I'm tired of 4x

[Lrfss]

ORIGINAL: thiosk

For me, the spammyness of the colony rush can be rectified in a simple, but not always fun, way.

Material upkeep.

As a planet develops, it requires large amounts of steel, polymer, carbon fibre, etcetera. Enormous quantities. Putting a colony on a planet should be more than letting population grow and bringing in luxuries; it should require gigatons of strategic resources per point of population and per point of development. How many tons of building material are required to build a small city? Scale that up to 5 billion screaming peasants.

Further, it should require a certain amount of resource "flow" to keep those development levels. In this way, strategic resources will actually require strategy and development, and would need to be monitored and invested in. Question: has ANYONE EVER run out of steel? If not, whats the point of the resource again?

A massive colonization spree would drive demand for simple resources through the roof. Such demand would squelch resources from upkeep, causing development to deteriorate. Too many developed worlds would have too high an upkeep to allow for a rapid pace of colonization, without the industrial and research base to support it. Stars containing only asteroids would suddenly be worth fighting over in a long game, and pirate raids on base resource extractors would suddenly actually hit the pocket.

Would this kind of economy be "fun" in a traditional 4x sense? No, i'm not sure it would be, too complicated to beginners, especially. Is it the kind of thing I want? YES IT TOTALLY IS. A properly balanced system would SOLVE colony spam outright. An epic game would become truly epic.

DO IT. Or, someone, mod it-- i can help with the design principles but I'm no coder

Edit: Now take the requirement for constant shipments and upkeep flow, and add that to the fuel extraction and conversion cost, and you have real functional limit to the true range of your colonization. All those freighters carting trillions of tons of metal and carbon to a world require a lot of fuel. You may have to mothball a planet that is too far away to support. And suddenly dumping research and investment into improved cargo holds and extractor rates becomes a real pressing issue for the burgeoning empire.

I like this idea for sure!

[Lrfss]

ORIGINAL: J HG T

Material upkeep and creature farms both sound like great ideas. The creatures are part of DW world so it would be great to give them even bigger role gameplay wise.
The only thing that worries me about material upkeep is that it could once again rise the importance of the mighty Homeworld. Also, it would be neat if there would be small icons next to transports, planets and bases showing what materials and how much of them they are holding. This could be toggleable of course so you could check it when you need.

I like the icon idea as well, would be helpful in particular if we had material upkeep!

[Lrfss]

ORIGINAL: thiosk

This is how I imagine a game of Thio's Ideal DW would start:

A species doesn't go to space for any reason other than necessity. So, the almighty homeworld, while responsible for all the production and the wealth, should really be in quite a depression when we first step into the stars. Overpopulation, natural resources stretched to the limit, damaged development value, terrible shortages of... everything.

Colony ships are huge, and shouldn't be the first object produced. Ever. I'm anti-colony-rush.

Maybe the slider for starting tech should just have another notch-- dawn of the space age, before even the hyperdrive is in production. The early mining ships should start getting produced, should be a little tough to actually get going. Forget a constructor. You need private corporate mining before you can even start building proper mining stations. Anything to placate the homeworld and get the economy established. Work in the initial star system to get your nugget established, start heading outside the solar system to pick up some material on the outskirts. Hell, maybe you'd even have to build enough really crappy vessels to bonk a couple kraltors guarding a derelict starship, and THATS how you get your hyperdrive.

I'll wait patiently. Someone make me this game.

Would be cool if DW started Pre-Warp Tech, good idea!

[Lrfss]

ORIGINAL: Gareth_Bryne

Okay guys, sorry to go against the flow here, but (IMHO):

Why NOT material upkeep (for planets)?

Any planet of the types used in DW has a sizable amount of resources, which it uses for it's own needs. Take a look at Earth, for example: our planet has huge (and badly wasted, yes) reserves of steel, carbon, the whole table of elements. BUT there are SOME resources lacking, because a) they are unstable, b) they are hard to get or produce, c) they are dangerous to work with and only then d) everyone wants so much of them. The principles of recyclability, reusability and economy should be counted in too. In short: the basic resource upkeep is the (hidden) parameter that defines maximum planet population and the planet's attractiveness (that's why continental is on top of the list[:)]). In my opinion, the DW existing planet-resource system is top-of-the-line and can mostly be polished around.

