Early 2015: Unnamed Terrestrial 4X...

[Teal_Blue]

I know this idea is going to sound crazy, but bear with me for a few minutes ok?

So to NOT make the same 4x that has been made and re-made since MOO, what if we turn it on its head? By that what i mean is, call it evolution of the machine...(shameless plug) and have the map start completely open and 100 percent owned and controlled by the player, who has all the researches already done.

What we have is a reversal of a 4x, so the player controls the map, until...

until the ai breaks out of its containment program in a pc lab in a eastern university... which show as red dots on the map.

From there it becomes a task of trying to contain and eliminate the ai, which made its first jump in that initial red blip. But did it jump to a single other computer? Or to a random number? 12, 48, 128? (less than XXX maybe? But if this is an open number from infinitesimally small to outrageously large, then the games can range from perhaps easy... maybe? To how many minutes can i last here?) I think that could be fun.

Anyway, the player loses ground everytime the ai spreads, the player concentrates on pulling power from different areas of the map, and shutting down computers, in an effort to stop the ai from getting larger.

The ai for its part is spreading from a simple program to mutating itself into other areas, maybe embedded devices? like coke machines and robotic fastener robots that build cars in a detroit auto plant? So we have stage one, which is just the program, stage two is where it mutates, stage three is where it starts attacking in physical robotic forms that it has built, the humans that are trying to shut it down. All the while the map gets redder (if the ai is gaining ground) or whiter (if the player is taking back control.

The key is that as the ai gains control though, that the player is losing it. so, its a tug of war, and where are the critical junctions? is it where it is still software making itself smarter, or is it when it jumps to the machines and starts walking around? Or taking control of cars, or cranes, or satellite relays?

Anyway, instead of slowly researching and building up as a normal 4x would, we are playing a game, of don't lose too much ground. In some places on the map that may mean we try to contain a software lab and that means we have more time to make a decision, or try to put a complicated plan into action, whereas in other areas of the map, the ai has already jumped to machines, and we don't have time for any finesse at all. We are lucky if we try to hit it hard and not lose too many units, before it pulls back into a manufacturing factory and we find ourselves facing a line of a thousand shiny new autos coming off the assembly line, all perfectly conscious and hateful and looking to hit us back. 

This could be where AI War all started.    And well.... we all know how that ended don't we? Well... we're still fighting them... 

Just a crazy idea, but i thought the strong points might be the ai war tie in and the 'not just a regular 4x type of playstyle' 

-Teal

[x4000]

Don't worry, we're not in the habit of just remaking things that others have done.

[Teal_Blue]

  I know, I just had to throw out my crazy idea though.     I have no doubt you are going to make it interesting.   Looking forward to it.

[Coppermantis]

No units, huh. Wonder how that's going to work. Can't say I know of anything that's done it like that.

[Teal_Blue]

I know its too early for you probably to talk about it,  but i'm interested in finding out what the 'no units' thing means too.    But maybe its better to try the idea out and see if it works like you think it will first? Without a hundred people telling what they think. Anyway, it sounds cool and now its got my puzzler puzzling trying to wonder how you are going to do that!

-Teal

p.s.    hmmmm........   you know what comes to mind?  you know that game where they had cultural influence? that spreads out for every cultural center that is built? and these colored lines spread out from the centers, blue  for me and red for the Artesians and green for the Gregors, which you have to defend of course or you lose them, and that put slow pressure on the territories of the opponents. unless of course they have more centers than we do, then of course we start to lose ground and start to sweat.   

and maybe research gives bonuses to the centers? or protects them from certain types of attack?

of course this could be completely wrong, what if its Mind to Mind Control and there are like thousands upon thousands of memories that are compromised and deleted in a war of minds, where if I lose, I forget who I am?  And what my purpose was, and what the war was all about...?

Anyway, that's it for this entry of Dogs Life Magazine, thank you for subscribing, I am your host.... now what is my name?  Anyway... have a great night and don't forget to tune in next week when we talk about... well... I forget.... but i'll remember by then, hopefully.



p.s.s.   sorry for the silliness, take care. 

p.s.s.s. of course the problem with my ideas is that they all have units....  hmmm.... now how do i get rid of them?

