FreeOrion

To respond to the original thread post, I agree that making an interesting research system means creating techs that give more than a numerical bonus. One of the (many many) problems with MoO3 was that all of the weapons tech "felt" the same. The just had straight-up numerical boosts. To m...

I am not a programmer, so please forgive me if I mess up the lingo, but I am a game designer who has worked with programmers on similar problems. This is a suggestion for part of the second half of your question. One thing I have done to give flexible, quasi-random starting resources to players in m...

How about a compromise band-aid solution: If a planet has zero population, a colony ship will "magically" create 0.1 population. If a planet has more than zero population, the planet can no longer be colonized BUT the colony ship can be "decommissioned" or "scrounged" f...

If you do have a racial pick that allows your race to convert minerals and/or industry into food, you should have a racial pick that allows similar trade-offs in other directions. The current idea of Lithovore seems to be: Minerals ~ Food: Lowers industrial potential of a planet, but removes the nee...

First, I would like to stipulate that I am a game designer, but in no way shape or form am I a programmer. Take the following with the appropriate grain of I-don't-know-how-hard-this-is salt. The way that the AI should act should be related to the race and/or government that they are playing as. We ...

Hey guys. The players on the Star Chamber forum have been trying to get a grass-roots campaign going to spread the word about the game, so I thought I'd do my part. http://starchamber.station.sony.com/ I've been playing Star Chamber for going on 5 years now, and I'm still not tired of it. It's a com...

One element which has not been discussed yet in this thread yet is how the concept of 'fighters' adds to game flavor. Even if fighters have exactly the same functionality as missiles (travel at X speed, do Y damage, are vulnerable to PD but not LR weapons), they will still add flavor to the mix. Art...

Yes, that was what I was referring to. In HOMM, getting the Oracle treasure gave the city to which it was applied to a HUGE bonus. There's a 4X space game out there that uses Artifacts, but I can't remember which one. One of the win conditions was in fact gathering 5 Artifacts. I was thinking that i...

Yes I read that. I just wanted to propose a way to make stealthy ships 'feel' stealthy, above and beyond 'with 50 stealth I'm detected, with 60 stealth I'm safe'. What do modern armies use stealth vehicles for? Espionage and information gathering! A consequence of the described stealth vs. detection...

Eleazar: Your idea seems interesting, although the payoff takes long enough that planets with natives might not seem interesting/desirable. I would suggest that if there are 'Artifacts' in the game, similar to the Oracle rewards in Heroes of Might and Magic, some artifacts might be discoverable by s...

I have a number of linked ideas that I would like to see, tied to the way that the Stealth system works. I feel that it would be very interesting if a ship with a high Stealth statistic could enter an enemy system and choose not to initiate combat. The Stealth rating of the ship would have to be hig...

It would indeed be nice if regular weapons and 'special effect' weapons could draw from the same pool of ship resources. One of the decided-upon resources must now be 'slots', as that game mechanic has been decided, but that doesn't mean that weapons can't have other stats such as mass and energy us...

I would like to give an example of another 4X game's blance between casual and deep: I frequently play a game called Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, which is a great fantasy-themed 4X game. This game has tactical turn-based combat, which takes quite awhile as you can have up to 56 units in a single fi...

I wanted to respond to the original topic of this thread. As with everything in a game as deep as FO, natives on a planet should provide benefits or drawbacks, depending on your situation, race, government etc. Here is my suggestion for how natives should function in-game: Natives should take up a c...

Another alternative: when an empire steals/trades/backwards engineers a tech from another empire, they get a version of the tech which is one itineration better then the version they have now. For example, if your empire already has Laser Mk 1, and you steal "Laser" technology from an empi...