Resources, guides etc. to make your own 4x-game?

[Ail]

After critizising other games for what I don't like about them and what I would have done differently, I came to the conclusion that the only way to make sure to actually get a game that I completely agree with the design, would be making it myself.

As of yet I've only done the "fun-part" of game-deving, which was coding AIs of already existing games, where the actually hard part of UI, engine, etc. all was already in place.

I figured that several people who are here probably went through the same and may know about ressources. What engine to use, how to learn how to use it?

I was thinking about Unity, because I've already used it in the past. But I never bothered to try and figure out how to do anything but starting Visual-Basic and clicking the run-button.

Another reason for posting this is creating some sort of accountability for myself, so I won't wake up tomorrow and have forgotten all about it. Maybe even make this thread some sort of diary and discuss the ideas of design and receive feedback.

So what's the general idea of where I want to go?

I want a really simplistic 4x-lite-game. Think of Moo1 but even more simple.

The economic part shouldn't burden you with any repetetive tasks or even worse math-puzzles or build-orders. When you get a new planet you decide what it will specialize in and that's it. No adjusting of sliders, no allocating of population, no queuing of buildings. You can change what it does but that will be discouraged by it having to change it's infrastructure for the new task. The idea is that you'll have to pick the best compromise between what you need the most and what the environment is most suitable for.

Combat will only be ship-to-ship and all sort of invasions are abstracted. For that I really liked the original Endless Space, before it's add-on. Incase you don't know: A planet got automatically invaded by hovering your fleet in it's orbit for long enough. Other than invading, there will be no way of damaging the colony from space.
The general idea for that is that you distribute your ships strategically as you see most advantageous fit. One big fleet at one position or many small ones at different positions or anything in-between. I'm also thinking about a rock-paper-scissor-system of basic ship-types, where it's your choice of whether you want to specialize, which makes you vulnerable to the counter or mix it up, which makes it harder to counter.
I'm also thinking of combat just being automatic because due to how I imagine it there will be a ton of small engagements, which would be tedious to all play out. The majority of the game would consist of repositioning your ships.

Victory-condition: Grinding down every last colony of your opposition is rather tedious, when you already know you'll win regardless, so I'm thinking about a completely arbitrary way of winning via accumulating victory-points. Maybe one way of specializing your planets is to produce those. They won't benefit you in any other way so it's a trade-off, that you can only afford when you feel save doing so.

To sum it up: I want to abstract away everything I consider tedious or repetetive and only leave in the parts that I actually enjoy.

[Ail]

I've been thinking some more about how I could make the research-system what I want it to be: A system that allows you to make choices that feel impactful, while avoiding to make it obvious in what order to do things.

So here's my current idea:

At the beginning of the game the player gets a limited pool of researchable techs. Those are randomly drawn from the existing techs and also consider what you've unlocked with prerequisite-techs.
You will also be able to spend research on a "reshuffle" of your pool of researchable techs. The cost of that will be similar to that of one tech but it won't cost maintainance, of course. At the latest once you'v researched everything from your pool, you'll have to do that in order to get access to a new selection of techs.
Techs will continue to cost maintainance once researched. That maintainance depends on Tier of the Tech.
You can drop a tech previously researched to free up the maintainance.
There will be different techs for improving the same aspect of an empire and which one will be better depends on circumstances. I'm taking inspiration for that from Endless-Space where for a lot of things you had a flat-bonus, a per unit(either pop or planet)-bonus and a percentage-bonus. So basically the tech-system I have in mind will be somewhat similar to building buildings in Endless-Space. So you'll only have to do it once.

Also about the economy: I didn't like the concept of just stockpiling ressources and then buying a fleet-instantly, when you need it. Also that new concept allows me to get rid of the idea of starports. Instead ship-production will be a new possible specialization of a planet and Production is a seperate type of thing that's required to turn minerals into ships.

About the amount of turns for changing a planet's specialization: I figured that instead of having a fixed value for that, the amount of turns to do this will scale with the amount of planets you have. That way: The more planets you have, the more you will be encouraged to specialize while you can be a lot more flexible when you only have a small amount of planets.

I also put some more thoughts into the ship-battles and how to make them engaging without making them tedious. I want them to be somewhat tactical while still not lasting more than 1 or 2 rounds. I'm also thinking about a rudimentary ship-design-system. Something like it was in Pandora, where types didn't counter each other in a rock-paper-scissors style but where certain weapons were good against certain types of weapon-carriers-units and you could combine unit-type and weapon-type in a way to increase efficiency.

