Hello all, I've managed to play around in a few more game sessions and I'm slowly realizing something... The early game pacing can vary tremendously based on how "good" of a start you get. The "goodness" of your start is entirely dependent on the galaxy generation system. As a point of feedback, I think there are far too many cases where players get a "bad" start. A bad start is where you have none of your preferred planets within your initial or upgraded (advanced logistics range), forcing you to use your initial colony ship on a sub-optimal planet, e.g. some combination of bad habitability (after having to burn research time to settle the planet), poor minerals, high/low gravity. Usually your best option has two of these negative traits when a "bad" start occurs. Anyway, I went through half a dozen games, playing the first 30-50 turns as quickly as I could to explore initial space, and most of these sessions had bad starts. A bad start results in a situation where it takes a really long time to get your empire up and running, often 75-100 turns spent mostly spamming end turn and picking new remote exploration targets. Bad starts severely limit your ability to expand your starting fleet, and even adding a survey ship or a few outpost ships (via the culture upgades for example) can put you over the fleet limit and drain your economy even more if you don't rectify the situation ASAP. Yes, you could use outpost ships to build outposts to extend your range and explore more, but that also takes time and can put the player in an economic bind given the low fleet capacity starting out (especially new players). On the other hand, a good start, really opens up the gameplay. It gives players more fleet capacity early on, more options for how to advance on the culture tracks, more stuff to do / manage, and so on. It's fun and has that nice "race" feeling on trying to find and secure good worlds ASAP. I had a game where I was able to get, as Humans, about 4 terran worlds and my empire really started humming along, leading to a very engaging and interesting game the whole way through. But when it doesn't happen - the game turns into a slog. In short, I think the galaxy generator needs to ensure that there is at least one reasonable colonization target within your initial fuel range to at least get that next expansion rolling. 1-2 good colonization targets within expanded logistics range would give players about 4 colonies to work with close to home and grow from there. Without changing the density of starts, maybe increase the chances for systems to have additional planets. It could even be a hard override programmed in after the main galaxy generation is done to ensure that around each players starting region there are a few decent colonization opportunities. I'd also consider increasing the base fleet capacity (up to 5). Starting out with 2 frigates at 1 colony ship and 0 fleet capacity isn't much fun. If you can't find a colonization target quickly, you cant really build exploration ships or outpost ships (important for boosting your starting planet and extending range) without going over fleet capacity immediately and wrecking your economy. Obviously, you don't want the starting game to feel too scripted, but at the same time getting a "bad" start requires some pretty specific responses from the player to work around those. The latter is going to turn off a lot of players immediately and cast a negative impression of the game, so fixing this is, I believe, pretty important.
Follow-up, this is a bit of an opposite experience (and different suggestions) from Konstantine's thread in the VIP section. Seems be a few big moving elements at work: How strong or weak your start is and how that informs what technology progression to follow. How easily you can rush the AI and end the game quite early (turn 150), shortchanging a lot of the game's content in the process. Relates to AI tactics (e.g. fleeing mechanics) as well as defenses (or lack thereof). How long civic infrastructure / development takes (ecological engineering, setting up asteroid mines, etc.) relative to rush strategies that win you the game. How easily (or not) the economy can snowball. "Bad starts" (or maybe we should call them "tough starts") are interesting conceptually because they force you to focus on other technologies you could otherwise ignore. But the gameplay that results from a tough start feels pretty dull to me as the player gets railroaded down a certain tech path too quickly. And I worry that with a bad start, the AI with a good start (once the AI is stronger) will be able to just steamroll the player too easily. Konstantine brought up some observations about certain combinations of bonuses snowballing the economy - which throws a monkey wrench in the balance and pacing. My sense is that too many of the production bonuses get funneled through multiplication functions (e.g. morale) which magnifies the effects of certain bonuses even more. I had one game where I was getting over 2,000 production on a planet ... but other planets struggle to get much good production at all. Anyway, this pacing/balance conversation is important (as I've said before of course), because it really does relate to the fundamental level of how certain mechanics operate, and the cost of changing some of these may become higher and higher as development continues.
