Increasing what we have

[Teal_Blue]

If instead of widespread and deep changes to the game, what if we increase what we have on an effort to address some perceived shortcomings?

1.  Increase the number of races?   To 16?  24?  32?  It certainly would increase the difficulty level.

2.   Increase the number of planets.   To 20?  50?  80?
Even of we keep the same number of races, increasing the number of planets could increase the struggle for resources, or expand military might. If randomized between the number of inhabited worlds,available worlds and open worlds, we could find the races holding different numbers from game to game, and changing the strategy accordingly.

3.  Increase number of techs.

4.  Increase the type of agents and numbers of agents, political, financial, technical, information and military to use in positive and negative ways.

5.  Make agents upgrade able.  It doesn't have to be elaborate, just increase their efficiency and balance against random chance of success.  In that way each agent is individual and the results will vary with each encounter.

That's it for now.  Comments and suggestions welcome.

-teal

[ptarth]

Apparently, my purpose in life is to be a stick in the mud.

• Races -Creating a race takes a lot of design and balance work. Creating X races adds a ton of work.
• Planets - The absence of an good racial and planetary AI and a larger planet base would make the shortcomings there really problematic.
• Techs - In some sense, unless a technology opens up a new mechanic, the only point is to add game length (They get a +1, you need to get the +1, otherwise they do more damage).
• Agents - The addition of more agents would require widespread and deep changes.
• Agent Upgrades - Same problem.

[GC13]

Yeah, it looks like all I'm good for these days is threadcrapping. I don't see how any of these would help fix the problem. You could make a game that stays compelling long-term with just two races on two habitable planets, it just requires more in-depth mechanics. As it stands, TLF's problem is that the mechanics don't really invite long-term play; you learn how to beat the game, and that's that—you've seen it all.

[Teal_Blue]

I had hoped to contribute something, though to be honest, i probably didn't spend enough time thinking through all the various points of where to tie in the changes and where it would affect things, and how.

These were really just off the top of my head ideas that came to me.

Maybe best left to the devs, but i sort of was hoping we could get the strategy audience that really likes deep gameplay to really stick around and make the game better.

I myself am not too strategically inclined, but well... its interesting when a game is popular and interestingly complicated, you know?    Anyway, maybe someone better at that sort of thing can get some changes made that will help that audience to stay around. At least i am hoping so.