Influence debates!!!
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Stardock Forums
Stardock Forums
I'm not sure what's a worse idea - having the CEO of the company as the project manager on a game or having the CEO coding on the game.
I'm worse than some of the most fanatical people out there on those game forums. Whenever one of you guys emails me or gives a game idea that is cool, it ends up in the game. I'm a very weak man.
So having the guy who sets the budget on the game also being the project manager really becomes a drawback because when I hear a cool idea, I just up the budget a bit so that we can put it in. And because of the way the game is designed (hyper modular) we don't delay the release date because we can throw someone else at a module (avoiding the "mythical man month" problem to a large extent).
SO where is this going? Influence is being tweaked. Influence doesn't just stay locked up in a given sector. It leaks out into other sectors. The further away the source, the less intense it is but there's always a background of it.
So then we move this into the sector ownership map. In beta 2, sector ownership is determiend by who has the highest population in a given sector. In beta 3, it's based on influence. Influence is now implemented so that star systems with decent planets tend to have influence of 10 to 15 (and crummy star systems have zilch) with the occasional random star system that has 20+ (and your home star systems start out with 20+ as well to avoid the "capital" game mechanic issue many strategy games fall into).
If you have a star system in a sector you don't control, there is a small chance each turn that it may rebel. The odds of it rebelling have to do with how much influence that star system has and its morale and how many military units you have stationed in orbit.
The idea here being that you should be able to conquer the galaxy in many different ways. Military might should only be one path. Other paths should be equally enjoyable. So a different path is to try to conquer the galaxy with Coca Cola, McDonalds, Levi's, Chinese Food, Volvo's, French wine, and other cultural products.
And you would do this by building up your influence in your star systems and building star bases that have influence enhancing modules on them that help magnify your influence into other sectors. Coding this isn't very easy since you have to avoid self-referencing code but it's going to be pretty cool I think.
The most obviosu difference is that you'll now be able to control sectors on the map that you don't have a star system in. I think this is more along the lines people here have been asking for as it creates real zones of influence.
Now to make sure the AI can defend against this.
I'm worse than some of the most fanatical people out there on those game forums. Whenever one of you guys emails me or gives a game idea that is cool, it ends up in the game. I'm a very weak man.
So having the guy who sets the budget on the game also being the project manager really becomes a drawback because when I hear a cool idea, I just up the budget a bit so that we can put it in. And because of the way the game is designed (hyper modular) we don't delay the release date because we can throw someone else at a module (avoiding the "mythical man month" problem to a large extent).
SO where is this going? Influence is being tweaked. Influence doesn't just stay locked up in a given sector. It leaks out into other sectors. The further away the source, the less intense it is but there's always a background of it.
So then we move this into the sector ownership map. In beta 2, sector ownership is determiend by who has the highest population in a given sector. In beta 3, it's based on influence. Influence is now implemented so that star systems with decent planets tend to have influence of 10 to 15 (and crummy star systems have zilch) with the occasional random star system that has 20+ (and your home star systems start out with 20+ as well to avoid the "capital" game mechanic issue many strategy games fall into).
If you have a star system in a sector you don't control, there is a small chance each turn that it may rebel. The odds of it rebelling have to do with how much influence that star system has and its morale and how many military units you have stationed in orbit.
The idea here being that you should be able to conquer the galaxy in many different ways. Military might should only be one path. Other paths should be equally enjoyable. So a different path is to try to conquer the galaxy with Coca Cola, McDonalds, Levi's, Chinese Food, Volvo's, French wine, and other cultural products.
And you would do this by building up your influence in your star systems and building star bases that have influence enhancing modules on them that help magnify your influence into other sectors. Coding this isn't very easy since you have to avoid self-referencing code but it's going to be pretty cool I think.
The most obviosu difference is that you'll now be able to control sectors on the map that you don't have a star system in. I think this is more along the lines people here have been asking for as it creates real zones of influence.
Now to make sure the AI can defend against this.
