Wishlist: High level design thoughts

[klausD]

I agree, Empire of the Fading Suns was one of the greatest Wargames ever on the PC along with Moo2 and SEIV.

It had the focus on planetary developement AND planetary combat, while space combat was just abstract. And it had absolutely no real time element which I prefer. I am wondering why noone has programmed a modern remake of this cult game.

Regarding using "naval classes" (destroyer, frigate etc., intestingly the designer only use the names to differentiate sizes, but not the operational task of these naval classes. It would be interesting to see a game where destroyers are built to attack the space equivalent of a submarine and escorts are really built to protect space freighters) instead of just a sandbox construction system with unlimited hulls, I would prefer the latter. In contrary to some opinions here, I dont think that such a construction system is "too much" for a 4x game. Its quite the opposite. 4x games are the only games which unlimited hull construction instead of the old boring naval classes would be a great enhancement. IMO, the greater problem is to develope good game rules for such a modular high end system and maybe this is the real reason why noone dares to bother with it.


While the majority of resources in capital and manpower concentrates on programming the game (and grafics), IMO only a small part of the resources are used for developing and playtesting good game rules. In most boardgames good, elegant rules are a must. Not so in the world of computer games. Only very few PC games are good enough to be convincing in programming AND game rule design. EotfS was definately one of them.

ATM I am not very convinced of the "Star Legacy" game project. IMO there are too many people involved in the creation which dont mind producing a RT game, pausable RT game or one of those boring "battle watching" pseudo-games like "Gratitious Space..." whatever. (if I want to observe a space battle I am watching Babylon 5) Instead of concentrating to recreate classical true mechanism like those we find in SEIV and MOO2, GC2 or CIV, we probably will see another clone of the newer generation of so called "4x games" like Sword of the Stars, SEV, Distant Worlds, Armada 2526 or another one of those uninspiring turnbased/realtime hybrids.

[MattII]

New poster here (lorq13 pointed me onto this place), and I have to say that some of there ideas are rather interesting, particularly the stuff about technology. Now I have a few ideas of my own regarding technology:
Specialisation
In most games, the price-per-level of a technology increases as the level does, but this runs contrary to how life actually works, so what I'd like to see is that various technologies start off expensive, but get cheaper with each level, maybe a 20% price drop for easy 10% for medium, and no drop for hard.
Uncertainty
Now I can't say I like tech-levels overmuch, but they are convenient. Now the issue here is that in most games levels have set costs, which I also don't like, so I'd like to propose that we ditch fixed levels and come up with a sort of chance thing, where you can see the resources you need to give for a 50% chance of getting the next level, but you can invest as little or as much as you want, with the chances being:
- less than the 50% price - 0.5*3)(x^2) [half the 3rd root of the square of the value]
- more than the 50% price - 1-0.5*3)((1/x)^2) [1 less half the 3rd root of the inverse-square of the value]
This gives a ~19.8% chance for an input of 1/4 the 50% value, a ~31.4% chance for an input of half the 50% value, a ~68.5% chance for an input of twice the 50% value, and an ~80.2% chance for an input of 4 times the 50% value.
There'd also have to be a per-unrequited-turn method of shortening the odds, but I'm not sure how to go about that yet.