Where CAN material upkeep be exploited?

Planets can have a surplus of specific rare/basic resources, which are shown on the planet view and form the basis of DW private economy. In my opinion, they could also have a deficit of specific basic resources, shown in red, which will lead to higher prices for the resource on the planet and slower planetary development without it. The deficit can be hard-set or random-event defined.

Ships will need refitting in bases once every 5-10 years. That should mean not only a credit price, but also a resource price based on the ship's total resource price.

As for colony ships, yes, a colony ship carrying 10-15 mil.!!! citizens, even if in cryostasis, needs MUCH MORE resource and logistics support than a 10,000 crew dreadnought. A review of the existing system is basically that a colony ship built using a single planetary docking space requires a LOT of time (and resources) to build. Such ships should be foolproof due to the responsibility for lives. The sheer callousness of my throwing C-ship after C-ship into pirate infested, hostile native, VIP resource planets, well... at the very least should lead to a severe temporary happiness drop on the originating planet (PR, you know). It must be much easier to build multiple constant passenger ships ferrying up to a 100k potential new colonists from the main planets to colony worlds than even a single C-ship. Notwithstanding, for efficient colonization, if you implement the above, a planet would be a) capable of building a C-ship from about 0,5 billion people and b) building those C-ships one by one, around the clock, automatically of necessity, so as to not to fall behind.

Me likes space creatures. Me wants kaltor skin boots and gas giant monster jelly pudding).


P.S. Oh, and one more thing. When a game becomes Epic, the excessive amount of available options radically turn off new players. So, a very thorough, immersive tutorial and most of the options turned OFF by default (until said new player learns how to use them) is the way to go. That's the reason that Dominions 3 didn't become massively popular, but everyone that took a risk and dug into the options, usually stayed forever.

All good ideas IMHO!

[Lrfss]

ORIGINAL: Abraxis

Another method for preventing colony spamming is to think of a way for small empires (just a few planets) to still develop, where large empires could not.  The one thing I was initially impressed by in Civ5 was how the global happiness accomplished this.  Ideally it should have meant that one could either expand out, having many cities, but low populations in each city.  Or you could just have a few cities of very high population.  Of course it ended up not quite working, and it was a pretty lame and too obviously contrived method for controlling the player.
Though I'm not sure of a good way to do it without imposing some kind of restrictions or rules who's sole purpose is to regulate this kind of thing, which could very easily end up just being an annoyance and make the game feel too controlled.

Your material upkeep idea would certainly be a step in the right direction (and would be easy to implement), but I do wish they would come up with positive motivation for an empire to be small (whether the empire wants to or the situation gives them no other choice).  They need a way to continue to expand economically if they can no longer expand their territory, this method has to be at the expense of expanding territory otherwise all empires will do it simultaneously while expanding their territory and it will accomplish nothing.

Definitely not an easy system to implement, or even conceive, but if a 4X came around that nailed this somehow I would be a happy man.

P.S. If I'm incomprehensible I apologize, I just woke up

Seems to me that a possible way for smaller empires and those that do not wish to do the mega colony rush could keep up via the Tech tree. It would seem that if the Tech tree was expanded like about 2x, 4x or more times the size it could manage all kinds of style of play! I would venture to guess that about everyone here would likely approve of a much larger Tech tree and one that makes sense and not just more stuff and gadgets to play with?

[Gareth_Bryne]

thiosk, I absolutely agree on that.[:)] It's just that specifically I agree with you on resource utilization and colony ships and have a slightly different perspective on planetary development. But, to throw in an extra idea, just maybe planetary buildings would require an upkeep of the kind. And there are MOO2-type events like: "Your planet has become mineral rich/poor."

