You said it was a little premature to be talking... but I can sense the excitement brimming over.
Haha. Yeah, pretty much. Part of why it's a little premature is that we're still in the prototyping phase, and so some of what I just told you may wind up not being true by the time we hit beta. So take that with a grain of salt that not everything has been proven out yet. As an example, the Risk-like elements from before were just graphically confusing as well as a lot of busywork for the player.
Anyhow, so none of what I'm saying thus far is an ironclad promise, but it is what we're working on at present and what we plan on doing unless something better comes up. There aren't any real scope concerns with the stuff that I specifically mentioned.
It sounds very interesting. I'm trying to boil it down to key points. So far I have:
"The short:
4x, hexes, hex-shaped map, 14 races planned (8 playable), 3 leader options per race, no units (think SimCity), futuristic but planet based and with co-op multiplayer."
Thanks! And yep, that should all be accurate. Though one thing we are not above cutting if it comes to time is co-op multiplayer. We're not super crunched for time here, but we want to come out with a very polished game at 1.0 and so don't want to GET crunched for time. I think we'll be able to handle the co-op fine, honestly, but it still has to be said. My wife and I plan to play the heck out of the co-op together, so I have a personal stake in making that happen.
(Feel free to suggest more accurate summary words, I'd like to keep working on the preview draft, updating for now based on your teaser posts. Until I can get my hands on the game that is... *steeples fingers*)
I'm still wondering about the multiplicative maths there... 3x terrain 12x land-locked species is 36 unique terrain types... Which I can imagine getting a little crazy both in terms of art assets and struggling to tell them apart. Although if the 3 represent farms/forests/city backgrounds I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to tell who's who. Or if they represent arctic/lava/crystal fields you'd see slowly spreading terraforming...
...do some races share preferred climates?
One thing to bear in mind is that you'll see all those sorts of terrains clumped up around the race, so you don't have to remember the terrains individually. But in terms of those terrain types, with things like the Andors it's not even living terrain. Instead it's these kind of golden robotic forests and fields that are much more mechanical. For the Burlusts, it's very lava-like, etc. And so on. Each set of 3 terrains has a very distinct feel to it, very different from any other race, so it shouldn't be something that causes confusion (hopefully).
The resource mechanics sound interesting. Will you be trading things with the AI? (assuming you know their language). I can imagine not knowing the other players languages could slow down diplomacy (5 turns to unlock breathing, 5 more to unlock grunting, 5 more to unlock talking) and push you towards ignoring it entirely in favour of conquest. Especially if the other players are actively damaging your terrain through hostile terraforming. That said, it would be interesting to have the diplomacy text be more and more detailed/unambiguous as you understand their language better, much like the spire conversations do in AI War. But perhaps having a little bit of diplomacy available at all times would be enough to prevent that worry from becoming an issue. (firing a warning shot is a solid form of non-verbal communication, giving a gift shouldn't require anything more than dumping valuable gems near their border etc.)
Conquest in a direct fashion is something that is abnormally difficult here, or that's the plan. There are some other mechanics that I haven't really mentioned, such as Planet Mood, which gets to the freaky guy you heard in that teaser video. The languages are literally transcoded text, so as you use linguists to unravel the languages you don't know (if you care to), then you can better piece together what is being said. At the moment my intent is to make it so that you can take a guess at diplomatic discussions by kind of mashing buttons in languages you can half read.
And then see the results if you want to take that sort of gamble. That may not work out in practice, but I have some interesting ideas there that I want to play with, anyway.
Regarding diplomacy, that's something I'd rather not talk about just yet. That sort of thing is always one of the most unsatisfying parts of most 4x games, and attempting a traditional route is likely to lead to the same sorts of bad feelings for me at least. Keith has had some excellent ideas about "implicit diplomacy" where your interests align with other races based on circumstances, and it's really compelling stuff that I feel certain will make it in.
But then there's also another layer that I want to have in order to give a sense of life and personality to the races and their leaders. It's a risky sort of potential time-sink, and so I'm trying to figure out a way to handle that gracefully. If you want to talk about multiplicative math, THERE's the real challenge in terms of coding and particularly writing. But in particular after reading the Civ:BE reviews, the need for really strong personalities makes itself abundantly clear to me. And honestly, thinking back to my time with Civ V, even there the less recognizable leaders were a problem in terms of me not feeling any connection to them. So I have my work cut out for me in that area. It's not directly on my plate yet, though, as a lot of that boils down to vertical content rather than horizontal mechanics.
