X3 and EVE Online, and all those more RPG / Adventure games are on the other side of the space games spectrum. They put the player in the driver’s seat and show him things closely. However what these games offer in action lack in strategic depth (you don’t really have that much economical decisions, resource gathering, diplomacy interaction, research and tactical warfare to do). Some 4X games try to use some RPG elements (like MoO2′s and DW Legends characters) and some Space Simulation / RPG / Space Adventure / Trade games also contain some strategic elements here and there.

I think there’s room for everybody. But I agree. As possible 4X strategy games should contain the best of the RPG / Adventure / Action games and the other way around. There all kinds of tastes for every type of space game.

” In the end, a jack of all trades might just be a master of none.”
Exactly!

One of my biggest problems is my removal from the action.

In any standard space 4x game, the player is always distanced from the action. The player never gets the experience of viewing the galaxy and events from the bridge of a ship. The player never gets the experience of being a participant of activies on planets – like diplomatic negotiations, espionage and sabotage, and ground combat.

I’ve played games where I have been a part of those experiences, and I have found them to be quite enjoyable. When I played X3 Reunion and viewed Argon Prime and its massive shipyard and defenses for the first time, then traveled through the gate system to another sector and prayed that my sensors could guide me out of the nebula I knew that I had never encountered a game like it before and I haven’t since. (Except maybe EVE Online.)

Maybe it would be better for space 4x games if the player could also participate in a singular role in his or her empire at any given moment and witness it firsthand. Of course, trying such a hybrid or fusion would be incredibly difficult if not impossible – both from a technological standpoint and an entertainment standpoint. Not only would the developer of such a game have to develop the traditional 4x engine, but a first person shooter or roleplaying engine as well. Not only would the developer have to develop the traditional 4x interface, but others as well. The final hurdle would be integrating the functionality and interface of those four things seamlessly. In the end, a jack of all trades might just be a master of none.

Lots of costs, little perceived reward. I believe if done just right the effects could be amazing. EVE Online is attempting something of the sort, with their online players contracting planetside missions to Dust players. It will be interesting to see how that works out. If someone cannot figure out how to eliminate the distance between the player and the results of his or her actions, then I fear that space 4x games will always be limited to the small niche that isn’t affected by that distance.

Meanwhile I’m still defining in my head the post on the player in-game role.

So the forums are the best place for you to get feedback from the community. If you want we can move the posts to the forums. You can create the forum threads that you find appropriate. Then copy & paste your comments from the “Space Strategy Games What’s Next” post to the appropriate threads. When you’re finished let me know and I’ll delete those comments from the post.

Then we can all discuss your ideas in a more convenient way. Let me know if this is ok for you. Let me know if you need help om familiarize yourself with the forums.

Some of the thing posted here were really in search of feedback and now I fear that reposting them will make contents duplication.

Bummer!

I will start with a couple of ideas not yet expressed and I hope to have developed at least a next step of the others when I will get there.

Alternatively you can launch your own thread(s) in “Game Design”: http://www.spacesector.com/blog/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=47

What do you think?

My next post is about the player point of view/in-game role. Where should it go for you?

I hope you understand that it would be more profitable to everybody that you launch discussion topics in the forums instead of concentrating all your ideas just in this post alone. I hope you understand. Thanks.

Sublimates civilizations could keep interfaces with this plane of existence to be explored with the outmost caution.
Defensive singularity tech level weapons can be waked up with dramatic effects (speak about space slugs!).

A Singularity swarm can stop just at the outskirts of the player empire basically resetting to zero a big part of the map.

And we are speaking just about random events. The story lines would be able to use them to great effect.

GalCiv2 has it but in a boring, mechanical way.

Singularity should be dramatic and non assuredly positive: when it start is uncontrollable and it’s effect varied and final.

As I said the best possible outcome is Sublimation, a race wide passage to another level of existence. It’s less glamorous brother is the Uploading, where everybody just give up on the Real and just go all to play WoW.
Other outcomes are possible and the game mechanics should steer your Singularity Endgame in one direction or the other depending on the moral and technological choices the player made during the game.

One particularly nasty Singularity outcome is the Godlike Power expansion swarm.

You, or worst someone else is expanding backed by an ever expanding almost godlike tech level.

