Rethinking and 'fixing' 4X Space Civ Games

[Simon_Jester]

Okay. So the thing you really want your game to have that makes it special is scalability.

You want to be able to start small, but grow to the space-operatic scale that always makes me think of the works of Dr. E. E. Smith... and have the complexity of managing your empire scale logarithmically, not linearly, with size.

Master of Orion (I and II) both suffer from linear or near-linear growth of administrative complexity. Compare managing twenty colonies that produce a ship every turn to managing one colony that produces a ship every five turns. The latter involves 100 times more output... and, in those game engines, roughly 100 times more work

What you want, then, is to come up with a really good game mechanic that allows you to NOT have the administrative burden of running your polity increase linearly with its overall size and economic productivity. You want the amount of work involved to, at most, increase by some fixed amount every time the Empire doubles in size. It's probably okay if a turn takes one minute when you have 1 unit of stuff to oversee, and two minutes when you have 10 units, and so on up to seven minutes for a million units... but obviously the game never goes anywhere if it takes a million minutes to complete one turn!

The 'multilevel' system you describe is a good step in that direction.
______________________________

But here's the catch.

4X games tend to sell to people who like managing things, seeing them grow and flourish. One of the biggest obstacles you'll encounter is that you have a player who has laboriously set up their exquisitely balanced little empire of 14 planets in five star systems, choosing the most productive worlds and micromanaging every detail to get things just right. Then he settles one more planet and WHAM it turns into a 'sector.'

Suddenly, those details he spent all that energy setting up are no longer tracked, every individual planet becomes a dull generic "mining world" or "science world" or "food court world" or whatever. So for one, a lot of work is sort of... lost. For another, if the player was managing his planetary economies well, it is very likely that they will actually be less productive immediately after the transition to the Sector Stage than they were before.

"What do you mean the research world of Petrine IV only produces 200 Science Points now? I had it doing 500 points a turn just ten minutes ago? AAAAAGH!" is not something you want to hear a 4X player say.

So we need some means of addressing that. Suggestions?

[bilateralrope]

One idea that comes to mind is to limit how many orders the player can issue each turn. For a few worlds they are more than enough but, as the size of the empire increases the player finds they don't have enough to do everything. But one order they can give is to assign an NPC governor to run the world with minimal interference from the player. Possibly with the extra complexity of different governors behaving differently and what happens if you anger them too much.

Though I get the feeling that it would upset a lot of people who like micromanaging everything. So I think the first question that needs to be asked is: "What kind of player are these changes aimed at pleasing ?"

[Crossroads Inc.]

Okay. So the thing you really want your game to have that makes it special is scalability.

You want to be able to start small, but grow to the space-operatic scale that always makes me think of the works of Dr. E. E. Smith... and have the complexity of managing your empire scale logarithmically, not linearly, with size.

Master of Orion (I and II) both suffer from linear or near-linear growth of administrative complexity. Compare managing twenty colonies that produce a ship every turn to managing one colony that produces a ship every five turns. The latter involves 100 times more output... and, in those game engines, roughly 100 times more work

What you want, then, is to come up with a really good game mechanic that allows you to NOT have the administrative burden of running your polity increase linearly with its overall size and economic productivity. You want the amount of work involved to, at most, increase by some fixed amount every time the Empire doubles in size. It's probably okay if a turn takes one minute when you have 1 unit of stuff to oversee, and two minutes when you have 10 units, and so on up to seven minutes for a million units... but obviously the game never goes anywhere if it takes a million minutes to complete one turn!

The 'multilevel' system you describe is a good step in that direction.

Thank you!
You have done a masterful summery of my over all feelings toward an "improved" 4X space game.
Especially in regards to "scaling" things up bit by bit.

But here's the catch.

4X games tend to sell to people who like managing things, seeing them grow and flourish. One of the biggest obstacles you'll encounter is that you have a player who has laboriously set up their exquisitely balanced little empire of 14 planets in five star systems, choosing the most productive worlds and micromanaging every detail to get things just right. Then he settles one more planet and WHAM it turns into a 'sector.'

Suddenly, those details he spent all that energy setting up are no longer tracked, every individual planet becomes a dull generic "mining world" or "science world" or "food court world" or whatever. So for one, a lot of work is sort of... lost. For another, if the player was managing his planetary economies well, it is very likely that they will actually be less productive immediately after the transition to the Sector Stage than they were before.

Up up up!
I have anticipated that contingency!

