Hot posts in thread: Well, if you have to have buildings...

Besides Combat (which I think we have fairly established needs to be TBS and not RTS), this is the other most important aspect of a successful 4X game for me.

Space 4X is meant for TBS combat, and everything else is a means to that end (e.g. Research for better weapons, ship designs and systems and overall production). Referring to OPs (@Reformations) posts and thoughts, I am completely in sync with them. I have made another post on a game called "Polaris Sector" for the same reason - empire management is nicely simplified so that Building queues are not needed, just colony role. Which is especially important if the empire is to have 10+ colonies (or some other number beyond which individual control of colonies bogs down the game).

Moo1 had it right simplifying planet management (ofcourse, we wont have just sliders today). Moo1 style helped with late game empire management immensely and didnt let the game slow down as much as every other 4X (space or otherwise) that I have played.

If I needed those features, then there are already many games with those - this is my view and counter to folks requesting for this feature on the grounds of realism, immersion etc.

tl;dr - Abstracting building the way Moo1 did, is much better for scaling in late game and helps retain focus on Combat which is key component of a successful 4X for me

 

Even though I deem MoO 2 a holy creation, I don't like how building work there and to be honest it don't work so well in Civiliziation 1-4 either. Early on you balance between postponing and not postponing buildings and later on you simply build everything. If that's the vision how buildings should work then it's basically the same as MoO 1/SotS/DG sliders but with extra player attention and pretty cityscape.

In the current PSS prealpha that is averted by making worthy colonies scarce and well by how buildings work. It made me develop homeworld one way, shipyard world the other way and population hubs yet another way.

 

we play a game not a simulator. In this case I like the way MOO2 did it which is good old classic civ-style, nothing more, nothing less. But one have to admit that reformist also has said some true things about it. eg. classic civ style does not promote differentiation in the long run as much as lets say galciv III which is IMO the pinnacle in complex modern planet building systems.

The question now is: do we really need a differentiation for planets? Or is it better to have some vanilla "optimal" builds like MOO2 offers it? Lets not forget, we have to deal with dozens or even a hundred of planets at the same time. Making them all individual is quite a task without fully changing the economic system of MOO2. Additionally if all have to be exceptional, in truth none is.

Maybe the solution is somewhere in between. Lets have a few visible spezialized "interesting" planets for food, industry, defense etc. while 80% is just vanilla and needs the same standard build.

 

Done judiciously and in a gamey way then yes. But that was not the case in my example. If population limit per limit is in quadrilions and population grows exponentially (not like in Civ where growth is quasilinear) then you would be hard pressed to care for productivity of colonies with few thousand people, compared to the homeworld with 6+ more digits in every number. Civilization and Endless Legend are poor example for this, there you typically have no more then 2 digits difference between new city and biggest one. What I described was more like in idle/incremental games where you start with 1 coin/s and eventually reach the biggest number Javascript can handle (300 digits). You maybe can conjure up a game that could be interesting with such numbers but put them in any top 10 4X game and you'd kill the reason for expansion in it. And without expansion PSS would be a lesser game.

Another point in my post was sense of scale when invoking realism. Earth is enormous and if we really wanted it could support more people then popular SF authors imagined.

 

IvanK, other 4X games have done this. Civilization is one of them. Their cities are not capped in size, early games in the series had to build structures like aqueducts to increase pop, later games you had to build buildings that increased happiness and health to get larger pops, but there was no limit. Endless Legend took this even further allowing you to expand cities indefinitely to keep increasing the pop, and it had a particular civ that could only build a single city but it had bonuses to make that city grow faster and larger. This 4X game was very interesting and it won multiple awards and game of the year by major publishers, so you are clearly mistaken in your argument that such a game would be uninteresting.

Besides, planets will have pops that effectively reach a max size based on food production. That's the way Civilization handled it. Your empire can only produce X amount of food and therefore can only reach Y population as a total across the empire. Let the player decide where they want to divide up that population. If they want it all on one planet, then why not? (Its probably a bad idea strategically)

Since other game publishers are being innovative, why cant PSS. All the other space Moo clones have pops capped by planet size and we have been there and done that to death, its now boring. Lets innovate and try new things, especially if it gets us a little closer to reality.

 

I liked the way that Gal Civ 3 had buildings to be honest.

There needs to be extremes though - some planets are city planets like Coruscant, while others are barely inhabited outposts.

 

Realism is important in games but should not overcome gameplay. I agree with ivanK. However there needs to be some realism so as to hook the player in the game's narrative. Even in 4X games where the narrative is usually a subnarrative for flavor, if the game becomes too unrealistic then the player's suspension of disbelief will not hold and he will lose interest in the game.
As for realism I'm not talking realism as dictated by our understanding of physics (or else no space travel for us) but consistency in the narrative and world building as well as in the gameplay mechanics.
For example if you dictate early game that even for the smallest movement a fleet needs at least a turn then you cannot have instant fleet teleportation unless it is explain by the narrative.
My point is not really relevant to the whole thread by I wanted to respond to this issue.

