It's also nice to see the modest changes with big impact. The buildings are certainly much more clearly defined now. It'd odd how such a little thing can have a big difference.
Indeed. Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned this yet, but basically the whole "racial flair" thing and "team colors" thing is going away. The human players play with one set of tiles, and then each AI-controlled race uses their own unique (much smaller set of) buildings. So there is literally 100% asymmetry, no overlap at all between AI and player buildings.
This keeps things a lot clearer, and works well mechanically for a number of reasons that I won't take the time to write up now. But if you think about AI War and why it works well there, this kind of takes the same general concept and runs with it.
Story-wise this has also been adjusted so that the human-like nature of the human-controlled cities makes some sense. Even if you are playing as "The Boarines," you'll be playing as the sole human who is kind of advising/leading them. You'll still choose your Boarine leader for the race, and get bonuses and all that, but it's basically a partnership between you and that leader in building your empire. The AI-controlled factions, meanwhile, are 100% non-human, so they wind up being extremely alien in all ways, in a good way.
As this thread is about clearing up the issue of units and war. I'm still not quite sure how wars will actually work... it still feels a bit vague there.
Risk - Wars where the aim is capturing all tiles.
Rebuild - Full conquest is expensive but border skirmishes are common. You'd push through the enemy cities towards their capital.
War of the Worlds - Territory control include hostile terraforming and spreading the red weed (visual change only).
creeper world, with troops abstracted as a fluid that is attracted to target buildings. So the orders are reduced to where the troops start from, what the terrain is (how they'll move/flow, how fast they'll advance) and what they should go towards.
I've played all of those extensively except for War of the Worlds, and the first two are particular favorites of mine. SBR is... kind of like a lot of these, but not really like any of them exactly.
1. Terrain really isn't a super limiting factor most of the time. As in Civ on a decent-sized map, you can pretty much capture enough terrain to run a nice empire without feeling cramped. So you aren't forced into fighting your neighbor out of simply having nowhere else to go, unlike Risk.
2. That said, sometimes you'll say "I want that area," and you'll have to go get it in some fashion. Or you might try to get around a foreign city to a clear spot on the other side, splitting your empire but making sure you are friends with them in the meantime. It's a lot more viable here than in Civ, where having cities spread apart is frankly suicide (at least for me). The impetus to kill your neighbor just for the sake of a cohesive empire is not inbuilt here, although depending on circumstances it might be (depends on who the neighbor is!).
3. So, why do you fight at all? A variety of reasons, really:
a. You might find yourself trapped in a smaller area than you want, and need to attack your neighbors to get out. The difference between this and Risk is that this isn't a foregone conclusion, and there are often other solutions anyhow.
b. You might be under attack by someone who really hates you, and thus have to kill them to stop their aggression against you.
c. The equivalent of "barbarian camps" are definitely there now (and working!) and you have to fight at a bare minimum to defend yourself against that aspect of the planet. Even if you never war on another race.
d. You might attack another race in order to gain something other than territory (but territory is a kind of bonus that comes with it). You might want to steal something from them, or prevent them from doing something before you can do it, or prevent them from attacking someone who is helping you, or etc.
At the moment there are four types of military actions that I have set up:
1. Ranged combat, where you fire missiles or similar at enemy targets from your buildings.
2. Ground combat, where you send troops across the ground from a barracks of yours to an enemy building that can be pathed to across the ground. You see the little guys run over and so forth.
3. Air combat, where you send a military dropship or a stealth helicopter over to a target to shoot at it from the air and then hopefully return home.
4. Naval combat, where it's the same sort of thing except with stealth boats that try to get in, strike, and then get back.
All of those actions are initiated from buildings, and there is no "unit position." The buildings emit the attack of whatever sort, and there are consequences based on the type of attack (aka, you don't lose any population to fighting if you just fired a missile, but you probably will if you send in ground troops).
