Grand plan for the game

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whaleberg
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Grand plan for the game

Post by whaleberg »

So, here is my question for the developers. You've clearly put a ton of effort into getting the game this far. The engine seems pretty solid, the interface is coming along nicely, the art is nice. It's incredibly rare to see a scifi 4x get anywhere close to this stage, and I'd really like to see it succeed.

However, currently it seems like the game is a pretty direct alpha centauri clone. The problem with that, is that alpha centauri did alpha centauri better. Pandora hasn't used a lot of the good ideas in alpha centauri, and it hasn't picked up any of the advances made since then as far as I can tell. (Alright, you took the unit embarkation mechanic from Civ 5 to avoid having to deal with transport ships...)

From what I see, the major change in the design of the game from previous civ type games, is the uncoupling of resource production from expenditure. Having a central resource bank is very different from almost every other game of it's type, although I've seen it done with success in a number of 4x games at galactic scale. I think it doesn't quite work yet though. Right now it works to make land grabbing more important than careful city placement, and reducing city specialization rather than enhancing it.

So, my question is, what is going to be the new, interesting thing in this game, that makes it different and better from everything that came before. Why should I play Pandora instead of firing up a 14 year old game. Or a a scifi mod of civ IV or V. (Although if you're looking for design inspiration, I think civ IV is a better place to look.) I think that's a question you seriously have to answer if you want the game to be a success.
Soheil
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by Soheil »

Well for me personally, the main differences are the fact that you can forge your own units which gives you a lot of options when it comes to cost and weaponry of your units and that you will have more special operations in your arsenal later in the game to combat ppl stacking too many units to create impenetrable defenses, you will have have to play quite differently when attacking or defending and have to actually attack from different fronts, hide and use your own operations to gain an advantage as your opponent can use a nuke or a black hole to annihilate foolishly placed units. Using operations in a smart way could actually turn the tide of battle when your facing a opponent that outnumbers and outguns you when it comes to military force. Im personally hoping that this with the stuff you already mentioned will set us apart. But you make a important point, maybe we should put more emphasis on the use of operations and do more tweaks to make our game even more unique. I would love to hear some specific suggestions on how to make our game stand out. Im personally trying to graphically set us apart even more at the moment.
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whaleberg
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by whaleberg »

Forging your own units is good, but as it stands, it's like a watered down version of alpha centauri's unit forge. I believe SMAC also had nukes to use against stacks of units, they just called them planet busters. Stack breaking nukes has actually been a civilization standard since civ II i think...

From what I can tell so far, they're isn't really any reason to ever build anything but the newest, best, most heavily armored units. You do have a choice of targetting machines or biologicals which adds some variety. Alpha centauri broke up the power stat into attack and defense, which made you think about what units you wanted for what purposes. It was cheap to build unarmored attackers, and to build low offense defenders, but high offense/ high defense units were MUCH more expensive. Th

Operations is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how it's really different from unit actions and infiltration, which were integrated into all aspects of SMAC. I haven't seen the full range of operations in the game, but the ones I have seen have been pretty direct analogs of the things in SMAC and Civ games. Lets look at orbital drops, I LOVE orbital drops. The thing is, alpha centauri did it already, and they're version integrated better with the unit forge and tech tree, as well as air defenses and city mechanics.

Here is the orbital drop component that could be added to any unit class and then used to airdrop from any city or airbase.

Code: Select all

Allows a unit to make an Airdrop over a range of eight tiles, instantly moving from the tile of origin to the destination, provided that there are no air defenses near the destination tile, that the unit has not moved yet this turn, and that the unit is starting from a friendly base or airbase. Upon discovery of Applied Gravitonics (or upon completion of the Space Elevator, whichever comes first) any units with Drop Pods may instead make Orbital Insertions, which removes the eight-tile restriction. A unit that has made an Airdrop or Orbital Insertion may attack on the same turn, but will suffer a -50% combat penalty.
I'm a little worried about the "black box" of operations. They'res no way to tell what operations your opponents have built, no sort of spy infrastructure. If you're going to have things like allowing the prebuilding of instantly deployable military units, they're needs to be a way for a player to try and find out if they're opponents are building them. I don't think it will be very much fun to have the ai suddenly declare war and instantly drop tons of units on you, with no way of discovering their plans. If there were spies and you could tell that they were building up drops, then it would be your own fault for not spying properly.

