Multiple Worlds design

[Blake]

I'm back. Now that the pleasantries have been dispensed with, on to business

I want to discuss the ideas of multiple worlds, for numerous reasons it is better to have multiple planets in the game universe, things like space battles and launching planetary invasions. But also realism and more strategic depth.

Designing such a game is a different matter, but I think/hope I have worked out a viable framework.

The game is basically divided into two levels:
Planet Level: Where you can affect a single planet directly, things like founding new cities, moving armies, building improvements.
Space Level: This is a view much like MOO I/II/III or Stars!, the interface between planet level and space level has to be quite well defined, iow the external effect a planet has on the universe has to be reduced to a few variables. For example the planet would devote a certain amount of resources to space operations, produce a certain amount of research, it would have a certain capacity for building space ships (space dock, space station, space elevator etc) and some sorts of collective stockpiles of resources like food and metals.

First important concept:
Avatar. You have an avatar in the game universe, you have a fine flagship built by some kind hearted aliens (or alternatively must be built before you can go out and do stuff in the big wide universe), at the start your flagship is small and weak, but it can be upgraded with better hulls, cargo capacity, engines and of course an assload of weapons. And what would a flagship be without a fleet to go with it (lonely?). When your flagship is destroyed, either the game will end, or you’ll escape in an escape pod, depending if the setting is regicide or not.
The important thing is due to stuff like the speed of light, you only have precise control over the planet you are in orbit of, if it's a friendly planet you can plan new cities and change terraforming objectives and ordinances, if it is infested with enemy you will be coordinating an invasion or maintaining a blockade. Some worlds will be cohabitated by two factions, which would make things tense if they aren’t too friendly.
You will have some control over other worlds, but only at the space level, and if there’s a space job to be done, but you’re busy elsewhere, you'll have to send off a fleet and pray the captain doesn't mess things up.
The point of the avatar is to reduce the potentional for micromanagement, even if you have 50 worlds, you will only be able to micro one of them each turn, just like every other player in the game.

The planet level in detail:
How I envisage it is something like this, visually the map of a planet would be a large rectangle, much like civ games, however the word "tile" will not be mentioned, the primary reason for this is it allows circular, variable, radius on cities and units.
An army would be surrounded by a circle indicating it's area of influence, large armies could cover a lot of ground, an armies units can considered to be anywhere inside it's area of effect, so if you send a big ass army into an area densely packed with many cities, it will attack and (try to) conquer all of the cities inside it's area of effect, meaning you don’t need to split it up. Basically a large army will act like a steamroller.

Armies will move at realistic speeds, meaning they can be mobilized to any point on the globe, provided an open route is available, speed wont really be an attribute of units, rather things like mobility matter. Send infantry into the mountains and tanks onto the plains, or just nuke everything from orbit, that works too.

Naval power may or may not be present

Terraforming and natives:
Worlds should have a great amount of variety in this, some planets should be covered with vast tracts of jungle, swarming with hostile native beasts. If you found a colony in the festering jungle you could get messages every turn about how the terrible native beasts are killing off the colonists, until you become sufficiently intrigued to mosey over in your flagship to greet the natives with some nukes from orbit. Now that’s what I call terraforming.
Different worlds should have different challenges, jungles could host dangerous natives, barren worlds would be good mining, but cities would grow slowly and at great expense, frozen worlds would attract only the hardiest colonists, some worlds could feature alien relics which can be claimed by the adventurous explorers.

Cities and Improvements:
As has been pointed out numerous times, cities don’t need a large amount of land, as such it would be my inclination to ditch all farm and mining type improvements, and while we are at it lose the roads too, with high mobility units wont need them and the colonists will build them anyway between cities, the advantage of losing the roads is also the map looks a lot cleaner and draws faster.

Most improvements would therefore be military or space related, things like defense clusters (shoot at spacecraft) and space ports (build spaceships, receive trade), space elevators, fortification lines (slows down armies), and terraforming, thermal condensers, boreholes.

The reason for these being separate to cities is they are fairly dangerous or undesirable neighbors; everyone loves ion cannons scorching the sky above them, space craft crash landing on their house or being under a 40000km tall terrorist target. Being fairly sizable they would have their own towns attached and so use some population.