[pmelheck1]

I like the Upkeep for colonies.  I also like to pre-FTL tech.  I like the idea of expanding out into the home solar system before other solar systems.  I do think the requirements for upkeep should taper off to lower values after all construction is done.  New colonies should be a drain on the empire that as they grow they go from drain to adding income to the empire.

I also like the idea of some form of limitation on ship sizes.  As it stands now escorts can be built as large as a capital ship with the only limiting factor being the yard construction size.  I also like the different types of systems (military, ect).  Pirates should never get military tech except rarely and should be a patchwork of what they do get.  Military systems should be expensive and require more rare materials for construction but should be much better but very much less likely to be stolen do to much higher security around the project and cost of the systems and rarity of materials pirates would rather sale than devote to weapons manufacture.  Something that might be interesting but I don't know if it could be done would be for the pirates to "supplement" their fleet by capturing ships and income by capturing resource bases.  Maybe even the ability to capture small colonies that are very lightly or undefended.  The colony would be eliminated and replaced by either a small resource base or a small resource spaceport to represent the colony being seized and exploited by the pirates.  Maybe have the pirates sell intel on ones enemies or neutrals or sell yours to your enemies or sell both your and your enemies intel to each other.

[thiosk]

  The colony would be eliminated and replaced by either a small resource base or a small resource spaceport to represent the colony being seized and exploited by the pirates.  Maybe have the pirates sell intel on ones enemies or neutrals or sell yours to your enemies or sell both your and your enemies intel to each other.

You might be on to something here. One thing that bugs me about pirates is how bloodthirsty they are. Pirates want to capture and steal, not blow up starbases as a top priority. Whats the point? Penetrating defenses and docking at your spaceport should result in them filling their cargo holds with your most expensive\valuable luxuries and resources.

Every space port has a cargo hold. Let the pirates raid it and run! If resources were actually valuable, it would be critical to protect against!

[Data]

+2

[RaffleSnaffle]

ORIGINAL: WoodMan

Anything that slows down the game and makes things more Epic (but not overly and pointlessly complex) gets my vote.  As long as the AI can keep up of course.  This is just a general statement, not solely aimed at Distant Worlds, but all games in general [:)]

I completely agree. I think you can put too much into a game and give the player soo many things to worry about and soo many things going on that you can't really focus on making the bigger decisions. More diplo options with empires and just positive tweaks to what is already an awesome game is good for me. There is a point where you can get overly complex and it just ruins the game. I like not having to worry if colony 'x' isn't happy with the way their roads are laid out or if they are un-happy with how the local bus system works when I am playing a space empire game.

Less can be more. I say just keep improving what we already have and make it so I can see the cargo of a selected ship in the selection window [;)]

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: Lrfss

ORIGINAL: thiosk

For me, the spammyness of the colony rush can be rectified in a simple, but not always fun, way.

Material upkeep.

As a planet develops, it requires large amounts of steel, polymer, carbon fibre, etcetera. Enormous quantities. Putting a colony on a planet should be more than letting population grow and bringing in luxuries; it should require gigatons of strategic resources per point of population and per point of development. How many tons of building material are required to build a small city? Scale that up to 5 billion screaming peasants.

Further, it should require a certain amount of resource "flow" to keep those development levels. In this way, strategic resources will actually require strategy and development, and would need to be monitored and invested in. Question: has ANYONE EVER run out of steel? If not, whats the point of the resource again?

A massive colonization spree would drive demand for simple resources through the roof. Such demand would squelch resources from upkeep, causing development to deteriorate. Too many developed worlds would have too high an upkeep to allow for a rapid pace of colonization, without the industrial and research base to support it. Stars containing only asteroids would suddenly be worth fighting over in a long game, and pirate raids on base resource extractors would suddenly actually hit the pocket.

Would this kind of economy be "fun" in a traditional 4x sense? No, i'm not sure it would be, too complicated to beginners, especially. Is it the kind of thing I want? YES IT TOTALLY IS. A properly balanced system would SOLVE colony spam outright. An epic game would become truly epic.

