Welcome Star Legacy Development Group!

[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.