Tom_Holsinger -> DW2 - New Concepts (5/29/2014 11:37:23 PM)
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This thread concerns proposed major concept and emphasis changes for the remake of Distant Worlds – DW2. Details such as interface ideas should be limited to “how-to” implementations of the new stuff. And I haven’t played any version of DW yet – I first heard of it about two months ago, and got DWU working only last night. I have read a lot of the DW threads on this forum. My priority request for DW2 is a feeling of “vastness” – everything else flows from that. I want “vastness” to emphasize the “wonder” sensation which is so important in science-fiction. Here that could mean having random seeds in a game start for optional major events much later in the game, with “discoveries” during the game as to what those major events might be. Even when players have pretty well figured out what the major events might be, discovering just which ones are coming at them in any given game can be discoverable only during that game. There are other means, not at all exclusive, to increase the sense of vastness and wonders. An obvious one is that players should worry about running into “worse” even in the end-game. ”And always keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse.” - Hillaire Belloc It’s not just that new things should be popping up even in the end-game, but also that those should be proportionate to the scale of the game at the point those are encountered. Early on a single group of pirates, who wouldn’t count as a blip in the end-game, can be tough for players to handle, but in the end-game players should encounter new things which are challenging given the size of player empires and fleets built up over most of a given game. Those end-game encounters would be totally impossible for early-game player empires. This will be difficult to design for a real-time game, so Code Force and MG should give a re-think to both the real-time vs. turn-based and open-space ftl travel vs. starlane “jumps” concepts. I believe one competitor has decided to its space 4x game from real-time to turn-based, and DW2 merits the same “from-the-ground-up” rethink. I am familiar with the trade-offs here, and there is a conflict between scaling a game up and being turn-based. Steve Barcia himself told me how important it is that players face minimum lag time after pressing the end-turn button of a turn-based game. Brad Wardock addressed this in the early versions of Galactic Civilizations by using a multi-threaded AI. This is really a feasibility question addressable only by Code Force. The second big change I’d like to see in DW2 is more of an emphasis on fleet combat and, particularly in the end-game, of full-bore wars between major star empires with lots of strategic decision-making. This necessarily includes greater emphasis on diplomacy than in even DWU, and on naval infrastructure aka fleet logistics. The marketing advantages of a more naval-oriented Space 4x game are rooted in the major appeal of Space 4x games in general – it’s the spaceships. Space 4x gamers want to play with “their” spaceships in particular, not merely grow an empire. Designers of Space 4x games have to give the players lots of spaceships and space battles. Such games fail if they don’t give the player empires enough spaceships and interesting space battles. Likewise 4x games are about four “x’s”, not three. That means big space battles, i.e., fleet engagements, during the end-game eXtermination phase. Space 4x gamers don’t want to merely build big fleets – they want the emotional satisfaction of using them in battle after all the hard work of building their empires. The usual problem here is that, by the time the 4th X period rolls around, player empires tend to outclass all potential opposition. The challenge for all 4x game designers is to extend the period of relative power parity between player and AI empires as long as possible. While that is what difficulty levels are for, almost all 4x games do so with flat-rate AI empire production advantages which, to be effective in the 4th X period, really imbalance the game against players during the eXplore and eXpand periods. The simple solution to that is to make the AI empire production advantages increase during the game based on a turn or time counter, but every 4x computer game designer I know throws up their hands in horror at the idea, almost always with nonsensical objections about the production cheats being open-ended. Obviously there can be a certain limited number of ascending levels of production cheats which kick in at discrete turn/time points, say 4-5 during a game with the final advance extending for the rest of the game. Games can begin at the Easy difficulty level, jump to Average after 25 turns/years, to Hard after 50 turns, Very Hard after 75 turns, and Impossible after 100 turns. Then a given Impossible Level game’s AI production cheats stay at the Impossible level for the rest of the game. And at least make it possible for players to adjust a game’s difficulty level manually during a game, say by exiting and using an editor on the most recent saved game. MOO3 also used a surprisingly effective Heavy Foot of Government feature which imposed production disadvantages on the larger empires. A satisfactory Space 4x end-game phase is not merely a disconnected set of gargantuan battles in which the only real objective is winning those without taking too many losses to preclude victory in the next battle. Some sort of strategy must be involved, which is usually achieved by creating strategic geography where specific territorial positions are worth fighting over more than other positions. This is one of the major advantages of starlane-based interstellar movement systems. More sophisticated diplomatic systems foster the importance of strategy in fighting a series of related, as opposed to unrelated, fleet engagements. Making who you fight and when important increases the rewards in fighting for specific objectives, and so enhances players’ emotional satisfaction in thinking strategically during the eXtermination phase. Here creation of major inherent animosities between the races of the various empires, and some sort of loose large alliance or league of star empires, a la Master of Orion III, is very helpful. MOO3 had a delightful absolute hatred between the various reptilian and fish races. Allying with a fish empire meant that all the reptile empires hated you too and vice-versa, so MOO3 players had real choices to make in diplomacy. MOO3 designer Alan Emrich also created a Galactic Council of the initial galaxy core empires which was bloody important in that its members could manipulate the Council into really hurting other empires, chiefly non-members, with trade embargoes and even wars against most or all members of the Galactic Council. Try winning when no one will trade tech with you. Not engaging in diplomacy generally put player empires at serious disadvantages. Plus the fish and lizard empires kept trying to drag everyone else into their eternal feuds. Diplomacy in most 4x games is pretty flat and boring because it at best provides minor rewards. MOO3 diplomacy was entertaining because it was important, and because of some major racial animosities that kept players on their toes staying out of other empires’ feuds. A two year-old forum post on existing versions, by Gelatinous Cube, fascinates me: quote:
RE: How-To Fleet Posture - 12/12/2011 7:31:49 AM Gelatinous Cube Matrix Hero Posts: 683 Joined: 10/26/2011 Status: offline quote:
quote: ORIGINAL: Grisha Excellent thread, GC! I've been using defensive posture correctly, it seems, but got the attack posture totally wrong. It seemed that attack and defense postures were just flip sides of the same coin, almost redundant in a way. Not so after your thread here. Now it all makes sense. Thanks for that! Yep! No problem, man. Personally I find the postures are most useful for the following two reasons (on the attack): 1.) Allows you to do MASSIVE multi-front assaults without having to micro-manage everything. 2.) Gives you a visual reference for what is going on. This is maybe more important than number one. The ability to have subordinate AI’s manage the details of “MASSIVE multi-front assaults” is exactly what a naval-oriented Space 4x game needs in the final eXtermination phase. Gelatinous Cube’s posts in that thread show that this ability exists in the DW game engine. It’s just buried too deep. A drastically reworked game using the DW engine, but designed from the ground up to emphasize end-game fleet engagements, might be everything we naval gamers hope for. Here’s one example of how something the DW engine does wrong now – the ship range and refueling system - could be easily redone for such a game. DW’s existing ship by ship refueling system seems to be one of its most hated features from what forum posts indicate (fleet creation is another). There is a big difference between “rationing by player’s time” which is inherent in real-time games, and “rationing by aggravation”. The latter should be avoided. I understand why DW ships must have limited ranges, but it errs by doing so with its present ship-by-ship refueling system which rewards micromanagement while at the same punishing players with mindless work in doing it. That is passive-aggressive game design. The trick is to take control of extending ship ranges away from players, while at the same time making those ranges variably uncertain, i.e., replace the refueling system with a “fog of war” system that reduces player control over ships as they start moving beyond “range” of refueling “bases”. Here I’d replace mere “fuel” with communications lag, ship maintenance problems, and logistics expense. For every designer-determined increment of distance from a suitable friendly base beyond a certain point (which varies based on technology and possibly the capacity of the base), a given ship or fleet of ships (the more ships present, the faster the increment goes up) has its speed reduced by an ascending amount until it reverts to subordinate AI control. For that matter, a given base might be able to support a larger number of ships individually at a given range, but only a lesser number of ships massed into a single fleet. Here I’d add some navalistic details. A naval base around a planetary colony world can support far more ships than a naval base at a non-colony space habitat. The size of the colony might make a difference too, but I’d make a very sharp distinction between planetary colonies and space habitats in terms of fleet support. Keep in mind that range in this proposed system is more a matter of ship maintenance and communications lag than fuel. Additional navalistic details could be a “fleet train” and “convoy routes”. A fleet train would be an abstracted large number of fleet support vessels, either limited in number based on empire income or expensive to purchase and maintain, which extends the “range” a given fleet can operate from a naval base. A “convoy route” is an abstracted path from the fleet in question to the naval base supplying it which the abstracted fleet train operates on. This “convoy route” can be reduced in length by “interdicting” or “blockading” it with raiding ships of some sort, while deployment of escort ships along the “convoy route” protects against raiding ships to some extent Plus the “convoy route” is also an abstracted “courier route”, i.e., it affects command & control as well as maintenance. If a fleet moves only a little bit beyond the current operational distance from a naval base, it has only a small chance of being impacted by fog of war problems, but players can’t control whether that happens. They can at best, with a limited number of “fleet trains”, reduce the chance of it happening, and the farther a fleet goes out of range, the more rapidly the chances of it being affected by fog of war problems goes up as does the severity of the problem. Individual ships are much less affected by fog of war and, when they are, it tends to take the lesser form more of speed loss compared to the greater form of reversion to subordinate AI control. This is mostly an illustration of how a more naval-oriented game can achieve the same strategic-range limiting effect as a DW feature without honking off the players so much, and additionally provide a more navalistic feel. Another means of achieving this effect is to have star empires bar entry of warships, or fleets, of other empires into their territory. This could be in addition to range issues, so that exploration of unknown territory is sharply limited. Plus limited permission by empires for small numbers of warships of other empires to cross imperial boundaries could be the subject of treaties, and even for one-time access. CF should also consider adding “mercenary fleets” a la the Dendarii Mercenaries in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar science-fiction series. Players can hire mercenary fleets to look up secret discoveries beyond the range of their own fleets. That is why Barrayar hired the Dendarii Mercenaries in the first place – to have them do military and paramilitary things in places where Barrayar’s own navy was denied access. DW has pirates. DW2 should have mercenary fleets too. This is long enough. Shoot it full of holes, and tell us what big new things you want in DW2.
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