[Teal_Blue]

Hmmm.... have you seen Pandemic 2?   Or perhaps Class 3 Outbreak? Don't know if they might provide some ideas or not... but i remembered them and I thought.... you know that could just be something like a unitless (of course if you are looking at it metaphorically, as if the zombies were really influence or range of infection. Or Pandemic for the same reasons, except... well... would a virus be considered a unit?

question because i haven't played the game, but did Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire use ideologies instead of units?

sorry to keep blabbing, but things keep coming to me, so i want to write them down. While watching a video on the Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire tutorial i suddenly thought --  how do we get no units... well instead units being the extension into the game,  that instead the player themselves would interact and interfere and research and move and battle... directly with the other races. Just as if we were there in the game world instead of at our keyboard in our cozy little houses, or sitting on cold benches in airports. Completely all on our own? with pull down screens and planet landscape screens and research screens to keep us informed and appraised of the situation.

Like a normal 4x,  but ... just without units. I'm not sure my implementation of chris's idea would work, but if it could work, then it might change the feeling of playing the game alot.
Just thinking out loud,

-T

p.s. Have you seen the video for Flagship, its a first person 4x being built by one guy, looks very cool. Almost like being there, you know? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx54CRrc5Y8

or here

http://www.flagshipgame.com

[Cyborg]

Your brain is a never-ending idea bucket, Teal.


And that is a compliment. I am hoping you like science.

[Teal_Blue]

  actually, its funny, i like being outside and looking at stars and things, and writing, and i like history and did actually quite good and enjoyed the class. And took biology which was kinda cool, interesting movies and even cut up a frog which was actually kind of yucky, but the other science classes like astronomy and like physics all just sorta goes over my head, haha. I don't know if that means i'm a slow child or what. But well... haha, i don't know... maybe i'm just a dreamer thinking up all this weird stuff? Anyway, its fun, even if a little weird sometimes. It makes me feel like the world is fuller than i  could think it is if i can dream up these crazy things. Then maybe the real world is a lot more complicated than my simple little ideas, you know?

Not sure i'm making any sense. But thank you for the compliment and hope something i say can help a little bit here and there, or make someone think of something cool. 

-T


p.s.  Or maybe i just play too many video games?  Haha, well... maybe.   

[Cyborg]

  actually, its funny, i like being outside and looking at stars and things, and writing, and i like history and did actually quite good and enjoyed the class. And took biology which was kinda cool, interesting movies and even cut up a frog which was actually kind of yucky, but the other science classes like astronomy and like physics all just sorta goes over my head, haha. I don't know if that means i'm a slow child or what. But well... haha, i don't know... maybe i'm just a dreamer thinking up all this weird stuff? Anyway, its fun, even if a little weird sometimes. It makes me feel like the world is fuller than i  could think it is if i can dream up these crazy things. Then maybe the real world is a lot more complicated than my simple little ideas, you know?

Not sure i'm making any sense. But thank you for the compliment and hope something i say can help a little bit here and there, or make someone think of something cool. 

-T


p.s.  Or maybe i just play too many video games?  Haha, well... maybe.   

Hopefully that never changes. When you stop dreaming, time to reevaluate. In a way, Chris is in the business of selling fantasies. Games are how we exercise our minds and make pretend, even as adults. I hope I never stop playing games!

[Teal_Blue]

  actually, its funny, i like being outside and looking at stars and things, and writing, and i like history and did actually quite good and enjoyed the class. And took biology which was kinda cool, interesting movies and even cut up a frog which was actually kind of yucky, but the other science classes like astronomy and like physics all just sorta goes over my head, haha. I don't know if that means i'm a slow child or what. But well... haha, i don't know... maybe i'm just a dreamer thinking up all this weird stuff? Anyway, its fun, even if a little weird sometimes. It makes me feel like the world is fuller than i  could think it is if i can dream up these crazy things. Then maybe the real world is a lot more complicated than my simple little ideas, you know?

Not sure i'm making any sense. But thank you for the compliment and hope something i say can help a little bit here and there, or make someone think of something cool. 

-T


p.s.  Or maybe i just play too many video games?  Haha, well... maybe.   

Hopefully that never changes. When you stop dreaming, time to reevaluate. In a way, Chris is in the business of selling fantasies. Games are how we exercise our minds and make pretend, even as adults. I hope I never stop playing games!

Sounds like a good plan!! 

