Multiple sets of Foci

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eleazar
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Multiple sets of Foci

#1 Post by eleazar »

The following are some ideas i want to kick around:

I added a new focus "Protection" in revision 5153. It is something i've wanted to try. But it occurred to me as i was making it that it didn't really parallel the other main foci. Things like "Stealth" seemed a better parallel-- and i haven't found the current implementation of stealth satisfactory i.e. research a tech and get a stealth special on all planets...

So what if there was a second, completely different set of focus options? Production foci in the first set, and in the second things like:
  • * "Protection" - increase the defensive meters
    * "Trade"- increase supply line length
    * "Stealth" - increases planet's stealth
There might be others including some of the remaining "advanced" focus effects, and/or buildings/tech/special effects you want to be able to turn on and off. And note, none of the focus options would be available in both sets.

There's two basic ways the second set could work:
  • 1) You don't have to choose one of the 2nd set -- they all have drawbacks. This would make planets with two focuses set somewhat rare.
    2) You must set a 2nd focus, but they don't necessarily have drawbacks. This would increase your control over individual planets.
At first blush, i lean towards #1. I'd rather not worry about setting/adjusting a second focus on every planet, but use them for specific reasons. In this scenario you could call them the "Special Foci". So if for instance you wanted a very strong or very stealthy planet, you would have to sacrifice production output. "Trade" could increase your vulnerability to spies.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:...it didn't really parallel the other main foci. Things like "Stealth" seemed a better parallel...
What do you mean by "parallel"? Why are "production" focus settings "main"?
...and i haven't found the current implementation of stealth satisfactory i.e. research a tech and get a stealth special on all planets...
There are alternatives to giving a bonus to everything an empire owns, such as having a focus or building that produces a range-limited bonus and penalty.

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eleazar
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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#3 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:...it didn't really parallel the other main foci. Things like "Stealth" seemed a better parallel...
What do you mean by "parallel"?
They naturally fit together is a set.
Geoff the Medio wrote:Why are "production" focus settings "main"?
Because they are the foci you always have currently. "Bioterror" and "Stargates" foci, etc, only appear when you research certain advanced techs.
Geoff the Medio wrote:...and i haven't found the current implementation of stealth satisfactory i.e. research a tech and get a stealth special on all planets...
There are alternatives to giving a bonus to everything an empire owns, such as having a focus or building that produces a range-limited bonus and penalty.[/quote]
If i'm going to do something, like raise a stealth screen on a planet that has negative side-effects, limited-range seems a potentially frustrating way to do it. It might not be easy to get the bonus on the planets that need it while keeping the penalty off planets where you don't want it.

Besides i think the effectiveness of special-based planet stealth is compromised when you have no choice but to apply it to a large number of planets. A lot of "Dense cloud cover" specials in a region of space strongly hints that there is an empire underneath.

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Krikkitone
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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#4 Post by Krikkitone »

Why have them be parallel?

If all the "special foci" are going to have a cost......
The "cost" of having "Stealth"/"Protection"/"Trade"/"Stargate"/"Bioterror"/"Hotlab", etc. foci would be that you do Not get Production/Research/etc. focus bonuses from that planet.

This way you stick with one focus per planet. (and keep the cost of the 'special foci')

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eleazar
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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#5 Post by eleazar »

Krikkitone wrote:If all the "special foci" are going to have a cost......
The "cost" of having "Stealth"/"Protection"/"Trade"/"Stargate"/"Bioterror"/"Hotlab", etc. foci would be that you do Not get Production/Research/etc. focus bonuses from that planet.
1) To allow more flexibility
2) If you safeguard a planet by setting it to "stealth" or "protection" but in exchange get no production from it, you are no better off than if you lost the planet. Yeah, there are some techs to give a little production when you are focused on something else, and you retain the planet for the future, but the exchange is too close to equivalent to abandoning the planet for my taste.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#6 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Having multiple foci is a pain from a programming / content standpoint, and makes this more difficult for players to understand. We'd need a much stronger reason for going back to two settings than having sets that seem to go nice together.

As well, having non-local effects from foci is what makes it possible to use things like stealth that aren't in themselves productive, but which help other planets. If there are a bunch of non-local effects of that sort, there's no need for multiple foci, as multiple planets' focus benefits act on eachother. As long as there are range limits or other reasons why you can't just have one of each focus easily acting everywhere, there's a bunch of choices to be made about what to use and where.

