I’ve implemented the starmap, with nice animations of the stars blinking, and dotted lines to show the possible route you can take to conquer the neutral or enemy starsystems. It turned out quite nicely I think, it is still quite easy to look at but also dynamic, flashy 🙂

I made my decision about resources: it will be based on only one value that is population limit. Every starsystem will have N planets, and each one of them will have a max population capacity, depending on the type (I’ll have various planets like arid/desert, gas, barren, etc). So how it will work? you’ll be able to assign a certain percentage of the population to specific task/jobs. Like recruiting soldiers, officers, scientist, engineers, etc. The more you have in a particular job, the greater is the effects. For example lot of population allocated to be scientist, and your research will go faster, and so on.

Then you can use engineers to extract material from minerals. I thought to make it limited, but wouldn’t make much sense, so that resource will be unlimited, but in some way constrained by the max population/amount of % you have assigned to engineers.

So let’s say that 15billion are engineers, and each billion extract 10 tons of material. Then you’ll go in the build menu and there you can build stuff with the material. A new unit type factory could cost 150 tons for example, a new kind of civilian building another 50 tons, and so on. It will be all global, so you don’t actually build single starships, but more like you build research lab or prototypes. The once the ship is working, you can use it on the battlefield.

Then in the battlefield part there will be a way of building single ships of all types directly on the battle, but I’ll think about it later when it’s time to program the fight itself. I have already everything planned though 🙂