Hi everyone! In this new dev diary, we propose to discuss Leaders in Project Space Sector. In our view, Leaders were one of the key ingredients that made Master of Orion 2 great and stand out from other space 4X games. Having officers commanding your ships and system governors managing your colonies gave the task of ruling a space empire much more flavor and character while enhancing the RPG elements of the game. Of course, Leaders will return in Project Space Sector, and this time their impact in the game will be even more meaningful. Hope you agree, and please enjoy this dev diary. Leaders There are ship leaders and colony leaders. Ship leaders can be assigned to individual ships, while colony leaders can be assigned to systems, and therefore oversee all the colonies that may exist in that system. Each leader will have a history and backstory and can have a nickname. Both their name and nickname can be edited. Leaders have both an initial hiring cost and an ongoing salary. How much money a leader demands will vary and can even change during a game. Primary Skills Ship leaders have the following primary skills: - Command (better stats allows commanding bigger ship classes) - Operations (adds to the empire’s ship support, helping field more ships while reducing maintenance costs) - Attack (ship attack modifier - affects all fleet) - Defense (ship defense modifier - affects all fleet) - Initiative (a factor on determining which side in battle moves first) Colony leaders have the following primary skills: - Administration (tax bonus) - Labor (production bonus) - Research (research bonus) - Corporate (bonus to system exploitation revenue, offworld mining operations, trade income) - Warfare (bonus to troops defending from invasions) Secondary Skills In addition to the primary skills, the leaders also have other skills, which we call secondary skills. These range from Smuggler, Pirate, Navigator, Explorer, Spiritual Leader, Scientist, among many others. These skills will evolve as the leader gains more experience. Each skill experience starts with "Basic" knowledge, upgrades to "Advanced" and finally to "Expert", for increased benefits as the leader levels up. Note that colony leaders only acquire colony-oriented skills while ship leaders only acquire ship-combat oriented skills. Some secondary skills though can appear in both Colony and Ship leaders, these are the (shared) “empire-wide” skills. An example of a shared skill is “Commando”, which provides bonus to both troops defending planets as for marines on board of ships during boarding actions. Leveling up skills As the leader gains enough experience (for instance, when a construction is completed on a colony they manage, a battle is won or a ruin is explored), the leader levels up and the player may choose to increase one primary skill further. In addition to increasing the primary skill, the leader will also be able to learn a new secondary skill or enhance an existing one from a choice of two. Traits In addition to having primary and secondary skills, which reflect more the leader's abilities, what they are capable of doing, the leader may also have traits. Traits are the characteristics of the leader that reflect their differences in personality, which may be inherited or acquired during the game. Traits affect mostly the things that may happen with respect to the leaders themselves, their relation with the empire (leaders may defect, revolt or become double agents) and the interactions among themselves. Examples of currently implemented traits include Trusting (the leader is less likely to revolt, to defect and/or of conducting sabotage), Genius (can level up primary skills twice per level up), Uncreative (cannot choose between two secondary skills to learn or improve by level up), Empathic (more morale on colony) and Lone wolf (combat penalties per additional ship in the fleet). And there are many others currently designed but not yet implemented. Desires Leaders may also have desires, which can pop up from time to time due to the current game's circumstances. These can be personal ambitions or a reflection of the wishes of the people they lead. Meeting or not the leader's desires will have consequences, which may translate into boosting the leader's skills, acquiring a new trait or the decrease of their opinion towards the empire in case of desire unfulfillment. Desires can be fulfilled through concrete gameplay actions, like building, researching or improving something, or by some diplomatic action, combat or exploration mission. The player will have to evaluate if meeting the leader’s wishes is advantageous with respect to the empire's current agenda. Along with ingame events, desires may influence the traits that emerge and vice versa. For example, a greedy leader may demand a raise, while fulfilling a leader's desire may turn other leader envious by not fulfilling theirs (even more serious if it was the same desire!). Leader Opinion As mentioned above, leaders have an opinion about the empire (the value at the top right). Low opinion increases the chances of the leader revolting, defecting, or of conducting sabotage / acting as a double agent (all not implemented yet). Not fulfilling the leaders desires can also lower their opinion towards the empire, while fulfilling them may raise it. Hope you like what we have in stock for you regarding Leaders, and thanks for reading. Most of what's described is already implemented and now it will be just a question of adding more content to the game (more leaders, desires, secondary skills, traits). Now please let us know your impressions, as for what your ideas and suggestions for improvement may be. Thank you all!
