Worlds Collide - 4X Space Strategy

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fishy417
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:35 am
Location: Australia

Worlds Collide - 4X Space Strategy

Post by fishy417 »

Hi All,

I though I might put up some details of a game I've been working on for over a year now (on and off). Its mostly something I've been wanting to play myself and working on in my spare time. I am working on the AI now, after that is functional i should have a playable game though still missing a lot of the features I plan.


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Game Description:

4X Turn based galactic strategy
Hex Grid based map
Modular based Ship design
AI Corporations that are the base of your empires industry\research
Jump based movement
Detailed Empire Diplomacy
Dynamic sensor FOW

Thoughts behind current plans:

Planets: Planets will be your income and resource production, ships can be produced in shipyards in space but ship components will come from the planets. Corps will mine resources on the planets but mine efficiency will drop for each mine on the planet, so there will be an optimal number of mines for each planet, which is effected by planets resource density too. Population is limited by food supply and housing, both don't have fixed limited but a planet can only produce so much food though you can import food from another planet to increase supported population.

AI Corporations: I'm looking at AI corps to give you a sense of an established empire without all the micro-management. This will also create targets of opportunity for trade routes and construction yards, but if you chose to attack a the corps within the empire you may be burning your bridges so if you take over their planets the corp will move on and won't help your infrastructure. Corps may be loyal to their home empire or may not, If they are loyal they may give discounts to purchases or even commit some of their security forces to defending your space

Ships: Ships will be modular based that you design, one big thing i'm thinking is to not have shields... so you can't just send off one powerful fleet\ship to kill half the enemy, it will still take damage and need to come back to repair. Tech can decrease the damage you take. you might have a stock of parts to allow repair infield once but this will be consumed and need to be restocked.

Jump Movement: I'm thinking of Jump based movement to allow more decisions before you take your turn. You could jump max distance but not know if you will land on hostile ships or jump shorter\save capacitor but only get one move per turn, This will also encourage the use of expendable scouts

Fleets: What I hope to avoid is hard group\fleet limits instead i plan to have AOE weapons that will damage all ships on a grid but are weaker then point blank weapons. Graphically as more ships collect on a grid it will just re-scale all ships so it visually fits on the grid.

Empire Diplomacy: I'm working on having detailed diplomacy but without having over complication. I plan to include just a few different types of treaties. Some of the treaties such as alliances can be ruled by a voting system and this can be determined by which type of alliance you choose to create. If your a warrior race you might form an alliance with other warrior races and votes will be counted on military strength. Or you could like defense and diplomacy and form an alliance on total population or even just one vote per empire.

Alliance Votes: Alliances can vote on anything from who to declare war on to kicking out members or inviting new ones. Again I don't want to create to many options so that only one or two get used.

Sensor Behavior: For detecting other ships it will work from a degrading strength out from your ship. You could have sensors that can detect pretty far but only the most obvious ships\fleets, etc. Detection will be based on a sensor signature for each ship and will add together for each ship on the grid, so large fleets will be easy to detect, and solo ships can stay undetected easier. Sensor strengths will work off the highest number, so large fleets wont detect other ships any easier then the ship in the fleet with the best sensors... i could include a small stacking boost to sensor strength but balance those options later.

Research: Still determining how to do this. I don't want to an empire to be able to out research another empire and their ships can't even scratch them. a few thoughts for this is to have research actually done by corps and not directly controlled then you just purchase licencing off the corp. this would mean the newest tech is expensive but comes down with age so smaller empire could always purchase the older techs even if from another empire. Corp loyalty will effect this and could stop a corp selling any tech to an empire. Plus you could help research along buy injecting cash\grants into the corp and defending research outpost\projects from hostiles\pirates. This may be too hands off but will try this way first and evaluate from there.

Standard Game Items: I'm still looking at having a lot of the whats considered standard 4X space items such as, asteroid belts, nebula's, wormholes, stations, pirates, events, wonders, etc. these are things that i will add as i go and determine how the fit in.

Inspiration: Galactic Civilizations, Civilization V, Anno, Endless Space, EVE Online. I like the diplomacy in GC, forming alliances then declaring war on half the galaxy at once. Civ V has good unit control (not perfect) but the controlling and attacking armys was fun. Endless space has a great UI and streamlined interface and gameplay that is great, would like have a bit more depth with it. EVE has great economy and depth with dynamic ship combinations and setups.



Wow yeah i guess I've thought about it a lot... lol. but yeah if you've read all that and are still interested in anything or want more info\plans, I wouldn't mind seeing what other people think of these ideas and hearing suggestions. Everything is still pre-alpha and mostly likely will change, especially stuff like GUI visibility and background colors. I'm doing all the models\graphics and programming, I may be interested in help especially with texturing and models but still enjoy working on it myself too.
Last edited by fishy417 on Thu Nov 26, 2015 1:48 am, edited 4 times in total.
Visit http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au to check out my 4X TBS project
d3jake
Posts: 198
Joined: Sat Mar 22, 2008 7:49 pm
Location: United States of America

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by d3jake »

Wow! Looks cool. I've never been one for planning out an turn-based\RTS, so... my best suggestion? Uh... take frequent breaks so you don't get burned out?
The Open Descent Foundation is always looking for programmers! http://www.odf-online.org
"I'll find out if what I deleted was vital here shortly..." -d3jake
hybrid
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Location: Oldenburg(Oldb), Germany
Contact:

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by hybrid »

Indeed really cool. Nice graphics and really good to hear that it's already almost playable :-)
Burns
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Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by Burns »

Ir looks amazing!
fishy417
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:35 am
Location: Australia

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by fishy417 »

Hi,

just thought I'd post a quick update incase anyone is interested in my ongoing development. I decided to start a blog to record my progress and updates in-case anyone is interested:

KWFLGames

Didn't think I should be spamming this post just with tiny updates or things that I have completed recently.