Governor:
Because players cannot be at every planet, control must be left to competent governor. Rather than having the governor magically determine what the player wants, I believe a "task queue" would work better, some tasks could be very specific, for example laying down "shadows" of cities and/or improvements that will be built by the population as resources become available. If you are not at the planet you can still revise the governor settings, which could look something like this
---------------- Task List -----------------------------------
1) Found 5 new cities.
2) Build 10 new Dragon IV cruisers.
3) Acquire 50% of the planets surface.
4) Develop research infrastructure.
------------------ Settings --------------------------------
[x] Use military force.
[ ] Rush build
[ ] Emphasis growth
[x] Emphasis research
[ ] Emphasis economy
[x] Emphasis military
[ ] Emphasis space
------------------------- Misc -------------------------------
Empire Tax: 15%
Verbose setting: Chatty
---------------------------------------------------

The task list ordering would act as priorities rather than a strict order of tasks. The task list should update to indicate progress, ie "Build 10 Dragon IV cruisers" might change to "Build 9 Dragon IV cruisers" after 1 has been built, or it might just have a progress indicator.

Tick boxes would allow traditional governor control and tweaking, to prevent the governor doing things you don’t want them to.

Finally settings for things like tax rate (how much production is devoted to the empire), the verbose setting would be how many messages the governor sends you, chatty might be sending you a progress report every year, but you could also just have them send messages when something exceptional happens, like the task list running out, or a natural disaster.


Summary of planet level:
Try to make it as close to real life as possible, in terms of movement rates, population models, resources models etc. Minimize menial micromanagement, most player actions should have a fairly significant impact on the game.
Primary player actions involve building/planning cities/improvements, social engineering, economic policy and planetary engineering aka terraforming.
Visually map should be relatively uncluttered.
Governor should be based on more than a magical intuition of what the player wants. Primarily because magic doesn't exist.

Space level:

This is where you fly from planet to planet in your flagship, the most important thing is to have multiple play styles:
Builder:
Divides time between a few high quality planets, tweaking the social engineering, optimizing trade and generally ensuring a high growth and profit from all worlds. May have a few outpost worlds for early warning. The governors are most likely quite bored.
Explorer:
Leaves the empire in the hands of trusty governors and generals, and goes off adventuring, it is important that there be rewards for such exploration, things like alien relics and rewarding places to build research colonies.
War Monger:
Attacks everyone, planets are used to churn out warships and conquered planets are used to churn out more warships doesn't bother much with building because too busy coordinating planetary invasions.
Nomad/Trader:
It may even be possible to take a role where planetary operations are completely neglected (other than a source of income), and trading stuff (including information) between players, this would probably also revolve around upgrading your flagship and fleet to be very powerful.

And of course the Diplomat / Mastermind and other manipulative types.

Also there will be space combat, probably in a combat simulator. How exactly this works remains to be seen, Newtonian physics would be nice, although possibly in 2D rather than 3D to make things easier and less confusing….


Miscellaneous

Graphics:
The planet level will ideally be a 3D real-time rendered landscape (not like SMAC… I mean with proper blending and stuff), to look good it’ll probably need to use OpenGL (although because the camera always points the same direction, a software renderer, perhaps voxel based, would be equally viable). The big advantage of OpenGL is it makes stuff easier especially stuff like zooming (I feel smooth zooming is quite important).
Cities will probably be something like sprites, perhaps with suggestions of urbanization radiating out from larger cities (the terrain texture changes to look like a sprawling city…). The other thing is circles suggesting the radius of influence of cities and/or armies, just like in many RTS games, but most notably those with 3D engines (like Warcraft3 and Dune3000)

What about the terraforming?
What about it? While formers and stuff were part of the fun in SMAC, that model also resulted in 2+ hour long turns later in the game. It’s really rather pointless too.
It is my opinion that a terraforming game would be much better done in Simcity style, where you could have all sorts of fun stuff like laying water pipes and building solar panels.
The really short answer is that having a detailed terraforming model adds no real strategic depth.

Long, I know.
And ofcourse I'd love some feedback

[aaglo]

Wellcome back, Blake!

Okay, feedback:

So, is this still the same game we are talking about?
Your post is so long, and my time is short, so I'll make it short, okay?

