Drox Operative

[madcow]

Some victory conditions I thought would be interesting would be playing more to the mercenary aspect. It seems like if a Drox operative wants to milk as much money as he can, he would want the races to be in a constant power struggle.

Making a certain amount of money, and/or making sure there are a certain number of races alive within similar powers of each other. For instance.

Other possibilities include keeping a certain star system from being colonized, making sure a certain number of colonies from all races are destroyed, even maybe protect the NPC monsters long enough for them to build a super weapon.

These are just ideas off the top of my head, but the general theme is - you shouldn't necessarily have to care in each sector who wins. You want to milk the most out of them along the way.

And maybe the Drox have some other even more esoteric goal that you are working towards.

Edit: I guess I just like the idea of playing as a sneaky backstabbing SOB... play both sides for all they got and then moving on.

[Mánagarmr]

That's a very interesting way of looking at it

[madcow]

Heh, well if there were conditions you could pick. You could decide if you wanted to play honorable or sneaky, or somewhere in between. Though I wouldn't be against randomly generating them as well.

[Stephen Hornback]

I'm all for picking from a multiple of victory conditions when you start a sector. I think it would add a huge amount of replayability to the game. I don't know how hard it would be for Steven, but I'm going to pester him for that, just like many others have. Maybe we'll end up with an extended beta period so these things can be implemented. But the wait would be worth it imo.

[Bluddy]

I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.

My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.

This can then be combined with random victory conditions per sector to make things interesting and varied.

Just having the random victory conditions would be good too, though there isn't as much to get you to be emotionally involved about what's going on in the sector. I definitely agree that as the Drox, you shouldn't care who takes over the sector (unless it's a secret objective of yours).

Glad to see you're interested in this sort of thing as well, Stephen!

[Mánagarmr]

Bluddy, why are you made of so much win? Agree completely with your suggestion there. That would truly be interesting!

[Cyborg]

I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.

My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.

I don't have a vested interest anymore, but I would think that this would be called vendor lock-in. You would never be free to backstab or switch alliances without penalty. Also, grinding reputation has never been fun. Ever. Having multiple win conditions is a good thing, but I think it would be better if that condition was something the player set (or had a hand in setting). The way that Crusader Kings 2 does it is very satisfying in the sense that as a player you decide what you want to do. Your choice in starting country and year plays a big part, but as a player that makes you think, "I wonder how far I can take this?" The computer keeps score.

Right now, I don't think drox is well-defined as to what the game is supposed to be. Is it or is it not a 4x? Is it or is it not a Diablo themed adventure in space? Is it or is it not a mercenary sandbox? I don't know. Narrowing the win conditions would make that more clear, but it would also shut a lot of doors.

[Bluddy]

I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.

My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.

I don't have a vested interest anymore, but I would think that this would be called vendor lock-in. You would never be free to backstab or switch alliances without penalty. Also, grinding reputation has never been fun. Ever. Having multiple win conditions is a good thing, but I think it would be better if that condition was something the player set (or had a hand in setting). The way that Crusader Kings 2 does it is very satisfying in the sense that as a player you decide what you want to do. Your choice in starting country and year plays a big part, but as a player that makes you think, "I wonder how far I can take this?" The computer keeps score.

Right now, I don't think drox is well-defined as to what the game is supposed to be. Is it or is it not a 4x? Is it or is it not a Diablo themed adventure in space? Is it or is it not a mercenary sandbox? I don't know. Narrowing the win conditions would make that more clear, but it would also shut a lot of doors.

The reason it wouldn't be lock-in is because together with this, non-allied races would offer you high rewards for betraying your chosen race. So you can choose to betray the race you're allied with, but you'd take an initial reputation hit. Also, another thing I'd like to be in the game is that larger races would give you less profitable quests than smaller races (they don't need you as much). Sticking with a race as it takes over the galaxy would become less and less profitable for you, which encourages you to switch to help the smaller races.

