Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

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Bigjoe5
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#76 Post by Bigjoe5 »

eleazar wrote:Um, espionage as general, vaguely considered would require happiness, influence, and allegiance/approval to interact with.
Espionage doesn't require allegiance/approval to interact with. The minimum we need to get espionage going is influence. We don't even need to make it depend on happiness yet - that's something that can be added later.
eleazar wrote:Jumping straight to espionage and all the other systems it interacts with is in my judgement biting off much more than we can chew at once, and is generally something that IMHO would fit better closer to 1.0 than to today. Unless you have a new different scheme for espionage or a plan for a partial implementation that doesn't require an excessive number of additional systems to work.
There's no need to jump straight to "all the other systems it interacts with", any more than there was a need to jump to all the other systems that research and industry interacted with. Espionage - or more broadly, influence - is just another pillar, like research and industry. So thinking about it in the broader sense of "influence" as opposed to "espionage", a reasonable next step would be to add a few simple content items to increase influence production, and develop a way to produce projects that cost influence. Actual "espionage" doesn't need to even enter into it in the sense that the happiness and hypothetical espionage meters don't actually need to be used yet.

So to summarize -> let's make an influence screen analogous to the production and research screens, which in the future, can interact with happiness, allegiance, and espionage when they are implemented.

On an unrelated note, as I was writing this, I became aware of the ambiguity between "production" in the sense of "resource production" and "production" in the sense of "industry". Perhaps we should consider renaming the production window and the corresponding tech branch to "industry"?
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eleazar
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#77 Post by eleazar »

Bigjoe5 wrote:...So thinking about it in the broader sense of "influence" as opposed to "espionage", a reasonable next step would be to add a few simple content items to increase influence production, and develop a way to produce projects that cost influence. Actual "espionage" doesn't need to even enter into it in the sense that the happiness and hypothetical espionage meters don't actually need to be used yet.

So to summarize -> let's make an influence screen analogous to the production and research screens, which in the future, can interact with happiness, allegiance, and espionage when they are implemented.
So why is that plan preferable? In the details you mention, it's almost a restatement of part of what i'm proposing. Something along the Sloth/Eleazar plan(s) adds Influence also, but it makes it and happiness a vital and important part of the game-- not just a resource with some content throw in.

It is not critical to what i want to do weather "an influence screen analogous to the production and research screens" is implemented in the next step, or sometime further down the line. I don't really know how big a chunk of work that would be.

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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#78 Post by Bigjoe5 »

eleazar wrote:Something along the Sloth/Eleazar plan(s) adds Influence also, but it makes it and happiness a vital and important part of the game-- not just a resource with some content throw in.
The problem with your proposal is that it's making happiness and influence vital and important parts of the game before there's actually enough of the game for them to interact with to justify them being vital and important, which is a big waste of effort. Instead, we should put in place the infrastructure that will actually allow these factors to interact with the rest of the game in the way that we eventually intend them to.
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#79 Post by Sloth »

Bigjoe5 wrote:The problem with your proposal is that it's making happiness and influence vital and important parts of the game before there's actually enough of the game for them to interact with to justify them being vital and important, which is a big waste of effort.
I think this is not true for Happiness, but i can understand your concerns for Influence. Introducing Influence just to have an Influence Focus that boosts Happiness sounds stretched.

It seems to me that everyone has their own vision how Influence (or Psi) should work and what it will be used for. Maybe it deserves its own discussion decoupled from Happiness and Allegiance? Maybe you can state your vision Bigjoe5? (referring to this:)
Bigjoe5 wrote: So to summarize -> let's make an influence screen analogous to the production and research screens, which in the future, can interact with happiness, allegiance, and espionage when they are implemented.
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#80 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Sloth wrote:Maybe you can state your vision Bigjoe5?
I've been more or less assuming that influence won't (only) be something that automatically gets drained based on factors such as how many planets you have, how many spies you own (should such a metric be applicable to FO), etc., but something that the player uses to complete "influence" projects, much like Research and Production are used for Techs, Ships and Buildings (which on a mostly unrelated note, I'd like to see expanded to the broader concept of "project", which covers things like Terraforming, which don't logically result in a building being constructed). A reasonable start for such projects, to provide an adequate "testing ground" could be just a few projects that do something simple, like destroy an enemy ship or a random building on an enemy planet. Any planet or ship (or building? or any Universe Object?) meeting the location conditions of the project (defined in influence_projects.txt or whatever) could be used as the project location - in other words, the location would not be restricted to planets owned by the empire.

