For the past few weeks I've been working on a new prototype which allows players to quickly "sketch" space ships into existence.
However, in order for the sketched ships to mean anything, there needs to be a world they exist within. A framework in which they can be judged. A set of rewards for doing well. A progression in the types of devices and hulls, and so on.
Any kind of stat-heavy core gameplay loop (repeatedly designing space ships, for example) needs a larger context.
Now, you could create a story. "The Earth Empire is expanding into deep space and oh no the Brikklebats from Klonor 5 are attacking!"
Or you could create a simple board-game-like set of mechanics. "The ship you created will manage to map sector 3 in 8 years, then you can build a colony ship..."
But both of those are missing the point.
See, when the player builds something, the point of the game is to glorify the thing they built. Whether it's good or bad, you want to make those good and bad aspects shine.
Games where you can fly the ship after you build it are good at this, because you can really feel that the engines you installed work well, or that the guns really aren't good enough, or whatever. But I don't want to make a game solely about ships that shoot at each other. The player is far more likely to build a freighter or a science vessel, and I need to glorify those... and there's not many games which do that.
I think the main feeling I want is that moment in a science fiction show where you see a ship type you're familiar with doing something in some episode. It could be a squad of Galaxy-classes struggling to fight off a Borg cube, or it could be something as simple as a rebel B-wing sliding into a docking bay alongside Luke's X-wing.
These ships are things you recognize, and they exist in the universe. Hell, they make up the universe. They have an ongoing role not just in one story, but in dozens of stories. They don't stop existing once you've rated them, and the fabric of the universe is woven out of these threads.
To make this something that works in a game environment where the players make the ships, we need to be able to tell those kinds of stories.
So... what if we make a star map that is entirely about creating story hooks?
Instead of placing facilities that make numbers go up, you place facilities that create stories.
For example, instead of placing a lunar mining facility to make your minerals increase, you might place a "mining concern" that overlaps the planet and the moon. This would create stories of strife between the lunar miners and the planetside miners. To place it, you would need to build some kind of freighter or mining ship. Then there would be an "episode" - a simple story where the emergency performance of your ship helps miners survive... or die. The core performance of your ship would determine how long the mining concern remains a mining concern: at the end of that duration, it would transition into established and peaceful infrastructure.
Basically, each turn the player might choose to place a concern on the map, and then either build a new ship class or assign an existing ship class to it. The simple, generated story it tells highlights the ship's emergency performance and livability, while the numbers attached to it at the end are determined by the ship's core mission functionality. The story can easily include arbitrary existing elements: interference from nearby concerns, ships inherited from old concerns in the area, named characters and ships from other episodes.
The amount of player control over these episodes is limited, perhaps even nonexistent, and the story quality is not important. I mean, they play the same role as an arbitrary random encounter in a combat game, they don't have to be genius.
They exist solely to take what the player has created and show it back to them in full glory. "You made this", the game says, "look how it works in this universe!"
With a side plate of "oh, remember this stuff from before? What a definitely-existing-and-not-at-all-completely-bullshit universe we have!"
... I think it might work.
What do you think?
Showing posts with label 4x. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 4x. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
A Simple Game about Huge Space Nations
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?
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?
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Humanizing an Empire
As you may know, I really love games where you build things. And what is the biggest thing you can build?
An empire.
When I was younger, I was obsessed with 4X games like Civilization, Masters of Orion, and so on. As time wore on, their shine wore off. These days, I still play those kinds of games on occasion, but I prefer games where I build smaller things.
The reason is simple: those smaller things are more people-centric.
Recently, games about building empires have tried to become more people-centric. Civ animates their iconic rulers with loving care. Stellaris gives you a bunch of people with personal traits and names and asks you to assign them to colonies, star ships, factions. Everywhere, people are becoming more common.
The problem is that these games aren't about people. They never were, and they can't be: the structure of the game is oriented around nation-building, not personal dramas. This means interactions are all about bowing to the will of the empire.
