Tag Archives: master-of-orion

March Update: Fleet Combat, Backer Reward Update, and Work Experience

Posted by Brendan Drain on

marchdev

The past month has been jam-packed for the Predestination crew. We made a lot of progress with the fleet combat part of the game, designed our first reptilian race (The Sauros), and hosted work experience weeks for two students aiming for careers in the games industry. We also moved to a new house with more office space to work in and applied for some government funding to help your pledges stretch further.

Update notes for fleet combat:

  • Added projectile weapons such as mass drivers, with their own graphical effects.
  • Added dumb missiles that travel to the target hex and explode, or explode early if they enter a hex with another ship or object in it.
  • Implemented smart missile AI that locks onto a ship and follows it, avoiding obstacles.
  • Added interceptors. They use the smart missile AI and attack the target ship every turn until destroyed.
  • Implemented area-effect weapons (smartbombs, area missiles).
  • Implemented proximity mines and cloaked proximity mines.
  • Created some basic explosion effects with screen shake, and a timing system to synch explosion graphics and screen shake with sound effect volume.
  • Implemented a module system that lets us create interesting non-weapon ship technologies. Modules added so far include: Holographic Projector Matrix (creates decoy holographic ships), Afterburner (double movement for one round, then takes a round to recharge), Shield booster (consumes movement points to boost shield hitpoints), Cloaking device (ship is invisible until its next turn, but then takes a round to recharge).
  • Fleets can now engage each other in the galaxy view, which switches to the fleet battle screen.
  • Ships can now retreat from combat. They will wait for one full round without moving or attacking and then warp out.
  • Combat now detects the winner when one side’s ships are all destroyed or warp out.
  • Ships destroyed in combat are now removed from the galaxy view.

Holographic projector ship module

Dozens of backers have now given us their ideas for interesting weapons and ship modules over at the Predestination Community forum. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them in the official fleet combat thread!

Kickstarter Backer Reward Update:

As part of the Kickstarter campaign, many people selected rewards such as your own custom-designed commander, missile, building, singleplayer level or core game race. Almost everyone has now submitted their commander and missile ideas, and our race and level designers have let us know how they’d like to be contacted to discuss their ideas. We had hoped to get back to all of you by now to confirm your selections, but are unfortunately running a little behind schedule due to moving house.

Those of you who have submitted commander, missile, or building designs will be emailed by Tina soon to confirm that your designs are good to go. Level and race designers will be contacted personally to get a brief outline of their ideas, but don’t worry if you haven’t got much of an idea yet as we don’t need the full details just yet. If you wanted to upgrade your pledge for any of these rewards but missed the end of the campaign, you can upgrade your pledge at our Paypal Upgrade page or send us an email with your inquiry.

workexperience

One of our big goals with Predestination is to help kickstart the Northern Ireland games industry and help emerging talent get into game development. With that in mind, we’ve spent part of this past month organising work experience weeks for students aiming to get into the industry. Our latest student was the extremely talented budding concept artist Nuala Mc Garry, who is already producing fantastic character art at the age of just 15.

In addition to giving Nuala some experience in the industry and advice on education paths, we were able to send her home with a new graphics tablet and an upgraded PC to help her continue developing her talents. This would not have been possible without all the support and pre-orders pledged through Kickstarter and Paypal. Your support has made a big difference to one talented young artist this month, and on her behalf we’d like to say thank you!

As part of her work experience, Nuala created her own race with unique concept art, technology and lore. They’re a species of intelligent feline humanoids whose culture revolves around entertainment and gadgets and treats fighter pilots and scientists as celebrities. The race isn’t named yet and we’d like to open that up to the community. If you have any name ideas or just want to give some feedback, please head over to the race’s official thread or leave a comment here on the blog!

Nuala's race (work in progress)

Background Lore:

The [Suggest a name] are a feline humanoid race discovered on a Terran planet near the Human empire’s borders. It’s not known whether the species is natural or the result of genetic experimentation, but they predate the Human empire and have shown incredible intelligence and adaptability. Their society revolves around entertainment and research, with great technological accomplishments being spurred by competition to make the ultimate gadgets and televised sports.

The race to achieve space flight, break the lightspeed barrier, and colonise other worlds were all sponsored by entertainment megacorporations looking for the next big show. When first contact was made with the Humans, the event was televised across the homeworld and eventually led to an alliance between the two empires that persists to this day. Not to be underestimated, the [Suggest a name] have repelled several attempted invasions of their space by turning the war effort itself into a form of entertainment. Fighter pilots became celebrities overnight, and research labs competed to make flashier and more inventive defensive technologies.

