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If anything, the levers that already exist and which affect your colony performance could be played around with more. Random events or maybe planet discoveries that help or hinder your colonies in ways you have to work around could be considered? For example, there isn't much that affects your colony happiness negatively other than the biome condition. Once you've accounted for that it's always happy all the time it seems. Maybe some more thing that affect happiness negatively that cause you to invest more in mitigation measures? I don't know just a thought.
But I don't know what more systems added in. There is plenty to work with already.
You mean you want to have another 20 buildings types and build them on every planet.No thanks.
I think IS:G has struck a really pleasant balance in this regard. It’s a shame they are not getting more positive recognition for that. Sure there are a few indie rough edges here and there, but all in all everything is quite well thought out.
One way to rework the whole thing would be to have MoO 1 slider system where you choose how much infrastructure capacity you'd build for each category (industry, research, food, defense, government). As you improve the capacity, the game automatically manages which individual buildings are "active" (solve the aforementioned puzzle for you). By all means this is not the best possible solution. Just food for thought if it's not too late for your 4X project.
But adding more complexity or more of the copy-pasta with each planet beyond what is already there isn't something I want to see necessarily. What I'd rather see as the baseline buildings handled by initial colonization as part of the colonization process, and maybe kinda like SotS, there's a build-up phase before the planet it useful for anything and is entirely slider based...ISG is sort of that way now.
Then I'd like to see the game provide the ability to build the important game-changing/planet focus-changing buildings. The ones that give major bonuses, the ones that you can only build one per nation, galaxy, system, etc. The ones that help specialize that planet for becoming a research mecca, war machine, trade and economics master, culture spreading, and maybe even specializations within each of those.
This would mean the decision for what you specialize in depends on what you choose to build, then the mechanics focus on that as driving the future of the planet itself. Meaning if you push spaceship/warship building, then the governor and colony push building the bog standard stuff the promote that based on the size of planet and available non-specialized slots. You choose to build a ground defense hub to provide defenses to your systems, it will build the freighter hub and transports and you choose how you disperse (maybe even by sliders) those ground forces to the rest of your worlds to help bolster beyond their default numbers.
Specialized slots might be generic to "always" have one for any given planet, and maybe research or exploration bonuses that make a planet either more specific or even provide additional slots. Some planets might only be generic planets where you can't choose a special building or planetary trait as well, could be penalties, planet types, races vs planets, existing societies or creatures on planets, etc. Maybe you have to meet a goal of having 1,2,3+ planets that have specific specialties to support a higher-tier of specialized planet, not quite like Star Ruler 2 and resources, but sort of. What those other planets specialize support, promote, spread or feed the higher-tiered planet in question once it takes on the role that is assigned by said building.
It would be nice for building to have more meaning and value, right now its not bad for me as a casual gamer, but its also not something I feel I want to spend much time in. And that's a shame and its not something I particularly loved about MoO2, SiS, or any other MoO 2 wannabe, but ISG hasn't quite solved that problem yet either. Don't get me wrong, still a fine game and fun, surprisingly under-noticed by the gaming communities.
With ISG as it is now, it just feels like there's more that needs to happen, should be happening, or was planned to happen and isn't done or ready yet, or was pulled to keep it closer to MoO to keep the core audience happy. That doesn't mean its bad, just means its my 2 cents.
As-far-as having more freedom/choice to build, and actually having ground units/battles, better design and definition of planetary defenses/protection, etc. and more of what I want out of this title is clearly different from what you guys want, I see no need to expand further here. :)
I think this is true (it could benefit from more content, events, or whatever), but I suspect the reason it is like this now is more due to indie budget limitations than anything else.
In theory, there are two levels of choices when improvement colonies through "building" stuff
1. What game area do I focus on? Product/industry? Food/population growth? Science? etc.
2. What exactly do I build to get there most quickly?
In practice, (2) rarely exists because constructibles are often (but not always) sequential. Science building 1, science building 2, 3 etc. And where there is no choice, it doesn't matter all that much what exactly they do or what they are called. Fallen Enchantress gave mutually exclusive choices at certain growth levels. Interesting, but distinct from building stuff. Endless Legend often had multiple building options to earn a certain resource.
The even bigger problem though is: how to make this into impactful and difficult choices. We have all been there with late-game busy work. Managing building queues for dozens of colonies isn't all that much fun even if the right choice isn't immediately obvious. And if the choice is obvious, why do I even need to bother with it? My implicit rule would be that if a game system can be optimised by a few short lines of code, it doesn't add to the game experience."IF Planet type = high-mineral THEN prioritise production buildings."