Also... I'm a little sad that the player doesn't get his hands on giant spire floating cities... But as both the Spire and Neinzul weren't the main races in AI War either (by dint of their awesome power) I'm not completely surprised. I'd love the ability to get a few of their terrifying toys either during the game or in an expansion though.
The main reason for certain specific races being AI-only is the way that they work so differently. As much as I'd like for the player to be able to play a completely different game from the base one in terms of having floating cities of unique buildings, that's just incredibly beyond scope, heh. But having AI factions do that is really fun. And being able to ally with them and get them to help you is something I plan (the opposite too, of course -- naturally).
In terms of expansions... who knows! I haven't remotely gotten my head to that sort of space yet, but there's plenty of room for more beyond the base game. In the sense that the world is a wide one, and the mechanics are broad -- not in the sense that there's something planned to be missing!
Also... (I know I'm full of questions, obviously I hope you'll answer but feel free to say 'ask me again later, it's a WIP' and I'll understand.) Will there be any orbital stuff? I'm assuming there's a reason they're all stuck on the planet together... perhaps a reason that interferes with satellites/spaceflight.
No problem on all the questions, again thanks for the enthusiasm.
There is not likely to be any orbital stuff, but I'm not sure if I'm really ready to say why just yet. I'm not sure yet at what point in the story that reason is going to be revealed. Possibly right upfront, or possibly as a reveal further into the game, not sure. One of the victory conditions will be escaping into space, at any rate.
Are the flying spire and neinzul the orbital equivalent - how high do they float? I'm assuming it's just an artistic representation of their buildings... is there any mechanical differences from them floating? (can they move, build over oceans, float over your cities?)
These are basically antigrav "buildings" that are still in the atmosphere, but high. They can't be positioned over the territory of other races, or above mountains, but they can go over water. The Yali are actually completely water-based, incidentally. And the Thoraxians dig tunnels all over the place, under water and land. Aside from looking for resources with sonar, you also have to watch out for tendrils of Thoraxian tunnels.
As to whether or not the Neinzul and Spire "floating buildings" can move or not, I'm not yet sure. I've considered it, but I'm not yet fully convinced either way. There are pros and cons, given the other game mechanics. At any rate, there are lots of flying craft that can go over mountains and whatever else, including the floating buildings.
I know I repay each post with a dozen more questions, thanks again for spilling a few more beans. I'm just excited, your excitement is rubbing off on me. Good luck with it all.
No problems at all.
And thanks!
[edit. Added eXplorminate feedback]
Nasarog:
Hmm, that an interesting Q/A. I see the similarities to Simcity, which I like, but for me, I would want distinct buildings sets for each race (human played or not) and whatever overlap there is in building/tech to be explained in lore. Even though, a 4x sandbox game works because we, the players, create our own narrative as we play the game, there has to be some base. This base is provided by the developers. A good studio set the tone of the game and lets the player run wild with it. This tone is important for new 4x entrants because they often feel very lost and don't "get" the genre.
There actually is a very good reason that there's a lot of overlap between the type of buildings that the core races use, although I'm not sure I'm ready to spill the beans on that yet. It's related to why you can't get into orbit.
In terms of having unique buildings for every last race, I think that one thing that isn't clear (mainly because I haven't made it so) is the sheer scope of buildings in this game. Right now my target is about 200 in all, which does include something like 60ish race-specific buildings IIRC. Trying to duplicate that sort of thing across multiple races but simply with different art would just be an absolute nightmare, both in terms of multiplicative math and in terms of players learning the game at all.
If you look at games like Civ, they have all the same buildings and units for all the different factions (a tiny exception or two here or there), but they have some distinct art for the cities themselves and a few other bits and bobs. That still is enough for them to charge quite a bit for added DLC factions, which I don't blame them for. But that sort of added cost there really harms the ability to make the new factions more unique in ways that are more than skin-deep on some parts of themselves.
There are definitely examples of 4x games that do every sort of thing various degrees of well. Some have amazing faction diversification and unique graphics for all of them, and that's fine. But unless those are just absolutely backed by a huge publisher and start with a huge following, or have really simple graphics to start with, they tend to suffer in other areas. One of those areas tends to be the scope of number of buildings/units/whatever available per faction, because art costs are simply too high. Or the number of factions total, as the case may be.
My goal is definitely to not try to take the "cheesy way out" of any aspect of the game, but at the same time play to our strengths. And not to try to be all things at once, because that tends to lead to being "jack of all trades, master of none." We've seen examples of that sort of game where they hit all the tickmarks on the back of the box, but it's all very shallow and uninteresting. I still intend to hit most of those tickmarks, but skip any that would cause the game to suffer for the simple sake of hitting a tickmark.
