Welcome Star Legacy Development Group!

[Ed Kolis]

Yes, they will most likely have a value which is factored into the production calculations. Thanks for reminding me of that!

[MarcoPolo]

This sounds like an intriguing idea to planet and resource management.

What I want to know is whether a players empire will have autonomous and self sufficient planet resources, ie will they be almost like city states in CIV? What I mean is if a planet experiences starvation if growing faster than the infrustructure... then in Civilization there is little a player can do to aid one city over another, they basically are at the mercy of what the city micromanagement screen permits and will not help if the city infrastructure is maxed out. This kind of defeats the purpose of having an empire if you cannot stretch one city to its limits with the full support of the outlying colonies. Kind of like Rome, where all the riches can be hoarded to the capital from the provinces (which is what historically happened in Rome) to truly prosper and bring with it more wealth.

I always felt that it would be nice to allow the player the ability to push production in favour of having a larger capital or core planets with the support of outlying colonies being specialised to specific tasks. Like science (ie science moon colony) or manufacturing/production (asteroid refineries) ..so that a player can diversify and actually not just capture planets in order to just found more and more pointless colonies. Its wonderful to have alot of Earths to manage, but also making Earths not so abundant and having the choice of also settling rocks that are more geared for production than population would be interesting too.

It would open up other possibilities, and maybe even change the dynamics to waging war on an opponent (if say he has many many moons and asteroids that taking over 1 or 2 of his earth planets, will still not impact him since his production power lies in his control of the stars with huge asteroid and moon resources) Perhaps making moons and asteroids easier to colonies and less inefficient and specialised would throw a spanner in the works, from having to see countless 4X games in the past fall quickly into drudgery of many earth planets micromanagement.

Just my 2c

[Ed Kolis]

We are planning on having automatically generated "civilian freighters" used to transport population and resources about without direct supervision by the player. If this turns out to be too troublesome for pathing or combat, or too CPU-intensive, we can always fall back on a modified version of the "spaceport" system from Space Empires: if a colony has a spaceport, it can access the "global pool" of resources, otherwise it's limited to what it can produce locally! I doubt we'd go with a system where every colony is expected to be completely self-sufficient all the time!

[dumbluck]

Hmm. If you are planning on having the computer handle migration for you ala SE5, might I suggest Target Population Densities. It would just be slider bars for each valid race that you have access too. Don't want any aliens on the homeworld? Move the slider bar for your race up to 100%.

That brings up another question. How does SL handle non-breathable atmospheres? I'm thinking of a system where non-breathers suffer infrastructure limits. So you have 500M non breathers and 100M breathers on a planet? The 500M non-breathers would suffer an infrastructure limit (based on planet size), while the 100M breathers would work "outside the dome" and have no such limit.

So, if the non-breather infrastructure limit for the above planet, is, say 250M, then half your non-breather workforce would be without infrastructure. So you'd have 350M + (250M*10%=25M) = 375M production (assuming there was enough infrastructure in place for the the 250M non-breathers + 100M breathers).

Another thing to consider would be how having 500M non-breathers crammed into a 250M rated "dome" would affect happiness levels.

[MarcoPolo]

Sounds like a promising idea.

I just hope this doesn't turn into a spreadsheets in space game, because those I can't really stand anymore, hence why I never could get hooked on SEIV or SEV. Developers should understand that we are not living in the 80s anymore where one could ignore any graphical oversights in favour of more intense gameplay.

Peace.

[dumbluck]

How do you plan on handling construction? I was thinking maybe it should be just another factor in the Infrastructure idea you were talking about earlier. So if you want Planet A to start working on that Big Military Construction Project, you'll have to move people off of the Research they were working on. And if you don't have any Construction Infrastructure in place, it will take a while to spin up the construction rate.

Also, from the sounds of it you're going to have 4, 5, or even more sliders per planet, and moving one will make the others adjust accordingly. Without a way to lock the sliders in place, you'll end up spending a whole minute or two just getting the sliders where you want them. It would be much better if I could adjust Research to where I want it and lock the slider. Now when I move the Mining slider, Research stays put.

[Ed Kolis]

Regarding "locked" sliders, we've (actually I think it was Kwayne's idea, IIRC!) come up with a clever way to deal with that...

Remember MOO2, where you had the population assigned to various tasks (mining/farming/research)? To reassign population, you first click where you want to DEallocate people, then click where you want to allocate them TO. The farther left you click on the first list of people, the more people you deallocate from that task; then you just plop them down somewhere else.

We're adopting that same mechanic for allocating infrastructure growth and even research. The only difference is that it's a continuum of points allocated, not a granular "list" of people. So imagine you have 100 RP allocated to lasers, none to armor, and none to sensors. You want to move some RP from lasers to sensors, so you click somewhere in the lasers bar; if you click at exactly the halfway point of the bar you will end up grabbing 50 RP from lasers. Then you click in the sensors bar, and that moves the 50 RP (or whatever you just deallocated) over to sensors.

With this system, you don't have to worry about sliders reallocating themselves automatically, because you always explicitly specify where the points come from and where the points go!

[dumbluck]

Sounds entirely workable.

[klausD]

Well, I hope you go the way of "small numbers" and not 500 Million or so.

MOO2 showed that managing abstract population icons are much better than dividing population numbers in small micromanagement fractions like 1 Million out of Billions or so. You should not aim at developing a "simulation". The aim should be creating a fun game and not a spreadsheet.

In this respect even SEIV failed. The population management in this game was NOT really a good design, obviously mostly due to the fact that the makers were too much into "simulating the correct population numbers on a planet" instead of game. It was no hindrance, thats true, but managing population was no fun. But in MOO2 it was fun, mostly because its designers were able to use boardgame concepts and translate it perfectly to their PC game.


For example: in Moo2 a planet could have between 1 population icon and 35 or so. Thats ok, because its abstract and small numbers enable the intuitive creation and handling of subsystems like transport=5 POP per transport per turn etc. Had MOO2 numbers like the SE-series where you handle "realistic" population which went into the Millions and Billions, such intuitive (and great) population handling subsystem would not have been that intuitive or even possible.

So my tip: keep the numbers small and handy and dont blow it up just because you want to create a simulation. Eg. for inspiration look at some SciFi 4x boardgame concepts out there. First and foremost SL should be a game and not a spreadsheet simulation.