You see, colonies "stay" the way they are settled even as things move.
In stage 1-2, your colonies that you may spend a lot of time laboriously balancing and pruning, will STAY as they are even at the 'Galactic' stage. I had referred to those early colonies as becoming your "core worlds" the ones that would become your 'Courscount' and such.
Colonies settle AFTER you hit the sector stage turn into the "Science world" or "Food court world"
Also, in my own idea for how things would be calculated, a "Food Court world" colony module would always be MORE productive then a 'normal' colony that you founded and, say, built only food courts on. Basically you should be secure in knowing that if you make say, a 'Mining World' it will always produce more minerals then a 'normal' colony you build bit by bit. It will of course ONLY ever produce minerals, but should do it more efficiently.

As for the whole "System management" and then "Sector management" was meant to be just that, managing the planets in those areas. I had considered that upon hitting stage4 / 'Galactic' stage, you could go BACK to doing little fiddily micro managing of things if you wanted.

Hope that makes sense?

[Purple]

So we need some means of addressing that. Suggestions?

Honestly I do not feel it needs to be addressed at all. As a player that doe splay 4X games, civilization, Dwarf Fortress etc. I can flat out tell you that I would rather have 30 minute turns than hand over control. Because from my perspective the joy of the game is spending those 30 minutes performing every single action by hand. And tuning every single thing to perfection is its own reward. Thus from my perspective, this whole tangent is just a basic violation of the genre meant to cater to the "casual" crowd in order to attract players from outside the usual type.


Honestly, I think Civilization IV did it best. You could automate away almost everything. But it was always optional. The game at no point forced you to automate anything away, ever. So I could have my 5-10 minute turns and enjoy them. And someone more "casual" *spits* could automate it all away and have the game run it self.

[Simon_Jester]

One idea that comes to mind is to limit how many orders the player can issue each turn. For a few worlds they are more than enough but, as the size of the empire increases the player finds they don't have enough to do everything.

That can be made a GREAT idea by making it a customizable game setting. Micromanagers can turn the game into a completely different game by cranking the 'number of administrative orders' setting up to infinity, while people who want to click a few sliders and be done with it can crank it down and rely on AI governors.

Although those governors had better be competent to do what they're advertised as doing, in that case. Programming the governor AI would probably be the single biggest challenge of the game. The human player usually won't get offended by the AI doing something stupid with its own empire, but they'll rapidly approach throw-game-across-room levels of frustrated if it does something stupid with theirs.

[i.e. quirks of AI pathfinding aren't really annoying until you watch your own army wander into a cliff while the enemy laughs and drops hand grenades on them from above]

But one order they can give is to assign an NPC governor to run the world with minimal interference from the player. Possibly with the extra complexity of different governors behaving differently and what happens if you anger them too much.

Governor personality should be an optional toggle unless you're basically planning to play Crusader Kings IN SPAAACE where the game is in a real sense all about managing the personalities of your subordinates.

Though I get the feeling that it would upset a lot of people who like micromanaging everything. So I think the first question that needs to be asked is: "What kind of player are these changes aimed at pleasing ?"

With the "set the number of orders you want to issue" toggle you can get around this... as long as the game is designed to function correctly at low toggle settings. It's vitally important to make sure that, seeing as how the player can only issue 12 orders a turn or whatever about the administration of his empire, those 12 orders be meaningful and correlate directly to the success and prosperity of that empire.

This game is really gonna need a tutorial that walks the player through the stage transitions, by the way.

But here's the catch.

4X games tend to sell to people who like managing things, seeing them grow and flourish. One of the biggest obstacles you'll encounter is that you have a player who has laboriously set up their exquisitely balanced little empire of 14 planets in five star systems, choosing the most productive worlds and micromanaging every detail to get things just right. Then he settles one more planet and WHAM it turns into a 'sector.'

Suddenly, those details he spent all that energy setting up are no longer tracked, every individual planet becomes a dull generic "mining world" or "science world" or "food court world" or whatever. So for one, a lot of work is sort of... lost. For another, if the player was managing his planetary economies well, it is very likely that they will actually be less productive immediately after the transition to the Sector Stage than they were before.

...You see, colonies "stay" the way they are settled even as things move.

In stage 1-2, your colonies that you may spend a lot of time laboriously balancing and pruning, will STAY as they are even at the 'Galactic' stage. I had referred to those early colonies as becoming your "core worlds" the ones that would become your 'Courscount' and such.

That smacks into its own problem, which is "why aren't my new worlds as all-around awesome as my old ones? Why can't I go in and fix things to be the way I want?"

