Ok after finishing the macro-resource management part, I am now doing the technology one. It will be interesting. Of course since I am not making a 4X game, the techs will all focus on the wargame part with a few exceptions (maybe just a few techs to boost population growth, productions, and so on).

Now I am starting to plan the wargame part, the real core of the game, where I hope players will spend lot of their time 🙂

Since it will be turn based, I’ll have to carefully balance all the units. I don’t like games in which you start with a low-level unit that soon become obsolete, “cannon food”… I want every units to have pro/cons in a sort of rock/paper/scissors game.

So the small scout won’t have much firepower but they’ll be able to evade shots of the bigger cruisers, effectively beating them in the long run. This is just an example. I plan also to have different weapons, like beam weapon, missiles, shields, etc.

Before you ask, in this first release there won’t be any “ship design” options, in which you can completely customize your ships blueprints.

The units types will be fixed, as well as their weapons/shields/devices. What will change is the possibility of upgrades . Example: Red Legion scout ship with 2 lasers and 1 missile. If you discover the technology “black laser”, an upgrade to the normal laser that delivers more damage, you automatically have it upgraded on the unit. Same for the missile. I have yet to think if allow a choice on what to install on the ships once battle start, in case you have 2 techs that can apply to same device type, like “black laser” and “neutron laser”. It could add a lot of more strategy since each weapon could have different damage types to different enemies, but probably I’ll add this feature in a future upgrade… 😉

I’m almost done with the empire resource allocation screen, which is the macro-management core of the game, but I am encountering a problem… take a look at the screenshot below (click to enlarge it):

every “social class” has a PRIMARY and SECONDARY impact on the game, from the officers improving your ship accuracy and view in the fog of war, to the engineers extracting more raw materials and increasing production speed.

The problem is population now. What it should do? ok increase the current population size up to the max population cap – but I can’t make it have an influence on all the other categories as I thought originally. That would make a mess I think, and also would unbalance the game – once one of the two faction had conquered more than 60-70% of the stars they would surely win, if the other categories performance is influenced by the population amount… in practice there won’t be any chances to reverse the situation once one faction starts to have more population than the other.

I could make the influence on other categories smaller than what I thought, but I think I found another way, a better one – taxation 😀

Population = taxes = more money to the empire. That’s what happened in whole human history so far… the government always want more population, to increase the amount of taxation. But what would be money spent in? It could be a sort of bonus like in Civilization game. Spend 100 gold/credit to instantly discover a new technology, or build a new ship blueprint, and so on. Since my game will use macro-management, I have to think well about how to implement the whole money feature. For example if you go in red, what happens? since both faction are empires, there could be population revolts, and some starsystem could turn neutral!

Yes, I think I’ll go this way. With this system also you can’t conquer quickly all the starsystem. You must first populate the existing ones to increase your empire economic growth, sustaining its expansion on the space 🙂

So I “converted” Supernova 2 into 800×600 and now I must admit that looks much better. You have also to scroll less in the galaxy map screen, which is another positive effect. Now that I think about it, was stupid to start a new game in 2007 using a low resolution like 640×480, expecially for a strategy game. I’m able to put much more information on each single screen now!

A quick update also about my future projects: even if my last post about Tower of Destiny is dated 30th june, I’m still working on that game but a very slow pace, because I’m currently moving from my region to another… anyway, my plan is still to release Supernova 2 before Christmas and TOD before next summer. I really hope to respect those deadlines! 🙂