This post, the seventh in a series about Milestone 2′s database structure, describes the elements that are used to store information about empires. This includes the description of an empire itself, information about planets owned or visited by an empire, and diplomatic relations (enemies, allies and alliances).
An empire is identified through its empire name. There may only be one empire using a name from a single account at any given time. An empire possesses various quantities of different resource types. These quantities are always greater than or equal to 0, as debts are handled by damaging fleets and buildings.
Research
An empire may have implemented a set of technologies, and it may also be researching technologies. For each technology being researched, it is necessary to know the amount of accumulated research points. A priority (low, normal or high) may be assigned to a technology being researched.
Empire-controlled planets
An empire may own planets. Each owned planet may be in the process of being abandoned, which implies knowing the amount of game updates left before actual abandon.
All planets currently or formerly owned by an empire still include the empire’s configuration of the planet. This “configuration” includes:
- the extraction priority for each type of resource,
- the default name, tactics (target selection criterion and target selection mode), attack strategy and defence strategy of fleets produced by the planet,
- the planet’s battle tactics (target selection criterion and target selection mode),
- the building priority for both the civilian and the military build queues.
Visited / known planets
The last known status of any planet visited or formerly owned by an empire is stored. In addition to the game update identifier at which the information was last obtained, this includes information about the planet’s population, buildings on the surface and, if the planet had been scanned for resources, the amount and type of detected resources. Fleet information is also included: for each empire possessing fleets at the planet, the amount of ships and current mode are retained.
Empire-level diplomacy
An empire may define two types of enemy lists: enemy empires and enemy alliances.
An empire may define up to 5 ordered trusted allies, which are other empires to which an empire grants the privilege to move its fleets. A trusted ally entry is either pending or validated. Each empire may also define a T.A. blacklist, the list of all empires which are not allowed to give an empire trusted ally status.
Alliances
An alliance is identified by an alliance name. It must have at least one member empire, and one of the member empires must be the alliance’s leader. In addition, an empire that is not a member of an alliance may be requesting to join one alliance. An empire may only belong to or be requesting to join one alliance at any given time.