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.

In Beta 6, we will introduce new ways to take actions against a foreign empire. One of them is the introduction of special agents, or more basically spies. So, how is the system going to work?

Special agents are considered as individual characters. Like any individual character, agents have a name and are members of a species. They are recruited on a planet, which is considered to be their planet of origin and which influences their initial loyalty to their empire. Wages are paid to them and after some time they retire from service.

The efficiency of a special agent is determined by several characteristics. While most of these characteristics are static values, they are affected by both the agent’s loyalty to his employer and his experience. Among these characteristics, we can consider abilities (such as stealth, bluff, physical condition, weapons, hacking), loyalty and experience.

A special agent is a powerful tool. It can be used to infiltrate another empire for various purposes or to prevent foreign agents from infiltrating his own; additionally, special agents can help with internal propaganda.

Among the various missions a special agent can perform, are considered training missions (to gain experience), internal missions (counter-intelligence, rebel assassination, etc) and foreign missions (government infiltration, technology theft, sabotage, founds theft, incitement to unrest, etc.).

Each mission implies the use of a set of abilities, lasts for a certain amount of time and might have several kinds of outcomes, depending on the agent’s characteristics compared to the difficulty of the mission: success, partial success, agent spotted, agent captured, agent killed, etc.

What do you think of this special agents concept?

Do you think it can bring new ways to interfere with other empire?

Do you think we should put limits to their use except their wages and availability on various planets?

Do you think it could help smaller players compared to big ones, or that it will make bigger players even more powerful?

In most games like LegacyWorlds, it is very difficult to reach a good balance between ways of playing. By ways of playing I mean being an insane warmonger or staying put in your corner of the universe nursing your planets, etc. Indeed, some behaviours bring bigger advantages than others. In particular extreme behaviours, in conjunction with very high activity are often more fruitful than casual playing with a good balance between various attitudes.

Moreover the penalties attached to some behaviours are so little compared to what they bring that they end up being interesting to have whereas we might not want to encourage them. I think for instance of attacking young players as soon as they get out of protection, which is “fun” and gives Inflicted Damage Ranking points at little to no cost.

In this context, alignment is considered as a way to classify players according to their ingame strategies. However we don’t want to define a value judgment on behaviours. Therefore the classical alignments with classes like good / neutral / evil isn’t appropriate.

The alignment axes we chose to consider are a bit more complex. The tolerance axis expresses how intolerant or tolerant an empire is and is linked for instance with oppressive or xenophobic attitudes towards the empire population. The war axis expresses how brutal or fair an empire is and is linked with the size of attacked empires compared to the considered empire for instance. The environment axis expresses how mechanist of environmentalist an empire is, with evaluation associated with the use of biological or mechanical devices, etc. The honesty axis express how open or sneaky an empire is, and is associated among others with the use of spies or propaganda.

According to his ingame actions the empire of a player then shifts along these various axes. The alignment of a player is then used to calculate ingame reactions of other entities, topic which will be described in more details in another post.

In your opinion, will this bring interesting features to the game?

Do you think the alignment categories are adequate?

Would you have other axes ideas?

What game parameters do you think should be impacted by an empire’s alignment?