Games like Crusader Kings II push this as far as can be reasonably expected, tracking hundreds of distinct individuals throughout lifetimes, letting you push them into service, crush them, or exploit them. This appeals to a certain kind of fantasy, I'm sure, but it's not really very good at letting me build something that means something.
This actively interferes with my enjoyment of these games. Civilization VI isn't about building a nation, it's about beating Alexander the Great as he weirdly and obsessively declares war against you every decade for a thousand years. It's humanized to the point where I don't think of that territory as another nation - I think of it as Queen Victoria's house. Vickie's front yard.
We've been humanizing these games for eons. Everyone remembers Gandhi's words backed by nuclear weapons. Everyone remembers the personality-filled cockpit views in Star Control. But these were very shallow, passive efforts - the difference between anthropomorphic tags and being a person.
Basically, when something is tagged, you can easily slip a personality onto it and ascribe a mood or emotion behind its actions. The Ur-Quan dreadnaught fighting the Spathi? It becomes the grumpy, remorseless Ur-Quan hunting down a hilarious, cowardly Spathi.
When something is portrayed as a person, things are different. The easiest example is Stellaris: a few minutes into the game, you meet a pirate faction made up of your own species in order to inject some kind of military action into the early game. You choose an admiral for your fleet. Do you pick Sara? She has a bonus to attack and a neat haircut. Doug? He learns fast and is wearing a space baseball jersey. Veronica? She can move the fleet faster and looks appropriately grumpy.
Whichever you choose, it's a person, not just a vague indicator. Instantly, you start thinking of your fleet ops as part of their career, part of their personal story. So you go to fight the enemy.
... and they have a fleet commander, too. A person. With a unique name, unique appearance, unique powers.
You kill them. You never learn anything about them. Ironically, you never even have enough info to give them a personality. They are the same species as you, so there's nothing distinctive enough to make you assign them the personalities you give to the other aliens you might meet.
This is distracting. Players naturally gravitate towards densely simulated things. You've taught the player that individual people matter, each one is simulated and tracked independently. Then you show them a person, as dense and complex and promising as the one they chose... and just kill them. Wordlessly, effortlessly, pointlessly.
Worse, the alien species cultures are largely randomized. When you do meet an alien, the anthropomorphic tags they bear don't correlate to their actual characteristics. This turns the emotional responses into mud. You've trained the player to respond to individuals, but then refuse to let them interact with individuals. You train the player to not care about species, because their appearance is unrelated to their traits, but then force them to interact with species.
Civ VI doesn't do as many things wrong. It has very, very strongly personified nations, but they have the correct personalities and feel reasonable. Unfortunately, you can't really interact with those people. You can only interact with their nations. Even that is in a vague, impersonal way.
On the other hand...
Let's say I make a game about building cars. There's a bunch of NPCs, they want cars that suit their personalities and needs. I build them a car. They go "whoaaaa! NICE!" They go drive it. They come back. "It was great, did X really well, thanks a ton!"
The scale is small enough that it feels like a personal interaction even when I don't do social things. The response is personal, about something concrete and part of their life. The choices I make are much more centered around facets of their personality, because each NPC can have wildly different taste in cars without becoming unbelievable.
It is already much more deeply personal than Civ VI, even if the NPCs are just a doodled pixel portrait.
Honestly, even if there were no NPCs, building the car is still more personal than building an empire in Civ VI, because I can easily imagine how someone would use and enjoy the car. That's a big part of why Space Engineers is fun! There's no NPCs, no personalities, but imagining how people would live in space, use my ships - that's fun!
In my mind, 4X games can't survive in this awkward place. They will naturally have to become either more humanized... or less.
"More" seems to be the trend, so how would that go?
The two basic paths are the Civ VI path and the Stellaris path, which is why I used them as examples.
The Civ VI path focuses on a few, highly detailed, carefully designed NPCs. Further down this path lies a game where you can interact with those NPCs in more detailed, complex ways. Expanding your empire probably matters less than establishing a good relationship with your neighbors. This will generally take the focus off the militaristic side of things and play up more complex interactions.
The easiest way to do it would be to make the lands of the empire play the role of the home and body of the other ruler. Rather than negotiate with the ruler as a lump sum, you interact with specific cities or lands in a wider variety of ways.