- planet/space levels: this game is getting big, right?
- army influence area:
- terraforming&natives: I agree, nuke is the ultimate terraformer. Definitely different planet types with huge differences
- planetary governor: There will propably be some 150 choises in the endgame... or maybe not. minor
- space level: I don't know what to think about this. Does this happen only when you are changing the planet you are dealing with? Or did I miss something completely.
- Graphics: If it becomes OpenGL (or any other 3D-stuff), then I need a lot of help (for my part) . I know absolutely nothing about these.

Nothing helpful, I'm afraid....

[Rasbelin]

I need to read your long post when I have time, Blake. But one quick comment. I noticed that Warcraft III seems to have influenced you somewhat when it comes to the graphics.

I know absolutely nothing about these.

Welcome to the club.

[Vultur]

First of all, welcome back Blake.

Some of your "Space Level" ideas reminds me also Black Nova Trader game (can be found here on Poly).
I'm not sure that will be usefull have a Warcraft 3-like graphic for a TBS game , a SMAC-like will be sufficent...

During your absence I've opened two design threads:Worker, Talents and Leaders and Weather Design, where I've gathered the ideas from old Forums. I desire to know the opinion of the whole SPDT before proceding with some coding.

NOTE:For the graphic stuff: next version of Map Builder will be 2D (release date: first days of 2003), but I've found a library for texture that can implement a 3D map w/o OpenGL (no camera problem...)

[DeathByTheSword]

i have read a little but this is not a smac kind of game this is more a Pax imperia/imperium galatica/MoO game.....what is this game going to be? i want to know because then i know how much time i want to spend on the project?\!

[carbaher]

I've found this ideas very interesting. I think Blake ideas are very good, specially the idea of having an avatar in the game in one flagship.

I agree in the division that he makes of the two levels of play (space and planet).

The idea of having governors to the city is also very good (perhaps something more configurable than MoO2) and I've found also great the idea of the "Task List" where we can build more than one thing at a time, not one thing after another.

I'm thinking in the idea of space in the game. I don't know how we are goint to make it, but I want some of you to look at one sourceforge project. It is called "Celestia" and is a virtual planetary where you can travel to many stars of the galaxy. I wonder if we can build something similar to build one custom galaxy, or to generate random galaxy . Perhaps, we can use this as the space environment. At least I've found it very interesting

Greetings to all of SpDT!!!

[Jeremy Buloch]

Welcome Back Blake! Long time no see.

The Ideas that you have included sound very good indeed. This game is getting more and more large as we go. But I like it.
I didn't have time to read all of it, I will get back when I have some spare time.
The Factions on the other planets sound very cool.
Well I'll be back sooner or later.
-J.B.-

[targon]

I fear game may degenerate into simple hunt for flagship.

[DeathByTheSword]

if we are using this kind of space interface then we will neglect the planetary managment and bring that back to simple order giving. I had the impression that we would have a big planet manegement but this sound like most action will be in space...if we are trying to do both...then we will have a very complicating game and very big

[Michiel]

Is that a problem?

Ok, the way I see it. If we compare StP with civ-games, space will be the 'world' and planets will be the 'cities'. Though maybe with a lot more detail... Tell me if I'm wrong.

It would be cool to have big planet-management AND big space-management, but as you said, it would make the game complicated.

[DeathByTheSword]

yes and that is my problem every body sees the game differently some see it as you see it but some see it as a planet is a world and space is extra....I want to know what kind of game this is going to be...will it be both or will it be what michiel said....Or will it be that we will have a 'world' for every planet

[Lemmy]

I know i've said it before, don't know if anyone listened bac kthen, but now that i read till "first important concept" i'll say it again.
Take a look at a game called Emperor of the Fading Suns (get it from the underdogs). It's not the perfect game regarding multiple planets, but it does give you pretty good idea regarding micromanagement, and overall structure.