[eRe4s3r]

Imo the greatest failures in game development happen when developers do not play games... imo as long as we can all agree that an Arcen 4x should not clone MOO (for all that is holy!) or CIV then whatever results from that ought to be great.

Futuristic, and TBS.  This one is not going to try to span multiple genres, unlike a lot of our games.  Instead it's just going to be our take on the genre, which is so broad there's plenty of room for experimentation anyhow.

And hexes!

Please make sure that turn times are not increasing over game-length..... if you do turn based, I think you should think about some abstraction methods for calculations where it results in more fuzzy results but... 60 times faster than normal calculations... and a strong multi-threading method where every aspect of a turn is laid into a different thread, so that you can easier debug where it hangs and potentially apply truncation or abstraction to certain threaded calculations....

Long turn times are what kills TBS games for me (Total War games are nigh unplayable post turn 200 ...)

[Cyborg]

Imo the greatest failures in game development happen when developers do not play games.
...
Long turn times are what kills TBS games for me (Total War games are nigh unplayable post turn 200 ...)

I agree with the first part, although I think the second part is a failure to nest the TBS system. For example, if you take a universe, sublet that into galaxies, sublet that into solar systems, sublet that into planets, sublet that into countries, sublet that into cities, this is where you could have success with "long turn times." For example, a player could choose to advance a turn at each level of abstraction, which would advance all the levels below it at a greater speed. If a player wants finer control at a lower level, they can advance at the lower-level without that automatic calculation. In this way, a player can micromanage or macromanage using a turn-based system at their own particular pace and preference.

[eRe4s3r]

Nested 4x would be really neat for a tbs. But it would never work when a game has MP ;/

It's imo why, for example, SOTS2 is such a giant catastrophe. The entire turn progression was made as an MP game, the AI's are just local clients in a MP game, this is why turn times are so absurdly (and exponentially) long for a game that barely simulates 5 things.

[Cyborg]

Nested 4x would be really neat for a tbs. But it would never work when a game has MP ;/

It's imo why, for example, SOTS2 is such a giant catastrophe. The entire turn progression was made as an MP game, the AI's are just local clients in a MP game, this is why turn times are so absurdly (and exponentially) long for a game that barely simulates 5 things.

Maybe, unless opening a given sublet is subject to player approval. I think it's an elegant solution to the kind of expansion and scalability of these kinds of games.

[x4000]

We're thinking of calling this Ashes to Ascent, now.

A few things:

1. "No units" is a bit of a misnomer, in some respects.  If you've played Risk, then you'll feel right at home with what I have in mind for the first prototype.  That said, this is a lot more involved than Risk.  I don't want to get into it too much, but basically each tile would have a "controlled by" flag and a power level that is kind of like how many armies you have there in risk, and then a type of the tile.  The type of the tile would affect combat there as well.

2. Generally speaking, 4X games get so vastly much slower in the late game because their AIs have to do so much more in terms of computations, AND they have to do it all at once.  By which I mean, turns are a single discrete unit of time, and so however much is going on with the AI has to all happen at that one moment.  So if the AI makes 100 attacks instead of 1, and has to consider 20 cities instead of 1, etc, then the time goes up incredibly. 

For our case, my plan is to have each turn be semi-simultaneous, but also with phases.  During the attack phase of the turn, everyone makes plays a single action in a series of rounds, until every player passes on making an action.  With that sort of decision making, things are inherently subset so that the AI isn't doing as much at any given time before control reverts back to you.

I'm not sure how much multithreading we'll be able to do, since most computations here are linear.  But we may be able to spawn worker threads to say "consider the quality of making this attack" and then return the result from that thread, so that we can spawn like 8 threads at a time, and then collect the results and do new threads as new results pop up.  Something like that would be a relatively straightforward way for us to do worker threads, now that I think of it.  It doesn't even require much data locking, unlike AI War.  So actually, multithreading is probably something we can intensively do for the AI, on second thought.  During other phases of each turn, we'd also be able to make the AI do that sort of thing, I'd think.  We have plenty of experience in that area, and frankly this design is one of the most ideal cases I could wish for in terms of multithreading, the more I think about it.

Anyhow, the prototype design notes have really grown quite a lot since my last post here, so I'm getting increasingly excited about this.  I think I said this before, but basically think Risk meets Civilization meets AI War.