Design objectives (1/2)
From the experience gathered while running previous Betas we can extract a few very important goals which we intend to keep in mind while designing Beta 5. At the same time we have to cope with a set of limits that we have to put on our imagination to design a game which we can actually write. It is the first aspect which is introduced here, as background knowledge around the underlying design context. The second one will be presented in a later post.
What we had in mind when working along the LegacyWorlds line after Chris released his uni project was to keep on developing a very simple game where a player could manage his empire in a very short time. However what we achieved is flawed.
First of all, while we have achieved the simplicity goal, the game remains too simple to keep interest high enough in the long run. Once you have settled down and implemented a reasonable set of technologies, it limits to building a few factories and turrets as population grows and to a pissing contest around the “My fleets is bigger than yours” and “I’m number x in IDR” issues. Personally I don’t find this exciting and I need more to a game than just this. Therefore we decided to add a more advanced empire management dimension to the existing warfare one so that people don’t get bored when no war is going on. However both aspects have to be sufficiently balanced so that being biased towards one of these aspects should work as long as it’s not too extreme - however, concentrating solely on warfare or on planet management shouldn’t work.
The second issue we have been facing with Beta 5 is a balancing issue between casual and hardcore players. Some design flaws, in particular around battle computations, make it very hard to defend, especially if you’re a casual player. Hardcore players have so big an advantage that it is driving away casual players. However LegacyWorlds should be a game open to both the casual gamer and the hardcore gamer. Therefore we have chosen to define a set of “online time objectives” surrounding game activities, such as:
- It should be possible to survive by playing about 30 minutes a day.
This doesn’t mean that someone playing so little would do great. However, it means that such a player should be able to manage his empire, grow to a decent size and survive medium-scale attacks. - At worst, defending against an attack should be a matter of 3 hours a day. This implies heavy scripting capabilities on the defensive side. However, in order to keep balance, being online more than that to defend shouldn’t make the defense much more efficient.
- Leading an attack should take time. The opposite side - leading an attack - should require a much higher activity level, at least 6 hours a day, to even start being efficient.
- Leading an alliance should be extremely time-consuming. This gives hardcore gamers something to do.
- LegacyWorlds should be able to satisfy both the guy who logs on daily during the evening and the guy who checks on it at regular intervals. This means that something should always be happening, but it should rarely be so urgent that it can’t wait 24h to be handled. It should be possible to “script” most actions and reactions, especially defensive moves and planet improvement.
A third issue we are facing in Beta 5 is boredom. When no particular action conducted by players, such as war, is happening, players have nothing much to do or to look at. Therefore we chose to introduce non-player empires, random events, etc. so that interesting things occur without depending on players’ choices. In the same trend, LegacyWorlds will be an extremely difficult game to master. However, it should allow for a relatively slow learning curve. As such, features should appear progressively, as the player discovers new technologies, and a lot of work should be put in an adaptive help system.
Do you think these goals are reasonable? What kind of other drawbacks from Beta 5 experience do you think we should take into account?
rimtosser:
I think that all of this is both really great and as Ju is saying, fairly necessary. While LW b5 IS really fun, it can quickly descend to a state of peace where no one is attacking anyone and all anyone is doing is “building a few factories and turrets as population grows”. All of this does sound really good with the scripting for defense and growth as well as making alliance management and attacking very hard, although I must say, maybe a little less than 6 hours to be only efficient, that does kind of limit the casual players from attacking EVER, you don’t really want their place in the game to be only defending right? In any case, I feel that yes these goals are reasonable and I really agree that it should be much harder to actually progress through the game then it is now.
March 14, 2008, 10:03 pmTSeeker:
@Rimtosser
Yeah, the 6h estimate was a bit aggressive on my part. If we limit that to 2h to *start* being efficient it might be easier for the casual player - however that might give the hardcore player too much of an advantage, and it’s hard to reduce the advantage one gains by having no life on both defense and offense.
