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What does the big picture look like?

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Zebeast46:
3rd topic for stars beyond reach ...daammnn. I know the title may be a bit misleading but how will the big picture look in SBR, for example in civ 5 when you zoomed out and watched a replay of a war it looks like an actual campaign is playing out, will that be in SBR. On an unrelated note how does the bidding on steam work. Is it like the top 100 highest bids get the game?

x4000:
Glad you're so enthused. :)


--- Quote ---how will the big picture look in SBR, for example in civ 5 when you zoomed out and watched a replay of a war it looks like an actual campaign is playing out, will that be in SBR.
--- End quote ---

This may just not have been something I did in Civ 5, so I'm a bit confused.  I played Civs 1, 4, and 5 extensively, but I was doing so in a manner to enjoy myself, not experience every last feature.  Big games. ;)  Anyway, my recollection is that when you zoom out, eventually it shifts to a globe view, and you see clouds and other fluff.  Nifty graphics, but never seemed to have any point.  I don't recall being able to really see units from space or anything like that.  It doesn't sound like what you're describing, though, so hence my confusion.

When you zoom way out in SBR, it looks like a big hexagon with the same perspective as each individual tile.  You can see the parts of it that you have scouted, and there's a border that runs around the outside marking off where the end of the playable area is.  That border is not complete yet, which is why I'm not posting any screenshots of that level of zoom yet.

Depending on the size of the map you're playing on, and the size of your monitor, when you zoom way out you'll be able to see the various parts of the field better or worse.  Larger maps means that tiles are smaller to fit the whole world on your screen at once, so buildings are harder to pick out.  No real surprise there.

The ground troops are extremely tiny, only 14px tall and wide when you are all the way zoomed in, so they are not visible once you are zoomed out much at all.  Think of how the cars look when moving around in SimCity, as the best comparison point.  The sense of scale is honored as closely as we could, so they walk around on the streets firing tiny lasers and whatnot.  I wanted these guys tiny so that the buildings would feel appropriately large.

The boats, helicopters, planes, etc, are all (well, mostly) vastly larger.  They're meant to be carrying dozens or hundreds of passengers or pieces of cargo or guns or whatever.  Stealth stuff is smaller, and is typically what you do attacks with.  Diplomatic pods and scouts are also quite small, and zip around.

The stuff that is not combat-oriented just moves around as visual eye candy, giving some life to the cities without really doing anything.  Aka, it's not part of the simulation that the diplomatic pod goes back and forth, or that the cargo ship does.  If it were, then they would have to start and stop each turn, like trade ships and similar do in Civ.  These move smoothly back and forth all the time, giving them a function rather like the cars in SimCity: a visual indicator of something that's happening under the hood, and it looks neat, but it's not actually a directly simulated piece.

The combat portions happen "when attacks happen," which basically means that it's giving you visual feedback of the soldiers striking or the helicopter circling and firing or the missile hitting or whatever.  But underneath it's already calculated the result, and it's then showing you an appropriate animation for what it decided.  This makes it so that if you want to turn off the animations, it doesn't impact the math at all, too.  A popular option in Civ, that.  It should be less popular here, because we're less obtrustive with trying to make you watch combat.  If you watch it, fine, but if you don't then you didn't miss anything: you can easily cycle through tiles that were attacked and see summary results of what happened as well as a detailed log of what happened.  It's kind of a more advanced version of what we did in Skyward Collapse in terms of the logging.

Unlike Skyward, for the most part attacks here are simultaneous, rather than all going in a line.  That's a bit more recent-Civ-like.  In this particular game, right now the idea is that if two attacks involve the same tiles, the second one has to wait for the first one to resolve before the second one kicks off.  But otherwise they can run at the same time.  So if there's a big war in an area, and you are looking at that area, then you'll see a crazy flurry of warfare for the most part all at once, and then possibly with a couple of waves of counterattacks or whatever.  If you happen to be looking somewhere else, then you can come over there and see the summaries of what happened.

Replays of things you missed?  Er... probably out of scope, but we'll see.  It's something Keith and I have already discussed, and we'll honestly just have to see.  It's a big programming task, though, if we were to do it.


--- Quote ---On an unrelated note how does the bidding on steam work. Is it like the top 100 highest bids get the game?
--- End quote ---

...bidding?  Not sure what you're referring to, but there's no bidding for the game, don't worry!  We'll be selecting a few volunteers from among the people who ask to be alpha testers based on our own judgement of who can best help us get to beta in good shape, which requires a variety of types of people.  Then once beta opens, anyone at all can either get the free demo of the current beta version, or buy the game and get the full version of the current beta plus of course the finished game.

Most likely we will not put the beta on Steam, just on our site, because it's a lot stronger to come out of the gate with a finished product on Steam.  And we have the good fortune of being able to pull in plenty of people on our own site alone to meet our testing needs during the beta period.  We aren't trying to fund this game through the beta period, we already have those funds on hand.  Anyone who buys the game before it's on Steam will of course be entitled to a Steam key when the official launch happens.

