In Beta 5, an empire is composed of a set of planets of equal importance towards the empire. The number of planets in an empire is limited by the happiness of the planets. The more planets you have the lower their happiness gets and the harder it is to prevent them from revolting, thus destroying infrastructures.
This setting causes several problems.
First of all, planets players don’t intend to keep, such as planets taken in war time, are treated like any other planet and therefore have a huge impact on “core” planets happiness. This tend to reduce the speed of wars and the will to go to war of players. And we want to write a war game…
Moreover, the same remark is valid for planets being exploited for money or ships building.
We could also add that even if an optimum of around 12 “core” planets is defined for Beta 5, this is quite artificial and was merely introduced to reduce player growth the same way Hyperiums does. And Hyperiums is a bad influence (TM). The number of planets a player can manage should only be limited by his ability to manage them efficiently…
Therefore we intend to introduce several new features in Beta 6.
The first feature is the ability to define a category for any player controlled planets.
Core planets are an empire’s innermost planets, hosting its government and being the center of its economy. They have to be close together. However their number is limited.
Rim planets are an integral part of an empire. However, they do not constitute the center of its civilisation. Rim planets strive to become core planets, and fear to become slave planets, which has an influence on empire parameters such as their tolerance to low happiness and such.
Annexed planets are planets that an empire just conquered.
Slave planets are planets which are being exploited by a player. The player has to pass laws to allow for slavery in his empire, which has a bad influence on his core and rim planets. Population on slave planets don’t like the empire but can be over-worked.
This distinction among several categories of planets allows to apply different penalties and bonuses depending on the category. Therefore all planets aren’t treated the same way and this allows to solve the “too many planets” problem during war time or to make money.
Another feature is that we intend to allow way more planets to be controlled by a player. The idea would be to get a typical empire up to several hundreds. In order to allow casual users to be able to manage that many planets, we intend to introduce advanced scripting abilities, for instance to manage build queues even if the required resources to build are not yet available. However, mass management of planets should be less efficient than micro-management. Therefore we should end up with huge but not that efficient empires with planets revolting and so on, and smaller micro-managed efficient empires.
What do you think of the idea of categorising planets?
Do you think the categories are adequate?
Can you think of other categories?
What kind of characteristics would you associate with each categories on the bonuses / penalties point of view?
What do you think of the intended empire sizes?
Is the idea of micro-managing hundreds of planets too much in your opinion (we intend to have way more buildings than just factories and turrets, with way more possible upgrades than what exists in Beta 5)?
Do you think the idea of huge empires on the number of planets point of view might provide too big an advantage to hardcore players? How would you reduce this advantage?
I like it, i mean all of it… I think that micro-cores should get some bonuses like you said, simply because when an empire gets too big, communication gets harder and control gets harder, especially on the exterior parts of the empire. So, is there going to be like a capital planet in each core to justify where the outskirts are?
There won’t be any capital planet per se. The outskirts of the empire are defined as what isn’t part of the set of core planets which have to be close together and are limited in numbers.
As for the bonuses side of things, we don’t really plan bonuses for small empires per se. They’ll just be easier to manage thus being better managed thus being more efficient than huge ones.
Is there a limitation on the number of rim planets that an empire can have? If I were to strive to be an honest, tolerant, peaceful, and I can’t remember the other current axes… Emperor and did not wish to maintain slave planets, would there be any sort of advantage to this aside from increased happiness levels?
Also, as this sort of relates to empires, will there be a limitation to population in this game? I think the cap of 40k in B5 was another factor of stagnancy at the end of round 1.
I really like all of this. I will probably be tending to have a ‘smaller’ efficient core but…I don’t know. I love how this is worked anyway. I just think that enough has to be in place so that uber active players cannot get that MASSIVE advantage over casual players. Obviously someone who is more active should and will have advantage but that advantage really needs to be managed and not…too big.
So far we haven’t planned a limitation on the number of annexed planets (core planets are limited to a fraction of the total empire size, not including slave planets, and rim planets to a multiple of the the amount of core planets). People should have the possibility to have a decent size empire without slave planets.
On the slavery side, possessing slave planets has major drawbacks, such as a happiness penalty, especially on annexed planets: people don’t like the idea of having slaves around because they might become slaves themselves at some point. Therefore possessing slave planets reduces the amount of non-slave planets a player can control.
There will be a limitation to population, but way higher than in Beta 5 and longer to reach (2-3 years). Moreover since there is no limit to the number of planets one can hold, stagnancy can be avoided by taking more planets once you have reached the maximum pop. The fact that players have to find resources for just about everything adds to that.
On the advantage to hardcore players compared to casual players, we intend to limit it with:
* more scripting tools, like the quick building from beta 5, for build queues, fleets movements and so on
* a “slower” game with events such as battles taking longer to complete, so that it is possible for someone connecting from time to time for a short period of time each day to react
* a real possibility to defend an attacked planet, impossible defense being obviously a design flaw in beta 5
oh, i thought this game was already slow enough… at least to start. So, as empires continue to grow larger and larger, are more and more z-coordinates going to open up so that there is room and hope for smaller players?
The slower game side of things isn’t applying to everything. It’s true starting up is slow in Beta 5 and we should correct that. However when you’re under attack you might lose a planet in 20 min, and this every 4h, which is way too fast for the casual user.
As for the universe expansion, this already happens in Beta 5 and a similar process will be in place in Beta 6.
thats a good point, because realistically also, a planet shouldn’t be able to come under another empires control that quickly…
That’s exactly the point here
However we’re still in the process of figuring out time frames for such things.
w00tzors