Colonies settle AFTER you hit the sector stage turn into the "Science world" or "Food court world"
Also, in my own idea for how things would be calculated, a "Food Court world" colony module would always be MORE productive then a 'normal' colony that you founded and, say, built only food courts on. Basically you should be secure in knowing that if you make say, a 'Mining World' it will always produce more minerals then a 'normal' colony you build bit by bit. It will of course ONLY ever produce minerals, but should do it more efficiently.

That would be helpful- but you'll have to be careful to make sure this actually works, that a skilled micromanager can't somehow figure out how to make a Stellar Age mining world that outperforms a Sector Age mining world.

Also, you'll want to make sure that the Stellar Age game rewards and encourages the creation of 'balanced' colony worlds, so as to avoid calling undue attention to the transition. Ideally you want your players going "oh cool, now I can access the Science, Manufacturing, Touristtrap, Foodcourt, and Mining World colony types instead of being stuck taking these boring Regular World colonies I have to micromanage!"

Basically, the key to successful transition between the different 'regimes' of imperial administration is that each transition should look more like "oh cool I unlocked a bunch of new stuff" and less like "all my old stuff has been taken away and I am now playing a completely different game that just happens to recycle some names and aesthetics from the old one."

As for the whole "System management" and then "Sector management" was meant to be just that, managing the planets in those areas. I had considered that upon hitting stage4 / 'Galactic' stage, you could go BACK to doing little fiddily micro managing of things if you wanted.

Hope that makes sense?

It is not a good idea to make micromanagement be off-limits in the Sector Age (when it's at least remotely practical to do so for every planet in your empire if you're patient) but not for the Galactic Age (when it probably isn't).

Honestly I do not feel it needs to be addressed at all. As a player that doe splay 4X games, civilization, Dwarf Fortress etc. I can flat out tell you that I would rather have 30 minute turns than hand over control. Because from my perspective the joy of the game is spending those 30 minutes performing every single action by hand. And tuning every single thing to perfection is its own reward. Thus from my perspective, this whole tangent is just a basic violation of the genre meant to cater to the "casual" crowd in order to attract players from outside the usual type.

Well yes, but you... may not be a representative sample of the population. That said, the game should be saleable to someone like you, so your opinion is relevant.


Remember, the objective here is scale. Games like Civilization IV and Master of Orion II are sized such that if you're still doing everything by hand in the endgame, you can just barely keep on top of everything and still get in multiple turns per playsession. Remember my point that if you have 20 cities/colonies making one unit per turn, as compared to one colony making one unit per five turns, that is 100 times as much management overhead.

Now suppose you actually want a game in which the endgame scenario has you coordinating million-ship fleets in assaults on Dyson spheres, or putting engines on planets and crashing them into each other, or building literal Death Stars that can blow away whole fleets of mile-long star battleships and heavily defended planetary fortresses.

But you started with one planet full of barely post-atomic primitives.

The objective, measurable size of this empire of yours has grown by a factor of thousands if not millions in the process of getting from the early game to the endgame. Even if you're the sort of person who enjoys spending half an hour per turn of the game... would you enjoy spending six hours? Would you enjoy rarely actually getting to finish a turn of gameplay in one sitting? How about each turn taking 24 hours? A week? A year? I honestly can't think of any upper limit.
________________________

At some point sanity kicks in and you must find a way to automate some of the administrative decisions. I mean, really, every 'empire management' game already does that, because you're dealing with abstracted high-level issues. You may issue orders to a city in Civilization but you're not making zoning decisions a la SimCity or deciding what individual citizens actually do. You're saying "yo, city #15, build some fortifications" and they go "okay" and inform you three years later when the defenses are built.

So a lot of the administrative complexity is already abstracted out and 'automated' by default (there is no way to make the individual citizens work more efficiently by micromanagement, because you literally have no access to their individual actions).

The point here is that if you're dealing with an empire that grows exponentially over the course of the game, you need some way to ensure that the player's workload does not ALSO grow exponentially... because if it does, sooner or later you'll swamp even the most determined micromanagement fetishist. Which makes ideas like being able to just designate entire worlds or sectors whose sole function is "do X very efficiently" helpful in the late game.

Honestly, I think Civilization IV did it best. You could automate away almost everything. But it was always optional. The game at no point forced you to automate anything away, ever. So I could have my 5-10 minute turns and enjoy them. And someone more "casual" *spits* could automate it all away and have the game run it self.

That's why I suggested (in effect) a customizable level of automation.

[Purple]

That's why I suggested (in effect) a customizable level of automation.

And that's fine for as long as it's 100% customizable. You see, the point here is that whilst not everyone is like me everyone is going to prefer different aspects of the game. And as complexity rises exponentially you must ensure that the particular aspects that someone prefers aren't taken away by the automation whilst the aspects they find tedious can be automated away on command.

