Hey Chris, I'm a huge fan of your games and would be happy to help out in any way I can. If that means helping test the game, I'd be really happy to do so. This is the only game I'm really excited about and have plenty of free time on my hands. Cheers!
(If you already have enough testers, I'm also happy to help donate to a kickstart etc)
Cheers, thanks a lot! I've added you to the list.
Believe it or not, but there are occaisional games where my first solution ISNT just exploding everything.
Who are you and what did you do with Misery!?!?
Of course, the diplomacy stuff in many 4X games can be a bit.... lacking. That's been my experience with them so far and one of the reasons I"m so interested in this one.
That's exactly how I feel. I tend to feel it's normally one of the most often undercooked aspect in 4x's which is a shame. I've had a thing for messing with and watching AI play against each other since I was young. Drox Operative is pretty fun for AI shenanigans.
It's a tricky sort of a thing, because diplomacy isn't something that I want to be super-duper central in the sense that it is in some of the Paradox games. I don't want to spend a whole heck of a lot of time as a player having to slog through menus for diplomacy, for instance. But at the same time, there's a lot of powerful stuff that you can only access via diplomacy in this game, so depending on who you make friends with that determines your "extended skillset," as it were. In a nonliteral sense, of course.
Testing diplomacy hasn't been my big focus personally yet with this game, although it got a lot of love and time in design and implementation. I've been focused mainly on the citybuilding first, and am getting into the military more now alongside that. As those are falling into line, and a bunch of GUI work related to them gets completed, then that feeds into diplomacy more. Diplomacy is one of those things in this game that doesn't hit you from turn 1, because you have to have linguistic ability to talk to those you want to do diplomacy with, and that takes a while. So it's more of a mid-game thing if you focus on it, or a late-game thing if you're focused less on it.
But one thing that I've been doing with the citybuilding is trying to make it so that there are better incentives for doing diplomacy earlier, too. There's a fair bit of infrastructure required for getting a really good resource pipeline going, which is often important to long-term diplomacy.
This is kind of a funny game, because I'm not sure how many turns a given game will take... but it seems to be a lot. I've played a hundred or two turns at a time, and with the way the balance is right now that's barely scratching the surface. One of my foci has been making turns less granular, so I can get more done per turn and so that combat is resolved over fewer turns, but it's a matter of twisting dials and so forth until that feels right. Still, the old tradition of ~200 turns for an average game is out the window here for sure, I think.
Take all of those last few paragraphs with a grain of salt, because they likely won't be completely true by the time we start beta testing with you guys. That's a big part of what I'm balancing right now, is what feels the best in terms of speed of turns, how long x and y take, etc, etc. I want all that stuff sorted out before you get in there, so something that was taking 10 turns isn't suddenly taking 1 and your strategies are all out the window. Not that we won't make substantial shifts once there are testers around, but I'd rather start with something that I feel is stable and then polish from there, rather than still be in the midst of actively turning dials, heh.
And thanks a bunch Chris for putting me on the list! Aside from a few mods, this is pretty much the only strategy game I'm excited for right now
My pleasure!
