Factions could be differentiated at first by goals…ie the Neo-Maoists are aggressive and want to develop military technology, but they shouldn’t get a hard-coded ability to develop military technology more easily. If you have social settings, the Neo-maoists shouldn’t get +2 on cohesiveness, they should simply choose to position their society at a certain point on a sliding scale.

All in all, I think EU II might be a better template than Civ. The scope and themes of the games are very similar, but the mechanics of EU might be more in line with what you are looking for.

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Sorry for not getting back to you earlier. Work is suddenly taking up a lot of my time.

I just wanted to thank you for all your input. I’ll let you know when we got something worth showing.

Back to work :).