A good example of this is Space Empires IV and the minister system it had. Basically you could assign ministers to planets, construction ques or even individual starships and these particular ones would work on their own. But because you could tick it on every individual unit you could chose which planets you want automated and which you don't and stuff like that. Seriously, you people should get and play Space Empires IV. It's possibly the best game of the type I have seen.

[Simon_Jester]

Another random idea: each Sector in the Sector Age could have a capital world that can (optionally) be micromanaged, and which serves as an 'interface' thematically through which you coordinate the economic effort of the other worlds in that Sector.

[Zinegata]

So we need some means of addressing that. Suggestions?

Honestly I do not feel it needs to be addressed at all. As a player that doe splay 4X games, civilization, Dwarf Fortress etc. I can flat out tell you that I would rather have 30 minute turns than hand over control. Because from my perspective the joy of the game is spending those 30 minutes performing every single action by hand. And tuning every single thing to perfection is its own reward. Thus from my perspective, this whole tangent is just a basic violation of the genre meant to cater to the "casual" crowd in order to attract players from outside the usual type.


Honestly, I think Civilization IV did it best. You could automate away almost everything. But it was always optional. The game at no point forced you to automate anything away, ever. So I could have my 5-10 minute turns and enjoy them. And someone more "casual" *spits* could automate it all away and have the game run it self.

Most players have difficulty handing over control; but the reality is that 30 minute turns massively inflate the time required to complete a game. For a 200 turn game - which is already very low turn-countwise - that already translates to 100 hours to complete.

There are games that cater to this level of complexity - say stuff like War in the East for a wargamey example - but by and large this is simply not a practical game to play.

Moreover, it is possible to actually condense a game to a shorter variant and keep a lot of the gameplay elements to make it memorable. Personally, I think the best 4X to come out in recent times is the boardgame "Eclipse" (also available on Android) - which is playable in 4 hours in total and yet incorporates technology, economy, and ship design.

[Simon_Jester]

The real challenge is allowing people to choose how much of the automation and interface-abstraction they actually use... while having the game subtly encourage them to use it in such a way that they don't end up mindlessly trying to play thirty-minute turns for fifty turns, then give up on the game because it takes too long because they forgot to use the automation.

[Borgholio]

One of the few things MOO3 got right was the planetary governor system. You turn it on, tell it in general what you want it to do...and it did it. Well enough that I could ignore planetary micromanagement and focus on larger strategic issues. Want more ship output? Change the "War" slider. Want planets to be self-sustaining? Say so. Want planets to optimize for whatever they're best at and import what they are missing? Toggle a switch. Done. But, the option was still there to micromanage every colony yourself if you wanted. Now with my massive 500-star empires with 5 - 8 planets around each star...the governors were lifesavers.

Same could go for ground combat, where you could take a mini-RTS style of warfare or just automate it while giving general instructions to all your commanders (focus on defense, focus on offense, limit friendly casualties, limit collateral damage, etc...).

I think space combat should be the bread and butter of a 4x space game though. Of all the time spent on a micromanage interface, most of it should be on the space combat interface. The ability to control your combats where a small fleet could defeat a larger one is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. Even in a large empire, I always liked to control one or two combats a turn and then just tell the AI to do the rest.

So the only question remains is how to best customize the UI for the player so that they can easily direct the AI governors / fleet / ground commanders while still allowing micromanagement for those who are into it?

[Zinegata]

The real challenge is allowing people to choose how much of the automation and interface-abstraction they actually use... while having the game subtly encourage them to use it in such a way that they don't end up mindlessly trying to play thirty-minute turns for fifty turns, then give up on the game because it takes too long because they forgot to use the automation.

I'm firmly in the camp that believes that you don't reduce unnecssary complexity by offering automation - you reduce complexity by removing subsystems entirely.

The automation approach is problematic because only two results are possible: The AI is so bad that you will inevitably turn it off unless you're winning so decisively you can afford its inefficiency; or the AI is actually good enough that you might as well keep it always turned on. The latter though is only theoretical at the current time, as AIs by and large are not good at managing subsystems unless they're exceedingly simple (in which case why bother giving the player a manual option to do busywork?) and the real way most opponent AIs get away with being challenging is giving them massive resource advantages that side-step their inherent inefficiency.

Besides, if the AI is good enough to manage your empire, what's the point in playing? The game's compelling decisions must ultimately be in the hands of the human player, or else you don't really have a game.