There's not really any way around this. We can't continue having a bleak, war-focused set of interactions if we keep humanizing the other side. I already have no interest in going to war, even with the relatively weak personalities in these games today.
The other direction is to track an impressive number of people. Rather than the ruler of each nation, you track everyone. Politics constantly evolves and changes who is in what positions. The rulers of each nation come and go.
I have a suspicion this is definitely going to spawn a genre, but I don't think I'll like it much. That many people means that each person will be disposable, temporary. That's not going to scratch my itch.
At the very least, I hope all these people have personality tags, so I can easily assign them a mood and emotion as they do things. At the moment it's all undifferentiated mush, and it's very hard to establish any deep connection to the various NPCs. It'd be interesting to try to improve that connection while still having a large number of randomly-generated NPCs. Maybe use some techniques to inject personalities into the flow of the game.
But right this instant, I have a car-building prototype to create.
An empire.
When I was younger, I was obsessed with 4X games like Civilization, Masters of Orion, and so on. As time wore on, their shine wore off. These days, I still play those kinds of games on occasion, but I prefer games where I build smaller things.
The reason is simple: those smaller things are more people-centric.
Recently, games about building empires have tried to become more people-centric. Civ animates their iconic rulers with loving care. Stellaris gives you a bunch of people with personal traits and names and asks you to assign them to colonies, star ships, factions. Everywhere, people are becoming more common.
The problem is that these games aren't about people. They never were, and they can't be: the structure of the game is oriented around nation-building, not personal dramas. This means interactions are all about bowing to the will of the empire.
Games like Crusader Kings II push this as far as can be reasonably expected, tracking hundreds of distinct individuals throughout lifetimes, letting you push them into service, crush them, or exploit them. This appeals to a certain kind of fantasy, I'm sure, but it's not really very good at letting me build something that means something.
This actively interferes with my enjoyment of these games. Civilization VI isn't about building a nation, it's about beating Alexander the Great as he weirdly and obsessively declares war against you every decade for a thousand years. It's humanized to the point where I don't think of that territory as another nation - I think of it as Queen Victoria's house. Vickie's front yard.
We've been humanizing these games for eons. Everyone remembers Gandhi's words backed by nuclear weapons. Everyone remembers the personality-filled cockpit views in Star Control. But these were very shallow, passive efforts - the difference between anthropomorphic tags and being a person.
Basically, when something is tagged, you can easily slip a personality onto it and ascribe a mood or emotion behind its actions. The Ur-Quan dreadnaught fighting the Spathi? It becomes the grumpy, remorseless Ur-Quan hunting down a hilarious, cowardly Spathi.
When something is portrayed as a person, things are different. The easiest example is Stellaris: a few minutes into the game, you meet a pirate faction made up of your own species in order to inject some kind of military action into the early game. You choose an admiral for your fleet. Do you pick Sara? She has a bonus to attack and a neat haircut. Doug? He learns fast and is wearing a space baseball jersey. Veronica? She can move the fleet faster and looks appropriately grumpy.
Whichever you choose, it's a person, not just a vague indicator. Instantly, you start thinking of your fleet ops as part of their career, part of their personal story. So you go to fight the enemy.
... and they have a fleet commander, too. A person. With a unique name, unique appearance, unique powers.
You kill them. You never learn anything about them. Ironically, you never even have enough info to give them a personality. They are the same species as you, so there's nothing distinctive enough to make you assign them the personalities you give to the other aliens you might meet.
This is distracting. Players naturally gravitate towards densely simulated things. You've taught the player that individual people matter, each one is simulated and tracked independently. Then you show them a person, as dense and complex and promising as the one they chose... and just kill them. Wordlessly, effortlessly, pointlessly.
Worse, the alien species cultures are largely randomized. When you do meet an alien, the anthropomorphic tags they bear don't correlate to their actual characteristics. This turns the emotional responses into mud. You've trained the player to respond to individuals, but then refuse to let them interact with individuals. You train the player to not care about species, because their appearance is unrelated to their traits, but then force them to interact with species.
