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 [...]
Archive of entries posted on February 2008
Factions
In Beta 5, the only possible empires / fleets / etc. a player could encounter were controlled by another player. Only recently were introduced the PeaceKeepers, as a group intending to insure peace in the universe who enforces the protection of new players and respawned dead players. In our opinion, this limits a bit the [...]
Alignment
Yes, the title of this post reminds of role playing games. It has a taste of good / neutral / evil. It has a taste of chaotic / neutral / lawful. It has a taste of player actions leading to a shift in his classification, leading to non player characters changing behaviour towards him. Well [...]
Space-time drilling
Space-time drilling is a technology allowing an alliance to bypass the standard fleet movements rules by jumping to a layer directly without having to go through supergates (it doesn’t allow players to jump to a different protection level tho). While this very powerful technology has quite a few inconvenients (it costs a lot and presents [...]
Species
In Beta 5, we considered only one species was inhabiting the universe: humans. Each player was the leader of a group of survivors from the destruction of Earth who were settling in a remote part of the universe. However the universe is huge and not encountering anyone else than other humans feels a bit… poor. [...]
Missiles
Missiles are projectiles containing both a propulsion system, a guidance system and some explosive materials. While they inflict quite a lot of damage, missiles are usually bulky, and they can be stopped using appropriate countermeasures. Some missiles exist in different variants, depending on their guidance and propulsion systems. This is not the case for all [...]
Military factories vs. industrial factories
In Beta 5, factories come in two different models. Industrial factories are factories producing goods which are then sold thus making money in a transparent manner for the user. Military factories allow to construct turrets and ships. This quite simple design – separation of factories between two kinds – sounds logical at first: the machines [...]
Ship design
In Beta 5 we only considered four predefined types of ships: Ground Assault ships, fighters, cruisers and battle cruisers. Moreover, any technological advance which improved ship characteristics was immediately available on all ships once the technology was implemented. This system is very simple and easy to manage, both for game internals and players. However it [...]
Planet characteristics
In Beta 5, planets are managed in a very simplistic way. They have a name, a location, an owner, an associated picture, and it’s pretty all there is to say about them. However in a real universe, planets would be linked to way more complex parameters. In order to reflect this diversity we have chosen [...]
A reshaped universe
While Beta 5 universe is very simple to manage, with a grid of 6 planets systems or nebulae which expands when needed, it poses several problems. It isn’t very realistic and we have always been attached to have a universe which would be as close to reality as possible or which could function in a [...]