Zebeast46:
Sorry I am terrible at describing stuff. Have you ever seen a time-lapse video of Europa universalis 4 on YouTube. If not it is basically observer mode for The last federation with borders shifting and expanding. I guess I should have jut asked will the other races in SBR sort of have something like the ark and the mire in SBR. The other thing was completely unrelated, on steam there is a thing where you can turn your virtual cards into gems which you can then use to bid on a game. I was asking whether or not the top 100 bids get the game? Sorry for the confusion, but usually I tend not to phrase things correctly.

Draco18s:
Depending on when that invite for testers happens, i may or may not have the time. So much going on in my life right now, but this sounds really cool.

x4000:

--- Quote from: Zebeast46 on December 13, 2014, 12:52:02 pm ---Sorry I am terrible at describing stuff. Have you ever seen a time-lapse video of Europa universalis 4 on YouTube. If not it is basically observer mode for The last federation with borders shifting and expanding.
--- End quote ---

Ah, I see.  Well... to some extent that would be the case, I suppose.  We don't really have a playback engine for this, but I dunno.  SimCity is perhaps a better example, because you start with a lot more available land, your cities take up much more space, and there is much less immediate pressure for military clashes.  You're going to be doing some fighting no matter what -- the "barbarians" (equivalent to Civ) are inescapable.  But whether you ever go to physical war with another race... it's possible that you might not, even though they might.

You might be helping to fund some race that is fighting a proxy war you care about.  You might be tussling with them on the open market for resources, basically fighting economically.  You might be making a social progress run, which will make you eventually fight the Thoraxians, but in a different way than you otherwise would (this is basically the "Cultural" victory from Civ, but different and also mixed with some of the ideas from Rebuild 2 and how it handles its endgame for most of the endings).  You might be fighting against the other races in a terraforming race, trying to get the atmosphere to match your own needs more than theirs.  In this you would have natural allies and enemies based on your race and what atmospheric components your race needs versus what other races need (each race needs 3, except the two robotic races and the one underwater race, none of whom care about the atmospheric makeup at all).

You might be basically just trying to turtle and then escape the planet with technology.  Or blow up the planet before anyone notices.  Those are all various paths to different victory conditions.  Well, some are just mechanics -- the victory conditions I mentioned above are Transcendence (social progress victory), a military victory (which I didn't really mention but is no surprise), escaping the planet (kind of a technology victory, but also more than that), and blowing up the planet (kind of a military and technology victory, very much more of a niche thing).  There might be some others, I don't know.  Depends on if I think of others that fit the mechanics, which is possible.

Wow, that was not the question you asked. ;)  The direct answer is that this plays out more like SimCity in terms of how things build up, and visually seeing the growth and shrinkage of empires is very much a thing.  Wars leave behind really nasty-looking City Wreckage tiles that look like they are out of WWII.  You or other races can then build over top of them if you wish.  And then of course the terraforming would grow and recede based on what you and other races are planting and/or destroying.  So the geography of the continents, plus the land area used by cities and empires, changes drastically throughout the game, and I imagine that a time lapse would look pretty darn cool.  I'm thinking about ways that might work, anyway.


--- Quote from: Zebeast46 on December 13, 2014, 12:52:02 pm ---I guess I should have jut asked will the other races in SBR sort of have something like the ark and the mire in SBR.
--- End quote ---

Kind of?  The makeup of the atmosphere is rolled at random at the start, and that affects races.  What resources are near them also affects them.  How much room for expansion they have, and who their neighbors are, also matters a lot.  Position matters vastly more here than it does in TLF.  Their historical attitudes toward one another also are randomly created at the start of the game, and that also affects things a lot.

I think the key part of what you're asking is how differently it will play out each time, and the answer is Very.  Oh, and of course there are 3 different leaders for each faction, each with a different set of bonuses, and so which ones of those are chosen for each race (again that's random) have an impact on the decisions the races make.

Overall my goal is less something like the Mire and the Ark from TLF, and something more like the crazy combinatorial variety that comes into play with AI War.


--- Quote from: Zebeast46 on December 13, 2014, 12:52:02 pm ---The other thing was completely unrelated, on steam there is a thing where you can turn your virtual cards into gems which you can then use to bid on a game. I was asking whether or not the top 100 bids get the game? Sorry for the confusion, but usually I tend not to phrase things correctly.
--- End quote ---

Huh.  This is completely new to me -- any links handy about this?  I can't really speculate without knowing more what this is, both from a back-end standpoint and from a consumer standpoint.  Encouraging players to get into a bidding war for the early versions of the game is... something I'm not super keen on, though.  While the money would be nice, I'd feel like I was gouging the biggest fans.


--- Quote from: Draco18s on December 13, 2014, 07:39:19 pm ---Depending on when that invite for testers happens, i may or may not have the time. So much going on in my life right now, but this sounds really cool.
--- End quote ---

Thanks! :)

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