Thanks... I'll be sure to check it out. I'm somewhat reluctant to start something there until I've got more of a product... too much pressure for something I'm doing just for fun right now. But anyone is willing to submit anything if they want to. I just don't know what's going to happen with stuff.

[GAMEPLAY]

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Early Game Conceptualizations

One of the problems I have with TBS strategy games is that I personally am impatient for the all the cool stuff that happens towards the late game. For me, the early game usually involves me waiting for someone to declare war on me while I research like mad so I can build cool ships/troops.

I really want to do something unique and special for the early game... something cool enough where players will look forward to loading up a new game just for the experience, rather than feeling they've gotta “work” for the cool stuff.

So what's the coolest thing about going a new planet? Exploration. The early game will focus a great deal on exploration... how well you explore the planet will influence how successful your colony is. I'm not talking about goodie huts, although I certainly am fond of those... but something a little more dramatic.

I've split these conceptualizations into different categories, beginning with the easiest to implement to the most difficult. Eventually, I'd like to go for the gold and make the most interesting early game experience as possible.

CONCEPT A

The player will be able to build “surveyor” units. Surveyors can capture Anomalous Regions, that generate Research points each turn. The thing is with these Anomalous Regions is that they draw from a limited pool of Research points shared amongst all Anomalous Regions... once this pool is dried up the Anomalous Regions only produce the slightest trickle of Research.

This immediately generates strategic locations for players to fight over... whichever player can wrest the majority of the Anomalous Regions will have a definite edge over less aggressive players.

CONCEPT B

Concept B really focuses on making Surveyors more interesting units... making them the equivalent of heroes from traditional fantasy RPGs, except they're of a much lower power level and can't lead armies. They will be fleshed out as individual pioneers, adventurers, and scientists, and should be readily hirable from the first turn.

Surveyors should also have access to interesting gear choices from the get-go... sniper rifles, scout armor, gas masks, survival gear, mobile labs, etc, and also should have interesting skills and abilities. Surveyors should be able to form and fight as parties.

Surveyors should be absolutely the best early-game choice. However, as the game wears on and the colonies are better established, surveyors should be too expensive and too few to field in armies effectively, and eventually are replaced by military. Also, since exploration is no longer imperative, their role by mid and late game is basically over.

CONCEPT C

Concept C expands on planetary hazards, native life, and exploration. At this point I'm not above making mini-dungeons in the form of cave systems for little surveyors to explore. Hideous alien beasts like monsters from Avatar should be encountered. Essentially, a modified quest system like what we'll see in Elemental.

With this in place, the early game will ideally feel like one of those good/cheesy sci-fi space exploration movies. I don't know how to translate “wonderment” and “awesome” into a computer game form, but screw it... I'm gonna try.

Also, your old Surveyors should retire when their careers are over and live as citizens in your colony, perhaps eventually become generals, politicians, or some other kind of agent.

That's pretty much how I play GalCivII. I build just enough of a military that no one thinks I'm an easy target, try to stay neutral towards everyone, and just keep clicking "turn" thinking to myself "please don't declare war on me, please don't declare war" while I research up to nightmare torpedoes.

Anyway, there is one problem I see with your Concept A. I think it encourages super-rapid expansion at the start a little too much. From the sounds of it, the only really effective way to play is to expand as far as possible, as quickly as possible. I turtle in pretty much every strategy game I play (real time or turnbased) and look for natural choke points that make it easy to defend my borders (in Elemental, that's usually mountain ranges and things like that). But with your model, I feel like I would be almost coerced into not turtling and instead aggresive expansionism.

My 2 cents

Noted, Kyogre... that's not the thing I'm going for. I too am a turtling player and I'd like that to be a somewhat valid strategy. The idea wouldn't be to build new towns over these strategic locations, but to capture them with surveyors and hold them with fortifications or something.

I think a weakness of other TBS games is that early game battles are uninteresting, don't happen that often, and usually require *all* of a civ's forces to be effective.  I want a sort of lower intensity conflict between small groups of well-armed people. Even if you are a turtler, there shouldn't be too much risk involved with arming 2-5 well-trained people to go out and capture strategic locations. Also, as a turtler, you wouldn't get super bored. As a point of comparison, it would be rather like the game Disciples, with well-fortified capitals and 2-3 groups of adventurers.

[Faction Overview]

MDC CEO Krupp, overseeing factories in a new colony. From the Republican Free Archives.

The Mars Development Company

The Mars Development Company was a name that once struck every human outside Earth with trepidation and anxiety. The truly ancient corporation once had a chokehold on near-Earth colonies in the early days of colonization, its entrenched management insisted on inhumane policies to ensure profitability. The MDC inspired centuries of anti-corporate violence and guerilla warfare targeted against the Company and other corporations that mimicked it's business model. It was thought that the conflict would provoke the first Republic-wide civil war.

It didn't. Actually, the MDC stock prices plummeted and its strategy of stripping planets for mineral wealth was not found cost-effective. Other companies found that native life made a far more valuable commodity than any rocks that could possibly be dredged up. The MDC's end founded a new era for entrepreneurship in the stars. Now, the MDC means about as much to the modern Republican as the East India Company does.

Except that the MDC never actually went away. It had eked out a living on distant moons of impoverished, buying up prison populations and hiring the poorest of the poor to mine away their surfaces and selling it in bulk... the same exact business strategy it had been using for a millenium.