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Krikkitone
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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#7 Post by Krikkitone »

eleazar wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:If all the "special foci" are going to have a cost......
The "cost" of having "Stealth"/"Protection"/"Trade"/"Stargate"/"Bioterror"/"Hotlab", etc. foci would be that you do Not get Production/Research/etc. focus bonuses from that planet.
1) To allow more flexibility
2) If you safeguard a planet by setting it to "stealth" or "protection" but in exchange get no production from it, you are no better off than if you lost the planet. Yeah, there are some techs to give a little production when you are focused on something else, and you retain the planet for the future, but the exchange is too close to equivalent to abandoning the planet for my taste.

Well that's assuming
1. You get 0 production from a non-economic focused planet (you should get some production even if it is not focused)
2. The planet would need to maintain that status long-term (depends on how fast defense meters change)

The only problematic one I see is "stealth" (you would have to maintain it long term)... if you are using stealth to defend a planet (long term) it should not be for economic reasons unless you want to go with an entire stealthed empire.

So stealth might work for "bioterror" locations [say make stealth the focus and bioterror a building that is best under that focus]
Or it could work for a secret resupply or reconnaisance position.

And even if a player knows that this mass concentration of "cloudy planets" is actually a stealth empire, you are still concealing important details of your economy.

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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#8 Post by Skyfire »

I had written a quite beautiful text here, but then I accidentally actualized the page - so its gone and I'm frustrated. Instead of presenting an elaborated holistic idea for multiple sets of foci, i will now just throw around the main idea - which might be better anyways. :-)


Thinking about the different sets of foci - at this point there might be 2 (or 3, 4) different sets:

(A) planetary activities
(B) military support
(C) logistic support
(D) strange things

(A) are the typical three foci
- growing
- production
- science

(B) could be:
defense support
fleet operation support
stealth support

(C) are things to get the different support lines more extended, and trade for whatever this might be good

(D) is everything else - planet billiard or that Void thing - fleet jumping - bioterror - whatever

My idea is, that we introduce a set of foci on star systems for the category B and C.
Reason: Defense, stealth, and fleet operation things (offensive stats) are more strategical on the level of the system map. (B) foci can always be set on a system - (C) foci only for systems of exclusive (or ally) ownership. (B) Foci negatively influence the effectiveness of some/all planet foci, (C) foci have no influence - something like that.

For (D) foci i have no idea.

with regards,
Skyfire

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eleazar
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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#9 Post by eleazar »

We just recently combined the two different kinds of supply lines into one. While this may not necessarily be final, it is very unlikely that we would add a bunch of different kinds of supply lines to FO.

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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#10 Post by OllyG »

Skyfire wrote:Thinking about the different sets of foci - at this point there might be 2 (or 3, 4) different sets:

(A) planetary activities
(B) military support
(C) logistic support
(D) strange things

(A) are the typical three foci
- growing
- production
- science

(B) could be:
defense support
fleet operation support
stealth support

My idea is, that we introduce a set of foci on star systems for the category B
I like the idea of a different focus for each system and one for each planet. Fleets are currently at a system, not a planet. If a focus which affects fleets is system based it will work better. Just having A and B, at least to start, will make things a lot simpler. Bioterror should be B, since some way of delivering the bioterror agent must exist, it would use similar resources to something which would support fleet operations. If planets provide resources and systems provide battlegrounds, then systems should be a bit more interactive than they are currently. The problem I see is that systems are not exclusively controlled by a single player. What this means needs work in other areas too, such as supply lines and fleet movement (and diplomacy and trade in the future.)

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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#11 Post by rnl »

I second the idea of a system Foci. It would cover the system wide affects, which planet shouldn't have to worry about. It could be place beside or under the system name. I don't see a problem to multi player in the same system, each player would have a different foci pull down.