I'm only saying all this now because it's starting to really come together at this point. There's still a lot that is almost-prototyped but not quite coded yet, so I don't want to talk about much more of that right at the moment. But I'm quite pleased with how well this is coming along, and how smooth the overall concepts here are. There are some extra clever things (if I do say so) that I have yet to mention, because I have yet to actually be able to test them and be sure they work as well in practice as they do on paper. But at any rate, I have a lot of experience looking at things on paper, and right now this is feeling very solid. If all goes well, I'll know more conclusively by sometime next week.
Oh, and I can't remember if I asked before. Nasarog from eXplorminate asks if you've ever played Deadlock?
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/deadlock-ii-shrine-wars/screenshots
I haven't played it but this looks interesting:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/deadlock-ii-shrine-wars/screenshots/gameShotId,209524/
It looks like you can change the function of buildings, much like how in Civ: Beyond Earth you can now pick one of two quest/specialisation options for each building. But this looks more toggleable. So you can do fun things like mobilising for war and making your hospitals serve the military over the public. Or in a push use hospitals as emergency housing. Not sure how annoying or micromanagement-heavy such a feature is. But it may be interesting for core, rare buildings. It'd certainly be nice as a feature. Like making exo-force fields a toggle for metal harvesters in AI-War. I can see it working, possibly a fair amount of micro if you would be tempted to switch too often. Or like you could push power stations in SimCity to produce more energy, if you had more control of the function of buildings it'd be interesting.
Neat! I have not played the game, no. And I'm generally not in favor of per-building things where you have to hunt for specific buildings on the map. That's something I'm trying to get away from. I do like things like SimCity does where at the city level you can set taxes or the amount of spending on fire safety in general, or whatever. Those sorts of centralized controls (by city, not your entire empire) is something that I want to explore. I haven't put anything like that in place yet, but it is in my plans.
Talking about buildings... I think most of these questions could wait for a 'Meet the buildings' thread but I'll ask now. You mentioned the SimCity elements and the impact they'll have on the game:
Other parts of it really bring out a lot of depth that lead to new and interesting diplomatic, technological, empire-management, and military options and flows.
So what are some of the important and fun buildings going to be? e.g. factories, hospitals... trans-dimensional rift generators?
What fun things can the buildings do? Increase production, growth... launch phasic nuclear strikes?
What other impacts and requirements can they have? e.g. adding or consuming: Pollution, power, population, water, resources, RCI, terraforming...
What control of buildings functions do you have? e.g. coverage area of a hospital, the output of power stations, the dumping site for all that pollution.
I'm thinking of examples... Do the Acutian buildings pollute? Do the Spire all have massive energy requirements? Do the Thoraxians have any commercial buildings? (I can't imagine them trying to sell sweets.) I can picture Thoraxian tunnels, Andorian hospitals etc. But there's a lot of room for fun stuff.
This is an incredibly complicated question, and I'm a bit short on time, so I'm going to defer for now. Right now there's a lot of buildings that are getting continuously re-defined in the interest of streamlining and clarity, too. There is a pollution model, but I wound up devising a completely new one more recently. It's a lot more clear and streamlined, but actually more complex to interact with, in a good way. It blows in the wind, and mountains block it, so building other buildings where they won't get the smog on them is something to take into consideration when building stuff that pollutes and stuff that is degraded by pollution (not all buildings care).
There are also hazmat buildings that you can construct that will send little hazmat teams flying around to clean up the blobs of pollution, so you can combat a dirty sector in a couple of different ways. As with SimCity, you could also just build your polluting stuff far away, but that also comes with some other risks/costs here, so it's a matter of your playstyle.
That's just addressing pollution, but there is also food, water, housing, morale, staffing, and a few other mechanics. These are designed so that most of those effects are city-wide and can be managed centrally (per city) without having to worry about specific buildings. There are some things with crime resulting from unemployment, or migration between cities based on that. Or you can build cryo sleep buildings to put the can't-be-cared-for-right-now citizens away.
As far as citizen specialties go, this takes the sci-fi theme and runs with it, giving basically the ability to "download abilities" into the minds of citizens, ala The Matrix. So one citizen is as good as any other at most tasks. Though of course there are racial limitations on things in general (just not limitations on citizens within the race compared to other citizens of the race). Although I do plan on probably having some limited "super citizens" that you can breed. The births are handled through artificial means in accelerated growth birth centers, rather than by direct mating. This lets you grow population as demand arises, relatively speaking, although the birth centers obviously have a limited throughput on each one.