One of my favorite diaries so far. I'm a fan of interesting characters and personalities adding life to space 4X though, so that's probably not a big surprise to anyone. There is a ton of room for variety in the systems presented. It could also help introduce further variety in how you develop your entire empire. For instance, I could see ship leaders who specialize in smaller ship classes and provide benefits to all ships of that class in their fleet. Something we've discussed on the forum is making smaller class ships more relevant in the late game, and this is just one more way we could potentially do that. A Destroyer Captain trait could grant bonuses to destroyer offense, defense, maintenance costs, and potentially even reduce the support point cost of destroyers across your entire empire. Such a captain, one in love with destroyers, would likely strongly desire to command a destroyer themselves and to also have a fleet of destroyers at their side. It'd all have to be balanced, but the potential for things like this is there, and this is why I am excited about the system.
Leaders in Moo2 were mostly a positive to the game and added some flavor to the same, PSS looks to have taken leaders to the next level. Personally I would be quite happy with the way they are presented now, they are beneficial without being too much of a distraction or game breaking. While it is true that more enhancements can be made, (a Reclusive Mind has already suggested nice additions) my focus is not so much on what further attributes they can be given, it is elsewhere. The way leaders are introduced in both Moo2 and PSS just annoys me. A few decades ago I didn’t mind as much but today I expect better. In both cases leaders show up at random and offer their services. Here is where my problem lies. A likely scenario has an early Empire (perhaps still restricted to their home system), get a message that a leader is available. No problem here provided the leader is the same race as said faction. Often however we see that this leader is an alien, sometimes from a faction that we “discover” 100 turns later. So I am asked to believe that an alien shows up, (even though we haven’t met aliens yet in-game), asks for a job, and we give the alien one of our most sensitive positions in government, no questions asked. I have to tell you, if an alien showed up in the U.S. tomorrow and asked for a job… it would be on the dissection table so fast that it would not know what hit it. An adjustment then that restricted leaders to your same species until contact is actually made with aliens would remove this rather blatant departure from reality. Another aspect that disturbs me is the whole random thing. Why? Why not consider a slight adjustment here. Classify leaders into three classes Common (generic) Uncommon Rare Common leaders should not be random appearing. Introduce an additional “wonder” type building limited to one per empire (yeah another building, adds variety). The building is an academy and the player could for a cost, create a generic leader. This leader would start with all stats at zero and the player could select which trait to improve once the leader is trained (5 turns after being paid for) In all other areas the leader would be similar, including maintenance costs. Uncommon leaders would be What PSS has now, no changes needed here with the exception of restricting leaders by species until after contact is made with aliens Rare leaders would have to be exactly that, rare. Their attributes would be empire wide and as long as attention is paid to insure they do not unbalance the game they would become very sought out and beneficial. Triggers could be adopted here so these type of leaders offer their services only to those that are hard pressed, If a faction is already ahead, it may not make sense to give them a Darth Vader. In short then I am real pleased with the way leaders are presented in PSS and consider it to be a strong point of the game, a few adjustments could see this going from strong to excellent.
I was thinking about this and there is one more thing I would like, it should help with immersion and add a further RPG element to PSS. What if the player was represented as a leader? Start screen will allow the selection of an avatar and certain number of points that can be spent on attributes, (points could be dependent on difficulty level). The "leader" unit would be available from turn one and could be either a ship or colony leader per choice. Perhaps the leader could even be a unique unit that can do both. Initially the leader unit must only give slight boosts (to retain balance and pacing), but be able to level up similar to existing units. Consideration could also be given on whether these units can be lost and if any consequences arise in such an event.