I think since this is a small team, you probably have to focus on a few areas of interest and really work at them. If you want it to be a tactical war game, with unit design and flexible tactics up front and center, then that has to be really polished. You're going to have to give the different unit classes some different properties that make them tactically more interesting. The terrain should become more important. Things like restrictions on certain types of units moving through different terrain types, more powerful roads and transport networks, the ability to create choke points, long range fire, etc. The distribution of cities vs open terrain right now feels really wrong for a game about battle tactics though. You need to solve the cities everywhere issue for battle tactics to become more interesting. Right now I can't go more than 2 squares without running into a city, which cuts down on the ability to maneuver in interesting ways. The lack of unit imposed movement restrictions on enemy units, or attacks or opportunity, or things like that really cuts down on the tactical side of things too.
If tactics are what you really want to push, then simplify the rest of it. Cut the tech tree down a lot. Cut down city management. Really focus on the tactical side of things. Maybe cut down the number of factions, but add unique faction units.

If you want the empire building to be front and center, then you have to push that more. Fix the city sprawling issues, fix the lack of insight into the tech tree. Add support for automatically maintaining reasonable garrisions. Get more going on the diplomacy/spy/trade fronts. Get transportation and trade networks into the game in a meaningful way. Add more variety of map features (rivers are one that seem noticeably missing), add tradeable resources. Get ruins working as something other than random goody huts. And simplify the tech tree. It's not that interesting to rebuild units every few turns with slightly upgraded weapons. Make advancements be either large radical changes that dramatically change your abilities and require some though, or incremental upgrades that don't require you to do anything to use. It's annoying to have many small upgrades that aren't interesting but require refitting/redesigning troops, upgrading buildings from the mk1 to mk2 models, etc.

Graphics are great, and pandora looks pretty good, but with a game like this, you don't even notice the graphics after an hour or so, it really comes down to having interesting features, and tight implementation of those features.
void
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by void »

Thanks a bunch whaleberg, your level of concern is highly appreciated; I'll give a detailed response in one or two days -- just really busy with coding at the moment, implementing changes based on you guys feedback.
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whaleberg
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by whaleberg »

Cool, thanks for the response void.
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by whaleberg »

So I'm still curious what the overall plan is. I know there is an alien invasion coming, but what triggers it? How is it going to work? Will aliens just randomly appear at some point and start killing whoever happens to be in the wrong spot? Do they always land in uninhabited spaces so that no one gets screwed? Maybe it could tie into ecosystem destruction and the clearing of hives? Or maybe it's tied to the utilization of ruins?

I'm still just not clear on what it is that you're going to try and beat Civ and Alpha Centauri at. You need to have a killer feature, and I still don't see what that is.
unormal
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by unormal »

whaleberg wrote:So I'm still curious what the overall plan is. I know there is an alien invasion coming, but what triggers it? How is it going to work? Will aliens just randomly appear at some point and start killing whoever happens to be in the wrong spot? Do they always land in uninhabited spaces so that no one gets screwed? Maybe it could tie into ecosystem destruction and the clearing of hives? Or maybe it's tied to the utilization of ruins?

I'm still just not clear on what it is that you're going to try and beat Civ and Alpha Centauri at. You need to have a killer feature, and I still don't see what that is.
Honestly if they just made a modern, streamlined AC, with modern usability; I'd be completely happy with that. I don't really think they need a killer feature. Though some sort of big menace like MOO 1/2's Orion/Invasion is fine, if that's the idea. I'd also love to see some more modern tricks-of-the-trade beyond usability, like the semi-random tech tree from SOTS. That would really kick it up for me from like to love.

I would personally focus on usability/accessability, and simple modern, proven techniques like a randomized tech tree over spending too much time on any massive single "killer feature", that isn't really needed for a great success.
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by jamaine10 »

I'll admit I'm kind of wondering what the overall goal is too (besides kill/take over all other Factions). I'm still early in the game, but I've already run into not only alien Hives, but alien technology. Is this the 1st world man has found alien technology? Know what I mean? Maybe adding a random event where alien raiders land near an exploited alien technology hex and blast everything in a 1 hex radius ("How dare you use our technology!")? I remember in MOO 2 that for the first half of a game the Antares Raiders would ruin your entire day (and significantly set back planet production). If conflict with an alien species is the ultimate aim, this would definitely clue the player in that something was going to happen/appear in the future.
whaleberg
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by whaleberg »

Honestly if they just made a modern, streamlined AC, with modern usability; I'd be completely happy with that. I don't really think they need a killer feature. Though some sort of big menace like MOO 1/2's Orion/Invasion is fine, if that's the idea. I'd also love to see some more modern tricks-of-the-trade beyond usability, like the semi-random tech tree from SOTS. That would really kick it up for me from like to love.

