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For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Impaler
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#16 Post by Impaler »

I think you can achive most of the desirable benifits with a flexible and mutable Planet Special which contains several bits of information on the "lesser Race" thats on that planet.

Lets say their is a whole class of "lesser Race" (LRS from hense forthe) specials and a planet can have any number of these, they are generated when a planet is concoured with the old rulers population being deleated and a LRS is gernerated. Some planets simply start with a LRS and retain it after being colonized these are refered to as "Natives" but in all reality the game treates these using the same rules as a concoured Player Empires LRS.

A LRS designates the Race involved, describes their mood and gives positive or negative modifiers that depends on the combination of the other 2 paramiters. Each combination is a specific special and a change of a Paramiter (triggered by some event) esentialy deleates the old special and creates a new one. Their might also be information on Quantity of individuals present but this should be kept simple like "Greater then" "Equal to" "Less then" the Master Race of the planet. The Master Race is able to take various options on how to treat each LRS (see DaveBabby's COW Project Design/Races for some excelent ideas in this area) and these policies will effect the Mood of the LRS (% probabilites to move from one state to another each turn) and possibly deleate it.

Enemy Empires can effect LRS with Espionage missions (especialy if they are targeting LRS of their own race or ones which they have a good relationship with). In this manner LRS are still "atached" to their Races Empire even when that Empire is "gone" and has been reduced to nothing but LRS on other peoples planets, the LRS's still read from the diplomatic status files for how they have been treated. Sufficet to say how you treat a LRS has perminent diplomatic effects with that Race and all their other LRS.

The output of Bonuses or Penalties should be rather obvius here, when the LRS is happy it can produce some nice bonuses that will typicaly resemble the inate racial advantages greatly simplified ofcorse. Restless LRS make penalties and can aid enemy espionage and potentialy trigger the "revolt" event which if not suppresed can lead to the "revolution" event inwhich the master race is overthrown and switches places with the revolting LRS. The Master Races Policy towards a LRS can also generate some form of Bonus for example the "Use them as Food" might give +3 Food Metter (expect the LRS to be in a bad mood in response though). Conversly a generaous policty might make your own citizenry unhappy but that loss would be balanced by the bonus from the LRS.
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Aquitaine
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#17 Post by Aquitaine »

This is all pretty similar to the original discussion we had on it. I'll excuse myself from it as I don't think that the return on any of the ideas presented so far warrant the trouble.

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#18 Post by drek »

Just having population loyalty tracked by percentage of population on a planet that falls into various groups (all people generic otherwise) would be a start, but I'd guess even that is too complicated for some. It would be rather unsatifying for me... but I guess I take it if it was the best I could get... This wouldn't need to have any direct effect on bonuses or prodction to be useful. It would indicate when your colony might flip to another race, or go into civil unrest or somesuch, which could be a limited discretized set of states. It would also indicate how well your assimilation is progressing, or give feedback for espionage and such.
It wouldn't even really have to be a percentage.

Just something like: " Zerg minor presence", "Protoss major presence", "Native Race major presence" would be enough. They'd be planet specials. (could do the same thing with factions: "Church of Xenos minor presence".)

If we are to accept that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts, then a "presence" could give a small bonus. (or in the case of nasty bad races like the Zerg, a small penalty) Maybe a Protoss minor presence gives +2 Research, major +5.

In addition, presence would effect, as you've stated, civil unrest, colony flipping, etc. For example, espionage actions committed by a Protoss empire would be easier on planets with a Protoss presence. If the player goes to war with the Protoss empire, Happiness on that world might fall based on how large the presence is.

Certain presences would reduce happiness and security if on the same world....if the Zerg and Protoss empires are at war, then all planets with *both* races present would suffer a hit to moral, and gain a chance at a little civil war breaking out tween the races as a random event.

Certain government types could allow a "Forced Relocation" or even a "Genocide" build project to remove these specials--the project would drastically lower happiness on the colony, but result in the presence being eliminated.

Certain diplomatic arrangements (full alliances, trade deals) could create new presences 'tween the two empires. A zerg like race might, as a special form of attack, infest enemy planets with presences (perhaps a weapon shot from their bio ship).