Civ VI doesn't do as many things wrong. It has very, very strongly personified nations, but they have the correct personalities and feel reasonable. Unfortunately, you can't really interact with those people. You can only interact with their nations. Even that is in a vague, impersonal way.
On the other hand...
Let's say I make a game about building cars. There's a bunch of NPCs, they want cars that suit their personalities and needs. I build them a car. They go "whoaaaa! NICE!" They go drive it. They come back. "It was great, did X really well, thanks a ton!"
The scale is small enough that it feels like a personal interaction even when I don't do social things. The response is personal, about something concrete and part of their life. The choices I make are much more centered around facets of their personality, because each NPC can have wildly different taste in cars without becoming unbelievable.
It is already much more deeply personal than Civ VI, even if the NPCs are just a doodled pixel portrait.
Honestly, even if there were no NPCs, building the car is still more personal than building an empire in Civ VI, because I can easily imagine how someone would use and enjoy the car. That's a big part of why Space Engineers is fun! There's no NPCs, no personalities, but imagining how people would live in space, use my ships - that's fun!
In my mind, 4X games can't survive in this awkward place. They will naturally have to become either more humanized... or less.
"More" seems to be the trend, so how would that go?
The two basic paths are the Civ VI path and the Stellaris path, which is why I used them as examples.
The Civ VI path focuses on a few, highly detailed, carefully designed NPCs. Further down this path lies a game where you can interact with those NPCs in more detailed, complex ways. Expanding your empire probably matters less than establishing a good relationship with your neighbors. This will generally take the focus off the militaristic side of things and play up more complex interactions.
The easiest way to do it would be to make the lands of the empire play the role of the home and body of the other ruler. Rather than negotiate with the ruler as a lump sum, you interact with specific cities or lands in a wider variety of ways.
There's not really any way around this. We can't continue having a bleak, war-focused set of interactions if we keep humanizing the other side. I already have no interest in going to war, even with the relatively weak personalities in these games today.
The other direction is to track an impressive number of people. Rather than the ruler of each nation, you track everyone. Politics constantly evolves and changes who is in what positions. The rulers of each nation come and go.
I have a suspicion this is definitely going to spawn a genre, but I don't think I'll like it much. That many people means that each person will be disposable, temporary. That's not going to scratch my itch.
At the very least, I hope all these people have personality tags, so I can easily assign them a mood and emotion as they do things. At the moment it's all undifferentiated mush, and it's very hard to establish any deep connection to the various NPCs. It'd be interesting to try to improve that connection while still having a large number of randomly-generated NPCs. Maybe use some techniques to inject personalities into the flow of the game.
But right this instant, I have a car-building prototype to create.
Monday, December 19, 2016
The Stars of Stellaris
Remember Stellaris? No? 4X space game that kinda flopped a little?
Time to learn some game design. Let's examine why Stellaris is flawed and how to fix it.
Oh, no, we're not talking theory. We're talking mods.
This mod.
All the mod does is make your starting "warp" drive travel at light speed. In normal Stellaris, a journey takes around ten days. With the mod, it takes a few years to get anywhere. A year charging up, a year charging down - it represents light speed travel.
And the result?
Stellaris is suddenly fascinating. Absolutely amazing.
There's a lot of moving parts to examine, so let's get to it.
1) The stars are not our friends
Stellaris' normal play feels... anemic. One big reason is that space itself feels anemic. The number of stars you can touch is immense, only bounded by random enemy empires and beef gates. Similarly, the number of stars that can touch you is immense. Enemies are always less than a month away, and most star empires seem to want to wage war across those stars.
There's no sense of mass, or slowness. You can reach out and touch ten different empires. At an instant, your fragile empire can be taken away by an enemy so far away that their stars are tiny points of light in the sky.
By limiting things to light speed, all of those problems go away. Every star you explore is a multi-year expedition. Every star is a treasure, and the shape of your empire is stamped deep in your brain because of it. Empires are easy to talk to, but wars take years to unfold - easily time to mobilize your defenses.