In terms of reputation grind, the idea here is that it's something similar to 'make X money from quests', except more easily quantifiable than money. The reputation I'm talking about here is NOT from grinding faction, trying to get races to like you. It's from accomplishing big things. The small quests - finding planets and such - would give you minor rewards. The big quests - defeating an enemy, defending a planet from invasion, espionage - will give you a lot of reputation. Really, by making it about reputation rather than what's there now (making sure one race takes over the sector and allying with that race), you allow the player to do whatever he wants to do. I agree that you don't want to force the player to force the space race to end in any particular way. What you want is to tell the player: do what you do as a mercenary. Become famous by doing cool stuff. Choose which faction you want to support, and how you want the sector to turn out (one race destroying everything, cold peace... whatever).

The basic idea is, a. let the player play given the backdrop of the 4x. b. Make the player feel invested, especially in the plight of small races. c. Don't force the player to wait until the 4x resolves itself -- just long enough to 'establish a reputation' for the Drox, at which point the player can move on. 

[eRe4s3r]

But let's be realistic, this beta is started, usually, unless you are Arcen Games and you make AVWW, in a beta you do not change the defining characteristics of a game.

I see some problems with the suggestions, not that they are bad, they are just not going to work out the way we want.

1) Due to not knowing where anything is at the beginning, we can not realistically influence any races start-up phase. AT ALL. Even if we are level 50 if a race gets pummeled that we are supposed to keep alive there is no way we could match another races fleets, because at the beginning everything is the same level as you.

2) If we are lucky, and our target race becomes the dominant force, we don't even need to do anything except stir up some trouble, trail 1 of their ships and kill anything near it. You could also call that an indirect reputation grind.

3) It is not uncommon for 3 out of 5 races to be gone just 30 minutes in, thats a 60% chance of losing right there.

4) The combat and movement doesn't work for this at all, if races can fly the same ways we can there is nothing that makes us superior or gives us an advantage. If you think you can outcolonize the dryads you have not played against them. I see colonized planets every minute pop up, by the time I found where they colonized, they colonize 2 or 3 more somewhere else.

5) Because combat is very, let's call it carefully "arcade" there is no tactics involved in engagements, NONE. Poking and running then keeping 1 pressed is not a tactic ^^ the amount and way monsters/enemies behave plays into this too.

To me, if you want this to be a proper "merc in a 4x world" you have to give us
a) A way way bigger ship with the possibility to properly guide upgrades, over at least 50 or 100 stages, with at lest 2 or 3 choices for each upgrade. And a factory, lab and hangar expansion option, including resource refining etc.
b) a proper crew we can assembly with personality, not just crew as equipment, so that they have a moral and a race that relates to ours (so that race choice matters at all)
c) Auto-firing turrets
d) Star Farer style movement
e) Non-race entities that exist outside of our goal and outside of the race system, independents, so to speak.
f) way less enemies, that are way more interesting to fight. Sprawling flak fire and torpedo engagements, carrier vs carrier with dozens of fighters, barrages etc.
g) A proper directional armor system + a directional shield system, so that running away is never a good idea unless you really really want to run away (in which case you put all energy to engines and shields and run like hell.. not "train mobs"
h) physics based weapons ( I am not huge fan of target and throw a dice whether it hits or not weapons)
i) Races that start established and away from each other, but not at war with each other unless the random generator decides that.
j) proper motivations for races, expansion is not a proper motivation, a colony should take much in-game time to get running, require continuous support that a race can not use for war or development of established colonies. Goals, fancy resources to go for etc.
k) Resources that are not just on planets but also asteroids
l) A better way for races to travel that is not a -1- point stargate system, like jump drives.
m) Anomalies should feed into research aboard my ship, in my labs for my personal gain.
n) A more dynamic world, talking about everything besides races, those are dynamic.. but the rest isn't.
o) More things to explore that awe us, including interactions with npc's. Should be highly moddable

[Bluddy]

eRaSeR (sorry your name is hard to reproduce without copy-paste. Hope you don't mind), I think your point detailing the problems with goals to safeguard a race is good. You'd have to come up with a good way of doing this without making instant loss a problem.

A lot of your points I find to be design decisions. Stat-based combat is more common in RPGs, for example.

I do agree that the combat is lacking. I think there's a way to improve it, but it'll take some work. I'm looking more for tweaks though, rather than complete redesign.