When the Revenants were unleashed on the galaxy, the [Suggest a name] were the only race able to sometimes successfully evade the attacking ships. Using clever holographic modules to hide ships and project decoys into space, pilots were able to evacuate millions of citizens from colonised planets across the sector. It’s thanks to their efforts that so many ships survived to take part in the final battle with the Revenants. Now sent back in time, they seek to explore space, find their former allies, and develop technology that can stop the Revenants once and for all.

Nuala's scientist

Possible race stats and abilities:

As a humanoid race, the [Suggest a name] are most at home on Terran worlds but can adapt to live in other environments. Their diminutive stature makes them poorly suited to ground combat, but quick reflexes makes them excellent fighter pilots. The celebrity status their society grants fighter pilots attracts a lot of legendary ship captains, and normal ship crew are more likely to achieve legendary acclaim following a successful battle. Their culture emphasises openness and honesty, increasing morale on all planets but making them vulnerable to spies. They also freely trade their entertainment programmes with allies, adding a free empire-wide morale boost to all trade agreements with other species.

Example stats: (not finalised, just to give an idea of the abilities we think they’ll have)

  • +10% Morale On All Planets
  • +2 Research Per Turn From Research Labs
  • -20 Ground Combat Rating
  • -10% Spy Mission Success Chance
  • Cultural Traders: Your empire freely exchanges its culture and entertainment with other nations. Trade pacts with your empire increase global morale across both your empire and the empire you’re trading with by 10%. This effect can stack for each new race you establish trade agreements with, up to a maximum of 50%.
  • Natural Fighter Pilots: Quick reflexes make your people natural fighter pilots who favour small hulls over larger ships. +50% beam and projectile defense on small and medium sized hulls, but -25% beam and projectile defense on larger ships.
  • Legendary Pilots: Double the normal chance for a legendary ship captain to emerge following a successful fleet battle, and ship captains will cost half as much per turn to employ.

Possible starting technologies:

Each race starts the game with several advanced technologies that are either not available for research or can only normally be researched late in the game. Possible starting technologies for this race include:

  • Camera Array (Ship module): An array of high-definition cameras are fitted inside and outside the ship, recording footage of fleet combat to be used as propaganda. If your fleet wins a battle with a ship carrying this module, all planets in your empire get +10% morale for 10 turns.
  • Holographic projector (Ship module): Holographic projectors are hooked directly to the ship’s power core, allowing the ship to project fake versions of itself into space. This ship module can be activated in combat to split the ship in three, moving the real ship into one of the three hexes directly ahead and placing decoys in the remaining two hexes. Decoys last for one full round and are instantly destroyed if fired on, but are otherwise identical to the original ship.
  • Cultural Hub (Building): You can only have one of this building in your entire empire. The city it’s built in becomes a huge cultural hub, completely eliminating all morale penalties on the planet. This allows higher taxation and prevents revolts and unrest.

Thanks for your feedback!

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported Predestination on Kickstarter or via Paypal, and a special thanks to fans who have contributed feedback on updates and shared their ideas on our forum. As always, we’re eagre to hear any feedback you have on this update or any ideas or questions you have relating to it. Head over to the official feedback thread or leave a comment on this post!

Cheers,

– Brendan, Lead Developer

Predestination Race Reveal: The Sauros

Posted by Brendan Drain on

Sauros race reveal

The Sauros are Predestination’s first reptilian race! The race is composed of three distinct sub-species:

  • The purple Monitor Sauros: The shamanistic ruling caste and diplomatic contacts for the empire. They are native to the desert regions of their home world and are worshiped as if they were gods.
  • The white Albino Sauros: A rare breed possessing an immense intellect. They are native to desert regions and are responsible for all scientific discovery in the empire.
  • The green Jungle Sauros: Have been selectively bred to be the perfect labourers and ground combatants. They are native to the jungles of their home world and make up the majority of the Saurosian population.

Background Lore:

The Saurosian Empire is one of the oldest and most feared cultures in the Predestination universe. The desert-dwelling ruling caste conquered the jungles of their homeworld, enslaving the primitive jungle race as a worker force and military army. In breeding massive slave armies, the Sauros soon overpopulated their home planet and were forced to expand into space. The empire slowly grew without interference for millennia, producing colossal armoured hulk ships and protecting its borders from intrusion.