This gives your empire a sense of mass and weight. It also makes every jump matter, and you quickly learn to schedule predictive jumps. It's a radical change that, yes, slows the game down.
2) Planets are our friends
Now, in most 4X space games, this would make things unbearably slow. But Stellaris is fundamentally well-made and powerful. There are other systems which pick up the slack and absorb the pacing change - and also end up making your empire feel more real and weighty.
The on-planet options you have for managing your empire are deep and interesting. Constructing buildings, managing populations, installing space station modules, expensive building upgrades. Add in some of the additional mods allowing for more complex populations, more complex resources, and buildings with adjacency rules, you have a lot of really interesting literal world-building to delve into.
That said, this is an area that could be improved a lot. Not to blame Stellaris: it was never intended to carry this much of the gameplay load. But there are a few tweaks that could be made to make managing your empire even more interesting and rewarding. I might go with more variations within the population and a lot more on-world events, along with actual environmental evolution based on industry/geo-engineering projects. Interplanetary stuff might also be a lot more interesting and fun, maybe with "micro-bases" on moons and such, managed on the same screen as your main base's population.
All well and good, but all that stuff is theory. What's actually in the game works reasonably well.
3) Look at your hands
The basic result here is that Stellaris goes from being a mediocre game about endless conquest to a really interesting empire-management game. The change in focus arises from a simple change in pacing:
Stop giving the player stuff. Instead, make the player struggle to get anything new. Make them value what they are already holding.
This makes the player value what they have quite highly. As long as the play is dense enough to make that interesting, it makes everything meatier and more important.
Yes, you can make a billion random stars and a trillion random planets. But they only matter if you make them matter, and that means making the player value each one. Easiest way to do that is to make each one very expensive.
4) Moral of the story
The worst part about this story is that these mods are really unpopular.
Almost nobody plays Stellaris with the mods that make Stellaris fun, because most people think "more power = more fun". Millions of mods that make interstellar travel faster, or give you a higher colony cap, or add "sexy space babes"... but the mod that actually improves the game goes unnoticed.
As game designers, this is the heart of the problem. Every part of a player's feedback is going to be about how they want more, faster, stronger. When we take this to heart, we end up with vanilla Stellaris: a game that gives players far too much, far too fast.
Instead, consider that impulse as a source of power. If a player wants more stars, make the stars twice as expensive. If they want more ammo, make the ammo half as common. At least experimentally, for play-test purposes.
Because their urge for more is what makes them value what they have. If they want more stars, that means they think the stars are valuable. Condense that. Put that energy into fewer stars, and they'll treat each one like a priceless treasure.
That's my theory, anyway.
Time to learn some game design. Let's examine why Stellaris is flawed and how to fix it.
Oh, no, we're not talking theory. We're talking mods.
This mod.
All the mod does is make your starting "warp" drive travel at light speed. In normal Stellaris, a journey takes around ten days. With the mod, it takes a few years to get anywhere. A year charging up, a year charging down - it represents light speed travel.
And the result?
Stellaris is suddenly fascinating. Absolutely amazing.
There's a lot of moving parts to examine, so let's get to it.
1) The stars are not our friends
Stellaris' normal play feels... anemic. One big reason is that space itself feels anemic. The number of stars you can touch is immense, only bounded by random enemy empires and beef gates. Similarly, the number of stars that can touch you is immense. Enemies are always less than a month away, and most star empires seem to want to wage war across those stars.
There's no sense of mass, or slowness. You can reach out and touch ten different empires. At an instant, your fragile empire can be taken away by an enemy so far away that their stars are tiny points of light in the sky.
By limiting things to light speed, all of those problems go away. Every star you explore is a multi-year expedition. Every star is a treasure, and the shape of your empire is stamped deep in your brain because of it. Empires are easy to talk to, but wars take years to unfold - easily time to mobilize your defenses.
This gives your empire a sense of mass and weight. It also makes every jump matter, and you quickly learn to schedule predictive jumps. It's a radical change that, yes, slows the game down.
2) Planets are our friends
Now, in most 4X space games, this would make things unbearably slow. But Stellaris is fundamentally well-made and powerful. There are other systems which pick up the slack and absorb the pacing change - and also end up making your empire feel more real and weighty.