In short, if the real decisive point is choosing Option 1 or 2, then it really doesn't matter if the game simulates getting "2" by a simple "1+1" instead of "(78/39+4-2)/2". The latter just gives you more rope to hang yourself with.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Ok, so Simon, let me run down a more in depth concept of the whole multi-stage colony system set up, and see if it sounds ok. Because I think the idea that a specialized colony as always being better may be the wrong way to look at it. Im thinking the 'hook' should be in just making it easier for a player.

So In stage one and two, colonies are standard Micromanage every aspect colonies.
Then in sector you get your specialized colonies.

Now a 'normal' colony can do a bit of everything, and, to make a totally random example, let us say your home world is pumping out:
400 science
600 industry
500 money
400 happiness
500 minerals.
For a total of 2400 'production units'

So basically fairly well balanced, because you have to have enough people to do all that work, and then keep everyone happy and well fed.
But if we fired a "Mining" colony pod at the same planet... Let us say it creates 2000 points of mineral production. Now, that is LESS than the 2400 Imagined points in our example, However, if we factor in trying to create a colony to produce that, and the amount of population you would need, food, happiness, etc... Making a 'normal' colony produce that much production in a single thing, may well be impossible.

After all, the amount of people who want things 'Simple' vs love of micro manage is much higher.
Now, amending what I thought earlier, you CAN still do the micro managing throughout the whole game. You could build nothing but 'normal' colonies, fiddling with each one of them if you want... But you don't have to.

I hope that may make more sense in terms of how best to imagine the whole normal vs specialized colony thing. After all, from a "plot" stand point, an expanding Galactic Civilization shouldn't have to worry about spending 20 years of growing a population to work the mines and factories of a new world... That’s what Robots are for. It's also ((I think)) A good way to utilize worlds one might normal never settle. Some small toxic planet would be unthinkable for a "normal" colony, but might be just right for a Pure research 'think tank' planet, or such.

Also, I love your idea of each Sector having a "capital" planet. You could have a standard 'Political' building that becomes the default planet capital. And then going out you can have a System capital, then Sector, the 'Imperial Capital'. These could be where you make all the changes as well.
Right click on your 'Sector Capital' and bring up a menu for changing polices and governments for the whole sector. Or you could right click on a single planet, and change settings for JUST that one planet.

I think the idea of 'Sectors' being like separate nations would be interesting, and add variety. One could be "Monarchy-traditional" sector, one could be "Stuffy Science Logical" sector, etc, but they would all be part of 'your' empire.
Mostly I really like the idea of a player being able to experiment with several different forms of government at the same time to see how they work. Especially in the late game.

And of course, again IF a player wanted, they could go within the sector, and fiddle with micro managing things... If they wanted...

[Simon_Jester]

I'm firmly in the camp that believes that you don't reduce unnecssary complexity by offering automation - you reduce complexity by removing subsystems entirely.

The automation approach is problematic because only two results are possible: The AI is so bad that you will inevitably turn it off unless you're winning so decisively you can afford its inefficiency; or the AI is actually good enough that you might as well keep it always turned on. The latter though is only theoretical at the current time, as AIs by and large are not good at managing subsystems unless they're exceedingly simple (in which case why bother giving the player a manual option to do busywork?) and the real way most opponent AIs get away with being challenging is giving them massive resource advantages that side-step their inherent inefficiency.

Well, that's more or less Crossroads' plan.

EDIT: [Or so I THOUGHT when I wrote this, but he explicitly contradicted it later]

Make the specialized "mining world" or "factory world" so productive that it becomes more desirable than a player-managed colony intended to do the same thing could realistically be. And a "mining world" isn't simply a normal colony planet optimized by the computer for mining; it's a planet where you explicitly click a box stating "I intend to use this world only for mining, plus any fortifications I construct."

Besides, if the AI is good enough to manage your empire, what's the point in playing? The game's compelling decisions must ultimately be in the hands of the human player, or else you don't really have a game.

One possibility is that the compelling decisions are not about economic micromanagement, but are instead about other things.

Ok, so Simon, let me run down a more in depth concept of the whole multi-stage colony system set up, and see if it sounds ok. Because I think the idea that a specialized colony as always being better may be the wrong way to look at it. Im thinking the 'hook' should be in just making it easier for a player.

The problem then is that you're creating a disincentive to use the specialized colonies, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do.

Now a 'normal' colony can do a bit of everything, and, to make a totally random example, let us say your home world is pumping out...

So basically fairly well balanced, because you have to have enough people to do all that work, and then keep everyone happy and well fed.
But if we fired a "Mining" colony pod at the same planet... Let us say it creates 2000 points of mineral production. Now, that is LESS than the 2400 Imagined points in our example, However, if we factor in trying to create a colony to produce that, and the amount of population you would need, food, happiness, etc... Making a 'normal' colony produce that much production in a single thing, may well be impossible.