I would personally focus on usability/accessability, and simple modern, proven techniques like a randomized tech tree over spending too much time on any massive single "killer feature", that isn't really needed for a great success.
The issue for me with that is that currently it's lacking A LOT of what made AC great. No probe teams, simplified unit creation (although they're adding in unit abilities.) No social engineering, no wonders, simplified diplomacy, so far no real storyline, simplified trade, simplified pollution, no sea colonies / formers, no terrain alteration, no named locations, world isn't round, etc. I don't expect a small team to completely duplicate AC and add prettier graphics, but if that's the goal they really need include everything that made it good. Currently it's still a lot shallower than AC.

If the idea of the game is really to be about man despoiling a beautiful alien planet, it needs to have more built into the mechanics that supports that idea. If the game is about alien invaders retaking they're world, I'd like to see the alien ruins play into that. They should be more significant and permanent features than just a +10 food bonus. And the arrival of the aliens has to have some a major effect on the game play options. Maybe certain essential techs can only be acquired by capturing alien cities or ruins. Maybe when they land they initiate a change in the planet that starts the appearance of new valuable resources that alter the way the game is played. I really want to know how the aliens work into things, what triggers them, and how their appearance works. I'm worried they're just going to show up at a certain somewhat random milestone, plop down 6 cities on top of some poor faction that happens to be in their way, and start playing exactly like the other factions but with some slightly different graphics.
void
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by void »

Alright, finally, here we go:

What we have in mind for Pandora is to constantly expand the universe to eventually have a huge feature set. When you check our interface design, help panel and world data, you might notice that everything is built very modular. I don't think there is a limit to the number of features, factions, alien species, technologies, units, operations etc. we can add, I almost want to drown the player in options. At the same time -- in order to prevent chaos -- the number of core mechanics (manage cities, design units, order units and ops, select technologies and negotiate with other factions) will stay limited. I don't think we need this one killer feature, but rather want to make a very deep and robust sci-fi planetary TBS game. As you know our team size and budget is a fraction of that of Alpha Centauri or Civilization, so we have to build up our franchise over multiple installments with expansions. Civ 5 got away with adding espionage via expansion, and I'm aiming for the same: Add a seventh faction that specializes in diplomacy and information warfare, basically masters of scheming. Combine that with the possibility to gain a diplomatic victory as planetary governor as well as a spy unit that has special commands like infiltrate cities, sabotage etc. and you already got a very robust expansion core. We won't have all of SMAC's mechanics at release, but we'll make sure that what we have is really solid in all areas and enjoyable (and at least on the level of e.g. Endless Space or Civilization), and if everything goes well, with free updates and expansions (smoothly delivered via updater) eventually catch up and even surpass Alpha Centauri in possibilities.

Concerning drop pods: What we will do is implement the concept of passive operations. Rather than being deployed they are grayed out and consumed on actions. For example, if your unit is in a city and you have drop pods available, a orbital deploy order will be available that then repositions the unit and consumes a pod. Alpha Centauri had most of their custom mechanics in unit modules, but I firmly believe this is not the way to go. Workshopping units is a cool thing, but it can get too much and even cumbersome. Also, let's say you have a large standing army and want to perform an orbital invasion: Unless you have large amounts of cash banked to upgrade all your units, you're really limited in how many units can be deployed. On the other hand, with our system you can build a bunch of drop pods (production is way easier to come by) and go big -- and army-wise Pandora is about going big. Overall, in my opinion the concept of operations is way more elegant.
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by whaleberg »

