FreeOrion

There's been a long-standing idea that species ( or at least major species) would get their own hulls. I never understood how this fit with the rest of the game, where:

• empires != species. multiple imperial species may add their ships to an empire
  
• Diverse hulls are available to all empires: everybody can build asteroid, energy and bio hulls. It is not possible to fit all of those into a recognizable species style.
  
• Many species will probably have no fleet bonus/malus so a different ship skin will simply make fleet management of functionally identical ships more difficult.

Can somebody describe usage of species-specific hulls that makes sense with the game we are making?

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

There is one option where they could be used:

Once we have unlockable techs some species can have one or two exclusive techs giving exclusive hulls.

_________________
All released under the GNU GPL 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licences.

The Civ unique unit approach. I guess that's a possibility, though it seems a better fit for Civ. What's the generally applicable rational for certain ships only being useable for certain species in the same empire?

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

I wouldn't add any species restrictions to the hulls. If you have the right species you can research the tech and you get the hull. Otherwise these hulls won't be different from others (if someone really insists on a hull only being usable by one species he can add a script that enhances the hull if said species is present).

_________________
All released under the GNU GPL 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licences.

I don't think we planned to create species specific hulls for asteroid, energy or organic hulls. This does sort of put a bias towards constructed hulls, at least from a graphical perspective. I would consider perhaps mirroring that from a gameplay perspective in that nearly all empires should be using constructed hulls, and certain empires will additionally choose to use asteroid, organic, or energy hulls, depending on their playing style. This may not be the way we want to go, but it's something to consider. I've always liked the idea of each species having its own style of constructed hull.

Even if we don't do this, the idea that different species would produce vastly different ship designs given total freedom of design (Constructed Hulls) and somewhat similar (i.e. identical) ships given the constraints of building with asteroids/energy/organic materials, doesn't seem terribly far-fetched.

Also, I don't see your point about species != empire... what's the issue with the same empire building different ships with different species, and having them be displayed with a different graphic?

One could make a similar argument about why each species should/shouldn't get its own combat music, but getting species-specific combat music still seems like a much more appealing option to me. It's another way to represent the character of a species in-game, which is artistically interesting and hopefully very cool visually/aurally for the player.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

A stronger argument. While it is not jarring to have multiple ship designs on the screen, you can only play one music track at once. By what criterion do you decide which species music will play? Is it going to feel any different to the player than randomly shuffling music tracks? I don't see how the average player is form an association between music and the species.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Well, there could be some way to determine the dominant species in a fleet, either by the number of ships crewed or by some weighted sums (ship size or fire power could be a factor). And by 'dominant' I don't mean 'in charge', just 'most representative'.

Then again, this could get boring during a long war against a single species empire.

_________________
[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

That was my intention, yes. The client would pick music for either a representative species in his own fleet, or one in one of his opponent's fleets.

Because the (my?) plan is for each species' main theme to play when you're in diplomacy with them (and yes, that idea suffers from the conflation of species and empire as well; everything is fine if a species can have diplomacy as one of its "roles", otherwise things need a little more re-thinking). It should be obvious to the player the species to which a particular battle theme belongs if he's heard that species' main theme before.

It might require a bit more work/thought to keep the selection of music from seeming arbitrary in some cases, for example when your opponent has different species on diplomacy from the one that pilots most of his ships, but I don't feel like that's a major problem.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

For version 1, no. All should be the same hull. No need to have a lot of graphics for this game.

However, one flaw with games of this type, and a lot of strategy games, is having a back story and/or predetermined properties to each species. I think species should be nothing more than your appearance. The play style of your empire should not be determined by your species. It should be determined by you. MOO had back story and stats for each species, and I think it restricted player's choices. People chose how they thought they would play the game, before it even began.

It would be great for a game like this to allow you to choose your species appearance in icons, diplomacy, ship hull style, etc. People who play as warlords may gravitate towards aggressive and feral looking species. While players who favor technological research may gravitate towards peaceful and refined looking creatures.

Well, a very important feature of FreeOrion is that empire != species. You can pick up more species through conquering planets with them. This means that your starting species can have little effect on your end-game, depending on your strategy. Of course, your starting species will affect your starting play, but since you can make any species you want, I don't think that matters so much.

The only thing I can think of is a small bonus to existing ship hulls from species alignment. IE a robotic hull piloted by exobots gets some kind of bonus because both are robots. An energy hull gets a bonus with a phototropic species... etc.

I'm not crazy about the idea, but that would be one way to distinguish things.

It does not. Which is why I think it should purely be for appearance. But making an alien cargo ship recognizable as a cargo ship can be hard. Sure, a terran freighter is obvious, it probably resembles a semi truck. But an alien freighter is harder to recognize if it takes a different shape than the terran one. It has too look "alien" and so players may not recognize its function.

It's more clearer to me now,I'm also wondering about the usage of species-specific hulls..thanks for your inputs!
--elle

i'm not sure i agree with this statement
to which MOO are you referring?
aside from the darlocks[r] in the first one i find it impossible to agree with that statement where MOO1 is concerned
there was no more backstory per race in MOO1 than there is here
but that's the only MOO i played more than once.
any type of static bonus **will** influence how one plays the game
being able to create/define your own race isn't too crazy and if everything is balanced within a range: personalization would really be no different than choosing your flag/color

_________________
thanks for a great game.

Starcraft, Syndicate, Populous, Star Control II, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, X-COM UFO Defense, Spacehulk: Vengence of the Blood Angels.