Once this is in place, it will be much more sensible to add espionage and happiness as a means of enabling/defending against various influence projects.
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#81 Post by Krikkitone »

Regarding Influence v. Happiness

I like the idea of

Influence: something you spend+generate to get things... (buying 'civics' for your government / buying 'espionage' against enemy empires, buying 'counter espionage', possibly "incorporating" a conquered planet into your empire, etc.)

Happiness: a reflection of the state of a particular planet. This could significantly affect how 'Influence' spending for certain projects worked. Certain Influence projects would also affect Happiness.

(So rather than drain X influence per turn because you have Y planets.... you complete a Project that gives a happiness bonus.)

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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#82 Post by Sloth »

Bigjoe5 wrote:I've been more or less assuming that influence won't (only) be something that automatically gets drained based on factors such as how many planets you have, how many spies you own (should such a metric be applicable to FO), etc., but something that the player uses to complete "influence" projects, much like Research and Production are used for Techs, Ships and Buildings (which on a mostly unrelated note, I'd like to see expanded to the broader concept of "project", which covers things like Terraforming, which don't logically result in a building being constructed). A reasonable start for such projects, to provide an adequate "testing ground" could be just a few projects that do something simple, like destroy an enemy ship or a random building on an enemy planet. Any planet or ship (or building? or any Universe Object?) meeting the location conditions of the project (defined in influence_projects.txt or whatever) could be used as the project location - in other words, the location would not be restricted to planets owned by the empire.
So Influence will work like Production, but without the location restrictions and without supply-line connected groups (empire wide pool).

Question: Should Influence be stockpileable or not?
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#83 Post by Krikkitone »

Sloth wrote:So Influence will work like Production, but without the location restrictions and without supply-line connected groups (empire wide pool).

Question: Should Influence be stockpileable or not?
Probably not. Instead have a variety of projects some of which are expensive and dependent on empire size. (Civ V Social Policies) in addition to simple espionage/diplomacy projects.

Anything that would be "stockpiled" should have a better, permanent bonus option to be spent on.

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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#84 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Sloth wrote:So Influence will work like Production, but without the location restrictions and without supply-line connected groups (empire wide pool).
I'd also like to potentially remove the location restrictions for production, but that's another issue entirely. But yeah, basically - the lack of supply-line connected groups is also a major point.
Sloth wrote: Question: Should Influence be stockpileable or not?
I think there's more or less a consensus that there should be at least one stockpileable resource. Eleazar wants/wanted it to be production, IIRC, but I (and I think Geoff as well) would prefer it to be influence, since it's not distribution-limited.
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#85 Post by yandonman »

For influence, why not use the more personable "spies" as the name of the resource?
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#86 Post by Sloth »

Bigjoe5 wrote:I think there's more or less a consensus that there should be at least one stockpileable resource. Eleazar wants/wanted it to be production, IIRC, but I (and I think Geoff as well) would prefer it to be influence, since it's not distribution-limited.
Question 2: Should Influence be the ressource currently called Trade? (as discussed here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2129)

If it is the general form of Trade/Money i also think it should be stockpileable.
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#87 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Sloth wrote:Should Influence be the resource currently called Trade?
I personally don't see a need for Trade as a separate entity from Influence.
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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#88 Post by rnl »

I'm getting confused here. Is Influence suppose to be base like Intel or Politics? Also Trade would be affected by a Politics like Influence, but not a Intel one.

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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#89 Post by qsswin »

Influence is intended to be a very broad conception of a resource, the way that "production" includes factories, workplaces, workers, raw materials, and anything else you might need to make ships or buildings, and research similarly.

Therefore, influence includes propaganda, Ψonic powers, spies, diplomats, money, trade, intelligence, government programs, and anything else that controls how people think of you -- for good purposes, with happiness; diplomatic purposes; and nefarious purposes, with espionage. See this (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2129) thread for more information on the idea.

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Re: Happiness, Influence, & Allegiance

#90 Post by Sloth »

Ok, i think i have a concept of combining Happiness with a stockpileable producing Influence ressource:

- The player can start a project (like a building) on the planet he wants to make happier.
- This project will sit in the Influence queue and will convert up to 20 Influence Points into Happiness each turn (less when underfunded).
- The project has no duration (it will be there until removed), the limit is one per planet.
- Better projects like this will become available with techs.

So i don't have any objections to implementing this version of Influence.
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