The Sauros watched as other species emerged into space and began colonising the stars, but rejected all attempts at contact and co-habitation. No-one dared enter Saurosian space, and they liked it that way. When the Revenants were unleashed on the galaxy and started destroying their hatchery worlds, the empire finally broke its silence and led the younger races into war. But despite their advanced technology, even the ancient Saurosian hulks couldn’t stand against the Revenants.

At the final battle with the Revenants, the last surviving hulk was torn apart by temporal rifts and pulled back in time, crash-landing on a terran world. Now cut off from their empire, the Sauros have only a few scraps of advanced technology remaining and several technological relics whose secrets remain to be unlocked. The Sauros now aim to rebuild their civilisation and stop the younger races that might foolishly wake the Revenants again in the past.

(Sauros story trailer still to come)

Race stats and abilities:

As a reptilian race, the Sauros are at home on Desert worlds and have a penalty to living on Ocean and Tundra worlds. Military expansionists by nature, the Sauros have a bonus to armour hitpoints, ground combat and diplomatic intimidation. The species’ isolationist ways give them a large diplomatic penalty with other races, and their starting planet contains ancient artifacts left over from the crashed ship. Example stats for the Sauros are below: (Stats are not finalised but are intended to give a general idea of what we’re thinking of)

  • +10% Armour Hitpoints
  • +15 Ground Combat Rating
  • +10 Intimidation (bonus to diplomatic extortion)
  • -20 Diplomacy (penalty to friendly diplomacy)
  • -50% Population Growth Rate
  • Ancient Artifacts: Home world contains ancient artifact resources that increase research output. Once your race reaches a certain tech level, the artifact turns into a usable item.
  • Low Metabolism: Population use half the normal amount of food per turn.

Sauros starting technologies: Each race starts the game with several advanced technologies. The Sauros start with a number of technologies left over from the crashed hulk ship:

  • Assault shuttles: Armoured shuttles are fitted with shaped charges and fired at enemy ships. They pierce the enemy’s hull and deliver marines that try to capture the ship and kill its crew. Enemy shields must be down for the shuttles to penetrate.
  • Reactive armour: An inert polymer is inserted between two layers of hull armour. Dissipates some of the impact energy from projectiles, increasing the effective toughness of the armour. Reduces damage from projectile weapons by 10%, and cannot be penetrated by assault shuttles unless the hull is exposed (armour hitpoints are all gone).

Sauros Shaman

Reptilian race archetype:

Unique gameplay: Each of the four race archetypes in Predestination (Humanoid, Aquatic, Reptilian and Mechanoid) has its own unique gameplay that will hopefully feel iconic to that type of race. Reptilian cities feature a unique hatchery for storing and hatching eggs, and an organised breeding area to speed up their usually slow reproductive habits. Players can decide what percentage of the hatchery building to dedicate to each particular sub-race of their species: Workers/Ground troops, Scientists, or the Diplomatic ruling caste. This will in turn provide bonuses to Production, Research, or Morale/Tax at that colony.

Unique tech field: Reptilian races have access to a unique technology field full of upgrades to the hatchery to let you specialise each city to a particular task. A few ideas we’ve had for possible upgrades include:

  • Heat Lamps: Improves the population output of the hatchery by 25%.
  • Farm Upgrade: Uses up one food resource linked to the city, but gives a large bonus to population output of the hatchery.
  • Training Center: All workers are trained as ground troops and give a bonus against invasion. *We could also have training centers for scientists and diplomats
  • Forced Breeding: An emergency option to produce extra ground troops.
  • Euthanasia: Can kill existing population and replace them with another species. For example, can kill workers and replace them with scientists. Has a huge morale penalty.
  • Genetic Manipulation: Can convert existing population units from one subspecies to another. For example, can turn all workers into scientists. No morale penalty.

Have your say!

What do you think about the Sauros? Head over to the Sauros thread on the Predestination Community forum to leave us feedback, and don’t forget to share this post on Facebook and Twitter if you like it!

Kickstarter success! Wrap-up post with stats and graphs

Posted by Brendan Drain on

kswrapup

Last week Predestination officially succeeded on Kickstarter! Thanks to a huge push in the last few days of the campaign, we managed to hit over double our initial goal and smashed the three biggest stretch goals. We’ll now have a full singleplayer story campaign, play-by-email and full online multiplayer for release.