The truth is they can't stop it if they wanted to... they were all betrayed by the CEO Alfred Krupp. A thousand years ago the entire upper management were placed in robotic bodies, thinking that if they were immortal they could become the most powerful men in existance. These robotic bodies were known as the PresUnix (or Preservation Unit). However, there was a technical flaw built into the units: the part of the brain that governs imagination ceased to function upon introduction to the unit. Krupp's own PresUnix, of course, didn't have the flaw, Krupp's own lack of imagination is simply due to age. Krupp thought that by sabotaging his upper management without actually killing them he could ensure he had no rivals.

The MDC, the robots that they are, continue to perform the same things they have done for centuries without any sign of cessation. But Krupp knows in order for the company to survive he'll need to "evolve"... that is, he'll need to take his operations to the frontier, where he will no longer be confined to dusty moons but to worlds filled with mineral wealth. Krupp is absolutely incapable of seeing value in the native life of planets, he very much views flora and fauna as the stuff between him and the rocks.

FACTION QUALITIES

- The MDC relies on law enforcement and military power to keep order, rather than loyalty.

- MDC's military style is masses of poorly-armed infantry supplemented by mercenaries and robots.

- Enormous population growth and immigration ensures that the MDC player will never be short of soldiers and political instability.

- The MDC are terrible at terraforming... however, they are really good at reversing the terraforming process and making a planet less habitable.

- The robots may not have imagination but they have long memories... and longer lives. They remember a lot of secrets the great UNITY members would rather kept secret. They curry political favors by blackmail.

(My art skills are the suxors right now. I'll have to make something later)

[GAMEPLAY]

Planets and Gameplay

It's been a while since I posted, and I wanted to show you guys what I'm looking at right now.

Today I started playing around with Python. It's an extremely easy language. So easy I sort of did a "proof of concept" planet generator. You type in the inputs and it tells you the colonization potential of that planet. It even cranks out a "population growth rate" index and the escape velocity. It's a very crude program but I wanted to just illustrate some points to myself.

I'd like the choice of planet to dramatically change the gameplay. What I wanted to focus specifically on in this post is gravitational pull. Depending on the gravitational pull, warfare and society should dramatically change.

Gravity heavy worlds are generally less valuable because the escape velocity makes it more expensive to export goods from the planet. Heavy gravity worlds also are just more unpleasant... since everything literally involves more work. Air travel and travel in general is far more restricted.

On the other hand, low gravity worlds benefit from a high escape velocity. The increased capacity for flight and transport affords a more dispersed society. For a low-grav worlder, a high grav world should seem really frantic!

These things should be fairly easily simulated by attaching a "Gravity" modifier to things such as movement speeds, population growth, cost of transportation and flight.

In terms of military, low grav worlders would benefit from high manueverability and speed as well as exceptional ranges for weapons. War on high gravity worlds, on the other hand, would have effective ranges reduced by a lot, being largely replaced with very powerful guns, thick armor, and even melee weapons. Aircraft would have to be very specialized, but they would for the most part be replaced with tanks.

This also allows weapons specialized for different environments. An expensive, slow-firing obscenely overpowered rifle might be excessive on a low-grav world but the only well-functioning ranged weapon on a high grav one. Melee weapons would be of greater use.

Low gravity would allow a ton of really fun possibilities too... jump pack infantry, obscenely huge creatures, crossbows that fire artillery shells...

On a deeper level, there could even be a difference between a character raised on a high gravity world and a low gravity one. Low grav worlders would be crushed on a high grav world!

Of course, on a "Earth" gravity world, there would be a suitable mix of military strategies.

Here's the link to the raw code to the "planet generator", in case you wanted to copy/paste it into Python v3 and play around with, frankly, a pretty dumb program.

http://www.pastebin.ca/1823320

I am sorry. I have to say this.

Every time I see the second concept art image, all I'm seeing is a dead man-horse with blue jeans and blonde hair.

Lol

You aren't the first person to think this.

Maybe I should alter the original art.

I've begun to model some of the buildings. There's nothing I want to show off yet. Mostly I've picked buildings because they're very simple to model, compared to guns, which I can't even draw for some reason. I can pretty much draw anything except for a gun. Weird.

Anyways, this is a list of buildings I need to make models for, as well as their state of completion. These are only the buildings I definitely need, more are certainly necessary but I can't waste my time making Residential Townhouse Variant 3 right now.

Initial Colony Structure (Partly Done)

Agri-Dome (Partly Done, had a completed model for it but I accidently deleted it. It was a neat one too... )

Traditional farm

City Center

Factories

Houses (Partly Done, these will be dome houses like in common scifi, but more variants are necessary)

Mines & quarries

Oil derricks & drills

Refineries

Research firm

Financial firm

Legal firm

Hospitals

Airport

Seaport

Spaceport

Bunkers & Trenches

AA implacements

Military bases

These are more infrastructural, I'll hold off on modeling these until I know a little more about how roads work.

Highways

Maglev trains

Pipelines

Lower priority are variants and ruined versions of each structure, which will probably end up looking much better than the other buildings on this list as by the time I get to those as I'll be a better modeler.

do you plan on having tactical turn based ship and fleet battles, because if so that would be amazing.  there is so much you could do with turn based space combat.

Thank you Stmorpheus. As of right now I don't think I'm anywhere the skill level to do ship and fleet battles, although I think it's pretty important to have an abstraction which is what I'll be using for right now. Dark Republic is a long term mod, and something that I really don't have the particular set of skills to do right now.

So right now, I'm working on Grand Ambitions which is, ironically, a less ambitious mod so I can sink my teeth into modding before moving onto Dark Republic. Some of the systems in Grand Ambitions will be used directly for Dark Republic.

I look forward to this one.