So in that situation, you're creating an empire that is overall less efficient because of overspecialization, but easier to run. That's going to annoy all those people whose "solution" to the Civilization games is to tile the map with cities two squares apart so as to gain maximum resource utilization for minimum population size and growth.

Create a situation where you tell the player "micromanage your whole empire or accept an overall 15% loss of efficiency," and people will micromanage well past the point where they were supposed to stop, then complain about your game because it requires too much micromanagement.

If you want a game to be played in a certain way you HAVE to reward the player for doing it that way.

I hope that may make more sense in terms of how best to imagine the whole normal vs specialized colony thing. After all, from a "plot" stand point, an expanding Galactic Civilization shouldn't have to worry about spending 20 years of growing a population to work the mines and factories of a new world... That’s what Robots are for. It's also ((I think)) A good way to utilize worlds one might normal never settle. Some small toxic planet would be unthinkable for a "normal" colony, but might be just right for a Pure research 'think tank' planet, or such.

That's at least a comprehensible idea, but it still raises the problems above. Also, you probably can't afford to make productivity of specialized colonies be independent of environmental factors- because otherwise you remove the incentive to terraform or improve the environments of newly colonized worlds.

Also, I love your idea of each Sector having a "capital" planet. You could have a standard 'Political' building that becomes the default planet capital. And then going out you can have a System capital, then Sector, the 'Imperial Capital'. These could be where you make all the changes as well.
Right click on your 'Sector Capital' and bring up a menu for changing polices and governments for the whole sector. Or you could right click on a single planet, and change settings for JUST that one planet.

The roughest part of making this work is actually the "home sector," the one where previously you could manage every individual subcomponent, but now all of a sudden you're stuck managing everything through a 'capital world' screen.

I think the idea of 'Sectors' being like separate nations would be interesting, and add variety. One could be "Monarchy-traditional" sector, one could be "Stuffy Science Logical" sector, etc, but they would all be part of 'your' empire.
Mostly I really like the idea of a player being able to experiment with several different forms of government at the same time to see how they work. Especially in the late game.

Well, you might have a '(con)federation' style of government that encourages and enables this. On the other hand, you might have other styles of overall imperial government ('iron-fisted tyranny' or 'galactic bureaucracy') that don't, and in fact that actively reward you for enforcing uniform policies.

[Zinegata]

Make the specialized "mining world" or "factory world" so productive that it becomes more desirable than a player-managed colony intended to do the same thing could realistically be. And a "mining world" isn't simply a normal colony planet optimized by the computer for mining; it's a planet where you explicitly click a box stating "I intend to use this world only for mining, plus any fortifications I construct."

Well, Warlock 2 tried this to an extent with the free city system; where going above a certain number of cities results in considerable penalties. Hence people were pretty much forced to stick to the city cap and "free city" the rest, even though free cities were less productive as the alternative was a disintegrating empire.

I liked it from a design perspective, but it was very flawed in its execution as cities that were turned into "free cities" lost all of their character (and access to key special resources they were built on). A lot of people ended up using the option to disable it entirely.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Well, that's more or less Crossroads' plan.

EDIT: [Or so I THOUGHT when I wrote this, but he explicitly contradicted it later]

Make the specialized "mining world" or "factory world" so productive that it becomes more desirable than a player-managed colony intended to do the same thing could realistically be. And a "mining world" isn't simply a normal colony planet optimized by the computer for mining; it's a planet where you explicitly click a box stating "I intend to use this world only for mining, plus any fortifications I construct."

[/quote]
Yeah sorry about that, I have NO idea why I went back from my original assertion about Specialized colonies vs normal ones.
Really, it seems all of the Colony discussion seems "Sound" in terms of the ideas, it is just hammering out just HOW to make sure a Specialized colony will always be better than a normal one. I think part of it is just the fact that a Specialized colony can ONLY do one thing.
I had to think about it for a while, but your correct. Given the chance between Production, and "easiness" most players will take overly complicated to maximize production, over something that is "easy".
So at the end of the day, "Specialized" colonies 'hook' is that they always produce more than a normal colony. Really, after a certain point, most people will focus purely on Production and research, which would be done through Factory worlds and Research Worlds. So in truth, a player shouldn't really 'need' normal colonies, save for those that, again, like ot micromanage every little thing.

I hope that may make more sense in terms of how best to imagine the whole normal vs specialized colony thing. After all, from a "plot" stand point, an expanding Galactic Civilization shouldn't have to worry about spending 20 years of growing a population to work the mines and factories of a new world... That’s what Robots are for. It's also ((I think)) A good way to utilize worlds one might normal never settle. Some small toxic planet would be unthinkable for a "normal" colony, but might be just right for a Pure research 'think tank' planet, or such.