 

Invoking realism to game design would lead to boring games. Billions and trillions (both scales) are far from theoretical limit. You don't need planet sized cities like on Corsucant or Trantor (Isaac Asimov's Foundation), you could easily fit them in one big acropolis and leave 90% of planet to wildlife. Youtuber Isaac Arthur (I recommend his videos) argues that the figure for Earth (video) would be in at least quadrillions (10^15) if heat problem can be solved. No 4X game would be interesting if you could just stay on one planet and develop it virtually indefinitely.

And there is our surface bias were everybody is imagined to live on the surface of a planet. Some planets like Venus and gas giants could host could cities and if you think about it, you don't need a planet at all. Just spam Rama-like spaceships until you run out of building material.

Necroing a stale thread, I know...

 

Planet sizes having restrictions on max population or max number of buildings doesn't make any sense. Even the smallest planet is absolutely huge and should be able to hold an unlimited population. Think Tokyo or Hong Kong, huge numbers of people in a very small area. Now apply that to an entire planet, and you get Corsucant. A whole planet that is covered by one mega super ultra uber huge city of 2 trillion population. I want to be able to create a Corsucant world in my games, but if planet pop is limited by size, well then I cant, and I miss out on creating yet another great sci-fi thing.

Realistic planets should have unlimited pop and unlimited production capacity, as long as you can ship in food and resources, but you would most likely specialize planets. You could have a Corsucant home world, and 5 other planets that are very low pop but are covered entirely by farms and they ship all their food to the mega pop planet. A farm planet should not need much population. Think about it, America today produces more food then it consumes yet less then 2% of our population is farmers. You should be able to find a fertile planet and have only 1 or 2 population units on it and it should be able to produce max food. Adding more pop wouldn't increase food production.

Planets could have a happiness rating for over crowding, but you should be able to offset that and make them happy somehow and thus still get a mega huge population.

 

Wonders and mini wonders is one of the important concepts of the first post. It lends itself well to idea of fewer buildings but more choices.

Another similar approach is to limit number of buildings per planet (think size). This is also known as the knapsack problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem

This is somewhat interesting but less critical than limiting number of building of same type in empire.

Both are preferable to the thoughtless spam approach of moo2.

Many people don't appreciate the elegance of moo1 factories. I've played a lot of 4x and the factories mechanic easily scales the "progress" of a planet through early and late stages. The output is intuitive (1 bc per factory). The costs to build a factory,although complicated to calculate per hand), scales so that early factories on a planet are cheap to build but get more expensive as they go. This makes for better decisions of when to max out a planets factories or switch over to research/ships and wait for future factory costs to come down. (Either through construction or computer tech).

 

To ADD a note on that aspect I also liked The Way Ascendency did it with The planets. You had A certain amount of spaces and some spaces were good for produktion, science etc.

 

I kind of like this approach but would still prefer something more aesthetically pleasing than sliders.
Foe example.
A missile base would become planetary missile defence. This could be represented as a "building" on the colony screen but... it would be upgradable. You would then see a single building as an abstraction but would be able to determine its scale on a planet by planet basis. (This would act similar to a slider and you would no longer feel that it is absurd to be limited to a "single" missile base).

If you then take the approach of fewer buildings, some of which are indeed wonders, you could eliminate a lot of micromanagement while retaining the feeling of Moo2.

Months ago I posted The colony screen which details some of the reasons I prefer the Moo2 approach of using buildings, this does not mean however that I wish to see the same exact approach, I would be quite pleased if it were taken a step further and refined so as to please players like myself and players like you at the same time.

There is also one more relevant piece of information that I have that you do not yet. I have seen how this game scales and it is sweet. You will be doing quite well if you can manage to have 6 colonies by turn 250, run-away growth has been paid great attention to and looks to have been virtually eliminated. (Don't worry, it does feel like you are spanning the galaxy even with so few colonies).

That, in combination with some innovative mechanics instituted by the Devs as regards planetary engineering and exploitation, should lead to much less micromanagement while providing greater variety at the same time.

 

I agree with Reformations somewhat, I've also thought MOO1 was better in many aspects than MOO2, particularly planetary management. I actually like the planetary management mechanics of Moo1 over Moo2 and I have always wanted a Moo 1.5. However, I dont want my planets to have a very boring planetary management like Stars in Shadows. I never liked the idea of building 1 each type of building per planet, it was too much busy work and it just never made sense why only 1 per planet. I think a combo of Moo1 factories with sliders, with a little bit of Moo2 where you can make some buildings, would be great, but all the buildings should be wonders (or mini-wonders) instead, where you can only build 1 per empire or 1 per solar system. For basic buildings like factories, missile bases, shopping malls etc... you should be able to build as many as you want like in Moo1.

