LegacyWorlds Beta 6

In Beta 5 the only items which can actually be built are ships. Moreover the only “permanent” items a player can control are planets which are located at specific coordinates. With the introduction of real buildings it felt logical that a planet’s surface might not be the only location where permanent structures could be installed. How about space?

That’s where space structures come in. Space structures are structures which can be constructed by an empire or an alliance in various places in space. Three types of space structures are considered, depending on the locations at which they can be built.

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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.

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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…

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In Beta 5, some technologies might be considered as leading to the construction of buildings; however, the construction process is implicit and no actual building is present on the planet. Beta 6 will feature actual buildings, allowing for a much higher degree of control.

Several buildings with either different effects or different levels of effect on the same parameters are available. These buildings are organised in several building types, each including several building categories.

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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. Therefore we decided to include other species in Beta 6. So who are they?

First of all we decided to include species living in very specific environments, such as nebulae, hyperspace, etc. Having fleets going through these places would lead to encounters with these aliens.

Then we also chose to add species living on planets. These species would already live there or evolve from normal human beings. Each player would then have to manage a mixed population, where each species would have its own needs and tolerance to game related factors such as employment, happiness level, corruption level, etc.

So far the exact list of species to be included in Beta 6 is still open but we plan on having around 20. Therefore the list is open to suggestions (with original names and short descriptions).

Do you think having several species in the universe, be it in special environments or on planets can bring new dimensions to the game?

Don’t you think it might get too difficult to have to make several population groups happy on each planet of your empire?

Do you think we intend to have enough / too many / too few different species?

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 to include some more characteristics which will define a planet and what will be possible to do with it.

A planet is first of all attributed a size and a class of environment which determines how friendly the planet is to life; both values therefore impact the availability of living space and building space.

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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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