Wonder why I didn't think of it before: seems like KISS compliant solution to the problem. Perhaps it's something to think about when random events and planet specials are added to the game....

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Geoff the Medio
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#19 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek wrote:It wouldn't even really have to be a percentage.
It doesn't have to be a percentage, true... but not in the way you mean. It'd be fine if they were separately tracked population numbers, rather than a percentage for each...
Just something like: " Zerg minor presence", "Protoss major presence", "Native Race major presence" would be enough. They'd be planet specials. (could do the same thing with factions: "Church of Xenos minor presence".)
That would be completely pointless for any sort of meaningful espionage / culture game. Note that I'm talking about both race and loyalty groups within races. What I really want is to have culture and espionage be viable ways to take over a planet. Doing this really requires separately tracking the percentage of population (or an averaged loyalty score if you prefer) for each race. Doing that requires actually knowing the popluation of each race, to more accuracy than "minor presence". It's not enough to say there's a zerg minor presence that is slightly annoyed... this is too discretized. In order to have an interesting and meaningful culture war, the race / loyalties need to be broken down much more acurately.
For example, espionage actions committed by a Protoss empire would be easier on planets with a Protoss presence.
"espionage actions" of the sort you describe will just end up being like civ espionage, if there is not any tracking of population and loyalty numbers. It'll thus be a minor and too-random system that feels tacked on. In my system, the most important espionage missions would be those which influence the loyalty numbers on an enemy's planet. You'd doing this on an ongoing basis... each turn convincing a few more people to join a faction opposed to the current rulers (though not necessarily loyal to you). This can't be done using just "minor presence", "significant presence" and such. Using a few specials to achieve this would be like having a "fleet" special that means you have a few ships in a system, but not bothering to break down what those ships are or their capabilities in any way.
If the player goes to war with the Protoss empire, Happiness on that world might fall based on how large the presence is.
ok, if you're talking about "how large" a presence is, then you're measuring the population. What I want to do is integrate this into the actual population of the planet, and allow the number of protoss to grow just like your own population. If we set all races to grow at the same rate, then the population ratio for each race can be stored, but if races grow at different rates, then we'd need to store a population number for each (who says population points mean the same number of beings for all races anyway? the popluation number is just an abstracted measure that has the same economic value for all races, whether it means 10 megazoids or 100 million humans.)
Certain presences would reduce happiness and security if on the same world....if the Zerg and Protoss empires are at war, then all planets with *both* races present would suffer a hit to moral, and gain a chance at a little civil war breaking out tween the races as a random event.
This is exactly the kind of boring silly special that I want to avoid. I want natives and foreign nationals to have real signifiance, and not be reduced to a minor bonus like any other special.
Certain government types could allow a "Forced Relocation" or even a "Genocide" build project to remove these specials--the project would drastically lower happiness on the colony, but result in the presence being eliminated.
Or just having the presence's population reduced... and I imagine that under cetain circumstances, genocides would happen without player control. In particular, if you've had a presence on a planet for a long time, and then another race brings in some colonists, and they start growing rapidly, or you have a war with their empire, or your race has a particular dislike of them, or other such things, the much larger population gets mad at them and forms a militia of its own, and starts killing. The galactic senate would then pass a resolution requiring you to stop the genocide.
Certain diplomatic arrangements (full alliances, trade deals) could create new presences 'tween the two empires. A zerg like race might, as a special form of attack, infest enemy planets with presences (perhaps a weapon shot from their bio ship).
Zerg doing this would just be invading with ground troops, not treated as a presence. Forming a presence would generally only occur during peacetime... at war, if you land a bunch of troops, you fight with the ground troops of the planet's owner, until they are destroyed or surrender. You then own the planet, which is entirely populated with the race(s) it had before. If you bring in a colony ship, you can put down a bunch of colonists to start a secondary popluation group. The first group of population is still 100% loyal to it's original empire at first, and produces nothing for you unless enslaved. The loyalties could change depending on your various race characteristics, governments, whether or not you enslave them, tax levels and various other things. Anyone who becomes loyal to you starts producing stuff that you can use. Similarly, if you are at peace with someone and have a planet with 8 population points of their race, they might be 75% loyal to you before the war starts. When the war stars, depending on the agressors and tactics used and any espionage efforts to change opinions (propeganda) the loyalty numbers change. This is the sort of thing that a system using only specials can't achieve.