Because of the versatility of your citizens, any citizen can do any job. However, overall your technologies and race and buildings and whatnot determine what overall skills you have available to download into citizens, AND the available buildings and their situation determine what hardware is available for use. Aka, if you don't have hospitals in an area, it doesn't matter that you could download surgeon knowledge into citizens -- it isn't going to help them perform surgery with no tools. And if you only have limited surgery skills to download into anyone, well, that's as good as your surgeons can possibly be right now.
Note that all that talk of "downloading into citizens" is completely automated. You're managing the buildings and the techs and things of that nature, and the citizens implicitly move to where they are needed based on your actions and setup. It's easy to infer what the player is trying to do with high accuracy, and from a player perspective it is also easy to infer what will be inferred. So you get the streamlining, aka lack of a tedious interface with lots of clicking, without the removal of depth. I would argue actually there is more
effective depth, since in a lot of overly-deep games there are so many features that go unused because of the tedium of using them.
A lot of the "how could that possibly work" is stuff that will have to wait until I can show it to you in practice. But this was a big part of my breakthrough earlier this week, where I discovered an "oh of course that's how it would work" obvious way for this to function. I don't want to say what it is just yet, because it's still about 50% prototyped at the moment. There may be some hidden problem with it that I'm not yet aware of.
But at the moment I am super stoked, because basically all of the biggest problems I've had in terms of "hmm, I have options, but how to handle this the best?" have at least on paper been solved. If the prototypes pan out the way I hope in the coming weeks, then we'll be hitting Q1 extremely strongly with the game. If there are problems with what I have on paper, then we'll iterate and see what happens from there. But what I like about what I have at the moment is how bloody obvious it is, in the main. It's not like any other game, but it just feels very natural to me at least.
SimCity again. I found each city felt unique not from the buildings themselves but based on your personal aim. A city designed to be efficient had strong repeating patterns and very short travel times. A city designed around pollution is more stretched out, distancing population from industry and having better quality buildings in key, clean areas. I'm just wondering what factors each race will care about and what types of cities each will make. Will each race have a different layout or plan? (e.g. focus on energy, food, production, low pollution etc. Build in ordered patterns vs organic blobs)
Yes, immensely so. I love that, and here this is also an implicit thing to your cities. Not so much the AI cities, because they each have very limited building sets (about 6 buildings for each of the 14 races). Given the super-alien nature of the alien buildings, learning more than the 6*14 = 84 unique and strange alien buildings would be just absolutely insane, anyway. Your own civilization will have about 120 buildings to choose from, and different ones would go in different cities within your empire based on your aims. Just putting everything in every city would be extremely inefficient and unwise. And some things benefit from different environments, too, so you may see cities that have more of this or that because of local conditions as well.
Here's a few comments from eXplorminate:
athelasloraiel 14 hours ago
I love mining ideas...
AwakenTiamat 13 hours ago
"Risk meets Civilization meets AI War"...be still my heart
athelasloraiel 6 hours ago
with a pinch of Majesty on top...
Nice.
I'm just extremely curious as to what you've come up with in prototyping and what those buildings pictured actually are and do, and which race will be building them, and why... generally each picture prompts a thousand further questions. Hope all is going well.
All is going very well at the moment.
General notes of importance:
1. All of the buildings pictured thus far are "player buildings," meaning that you the human-who-is-helping-a-race always control them. The way the races you are helping use them can vary, though, and there will likely be some unique buildings from your race that get pulled in, too.
2. All of the buildings used by races-controlled-by-the-AI are completely unique to that race, and you've seen none of those yet. There are generally 6 per race. We're through modeling on the Thoraxian and Spire ones, and I think the linework is done on the Thoraxian ones as well, but coloring hasn't happened yet for any of those. I still have to get to the building definitions for the other races, but I've been more focused on the player cities thus far.
