Tag Archives: micromanagement

New colony system, what do you think?

Posted by Brendan Drain on

In last week’s development update, I showed recent work on the planetary colonisation that made the exploration grid visible from orbit. This week I updated it so that you can even direct your exploration efforts from orbit and developed a new resource distribution algorithm, but I ran into a small problem: If you add in enough resources to keep exploration interesting, you’d end up with a ton of colonies to build on each world. To solve this problem, I decided to try out a new system inspired partly by Civilization.

Explore Planet

The old system:

Planets are currently covered in randomly distributed resources and pre-defined city locations. Cities are residential colonies with lots of building space that is used for housing and big buildings like shipyards, while resources are small colonies with 6 building locations. Resources are only accessible in the resource towns themselves and the materials collected are stored in material silos. You’d need to design separate blueprints for each resource and for residential cities, and there’s not really much choice in where your colonies go or what they’re set up to do.

The new system:

The new system covers planets randomly in resources as normal, but players can decide where to build their cities! You can set up a city in any suitable location (on flat land for most races). Resources are no longer mini-cities with building spots, instead you set up an extractor like a mining drill and then tell it which city to ship the materials to. It’s up to that city to use all the resources that are linked to it. There may be a logistics cost for linking a resource to a colony far away, and you would be able to set up trade routes between cities to move resources around more efficiently.

There’s only one type of colony in this system so it’s up to you to decide how to lay it out and balance housing space with industrial output etc. You would only need to design blueprints for the different types of colony you want, for example you could have one for a production colony that uses 4 ore per turn or a residential colony that needs 20 food and 2 coal per turn. To keep things balanced, we would simply impose a limit to the number of cities you can have on a planet based on its size. Instead of having 5 residential cities and 30+ small resource towns pre-placed on a planet, now we’d just have 5 manually placed cities that split the 30 resources among them.

What do you think?

Which system do you prefer, and are there any other issues you can see with the new colonisation system?

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.

The blueprint system – Fixing the micromanagement problem

Posted by Brendan Drain on

Every single 4X game has the same basic flaw — as the game progresses, the micromanagement that was fun gameplay at the start becomes a bother later in the game when colony numbers scale up. Building up one colony is fun, but building up dozens that are all at different stages of development is irritating. When you’re busy sending ships all over the galaxy and playing the political endgame, there’s usually no time for colonisation or to direct conquered worlds. The only game to solve this issue was perhaps Master of Orion III, and it only did so by putting an AI in control and making the game essentially play itself. That’s not a solution, it’s a disaster.

I propose a simple, elegant solution to the colony micromanagement problem that should let people continue colonisation well into the endgame, but without taking direct control away from the user.

The blueprint system:

Each planet will have one capitol colony from which everything is managed. This is where the important buildings like factories, defensive structures and research labs will be built. The capitol colony’s buildings will be arranged on a grid, and when you’re managing the colony down at this level you’ll be able to place buildings into a build queue by putting them on the grid.  The arrangement of buildings on a grid, and the order in which to build them, can be saved as a blueprint. New colonies can then be built using this blueprint, and they’ll automatically build all the recorded buildings in the specified order. A mock-up of a colony is below:

The clever part is that the blueprints will be updatable; Add a new building to the blueprint and all colonies using that blueprint will start producing it. So if you’ve just researched a new building and want it on every production planet, you can just edit the blueprint and add it. The area marked out by blue squares in the image above (including the ones currently occupied by red and green ones) is reserved for the colony’s blueprint, so you can’t manually place buildings there.

The squares around the outside that aren’t part of a blueprint can be built on manually, allowing customisation of a colony even though it’s following a blueprint. For example, you might have a “production colony” blueprint, and if your planet is close to enemy territory you might want to use the squares around the edges for defensive buildings like turrets or shipyards. If your planet has more mines than usual (if it’s mineral rich), you could build extra factories in these squares too. Blueprints could also contain population percentages assigned to particular jobs, spending decisions, and anything else a colony might need.

Maintaining control

This system solves the micromanagement problem by turning dozens of repetitive colony management actions into one single action and then propagating that decision across your empire. But because every action done to a blueprint is manually chosen by the user, he is still in direct control of every decision. There’s no AI calling the shots, blueprints are literally just a productivity tool to make control of an expanding empire much simpler. It’s also a completely optional system, I intend to let people play the game without ever using the feature, but I don’t really see a down-side to using it.