What can stop that? Well, if we are speaking about a single consciousness probably a late Sublimation. If not the various part of the swarm will probably begin an attrition between themselves.
It can collide with another Singularity etc.

Point is that the faction who first attain a Singularity is the winner.

Or it is?

You have to understand that I.’m still thinking in the ‘Infinite Map’ point of view so during the game we have to assume that multiple Singularity had happened in the Galaxy but we can’t made a winner an unnamed empire in an unexplored part of the galaxy.

Space is vast and the player should feel that so I’m thinking more of player victory condition:

The game is won if the player attain certain space/population/economics size, or Diplomatic/politic prominence or a well developed Singularity or something else.

Winner condition are from the player point of view, losing condition also. So Singularity can happens without ending the game.

That side a close Singularity wil probably overwhelm the player closing the game, possibly any moment.
Can it be frustrating? Yes, also exciting.

I would propose an ‘Excession parameter’ at the game start. Can a close Excession close a game? Yes, no, rarely, and for the thrill seeker … Often and abundantly.

I will speak more about Excession in a future post if I’m not boring you all too much.

Maybe all of them at the same time (but in different moments of a game).

I quite like the idea of the advisors having a face, maybe aging and being substituted by a younger new one, maybe a ship captain will become admiral and then your military advisor/minister/automatic manager.

At some tech level they will be replaced by in-game AIs. Sometimes the AI will make their move to take control.

Maybe this will be a player-managed evolution of their empire. Maybe this will be an empire-level disaster where the AIs are really trying to expel the player from his command chair. This will be quite hard especially for a technocratic dictatorship.

If expelled the AIs can then evolve from ‘Space Monster’ to be kept at bay to enigmatic and spooky encounter, to a new race in the Galaxy, to a End of Times opponent or to an ally against one.

And this are only the ones that came from your empire.

Lots of story lines, every game a different combination of them, every game a different game.

What about an iPhone/iPad/Android app?

I’m in vacation writing this on my iPad ;-)

Newton is seldom acknowledged and Relativity is at best very relative.

A modern Space TBS should move up a notch in scientific terms.

This has not to be done to be ‘correct’ but because every time a player see in the game something too pulp he will think about it and that will kill his suspension of disbelieve.

Start Trek moved around that kind of problem growing around any kind of gobbledigock (Geordie was dramatic in that sense). At some level you will be obliged to do that but it has to sound realistic and the level has to be at the least medium to not be spotted by just anybody.

That said while a Space Slug is at best pathetic a cloud of auto replicating killer nanites can cover the same functions with a much better plausibility and thanks to that a much cooler creepiness.

Also missing from all the game that I know of are the Relativity Speed accelerated vehicles (rocks) that are the most plausible weapons that will be used in space wars.

Missing in action are also double or triple stars and black holes / neutron starts are grossly underused.

Space engineering is quite behind also: no orbitals aside of Halo, ring worlds, Dyson spheres, Matrioskas spheres, beanstalks. No use of L4 and L5 points and other know distinctive places.

There is a real trove of inspiration in thousands of SF books for interesting and unique planet building. A modern game should be able to use them.

What the player can know and what he can’t is extremely important: it can generate surprise. If a game manage to surprise the player a few times in completely different ways you are on the way to success.

The classic place where you have the FOW is on the map.
In the SciFi TBS games that I know the FOW is managed more in term of game choices than with some kind of reasonable explanation.
You can see all the stars or just the near ones. You have to explore stars with your ship to discover if there are planets! Even the gas giants!

In a modern game nebulas should mask part of the galaxy and sensor should gave more information about the nearby star system, with the appropriate speed of light delay.

Another area where the FOW is important is the research tree. While it should be different for each race it should be also different game after game. I would not go the random way: it is too strategic to be left at the hand of fate.
The LAI can follow this, remember previous games, previous research tree arrangement.
Some branching can be linked or triggered by the storyline or, again, at the state of the player development.
The perfect game is the one where the player win but with effort. The program, the LAI should maximize the number of games where this happens.

The FOW should also be applied to the relationship with the other OAI. The relation value and the posture that they have toward the player should be the official stance, not the real one. The OAI should really try to win or, at the least, to attain it’s goals.
That would close a little the gap between an human and an AI opponent.

BTW a galaxy is a big place, I think it could accommodate more than one winner.