Echoes of the Imperium (4X Strategy Game)

[Lap]

Well at least I can be happy knowing I wasn't missing some sort of easy trick here. I guess I should hold off on visually representing the tech tree in anything except its most basic form, as it is very likely that the tech tree will change multiple times before all is said and done.

Thanks for taking the time to gather all those resources. Looks like I have a lot of stuff to go through.

[Lap]

Oddly enough my main problem now isn't coding at all. I'm stuck just figuring out the economy aspects. How many resources should the average province produce per turn? How much should the average tank unit cost?

Should buildings benefits function with additive multipliers or not? (100% + 100% = 200% increase vs. 2 * 2 = 4x increase)

Additive multipliers are safer and don't encourage specializing provinces as much.

Anyone up for toying around with econ values?

[Lap]

I had to do some traveling recently and so I spent a lot of the downtime planning out stuff on my Droid. I found a nice program called ThinkingSpace and I got at least some basic tech and unit tree stuff done. I'll need a lot of feedback on these so throw forth the criticisms and additions.

Unit Tree

I basically mapped out every basic type of unit off the type of my head. I realized that a lot of these units could have stealth versions or ones with slight improvements so I tried to only list ones that were significantly different and not just minor improvements to previous units. All of the first tiered units I plan to have available to players with the exception of any highlighted in red. Players should have a lot of choice in what type of units to make from the get go.



Tech Tree

This is even more of an unrefined brainstorm than the unit tree. I decided to set the techs into relevant fields of study like physics, biology, and engineering. The downside to the way I've done is that a player who wants to focus on war might not initially know how to get the latest guns. I'll have to make some sort of adviser or something for new players or perhaps color code certain techs that are more "warlike".

Red techs are highly likely to be banned by The Church or whatever authoritative body takes its place in the story. Arrows indicates it is a necessary prereq to a tech, as do the numbers. A "light bulb" icon and a number indicates this technology also needs the prereq tech with the corresponding number.




Other updates:

-Implemented province defense (works very similar to Dominions 3).

-Estimation of nearby enemy unit strength based on spotting and stealth (Rather complex; takes into account nearby provinces and any ships in orbit).

-Icons now appear on the worldmap representing province defense strength, army strength, construction.
-Got the construction queue client-server bugs ironed out

-Saving and loading games is working. Way easier than expected. Finishing up the UI for the saving and loading (which is oddly enough harder than the actual saving/loading).

-Added in most all the techs from the brainstorm and some units as well.

-Resolution changes no longer screw everything up. Tried out the game on a 40+ inch LCD and it looked great. It's the <300 resolutions that are actual more of a problem.

-More menus done.

-Basic research backend done.

-More indicators and messages for the construction queues.

-All basic econ buildings are working, with all harvesting stuff done.

-Disbanding (but not creating) armies.

-Battles from last turn now leave a battleground icon on the world map so players can easily see any action.

-Added a bunch more tooltips and confirmation dialogs.

What's next:

-More units, menus, worlds, and content in general.

-Formalize the mutliplayer interface and server

-Add a very basic AI so testers can find some more purpose while they're testing.

-I still need to finalize exactly how players research. Some ideas:

1. Old school EFS lab buildings. Players build them and every turn they are active they use money and provide research points.
2. More Civ style system where population provides research points and buildings can augment the amount provided.
3. Money allocated per turn gets converted into research points with efficiency dropping off with higher amounts per turn.


Story

Picking the backstory and setting is still a bitch. Going back and forth between two variations:

Feudalism in Space

More of an EFS/WH40k old worlds feel. Houses/Clans rule. Technology is mostly forgotten/destroyed. A powerful trading guild and a central church are big players in the world.

Corporate Modern Variant

Basically the same thing with or without a post-apocalyptic story, but with corporations and powerful bureaucracies in place of player houses/clans and trading guild.

In either case, all the game play elements translate with ease. There's no reason a church can't be present in either one and guilds are basically just old school corporations. It's really the feel that each setting gives to the game. I'm kind of leaning towards a more EFS feel because there are so many games that use the modern variant and that would make this game sound very similar to GalCiv.


Working story:

Mankind never finds any kind of travel faster than light speed and is forced to send out sleeper ships to colonize other star systems. Communication is slow and each new world is essentially isolated. With delays in communications that can be measured in decades Earth often left in the dark on whether a colony has been established or not. Over the centuries, some colonies eventually respond back to Earth, and even converse. One day the transmissions from Earth abruptly stop, leaving the colonies totally alone. Through the generations, Earth soon becomes a legend, many colonies even forgetting its location and some even forgetting it entirely.

One of the colonies ends up flourishing far more than anyone expected. Through luck, determination, and the genius of its population, this colony becomes a gem on par with that of Earth. It is they who discover the secret to opening massive wormholes between systems. The wormholes allow mankind to finally reunite and the technology also allows for near instantaneous communication over almost any distance. These wormholes reunite nearby colonies who've been living in solitude ever since they left Earth.[/i]

The story allows for random maps and a lot of different scenarios without scenario creators even needing to modify the story. It leaves Earth open as a place to be rediscovered, or not; and the fate of the planet is totally undetermined. Maybe in one play through it's devastated by nuclear war, natural disaster, alien invasion, or something similar, in another it's an advanced society who have been unable or unwilling to communicate with the colonies.

I also like using massive wormholes instead of jump gates/star gates or faster than light drives. With star gates players question why they can't just shut down or barricade a star gate. With FTL drives star lanes don't really make much sense either and I'd rather not have unrestricted movement.

[thelinx]

You're welcome to upload the images straight to the forums, bro.

[Lap]

I mostly do it this way because I actually post about this on a couple different forums. You'd actually prefer I put the bandwidth burden on you guys though?

[thelinx]

We can handle it.

[Robin]

We can handle it.

*imagines thelinx flexing muscles*

He is The Strongest, after all.

[Lap]

Strong enough to handle the combined 254kb of those images!?! He must get all the ladies.

[Robin]

He must get all the ladies.

Yes he does. All 0 of them.

[tentus]

Strong enough to handle the combined 254kb of those images!?! He must get all the ladies.

I think you mean he gets #ladies.