[Emperator Orionii]

Originally posted by Ail:

I also put some more thoughts into the ship-battles and how to make them engaging without making them tedious. I want them to be somewhat tactical while still not lasting more than 1 or 2 rounds. I'm also thinking about a rudimentary ship-design-system. Something like it was in Pandora, where types didn't counter each other in a rock-paper-scissors style but where certain weapons were good against certain types of weapon-carriers-units and you could combine unit-type and weapon-type in a way to increase efficiency.

You are starting to complicate things.

[Ail]

Originally posted by Emperator Orionii:

You are starting to complicate things.

Well, that's true. I think that adding a little bit more player-agency toward influencing the outcome of an engagement other than "who had more production and better technology" won't compromise my general direction too much.
As I said, I've not finished pondering about how the whole military-side of the game will function. I will talk about it again, when I think I've come up with something that I imagine to be fun to play with.

[Ail]

Progress report:

Planets now produce resources. You can colonize a planet by clicking it. You have to pay the according resources for that. Colonizing costs distance * food + 5 minerals. You don't need to have a ship to orbit it because there are no ships yet. For testing-purposes newly colonized planets automatically become another homeworld, rather than specialized colonies as it is intended by the game-design. Also colonization right now is immediate instead of taking several turns to complete.

I made an AI that does the same thing. I got into an endless-loop because I had only checked if there's enough minerals once rather than for every colonization so the AI tried to colonize over and over but couldn't because it didn't have the minerals to do so while it thought it had. This allowed me to find out how to debug it. But while I saw the error, I didn't manage to actually stop it.

So technically you can already play the game. It plays a bit like Go, as in the only real way to interfere with your opponents is trying to cut them off from an area you want to colonize everything in.

Next plans are: colonies becoming colonies, not more homeworlds, and you have to pick the specialization.

[Ail]

The current state now is that you can produce and order around ships. There's quite a bunch of todos as fleets currently won't merge (they just stack on top of each other) and can't be split.
As described earlier, you need a ship in orbit of a planet not owned by yourself to interact with that planets.
AI hasn't been updated to use the ships. I generally find it more laborious to make a feature accessible to the human than to the AI, as the AI doesn't need a GUI.

I can now get a somewhat realistic view on how the resource-flow develops throughout the game and made an interesting observation, when it comes to game-design, that I also made for Stars in Shadow, which I played a bit recently for inspiration or in Pandora: First Contact:
The food-ressource really doesn't seem to add a whole lot to the game. I used it to maintain planets and as part of the cost for colony- and invasion-ships.
After I'm done colonizing I really don't need a whole lot of it anymore. Figuring out how much of it makes sense to produce is completely trivial: "Slightly more than is necessary to feed my planets"

I've been thinking about finding more uses for food... like increasing requirements as technology advances or some sort of food-maintainance for ships. Both of which make sense but eventually it means that the food-requirements are tied to the production-requirements and that there probably is a simple formual to calculate the optimal ratio of food to minerals.

So I'm now thinking of "merging" it with minerals into a more general kind of resource. "Supplies" or so.
That would basically reduce the kinds of ressources to 3 which then all act very distinctly and where there's no simple solution to determine the ideal ratio:

Supplies is what makes you stronger in the most immediate and direct way.
Research is more of a long-term-investment to making you more efficient.
The victory-resource serves little purpose (currently I made orders cost one, so it cannot be completely ignored) It will only become relevant, if someone tries to accumulate it in large amounts, which forces everyone else to react in one way or another.

[Mezmorki]

Ail,

I'll share a couple of thoughts from my own game design project, that might be useful to consider as well.

"Food" is kind of an outdated thing to have a resource for sci-fi far future game. If a species can't reliably synthesize it's own food across scale there is no way it's going to ever be a star-faring race.

With that premise in mind, I boiled my (also intended to be streamlined) game down to two primary resources: Energy and Ore (there are also special strategic resources).

I'm lifting a page from the browser 4X game UltraCorps, which also uses simple primary resources (population and a special mineral ultranium). You don't have a global stock of these resources like in most 4X games, instead stocks sit on each planet/system and are consumed either when constructing new "facilities" (which are huge in scale) and spent for upgrading the infrastructure level of your planet - allowing it support more population and in turn allow more facilities.

The infrastructure concept is a catch-all simplification for all of the life sustaining and quality of life services that you need to provide. It requires amassing a lot of extra energy/ore to launch a project and then requires a portion of that as on-going maintenance each turn.

