I finally started today to program the core of the game: the wargame part! I still have to define many ships and devices but in the meanwhile I thought to start programming this part, so I can get new ideas on what equipment would be more fun to implement.

So I started to implement the fog of war, ship placement at beginning of battle, planets, and so on. Now I have another question in my mind… how to design the gameplay in the wargame, expecially the turns system.

There are mainly two kind of system (with a third one not really common):

1) each faction moves all his units until ends his turn. This system is popular in many wargames, like Advance Wars or the famous SSI Panzer General series. You first move all your units and do the attack, then watch the computer doing all his moves.

2) each single unit (independently from which faction it belongs to) moves based on their “initiative” or speed. I used this method in Magic Stones, this way the unit attack order plays an important role (since they’re able to strike first). In some games, like Heroes of Might and Magic, they even allow particularly fast units to move twice vs another unit, in the same timeframe.

3) this method, not very common, is “simultaneous turn” – the units move at same time, but is particularly good only in multiplayer matches, and since my game won’t have multiplayer, I don’t even take this one into consideration 😀

For now I’m more inclined to use the method 2, even if method 1 could be used too. But I think method 2 adds more strategy because of the “initiative”. I still need to finish implementing the ship deployment on map though, so there’s time to think what to do…!

Today added another feature to the game, which will be an important factor in the wargame part: it is ships’ turn rate.

As I said before, the angle from which you hit the enemy will be important, since hits from the side or the back will do much more damage. So, beside moving your units in good spots, you’ll have also to consider the orientation. Each ship will have a peak speed and a turn rate, independent from each other. Some ships could have a high speed, but be very clumsy when turning around, being very vulnerable expecially in the short range battles.

An user in my forums asked me about rotating turret (expecially in big ships). That makes sense indeed, otherwise would be too easy to destroy a big battleship with a couple of scouts! of course each weapon will have a fire angle. Some will have 360° of fire capability, so in practice doesn’t matter where your target is, they’ll be always able to hit them.

I’m thinking for now to make this division:

1) beam and missile devices, typically short range weapons, will have very wide angle of attack, but usually will do less damage
2) bolt and torpedoes devices, typicall long range weapons, will have narrow angle of attack, but usually will do more damage

of course that’s just a generic rule, there will be exception. Also when you come to short range, will be very hard to avoid being hit, so short range weapon will be always deadly in closer combat, while long range one will do lot of damage from distance (to borrow a term from modern warfare, “artillery barrage”).

I am still fleshing out everything of course, so for now I haven’t yet made an implementation of all those features in the wargame. Won’t be easy but I’m progressing fast recently… 🙂

I’ve yet changed another part of the game. Initially I thought of simply putting some default ships when a new battle starts, based on the values of the resource management screen. However today I realized that this would be crap, since everyone has some preferences in term of tactics and ships. So I’ve removed the options screen button, and put a military one 🙂

( the options will still be easily accessible hitting the ESCAPE key during the game )

So what does the military screen do? it lets you manage your fleet. You have up to 64 slots that you can use to assemble your fleet, building one ship at time. This way even the money factor will come into play: beside the mineral resources (metals, etc) needed to build a specific ship, you’ll also need money to pay for the costs (think about the workers, energy, etc). So each ship will have a resource and a money cost, adding more strategy to the game. Later, if I’ll add a custom ship design update, things will be even more interesting 🙂

Then when you attack you’ll be able to place X ships (with X is a value depending on your current “maximum unit” value) on the battlefield, choosing from all the 64 ships you currently have in your fleet.