Thanks for your feedback Mezmorki. Yes, we've already identified that the game starts can vary quite a lot from very bad to too great, and that that has a huge impact on the game's pacing. What we want the game to offer the players is a situation in which they will have to adapt and decide what you'll need to do this time to make it work for this game. And, there should be alternate viable paths for you to grow your empire, so you can play a slightly different game each time in the process. As we've discussed in the VIP subforum, harsher starts will be more the norm and not the exception (even harsher in higher difficulty levels). Conversely, the player will tend to have nicer starts as the difficulty goes down, and vice versa for the AIs. So, we'll be implementing a starmap generation post-processing algorithm soon to normalize starts a bit. The idea is to don't get those very bad starts (the ones that may lead to dull gameplay) but also not the too good ones either, which may lead to shorter game experiences where the player does not feel the need to explore what the game has to offer. There will be variability, just neither of the two extremes. After the starts have been normallized we can then re-assess the situation.
Unconditionally agree. With all due respect. The current version of ISG is too fast already. Average game length on a medium map, impossible difficulty, gives a 140 turn game on average. Giving the player an even easier start will just create some short term relief at the cost of ending the game faster, the game will be too easy and boring. Now if you were to balance it... give at least a tolerable world nearby not a second ideal one, that is enough, just don't get greedy and pick the free colony ship as your first cultural advancement. The second advancement comes quick enough so you can avoid going over the SSP limits. In the meantime you research the tech needed. As it is, a lot of the mechanics in ISG can be ignored, an easier start will just entrench that practice. It is too soon for changes here. Steps need to be taken to insure the Ai survives the early game. After that steps need to be taken to create an actual need for all the wonderful mechanics in ISG. Once these steps are in place, then the star algorithm can be defined better. Oh. and definitely tie into the difficulty level. I get turned off far quicker by playing a game the first time and not having difficulty, I know that the game will only get easier as I play it, therefore if it's too easy the first time I try it,..why bother with it. I don't think you can generalize so broadly here. You are a veteran gamer Mezmoki, there has to be some challenge, otherwise what's the point?
Good discussion, thanks for the replies. I agree with what you both are saying with respect to wanting to normalize experience a bit better. I also acknowledge that if the start's are too good, your production can snowball quickly, allowing you to rush the enemy and win quickly (turn 150-ish or earlier) and bring the game to a close when you are barely a quarter of the way through the tech tree. In my mind, the ease of rush winning and ignoring different strategies / technology approaches isn't something that should be solved primarily by making tougher or more challenging starts - especially when often times those tougher starts led to rather dull gameplay early on. As discussed, I think there are a bunch of other things to consider that would make the overall game length longer so that players get further into the tech tree, such as: Improving the AI so it can't be bulldozed as early Adding invasion mechanics that slow down your rate of conquest (per other thread) Potentially some organic / logical rubber banding with respect to ship construction. E.g., what if you got a production bonus to building ships that was proportional to how many free SSP's you had. A player that lost a fleet battle would get a little help in bouncing back quickly to muster a defense. Mitigate the snowballing economy so it's more of a gradual rise than than an exponential increase. Possibly increasing the rate of technology advancement in the early game to give players more ways of quickly dealing with challenging start situations. I'm all for challenging games. But the thing to realize is that while a "tough start" may be challenging, it isn't a challenge that is posing you with interesting choices. If I don't have anywhere to colonize easily, I have to research new colonization techs ASAP, if nothing else so I can settle a world and increase my SSP so I can immediately then start asteroid mining. The above isn't creating an interesting choice, as it's basically the only way forward from a tough start position. Basically, I think the start conditions need to be managed such that they consistently give players an interesting choice in how they expand and advance. I feel that points happens when you have 2 good worlds. You have enough SSP's from two worlds that you have choices about making an exploration ship vs. more frigates vs. outposts/freighters vs. colony ships and so on. Without that level of flexibility, you're basically forced into a 75+ turn sequence of play that is just not exciting and is practically devoid of choice. EDIT: On point #4 from above. In some of my longer running games, I've notice I end up with some worlds with huge 1,000+ levels of production, and other worlds that I've had since the early game with barely any production. Maybe a lot of the normalizing could be addressed by narrowing the range in benefits & penalties to production based on planetary attributes. Or maybe speeding up the rate of ecological engineering & terraforming? The problem with ecological engineering is that production is king. If the planet is less tolerable, that impacts production, which makes ecological engineering even more time consuming.