Stockpiles of ore + energy are used for most other things too - fleet maintenance, building outposts, building starships, and also tie into some massive stellar constructs that need to be built to reach victory. Much of the game is in the strategic allocation, distribution and logistics surrounding use of just a few critical resources.

[Emperator Orionii]

In Civ and MoO:CtS excess food equals population growth. In GalCiv 2 food defines population limit, not planet size. At the moment I'm too lazy to scroll back to check I you have mentioned population mechanics...

In reality, as per Isaac Arthur, trading food is not going to be a thing. Gravity wells are PITA and you'd be producing unnecessary heat to landing it in large quantities to an earthlike planet. Spacefaring race could apply less energy to synthesize food locally but when you put all of the atoms in circulation, only way to grow is to import more mater.

Hmm, maybe instead of food a planet could specialize in "exporting" people? As a short term boost until economy reaches peak capacity. But than again there is a reason why there is no population minting in Dominus Galaxia, it comes with substantial downsides.

[Ail]

I must admit I never really understood the game-mechanics of GalCiv2 well enough. At first glance, what you say about how food works there, sounds like it actually could be the most interesting food-mechanic in a game. In order to better judge that, I'd have to understand how the population mechanics worked there, though. I think it might boil down to a really complicated math-puzzle where there is an ideal ratio of food-production to other things.

Originally posted by Emperator Orionii:

At the moment I'm too lazy to scroll back to check I you have mentioned population mechanics...

I didn't because I didn't plan on having any. Once you have colonized a planet, it immediately produces what it's supposed to produce. A phase where you have to grow population and invest in infrastructure before you reap the benefits, in my opinion, just prolongues the game for no real purpose. I want to get to the part that is interesting much more quickly.

I've also just thought some more about one thing that a lot of 4x have in common which I don't know what is the best approach to handle or whether it is inevitable to happen.
That is the research/economy vs. military balance. Usually there's some sort of advantage for the defender, which makes it so that early on investing in your future is better as you'll still be able to react to someone going for army very early and your technological-advantage lets you come out on top.
At some point that balance shifts. Technological/Infrastructural progress slows down and the return of investment for more tech/infrastructure becomes too bad when compared to making military. Often it's certain key-techs, that open this window of opportunity to go "all in" with the military.
I'm seeing that very same issue with my game even though it isn't even that far.

[Emperator Orionii]

Well ironically you were very very discouraged to have high pop in GalCiv 2 because unhappiness grew faster than population benefits. GalCiv had some strange economy model, something along the line of no direct pop productivity only tax which in turn can be invested in production or science. I remember reading that income was proportional to square root of colony's pop while unhappiness grew linearly. And you had to pay quite high maintenance for entertainment buildings so you were discouraged from exploiting +200% food squares :D.

About the other thing, in early Civ games pre-modern eras saw relatively low industry per city so it was hard to spam enough attackers to overcome defender's position of advantage. Also you had to keep construction buildings to keep tech progression going so there was few turns where you had a city idle enough to build offensive unit that will go obsolete. In MoO 1 early game offensive techs are crap, not damage per space efficient enough to overcome emergency defences that a defender can muster when he/she/it sees you coming 5 turns in advance. Also industry prevents you from amassing soon to be obsolete units. In MoO 2 you have to reach critical point where you can overcome planetary defences (star base or missile base if opponent is creative or lucky). But if you are skilled enough star base is only an issue at homeworlds, everything else is free game from turn 1 if you bring enough bomb/troops/telephats.

[Naselus]

Originally posted by Ail:

A phase where you have to grow population and invest in infrastructure before you reap the benefits, in my opinion, just prolongues the game for no real purpose.

That is the research/economy vs. military balance. Usually there's some sort of advantage for the defender, which makes it so that early on investing in your future is better as you'll still be able to react to someone going for army very early and your technological-advantage lets you come out on top.
At some point that balance shifts. Technological/Infrastructural progress slows down and the return of investment for more tech/infrastructure becomes too bad when compared to making military. Often it's certain key-techs, that open this window of opportunity to go "all in" with the military.
I'm seeing that very same issue with my game even though it isn't even that far.

These two elements are connected. The purpose in the growth period for cities in Civ, for example, is to retard industrial growth, so that military production is slower than technological improvement, so that until you have a large number of mature production nodes you're generally producing units which are obsolete by the time they achieve critical mass. They also tend to balance around making larger population cities cause a penalty to research costs, so if you go all-in on industry with a big city with zero research output from it, your tech falls behind to compensate for your unit advantage.