The on-planet options you have for managing your empire are deep and interesting. Constructing buildings, managing populations, installing space station modules, expensive building upgrades. Add in some of the additional mods allowing for more complex populations, more complex resources, and buildings with adjacency rules, you have a lot of really interesting literal world-building to delve into.
That said, this is an area that could be improved a lot. Not to blame Stellaris: it was never intended to carry this much of the gameplay load. But there are a few tweaks that could be made to make managing your empire even more interesting and rewarding. I might go with more variations within the population and a lot more on-world events, along with actual environmental evolution based on industry/geo-engineering projects. Interplanetary stuff might also be a lot more interesting and fun, maybe with "micro-bases" on moons and such, managed on the same screen as your main base's population.
All well and good, but all that stuff is theory. What's actually in the game works reasonably well.
3) Look at your hands
The basic result here is that Stellaris goes from being a mediocre game about endless conquest to a really interesting empire-management game. The change in focus arises from a simple change in pacing:
Stop giving the player stuff. Instead, make the player struggle to get anything new. Make them value what they are already holding.
This makes the player value what they have quite highly. As long as the play is dense enough to make that interesting, it makes everything meatier and more important.
Yes, you can make a billion random stars and a trillion random planets. But they only matter if you make them matter, and that means making the player value each one. Easiest way to do that is to make each one very expensive.
4) Moral of the story
The worst part about this story is that these mods are really unpopular.
Almost nobody plays Stellaris with the mods that make Stellaris fun, because most people think "more power = more fun". Millions of mods that make interstellar travel faster, or give you a higher colony cap, or add "sexy space babes"... but the mod that actually improves the game goes unnoticed.
As game designers, this is the heart of the problem. Every part of a player's feedback is going to be about how they want more, faster, stronger. When we take this to heart, we end up with vanilla Stellaris: a game that gives players far too much, far too fast.
Instead, consider that impulse as a source of power. If a player wants more stars, make the stars twice as expensive. If they want more ammo, make the ammo half as common. At least experimentally, for play-test purposes.
Because their urge for more is what makes them value what they have. If they want more stars, that means they think the stars are valuable. Condense that. Put that energy into fewer stars, and they'll treat each one like a priceless treasure.
That's my theory, anyway.
Tuesday, July 05, 2016
Galactic Politics
The 4X genre is incredibly stagnant, and nowhere is that clearer than in the complete failure to offer any kind of political gameplay.
This means that the 4X games are always going to have that fourth X: "Exterminate". If you can't really build a relationship with other nations, you don't have any choice.
There have always been vague, hamhanded concessions to those of us that like "pacifist" gameplay, such as cultural victories or voting for yourself in the galactic senate, but these are very passive experiences that don't feel as strong as the warfare gameplay.
There's no reason for that. Let's do a very easy experiment: let's re-engineer Stellaris so it has political gameplay.
And by "re-engineer" I mean "a mod".
Stellaris is a very flawed game, largely because they tried to extend the midgame but didn't add in much midgame play. We can fix that by adding in politics, and it doesn't require much of a change at all.
Trade Fix
First, let's get rid of the "trade" system. We're replacing that with a new way of gaining favor and benefiting from other nations. Instead of trade agreements, we should instead have outreach activities - they fill the same spot and work in the same way, but there are a few differences.
(This makes more sense to me anyway, since individual diplomats would handle details.)
One is that activities have an in-world color. Rather than donating 200 energy, you spend 200 energy hosting a Glarthian history exhibit on your homeworld for ten years. Or you spend it on Glarthian refugees. Or you spend it on raising patrols on the border, creating a trickle of material input due to seized smuggling goods.
The Glarthians will respond in a way that makes sense to their culture, which means different activities will result in different things from different cultures.
The best thing about this approach is that the activities can adapt to the current relationship. The treaties can still exist: if you close your borders, certain things become impossible and others become possible. If you're in a defensive pact, more things are possible and some of the "getting to know you" ones are scrapped. Even during an outright war, you'll still have political actions you take take: to lay the groundwork for peace, to exploit their weaknesses, to perform spy actions.