That's at least a comprehensible idea, but it still raises the problems above. Also, you probably can't afford to make productivity of specialized colonies be independent of environmental factors- because otherwise you remove the incentive to terraform or improve the environments of newly colonized worlds.

[/quote]
THAT is very true...
Even a low population specialized colony is still going to work better on a Non-Toxic world. You don't want radiation or nastier environmental stuff mucking up your Automated Mining/Factories and what not. Obviously you COULD found a colony on a "toxic" world, but you wouldn't get much back in terms of production.

Oh one last note on colonies. My "vision" for specialized vs normal colonies... I don't know if this makes a difference, but I feel a Specialized colony should 'look' fundamentally different when founded. If you create one on, say a world with 30 open tiles, instead of a planet with 30mines for instance, it should look more like one massive mining complex, with super strip mines across the surface or such. It may be purely an atheistic thing, but I "think" it may be good to have it to differentiate.

Well, you might have a '(con)federation' style of government that encourages and enables this. On the other hand, you might have other styles of overall imperial government ('iron-fisted tyranny' or 'galactic bureaucracy') that don't, and in fact that actively reward you for enforcing uniform policies.

Exactly, obviously if your main government is "Tyrannical Imperium" You won't dare let other worlds 'experiment' with democracy or something. So obviously a player would consider this in making choices of government. So you may have the old Civilization balancing trick of "Big production" vs "unhappy/oppressed citizens" or such.
Personally I'd LIKE to find a way to offset this. As I said, just because your a Tyrannical Dictator, doesn't mean you have to be EVIL, I feel you should still be able to (If your good at the politics) balance a dominating political system with "happiness".



Oh... I am also curious what you thought of the "Military" part of things, as that was were the second most effort was spent during the original discussions.

[Patroklos]

Crossroads, have you played Aurora at all? I ask because Aurora is an example of a 4x running rampant with some version of basically every feature you ask for and the result is a niche game few tackle at all and even less stick with to explore in any depth.

I like it, because every feature it has I have thought would be awesome if included in some 4x I've played. The problem is I very rarely wanted those features at the same time or even while playing the same 4x. Usually some combination of circumstances would make me think "man, wouldn't it be cool if I could do this too?!" but then in the very next play through things are different and that would no longer apply.

In Aurora you are forced to deal with every feature all the time whether you are a one planet starter empire or galaxy spanning mega empire. Assigning ship captains to every ship sounds awesome when you have 20 ships and an active war, it is less so when you have 1000 and haven't had a war in 100 game years. Or the opposite, when in the early game you are shuffling ore minors around and could care less who commands them but have to manage that mechanic on the off chance you play long enough (and survive long enough) to have you awesome Kirk-like command your battleship of doom.

Just a thought. Its also nice if you design the game so you can turn off or abstract whole segments of gameplay if you don't like them without appreciably affecting the other game mechanics. Don't like Panzer General style planetary battles that take an hour each? Fine, just have an auto summary function that resolves it in a second. The problem with this from a development standpoint, however, is that you never know what features your players will value so you might end up spending lots of time developing game sections nobody will ever play.

Great ideas in the OPs though, I am still working through it all!

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah sorry about that, I have NO idea why I went back from my original assertion about Specialized colonies vs normal ones.

Really, it seems all of the Colony discussion seems "Sound" in terms of the ideas, it is just hammering out just HOW to make sure a Specialized colony will always be better than a normal one. I think part of it is just the fact that a Specialized colony can ONLY do one thing.

I had to think about it for a while, but your correct. Given the chance between Production, and "easiness" most players will take overly complicated to maximize production, over something that is "easy".

One option might be to have an automatic "match our competitor's price" function. If, through some amazing feat of micromanagement, the player manages to get a productivity of X hammers per turn out of one of their generic colonies, where X is greater than the productivity of a dedicated mining world (or even greater than, say, half that productivity)...

Then ALL mining/industrial worlds automatically get a productivity boost. You get a text box saying "The Emperor's brilliant institutional reform of the industrial complexes of Zorchixaz XII is a model for industrial planners throughout the galaxy!"

That way, the player feels like he's accomplished something (and he has, he's unlocked an 'achievement' that will permanently enhance the productivity of his empire). And he's rewarded for it, and under no circumstances would he have been better off micromanaging his empire that way instead of, y'know, having dedicated mining worlds.