If you remove the production node's immature phase, then you'll find industrial output overcomes research earlier in the game's lifespan. This opens up to 'warrior rush' gameplay where simply producing the lowest-tier attack unit en masse and ignoring all economic and research gameplay from the very start is a worthwhile strategy (Civ 4 actually encouraged this with some of it's factions, since it's not necessarily a bad thing provided that it's not the only viable strategy to follow).

A counter to this if you still don't want the growth period is to make the tech scaling very, very pronounced from the beginning - having your T2 unit be maybe 5-6 times more powerful than the T1, so that those who pursue a research strategy have a greater payoff for their choice to invest in the future rather than beefing up the military right now.

[Ail]

The 4x-game that I have sunk the most time in was Pandora: First Contact. I didn't really figure out all by myself what the general best strategy was. I had a very good player to help me and did a lot of observing him and tweaking the AI to counter what he did.
So the "meta" shifted a bit back and forth.

The final findings we made werer very specific to that game but I would say we basically figured out what the best strategy is:

You do a balanced approach of tech, development and military early on. Once you have all the important economic-techs from the first era and can run 90%+ tax-rate without unhappyness, you can put as much into industry as you can handle the pollution without having to lower tax-rate to compensate.

Research at this point slowly becomes a "leftover" because you can't focus on it fully anyways. Also you'll have your first artillery-weapon and even though it barely does any damage, it damages all units in a stack and thus allows you to lay siege onto the enemy and force them to attack. It doesn't matter if their units are slightly more advanced when you have a lot more since production-cost and unit-strength keep their ratio.

I had AIs play different approaches here to match their factions. But letting the science and diplomacy-faction play a more peaceful and science-oriented game meant they'd always die first. The faction with the science-malus actually turned out to be the most potent when playing this way because their bonus to military-production, morale and attack-bonus fit so well to spamming lots of low-tech-units.

The other 4x that I've played so much to have an in-depth-understanding of the most successfull meta-game is the Alpha-Version of Dominus Galaxia from 2 or so years ago. In this game a combination of circumstances makes it so that at the beginning you'll want to tech and only make units when you really need them. Unit maintainance slows your tech-rate and economic development. Once you actually need units you can produce a lot in a short amount of time. These two points combined mean that having a standing army that doesn't actually fight is very ill-adviced. Finding the right moment where going from tech to military is a lot more difficult here. It usually is dictated by which of the semi-random techs you can get. Eventually the ROI of more techs slows down too so that going all-in on military at this point becomes ideal.
Trying to go for some balanced approach really is not good. That's also why it was particularly difficult to optimize the AI. I couldn't really describe what the best way to play would be and so I also couldn't teach them.

Another very interesting thing was my excursion into StarCraft-bot-coding. While RTS are quite different to 4x, there was a similarity in this regard. This game is full of all-ins and the way to counter that is to maximize your economy just a little bit longer than your opponent and then go for military-only just a little bit later. You cannot not make units next to your economy because they take a significant amount of time. As you approach the supply-cap you'll eventually want to stop making more economy.

I'd actually say that the way StarCraft works in this regard feels the best. You kinda need units right away but if you don't squeeze in more economy and teching from time to time you'll fall behind. There is a defender's advantage but it is almost negligible and under some circumstances being the attacker is even beneficial against an opponent who has more military. That is if you can bypass his army and attack his economy directly. But this is all for 1v1. FFA, as it is in 4x-games plays compltely different in StarCraft. Actually there is no FFA as it is in 4x-games in StarCraft because A taking out B gives A no advantage whatsoever over C. It actually puts him at a disadvantage which gets stronger the more B fights back. Attacking anyone before the supply-cap would be disadvantagous and the only real incentive to attack someone is when your bases start to get mined out and they still are in control of fresh mineral-nodes.

In most 4x, there's much more of a reward for successfully attacking someone.

Maybe I shouldn't overthink it and try to figure out a solution for something that doesn't really need a solution. In the end there's some really easy to tweak variables, like tech-cost and/or unit-cost. As long as some form of "not completely ignoring the other" prevails, it should be okay.

[Naselus]

Yes, I generally got bored with Pandora because the only really viable way to play was the strategy you outline (possibly because you literally wrote the AI to follow that strategy lol). This made the various faction options a bit pointless - as you say, the tech-oriented one was basically playing a harder game than anyone else, as the strategy it was designed for wasn't really viable. But this is probably more because Pandora was very much a war-focused 4X anyway - you're not supposed to play peaceful.

