Who says dead bodies and smog can't be fun? (Stars Beyond Reach Teaser)

[DrFranknfurter]

It's great to see the game interface and overlays. Also 35 resources sounds like a nice amount, especially if they all have their own augmentations... whatever that means in practice. (What are augmentations?)

Will all the resources be in every game or are some luck/map/terrain-dependent? I can imagine some ice-resources only found on cold worlds (they lower the entire planet temperature, and can be enhanced or nullified by the controller). Also and related, can raw resources be turned into something else? e.g. spiders (gives spider-silk) being mutated into giant spiders (used for food/pest control/decorating/hyper-efficient buskers one-man-banding for entertainment). It would also let any resource be destroyed or consumed, should the situation demand it.

(I quite enjoyed Civ 4's Fall from Heaven 2 modmods (quite a mouthful) which had raw mana nodes that could turn into one of 16 mana types. I mention it because some had fun little passive effects like: Chaos giving +2% mutation chance, Entropy -2 relations with most civilizations and enemy units heal -5% per turn within your Cultural Borders)


The unclaimed bodies sounds intriguing. I'm trying not to get too excited by the prospect of attacking enemies with waves of science-fiction zombies. Who doesn't like making lots of zombie-bots in AI War? I love playing as Necromancers in general. (It's always my first choice in any fantasy game if possible)

Dominions has a similar-sounding unburied dead resource. In Dominions unburied dead are produced when living (not a plant, lifeless or inanimate) beings die (in battle, via patrolling, from events, death dominion etc.) These dead bodies can be raised as soulless (zombies). Equipment is tracked separately so only battlefields will produce useful armed and armoured undead. Otherwise your options are between longdead summoned in very small numbers anywhere with rusty weapons and brittle bones or ghouls made by corrupting the living members of the population (which aren't mindless and can't go underwater, but have claws and are better at repairing castles)

I can imagine Unclaimed Dead causing unrest/war weariness/disease/anger/fear? (mitigated by burying/burning the dead) and for positives, unclaimed dead being used for: Luxury foodstuffs, free organic spare parts, zombie-bots, Lobotomised cyborgs... *takes a breath* pet zombies, meat-shields, ammunition for biological warfare, a positive modifier to experimental research labs, zombie-slaves, organic constructions... and a prerequisite for all types of memorial gardens.
So... long story short. What are the plans for mechanics around the dead/zombies?

Related question, do all the races leave unclaimed dead? Dominions for example has bodies decay quickly underwater due to sharks, and soulless (zombie) giants being a thing. I can imagine SBR having other little subtleties like organic corpses decaying faster in summer (and having worse negative effects) while inorganic corpses (spire) not causing the same problems or being used in the same way. (so effectively they don't leave corpses?).

Not that important, but if you could make the game track the population type of the unclaimed dead it'd give the game lots of options for fun little subtleties like those mentioned above. Even if the game only ever shows you one number, and only even shows that when it's non-zero.

Anyway, that's all for now. As always, I ask more questions than you can shake a stick at. I don't intend to it just sort of snowballs, one little thought grows and grows until it's a big snowman with flashing eyes, a top-hat and a menagerie of snow-pets... and his own snowmobile. Hope all is going well.

Comments from eXplorminate on the latest news:
DevildogFF  Officer 6 hours ago
"This game is starting to look more and more interesting to me. Thanks for the update"

athelasloraiel 1 hour ago     
"Same feelings for stardock. I posted a lot of bugs and suggestions for SK, but got almost no reply. and replies that were posted were - we read them and they are great...nothing on specifics, so I lost strength.

Arcen is another thing altogether.
Like Starpoint Gemini 2 folks - those are again another class......"

Nasarog  Officer 41 minutes ago     
"Interesting."

[x4000]

Cheers!  Real quick before I'm off for the weekend:

1. Yes, all the resources are in each game, but that does NOT mean you'll remotely have them all.

2. Unclaimed bodies aren't race-specific, it doesn't matter to that level of detail.  All the races have them, but not all types of fighting leave bodies.

3. No plans for zombies, though there are other monsters.

[Zebeast46]

How will asymmetry work in this game?

[Sounds]

As noted above a couple of places, if you have that much smog you are doing something horribly, horribly wrong.  There isn't really a need to tone that down, because that should never be happening when over your actual cities.  But there are a variety of overlay modes, and one of them is "no smog."  There's another one that is the pollution map, which gives a view that is based on colors instead, which lets you plan how you're going to address the smog:



Needless to say, if you find yourself covered in smog, the problem is something you want to rectify as soon as possible.

Now this is what I call a nifty, good-looking map overlay .
Sweet!

I too acknowledge the sweetness.   

It's a starting to sound like something of a must have next year. Playing EU4 for the last 6 hours (awesome game too) and the only part that really annoys me is the humangous solders on the map. Fingers crossed what you're suggest for SBR eliminates this.

[x4000]

How will asymmetry work in this game?

There are one of 8 factions you can play as.  Well, technically if you have up to 8 players, you each can be one of those factions respectively.  The rest of the 14 total factions are all AI.  They may be friendly or not.

Any AI that is not controlled by a human has completely unique buildings, rules, and so forth.  They work very differently from one another, have their own diplomatic web and tech tree variants, etc etc.  Even the ones that can be human-controlled have these buildings when they are not human-controlled.

Human-controlled races always use a completely different set of buildings that is pretty consistent between the races (basically they lost most of their memories before crash landing on this planet, and they have some data from Earth broadcasts that they use along with data they glean on this planet to reconstruct a new society that does not completely match what they would have been had they come here more naturally -- as the AI-controlled races did).

The human side of things is a lot more complicated in terms of how you manage your cities and the size of them, and the various factors you have in play, etc.  There's no reason for the AIs to be that bulky in terms of the complexity of management of their individual empires.  Rather, they have more streamlined, more futuristic empires that outmatch you in other ways.

Now this is what I call a nifty, good-looking map overlay .
Sweet!

I too acknowledge the sweetness.   

It's a starting to sound like something of a must have next year. Playing EU4 for the last 6 hours (awesome game too) and the only part that really annoys me is the humangous solders on the map. Fingers crossed what you're suggest for SBR eliminates this.

Thank you!  I'm really super excited about how the combat design has turned out, now that it is fully written up.  It is not yet implemented, but will be over the course of next week.  I won't be able to really start showing it until early January most likely, because of the holidays, but we'll see -- maybe a sneak peek, I dunno.

[eRe4s3r]

Just remember that for color blind people map overlays need always text/number/symbol elements over the hex, never make stuff only color ;p I have for example a lot of trouble telling the color of anything that's bright yellow orange or light green with transparency on green/red land.

[Mánagarmr]

Just remember that for color blind people map overlays need always text/number/symbol elements over the hex, never make stuff only color ;p I have for example a lot of trouble telling the color of anything that's bright yellow orange or light green with transparency on green/red land.

<3


(I'm red/green colorblind, so thank you ^^)

[x4000]

Of course!  We can also make it so that in general there is a colorblind option to shift the colors of those to something that you can see easier.  We'll work with you on that during beta.

In general throughout the GUI, we use blue for positive and red for negative, though, as we tended to in TLF.  Why?  Colorblind folks.