We’ve decided to wrap up the campaign in the same spirit of transparency that we intend to keep up during Predestination’s development, so I’m releasing a ton of stats that are normally kept for the project creator’s eyes only and discussing some of the lessons we learned throughout the campaign. This kind of info from previous projects was invaluable when I was researching and putting together this campaign. I posted this originally as a Kickstarter update, but am posting it as a blog post so it can reach more future Kickstarter project creators. It’s a bit of a wall of text, but hopefully future Kickstarter creators will find it useful!

(More updates on the way)

Continue reading →

90% funded on Kickstarter, help push us over our goal!

Posted by Brendan Drain on

We launched Predestination on Kickstarter a few weeks ago and the response has been absolutely immense! Over 500 people have backed the project so far and we’re at around the 90% mark. There’s just 10% to go until we’re guaranteed funding and can press on into stretch goals. It’s very important that we hit 100% as soon as possible, because that guarantees we’ll get our minimum goal and we can take that guarantee to banks and government grant schemes. If you haven’t pledged yet, head over to Kickstarter and take a look at some of the rewards you can get for supporting Predestination.

Thank you so much to everyone who has pledged their support so far! If we exceed our goal, we’ll move into the stretch goals to let us add extra features like multiplayer, a singleplayer story campaign, tools to let players mod the game and design their own levels, and other features we can’t realistically fit into the $25,000 minimum goal. There’s still a long way to go if we want to make the ultimate 4X game, and with your help we’ll get there!

New screenshots: Galaxy map, planets, system window and planet exploration

Posted by Brendan Drain on

There are some big announcements coming in the next week or so for Predestination, but until then we have some new screenshots of the game in action. These screenshots show the three main parts of the game: Galaxy Management, Planetary Exploration, and Tactical Fleet Combat. All three areas are still work in progress, but they’re really starting to come together.

Robot concept art: Character artist Connor Murphy in action

Posted by Brendan Drain on

Most game developers work behind closed doors and don’t let players see early work in progress designs. With Predestination we aim to give fans a front row seat to the game’s development and let you help develop the game with your feedback and suggestions. We have a community website launching soon where you can suggest ideas and discuss the game, and we should be finally launching our Kickstarter campaign within the next few weeks, but today we want to give you an inside look at how we’ve been designing our first race:

Concept sketches:

We wanted the robots to look like they were originally designed as humanoid robots to serve another race but have had to adapt to survive when left to fend for themselves on their starting planet. When their power sources began to run out, they had to adapt to using fossil fuels and became all steampunky. They began building new robots and reprogramming them to do new tasks like mining for coal and designing new technology. Now they’re pretty much a fully-fledged race with workers, scientists, and military robots. Our new character artist Connor Murphy turned those ideas into the five concept sketches below:

We really love the top left design but want to keep that kind of tentacled concept for a more organic race. We decided on the top right design for military robots as it looks like a standard combat robot built by another species as part of a war. The bottom left robot looks like what would happen if those military robots were forced to adapt and become engineers or scientists, with the huge humanoid arms and hands being replaced with an array of tools.

 

Science robots (work in progress):

Today Connor got back to us with his first draft sketch of the Scientist robots. The left arm now has all these precise tools that remind me of the Borg from Star Trek, and there’s a window into the robot’s furnace that adds to the steampunk effect. It’s still a work in progress, so expect to see more race art from Connor soon! He’ll be focusing on the robots first and then moving onto the humans, aquatics, reptiles and other races.

I hope you’ve found this to be an interesting look behind the scenes at Predestination, it’s a real pleasure for us to have Connor on the Predestination team and the whole team just loves his artwork. Soon we’ll be launching our new community site where you can post your own ideas and have your say on what you’d like to see in the game. Until then, please feel free to post your ideas in the comments. If you’d like a reminder when something new is posted to the blog, like us on Facebook or sign up to our RSS feed.

A brand new planet colonisation system!

Posted by Brendan Drain on

This week we did a major design iteration on the planet colonisation system. In the previous design, the planet was split into a huge square grid and you could send scouts anywhere to find resources. Extractors were built on the resources and they were piped to the planet’s main colony for use, so if you found a mineral deposit you’d build a mining station on it and the colony would then have +1 minerals/turn for use in factories.