[Blake]

Alright, some more details.
There will be very little (prefferably nothing) in the way of planetary micromanagment. What will be available are things like:
Social Engineering: Tweaking your factions goverment, values etc.
Ordinances: Tweak a particular planet.
Terraforming: This is planetary level terraforming, things like solar shades and melting icecaps. Also adjusting the atmosphere density (obviously not directely). The primary things you'll be able to do is make the planet hotter or cooler.
Dangerous natives: Some planets will be infested with Aliens or starship trooper style beasties. Most planets will have some challenges.
Research: Will be very important. Moving the game into space gives a lot more scope for fantastic (while still plausible) technologies. On a planet a lot plausibility is lost at high technologies, primarly because the factions are still *on* the planet, while they clearly have the technology to leave
Economic Engineering: The in game economy will use a supply/demand model and you'll be able to adjust prices through the use of taxes and subsidies, encouraging the production of different resources or services, it will not be possible to do something like taking a worker from a mine and putting him on a farm, but economic engineering will allow the same thing to be done, but on a planetwide or empire wide level.
Trade: the civilian populations of factions will trade between each other, you'll be able to manipulate the trade through the use of economic engineering, adding tariffs and the like to either increase your profits or meddle with your neighbours economy, through the use of flooding and (later) trade denial.
Note that the default state of things for economic engineering will be a free market, which has little in the way of taxes, subsidies or trade barriers. This will mean the economy will automatically run very smoothly. Unlike social engineering, increased economic engineering will generally move the economy into a less optimal state (So why do it? Usually to increase your tax income, deny your neighbours trade, or just because you can)

I fear game may degenerate into simple hunt for flagship.

I dont see that, for a start killing the flagship would only eliminate the player in certain game modes (ie regicide), in other modes the player just gets a new one.
Finding the flagship wont nessecary automatically allow you to kill it, for a start they'll be able to armed to the teeth, and secondly players will probably bring a sizable escort consisting of no less than a half of their military force.

If you want a parallel with Civ, the
Civ ::::: StP
The Planet = The Universe
City = Planet
Facility = City (cities specialize to a degree, and can be targetted and stuff)

Most things you can do will be relatively more important than in SMAC or Civ, if you can do an action, that action will have some noticable effect on the game, compare to SMAC, where building or destroying a single forest really has very little impact (unless it's in the first 20 turns...)...
if that makes any sense at all.

[Rasbelin]

As for the size of the campaign if we would go for good planetary management and space conquest, it could be well done by having two different game modes. One with the system Blake has now suggested (which sounds good indeed, but it turns up more as a space conquest (I assume I have the same opinion as Targon basically)) and one with only one planet and maybe space trade and colonisation (you simply send away ships, but you don't control them). This would mean you could choose between a larger game with the space included too, or a more Civ and SMAC styled game on one planet. But going only for something MoO styled is something I questionise, unless the victory models are flexible enough so that you don't have to explore the rest of the galaxy so heavily.

Most things you can do will be relatively more important than in SMAC or Civ, if you can do an action, that action will have some noticable effect on the game, compare to SMAC, where building or destroying a single forest really has very little impact (unless it's in the first 20 turns...)... if that makes any sense at all.

Some of us want a little bit more micromanagement for e.g. the cities. Only giving a very streamlined order to do X or Z that will have very great impact on the game sounds very simplified (i.e. no depth in city management IMHO). Maybe we should concider more seriously having two different game modes or adding some better city management and also get down to the planetary level abit more from space.

[Rasbelin]

It would be cool to have big planet-management AND big space-management, but as you said, it would make the game complicated.

So my (actually Blake suggested something like this previously) suggestion that could solve the problem is to have the 2 different game modes, unless we simply skip one of the concepts and leave it for secondary priority.

[Kurilka]

But i don't understand how we deal with these 2 modes in multiplayer situation when some people are in space mode and some in planetary...

[Rasbelin]

Well, it would mean would have 2 different multiplayer game modes (compare to e.g. FPS games with deathmatch, teamdeath, roundbased deathmatch and objective matches). Of course this sounds insane to someone, but it should be quite working, unless we settle for the second suggestion I came up with.

[Kurilka]

And what about singleplayer?
Will it be the same? Actually as i understand strategy games in singleplayer and multiplayer are almost the same, the main difference is that there are not real player but AI

[Rasbelin]

Well, as you run the server anyway for SP too, it would be available in both SP and MP. And that's if we decide to use the suggestion I made.