Some very interesting ideas here, expanding the role of leaders in the game can only be a good thing. I like the idea of the president or emperor of your faction also being styled as a "leader" with abilities and limitations, it worked well in Age of Wonders. How will the player obtain these leaders? Is it just pure luck or will the player be able to "advertise" to improve their chances? What about the number of leaders the empire can have at once, will it be fixed or will government or other in-game choices affect how many you can have and in what areas?
Yes, I'm a big fan of the AoW games and that is one of the things I like in that game, the player is represented "in game". Huge plus for immersion and adds an extra layer of strategy and tactics to the game. The player is like the king in chess but with more practical power. Big thumbs up in my opinion.
While i really liked AoW too, i dont like the idea of role playing your leaders/heroes to the point that AoW did. AoW had horrendous balance issues, the leaders/heroes we over powered super weapons in that game, and if you lost one, the whole game was lost, particularly in multiplayer. Role playing your leader fits particularly well in a fantasy setting, but not so much in a futuristic space setting. I would like to see leaders that can turn the tide in combat between 2 equal forces, not super powered weapons that can make a much weaker force defeat a much strong force. And i would prefer to not have your leader avatar be present in the game. I think an argument can be made for that type of game where your leader is present and you have heroes leading your army and they are super powered units, such as AoW and Endless Legend, but that would require a more limited game time scale, such as AoW and Endless Legend do. Not a game that spans hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe that could be an expansion pack or a scenario addon type of content.
While I agree completely with your cautionary criticism, I think your "solution" is unnecessary. Yes leaders (including any player avatar) should definitely not be so overpowered that they become super-weapons who make or break the entire game, that would be true for either fantasy or space 4x and I agree that AoW can occasionally suffer from that problem. However I dont think the solution is to just completely discard the entire concept and forget about it. The obvious solution would be to just limit the amount of effect that leaders can have on the game to whatever seems best balanced for optimal gameplay. You mention that role-playing leaders is a good fit for fantasy but not for space 4x although I really dont see how that claim is in any way self evident except as an expression of your specific personal taste. Personally I would find role-playing a leader-type character in a space 4x to be quite an interesting and immersive mechanic, just as it is in Crusader Kings, although admittedly I'm not totally married to the idea either and could easily live without it. Leaders - including player avatar leaders - could be designed to barely have any impact at all, be moderately influential or be completely overpowering. Either extreme is undesirable IMO and while AoW seems to have erred slightly on the OP side, there's really no need for PSS to exactly follow suit. Its entirely up to the devs to get the balance right through game-testing and tweaking.
Leaders appear randomly, in a general case, but some also appear in reaction to your cultural choices. There are no limits or other constraints on the number of leaders one empire can have, at the moment, as long as you can afford them.
What?... I didn't say they should be discarded from the game. I just dont want to see the actual player leader as a hero (avatar) in the game, but recruiting other hero leaders is a definite must have feature for the game. But just dont make them over powered that if you loose one in battle, you feel like immediately quiting the game because the loss is to devastating (like AoW was). They should also not be so beneficial that when you are given the opportunity to recruit one its always a definite yes or that you'd be dumb not too. You should have to think hard about recruiting them, and weighing the cost of doing so. And 50% of the time you should decide no I can't afford this hero or my resources are better spent elsewhere. If the game can do this, then the hero system will be a good addition. If you want deep roleplaying with the hero/leaders and to also have them be very powerful game pieces, then that would be best left for a custom scenario game or add on content. Maybe players can create these types of custom scenarios themselves, and upload them for other players to play, and they would come with a story and that kind of stuff. But for a general open world game, especially multiplayer games, I would rather have heroes on the weaker side then the strong side of the curve but for sure there still needs to be heroes.