There would also be lots of peacetime espionage stuff you could do... enough that you could arrange things such that it becomes politically impossible for someone to declare war on you... doing so would outrage the border worlds you'd been working on with propeganda, causing them to stop working (become loyal to no-one = civil unrest) or even flip to you. This flipping wouldn't be random and sudden like in Civ, but would be entirely predictable and controllable and explainable and rational. Before declaring war, the other empire would know that much of it's border population likes you too much, and that declaring war would have big consequences.

It would also be possible, and easier, to fund the opposition / resistance parties that object to the imperial rule on other empires' planets. This would cause the planets' population(s) loyalties to their empire to drop, reducing the productivity of the planet, and perhaps even sending it into civil unrest if you go far enough. It could even declare independence, allowing you to then invade with significantly reduced diplomatic consequences. You could also make the planet a protectorate, meaning you declare it under your military protection (like say NATO with iceland or somesuch), which would significantly endear the popluation to you.

This is the sort of culture/espionage war stuff I want to allow... making it just as involving and important and practical as a way to win as building a big fleet of ships. It should not be as easily avoided / ignored as in civ3.
Wonder why I didn't think of it before: seems like KISS compliant solution to the problem. Perhaps it's something to think about when random events and planet specials are added to the game....
Your suggestion is KISS, but it's exactly what I was hoping to not be reduced to. I'm also surprised it wasn't suggested before, and had assumed that it was what would be done if/when natives were implimented, if I can't convince people of the need for / benefits of a more robust system.

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#20 Post by drek »

ok, if you're talking about "how large" a presence is, then you're measuring the population.
Only measuring as far as whether the presence is "major" or "minor."
. You'd doing this on an ongoing basis... each turn convincing a few more people to join a faction opposed to the current rulers (though not necessarily loyal to you). This can't be done using just "minor presence", "significant presence" and such.
Er, yes it can. Sorta.

Goal 1 would be to create and then improve presence, as a prerequest to flipping the planet to either your control or the control of a third party. Then you'd want to somehow force the planet into a long-term rebellion, providing an increasing chance each turn that the planet will flip to a new domniate race/faction.
I want natives and foreign nationals to have real signifiance, and not be reduced to a minor bonus like any other special.
The signifigance would be:
1: a penalty in war-time. This would mean if you've been strong allies with the Protoss for many turns, you'd pay an economic hit going to war with them, as many of your planets would have a Protoss presense.

2: a penalty to spy defense. It's a lot easier for the Protoss to spy on you if they've got some of ther buddies living on your planet.

3: a chance of flipping. If a planet is rebelling, every presense provides a chance of the planet flipping dominate races. The current race would become a major presence, and a current major presence would become the new owners of the planet.
Zerg doing this would just be invading with ground troops, not treated as a presence. Forming a presence would generally only occur during peacetime... at war, if you land a bunch of troops, you fight with the ground troops of the planet's owner, until they are destroyed or surrender.
Don't know if you've played starcraft, but that's not exactly how the Zerg operate. The hives really do form a staunch presence on a planet otherwise controlled by another race.

Perhaps "Zerg" were a bad example. Think "body-snatchers" instead, if it helps, or even "Tribbles". A nasty bad race might considered it a goal of war to establish a presence to exploit, since other races would tend not to have trade agreements with nasty bad races. (races that give penalties for presense instead of bonuses)
Your suggestion is KISS, but it's exactly what I was hoping to not be reduced to. I'm also surprised it wasn't suggested before, and had assumed that it was what would be done if/when natives were implimented, if I can't convince people of the need for / benefits of a more robust system.
More robust systems have already been rejected. As Aq indicated we've been down this path before. I want multiple races on a planet to eventually be in the game (even if it's post v1.0), so I'm thinking of ways to conform to the KISS tenet.