After some testing, I found that it felt like I wasn’t really colonising the planet; I was just exploring it because I had to get it out of the way, and that’s not fun. Since I could see the terrain and knew where resources would spawn, I tended to go straight for those areas and there wasn’t much left to find in the entire planet. There were also unanticipated problems with designing a reusable colony blueprint: How do you know how many fossil fuel power plants or factories to build if each planet has a different number of resources? And what happens if the blueprint finishes building all your factories but you haven’t found the minerals to supply them yet? This week’s design iteration solved all of the above problems.

Residential cities:

The new design splits the planet up into a hexagonal grid and you can only scout hexagons adjacent to currently explored areas, so you have to explore outward. Unexplored areas are black so you can’t see the terrain, and the hexagons for scouting are huge so you won’t spend forever exploring the planet. Most hexes will be empty, but some will contain resources or suitable locations for additional residential cities. Below is a mocked up image of the city planner:

Tiny planets will have just one viable city location, and larger planets will have several. These cities will be fully independent colonies on the planet, each housing its own population and requiring its own energy generation, military protection etc. All of your important buildings will go in the cities, but it’ll be mostly residential and military. You can have multiple of every building and their effects stack, so you could build nothing but power generators and orbital cannons or mostly housing and entertainment centres to generate tax, it’s up to you. Later in the game, new technologies will give you more space in every city.

Resource gathering towns:

When you find a resource like a mineral deposit or research artifact, you now colonise it with a small industrial town. The town starts with just the extractor building (such as a mining drill or research outpost) and 6 empty hexagons around it that new buildings can be built on. Rather than always sending the resource to the main colony to be used, you can use buildings here to refine it locally and either use the refined product immediately or send it elsewhere for stockpiling. Below is a mock-up of an example town:

In a mineral mining town, you might build an ore refinery, a metal factory, a few power plants and a transport link to an orbital shipyard. This little self-contained town would then send metal to your shipyards each turn, where it’s stockpiled to be used to build ships, missiles, etc. You can build your towns  manually or design blueprints to save your designs and help update them later. So you could colonise a uranium deposit and select between blueprints you’ve designed for nuclear power generation, uranium processing for sale, or a  nuclear weapons factory and missile silos.

With limited space to build buildings, you’ll have to make tactical trade-offs between money generation, military defense, research and ship production. Do you sacrifice a valuable square to build a shield generator in each towns to protect it from orbital bombardment, or a weapon to help in fleet combat above the planet, or more industrial buildings? I’m leaving it entirely up to the player to decide how to use the system. When it’s done, it’ll have to be tested extensively to make sure there are no clearly overpowered strategies and there’s no single best way to build a colony.

Population control:

Your colonists live in the cities most of the time and are rotated into the towns for work. Cities start with a colony base that houses 1 million colonists and provides food and water for them, and towns start with an extractor that does the same. In cities, you can build houses to increase the maximum population at the cost of using squares. You can’t build housing in towns to increase the population limit, they always have 1 million colonists. It costs 1 million colonists to establish a new town so all of your population growth happens in cities.

Each town links to its closest city and decreases its connected city’s morale because people really hate working in harsh industrial environments. Each unit of population in the city increases the city’s morale because more people in the city means people have to spend less of their time working in the industrial towns. You can build entertainment centres, police stations and other services in the city to increase the morale bonus each colonist gives, so balance the morale on your planets with their industrial output.

Morale affects the amount of money that population can be taxed for and the chance of a revolt or worker strike. Robotic races would be immune to morale but also can’t tax their population. Communist races would force people to work in the towns, while democratic races might be able to pay their workers to reduce the morale penalty. There’s a lot of potential for race picks and new technologies in this system, and we’re still throwing a lot of ideas around about it.

 

I’ll implement the new colonisation system this week and will get a video of it up to show you the results, then I’ll get back to working on the fleet combat system :D .

Combat system update and prototype video

Posted by Brendan Drain on

Made good progress on the combat system this week. It now has:

  • Movement mechanics: Left click moves ship to the selected square, right click turns toward the selected square, end turn button cycles to next ship in initiative order
  • A glowing line indicates the path ship will take to the square you have the mouse over
  • A ghost ship shows where your ship will end up and what diredction it will be facing
  • Ships smoothly animate along the selected movement path
  • Ships now have weapons
  • Weapon firing arcs are working and show on the grid when you activate the weapon

To see the system in action, check out the prototype video below. Please post any comments you have on it and I’ll use them to help refine the next iteration.