 

That's a very positive and reassuring sign. There have been innumerable attempts to recapture the subtle feel and balance of MOO 2 but nobody - especially that dumbed-down mess of an official sequel MOO-CTS - has even come remotely close to getting it right.

I'll have my fingers crossed that PSS ends up being the one to do a faithful job.

 

The essence of the matter, balance.
So far, everything I have seen and experienced with PSS indicates that it will be even better balanced than Moo2, far more fine tuned. You will definitely experience well thought out balance far later into the game than you could with Moo2 which tended to become rather homogenized in the latter game.

 

Yes, I do. The vast majority of buildings in MoO2 are distractions. What sort of question is there about constructing a building that doubles the $ output of the planet? I can understand using the resources as a way to extend the development of the planet but there are far far more elegant ways of conveying a planet developing over time.

Yes, there is a research choice about whether or not to get access to the building. That choice can still remain in the game without using the building mechanic. (See list above of research options that result in global bonuses).

PSS would do well to get the building count down to ~1/3 of MoO2. I would also suggest a limit to the number of buildings per planet and a limit to the number of same buildings per empire.

Part of these strong feelings comes with recent playthroughs of the excellent remakes of MoO1. Remnants of Precursors and Dominus Galaxia (as well as many recent hours in original MoO1 for comparing the new guys). These guys are the true follow-ups to MoO1. I'd be happy if PSS also kept MoO1 in remind and ended up more as MoO 1.5 rather than 2.5.

 

You feel that strongly about it?
Still, from my perspective, the execution of the concept certainly had flaws, however that doesn't diminish the validity of the concept itself.

 

This is pretty much where I stand as well. While some abstraction is vitally necessary in any strategy game, I think too much is definitely a bad thing, if all we wanted was pure abstract strategy then we would all be playing chess.

Clearly most SPACE strategy gamers also demand some degree of immersive involvement where they actually feel that they are playing the role of "space admiral", "explorer" or "emperor". This is an enormous part of why many people play and enjoy space strategy games and should definitely not be underestimated in development.

The more bone-dry sliders, spreadsheets and pure-abstract mechanics you put in, the harder that immersive involvement becomes to achieve. As with anything, a subtle balance is needed and I think MOO2 struck an incredibly good chord between strategic complexity and immersion. Its one of the reasons MOO2 was so popular, beloved and deserving of a faithful modern update, they actually got the balance right! A very rare thing in space strategy gaming.

 

"One must be careful then not to add too much complexity simply for complexities sake, Moo2 was pretty good about not falling into that trap."

Hmm.... I would say MoO2 nosedived into that trap, got out of the trap and then jumped back in. Repeatedly.

MoO1 abstracted buildings into incredibly few categories. #Factories for infrastructure and #bases/shields for defense and +max_pop "buildings" of terraforming for growth.

MoO2 took each of those and added a half dozen unnecessary buildings for each category. Then added more categories. There's military buildings for ground defense, specialized buldings for conquered species, buildings for income, buildings for morale. It gets ridiculous.

Name a MoO2 building that actually added variety to the game? You might think planetary generators or radiation shields. Wrong. Their presence promoted even more homogeneity by turning would-be diverse planets into the same as the others. I might buy an argument for Deep core mines because it was a rare building that actually had you think about maintenance cost.

Cool techs in MoO2 are more like heightened intelligence, nano dis assemblers, microlite construction, and virtual reality network. Empire-wide effects that don't require 100+ clicks to implement in your game.

MoO2 buildings are a curse on the series and are based more on Master of Magic and Civilization than Master of Orion.

 

Oh I certainly want buildings. I know is is not a realistic approach but it's more fun and allows some players to become more personally attached to their colonies, somehow I can't generate the same level of enthusiasm for sliders.

Micromanagement never became an issue for me, I built what I needed where I needed and after that set the world to trade goods, only a handful of my worlds were paid attention to on a more intense basis.

One could argue that it is not realistic to be able to build only a single missile base on planet versus Moo1 but that misses two points.

A missile base should be seen as an abstraction of a defence system, not just a building.

I cared far more and was attached to my colonies to a greater degree with buildings versus sliders. While this may not hold true for some players there are numerous players that prefer it.

The whole key in my opinion is to include enough variety, retain enough abstraction and actually give the buildings meaning in the game. One must be careful then not to add too much complexity simply for complexities sake, Moo2 was pretty good about not falling into that trap.