The main variable you need to think about is how unit cost interacts with tech cost. If unit cost is too cheap compared to tech, teching becomes pointless - just spam units and attack. If units are too expensive compared to tech (ie, Civ 5 model), building units is pointless since they become obsolete before they can go anywhere or do anything. Maturity times for production nodes allows you flexibility on this, tho - you can have units be cheap for a mature node but expensive for an immature one - and also mean you can increase the opportunity cost for colonization without making settler/colonizers absurdly expensive.

Ultimately, I think there's quite a few mechanical purposes to the ramp-up on colonies that you may not have considered, and which you'll need to come up with other means to deliver the same effect for if you go for just having a production node be full power from the day it's created. That's not to say it can't be done, but it's probably a bigger decision than you're giving it credit for.

[Mezmorki]

I apologize for continuing to inject my own design notions into AiL's thread... but I'm going to do it again.

One of the core problems with 4X game balance is in the fact that production is such a universal resource and feeds into everything else. As production capacity ramps up you can generally build more of everything - more food production stuff, more research labs, more units to conquer more lands to get more production capacity, etc.

Much what is discussed above is how different games try to build in some checks and balances to mitigate this. Too many colonies and people get unhappy and it hurts production or research. Too much military and your labs fall behind or you become short cash. It's a band-aid, and it's not addressing the core problem.

I tried to circumvent this problem entirely by having each of these systems operate more independently and not be tied to a global production capacity at all.

Take research for example. At the start of game, maybe you have 1 research admin, that gives you 3 action points to spend on research. You'd spend these points queuing up research projects, investing them in building more labs, or not spending the points and letting a passive set of bonuses slowly build up, increasing the chances of a breakthrough. There is no "using workers or production to build science labs" - your science admin does that on its own. And by severing the link with global production it (in theory!) avoids the worst of the snowball syndrome.

Granted, you will earn more admin capacity over the course of the game, but it is not easily earned and it is hard choice as to where you place it. It's gated around certain feats and milestones rather something like raw population providing X admin.

[Naselus]

Well, earlier versions of Civ have the separation between hammers and commerce, which does go some way to split this off - a high industry player will be missing out on a lot of the commerce which supports science. The result is that, if you have enough industry to produce a lot of units, you pretty much automatically cannot produce enough science to be a top-end research power, and visa versa.

The 3-resource approach in Civ 4 is very elegant - industry for making stuff, commerce for paying maintenance and doing science, and then food as an tax on population's output potential which can be adjusted over time; you go from about 50% of your pop man-hours being wasted on food to roughly 30% by endgame.

[Ail]

Originally posted by Naselus:

Ultimately, I think there's quite a few mechanical purposes to the ramp-up on colonies that you may not have considered, and which you'll need to come up with other means to deliver the same effect for if you go for just having a production node be full power from the day it's created. That's not to say it can't be done, but it's probably a bigger decision than you're giving it credit for.

I'm kinda already seeing it. The game is a 1.5x as of yet. You can expand and exterminate but exterminating is simply done by expanding over somone else while being slightly more expensive than expanding to unowned territory.
Ships, while technically implemented currently don't do anything. I've removed food as a separate ressource and things that cost food before now cost more of the remaining resource.
I've also updated the AI to try and play the game in it's current state in a somewhat feasible way. This allows me to get a good picture.

The game is very quick. Both in terms of turns and in real time. It takes about 2x as many turns as there are planets until someone has won. Well, right now the AI doesn't look at who's winning when deciding what to invade. They just look for "what invasion has the best gain:effort-ratio".
Even when I play myself, it doesn't take more than maybe 1-2 minutes per every 10 planets in the galaxy. I can make estimates how long the game would take with all of the intended features integrated. I'd say maybe by a factor of 6.

I'd say that this kinda what I'm aiming for given the whole boardgame-esqe-4x-lite-idea. Being able to finish a game on a small map in an hour or less
I must say, that the meta-game, as simple as it is right now, is surprisingly fun. Finding the right balance between production-resources and victory-points is not trivial. I think the "you need twice the victory-points of the second"-idea turns out really well in practice, when it comes to deciding the game at a point where you'd usually feel you'd have won. In one scenario I was presented with a starting location that called for going for a VP-all-in.
With no diplomacy starting-locations are extremely important right now. Usually I just need to look at the generated galaxy and can tell who will win. I'm not sure I really want to change this. In DG Jeff eventually worked out map-generation in a way that gives kinda equal chances to everyone. I personally preferred the uphill battles that the complete randomness could lead to.

One issue I'm having now is the whole factions-thing. Having very few game-mechanics makes it tough to come up with ideas in how factions can differ and also makes it difficult to balance them. But maybe factions don't even have to be balanced too well.