DO IT. Or, someone, mod it-- i can help with the design principles but I'm no coder

Edit: Now take the requirement for constant shipments and upkeep flow, and add that to the fuel extraction and conversion cost, and you have real functional limit to the true range of your colonization. All those freighters carting trillions of tons of metal and carbon to a world require a lot of fuel. You may have to mothball a planet that is too far away to support. And suddenly dumping research and investment into improved cargo holds and extractor rates becomes a real pressing issue for the burgeoning empire.

I like this idea for sure!

Another way to really help this is with a food supply/demand system. You would need agrarian worlds (for your species) that don't grow huge colonies, but have lots of farms to supply the larger over-populated planets (MoO3 did this). If you don't have enough food for your people, colonies start suffering, rebelling, and citizens eventually die off of starvation.

How it works is rather simple, I'll do an example of playing Humans:

Humans need grain, meat, and vegetables to live. While you might be able to get meat from an Ice or desert planet, maybe even volcanic, grain and vegies aren't going to grow there (too hot, lack of water, or too cold). For that reason, humans really need some good continental planets for growing their food, and Marshy Swamps would work as a best second choice, but at a greatly reduced rate. The balance is in how the 'land' is used.

When I get home from work where I can be on my own computer with more time and tools, I will flesh out this idea and post it as its own thread. Then we can have further discussion on it. But the general idea I am having is that taking on too many 'unsuitable' colonies will stretch your ability to feed your people beyond the acceptable limit.

[Data]

the moo parallel and food element remind me of anther thing...race picks. They would hugely expand the customization and gameplay.

[RaffleSnaffle]

yeah the food thing is a cool idea. I got tired of Gal. civ.'s planet lots tho. like where you manually built the buildings and depending on the planet it had a certain number of buildable lots. I guess that concept worked there, but for an RTS it really can't be TOO complicated. Although I do like the idea of having races generally flourish on certain type of planets. (do they already do that? still not sure...)

[RaffleSnaffle]

like i mean while you have to concentrate on everything else you also have to make sure you have enough farms on all of your planets too. idk i guess i just don't want this to be another GAL Civ game i guess. that game pissed me off. lol i am not smart enough for it i think. I have never tried moo2 tho. where can i try it?

[thiosk]

If foodstuffs were some abstract resource that was moved around and consumed, I think that would be pretty cool. Creating a separate 'class' of resource, though, I'm not sure about... but there could be something to it if implemented properly.

But, it fits in great with the concept of regular shipments required to maintain a population and development. It also creates great opportunities to cheese the AI.

Regular shipments also makes the direct attack of private vessels viable targets. You could engage in a trade war, blowing up vital shipments of food. Also, your vital shipments could be likewise struck.

I think it would be awesome.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: thiosk

If foodstuffs were some abstract resource that was moved around and consumed, I think that would be pretty cool. Creating a separate 'class' of resource, though, I'm not sure about... but there could be something to it if implemented properly.

But, it fits in great with the concept of regular shipments required to maintain a population and development. It also creates great opportunities to cheese the AI.

Regular shipments also makes the direct attack of private vessels viable targets. You could engage in a trade war, blowing up vital shipments of food. Also, your vital shipments could be likewise struck.

I think it would be awesome.

Well I fleshed out the entire idea in tm.asp?m=2727075 thread, and what I described would be very detailed and in depth. And in truth, a simple abstracted 'Food' would suffice as a strategic resource. I just like the idea of the added logistics, as it forces you to slow down and plan out your expansion.

One thing, with the addition of the different types of food for different species makes it even more strategic on the empire scale. If my empire is all humans, I know they like beef, potatoes and bread...but if conquer/colonize a planet full of Ackdarians, they might like to eat bacterial plankton...meaning I have to supply them with another type of resource. Might be too complicated, might not...but that is why we debate things.

If at all possible I would like to debate this system in its own thread, rather than completely high-jacking this one. [:)]

[Data]

Not checked but I'm pretty sure you can find it on GOG now....MOO2 should be de definition of GOG [:)]
fair warning: being an older games means more micromanagement