What I was thinking when I wrote the Wiki version of this text was that an attacking player would end up managing a few others’ fleets either through his own TA list or through his alliance’s fleet management permissions.
But you do have a point, I’ll need to think about it some more.
March 15, 2008, 12:48 amDav:
this is great, it should make beta 6 more interesting and a bit more fair..
although how would you make alliance management harder, I’m not sure i like this part of the idea.
March 15, 2008, 4:33 amju:
The point is not to make alliance management hard. It’s just that given what we have roughly sketched so far it would require more time to do it properly than in Beta 5.
March 15, 2008, 8:54 amCyliis:
I agree with rimtosser, 6 hours does seem a bit extreme on the offensive side of things. Currently in B5 I can effectively plan and execute an attack given 2 hours, albeit spread out throughout the day. That’s without scripting capabilities. When I say effectively I mean that I can win. Very rarley can I spend more time than that on the game.
When you say 6 hours do you mean cumulative of all of the alliance members (using TA lists and such) or per person?
March 16, 2008, 3:55 pmTSeeker:
@Cyliis,
March 16, 2008, 4:36 pmAs I said, 6h was a very aggressive estimate. What I’m thinking of doing is adding some statistics on the Beta 5 code to be able to better adjust these requirements. I’d need to know:
* how much time each player spends online,
* how much of each player’s fleet movement can be attribute to the player himself (and not to one of his TAs),
* how many attacks each player participates in.
This would give me a much more valid basis to set the times in the design goals.
Cyliis:
I saw what you said, I was just reiterating the point to give it even more emphasis. To wage a completely offensive war by myself I would need to be online anywhere from about 20-60 minutes per battle tick. So, given the current 6 battle ticks that would be at the most 6 hours… if I were to wage the war by myself. Again, that’s completely offensive, not worrying about retaliation.
So, that’s how I think I’d work… though adding on those statistics things would be much more accurate.
March 17, 2008, 7:04 amScintir:
Umm, since it seems I cannot make a new thread, I will say this here. FIRST OFF CHANGE THE DAMN LOOK OF THE GAME!! =D, only 150 people or so in the game is horrid! If you make a very appealing home page then we can actually advertise a bit ( I am sure we can all chip in and spread the word) and it will actually ATTRACT people to the game to help deepen it! It needs to seem easy but allow for a complicated experience. A tutorial if there is none should be added in to help players. I am sure with any of this I could help chip in to give some more in depth details or help with a tutorial (writing it) for the players. Like hyperiums has, a tutorial is displayed for the specific viewed page, this can help players get immersed into the game.
Next off, make alliances gain bonuses and like I said make war more profitable. I suggested slave planets before which I was told would be in the next version. For being in an alliance, a bonus should be set up so people are more motivated to join alliances. Note: this bonus shouldn’t be great, but lets say your happiness grows if you go to an alliance that has a good rep (get a report formula which will calculate the average alliance happiness and the decline and increase of the average to help get the rep designed for the alliance, thus making joining alliances that have a good rep will allow the person an empire that has a better happiness for they would know what they are getting into). This could also extend to other things, such as tech ( an alliance with a great tech history could give a tech bonus or something), etc….
Next off, TECH BRANCHES =D. I believe I discussed this with cyliis, allow tech branches to be put out more, thus developing the players style. For example, one play may be more military while other be more civil, let the branches extend out more and allow the user to go towards this shit. Sub branches off this could be awesome as well. For example one person could be speced out to gain land easily while another could be speced out to be great at dog fighting, this would mean restrictions on tech sharing would occur but it could create a more team oriented and deepened game which focuses on relations to form. Most games seem to require team work but that is only because one person may not be powerful enough, thus doing this, it would allow people to team up and need each other much more for each would be better at a different field.