Well, here we see things differently, when confronted with a difficult start, I see many options. Do I go into researching hostile colonization techs or do I expand logistics. Do I use my remote scanning on my home system or do I start scanning a different sector on turn one. If anything, when I play for fun, I discard easy starts. The choices are there, the only thing that a player is forced into doing when they roll a difficult start is not playing with the most comfortable and easiest way to them. I just delay taking free ships and tailor my approach to what I find. I already find the opposite here, the starts are too easy, I don't want to see that everywhere, keep it on the easy levels where it belongs. The thought of favorable planets always available right at start isn't interesting, and I certainly don't want to see it when I set the game on impossible. I understand that from a commercial point of view, there is logic in dumbing the game down but you can have it both ways, address it via difficulty settings. Do you recall Armada 2056? That game did so many things right... and it was boring as hell because it offered no challenge. MoO2 beat me at times, that's what I liked about it. Any action taken which just increases my odds of winning before I even start the game doesn't interest me with ISG, at least not at present.
I think bad starts are fine in a single player game.I don't like this modern thing with forcing good planets near the player ala Stellaris. Maybe a balanced start option for boring players.
Played some more games last night - things went well overall. What I may be reacting to most regarding a tough start, although really it can happen with a good start too, is the number of "dead' turns in the first 30-40 turns of the game. Often there might be a dozen or more turns where you are doing nothing but hitting end turn, with that occasionally punctuated by re-targeting your remote exploration. This isn't a deal-breaker for me, and in reality yo can play through the first 40 turns of this game pretty quickly (10 minutes?) if you know what you're doing and have a plan for what you're going for. But think about new players that will try this game. And I'm not talking about more casual gamer, I'm talking about the core 4X game audience. A lot of them are going to be turned off if there is an abundance of dead turns in the opening stage of the game. https://www.reddit.com/r/4Xgaming/comments/6mz120/preorder_interstellar_space_genesis_space_sector/ That's the only thread on the the 4Xgaming reddit and people are already raising this same concern. If people give the game an honest chance, I think they'll find that the pace is not as slow as it seems. I thought the same but have since back peddled on that account. I guess the critical question I'm asking is this: if you adjust the early game pacing to make it more engaging right-off the bat for more people, can you do it in a way that doesn't undermine the strategic depth and challenge of the game? Can you reduce the frequency and length of dead turn runs without changing the basic choices and tradeoffs facing the player? When designing boardgames, a rule of thumb we use is this: if the opening moves for effective play are consistently a scripted sequence of moves, then change the starting conditions to bypass that scripted sequence. Maybe it's starting the equivalent of a few turns into the game, or it is changing the menu of options at the start so it isn't so scripted. As for ISG.... Reducing dead turns could be some combination of... a simple matter of moving logistics into tier 1 and maybe lowering the tier 1 costs. Getting logistics early will give players more targets to explore early on, and is on the same tier as the initial colonization techs, giving you an easy choice. I recognize you can research logistics 1 right away (for humans?) - but as a tier 2 skill it takes 25+ turns or something to research. Maybe it's also a matter of replacing one of the starting frigates with an outpost ship, so players can immediately expand to an asteroid belt or gas giant as a way to extend their range. This also introduces them to this (very cool) mechanics right away. Or adding a bit more base SSP so that if players DO take the +2 outpost ship or +1 colony ship culture advancement they don't immediately crash their fledgling economy. This is a "newb trap" if ever I saw one and it will enrage people. Maybe planet-type morale is changed such that the direct penalties are less (e.g. reduced to -20% morale/production instead of -40%) but that the MAX morale is capped at a lower level as well (e.g. maybe max morale for a tolerable world is only +15% or something). This would make colonizing non-ideal worlds more attractive in the early game since you wouldn't have such a huge morale + growth + production penalty. Mid-game it would make terraforming a more attractive choice because it would remove the limit on max morale. That's all for now. Cheers.
Thank you for posting that Mezmorki, you were far more concise in describing the issue and you are indeed correct. Not only do I agree with you here, as it would be an instant quick fix, (with no dev effort), but it may interest you to note I too suggested the starting base SSP be increased a while ago. 5 SSP to start would be a nice move, it won't break the pace of the game or reduce the strategic depth but it will remove the newb trap. Well said sir, you have my full support. My suggestion would be start with this only, analyze the results, and then if needed, incorporate some of the other suggestions you made.
Thanks for your feedback guys, I took note of this "extra SSPs at the start" issue and will take it into consideration for the next versions. Thanks.
I think that there needs to be a some degree of consistency in terms of starting area for the home neighborhood. It doesn't have to be the same systems, but it has to be fairly consistent. A case could be made that at higher difficulty levels, the AI might get a better start zone, but for the player does need a narrower normal distribution range for starting.