[DeathByTheSword]

ok thank you now i finally now what kind of game we are making an most of my units i suggested are usseles for one of the gamemodes

[Rasbelin]

Hey, hold your horses, DBTS. This was just a suggestion by me, not a final resolution. You can come up with other suggestions and have a different opinion.

[Michiel]

I was wondering if there is going to be a Single Player mode at all. The last thing I remember about that in the old freeAC forums, is that it wasn't a priority and the game would primarily be for online gaming. So, in my absence, did I miss the final decision about that?

BTW: I agree on the multi world thing you/Blake suggested.

[Blake]

DBTS, most of your units are still valid. Except maybe the ships (probably do what so many games seem to be doing, and replace ships with fliers and hovercrafts)

The planet level will still be important:
It will be possible to share a planet.
Cities have a definite location (so you can attack one city, rather than another), and there will be borders and stuff.
Armies will also have a definite location on the planet, meaning armies are still moved around, can target particular areas, etc.
Ground combat will still be important, orbital power will be about as effective as modern airpower, you can bomb the target all you want, but if you want to capture it, you have to send in the groundpounders.
Later in the game it will be possible to build weapons which allow for scorched earth strategies, but if you want something left of a planet to utilize, then you'd be best not saturate nuke it from space.

The problem with hands on, is it directely equates to micromanagment, it puts players that dont want to hands on at a disadvantage.

My vision is to have a game which is designed for interesting multiplayer, rather than 7 people playing introverted single player games, but in the same game, and occasionally attacking/obliterating one another.

I have nothing against hands on, but there is a place for such games, the "sims"/"tycoon" series. A good game about colony micromanagment on another planet would put you in command of a single colony in a nice valley or something, then you can build farms, housing, power plants, research labs, waterworks, entertainment and a hundred and one other things, it would be real time and designed for single player. (have I designed such a game already? Probably.)

What turn based is great for is strategy games, and especially diplomacy because there is time to think about diplomacy between turns, so I'm designing a game which will make for interesting multiplayer with lots of potentional for diplomacy and politics, but still with plenty to do, and yes, some hands on stuff, planetary invasions should be especially hands on, if you choose to lead the attack force you'll be targetting the orbital weapons to destroy ground based defenses (or economic targets), sending in drop ships, and moving the armies around conquering stuff.
You'll also have a fair amount of control over your cities, atleast when you are currentely at the planet.

[Blake]

In response to Michiel:
Yes, there will be a single player mode. Otherwise new players would be so darn newbie in multiplayer it wouldn't be funny

I lean towards a tutorial, and campaign. Possibly a sandbox mode if the AI can be made good enough. Also the game should be interesting enough to play just by yourself in a universe, if you want to play starship troopers (exterminating the native lifeforms) or just mess around with stuff, so that option too.

[Jeremy Buloch]

). However, the most mathematically efficient method to explore space is far less glamorous: to send fleets of "Von Neumann probes" throughout the galaxy (named after John Von Neumann, who established the mathematical laws of self-replicating systems).

A Von Neumann probe is a robot designed to reach distant star systems and create factories which will reproduce copies themselves by the thousands. A dead moon rather than a planet makes the ideal destination for Von Neumann probes, since they can easily land and take off from these moons, and also because these moons have no erosion. These probes would live off the land, using naturally occurring deposits of iron, nickel, etc. to create the raw ingredients to build a robot factory. They would create thousands of copies of themselves, which would then scatter and search for other star systems.

Similar to a virus colonizing a body many times its size, eventually there would be a sphere of trillions of Von Neumann probes expanding in all directions, increasing at a fraction of the speed of light. In this fashion, even a galaxy 100,000 light years across may be completely analyzed within, say, a half million years.
If a Von Neumann probe only finds evidence of primitive life (such as an unstable, savage Type 0 civilization) they might simply lie dormant on the moon, silently waiting for the Type 0 civilization to evolve into a stable Type I civilization. After waiting quietly for several millennia, they may be activated when the emerging Type I civilization is advanced enough to set up a lunar colony. Physicist Paul Davies of the University of Adelaide has even raised the possibility of a Von Neumann probe resting on our own moon, left over from a previous visitation in our system aeons ago.

