{"id":9355,"date":"2013-06-28T10:45:16","date_gmt":"2013-06-28T14:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spacesector.com\/blog\/?p=9355"},"modified":"2013-06-28T10:50:27","modified_gmt":"2013-06-28T14:50:27","slug":"making-a-space-4x-game-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spacesector.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/making-a-space-4x-game-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Making a Space 4X Game: Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Making<\/a><\/p>\n

For this article I’m going to discuss technology in my game. On my previous article, A Living Galaxy<\/a>, technology became a hot topic in the comment section so it only makes sense I write about it next.<\/p>\n

Overall Game Design Philosophy<\/h3>\n

Since I’m going to be writing a lot about the game systems, I’ll take a brief moment to explain my philosophy on them. For many of the systems, I take something that players are familiar with (ie: genre standards) then I improve and add onto it. So you will see many familiar aspects but done differently.<\/p>\n

The aspects that I change are carefully thought about and chosen for specific reasons. Technology is a system where I added some new features onto the standard. However, I do add larger twists to the systems to make them radically different than the norm.<\/p>\n

Overview<\/h3>\n

The two main goals that I’ve tried to accomplish with the technology system involves replayability and choice.<\/p>\n

Technology consists of 4 broad categories: Energy, Materials, Xeno-Sciences, and Computers. In addition, there’s a special one called Super-Projects \u2013 but more on this later. There will be 50 technologies in each of the 4 main categories (200 total) and most races will not have access to them all.<\/p>\n

Proficiencies<\/h3>\n

Since races currently do not have any special\/unique technologies, I still needed a way to show an affinity or lack thereof. There is a proficiency for each technology category, and this serves to modify the technology cost. An empire with a high proficiency, say 100%, will have to pay the base cost to learn the technology. While an empire with a rating of 80% will pay 20% more. This helps distinguish between the different categories and races.<\/p>\n

The benefit of this system is in it’s simplicity which still offers depth and impact throughout the entire game. It’s also easier to balance from a game design perspective and is trivial effort from an implementation standpoint.<\/p>\n

Technology Cost<\/h3>\n

I’ve decided to use the familiar \u201cresearch points\/beaker\u201d concept here. It’s a nice abstraction because trying to easily quantify research (especially in various categories\/sciences) seemed to make things overly complicated. I’ve experimented with ideas such as \u201cmillions of hours\u201d and \u201cresearch labs\u201d and while I could get it to sorta work, it never really fit in (in my opinion :) ).<\/p>\n

Details and Progression<\/h3>\n

The following explains specific details and the progression of the technology system.<\/p>\n

First, you can only research one item at a time. This is a genre standard but cuts down on micromanagement and offers choice.<\/p>\n

Second, there are 10 tiers of technology within each category \u2013 so each tier has 5 technologies. Each empire starts with the first tier unlocked. Upon unlocking a new tier, 3 random technologies will be selected from the 5 (note: Races may get different amounts based on their characteristics). In the end, a race can only learn 60% of the known technologies (ie: 30 of the 50 technologies in each category). This is good because it offers:<\/p>\n