Some new ideas

all the talk around the remake

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Macroz
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Some new ideas

Postby Macroz » Sun May 02, 2004 12:26 pm

Finished my thesis so now I've found some time to think about what I'd like to do. I will describe the force design system but first a recap on the terrain.

As you may remember, the world map I'm suggesting is a real sphere and not a flat hexagon map. The main change to my earlier "planettest" ideas is to reduce the amount of areas by making the planets consist of non-regular regions. Technically, the planet is a subdivided icosahedron and the regions are automatically created. I think 1280 triangles as regions (required for smooth planet) is too many. A few regions per planet is too little to justify having planet maps in the first place, so there will be about 100 regions. Could have more or less depending on planet size.

A huge problem in EFS and many other games is that there are a lot of armies and the game becomes tedious to play. Reduction of the number of regions and armies will help this. Offering better tools will also help by making the management easy. On the other hand, the combat system can now be made more interesting. I have always thought the combat system in Civilization games is uninspiring. For better ideas real wargames can be studied.

Two games that have influenced my combat system lately are MOO2 and MOM (not real wargames but good games). From MOO2 I borrow the idea of ship design but change it into force design. In MOM I loved how every unit had some easy to understand special abilities (immune to magic, armour piercing, shields), units gained experience and such.

http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezone/images/screens/moo2-4.jpg

Replace weapons with units (infantry, marauder, spy). Damage with combat power (calculated from unit stats). Arc with role (front line, reserve, etc.). Space with size (team, platoon, legion etc.). Modifications are not needed as units will have a set of special abilities (anti-tank, recon, command etc.). Drive, armour, shield, targetting computers are all integrated into special systems that are renamed special equipment (repair depot, planetary comms, exoskeleton, transport trucks etc.).

I guess I should try these in action and write a design document. I just noticed the details are a bit too much for this forum post. I'll be back. :D

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