Not sure about solutions. On the former, I wonder whether a move from distinct to continuous build choices would be worthwhile. Someone mentioned SotS and I *think* it had that with production value. Why not apply across the main 4X resources? And then maybe at regular intervals, one gets to make a choice between specialisations. For all its other failings, Dawn of Andromeda had the kernel of an interesting streamlined economic system. You allocated investment points to the different main resources and once the bar filled up, the planet improved in a way matching to the resource. Each investment point cost money so you needed to decided not just where to develop by also by how much. One problem was that the system was set up such that it was optimal to focus points. The other shortcoming is related to the second problem.
That second problem is basically about making terrain count and inter-relating the resource types (and maybe other game systems) in an interesting way. Terrestrial games tended to have a slightly easier time, given that terrain is more obvious, distinct and differential. In space 4X, the planet is either lava, large, high-gravite etc. ... or something else. It doesn't have multiple different climates (should it have?). So that means any planet is generally obviously better at some things than others. The only situations I can think of where you wouldn't develop the planet according to those strength are:
a) You need to settle it sooner than you otherwise want to because e.g. it has a rare resource and/or is close to rival or would offer a strategic base for rival to attack AND
b) You also need some other macro resource much more pressingly which that planet can also sort-of provide.
Not bad, but is it enough? Yes, terrestrial games can also suffer that. Hills/mountain regions in earlier Civ's will typically become production hubs, grasslands are food or money hubs. Civ VI made it more complicated, but at the cost of a pretty complex rule set.
Unfortunately, I have no bright ideas on that front. At least none that wouldn't involve lots of additional complexity. One could use Gal Civ III's planet hexes system and turn it into different climates such that planets are less monolithic. But it sounds complex. One could move the management layer to the star system and treat planets as "tiles" to build on. I certainly like how limited building slots force hard decisions. Maybe we move away from planets being static objects with fixed attributes. The player's actions impact it gradually in different ways. Mining and production could degrade growth. A planets' population could develop local cultures that favour different things and are not necessarily in line with the planet's natural characteristics. A culture of science and discovery has developed on your hard mining colony, giving bonses to/from developing science infrastructure? Do you take advantage of that or stick with the planet's natural inclination? Maybe have
Maybe the solution lies in combining the two ideas: continuous build options within an interesting inter-relationship of resources and terrain. Just not clear how that could be put in practice. And clearly way different to what IS:G has now. On that game, more innovative victory conditions and a way to reduce my involvement in ship design and tactical combat could sell me. That part of the MoO II formula just isn't my cup of tea. Despite its weaknesses in execution, ES II had some interesting ideas in that regard.
The game I've designed (on paper, as I'm not a programmer!) gets at both of your two points when it comes to planet development.
The basic idea is that each unit of population that lives on a planet can work one facility. This facility can either be some sort of planetary structure - in which case the total population works as a hard cap, effectively, on how many buildings you can have - or the facility can be some type of orbital or remote installation. The orbital could be things like a starbase, a asteroid mining station, an strategic resource deposit, or even installations on other planets that aren't yet a proper self-sustaining colony. The logistics range of your empire effectively controls how far away from a planet you can assign its population in working these off-world facilities.
Additionally, the limits on population size is fairly narrow, with planets having between 1 and 15 population (15 would represent an enormous hive world). The population isn't really a linear scale, and the infrastructure required to support each new amount of population ramps up significantly as a check against rampant growth.
The other piece of the puzzle is that each sector of development in your empire (science, industry, civics, etc.) are largely decoupled from one another. Let me back up. In too many 4X games everything comes down to ramping up industrial production because that ultimately is what builds everything else. More industry lets you get labs quicker, to build science faster, etc. I did away with this assumption. Each field of your empire builds and supports itself. Getting one level of labs leads to another. It doesn't take “industry” to make labs. Instead your labs basically give you actions points that you manage to either conduct and fund research or building more labs.
The idea is that this cuts out the optimization mini-game where you're trying to puzzle out the right order to build labs versus factories vs whatever to get most out of it. Instead you're making higher level decisions about what ways to develop each planet and how to specialize it.
Terrain comes into play because essentially the “reach” of a planet is spread across nearby space for off-word facilities (which could be light years away). Enemies blockading or disrupting supple flows could have a big impact on your empires operations. Ore and energy underpins everything and with the numbers in the game based on large marginal increases at each level - eventually you'd need to be drawing power from things like black holes to power the craziest stuff.
That's probably enough for now - but the basic idea is to put the bigger choices front and center, make terrain and spatial gameplay matter more, and cut down on mindless optimization.
That makes two of us!