So at the end of the day, "Specialized" colonies 'hook' is that they always produce more than a normal colony. Really, after a certain point, most people will focus purely on Production and research, which would be done through Factory worlds and Research Worlds. So in truth, a player shouldn't really 'need' normal colonies, save for those that, again, like ot micromanage every little thing.

It might actually be best if Research came from, say, two different sources: specialized "City Worlds" that at a high level of development become very efficient sources of research (and economic goods, but not industrial goods), and "Research Outposts" that are best placed on worlds that would have limited growth potential.

The idea being that in the long run most of your population lives on "City Worlds," which support your people's cultural and intellectual life. Which are fed from "Farm Worlds" because one biosphere isn't enough to feed them. And most production is done on heavily automated "Industrial Worlds," which often have degraded (or no) biospheres and aren't really desireable places to live.

I hope that may make more sense in terms of how best to imagine the whole normal vs specialized colony thing. After all, from a "plot" stand point, an expanding Galactic Civilization shouldn't have to worry about spending 20 years of growing a population to work the mines and factories of a new world... That’s what Robots are for. It's also ((I think)) A good way to utilize worlds one might normal never settle. Some small toxic planet would be unthinkable for a "normal" colony, but might be just right for a Pure research 'think tank' planet, or such.

That's at least a comprehensible idea, but it still raises the problems above. Also, you probably can't afford to make productivity of specialized colonies be independent of environmental factors- because otherwise you remove the incentive to terraform or improve the environments of newly colonized worlds.

THAT is very true...
Even a low population specialized colony is still going to work better on a Non-Toxic world. You don't want radiation or nastier environmental stuff mucking up your Automated Mining/Factories and what not. Obviously you COULD found a colony on a "toxic" world, but you wouldn't get much back in terms of production.[/quote]Well, if research comes from "city" worlds, as does money and anything you recruit from your actual population, then that automatically helps to rebalance the situation.

Also, what takes time on a mining world isn't growing the population, it's growing the infrastructure. Unless your civilization is REALLY BIG, setting up industrial infrastructure on a whole new planet is going to take a long time because it can't all just be shipped in prefab from somewhere else. You have to land on the planet with the tools to make the tools to make the tools, and build up from there.

So population won't be the bottleneck; logistics will.

Oh one last note on colonies. My "vision" for specialized vs normal colonies... I don't know if this makes a difference, but I feel a Specialized colony should 'look' fundamentally different when founded. If you create one on, say a world with 30 open tiles, instead of a planet with 30mines for instance, it should look more like one massive mining complex, with super strip mines across the surface or such. It may be purely an atheistic thing, but I "think" it may be good to have it to differentiate.

Aesthetic != atheistic, but yes, I like this.

Well, you might have a '(con)federation' style of government that encourages and enables this. On the other hand, you might have other styles of overall imperial government ('iron-fisted tyranny' or 'galactic bureaucracy') that don't, and in fact that actively reward you for enforcing uniform policies.

Exactly, obviously if your main government is "Tyrannical Imperium" You won't dare let other worlds 'experiment' with democracy or something. So obviously a player would consider this in making choices of government. So you may have the old Civilization balancing trick of "Big production" vs "unhappy/oppressed citizens" or such.

Well, the flip side of that is that a democracy won't let people "experiment" with tyranny either; if it does it isn't much of a democracy.

My point is that if you go for something like Civ IV civics choices, you should have the first choice be something like "basic structure," with options like "confederation," "hierarchy," "hive mind," and whatever. Each of these choices has multiple possible variations: a "confederate authoritarian" system will be more feudal, while a "hierarchical authoritarian" system is a classic interstellar empire with brutal guy on top. Some combinations may be forbidden, but in general the point is that the degree to which your empire has a uniform central government and social structure should be a choice. You should be able to have one government for everywhere, and indeed this should be presented as the default choice.

Personally I'd LIKE to find a way to offset this. As I said, just because your a Tyrannical Dictator, doesn't mean you have to be EVIL, I feel you should still be able to (If your good at the politics) balance a dominating political system with "happiness".

Conversely you could have a "free" society that is in fact sociopathic and predatory and in which the average economic activity is efficient but demoralizing for the common citizen.

Perhaps we should just track "centralized/decentralized power" separately from whatever index we use for the evil-meter. With maybe a weak correlation at the extreme ends of the scale.

Oh... I am also curious what you thought of the "Military" part of things, as that was were the second most effort was spent during the original discussions.

I haven't got an opinion of that. My impulse it to sort out the economic side first, then look at the military side.

Because frankly, we can append almost ANY military system to almost ANY economic/logistics system. They're separate elements of a modular design, not an integrated whole.