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Geoff the Medio
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#21 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek wrote:
. You'd doing this on an ongoing basis... each turn convincing a few more people to join a faction opposed to the current rulers (though not necessarily loyal to you). This can't be done using just "minor presence", "significant presence" and such.
Er, yes it can. Sorta.

Goal 1 would be to create and then improve presence, as a prerequest to flipping the planet to either your control or the control of a third party. Then you'd want to somehow force the planet into a long-term rebellion, providing an increasing chance each turn that the planet will flip to a new domniate race/faction.
The "somehow" is the problem... as is "increasing chance each turn". These sound like civ-style cultural flipping, which was simplified far too much, and basically completely sucked, imo. Randomness should have only a minor role in determining the outcome of a culture / political war of influence. Tracking the groups of population by race and loyalty and allowing lots of different espionage and racial factors and culture issues and diplomatic states with specific and predictable effects of the loyalties of these groups is the only way to make things nontrivial and equal in importance to ship battles.

"increasing chance" of flipping is not enough. It needs to be clear what the numbers of people who are loyal or aren't loyal are, and whether this is increasing or decreasing, and there should be continuum of states between "fully loyal and productive" and "outraged and mad and defecting to another empire". There need to be numerous ways of influencing this as well to differing degrees with variable effort / investment and results depending on numerous factors, just like with ship combat.

There is also a distinction you don't seem to be making between having multiple races on a planet, and having groups of nonloyal population on a planet that doesn't work for the owner. You don't need to have a race-based population presence on a planet to have part of its population loyal to you or rebelling against the owner due to your meddling. Yes, having a significant presence would help, but the size of the presence would also be a factor to a greater precision than "minor" or "major", as would the happiness of the presence with its current ruler, and the happiness of the population of the ruler's race (or some third party race), and government systems of both, the efforts both are putting into diplomatic / cultural espionage, etc.

Again, think of this as equal in importance as fleet battles. Most people would not be fond of the idea of completely abstracted fleet battles into a few discrete specials which have "minor presence" or "major presence" to describe your fleet strengths in a given system. It's equally necessary to not do so for the non-military forms of conquest to work well.
Don't know if you've played starcraft, but that's not exactly how the Zerg operate. The hives really do form a staunch presence on a planet otherwise controlled by another race.
I did. Starcraft was completely focused on the battles, and had almost nothing to do with civilian populations. What it did have, which was the occasional civilian building on a few of the early terran maps, had nothing to do with the stuff you could build. The "zerg presence" on various planets in the game were not a model of colonists. They were a model of an invading army, (which happened to have mechanics completely different from how I expect most FO invasions would work... what with the easily accessible mineral crystals and vespene guisers all around for the taking...)
Perhaps "Zerg" were a bad example. Think "body-snatchers" instead, if it helps, or even "Tribbles". A nasty bad race might considered it a goal of war to establish a presence to exploit, since other races would tend not to have trade agreements with nasty bad races. (races that give penalties for presense instead of bonuses)
If an empire drops a bunch of colonists on your planet while you're at war, you're free to round them up into concentration camps or exterminate them all without diplomatic penalty in most cases. Perhaps if your population on that planet was significantly fond of the dropping empire, they would object to mistreating them. This would be a goal of the pre-war culture / espionage stuff... to butter up the world so it's practically begging to be invaded. This should not be done with a special that's just on/off for "fond of empire X", as that would be too random, like civ. This should instead be done as a gradual process with gradual results over many turns. The current owners of the planet would be able to see that this is happening and take action before the situation gets out of hand (assuming they had sufficient sociologal research and investment to notice that is). If they do notice, both empires would start propeganda and espoinage wars on and around the planet. The owner empire might also send some military to the area to show the strength of the mighty empire and impress the locals with their current government as well. All these different things you can do, some with varying intensity, would need non-discrete loyalty / happiness states in the populace to really work.