Maybe people can help me chose a name too, had to add a token poll for my first blog too... ;) lol

might even put some short videos up there soon if I don't think it looks too incomplete or if people are interested.

Thanks,
Visit http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au to check out my 4X TBS project
chronologicaldot
Competition winner
Posts: 684
Joined: Mon Sep 10, 2012 8:51 am

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by chronologicaldot »

Cool looking game!

Hey, I tried voting on your poll, but when I clicked to vote, it showed the percentages were at zero. Does that mean I was the first or is the poll broken?
TheMrCerebro
Competition winner
Posts: 80
Joined: Tue Jun 29, 2010 10:06 pm
Location: Valencia, Spain

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by TheMrCerebro »

:shock: Impressive. Look good. :wink:
Follow me on twitter: @themrcerebro
TheMrCerebro
Competition winner
Posts: 80
Joined: Tue Jun 29, 2010 10:06 pm
Location: Valencia, Spain

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by TheMrCerebro »

Why is your project in the section "blitz showcase" of blitzBasic.com?
Link: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/pos ... opic=98719

This section is for projects developed with Irrlicht :evil:
Follow me on twitter: @themrcerebro
serengeor
Posts: 1712
Joined: Tue Jan 13, 2009 7:34 pm
Location: Lithuania

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by serengeor »

TheMrCerebro wrote:Why is your project in the section "blitz showcase" of blitzBasic.com?
Link: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/pos ... opic=98719

This section is for projects developed with Irrlicht :evil:
He might be using blitz basic wrapper of irrlicht for the project :roll:
Working on game: Marrbles (Currently stopped).
fishy417
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:35 am
Location: Australia

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by fishy417 »

chronologicaldot wrote:Cool looking game!

Hey, I tried voting on your poll, but when I clicked to vote, it showed the percentages were at zero. Does that mean I was the first or is the poll broken?
Yeah your right that its doesn't show your initial vote and just you were the first one, its updated now :)

Thanks for the feedback!

TheMrCerebro wrote:Why is your project in the section "blitz showcase" of blitzBasic.com?
Link: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/pos ... opic=98719

This section is for projects developed with Irrlicht :evil:
as serengeor mentioned I'm using blitzMAX and the Irrlicht wrapper so I would consider it appropriate to place posts on both sites. Thanks for the feedback though :)
Visit http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au to check out my 4X TBS project
aanderse
Posts: 155
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2008 2:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by aanderse »

Will this game run on linux?
fishy417
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:35 am
Location: Australia

Re: 4X Space Game (Still to be named)

Post by fishy417 »

aanderse wrote:Will this game run on linux?
That's a good question, I'm currently just working on a windows build but Irrlicht and blitzmax, which i use, support linux and Mac so it is a possibility later on, I would have to rewrite the shaders, currently i'm using DirectX and HLSL and i'm sure there would be other things that need to be done but its not an impossibility. Guess i would need a Linux machine too...
Visit http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au to check out my 4X TBS project
fishy417
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:35 am
Location: Australia

Re: Worlds Collide - 4X Space Strategy

Post by fishy417 »

Hi All,

Just a quick update, I've still been working hard on this though it's definitely a slow process at times. I'm excited that I finally manage to work out how rebuild the irrlicht dll and the Blitz MAX modules so I can make changes or add some of the features that irrlicht supports but weren't setup in the BMax wrapper. Getting the right Irrlicht,BMax wrapper and MinGW version and setup was harder than I thought.

One of those is particles affectors particles would work but I couldn't make them scale and fade with BMax so instead i created a shader that does it for me and includes particle rotation too. though for some reason the performance of the shader isn't what i'd hope it would be it seems to act like its a pixel shader issue because FPS dropped drastically when the particle explosion filled the whole screen but even when I have the pixel shader too just render a white box and nothing else performance was still just as bad... so i may just go back to the inbuilt irrlicht particles and just add to it as needed.

I hoping to find out why it wasn't fast enough because other then performance it functions as I want it too and performance was fine until I started having a simulated fleet fight with 30 v 30 ships and each hit would create between 0 - 4 pieces of debris with a particle trail off it then FPS would drop to 5-10 :(. once I just removed the particle trails still keeping the debris chucks it would stay around 50-120 FPS which i'm happy with.

Lately I've been expanding the way sensors work (sensor triangulation and signature stacking if ships are on the same grid) and adding extra GUI functionality which is looking good if I say so myself ;) Also been doing plenty of bug fixing as I go which is good too.

Let me know if anyone has anything they would like to know more about?

Thanks,
Visit http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au to check out my 4X TBS project
fishy417
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:35 am
Location: Australia

Re: Worlds Collide - 4X Space Strategy

Post by fishy417 »

Hi All,

Just thought I'd let anyone interested know that if you want to check out an early build of the game you can download a pre-pre-alpha build from my blog http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au/. Would be glad to hear any initial feedback or thoughts on it :)

Thanks,
Visit http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au to check out my 4X TBS project
fishy417
Posts: 11
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2008 4:35 am
Location: Australia

Re: Worlds Collide - 4X Space Strategy

Post by fishy417 »

Hi,

Wow can't believe it's been 2 years since I posted here (blog has been updated a little more often).

I've just posted another update on the blog for those interested, progress has been steady even if a bit slow ;)
http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au/

Should have details of the tech system and some GUI shots up soon too!

Happy to answer any questions you may have?

Thanks,
Visit http://kwflgames.blogspot.com.au to check out my 4X TBS project
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