It's outside of the realm of a mod, but it'd also be pretty easy to set up N-way activities by simply allowing you to invite people to help you do the activity. Whether it's hosting a Glarthian history month or setting up an economy-shredding blockade, just invite anyone you want.
Buildings
Since Stellaris has colonies that are very building-centric, let's introduce some political buildings. Museums, market districts, embassies. We can even put them on space stations!
Some of these are multi-purpose. Market districts give a steady flow of materials, while museums decrease cultural drift (already a thing in Stellaris). But they also affect the relationship between your nation and any nation whose border is within N light years of the installation.
Rather than trying to get a +1 trust per month by randomly spraying them with credits, how about we use these buildings? Because colonies have limited space, this produces some wonderful new tradeoffs. Right now, having a colony crammed against a few borders is a panic-inducing state of affairs, but how about if you dedicate that colony to international politics? Now it's establishing good relations between you and them, reducing or even reversing the penalty for having borders touching.
People
Since the colonies are inhabited by populations with explicit values and traits, we can make those buildings modify the populations on the affected worlds. Xenophilic groups will tend to pop up, and if possible, we could add species-specific xenophilia as the people on the planet learn to love Glarthians specifically.
We can even have the various facilities push different traits. Embassies might create pacifism, while museums might create xenophilia (if near a border) or xenophobia (if not near a border).
This would let us take advantage of the already-existing population engine, and a clever person could seed xenophilia throughout a neighboring nation, then use outreach activities to put those populations in power and change the nature of their empire.
Now imagine if that xenophilia was specific to your species! Or imagine it was pacifism, and you've changed a warlike nation! There's a lot of potential to let the player customize their approach.
While it'd be tough to mod it into Stellaris, it'd be fun to have some control over the pro-you factions in other nations. Right now there is a faction control system in Stellaris, why not have foreign factions that you have some control over in that list?
Ships
One thing that's easy to overlook is that the Enterprise was always as much a political vessel as a science vessel. Why don't we add a few new science ship components?
Specifically, political/outreach facilities. You can research and upgrade them just like sensor kits.
Ships with political facilities will automatically improve relationships with whoever they are orbiting. As long as you have open borders, you can use your science ships to wage peace.
We could have the facilities mirror our colony facilities, allowing us to create traits such as xenophilia or a physics specialty or pacifism on the planets we orbit, instead of at random. Moreover, this would mean we could park our science ships over our own planets to mold our own populations in that way.
Although it'd be hard to mod it into Stellaris, it'd be nice to have another category of science mission: political outreach missions. These might pop up at random, or maybe you have to survey worlds again every few years to have a chance of uncovering one. The science ships with outreach modules can perform these outreach missions and things will go better between your people and theirs.
Counter-agency
There's also how to counteract these cultural attacks. Even closing your borders doesn't completely prevent them. So why not have some more policies, facilities, or science ship components that specifically negate the effect of museums or science ships, preventing your people from developing traits you don't like.
And, of course, you can take political stances that force them to back off - cultural preservation or something.
There's a lot of potential here, and it's so close to being something we could simply mod into Stellaris.
So... why are 4X games so stagnant? Look at all this stuff we could be doing with it!
This means that the 4X games are always going to have that fourth X: "Exterminate". If you can't really build a relationship with other nations, you don't have any choice.
There have always been vague, hamhanded concessions to those of us that like "pacifist" gameplay, such as cultural victories or voting for yourself in the galactic senate, but these are very passive experiences that don't feel as strong as the warfare gameplay.
There's no reason for that. Let's do a very easy experiment: let's re-engineer Stellaris so it has political gameplay.
And by "re-engineer" I mean "a mod".
Stellaris is a very flawed game, largely because they tried to extend the midgame but didn't add in much midgame play. We can fix that by adding in politics, and it doesn't require much of a change at all.
Trade Fix
First, let's get rid of the "trade" system. We're replacing that with a new way of gaining favor and benefiting from other nations. Instead of trade agreements, we should instead have outreach activities - they fill the same spot and work in the same way, but there are a few differences.
