Different starting setups...

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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The Dave
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Different starting setups...

#1 Post by The Dave »

So I played FO a little bit and was not surprised to start off with a homeworld, 2 scouts, and 1 colony ship. It is based on Orion, and virtually every 4X game starts more or less like that. But I've had a thought for a while about how to create a game that could be played in drastically different ways from start to finish. Some players favor an economic approach or a diplomatic one, but by having planets as the fundamental unit of everything all players end up playing more or less the empire/political game. Consider the following:

-We nerf the common game mechanic that states you must have a planet/city/whatever to stay in the game and instead tie it to something else, such as simply having property (such as a space outpost or warship).

-Instead of starting the game with a planet and a colony ship the player is given a few points to spend on starting resources. Now maybe they start out with a home world a colony ship and a 2 scouts, or maybe they go a different route and invest in a couple of space stations and some mining units. Rather than focusing on settling planets that will be populated by billions of people (with, realistically, only a small fraction of those population units contributing to your empire) they instead have a small population but are a major employer with a military rather than an interplanetary government. Sure, without planets the total population will never be high, but the total workforce and thus production could be comparable. As the game advances the player could focus more on participating in trade and would remain a much more difficult target to strike it.

-By eliminating the need for planets to remain in the game it allows for the possibility of completely fleeing during a war you can't win, hiding in some distant corner of the galaxy and rebuilding, somewhat Battlestar Galactica style.

-The design document has space in it for combats to require infrastructure to resupply them. Should players be able to prey on this by choosing the pirate life somehow?

Thoughts?

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Different starting setups...

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

The SVN (latest, unreleased) version of FO doesn't eliminate players until they've lost all ships ans all planets, so that aspect of your suggestion is already implemented. Once we have some new effects added to create ships, we could make various game scenarios that don't involve any planets, or which don't use planets in the traditional way. It's also feasible to make some modifications to allow ships that function like planets do now, able to produce resources and have growing populations, but also able to move around the galaxy.

I'm not sure what the point of your contrasting between employer and empire is, though. A sufficiently large "company" with a large fleet of ships essentially is an very mobile empire with a very planned / controlled economy.

There were discussions about pirating when designing the fleet supply lines, but for v0.4 and probably for v1.0, we likely won't have any way to profit by taking others' fleet supply as a major game component. It might be possible to set up some conditions and effects (used for content scripting, like ship parts or techs) to create such a situation or mechanic, though.

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