UnterribleSoTS

Getting Places

Slowships and slowships only. However you can set stargates up once you get there, and possibly as soon as you get there. Ships can come through stargates at any time; even in flight.

Building Ships

Build sections, not ships. Design decision will continue to be shown in full 3d glory; reference Naval Ops for a damn good way of doing this well; certain turrets and features “penetrate” into the hull of the thing while special systems sometimes erupt outwards. Powerful ECM generators might require lots of internal space (meaning light turrets, but no larger), and powerful shields might require large emitters.

Start by aggregating MoO 1 design features. You can have literally just about any ship you can fathom in MoO 1 and make any tradeoff. You are in complete control of every aspect of the ship’s handling, design, and armament. To extend the SotS metaphor, the command section encloses ECM, Battle Computers, and Shield generators from MoO. Then you would be able to assemble this to your heart’s content; eschewing certain features for increased armament. Consider some of the “extras” that Naval Ops had like spotlights and helipads and so forth; consider bringing these back. Sensor aerials or something like that.

Next logical “chunk” of the ship to construct would be the main body. This would aggregate armor type and thickness as well as all the main weapons of the MoO 1 interface. Consider two separate mission sections, one for weapons and one for specials?

Hmmm… “Bridge”, “Hull”, and “Auxiliary”, perhaps, with Hull accepting weapon banks or special systems, and Auxiliary being entirely optional… this way you define, say, a colony ship early in the game, with perhaps some autoupdating as you get better colony tech, and then to build a new colony ship, you select an appropriate bridge section, and slap it on the hull. While I’m at it… Pax Imperia or Outpost perhaps style satellite-deployment-on-colonization sounds kind of awesome.

Attacking Stuff and Interface Stuff

When you engage an enemy fleet in deep space you cut right to the combat (or perhaps run them out of movement). When you assault a system, it asks you how you want to do it. Theoretical options are blockade (destroy incoming and outgoing ships away from defenses), direct assault, or piss off. While you maintain blockade, you can also choose to do stuff. Divert asteroids, launch R-bombs, maybe even construct assault parasites or similar things if we get crazy. Plus, the longer you maintain a blockade, the more damage your ships can do to asteroid colonies and sensor networks. This would be a really cool thing to impliment. Fleets are discrete entities that can be engaged on either turn; for example, if you move a fleet up to my home system and choose to start a blockade and prepare some asteroids to smash into my homeworld, on my turn, I can rally up some defenders as well as move one of my fleets behind yours to eliminate you.

Instead of having completely free movement, movement will be based on Interesting Stuff (space is largely empty). You’ll get a stacking of arrivals; so, if I have a fleet at my homeworld, you attack my homeworld with a fleet, and I bring in reinforcements on my turn then I deploy outside your fleet, your fleet deploys outside my homefleet. Consider moving each fleet in turn instead of moving at end-turn; so I select fleet, click on a star, and it -goes- there. Ships have movement points based on drives and ramscoops and fuel supply or whatnot; and there’s totally waypointing. So if I click on a star ten turns away it’ll move every turn unless it runs into something. Similarly relocating construction auto assigns a move order. Though, if we go for the stargates route, relocating construction will be -so- not an issue.

If this sounds oddly familiar, its because it’s wholly ripped off of Total War. Total War has a lot of really really important lessons that can be applied to a space 4x. A lot of it (like moving your units’ move capacity during your turn) is civ inspired, but done a lot more slick-ly. Also, Total War doesn’t have much in the way of colony building; cities are already there (just largely neutral or controlled by weak npc factions). So it will be interesting to see how well this scales up with large universes. It works okay for Total War, obviously, but we shall see.

Disasters and Random Events

Timing and Shit

Disasters should be scaled to the player in question by means of a “score” that the game keeps track of. This is reflective of how the player is doing in general categories and should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s played Xcom or Master of Orion; basically for every so much trade or research or population or infrastructure or military power and whatnot, you get some Points. Points for military should be calculated by weapon, scaled by survivability of the ship, and times’d by number of weapons on that ship and then number of ships in the fleet. In this way, ten superpowerful godtech dreadnoughts would be rated much higher than 32,000 fighters with lasers, unlike in MOO. Carrying on…

Disasters span many turns and have warning signs. Pirate attacks ramp up to the big raids; before then you’ll get reports of or see unidentified ships moving around your borders (though that movement should be difficult to track reliably). Similarly spies should give you reports that there was some odd behaviour about a particular admiral before he declares himself dictator of the system you just conquered with your fleet as guards (a sample military disaster).

This leadup should be similar for many disasters and sometimes good things as well. For example, officers behaving oddly could presage some development of great genius or victory. If admirals were discrete characters this would translate to leadership stat-ups and the like; perhaps development of a characteristic maneuvering or firing strategy would give all your ships a static defense or offense bonus that would function a little like a Wonder in Civ; eventually becoming obsolescent with increasing technology or tactical diffusion giving everyone access to the same maneuvers and bonuses.

Similarly, odd ships moving on your borders could lead to alien migrations bringing new populations and ideas (tech tree stuff!) to your empire, nomadic traders offering cool prizes, or a mercenary fleet offering its services. Or derelicts to be attacked, that sorta nonsense. Not just pirates. You shouldn’t be able to take one glance at the timing of the event and know that the “unknown menace” is either a VN attack or meteor swarm.

