Publicado originalmente por Cyber-Mage:

Publicado originalmente por Mezmorki:

The emphasis of most space games is the RPS-dynamics of ship design - and other opportunities for creating more interesting depth are almost always forgotten. Why is there not more done with ship detection + stealth dynamics (something that always comes up in sci-fi literature)? Why do fleets always move at about the same speed on the strategic map? Why are the only types of terrain features only "star lanes" or "nebula clouds" and nothing else? (aside: UltraCorps is the best 4X game when it comes to movement, stealth, and detection Very interesting system. Would you like to know more?).

Mezmorki, I've said it again before, but I personally would be really interested in an UltraCorps "article" by you, where you would analyze its various innovations that work well. I've had a lot of experience with other browser-base strategy MMOs and I think that they indeed have some interesting ideas to contribute to the 4X genre, though I haven't found one yet with truly compelling fleet combat and movement (and I don't have the free time to start playing UltraCorps myself right now) so I would appreciate hearing a detailed account of how UltraCorps handles that

Here's a write-up I did awhile ago on my blog on boardgamegeek for UltraCorps. I'm linking here since you can enlarge the images (not that the game is very pretty mind you!).

https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/10407/ultracorps-boardgame-isnt

Here's the short notes for what ultracorps does that I've yet to see another 4X do as well mechanically:

1. Battles auto-resolve using slick round-based attack + defense calculation (see my write-up under the fleet composition).
   
2. No ship designing - all ship (and ground units) are pre-made and various strengths, weaknesses, and purposes.
   
3. The combination of (1) and (2) above means that combined arms / mixed fleets are essential. You have to have fodder units to buffer your capital ships, you need high damage ships, you ships that can soak up damage. Works well.
   
4. Ships have very different movement speeds (from around 40 AU to 300 AU per turn), and different fleets can therefore perform different roles as raiders, front line forces, etc. depending on their speed. Speed is crucial to flexibility and catching your opponent off guard.
   
5. Very clever detection system. You can build sensor units on your worlds that can detect out to a certain range - BUT ONLY when the enemy fleet is headed DIRECTLY toward the system with a sensor. This creates an amazing bluffing & deduction game where you try to find your opponent's blindspots or use fast moving fleets to close range from outside sensor range in a single turn. Very cool.
   
6. Production is essentially supply chain based, where you need to funnel resources to core production worlds. This opens the window for raiding and blockading to genuinely disrupt empire wide production.

In short - as a war driven 4X game (there is ONLY warfare really) it does everything people often clamor to want, but does soby rejecting all the things we take as a given. No hand-on tactical combat, no ship designing, no complex colony management. But what we get instead is the need for combined-arms fleet composition, a variety of fleet purposes and uses, networked economic supply chain system, and a deep stealth / detection system. It makes for some tremendous games.

Publicado originalmente por echo2361:

One of the more interesting things about this topic is the concept of no ship customization in favor of more rigid ship choices with a small amount of variation.

Personally I don't need full ship customization in my games. While I enjoy putting ships together from scratch, I would be quite willing to give up this area of total control if it offered a chance for actually diversity between species/factions and how they approach combat. Almost all space 4x games offer full customization which leads to repeats of the same ship types and technology among all the species. Sins of a Solar Empire didn't do this, and I think that is something to look to for space 4x combat. Similar ships, but different in subtle but important ways. This greatly adds to the character of a species and makes combat more enjoyable.

I agree - and see above on information regarding UltraCorps.

The funny thing is, people complain about not wanting combat to take to long, since it pulls attention away from the strategic layer - but then seem perfectly fine having a ship design system that requires even more time away from the strategic layer as you fiddle with optimal layouts. That's even worse in my opinion.

No ship design is a hard obstacle to overcome. Armada 2526 did away with ship designing, which I think was a brilliant move, but that game was thrashed for that missing feature (among other things it was criticized for).

FWIW, I think Armada 2526 is one of the hidden gems that did a lot of things differently.

• No ship designer - instead ship designs are unlocked through the tech tree
  
• Ship designs from different tech trees have very different uses - from stealth ships, to fast hyperspace ships, to infiltration ships, spy ships, to heavy defense, to long-range missile, to biological warfare ships, etc. It's all in there and made feasible due to the lack of a ship designer.
  
• TERRAIN - different levels of "dust" density (which certain techs allow you to move faster through) affect movement and create choke points organically. Also had THREE levels of wormholes that greatly mixed up the terrain and created interesting control points and spatial adjacency.
  
• People knocked the UI - but it basically has a even more powerful version of Stellaris' Outliner, coupled with a searchable object database. Brilliant.
  
• Multiple technology fields (like 9) - which you would specialize in by building labs of a specific type. Added a lot of replay value as it was hard to drill into more than 4 or maybe 5 fields in a given game.
  
• Building slots linked to population units, created very limited choices for system development, forcing you to make tough trade-offs all the way through the game.
  
• Logical trade system that worked internally and with foreign empires based around special strategic resources or natural wonders.
  
• Victory conditions were score based and each race earned points in a unique and thematically appropriate way - which in turn required very different playstyles for each race.
  
• Minimal colony micromanagement - system level management reminiscent of MoO1 (in a way) with colonization based around a primary planet in each system.
  
• Tug-war between detection and stealth technologies. Push your stealth up high enough and your fleets were practically invisible on the strategic map.
  
• Relatively decent diplomacy system - lots of options for forming agreement, coordinating wars, trade embargos, migration settings, etc.
  
