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Hmm there is awfully little on this page and forums. I couldnt even make out what stage of developement the game is in or when they plan to release. Only a bunch of, sure, nice sounding ideas..
Now that we have an official site, we will post our news and updates there from now on. This was a recent change. So people who haven't been on the blog may feel that there's not much details as a result.
To sum it up, yes, it's a game similar to MoO 1, with any major differences noted in the blog posts and future updates. Our goal is something of a spiritual successor to MoO 1 that MoO 2 wasn't, expanding and enhancing on the gameplay experience. The core features are there, stacked ships, turn-based space combat, slider controls for colonies, ship designing, and research system.
There's a lot of under-the-hood work done in the past month, including saving/loading games, start of rudimentary AI, and general optimizations, bug fixing, and polishing. So we didn't really have anything visual to show. Hopefully we'll be able to wrap this part of development up soon, and start on more visual parts of the game. Most of the game's logic are there (support for ship designs, research, etc) but are lacking UI.
I've thought a lot about stacked ship-types in combat from MoO, as both a great design decision to keep the interface manageable (splitting ships, controlling hundreds of vessels in battle), and also infuriating as an artificially imposed restriction (can't design my new bomber until the colony ship lands?). Still, usually by the time you needed to scrap a design to make way for a new one, its systems were usually woefully out of date and its numbers dwindled from attrition.
The only issue balance-wise with stacked ships was that in many cases it was strictly better to build two stacks of the same cruiser design to allow them to share damage that would normally kill one in a stack, and to give you better mobility and control over the field. In that case you'd want to fill out all 6 slots with identical designs and the design-limit would become intensely frustrating. But for all it's pros and cons, one thing is certain: It sure helped to keep things tidy!
How have you implemented ship stacks in Dominus Galaxia? Are there the same sort of design restrictions? What are your thoughts on the benefits and disadvantages of such a system?
We're well aware of the issues MoO 1 combat had (i.e. 6 ships of the same design to spread out the damage and to exploit specials such as black hole generator or statis field, limited number of ship designs making for hard decisions, etc), and we hope that through many play testing and brainstorming, we'll be able to improve on them and make for a better experience.
We're going to start off using MoO 1's approach, and tweak and change as needed, but no matter what, it will stay a stacked ship system. There's some subtle changes we've already decided on, the biggest one being that the combat will use hex, not square, for a more accurate movement system.
Some of our design ideas are still in flux, so I can't really say much more than what we've already talked about in the thread and this post, as I don't want to imply we're doing certain features, only to change them later down the road and have people upset about the changes. When things are set in stone, we will announce the details (for example, the hex-based grid for space combat is firmly set in stone). We try to be as transparent as possible, but at the same time, we don't want to trap ourselves. If you look at the Beyond Beyaan's blog, all posts that is about Dominus Galaxia (not the previous Beyond Beyaan posts) are details that we've already decided on and will not change (there's some mentions of tentative plans, such as data driven, but I was careful to clearly state that they're not quite set in stone yet).
With that said, I don't want to discourage questions or discussion. I'd be glad to answer any questions, but if there's some that I can't answer, it's not because we're trying to hide anything, but rather it's something that we haven't fully decided on and are still debating among ourselves.
About the benefits of stacked ships:
1. It sets us apart from many other space 4X games
2. It scales well from start of game to late-game, in that the battles don't take longer and longer over time.
3. It conveys a sense of epic battles, not a skirmish
4. Reduced management of colonies (i.e. building one ship at a time and having to queue up individual ships vs building a whole bunch of them)
5. More easily manageable (splitting a fleet of thousands of ships are done easily with a slider, rather than dragging each ship individually)
Disadvantages:
1. Certain battle mechanisms cannot be done with stacked ships (i.e. component damage such as destroying a special on a ship or capturing a ship) without some over-complicated mechanisms
2. Limited slots for designs forces player to scrap entire fleets just to open up a slot
3. Can't have "Captains" giving bonuses to individual ships, so if leaders were to be added for fleets, they'd have to either apply bonuses on a stack, the fleet, or the overall empire's ship designs.