(This makes more sense to me anyway, since individual diplomats would handle details.)
One is that activities have an in-world color. Rather than donating 200 energy, you spend 200 energy hosting a Glarthian history exhibit on your homeworld for ten years. Or you spend it on Glarthian refugees. Or you spend it on raising patrols on the border, creating a trickle of material input due to seized smuggling goods.
The Glarthians will respond in a way that makes sense to their culture, which means different activities will result in different things from different cultures.
The best thing about this approach is that the activities can adapt to the current relationship. The treaties can still exist: if you close your borders, certain things become impossible and others become possible. If you're in a defensive pact, more things are possible and some of the "getting to know you" ones are scrapped. Even during an outright war, you'll still have political actions you take take: to lay the groundwork for peace, to exploit their weaknesses, to perform spy actions.
It's outside of the realm of a mod, but it'd also be pretty easy to set up N-way activities by simply allowing you to invite people to help you do the activity. Whether it's hosting a Glarthian history month or setting up an economy-shredding blockade, just invite anyone you want.
Buildings
Since Stellaris has colonies that are very building-centric, let's introduce some political buildings. Museums, market districts, embassies. We can even put them on space stations!
Some of these are multi-purpose. Market districts give a steady flow of materials, while museums decrease cultural drift (already a thing in Stellaris). But they also affect the relationship between your nation and any nation whose border is within N light years of the installation.
Rather than trying to get a +1 trust per month by randomly spraying them with credits, how about we use these buildings? Because colonies have limited space, this produces some wonderful new tradeoffs. Right now, having a colony crammed against a few borders is a panic-inducing state of affairs, but how about if you dedicate that colony to international politics? Now it's establishing good relations between you and them, reducing or even reversing the penalty for having borders touching.
People
Since the colonies are inhabited by populations with explicit values and traits, we can make those buildings modify the populations on the affected worlds. Xenophilic groups will tend to pop up, and if possible, we could add species-specific xenophilia as the people on the planet learn to love Glarthians specifically.
We can even have the various facilities push different traits. Embassies might create pacifism, while museums might create xenophilia (if near a border) or xenophobia (if not near a border).
This would let us take advantage of the already-existing population engine, and a clever person could seed xenophilia throughout a neighboring nation, then use outreach activities to put those populations in power and change the nature of their empire.
Now imagine if that xenophilia was specific to your species! Or imagine it was pacifism, and you've changed a warlike nation! There's a lot of potential to let the player customize their approach.
While it'd be tough to mod it into Stellaris, it'd be fun to have some control over the pro-you factions in other nations. Right now there is a faction control system in Stellaris, why not have foreign factions that you have some control over in that list?
Ships
One thing that's easy to overlook is that the Enterprise was always as much a political vessel as a science vessel. Why don't we add a few new science ship components?
Specifically, political/outreach facilities. You can research and upgrade them just like sensor kits.
Ships with political facilities will automatically improve relationships with whoever they are orbiting. As long as you have open borders, you can use your science ships to wage peace.
We could have the facilities mirror our colony facilities, allowing us to create traits such as xenophilia or a physics specialty or pacifism on the planets we orbit, instead of at random. Moreover, this would mean we could park our science ships over our own planets to mold our own populations in that way.
Although it'd be hard to mod it into Stellaris, it'd be nice to have another category of science mission: political outreach missions. These might pop up at random, or maybe you have to survey worlds again every few years to have a chance of uncovering one. The science ships with outreach modules can perform these outreach missions and things will go better between your people and theirs.
Counter-agency
There's also how to counteract these cultural attacks. Even closing your borders doesn't completely prevent them. So why not have some more policies, facilities, or science ship components that specifically negate the effect of museums or science ships, preventing your people from developing traits you don't like.
And, of course, you can take political stances that force them to back off - cultural preservation or something.
There's a lot of potential here, and it's so close to being something we could simply mod into Stellaris.
So... why are 4X games so stagnant? Look at all this stuff we could be doing with it!
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