Am I right to assume that keeping influence and tutor-missions on cooldown is a good investment of orders and cash?

You have a fixed tech-tree that is very broad. As in there's a lot of techs at the same level. Way more than in Civ.
However, you cannot freely pick which of these 10ish options you want to researach. Instead you usually get 3 or 4 options and pick one of these. The options you didn't pick go all the way down and can only be redrawn once all other options have been shown.

It's basically a deck of cards that starts with the initially available techs and gets deeper techs mixed in once you unlock them. You can also unlock some special-researches that instead of giving you a tech give you something else.

Going for something specific deeper in the tree is almost impossible.

That being said: There's no useless techs. Everything gives you something you'd rather have than not have. And eventually every tech gets drawn. So you kinda will have something different to work with in each playthrough.

I wouldn't say that the overall feel has changed very much other than command-points being a little more difficult to accumulate. It's just continuously gotten more refined, less placeholders, more finished stuff and more polished. There's still constantly new patches. Last one isn't even a week old.

I recently got Heroes of Might & Magic 3 recommended to me after describing what kind of game-design I'd like to see in a 4x. I had heard about it and knew I didn't know it counts as a 4x. But I guess it kinda does. If Gladius is a 4x, then Homm has to be one too.

To me this 22 year old not-really-4x is a great shake-up of the 4x-formula. I really like where it puts the focus: Exploration, logistics and planning. It's AI is surprisingly good and can pull of things, I wasn't used to expect from AIs in a lot of more modern games. Looks like they actually put some effort into it rather than just having it to be an afterthought.

And it made me wonder why everything has to be 3D nowadays. The 2D map just has a level of clarity to it that's hard to reach in 3D.

Another thing it makes me wonder is whether game-design has really progressed much since then. I've yet to stumble over something I consider really flawed or unnecessary in Homm 3. A lot of modern games have features that seem "tucked on", by which I mean the feature seems very uninspired and wouldn't be missed if it wasn't there. For example things like "You have gathered enough perk-unlock-points to unlock a new perk." or even worse: "As every other turn, once again something random happened. Read this lengthy text which explains the context as for why you will now be present with 3 options of either tiny benefits or bigger benefits in combination with a drawback to choose from."

So I'm playing a remake of a game from 1993 (Rotp) and a game from 1999 (Homm3). And with Homm3 you can't even blame it on Nostalgia as I never played it before. It just seems better designed to me than a lot of modern games.

I don't want to make dozens of almost meaningless decisions each turn. I want to make fewer decisions that actually have an impact. And the decisions should be based on the core-gameplay-loop and not come from random-events. I'd also like it when there's logistical problems to solve. Like setting up a supply-chain. And of course I want an AI that plays the same game and is really good at it.

Maybe I can get more good recommendations based on these preferences.

I got to a working prototype for a very simplistic game using mostly place-holder-graphics. I'd say was proof of concept enough to realize that the basic idea wouldn't really work out.

Here's a video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AwU231BRzA

And here's a github-release of it in a similar state to what it was like in the video:
https://github.com/Xilmi/ExoTerra/releases/tag/0.1

After that I put myself into a made-nest where I can work on the aspect that is most fun for me: AI for Remnants of the precursors.

I wouldn't say that Unity isn't really built for strategy-games. I mean you need some sort of engine to render the graphical outputs and when I see all the effort Ray spent into an engine for ROTP and how bad it's performance is, I'd rather recommend Unity.

You can get to a prototype relatively quickly. Artwork and UI is the hard part. But the choice of the engine won't really change that.

Originally posted by Mezmorki:

Ail - I'm being quite serious here with what I'm about to suggest, which is that I would love to have a long conversation with you about your design and also share the ideas and things I've framed out in my own game.

I won't lie - I don't know how to program in any serious capacity but I do know game design reasonably well (have published board games, others are in the works etc). I feel like I have the kernel of something really unique in the 4X design space that tried to get around the very issues you're grappling with.

Anyway, if you'd be interested in talking more we could set something up over voice (discord or whatever) and swap ideas.

Cheers.

Sure, I'd be up for it. My Discord ID is AIL#3580

I'm honestly a bit frustrated... Not about using unity or coding or anything like that... But game-design itself. I actually was surprised how quickly I could turn my idea into something playable, albeit looking pretty terrible.
The whole reason why I felt the urge to do so is that I always ran into something about other games that I didn't like.
Weak AI certainly is one of the most prominent and widespread issues in that regard, but it's not the only one. The other is something that I'd call "endgame-fatigue", a feeling where the amount of tasks becomes so vast, that it kills the motivation to finish the game.
I thought I can just avoid these things and will end up with a game that I really like.
But after actually playing the game some with the game-mechanics mostly as I envisioned them, I came to the conclusion that my game suffers from the very same thing.
I enjoyed the games that I lost much more than the games I won because I didn't have to go through the endgame.
I actually got a slight headache in one situation where I had like 30 systems and they all had incoming enemy fleets that I had to coordinate the defenses for. In that situation I mostly despised being able to see them from so far away. I actually wished I had a shorter detection-range just so it wouldn't be so overwhelming.

I think I'll have to go back to the drawing-board and completely alter some of the things. One of the things I'm eying towards the most is an artifical limit to how many things you can do per turn, quite like the orders-system in "Old World".

Ontop of the "too many things to do"-issue, both the research-system and the victory-point-system turned out to have flaws I hadn't considered initally. Research snowballed out of control too much. But that system actually seems the easiest to fix.
Score-system turned out not to make much sense, which became more apparent when I increased the amount of opponents. Someone else will keep the score-leader from winning and I can just focus on becoming stronger.