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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#12 Post by Krikkitone »

Skyfire wrote:I had written a quite beautiful text here, but then I accidentally actualized the page - so its gone and I'm frustrated. Instead of presenting an elaborated holistic idea for multiple sets of foci, i will now just throw around the main idea - which might be better anyways. :-)


Thinking about the different sets of foci - at this point there might be 2 (or 3, 4) different sets:

(A) planetary activities
(B) military support
(C) logistic support
(D) strange things

(A) are the typical three foci
- growing
- production
- science

(B) could be:
defense support
fleet operation support
stealth support

(C) are things to get the different support lines more extended, and trade for whatever this might be good

(D) is everything else - planet billiard or that Void thing - fleet jumping - bioterror - whatever

My idea is, that we introduce a set of foci on star systems for the category B and C.
Reason: Defense, stealth, and fleet operation things (offensive stats) are more strategical on the level of the system map. (B) foci can always be set on a system - (C) foci only for systems of exclusive (or ally) ownership. (B) Foci negatively influence the effectiveness of some/all planet foci, (C) foci have no influence - something like that.

For (D) foci i have no idea.

with regards,
Skyfire

The problem with multiple separate foci is that they remove trade offs

In this system, there is no economy v. military trade off... just different Types of economy v. different Types of military

Some "foci" ie bioterror... because they are rare should be building based... Ie instead of setting a foci, you build the building in a location. (and the building can have its own set of trade offs ie a 'bioterror' facility reduces max population by 50% on the world that it is on.)

Common "Foci" should involve a trade off.

Economic (output) foci (most common)
growth
production
science
trade/influence
defense
supply range??
detection range??
stealth?????

A planet without a focus on a particular output should still have some of that output.

??Some of These Might be better handled by buildings [like shipyards]... because you don't need them everywhere... but some of them might be needed once per system.... for those I could possibly see a 'system focus'... but I see that as a false trade off... instead some focuses would only be needed on one planet per system (so you find an otherwise worthless planet and make that your scanning array or starport planet.

Defense makes a good focus, because it can be a good short term sacrifice (I'm only getting 10% of what this world could be producing, but I'm going to hold onto it.... and I can restore it to peak productivity when the danger has passed.)

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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#13 Post by Skyfire »

I see that trade off is an important tool to add strategic decisions between military activity and support - and this strategic decisions must be done over and over again as core questions to win the game. The reason is of course that every activity should at some point result in military strength to battle down the enemy.

On the other hand, every military activity of war except ground battle maybe is at system level - and I think it should stay there. Military activity should be organized at the star map - establishing check points, navigating fleets and so on. Every in-system ships activity and resources handling should be done abstract, as supply lines represent combine productivity and freighter fleets and so on. In-System activity - like planet handling, foci, facilities - should IMHO only concern resources management or very special things (as buildings should be anyway according to the actual design ideas).

So I really think it is a good idea to establish system foci for military actions and maybe supply line support (as it is a very strategic key element), and planet foci for resources. To achieve strategic decisions, I suggest a strong general effect of the system focus on the ability of planets in this system to produce resources, like halving the output of a planet, while generating the system wide military effect. The mali should be in effect immediately and maybe the military boni also - but after changing the effect, the mali are reduced slowly over several turns.

Therefore besides set obvious set of military system foci (attack boni, defense boni, stealth boni, supply lines extender, military production (which reduces the time of ships produced in the shipyard(s) of the system), ... ) an "empty" focus "resource production" (or something like that) can be set, which has not an negative effect on the planets output.

One nice effect of this is, that if you change system foci very often (a hard sieged border system check point for example) production of this system is decreased very strongly, because the system foci mali would stuck.

-- example for the stacking: every system focus (not every invocation of a system focus) generates its own - maybe different - malus (meter). The malus is reseted to if the focus is invoked (at end of turn) - otherwise it is reduced by some amount. To calculated the total malus, the mali are sorted. The strongest one has effect on 100% of the production, the second one only on the rest of the production --

So we have nicely separated military from resources, and we can still have decision tradeoff between production and military activity.

Sorry for my broken English,
Skyfire

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Re: Multiple sets of Foci

#14 Post by Krikkitone »

Well I think the general idea of a Secondary (or System) focus that also has a penalty(malus) to planets is better as

1. A Building giving the bonus with a penalty (if it is something rarely needed/useful... once every few systems at most)

2. A Planetary focus with the opportunity to produce resources lost being the cost


So if there should be a boost
1. if it should be common enough not to have a cost, it is a free tech
2. if it should be fairly common... enough for a cost, make it a focus (and techs boost that focus)
3. if it should be rare... make it a building

Having separate Types of foci (planetary, system) would then be unnecessary.

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