Civilization V did get away with it, but it was in a pretty shameful state at launch. Even with G&K it's still not really up to the standards of Civ IV:BTS or AC. Civ V has significantly undermined my trust in Firaxis. Endless Space at launch was an unplayable disaster. It's good to hear that Pandora is considered a long term evolving project rather than just a release and be done with it game. I think if that's the idea, then it makes sense to be conservative in releasing features. It's better to have a simpler game with really solid mechanics rather than a game with overly complicated mechanics that aren't very well integrated or tested. Conquest works because it's so simple, rather than despite it. I would try to focus on making some of the differences between Pandora and AC really the focus of development. In particular I would really play with the separation of production and consumption.
Concerning drop pods: What we will do is implement the concept of passive operations. Rather than being deployed they are grayed out and consumed on actions. For example, if your unit is in a city and you have drop pods available, a orbital deploy order will be available that then repositions the unit and consumes a pod. Alpha Centauri had most of their custom mechanics in unit modules, but I firmly believe this is not the way to go. Workshopping units is a cool thing, but it can get too much and even cumbersome. Also, let's say you have a large standing army and want to perform an orbital invasion: Unless you have large amounts of cash banked to upgrade all your units, you're really limited in how many units can be deployed. On the other hand, with our system you can build a bunch of drop pods (production is way easier to come by) and go big -- and army-wise Pandora is about going big. Overall, in my opinion the concept of operations is way more elegant.
I think that is a MUCH better way to handle drop pods than just having them drop new marines from no where. Although it raises a lot of other implementation questions. I don't see why you shouldn't be able to drop a tank, or even a ship, but I'm not sure it makes sense for them to cost the same as dropping an infantry unit. That's one of the advantages of baking it in to unit creation. The biggest problem I see with operations is that they are a separate mechanic that is unrelated to the game map. Games like this are all about what's on the map, and having operations live off in some space completely separate from the map makes them feel strangely disconnected. Operations currently violate what I think is one of the most important rules in strategy game design, which is that every action that can be taken against you should be foreseeable and counterable if discovered early enough. Stealth units are no fun unless there is a way to reveal them. Losing is only fun when it feels like you could have reasonably done something to avoid what happened to you. Currently operations completely break these rules. They are invisible, uncounterable, and completely disconnected from the game map. Nukes are little better than some of them, because you have to build nuclear launch facilities. This at least ties them to something, and I assume if your opponent captures all of your launch facilities than your nukes are disabled. There still is no way for an enemy to discover that you are building nukes, how many nukes you have, and no way to counter them, so I'm not sure how much fun they are. Certainly, having your cities annihilated instantly with no way of defending them or even knowing if they are likely to be nuked is going to suck. Nukes and drop pods would be MUCH more fun, if you could see your opponent assembling them ahead of time, either through espionage, or just scouting. If every nuke under construction placed a big rocket next to one of their cities, which could be pillaged or destroyed, than it would make it seem much more fair. They could reasonably prevent you from seeing it, by defending their borders, and you could reasonably discover it by sneaking in somehow. For super weapons, there may not be a way to prevent them working once their built, but if there isn't, there absolutely has to be a way to find out if they're being constructed, and prevent them from completing.
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by azpops »

I may be getting ahead of things now, but I'm still not sure what is the ultimate goal in playing the game. Here are some thoughts:

1) Pollution and formers. After several games I have found out that it is really to your detriment to build anything with a former. You need a couple in case of pollution popping up, but their main focus seems to be to build forest. If you don't build any mines or farms and plant everything in forest, no pollution problem. Then I ask is the reason we settle on this planet simply to look at the trees? There is no need for farms or mines as you can build buildings which increase production without incurring any pollution costs. It seems to me the whole reason for pollution is to keep you from changing the planet.

2) Bugs. Build lots and lots of combat units. Settle 2 or 3 additional cities. Build lots and lots more combat units. Go kill all the hives and bugs until they are all gone. No more bug problem.

3) Other factions. Bugs all gone. Build lots and lots of stronger combat units. Go kill all the other factions. End of game.

4) Is this supposed to be a short game? Not like the civs or SMAC. In my last couple of plays, I could finish the game within 200 turns. Faster if I really tried harder to kill off the other factions. The research is so fast I can't even build some of the units before a much better one is available. Is this intended? The game plays very fast right now.

5) I have only tried the game on medium settings so far. I will try on a "harder" setting next. Right now all the AI factions play in an incoherent way. Don't know what helps keep a faction friendly. What makes them mad. Only thing seems to be go kill them as fast as you can.

6) Your idea of adding extra features through upgrades and such is nice, but so far, after a couple of plays thru, the game becomes very mechanical in what I do and quickly becomes boring.
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by armyknight »

Is there a way or desire to create more specific faction units, weapons or technologies?

Right now, from what I can see, the units are pretty uniform in function.
Weapon sets are the same as are abilities

In addition to the faction global adjustments a few options that can only be available to that faction. On addition to more than just changing the color of the unit, having different image sets.

A faction that wants preserve the alien world should be discouraged from improvements that change the world ( morale is lower or the mines and farms are less effective for being less invasive on the Alien world

Maybe native bio armor from the plants as In addition to steel ect

Just some thoughts.
whaleberg
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Re: Grand plan for the game

Post by whaleberg »

If certain techs were limited to certain factions that could pretty strongly differentiate them, but will make balance a lot more difficult probably. Although as it is the factions are pretty unbalanced right now anyways.
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