There are indeed way too many enemies. Rather than feeling like space, it feels like you're inside the body dealing with the immune system. In most sci-fi notions of space, space isn't packed with monster ships. You can't travel for 5 seconds without bumping into monsters. This is ok for a dungeon teeming with monsters, but not so much for space. Additionally, combat with enemy vessels should be slow and tactical. You should need to bring down their shields, or hack them, and then do structural damage. For this you need fewer, more powerful enemies -- just as you've described.

Other problems with combat involve the fact that you only really need one weapon to fight. This really feels underwhelming for space combat. Enemies should have different weaknesses, and your weapons should only be good for certain things. For example, shields could repel lasers but not projectile weapons. EMP would wreck shields etc. This would make a variety of weapons necessary, which would also require the ships to enable equipping more weapons.

Still more problems involve the fact that the range of beam weapons is too long. I've adjusted the range down in my game and the combat feels more orderly and somewhat more tactical. This is a big deal, because it makes the difference between every monster on screen attacking you, and only the closest monster attacking you.

Anyway, I agree that there are issues, but I think some tweaks could take care of most of them. Other things I see as valid design decisions. The other really big thing I want to see is inter-race political quests (go attack this planet; go defend this planet; spy on what race X is doing). I'm not sure if those will ever make it into the game, but IMO they would improve the game considerably.

[eRe4s3r]

Just say eRe then ;p

If you haven't done so, I would say, take a look at how Star Farer does combat, that game is still not anywhere near done but the combat is incredibly well done. And well, i just love to fly my own ship + fleet ships that work independent.  Add to that crew management, experience, a decent damage and shield system and combat is great fun. And best of all, combat gets incredibly intense with large fleets, I mean, so intense you often lose track of what happens, and that is imo what a good space battle should be, chaotic outside of your awareness, intense inside your awareness. With strafing ships, orientation mattering, etc.

But you make a good point, with some proper modding the combat model could become a lot more fun, especially when we get auto turrets that take down missiles and fighters. And some way to strafe (flying sideways)

[Cyborg]

And this brings us back to the beginning of the never-ending discussion on this forum of how to make a true 4x.

[eRe4s3r]

one of these days this discussion WILL end up in a true multi-staged 4x. I can not believe there are no developers noticing this distinct lack in the genre. There hasn't been a proper 4x game in years, MOO3 was the last true attempt of revising the genre (with as many great as failed ideas). There is Endless Space but it is more a stream-lined 4x game, i don't dislike it but it is not exactly what I want.

There were some great "4x adventures" back in the Amiga and Dos times though. Which is all the more bestumpling, that entire sub-genre instantly died out.

Imo the 1 game that will break this stagnation can be made, but only if is absolutely focused on maintaining 100% moddability. Because the dynamic nature of the galaxy can not ever work without (little moderated) user created content. People have so many ideas for this kind of stuff, that no developer alone could ever make them happen, but users can, if the framework is there.

[Cyborg]

Imo the 1 game that will break this stagnation can be made, but only if is absolutely focused on maintaining 100% moddability. Because the dynamic nature of the galaxy can not ever work without (little moderated) user created content. People have so many ideas for this kind of stuff, that no developer alone could ever make them happen, but users can, if the framework is there.

And it is this fact that will more than likely exclude Arcen, which seems to be allergic to that concept. I know there is a thread about why somewhere. It's a shame because I think they could have done it, skill-wise.

[Wanderer]

one of these days this discussion WILL end up in a true multi-staged 4x. I can not believe there are no developers noticing this distinct lack in the genre. There hasn't been a proper 4x game in years, MOO3 was the last true attempt of revising the genre (with as many great as failed ideas). There is Endless Space but it is more a stream-lined 4x game, i don't dislike it but it is not exactly what I want.

There were some great "4x adventures" back in the Amiga and Dos times though. Which is all the more bestumpling, that entire sub-genre instantly died out.

Primarily because it takes too long to play.  Heck, even CIV has removed the 1 game - 3 months level of micro it used to take.  Couple that with the people with that much time (children) don't have the money to afford a top end 4x'er, so the market's a bit busted up on that one.