Alliances, once again. There should be some sort of starting alliance hosted by someone. Maybe a default alliance that would allow all noob players to join and have a default set of rules and will allow new players to develop, make new friends/team mates, and join alliances to better suit them,
Super weapons? Maybe allow like 5 people team up and during this team, each of their economies will be stressed along with their tech research, but after a certain time allow them to create a super weapon. This would allow them to do some massive damage which would be equal to what they suffered during the time, but could allow a better strategic attack. For example, allow 15 people to gather to create an uber one which could take a week to develop, after that time they could use it to weaken all the ships to 20% of their total power in a given area, this could be very well used if the alliance knew that they were able to be attacked and knew where this could be from, but due to the extreme strain it would create and the time, it means they would need to plan and to create a strategy. Another could be a protective field that could be put above the # of planets equal to the # of people participating. This could over time create a field over all planets in the alliance, but taking time and strain this would cause a strategy to be developed with this. The field would increase the power of the defenses and could last for a certain time, thus causing more things to occur. (Example: alliance going to attack, 15 players create the super weapon, the rest sit there and try to put up fields on planets that they expect to be hit on).
Possibly the last: allow development of planets to unfold kind of like civilizations games, this means basically that extreme development of each planet would be created. Meaning you could develop things like roads, electrical generating buildings, research centers, colleges, etc…. Each building would effect something slightly. For example, a improved road system could lead to a defense bonus and a slightly increase profit, etc….
Okay, now I think THIS is the last. At some point, for example a planet reaching a certain pop, allow a crisis to befall. For example, one the population hits 6 billion, have something like cancer wide spread, causing problems and thus requiring much more research. If a person has already overcome this on one planet, then it can be prevented over others. As the population or what ever grows, have more complicated problems come. As we can see on earth here, as the population grows, infections can spread to more people, along with new transportation allows even more widespread things. Take these into account and allow it to take in all these factors =D.
I suggest making legacy worlds more open source, thus allowing more work to be done so my BRILLIANT ideas can be put through =D.
March 18, 2008, 11:29 pmTSeeker:
@Scintir
March 19, 2008, 12:31 amBig comment which specifics we discussed on IRC ;p
To make sure we don’t forget about it, 2 points I found we should look deeper into are your superweapons (which could be nice as alliance abilities) and your idea about “not-so-random” events in the last part.
Yuckwitte:
NPCs… If we wanted to kill NPCs we’d play single player games
But IF they were regulated well and they either attacked alliances or did something too lots of people and required a team effort too kill them. Then they’d be awesome
March 20, 2008, 12:21 pmTSeeker:
@Yuckwitte,
March 20, 2008, 12:26 pmSince the NPCs will attack depending on actions and alignments, and since alliances will tend towards having unified alignments (your alignment influences your alliance’s and vice versa), it’s likely they will end up attacking whole alliances. Even then, if they decide to go after someone who pissed them off, having an alliance as support probably won’t be a bad thing (might be adaptive tho, i.e. they will send less overpowering forces if you’re not in an alliance).
AI specifics are something we keep for later tho, as the rest of the game’s design is still too incomplete to do anything useful in that direction.
Yuckwitte:
As for there adaptiveness, are we going to have the Borg, flying around in wierd cubes? But seriously, that would be cool… Or you could go ‘Warhammar’ and have… erm… what are they called again? (I don’t play it, just know about them a bit…)
March 20, 2008, 12:46 pmTSeeker:
@Yuckwitte, look in the blog’s archives, I think there is a more complete description of alignment-based factions (not sure tho), and one for species; the two are actually very different, since alignment-based factions act depending on the meaning of the players’ actions while species-based factions attack depending on your actions or status with regards to them. A post that’ll come shortly is about the Arc’kha’to, which are about as bad as it gets if you combine the Borg, the Goa’uld *and* the Reavers from Firefly.
March 20, 2008, 12:49 pmYuckwitte:
Who are the the Goa’uld?
Are they Flesh eating, psychos or Insane assimilators?
March 20, 2008, 12:56 pmTSeeker:
The Goa’uld are the parasitic aliens from Stargate. They’re slightly psychotic too.
March 20, 2008, 12:59 pm