Dice ’em up

Each X000 Points gives you a Random Event die that is rolled every turn. Presumably if you have less than X000 points you roll every However many you have / X000 turns. The dice from your most powerful points category are predominantly going to roll disasters, and the dice from your weakest category are predominantly going to roll good events. An economic powerhouse will have most of its points from trade, and thus it will have disasters attacking this. Things like pirates and corruption and that sort of thing that obviously would be linked to this source of power, and not be too terribly unbelievable. After all, wouldn’t pirates plump for the ships of the richest empire, like pirates in The Real World plundered many a treasure galleon on the spanish main whilst sailing a royal sloop?

Being kicked when you are down is never fun; this is why weak areas are almost always good events. If I’ve just expanded my empire and ran into a giant alien empire with a powerful military, it’d be neat to get a brilliant strategist to help even the odds. There should be some mitigating factors based on overall ranking; number 1 in the galaxy probably shouldn’t be allowed to get the very best good events and should be vulnerable to some of the nastier things, but it shouldn’t be so discrete that aiming for second place is a good thing to do. Many of the worst disasters should stand a chance to spill over.

System Control, Management, and Development

Trade

Trade should be conducted based on some kind of infrastructure expansion; it’s logical that a government would set up incentives and construct ports and so forth for civilian transports and freighters to dock in. Taking a cue from Total War, trade is enabled by stuff you build at locations (cities in TW, systems in a space 4x).

Development

Development of resource extraction and population housing should be able to continue pretty much forever as your people fill up all the rocks in the asteroid belts and hitch ride on comets in the Kuiper belt, that sort of thing. Consider labor “pools” that govern different sectors of a society but are still broad enough so that slider bars matter. The names are only -slightly- placeholder.

You have a master slider that governs the balance between Public and Private, so you can go Balls to the Walls defense if you need to, but it should most of the time stay at a balance. Then, you have two columns, with the apportionment of total labor for each. These are not scaled to the master slider, so you can set the ratio you like and then mess with the master slider. Nothing should move unless you tell it to.

Zones and Colonization

No, not zones like residential/commercial/industrial in SimCity. This is a relative distance scale and system description metric that simultaneously aims to reflect the real universe a bit better and concatenate an entire complex solar system into a relatively small panel. Let’s list the zones first, then talk about colonization.

• Zone 0: This is the object your people first landed on. It encompasses MAYBE a light second of space; if you land on a planet, it’s that planet. If you land on a big asteroid, its the asteroids in the vicinity. If you land on a gas giant’s moon, it’s the closest other moons. 1 production translates to 1 point of infrastructure or housing expansion; this zone is why it’s important to expand your empire as it yields up new, easily exploited regions that would otherwise be fully developed in your home systems.
• Zone 1: Up to ten light seconds from Zone 0. Earth’s moon definately, but all the moons around a gas giant, and a much larger chunk of an asteroid belt. 5 production translates to 1 point of expansion. Your homeworld will probably start out having fully industrialized through Zone 1.
• Zone 2: Up to ten light minutes from Zone 0. Complete asteroid belt or inner solar system. 15 or 25 production translates to 1 point of expansion.
• Zone 3: Up to ten light hours from Zone 0. This encompasses jumping from the inner system to mining gas giants, and their satellites and asteroids, that sort of thing. You’re still near the primary but you’re spending a lot to get out that far. 100 production translates to 1 point of expansion.
• Zone 4: Out to the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud; developing a vaguely continuous civilization out to eventually halfway to the next stars. The investment is understandably huge at this point. Each Zone in a system will have a Size (Capacity, perhaps?) value indicating total developable space; this should be logarithmic so a lone planet the size of pluto might be Size 1 or 2, the Earth maybe 5 or 6, and the Whole Asteroid Belt as Size 15 or 16 perhaps, unless we want to go by volume in which case it’s a 4. Size (or Capacity) will directly inform maximum number of residents given full expenditures terraforming and so forth. This can be expanded upon with technologies in the vein of Master of Orion. Similarly, each Zone will have one to three dominant environments loosely describing its constituents, so Venus would be an Inferno environment, while Jupiter would be Gas Giant / Volcanic / Snowball and Earth would be Terran / Selenic or Dead or whatever.

Finally, each Zone will have a resources value indicating its mineral content. Mercury might be 200-500, the Moon and the Asteroids 100-200, Venus and Earth 50-100, and then down to 1 to 10 for the Oort cloud.

When colonizing, you can choose which zone to land on though it will autoselect to closest compatability with your species. Not all zones will be filled, and distance (and thus cost) is relative. This means that to extract maximum resources from a system in the short term, you would want to land in Zone 0 where rocky planets with high resources values would be located. (The asteroid belt in Zone 2 would be a nice second choice). Zone 3 gives the best distance to all the various features in the system given time, so it probably gives you the “quickest” route to a dyson swarm but by then you’re in serious shit because the resources value there is very low. And also it’s probably not very hospitable unless you’re a robot.

Doodads visible from Galactic Map

• Oort cloud colonies, faintly
• Tradeships, faintly; some stacking so that thousand ship fleets are bright lights
• System shields
• Disasters incoming
• proplyds
• bok globules
• Ginormous minefields
• Ginormous artifacts (Eidolon Helix)
• nebulae etcetera