Next I will add:

  • Attacking other ships by clicking on one in range once the weapon’s active
  • Shield and armour hitpoint system and basic hitpoint meters (will develop a nice UI for this later)
  • Highlighting enemy ships in range when weapon is active
  • The Reactive Strike system
  • Togglable weapon view: See all enemy weapon firing arcs on the map, move mouse over square to see how much damage you could take in a reactive strike if you enter that square
  • UI buttons and hotbar system
  • Non-weapon modules: Shield/armour repairers, afterburners (add movement speed, has a cooldown) etc.

Why turn-based?:

A few people have asked me why I chose to go with a turn-based combat system, so I figured I’d answer it in this blog post. The reason I’m making Predestination is that I want to make the kind of game that I’d love to play, and one of the things I loved about the older generations of 4X games is the level of strategy and tactics involved. I think newer 4X games have lost a lot of the tactical gameplay that the classics had, partly because many of them focus on realtime gameplay and controlling massive fleets of hundreds of ships. So I decided to go with classic turn-based gameplay for the main game and combat based around directly controlling a small number of individual ships.

When it came to the fleet combat system, I was torn between turn-based gameplay or a system where both fleets give their ships commands and then all the ships execute their turns at the same time. The latter system has a lot of tactical potential, as you could limit the number of commands a player can give and ships can be destroyed before carrying out their objectives. I didn’t like the way it disconnects players from their moves, adding a lot of unpredictability to combat so that even if you win it might not feel like you really made it happen. I want a system where your commands are immediately carried out and you instantly see the result, which means it has to be turn-based.

Chess-like tactical gameplay:

The combat system will produce gameplay that feels more like a game of chess than an RTS. If you’re the kind of player who loves to strategise, you’ll have the freedom to sit and think about each move for as long as you need, weighing up the options and considering how the other player will react. You’ll be able to build strategies around clever positioning and blocking off areas of the battlefield, and to employ clever tactics to beat an opposing fleet that outnumbers and outguns you.

If you aren’t interested in playing intergalactic chess, you can design simpler ships that don’t use the Reactive Strike system or tactical weapons, or even disable Reactive Strike altogether when starting a new game. We might even make tactical combat optional for people who just like the colony management side of the game.

 

The response to the combat system has been really positive in the comments and I got some great positive feedback about the idea at QCon. It seems a lot of people are looking forward to tactical turn-based combat where you control individual ships of your own design. As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback, please leave a comment!

3D ship designer and ship customisation

Posted by Brendan Drain on

One of the things I’m particularly fond of in 4X games is custom ship design, both for cosmetic and gameplay reasons. There’s something special about designing your own ship setup and then testing it out in battle, and I really want to capture that magic in Predestination.

To achieve that, I’m developing a 3D lego style ship designer in which you slot together pre-made blocks to create your own ship designs. Most of the blocks will be purely cosmetic, but some will affect gameplay. You’ll add modules like shield generators, thrusters, weapons, armour plates etc to design your own custom loadout. You’ll also be able to research special mount blocks that give certain module types bonuses or modify their operation in some way, like long range or point defense mounts for weapons. A mock-up of the system is below:

The current design is kind of like lego, with each block having exposed faces that other things can be connected to. For example, you would get corner pieces that connect on three sides, straight pylons that connect on either end, and finishing pieces like spikes that only connect on one side. There will be a number of different hull sizes, with larger ships starting with a larger number of base hull blocks and a larger area in which to design the ship.

Each size of hull will have a fixed power output in MW and each module (weapons, shields etc) you can add to the ship will have a maximum power rating. When you add a module, you’ll set how much power it will draw from the hull, up to the module’s maximum power rating. The more power you draw, the more effective the module is. For example, a Class I shield generator may provide 10 HP per MW and 1 regen/turn per MW, or a laser cannon could provide 1 damage per MW.

Example:

Research:

In 4X games, war is a technological arms race to develop better weapons, defences, sensors and speed than the enemy. Your enemy develops ion cannons, so you need class 3 shields. Your enemy builds ships with neutronium armour and you design a counter-fleet with armour-piercing projectile cannons. You’ll be able to research bigger ships and better weapons, shields and other modules as the game progresses. Bigger hulls will have higher power outputs, and better modules will will have higher maximum power ratings and be more efficient.

