I'm actually a bit concerned about your stated goal of having around 1000 ships though. That sounds like adding it for the sake of adding it, without adding much quality to the core gameplay.
True, if I was hearing some developer I did not know saying something like that, I'd groan and think "they just want MOAR SHIPZ," which would be something I'd find concerning, too, and I'd immediately conclude that developer must be an idiot with no ideas about game design. To respond to that in my case, I'd point you to the following two links:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Design_Complexityhttp://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Design_Complexity#Why_Does_The_Game_Force_Variety_On_The_Player.3FThe good and great strategy games around have less than 20 units per 'race' and focus more on the interactions and balance between those units. I'm thinking especially Starcraft, and of the others the Warcraft series, Heroes of Might and Magic, Company of Heroes, Age of Empires series, Total war series, etc.
Yes, but there's a reason I don't just play one of those games -- and same for the other players who play AI War instead of them. Personally I couldn't hate the "20 units per race" more, I think it's lazy and oversimplified and just cloning past successes at this stage. It's also hugely pvp-oriented, and I don't play pvp. AI War is designed around being a co-op or solo game from the ground up, and so it takes more inspirations from games like Civ IV in terms of how it handles a tech tree, etc.
I estimate that you're already up to about 50 distinct basic combat ship types, and I don't think you need many more. It's inevitable that the more units you have, the less unique each will be and the less balanced they will be with each other.
Even in terms of CivIV, despite the fact that you have such a huge tech tree, you wind up with a build path that could be your baseline over time, which then sucks the enjoyment down for me. AI War uniquely solves that through its emphasis on variety and exploration. You can't have a sense of exploration and discovery without a ton of content, it just goes without being said. And as more content is added, you come upon multiplicative complexity, because ships can be used in concert, etc, rather than simply in isolation. Yes it makes for challenges with balance, but I think we've proved we're pretty good at handling that by now. I also disagree that the units have to become increasingly non-unique. Yes, that would be true if a single person or small group of people were designing them, but you wouldn't believe the crazy new ideas that come through the ship suggestions forum, and I think there are whole swathes of new concepts worth exploring there.
Yes it's fun to discover new ships or buildings every game, but that's only fun once, the first time you see it, and you can only keep that up for your players by adding more and more ships (which as argued above, doesn't add much to the game itself).
Well, given that it takes 120 hours of gaming at minimum just to see all the stuff in the base game, and then probably another 100 hours for the first expansion, I'd imagine that by the time you get back around to the stuff you saw at hour 1, you've mostly forgotten it. And then there's always the matter of combining ships in new ways, which leads to new strategies for you and the AI. At least, that's been my experience.
I think you'll find that AI War has captured a lot of people in solo and co-op play for far longer of a period of time than any non-4X strategy games have done before, and that most of the things you were talking about only apply in a pvp game. I'd been bouncing from RTS game to RTS game for a decade before giving up in frustration and creating AI War, so I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted by that stage in a solo/co-op context. AI War is supremely well crafted around those concepts (if I do say so myself), and comparing it to starcraft or warcraft is rather missing the point.
Yes new ships look good on patch notes or on an expansion features list. But I would've thought to improve the game, your energies would be better spent improving the core gameplay itself.
Yes, we're quite commercial and mercenary in terms of doing things for "how good they look on patch notes and release notes." As you know, our customers are told to just stuff it, and we rely on making quick-sales to teenagers who are dazzled by our amazing graphics, and boy do they feel suckered when they realize that instead we focus on depth and gameplay -- which, by the way, we never improve, and totally takes a backseat to the swarms and swarms of ships we add every week.
Okay, enough sarcasm. But I'm not even sure how to respond to that comment in any other way. Have you actually read any of our release notes? I'd have thought it is pretty clear that gameplay is our primary focus, and that ships are one way amongst many in which we expand gameplay opportunities. I guess the tendency is to assume the worst of others, and I tend to do that more than I should also, but I'd have thought that given the way we created the base game, grew it, created the expansion, and continued to grow the base game again, it would be pretty clear what our pattern of development, our goals, and so forth are. We neither flail nor add features to improve bullet points somewhere.
And yes, the models of the other strategy games works, but only in their pvp contexts, and -- let's face it -- that model has been done to death no matter how much people like it, and I think you can rest easy that a steady stream of derivative RTS games following exactly the model you cite will come out this year, next year, and probably every year for the foreseeable future. Each one prettier than the last, and more streamlined and simplified, and so on. I don't value that space, I'm not part of the target audience of that space, and I was tired of living on the fringes of that space in order to get the sort of co-op strategy I wanted. AI War takes some lessons from those games, but it mainly goes off in its own direction, and it also neatly solves a lot of the game design issues that those guys have been stuck on for the last decade. Everything has a unique niche and a real purpose, and different strategies can be arrived at in a multitude of ways... it's a far cry from a lot of those "20 'unique' units per civ" games where you wind up with many of them being just re-skins of some other faction's unit X with slightly tweaked stats.
At any rate, it's not productive for me to ramble on any further, hopefully that will clear up any confusion about our intent and design aptitude, at any rate.