• Combined space/orbital combat with ground invasion. Yes - in the same battle space, you're fleets can be fighting overhead or bombarding the planet surface while you send down your transport ships to unload ground forces, which then start fighting the ground defenses too. Heck - you can even infiltrate special forces onto a planet ahead of time, so that when a battle starts they are in place to knock out planetary shields or other static defenses. Seriously - what other 4X game has EVER done this?

It's an interesting design - and I'd love to see a modernized reboot of it someday. The biggest weakness of the game is that the real-time tactical battles are clunky as hell to control and sort of confusing at the same time. Yet they can be pretty interesting at the same time. I still consider Armada 2526 to be one of the best designed, as a strategy game, 4X game. It avoids nearly all the pitfalls the MoO2 clones fall into and brings something fresh to the table with drowning in needless complexity.

Here's a long article I wrote on Armada 2526:

http://www.big-game-theory.com/2014/12/the-stars-my-destination-armada-2526.html

This post is huge.

Another benefit that goes to historic and fantasy games has to do with races. In those games, the races/species/factions would've co-evolved in the same place and so we can make the same or similar assumptions about their motivations. We understand that elves and orcs are different - and yet it still makes perfect sense that they both be affected by happiness/unhappiness.

But in a space game with wildly divergent aliens with completely different evolutionary histories? It always sort of irks me that factions/races in sci-fi space games have the same basic functions. Some sort of intergalatic hive-mind wouldn't give too shits if one of the worker bees wasn't happy. Heck - the worker bee might not even be able to feel happiness (or emotion) in the first place. Yet so much of the empire management is predicated on these basic assumptions. It's anthropomorphism in the extreme really. Again - sci-fi literature can be so much more imaginative here.

Publicado originalmente por Gregorovitch:

2. Geography indeed makes a massive diference to the depth of terrestrial games and fantasy games also benefit from having a proper physical terrain to work with. Space games are always caught between two stools becasue any sort of on-world gameplay that in any way matched what you get in the Civs and ELs would amount to a whole game in itself per world therefore you can't have many worlds and space shenanigans as well within one game, too big/long, something has to give. Advantage historical and Fantasy.

I've been playing "Empire of the Fading Suns" a little bit recently - which does exactly this. Pretty interesting games in a lot of ways. Looking back I see a lot more creativity and interesting approaches to 4X game design than we see today. Everything feels more homogenized now.

Here's a bit:

In my mind, I think there are two really important things to make an interesting strategy game: constraints and texture.

Constraints are things that limit what you can do and therefor force trade-off decisions. Strategic decisions are as much about what you are doing as they are about the opportunity costs associated with what you aren't doing. I think 4X games as a whole could use more constraints - and in some ways I can find more examples of space games doing this better. Armada 2526 (also Satrbase Orion) has very limited building slots on planets, which forces these tradeoffs. Endless Legend's district system (okay it isn't space!) forces tough choices. MoO2 and StarDrive 2's technology tree requires tough tradeoffs. King of Dragon Pass limits you to only two actions per season (turn).

These constraints can be done in elegant and thematically interesting ways (Alliance of the Sacred Suns admin system?). The problem has to do with what different players want out of their 4X games. Many would view constraints as a major detriment to play - because they are playing a 4X game specifically because they don't want constraints, they want to be able to do it all and be all powerful. The downside is that the strategic depth of the game is diminished significantly when you don't use constraints.

Texture has to do with all the subtle nuance in the shape and form of the game space (and decision space) that helps make things interesting. Terrestrial games have a huge advantage in one critical area: terrain creates strategic texture in the movement and positioning of forces. Different modes of movement, terrain bonuses, hiding in forests, defending mountain passes, attacking fast across a plain. All these things add a lot of richness, character, and depth to the strategic aspects of warfare.

The above is almost entirely absent from space games. The emphasis of most space games is the RPS-dynamics of ship design - and other opportunities for creating more interesting depth are almost always forgotten. Why is there not more done with ship detection + stealth dynamics (something that always comes up in sci-fi literature)? Why do fleets always move at about the same speed on the strategic map? Why are the only types of terrain features only "star lanes" or "nebula clouds" and nothing else? (aside: UltraCorps is the best 4X game when it comes to movement, stealth, and detection Very interesting system. Would you like to know more?).

I think the above points to a greater problem in that Space 4X games are too timid when it comes to embracing the fantastical. Who has read any current stuff on theoretical physics? My god - there is a treasure trove of potential ideas to explore that could still have a smidgen of plausibility attached to it.

I think what space 4X games need, perhaps more than anything, is an interesting "x-factor" that shakes up the gameplay. Fantasy 4X games, for example, have MAGIC systems that provides an entire strategic layer to the gameplay on-top of everything else. It gives an entire direction of focus and often have an ability to undercut snowballing. It's a counter-pressure against the production treadmill. For sci-fi games, maybe we don't have "magic" exactly - but why not weird "dark matter energies" that can be harnessed for strategic impacts? Or huge star-system sized clouds of nano-bots that can work their "magic" in someway. These ideas have all been explored in sci-fi books.

Anyway - more so than terrestrial games, I feel like each new space 4X game is trying to improve, incrementally, on the "formula." It's like we're trying to perfect some golden formula for what a space 4X game should be, and in the process just keep repeating the same mistakes from the past while willfully ignoring the creative potential of the genre.

You're stealing my thunder!! I have an exposition in the works on this exact topic :).

But seriously this is a great point of conversation because I think there are indeed some serious hurdles space games have in front of them. I'll reply more in a bit.