(If this sounds a bit familiar, that's because it was the basis of the film, 2001. Originally, Stanley Kubrick began the film with a series of scientists explaining how probes like these would be the most efficient method of exploring outer space. Unfortunately, at the last minute, Kubrick cut the opening segment from his film, and these monoliths became almost mystical entities)

New Developments
Since Kardashev gave the original ranking of civilizations, there have been many scientific developments which refine and extend his original analysis, such as recent developments in nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum physics, etc.
For example, nanotechnology may facilitate the development of Von Neumann probes. As physicist Richard Feynman observed in
his seminal essay, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," there is nothing in the laws of physics which prevents building armies of molecular-sized machines. At present, scientists have already built atomic-sized curiosities, such as an atomic abacus with Buckyballs and an atomic guitar with strings about 100 atoms across.

Paul Davies speculates that a space-faring civilization could use nanotechnology to build miniature probes to explore the galaxy, perhaps no bigger than your palm. Davies says, "The tiny probes I'm talking about will be so inconspicuous that it's no surprise that we haven't come across one. It's not the sort of thing that you're going to trip over in your back yard. So if that is the way technology develops, namely, smaller, faster, cheaper and if other civilizations have gone this route, then we could be surrounded by surveillance devices."
Furthermore, the development of biotechnology has opened entirely new possibilities. These probes may act as life-forms, reproducing their genetic information, mutating and evolving at each stage of reproduction to enhance their capabilities, and may have artificial intelligence to accelerate their search.

Also, information theory modifies the original Kardashev analysis. The current SETI project only scans a few frequencies of radio and TV emissions sent by a Type 0 civilization, but perhaps not an advanced civilization. Because of the enormous static found in deep space, broadcasting on a single frequency presents a serious source of error. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, a more efficient system is to break up the message and smear it out over all frequencies (e.g. via Fourier like transform) and then reassemble the signal only at the other end. In this way, even if certain frequencies are disrupted by static, enough of the message will survive to accurately reassemble the message via error correction routines. However, any Type 0 civilization listening in on the message on one frequency band would only hear nonsense. In other words, our galaxy could be teeming with messages from various Type II and III civilizations, but our Type 0 radio telescopes would only hear gibberish.

Lastly, there is also the possibility that a Type II or Type III civilization might be able to reach the fabled Planck energy with their machines (10^19 billion electron volts). This is energy is a quadrillion times larger than our most powerful atom smasher. This energy, as fantastic as it may seem, is (by definition) within the range of a Type II or III civilization.
The Planck energy only occurs at the center of black holes and the instant of the Big Bang. But with recent advances in quantum gravity and superstring theory, there is renewed interest among physicists about energies so vast that quantum effects rip apart the fabric of space and time. Although it is by no means certain that quantum physics allows for stable wormholes, this raises the remote possibility that a sufficiently advanced civilizations may be able to move via holes in space, like Alice's Looking Glass. And if these civilizations can successfully navigate through stable wormholes, then attaining a specific impulse of a million seconds is no longer a problem. They merely take a short-cut through the galaxy.

These "Von Neumann probes" would be great if we were to use multiple planets. They could start building a colony on a planet or moon and wait for the transport vessel to arrive. The physics are theoretical and not too "Star Treky".
-J.B.-

[Vultur]

I've read about a similar idea on a Michael Crichton's book: "Andromeda".
A strange plague affect a little village in the U.S. desertic region after the fall of a Weather Probe. The scientist called to solve the mistery discover a sort of bacterium that eat pure energy and use it to replicate itself...
--------------------------------
Immagine a "living" probe of this type: can explore and replicate itself pratically forever. Advanced genetics, nanite techs and matter/energy converversion will be required for this probe, but in a SCI-FI games this things can be considered "normal".

I've an off-topic question:
I'm still coding an isometric map designed to represent the map of a planet with 9 altitude levels (changing tile's aspect it will be possible to draw all types of rocky planets, from desolate moons to jungle worlds). I'm wasting my time? The game will remain Civ/CtP/SMAC like or it will become something of totally different?

[Rasbelin]

I lean towards a tutorial, and campaign.

I.e. that would mean...

SP

- tutorial
- campaign
- random maps
- scenarios

MP

- random maps
- scenarios