For example, laser cannons may have a maximum output of 50MW and an efficiency of 1 damage per MW. You might later research ion cannons with a maximum output of 100MW and efficiency rating of 1.2 damage per MW. In the frigate example above, you could replace the two laser cannons with one 100MW ion cannon, or with two ion cannons downgraded to 50MW. Shield modules will similarly have a maximum hitpoint and recharge rate per MW, thrusters will have speed per MW etc. Other special modules like tractor beams and troop pods will have a fixed energy usage.

Tactical combat:

This ship design process opens up some interesting new gameplay possibilities for tactical combat. You could design a fast ship with no defences to hit the enemy first, or build an artillery ship with no thrusters but a huge tank and long-range weapons. As better weapons have higher maximum power ratings, you’ll eventually need to use larger ships to get the most out of them. This should encourage players to build smaller fleets of larger ships.

Module mounts will add tactical tradeoffs to the modules attached to them and let you mould ships to fit certain roles. Long range heavy weapon mounts would increase the range of the attached weapon but also increase its drain on the ship’s power core, so a 100MW ion cannon would take 150MW to power. Capacitor weapon mounts would half the power drain on the ship’s core but the weapon would only be able to fire every other turn. There are plenty of other possible types of mounts, you could even have them for shields or thrusters.

Next week I’ll have a post up on designs for the tactical space combat that these ships are used in. I’ve been prototyping the tactical combat mechanics using a chess board, and it feels pretty solid. I’m going to start prototyping these systems now in-game.

Energy as a tactical resource

Posted by Brendan Drain on

I haven’t really talked about energy generation, energy storage, and what you’ll be able to do with energy yet, so in this post I’ll throw my current plans out there. Every building requires energy to operate, and if there isn’t enough energy some buildings will switch off until power is restored. There are several types of power plant available:

  • Solar: Basic renewable power source. Twice as effective on Desert and Barren planets. Doesn’t work on Toxic planets.
  • Geothermal: Basic renewable power source. Twice as effective on Molten planets. Doesn’t work on Tundra or Ocean planets.
  • Fossil fuel: Consumes fossil fuels, but outputs more energy than solar or geothermal plants.
  • Nuclear: Consumes uranium, and outputs more energy than a fossil fuel plant.

There’s limited space for buildings in a colony, so you’ll want to waste as few as possible on energy generation. Fossil fuel and nuclear plants will save you a lot of space, but will consume resources. You’ll be able to research technologies to improve power plants, and because we’re using a tree system for research, many of them will be mutually exclusive. You might have to choose between improving solar or geothermal power plants, or choose between renewable sources and fossil fuels.

Stored energy as a resource:

Any energy above the building requirements of the colony will be stored in any energy storage buildings you have. Stored energy will be a currency that is spent to perform tactically important tasks and take gameplay shortcuts. While resources like uranium, ore, and fossil fuels can be transferred between planets, energy can’t. If you need to use a lot of energy on a planet, you have to generate it there. Below are a few ideas for things you can spend energy on once you have researched the appropriate technologies:

  • Spying on enemy planets
  • Firing long-range missiles at enemy planets
  • Scanning planets
  • Firing ground batteries during a battle
  • Absorbing damage to the planetary shield
  • Creating wormholes
  • Destroying planets
  • Cloaking planets
  • Transporting material to other planets
  • Replicating material

Energy as an offensive/defensive tool:

Energy will be used to power offensive and defensive structures like ground batteries and planetary shields. During a battle in orbit of a planet, you will be able to spend stored energy to fire ground batteries at enemy ships, but if you lose the battle that will leave you with less energy for the planetary shield. If your ships are destroyed but you have a planetary shield, every turn the enemy can bomb the shield until it’s down. Once it’s down, they can either continue bombardment or send troops to capture the planet. When the shield absorbs damage, it draws an equal amount of energy from the planet’s reserves.

This siege mechanic will let players hold out for a few turns before their planets are taken over or destroyed, giving them time to mount a defense fleet or perform a counter-attack. It would be theoretically possible to make a planet with ridiculous energy generation capabilities and massive energy stores that could withstand a huge siege for a long time, but such a colony wouldn’t be very effective at anything else as all its building space would be used with energy storage and power plants.

 

Those are my current plans for energy, but as always they are subject to change as I start implementing the system and see how well it works. If you have any ideas for things you would want to be able to do with stored energy, please leave a comment with your suggestions. Nothing is off-limits right now as I’m still throwing ideas around.