One of the most important and tricky aspects of Beta 6’s design is the creation of formulas. This series of posts (don’t ask me how many will be written, I really don’t know) will try to explain the process.
In this first post I’ll present the different types of formulas that need to be written in order to create a game such as Legacy Worlds.
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Biological drones are the achievement of many years of scientific discovery and advancement; they are produced by humans as a general purpose, low-maintenance workforce.
Biological drones were made to look like humans: they were designed to their creators’ image. They have a limited understanding to prevent people from getting worried about what would happen if they should revolt, which explains their blank stares, picturing their stupidity. Moreover they are generally very athletic. In order to further distinguish them from humans, they also bear a specific marking on their face; this marking can’t be removed, even through surgery.
In Beta 6, an empire’s primary cash reserve is limited to at most 2 billions. All cash earned after this limit is reached will be wasted. In addition, 75% of the empire’s main cash reserve is split between its planets, the exact proportions depending on the planet’s category. When a planet is taken by an enemy, this cash is removed from the victim’s bank; most of it is wasted and just disappears, while a small portion is taken by the victor.
Communications technologies associated with banking technologies allow an empire to access the interstellar bank. This intergalactic facility allows empires to donate money to each other and to get loans, and provides them with two additional accounts onto which they can deposit their money for short- or long-term savings. All of these services depend both on the amount of interstellar bank buildings owned by the empire as well as their type.
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We have already mentioned several times in comments that Beta 6 would include more resources than just money. There are in fact several types of natural resources which can be mined from various sources such as nebulae or asteroids. There are 3 different types of resources: gases, minerals and dark matter. While dark matter is a one-of-a-kind resource, gases and minerals come in different sub-types.
Resources are extracted from mines on a planet’s surface, or using mining stations, which are specific space station modules equipped with mining ships; however, to ease the process, the empire never manages these mining ships directly. They are considered a part of the station.
While Beta 5 only featured three different types of buildings, we stated in an earlier post that Beta 6 will feature dozens. But that isn’t the only building-related change Beta 6 will introduce, far from it.
One of the worst defects in Beta 5 was the “optimal factories” computation - it relied on nothing but arbitrary values and had one big flaw: it was supposed to prevent older players from being too powerful compared to newer players by having a decreasing derivative (yes, as in maths). This had a completely reverse consequence - people would just “whore” the planets and go away, having high population wouldn’t give you enough of an advantage in the long run.
Beta 6’s buildings will be managed in a completely different way. Instead of using arbitrary formulas, the new system will rely on a more realistic computation based on the size of the workforce available on a planet, the amount of jobs the buildings provide and what we call “secondary jobs” - construction, maintenance, police…
The Arc’kha’to, often referred to as controllers, are a species of ugly, parasitic and predatory aliens.
It is very hard to describe an Arc’kha’to as most of its appearance is determined by the host it currently uses. However, a host infested with an Arc’kha’to can be identified by the various protuberances and nodes that have pierced the host’s body.
Missile countermeasures come in various types and shapes; some will disrupt a missile’s guidance system while others will try to get a missile to explode before it can reach its target. Quite obviously, they protect ships against missiles.
Missile countermeasures come in three different types. (more…)
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 missiles, as some of them really require advanced automation or powerful engines, while others are really too basic to be worth an upgrade.
One thing that has become clear recently is that Beta 6 will not be the same game at all; while Beta 5 was already very far from Beta 4, it still amounted to the same principles: build factories, research technologies, build more ships than your neighbour and then bomb him back to the stone age. Which is basically one big pissing contest. We are going to try and avoid that.
How, you say?…
The first thing is to make the new version about choices. Beta 5 was quite limited on this point - sure, you could choose to enact a law, or not, and you could decide to follow one strategy or another, that is either “fact-whoring” or “pop-whoring”. But that is far from enough.
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