Backseat beta'ing, any redshirts can answer my questions?

[Cyborg]

I have been reading the feedback, and I notice there is some question about the first person to lay down military getting an advantage, making retaliation more difficult as well as placing buildings.


I have some ideas, and I want to know if they fit into this kind of game.


1) make military building construction obvious and take a  modifiable amount of time to build. If you notice your opponent is building military, you also have the option to place buildings and effect potential modifiers for each. Maybe you build hacking to slow down the construction of the building. Maybe you support hippie protests during the construction. Positive modifiers could be hiring engineer contractors. Or maybe modifiers that anticipate/counter enemy modifiers to your military.
1b) implement rock paper scissors military buildings, allowing you to place counter buildings, forcing your enemy to place counters to your counters. The rock paper scissors mechanic could actually be based on where you build it, such as land, underground, or air.


1c) create a military queue in a military building, where you can reorder and add attack types that act in sequence. For example, you could order airstrike, ground strike, underground counter or any combination thereof, and have those rolled against your enemy also creating their queue. This would create some depth options. Think along the lines of mixing phases from endless space with tactical games.
1d) create tactical priority queue along the lines of Final Fantasy 12/Dragon age origins.
1e) use high HP, low utility, low-cost junk buildings to attract fire while you build other military. Can you cheese in this game?  has anyone tried?
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Second question, about the pollution/meals/population modifiers. Is a possible to  bank any of the stats? Is there any way to make these modifiers carry over bank style? For example, building up meals and then tanking crop production in favor of skyrocketing another variable to hit the AI where it hurts.
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Third question, how much of the statistics are RNG? Do all the buildings give you a deterministic amount of such and such? Where do you feel the dungeon master comes in?

[Misery]

I have been reading the feedback, and I notice there is some question about the first person to lay down military getting an advantage, making retaliation more difficult as well as placing buildings.


I have some ideas, and I want to know if they fit into this kind of game.


1) make military building construction obvious and take a  modifiable amount of time to build. If you notice your opponent is building military, you also have the option to place buildings and effect potential modifiers for each. Maybe you build hacking to slow down the construction of the building. Maybe you support hippie protests during the construction. Positive modifiers could be hiring engineer contractors. Or maybe modifiers that anticipate/counter enemy modifiers to your military.
1b) implement rock paper scissors military buildings, allowing you to place counter buildings, forcing your enemy to place counters to your counters. The rock paper scissors mechanic could actually be based on where you build it, such as land, underground, or air.


1c) create a military queue in a military building, where you can reorder and add attack types that act in sequence. For example, you could order airstrike, ground strike, underground counter or any combination thereof, and have those rolled against your enemy also creating their queue. This would create some depth options. Think along the lines of mixing phases from endless space with tactical games.
1d) create tactical priority queue along the lines of Final Fantasy 12/Dragon age origins.
1e) use high HP, low utility, low-cost junk buildings to attract fire while you build other military. Can you cheese in this game?  has anyone tried?
======================
Second question, about the pollution/meals/population modifiers. Is a possible to  bank any of the stats? Is there any way to make these modifiers carry over bank style? For example, building up meals and then tanking crop production in favor of skyrocketing another variable to hit the AI where it hurts.
========


Third question, how much of the statistics are RNG? Do all the buildings give you a deterministic amount of such and such? Where do you feel the dungeon master comes in?

Alot of that isnt quite relevant at the moment;  there's other larger problems keeping those functions from really even happening, so it's hard to say right now until those bugs (or whatever) have been stomped flat.  Fortunately, knowing Arcen, this likely will not take long at all.  In an overall sense, testing is going well. 

The game though doesnt really seem to use much RNG outside of worldgen.  And I've never even touched the military aside from that one game where I happened to start really close to the Skylaxians (military buildings seem to have very short range), which is where the problem of the first to strike became very evident.  But yeah, you can get quite detailed stats on just what numbers of what things the building in question puts out and uses up; so far for me there's been no confusion whatsoever on building function.  While many of them have alot of seperate stats, they're presented well and are easy to understand.  They work like alot of buildings do in Skyward Collapse, in that their effectiveness varies depending on wether or not they're getting the things/effects they need.  Micromanaging that is part of the challenge, and everything is set up so that it constantly remains interesting.

I dont know what stat banking means.

[TheVampire100]

Funny enough I placed my Zenith city next to a Peltian city and it ended in an open war very soon. At first I didn't even see the Peltians. (that problemn seems to happen a lot, you notice other races to late, especially such unoticable races like the Fenyn that seem to merge with the environment).
As soon as war starts it comes down to one thing: Who can build faster military structions. To defend against attacks it is more important to build interceptors as soon as you can, after that attack structures like baracks and helipads. Destroying enemy buildings can be very time consuming since most of the time you will end up with interceptors. As soon as one opponent gets the upper hand on buildings you can say you've already lost at least for that secment of the city. You can of course set up soem defenses in inner parts of your city to stop them but you win't get a foot to push them back again.

I also cannot see how skills affect military very much, it always seems balanced in combat (I kill some, they kill some, fight over).
There is also the problem that Misery mentioned that military buildings have a very short range. You have no way of building military buildings in range of your enemy since they will be end up shot down anyway. You can rely a little on skills that increase range but that's not very reliable (that +1 on range won't do the cut when your enemy has the upperhand anyway).

As much as I appreciat the idea of making a game entirely without units it makes the whole game less flexible in war.