Side issue: If an empire is allied with you, having some of of its primary population on one of your planets shouldn't give a negative in almost all cases (a few exceptions might be ok). Immigration and emigration should also be separately negotiable parts of your alliace / peace agreements, so any race with bad effects on its guests wouldn't be invited over.

I guess a few races could have the special ability that their colonists act like marines, so they just bring a colony ship rather than needing a troop ship... but in most cases you should need to take the planet by force, on the ground before being able to set up colonists on it... the colony home guard / militia would stop you from setting up otherwise.

If you buttered up a planet sufficiently before dropping marines though, you wouldn't even need to bring a colony ship in some cases, as the populace would be happy that you came in and removed their former corrupt evil rulers and would happily work for you themselves.
More robust systems have already been rejected. As Aq indicated we've been down this path before. I want multiple races on a planet to eventually be in the game (even if it's post v1.0), so I'm thinking of ways to conform to the KISS tenet.
Aq said "...only be one 'PC' race per planet...", which would seem to prohibit your proposal as well. He also said "It's something that we could re-open...", meaning a "more robust system" could be accepted. Right now I'm trying to show how "keeping it simple" is a bad idea, despite any UI problems a complicated "robust" system would involve. Again, I come it to ship combat. Obviously there are big UI issues for ship combat... it requires a whole subsystem that's rather incompatible with anything more than a two player game (and even that's hard if there are computer players as well). Yet we still seem likely to have a real-time ship combat engine, and the ability to design ships and so forth. Ironically, the system I proposed for political / cultural / racial conquest is comparatively simple compared to what is being designed for ships.

In this case, I think the decisions that were made were made prematurely. Apparently nobody actually tried to actually design a system for this sort of political and cultural stuff, so nobody saw the need to have the extra information. Thus the rather-arbitrary, imo, rule of "only one PC race per planet" was made, based only on dislike for MoO3-style production bonuses that looked like "+24% farming beacuse you have 35% tree-people". Of course, I wasn't there at the time, so can't be sure, but that's how it seems...

Yes, you can make up a bunch of specials that are fairly simple and discrete that collectively give the same advantages and disadvantages that a more robust system would confer. The problem is that the overly simple system has no good way for players to have a cultural battle that's of any significance compared to ship battles, without making things too arbitrary and random, like Civ3 culture flipping.

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#22 Post by Impaler »

I see your Point Geoff and infact your arguments Remind me of StarWars Galaxies inwhich % Loyalties were tracked between Empire/Nutral/Rebel (Populations never changed). You could "recruit" planets by diplomaticaly swaying 50% or more of the population to your side. You could also concour them outright but that would ofcorse make them dislike you and the Rebels were very good at stiring up Rebelions which the Empire would mercelesly put down. The Espionage Side of that Game WAS as important as the Ship Combat (maybe even more so). I have always liked how it delt with Espionage/DiplomacyRevolts ect.. and intigrated "Hero" characters into that System very well (too bad the rest of the game was a flop).

If I understand you correctly you want

1 - A distinct number of Population Points for Each Race which grow and die independently of each other.
2 - The Population units will be Broken down into Factions each with have a distinct "loyalty". Would simply Pro-Goverment/Nutral/Anti-Goverment be sufficent for the Lesser Races with Possibly more sophisticated "political parties" for the Master Race of the Planet be sufficient level of detail?
3 - A whole host of Espionage/Diplomacy/Revolt ect ect that circulates around these numbers.

I think this is a nice idea and hope we can get some Re-evaluation of the topic and move our plan in this direction, it could add a lot of nice options for Revolts and Ocupations.
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#23 Post by drek »

I guess a few races could have the special ability that their colonists act like marines, so they just bring a colony ship rather than needing a troop ship... but in most cases you should need to take the planet by force, on the ground before being able to set up colonists on it... the colony home guard / militia would stop you from setting up otherwise.
Like tribbles, body snatchers, and zerg, races that can create a presence through military infestation would be difficult to uproot by nature. Security meter would gaurd against these kinds of attacks.
Apparently nobody actually tried to actually design a system for this sort of political and cultural stuff, so nobody saw the need to have the extra information.
I did, and I think Impaler and Bastian Bux tried their hand at it too. (though we were thinking mutlple races on a planet, but such a measure could easily be used for culture as well.) Some of our ideas resembled the one you are touting:

Aquitaine wrote:
This is all pretty similar to the original discussion we had on it. I'll excuse myself from it as I don't think that the return on any of the ideas presented so far warrant the trouble.
geoff:
In order to get support for multiple races/factions per planet, you'll probably have to try a different approach than the ones that have already been rejected (measuring percentages as in moo3, giving each population point a race/faction, probably more that I've forgotten.)

