Like everyone else, I love and hate 4X games.
Hearing the epic story of an entire species as they romp through the galaxy weaving their ten-thousand-year story in with friends, enemies, and supernovas? Yes please!
But the actual gameplay is so bland. It always goes in one of two ways. It's either "fun at first but now we've done the same thing 50 times" or "that thing is polished away, so it's not even fun at first".
I like the stories of interstellar civilizations!
Much like I like the stories of the families in The Sims.
4X games have some elements to create a foundation for these stories. Tech trees, alien races with reliable personalities, planets with different characteristics, and so on. However, the pattern falls apart in the midgame, as playing well becomes more important than having a story.
The Sims takes the opposite approach: after you've gained a few job levels, you probably have some breathing room. You can focus entirely on leveling up your skills and jobs in The Sims, but there's no real pressure to do so. The midgame allows you to develop the stories as you see fit. In short: the beginning of the game forces you to choose an approach, and then it gets easier so you can see what kind of stories arise from the approach you've chosen.
I've been brainstorming to see if I can think of a cool 4X-like design that does something similar, and here's one I like.
One of the big issues is that fungible resources like cash are disconnected from the continuity of your story. When you spend money to do something, you're not connecting it to a previous story beat. Therefore, instead of using space cash, how about constructing chains of assets?
For example, you have a garden planet. It has four slots: two industry, two evolution.
You might choose to mount a "mining" industry onto your planet. Rather than producing cash, it has some more specific slots: materials, orbital, metropolis. You can then start to slot in things like advanced armor, orbital construction yards, and a cultural center. In turn those have slots, and you can continue to build out a chain of Things Your Species Has.
This chain allows for context to be preserved. Your space fleet was built at the orbital construction yards supported by the mining industry of your home planet. This not only gives the player cues for their internal story, but it also gives the game opportunities to create interesting challenges: if the mines run out, it's not just a matter of losing a random facility on a random planet. Within a few years your construction yard will turn into a ghost town, and a few years after that, your fleet will start to fall apart.
That's an interesting situation from every perspective... especially if we punch it up with characters that are part of this. We can seed them all ahead of time: the mine foreman, the construction foreman, the admiral. In the beginning, you meet them, and the admiral doesn't care about the mine foreman's problems... as time passes, you can see the changing situations written on the characters, as the mine foreman becomes destitute and the admiral starts bickering with the construction foreman about why his ships can't be properly maintained.
You don't have to go that far, of course. I'm just doing whatifs.
Replacing that mining industry would be a priority. The easiest solution might be to put a "fossil fuels" asset on the planet. It takes up and evolution slot and has an industry mounting slot, which you could then move the mining industry onto. Bang, everything's solved. Right?
Wellllll...
A big part of this is that the chain of assets is not simply a chain of fungible things. The space fleet isn't simply "the same as every other space fleet but from a specific planet". Instead, the space fleet inherits all the "side effects" of its parent cards. Side effects are always passed down. Some are good, like "advanced armor". But some are bad.
The mining industry might have a side effect of "exploited underclass". This means that the docks, the space fleet, the cultural center: all would have an exploited underclass. Adding in the fossil fuel cards also creates a "toxic" side effect. Now the docks, the space fleet, and the cultural center have both an exploited underclass and a toxic side effect.
In addition to providing more materials for the implicit and explicit story we're weaving, they also provide a hook for an entire game mechanic: stories made out of the side effects rather than only the assets. The toxic + underclass combo is rife for a "black lung outbreak" story, where millions of underpaid workers are dying of toxic fumes and the corporations are trying to conceal it. This kind of story is great for allowing the player to explicitly specify what kind of space nation they're running. How far will the player go to help the underclass? To help the economy? After all, any choice they make will send a shockwave down the chain: if they spend a lot of effort on helping the miners, then the mining industry will suffer a temporary (20-year?) penalty. Halfway through that, the penalty will propagate to the dockyards and cultural center. Halfway through that, it'll hit the space fleet.
Now, the real secret of this approach is that it's only half of the system. That's the physical half, covering things and physical technologies.
The other half is the social half, covering rules, governments, cultures, social technologies, and so on.
The two sides interact. Assets for the social half are provided both by physical assets and by the vignettes inspired by physical side effects. Assets for the physical half are provided both by social assets and the vignettes inspired by social side effects.
So if you side with the miners, in addition to a physical penalty, you'll get a social card. Perhaps "worker's unions". Siding for the corporations has a physical bonus, but also gives you the social card "monstrous corporations". If you don't play them, you'll hit your hand limit and you won't get any more physical-side vignettes until you do.
You can add any additional complexity you like in terms of things like maps and factions and battle mechanics, but the heart of the system is simply a physical and social chain, where you try to manage the fallout of your older choices, especially as side effect build up.
I think it'd be fun! I prototyped it a bit, but it requires a lot more assets to work, so I'd have to put in a lot more effort to make a playable.
What do you think?