The most ironic thing is that the game is most fun, when I disable both the research- and the scoring-system. But then it's barely any different from the most basic game of this type: Conquest.

I actually once won on Harder myself. It was a 1v1 on a Tiny map with a horrible starting-location for my opponent. :D

Originally posted by RayFowler:

Someone told me that ROTP is the only game they've played for the past 6 months.

/u/bot39lvl, the one who plays against my AI on Hard and wins. The one who keeps finding exploits. :D

Sending both at once gives the opponent less time to react. You can always just retreat if things go wrong. Bad bombers are still better than no bombers at all. If you are good on pop-growth and/or invasion-strength, you might also consider invading the planet. Then no bombardment is needed at all.

Still coding AI for remnants of the precursors.

Originally posted by Bou:

Don't start with the humans! It's the most difficult faction to play with. Humans and Gremak's mechanics are different than the remaining factions. Humans are for advanced players. Pick the yellow dinosaurs for your first playthrough.

I think the most important way in which the humans differ from the other factions is their start. I don't see how you would improve at doing the human start while playing the other factions. So in order to learn about how to start as humans you have to actually do it.

I mean instead of telling some "don't play the humans on your first playthrough", you could also tell them that you have to manually unload the population from your transports and rush-buy a farm. Because that is basically the things because of which you would have a hard time if you didn't know them.

Other than that I can just chime in that this game has been sitting on my account unused for far too long. I just recently "rediscovered" it.
For me it's like that: Almost every game has their big glaring flaw. And with most 4x that's the AI.
SiS really is a rare exception to that. The AI actually is competent and "Hard" really means hard.

I also start to see the way how the economic-model is designed as more and more thought-through. You'll eventually be done with it and aren't forced to continously "work" on all your systems all game long but early on you really have to put thought into properly balancing your outputs with your needs.

My only problem with SiS was, that the AI did not pursue the enhanced-colonization-tech at all, which gave you a way to catch up and overtake everyone else by getting all the not-yet-colonized planets more or less.

Originally posted by Mr.Kill:

The only issue with Stars in shadow is that its got the one battle to rule them all problem.

That's not really the perception I've gotten in my limited time with the game.
If there's two equal empires, one has a mega-fleet and the other one splits their fleet up to do a multi-prong-attack, the mega-fleet-owner loses more planets in the same amount of time.
Of course it depends on what the border looks like. If there's only one "Chokepoint", then of course one battle can decide everything. But in the game I had on hard, the 2 remaining AIs in the end had a very long front-line. And my allies were attacked at like 5 places at once, unable to defend all of them.

That's exactly the kind of dynamic I'd expect from a space-4x without starlanes and essentially the main-advantage over ground-based 4x.

1. World of Warcraft
2. StarCraft: Broodwar
3. Pandora: First Contact

The iOS-Version is only 99 ct. to try if you like it. You can then only play human though.
I don't use a whole lot of hotkeys usually so playing on my tablet works totally fine.

Just one word I usually warn everyone about: On mobile the AI by default is set to fast but weak, which is different to the PC-version. So you have to change that if you don't want them to suck.

The dev of this game is really top-notch and ontop of things.

There have been like 4 patches since I started playing. He is also closely listening to the community.

For example I talked about how the smallest map-size doesn't feel small enough. He chimed in saying he'd look into it and next patch there was a new smaller map-size.

So if you have suggestions for improvements and run into design-flaws, just leave a comment on the forums and he'll very likely listen to it. :)

I did an experiment to figure out how big the biggest map-type is.
I took Steam and used their scan-ability to find the boundaries of tha map.
Then I measured the hexes and divided the side-length from one side to the other.
I got some 82ish value. If I account for measuring-errors, I would say the biggest map-size is 80x80 (but it's more hexes since it's hexes and not squares).

Originally posted by Nasarog:

Originally posted by Ail:

Not really sure what more there is to say. AI went back to building a balanced mix of everything they can build instead of using the algorithm I used to determine which unit is the overall best against what the enemies have and concentrate on that. It frustrated me a lot when this decision was made because I put a lot of effort into the algorithm that figures out what to build.

Any chance you would release that as an "Aggressor" A.I. Mod in the future?

I haven't looked at the code for quite some time now, but I guess it was never deleted. So it would be like swapping out one line to make use of it again. Maybe we can talk the devs into making it an option.

Originally posted by Nasarog:

Originally posted by Ail:

Keep in mind that a change I had made to the AI was removed because it unmasked how badly the units are balanced within their own faction.

For example AM-AI almost exclusively built Leman-Russ and later Baneblades simply because these units are so good compared to other options. The player can still do this.

Please, tell us more. I'm very curious.

Not really sure what more there is to say. AI went back to building a balanced mix of everything they can build instead of using the algorithm I used to determine which unit is the overall best against what the enemies have and concentrate on that. It frustrated me a lot when this decision was made because I put a lot of effort into the algorithm that figures out what to build.

Keep in mind that a change I had made to the AI was removed because it unmasked how badly the units are balanced within their own faction.

For example AM-AI almost exclusively built Leman-Russ and later Baneblades simply because these units are so good compared to other options. The player can still do this.

I totally agree with this thread.
That's why I rather play 4x-esque games nowadays as compared to actual 4x.

One example for such games is "Through the Ages".

It has the good parts of a 4x but doesn't get tedious and eventually is finished.