I suggest that the token idea (major/minor presense) I explained above could be made to work. Many of the wargames of Reiner Knizia (a semi-famous game designer) use tokens and virtually no random elements, and yet are incredibly deep in terms of strategy. Perhaps this cultural side of the game could be Knizia-esque? Some of his most famous games have been translated into computer games; in particular Reiner Knizia's Samuria is nicely done, has a free demo, and is a good example of the philosophy Knizia uses in game design.

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#24 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek wrote:Like tribbles, body snatchers, and zerg, races that can create a presence through military infestation would be difficult to uproot by nature.
I don't object to there being races that have bonuses to their disruption of other people's colonies who they don't like if there's an appropriately (dis)loyal group of them on the planet, but I just don't see why dropping enough colonists to make significant presence on the planet for production purposes would be worth the effort. Why not just take over the planet completely? It's not like you can sneak these colonists onto someone else's planet without being noticed and grow into as big a population as the other group in secret... Sneaking in works for spies or small raids to knock out a building perhaps, but if you want to have enough population to be considered as a separate group of planet population, you're going to have to do stuff like farming and mining and making houses... there's just no way you'd go unnoticed. If you are noticed, then being there is an act of war, and any defensive ground troops would mop the floor with civilian colonists... or if there aren't any ground troops, then the colonists would fight amongst themselves with militas, and the preexisting presence would win due to being much larger. So unless it's completely impossible to win a ground war against the invading race (which is probably a bit imbalancing), any colonists dropped in this fashion would be mostly wiped out... enough not to be significant to production.

Anyway, point was that any assualt colonists dropped during a war would be prisoners of war, and not a subgroup of population that would alter the political landscape of the planet sufficiently to make it culture-flip to you. Pre-existing groups on the planet would be different perhaps, depending on the politics of the empire being attacked... but the pre-existing group would need to be there before the battle for anything to happen.
Apparently nobody actually tried to actually design a system for this sort of political and cultural stuff ...
I did, and I think Impaler and Bastian Bux tried their hand at it too. (though we were thinking mutlple races on a planet, but such a measure could easily be used for culture as well.) Some of our ideas resembled the one you are touting:
Yes, my suggestions are similar / the same as the ideas in the old discussion, probably because there's only a few possible ways to do this sort of thing.

What's possibly different this time though, is what I originaly said and what you confirmed in the above quote: the justification for the system being propsed.

I want nifty complicated culture / political war stuff, and I think this requires the robust simulation. The previous discussions were apparently just about natives and having multiple races on a planet... perhaps because doing so is cool in of itself? That is, imo, a much weaker argument and reason to go to the effort of including the more complicated system.

As an aside, tracking the loyalty percentages of populations on planets would allow lots of interesting domestic politcs as well... which would nicely integrate with foreign espionage and shadow governments and whatnot.
In order to get support for multiple races/factions per planet, you'll probably have to try a different approach than the ones that have already been rejected (measuring percentages as in moo3, giving each population point a race/faction, probably more that I've forgotten.)
I'm hoping that by pointing out things that were not considered when the rejection was decided, the decision could be changed. As well, I'd like to reemphasize (since it's not been responded to so far) the comparison between the ship combat system and my proposed culture / diplomacy stuff. The former is / will probably be very complicated and involved. Using such a complicated system for ships, and then saying separate numbers for different races' populations and loyalties would be too much of a UI issue is a bit hypocritical, imo.
I suggest that the token idea (major/minor presense) I explained above could be made to work.
I've described a whole slew of situations that would, imo, need separate race numbers / loyalty percentages to work. If you can figure a way that tokens can produced similar results to those I descibed with the numbers / percentages in mind, I'll gladly give it due consideration...
Many of the wargames of Reiner Knizia (a semi-famous game designer) use tokens and virtually no random elements, and yet are incredibly deep in terms of strategy. Perhaps this cultural side of the game could be Knizia-esque? Some of his most famous games have been translated into computer games; in particular Reiner Knizia's Samuria is nicely done, has a free demo, and is a good example of the philosophy Knizia uses in game design.
I downloaded and played Samurai. Quite interesting, but I don't see how much of the design of that game applies to FO culture / diplomacy wars. The strategy is essentially geometric... so unless you want to have a culture / espoinage minigame played on a hex grid with tiles representing spies, propeganda, race traits, planet specials, preexisting racial attitudes and so forth, I don't what can be applied to our game / problem...