4. No refitting of individual ships. Refitting of stacks could be doable, but would require considerable thought and planning to execute, especially with limited slots (how to do the user interface, preventing exploits of multiple stacks of basically the same design beyond the slot number limit, etc)
The above are based on comparison between MoO 1 and 2. We have ideas of how to improve certain aspects so hopefully the battles and ship designing will feel as deep as MoO 2's, but retain the elegance of MoO 1's.
I looked over that thread, and there was a lot of discussion about Splitting/Merging stacks in combat. I remember reading a discussion on the Sword of the Stars forums explaining why you weren't allowed to Merge or transfer ships between fleets while in deep space. It basically boiled down to the question of how an intercepting force targets a mass of incoming ships. If FleetA is targeted by the defenders, what happens when the attacker Divides the fleet into two parts with 99% of the ships in FleetB, and then has FleetA stop or change course. How do you target things which can split and merge, which can appear and disappear?
In DG tactical combat, if you fire a seeking weapon at a stack and said stack splits...which new group gets targeted? Now in one sense, you could say that these problems are totally acceptable, since splitting and merging to avoid attack is a legitimate strategy used in nature by schools of fish to confuse predators. One group goes left, one goes right, who do you chase? Targeting a swarm is a fundamentally difficult problem.
Splitting stacks also seems like it could be problematic from the perspective of just occupying space. If fleets cannot move into or through one another in combat, then stack-splitting allows one to create walls in space.
The simplest way in my mind to handle splitting/merging is:
-Splitting consumes the full turn for both fleets, no moving or firing.
-Limit the total number of stacks that can be commanded in battle, no exponential target growth.
-Merging disallowed. Battle too chaotic to re-integrate groups.
Even with these rules though, if there is something to be gained by splitting, then optimal battle tactics would likely involve the first few turns being spent with each side splitting dividing into the maximum number of groups before engaging. Losing your turn to splitting would serve to encourage the attacker to get a move on rather than stalling as the defender's missile-bases launch volley after volley. But in truth the REAL simplest solution is just to disallow any splitting in the first place, but this leads us back to "more active designs = better".
Truly a connundrum.
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Now on a different subject, I must say that I really like the Taxation/Stimulus slider on the colony management screen. Remembering to allocate your imperial surplusses to each new colony and shipbuilding world was the biggest place where MoO got bogged down in micromanagement for me. Automating this will be great!
Yes, the idea is to improve on UI from MoO 1 wherever possible, with the tax/stimulus being one of them. Weighted distribution of sliders instead of all sliders adding up to 100%, automatic waste deduction from production instead of manually cleaning it up, and so forth. Streamlining does not mean dumbing down, it means reducing unnecessary clicks and micromanagement that does not add to the game experience.
One other thing that we're improving on is pathfinding. In MoO 1/2, there were no pathfinding. If you're at a star, and want to go to a star on end of a wormhole, it goes directly that star without going to the origin star of wormhole for a faster route, as an example. Or trying to avoid the slow nebula, etc. In this game, when you hover over a destination star, it will find the fastest path to the star (you can press a key to force direct route if you want).
Another advantage of this is it allows players to send re-direct orders for when fleets are in transit, they don't have to wait until the fleet arrives at a star before issuing orders. It will automatically continue moving after arriving to the new destination.
@Ail, do you have AI development experience? If so, do you have any examples? AI is very crucial as our game is basically single-player at this point. We do have someone else for AI, but more help is always welcome.
A list of what I've done can be found here:
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=173&t=65173
I've also programmed an AI for the game "Konquest" in the further past and one for a kind of a rogue-like-text-only-game with procedurally generated opponent-abilities.
Impressive work! I don't have Pandora: First Contact, but I will pick it up soon and test it out. From reading the forum for the game, I see people complaining about the AI being hard :)
Can you get on our forums and shoot me a PM with your contact info so we can discuss this in private?
"We are sorry, but you are not authorised to use this feature. You may have just registered here and may need to participate more to be able to use this feature."
Ah, it was set to 12 posts before PM can be used. I've disabled it, you should be able to PM me now.
Edit: Didn't help. How about you accept my steam-friends-request and I answer you here instead...