Re: Game Idea

[Jermin <melkiorgn at yahoo dot fr>]

Hello,

I'm a newby in the Xconq world. Still I will give you
my comments about that idea.

--- Stan Shebs <shebs@shebs.cnchost.com> wrote:
> "The year is 2030 AD.  The economic expansion of the
> early 21st century has brought both the final
extreme
> of overcrowding, and the hardware to do something
> about it; the nations of Earth begin to launch
colony
> ships to settle the solar system.

It seems realistic enough regarding current technology
and NASA projects. The time place is good.

> "Alas, with the planting of new colonies comes new
> social strains, and it is not long before each
> settled planet, and Earth itself, is locked in a new
> set of wars.  With the discovery of
faster-than-light
> travel in the 40s, the struggle expands to the 
> planets around nearby stars.  As the leader of your
> nation, it is your task to survive these changes and
> impose interstellar order, by force if necessary."

Your last sentence, "by force if necessary", means for
me hard work about diplomacy could be done to enable
another victory condition to impose interstellar
order.

What if player A manage to convince player B, C and D
(all players on planet Saturn) to let him rule in a
governorship commonly agreed ? Could that be a victory
condition enough ?

> The game concept is a sort of Xconqified Civ meets
> Starcraft.  A game consists of a sequence of
> scenarios, each played out on a planet's surface.

The 2-scale playing system would fit well to that kind
of game. Every player moves his starfleet around the
unknown space, and each time a planet is reached by
two or more players, a "planet-scaled" scenario will
arise.

> Players engage on only one world at a time, and the
> outcome could determine which world comes up next.

OK. I misread your intentions.

> At the same time, research is going on, so when FTL
> becomes available, a whole new set of worlds opens
> up.  Worlds can range from the hospitable to
> inhospitable (with terraforming research to help),
> and from thinly settled to urban.

Which level of terraforming do you have in mind ? I
mean it seems unrealistic to let a planet be terra=
formed completely in less than 10 or 20 years long.

> Since it's near-future, military hardware will be
> similar to today's.

If research could improve movement speed, why could it
not improve also fighting tools ? I'm refering to
games
(RPG) like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. Both look at the
future with a new range of weapons, from bullet- to
beam-weapons, including gas weapons and also combat
drugs.

> Space combat might be hard to fit into this and
> could just be ignored, or left as a sort of
> background transition device.

That's what I meant earlier. No space combat, else the
military invasion might prove to be very hard to
reach.

> The scale of combat will be much as for Xconq's
> standard game, but units will be generally faster.

If you want to include combined arms fighting ability,
then the stacking limit of each cell should increase
to allow many different units to fight together.

> Players' ultimate goal is to use their resources
> from the colony planets to take over all of the
Earth
> and thereby rule known space.

For mining operations, it would be interesting to let
the players do some programmed tasks to collecting
units.
In "Stars!", a game of interstellar conquest,a player
can assign ordered tasks at a unit, like a
space-miner,
to reach the mining planet, dig and get a certain
amount of minerals, return to its home planet, deliver
the materials and cycle again.
So, the first tasks are :
- find some mining ressources
- build some miner
- assign them tasks to have a regular income of
materials

> This game design will take some new implementation,
> but things like campaigns are already on the
> wishlist, and so the focus can be as much on adding
> some chrome and getting the AI to handle this well.

For the technology tree, CivII has some hints about
how
AI handle it.
Each technology can have one or two requirements.
Each technology has a type, defining its domain.
Each technology has a rating in that domain.
So the AI, with a defined behavior, consider each
technology with its rating and the "interest" it finds
in that domain.
Example : A "militaristic" AI favors the "weapon
system
and units" domain, and select in that domain with to
research first.
If the rating of a researchable unit is below the
"interest"-rating of a technology from another domain,
then the AI will choose the other-domain technology.

One might implement it like that :
AI militaristic :
domain interest-modifier
weapon 150%
social 50%
biology 75%
physics 125%

With the following technologies :
domain technology base-interest-rating
weapon laser-beam 12
weapon sharp-blade 2
social cathedral 12
social fighting-center 6
social library 8
biology genetic 12
biology first-aid 4
physics nuclear-plant 8
physics ballistic 4

The researching order for the militaristic AI would
result as follow :
 laser-beam 18 (12*1.5) (weapon)
 nuclear-plant 10 (8*1.25) (physics)
 genetic 9 (12*.75) (biology)
 cathedral 6 (12*.5) (social)
 ballistic 5 (4*1.25) (physics)
 library 4 (8*.5) (social)
 sharp-blade 3 (2*1.5) (weapon)
 first-aid 3 (4*.75) (biology)
 fighting-center 3 (6*.5) (social)

Jean-Luc

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