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#25 Post by Satyagraha »

why exactly was the idea put down? was the implementation of multiple races/planet too difficult or the implementation of the resulting effects? i´m not hell-bent on seeing multiple races/planet, if the effects were based on multiple races/system, that would be nice as well (instellar travel between planets of the same system would be as usual as travelling between countries is today). as long as there are cultural ties with noticable effects, i´d be happy with it.

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#26 Post by drek »

It's not like you can sneak these colonists onto someone else's planet without being noticed and grow into as big a population as the other group in secret... Sneaking in works for spies or small raids to knock out a building perhaps, but if you want to have enough population to be considered as a separate group of planet population, you're going to have to do stuff like farming and mining and making houses... there's just no way you'd go unnoticed.
Pod people (ie, body snatchers) could go unnoticed, but that's not really the point. I'm thinking more of races that, like weeds, just can't be eradicated easily. If you've got a roach problem in your kitchen, nothing short of a drastic action will remove all the roaches. Same with the zerg, or the bugs from starship troopers, or the changelings from ds9.

It's a "presense", which can mean any number of things: happy colonists co-existing with the majority, slaves, a well-developed embassy, a "bug" problem on a plantery scale.
I downloaded and played Samurai. Quite interesting, but I don't see how much of the design of that game applies to FO culture / diplomacy wars. so unless you want to have a culture / espoinage minigame played on a hex grid with tiles representing spies, propeganda, race traits, planet specials, preexisting racial attitudes and so forth, I don't what can be applied to our game / problem...
What I mean is that culture could be a Knizia-esque mini game. Samurai is just an good example of a Knizia game, it obviously doesn't translate directly to FO.

For example, we might have Buildings that generate culture tiles each turn. The player can place these chits anywhere he wants: on his own worlds to eradicate alien influnce, or on the worlds of other players to create a "presense". Only one tile can be placed on a planet per turn per player, and only five tiles can co-exist on a planet: you'd pick which tile slot to "overwrite" if all five are already filled.

Placing a tile also has a cost in terms of money, dependant upon the situation. Placing a tile on one of your own worlds is cheap. Placing a chit on to a world with a terrible enviroment might be more expensive. Placing a ctile on an enemy world that you have a controlling fleet hovering over might be cheap. Planets with high security would increase the tile placing cost for foreign powers. Planets owned by an empire with a trade agreement would be cheap to influence. Planets owned by an empire your at war with would be expensive to influence.

Ideally, new colonies would be created via placing tiles on empty worlds that you have ships hovering over.

In addition to tiles for your own race, there'd be buildings that generate 'em for certain organizations, such as the Spice Guild or the Cult of Xenos. These tiles might have some sort of negative effects.

There might also be spy mission tiles, generated by spy buildings and placeable the same as culture tiles.

Finally, there'd be some rules for tiles generating on planets without the player's intervention. The special "Spice" might randomly place tile from the "Spice Guild" on colonies in the same system.

The number of foreign tiles on a world would determine what sort of spy missions could be attempted on that planet. If a planet has tiles of your own race/culture, you'd be able attempt spy missions at a reduced cost/risk of failure.

0 - 1: Only basic missions can be attempted
2 - 4: blah blah blah
5: Flip the planet to your empire

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#27 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek: Those are some interesting ideas... and would certainly create an interesting strategic aspects to whatever system they're used in....