Sounds good Adam, from a design perspective at least it looks like PSS is shaping up to be clearly superior to MOO 2, at least in this area. No I was talking about player avatar leaders (presidents or emperors modeled as leaders) not ordinary garden variety leaders, sorry if that wasn't clear. I dont see any reason to dismiss them from consideration simply because of a blanket statement like "they dont belong in a sci-fi 4x" which - lets face it - really only boils down to personal preference. Player avatar leaders are a lot of fun in AoW and Crusader Kings and I dont see any reason why they couldn't also be a lot of fun from a roleplaying / immersion perspective in a space 4x as long as they dont overtly dominate gameplay. Playing Sherridan, Londo, Delenn or Palpatine could be extremely cool and If included they would only be as powerful as the devs make them, which might be very ineffectual indeed in the grand scheme of things, there's absolutely no reason for them to follow AoW's example in terms of power level or influence. Deeper roleplaying maybe, that could be interesting, but very powerful, no, I'm with you on that, I dont think they should be particularly powerful at all or a no-brainer to choose. But once again their power or lack of it is entirely under the control and design of the devs and should be carefully tweaked, adjusted and re-adjusted for maximum gameplay potential.
Haha I would allow to edit background and upload custom image. Other than that I think that leaders could die in battle. That makes you care more about them, but you also should have a possibility to build escape pods (increases cost of ship and reduces free space) for them. I don't see difference between fantasy game and sci-fi game. It does not matter whether your hero is commanding ships or trolls, both are just units at your disposal. I think leaders should be precious to you if you level them up but shouldn't be a defining force in a galaxy. I think MOO2 had good balance in that matter.
I'm a big fan of MoO and just discovered this project. Interesting discussion on bringing in leaders. Have you considered the way Crusader Kings does leaders and traits? Briefly, a leader is just a person with a background story, and they have traits, some they are born with and some they can gain, that make them better or worse at various roles. There would be no "governor" vs "captain" leaders per se, just a collection of traits that are better suited to a particular role. And it opens up the door for various roleplay and modding options down the road.
Welcome to the project Warped! That's the idea we have for the leaders. They have a background story, traits (some they bring with them others they acquire), that have an influence in the game. We did take some inspiration from Crusader Kings 2 for the leaders system design. There are two classes however: Colony Leaders and Ship Leaders. This was found to be the best way to proceed because the needs of managing a colony are really quite different from commanding a star ship. Modding for leaders is also an objective of ours. All leaders' characteristtics are data-driven, loaded from XML files. At some point in time, the idea is to open these files to the community so that everybody can create new leaders, with new skills, traits and associated desires/ambitions.
I like the depth you've described in this update. While I see the point of a few posts above about overpowered leaders in a heavy-immersion setting, I think what is presented here is a good balance. The fact that they have a more meaningful place in the game than in SotS, or in Stellaris is a big plus IMHO.
OK, Adam, well done. I like what I've seen here, especially the ability to have more than 4 of each type of leader. Ya done good! Keep it going.
read it only today.. :-( I was very busy with my normal work.. it seem to me a well worth addition and a better and more elegant system respect to the original seen in Master of Orion 2
OK, sorry to be so long posting this, but here goes. Leaders is a great idea and I'm happy to see it. Thanks. I do have one concern: It seems to me that, as planned, you're adding an element of micro-management. Now not only will I have to be concerned with all the usual factors in the game, I've got to worry about unhappy or dissatisfied Leaders. What? Gimme a break, please. Give them different levers of skill, etc., but please don't make me worry about what they're thinking or feeling or doing while my back is turned. Having said that, for what it's worth, thanks for everything you've done to make this game. I'm really looking forward to playing it (after I buy it, of course)!
Don't worry Joe3, the Devs managed to pull it off without it becoming a micromanagement headache, it's actually quite elegant and simple and definitely gives the leaders a "lite" RPG element.
ChrisKonstantine, thanks for the reply. I just read the writeup again (carefully). Sorry, but I still think the idea of dissatisfied, unhappy, greedy or traitorous leaders is going to be a pain in the management joint. I'm not saying it's a deal breaker, I'm just saying... But like everyone else, I'll wait and see. Most everything else about the game sounds great. Bring it on!