I have a stack of design documents. The whole project basically started as, "if I were to build a 4X game that fixes all of my issues with genre AND (more importantly) tries to push the genre forward, by starting with a blank set of assumptions about how the gameplay should work, what would it look like."
The design might not be for everyone, as my interest isn't in using the 4X genre to create a really detailed simulation across a huge epic scale. It's more about creating a concise yet deep and varied strategy game.
To be fair, I do know some programming. I've made mods for games using scripts (Fallout 3, elder scrolls), I leanred QuakeC this summer and made a retro gameplay mod for Quake (the original one). i've taken some unity classes and C# classes. I'm a quick learner - but just don't have the focused blocks of time in my life right now that it would take to make an honest go at the game. Maybe some day!
Thanks for your detailed post. Not sure I can picture the system fully yet, but it sounds intriguing. The goals you want to pursue with it make a lot of sense. You are right on the money that industry building everything else faster can lead to an overly narrow focus on increasing that attribute. Old World decouples this a bit in that some units are built with growth instead of production, other items with civics. Come to think of it, I don't think that game even has traditional "industry". Part of what makes it interesting. I'm similarly drawn to some board games that use a combination of resources to build stuff and where the player needs to balance a range of resources.
Sounds like you could use a partner to bring some of the technical skills. Or pitch the idea to some studios. Would be a shame if you had a lot of design thinking which never gets put to use.
I'd be open to partnering with someone if they shared the same design vision. Pitching it is a possibility too - but I've never heard of non-programmer "designers" pitching a game design and then becoming a part of development team.
I work professional with ArcGIS (spatial mapping and analysis platform) that's all about visualizing database information spatially. I could conceptualize of a database that stores the game state information, methods of visualizing that data, and even scripts to run that could process the turn. I keep wondering if there is some software development platform, that maybe isn't even a "game platform" that I could build a game prototype in. At one point I scripted a galaxy generator in excel using Visual Basic. Maybe if I can find a way to build a rough prototype of the design that way, I could have an avenue to pitch it. Not sure how or if that's possible.
This game brings a lot of fresh ideas to the genre of space 4X empire games. For that alone it should get a thumbs up. I am still learning the game so some of my comments may be due to limited understanding.
Things I like:
The concept of infrastructure (which must be built) and population working together to create exponential production is really interesting. Once you understand it you can create some super-producing planets. This allows for some interesting nonlinear gameplay. The use of a triangle slider to divide your production between manufacturing, infrastructure, and growth is also interesting and simplifies planet management. I like the ship designer too with the concept of miniaturization to force you to choose between updating to the latest tech or staying 1-2 techs behind the latest and having more systems.
Four things I would like to see improved are:
1) more events and things to do. As of now the game feels kind of one-dimensional in that you are just going to build up and then attack your neighbors. There are periods of time where not much is happening. For example space piracy would be a good early game threat that you would have to respond to. Internal politics between planets (like independence/secession) would be cool. Neutral inhabited planets that could be conquered would be interesting.
2) more varied diplomacy. The current diplomacy is standard for this genre (e.g. trade treaty, research treaty, declare war) but it is pretty bland in its implementation. The game would be way more fun if you felt the need to ally with some races, if there were existential threats that forced you to band together, and if there was an influence system that allowed you to modify the behavior of NPC AI's. I realize this would be a pretty major overhaul of the existing mechanics, but it would add a lot to the game.
3) more immersion. This is part of a consequence of items #1 and 2 and the generally low budget graphics. I realize the game design is what counts and I can look past some of the graphics, but that does not change the fact that most people expect a certain standard of graphics and having lower resolution graphics and static display screens just makes me care less about my effort to conquer the galaxy. This is more than just graphics though. It has to be a galaxy worth conquering. Somehow the systems have to tie together in a way that makes me care about beating the other NPCs.
4) Also this is minor but there is no real concept of supply in this game other than having a limited exploration range. It would be cool if you had supply lanes between planets that had to be protected and could be raided or broken when attacking other NPCs. Combat ships could be penalized if they have not been to a starbase in a certain amount of time.
I have spent more time talking about the negative than the positive, but that isn't the way I feel about the game. I think the game has a lot of new ideas and the potential to be the best space 4X on the market. There are a lot of design choices I appreciate, like not just adding more stuff for the sake of having more. It's clear the game has been created with love by people who know a lot about the genre and wanted to try out some new ideas.
As of today this is one of the better space 4X games out there, but it has the potential to really put some distance between itself and the competition if it continues to be developed and can address some of the areas for improvement.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/984680/allnews/
EDIT: Forgot to mention that the game is part of the current Steam holiday sale as well (50% off)!