I am starting to implement the battle, even if I didn’t outline all the technologies yet. I want to visualize the battle first. I’ll have some rock-paper-scissor rules, but I will also leave an open opportunity for the future. Let me explain better 🙂

The units will each have a special purpose and weapons. Scout ships will be able to run cloacked nearby the big battleships and fire short range missiles or beam lasers, while interceptor can discover them even if they’re cloacked, and so on. But I also made the game in a way that in a future upgrade you could design your own ships.

Each ship has some basic stats like speed, view range, etc but also a very important value called “energy”. It measures the ship’s energy production. Each device you deploy on the ship, it consumes energy. So in a future update, you could still use the default ships equipment, but also re-design the ship equipment, still keeping the base values. So the only limit would be the ship energy, which usually is equivalent to the ship size, with some variations.

So far everything seems going quite well, I have fear however when I’ll have to start programming the computer AI… with so many variables to take into account, won’t be an easy task!!

Today I’ve made another important decision about this game. While making the technology screen, initially I thought to divide it into 2 parts, research and build. So you would first need to research the technology, and then build it. However I realized that wouldn’t make much sense, and would also be too much “micro-management” for this game.

This game indeed started as a wargame with a macromanagement backend, and must remain that. Otherwise I could add more details, but also more complexity. It wouldn’t make much sense to research a new terraforming system, then to automatically build it on all planets at once? no, that would require some degrees of micromanagement, like deciding on which starsystem implement/build the new technologies.

So instead the production resources and the production speed will be used only in the wargame, adding yet another strategic element. I’ve already talked about the ships crew veteran training, the HP bonuses, and so on. Now there will be yet another component based on the production:

– initially when deploying the units on the battlefield you’ll spend resource point based on which unit to deploy (every one will have a cost) and maybe even deciding which devices to install on them

– then after battle has started, you can deploy new units building it, but building a new ship requires both resources and also some game turns to be done (once again depending on the ship size and quality). So the resources will influence what kind of ship you can build, and the production speed will reflect how fast you’ll be able to deploy the new units.

Imagine it like a reinforcement on the battlefield. A battle could be won this way, even when fighting with a enemy with higher crew experience and stronger starting unit, simply defending and building quickly more units after battle has started!

Yes, I’m very proud of this decision, I think will add even more variety to the wargame part 🙂

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 🙂