But, I don't really think it's appropraite for a galaxy wide conquest game... First, the whole tile-geometic strategy stuff is just too abstract and seemingly unrelated to what it's trying to simulate / model. That sort of system works fine if the whole game is basically about the geometic strategy aspects, as in Samurai. In that case, the "setting" is just fluff, and basically inconsequential. However for FO, we're trying to simulate something in particular: ongoing diplomatic and cultural battles. We thus need a game mechanism that either a) reasonably accurately simulates the strategic aspects of this, or b) is strategically neutral enough that the setting carries the system on its own. In Samurai, the mechanics are the whole point, and the setting is tacked on to give some atmosphere. In FO, we already have a setting, and need something that fits with the setting, or at least doesn't get so complicated and wound up in its own details that the essence of the setting is lost, which I think geometic-based strategy would do.

I'm not entirely sure of this, and might be convinced that it could work if you can explainhow how the geometry would relate various aspects of culture wars in a logical way, but I don't see the connection right now.

Part of the problem is the rather... short, discrete and permanenet nature of the tile placement in Samurai. Once you've placed a tile, it's pretty much fixed. There's little in the way of options to manouvre and change after a tile is placed. And once you've "won" a tile... it's completely fixed... there's no back and forth or gradual erosion of support towords one player or the other. This is completely at odds with the ongoing continuous nature of culture / diplomatic wars in FO. I suppose we could just not have tile placement and be permanent, allowing players to move them around tiles every turn, but that makes the effects of your actions far to instant and nonpermanent. It might work if the combination of all the tiles next to a planet's population tile had a net effect every turn on the loyalties of the population, but then we'd need to track the percentage loyalties of the population, which was what you were trying to avoid... Winning the loyalty of a planet, or reducing its loyalty to someone else, is not an on/off works if you put down a tile, does nothing if you don't type thing... changing opinions takes time to happen (unless you've got really advanced telepathic mind control or something... but that's a semi-special case).

And frankly, how would putting in a whole tile based minigame be any less complicated or better than just tracking the loyalty percentages of the population groups on the planet? The latter seems much simpler.

The graphical representation of various diplomatic and cultural forces and racial and loyalty groups could even be retained, except that placing and displaying them wouldn't involve geometric strategic issues. The tiles would just be icons on the "cultural / diplomatic status" summary for a planet, which would summarize what effects every icon / tile has, summarize the total results in term of changes in loyalties (that you know about) in a given, display the loyalty groups / percentages, and give a resulting total loyal (working) population, and a total nonloyal (nonworking) population for the planet. The latter two would also be displayed on the system sidepanel. I know this sounds spreadsheety, but I think it could be arranged in more of an icons with supporting details below way than a big grid of numbers.

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#28 Post by drek »

Er, there's no geometry in what I described above.

Just five slots:

* * * * *, though perhaps arranged in a circle around the planet's image on the sidebar. (actually four slots might be easier to handle)

You can place a culture "marker" in to any blank slot, at a money cost based on many factors. You can only place one marker on to a planet in a turn. If there are already max markers on a planet, you can replaced any other marker with your own. A player who produces ample money and markers in a turn will be able to slowly erode planets to his side.

The player gains markers from his homeworld (1 per turn) and special structures. He can also gain some 3rd party markers (the Spice Guild, the Space Pirates, Cult of Xenos) through special buildings. The game sometime places markers as well, as a result to random events.

1 marker is a minor presense. 2 or more is a major presense. max markers means you can flip control of the planet, by placing another marker. There'd have to be a way of highlighting which planets are in danger of flipping, so that the

Because markers provide small bonus to the target (for example a psilion marker migh give +2 Research, a spathi marker +2 Happiness), it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate to give an "ally" some markers, with the intention of eventually filling up and flipping some planets. Plus, if you have markers on another empire's worlds, it means that going to war with your empire will be more expensive (more unrest on planets with markers), so allies can be expected to place markers on to each other's systems as a form of insurance.

Basically, the markers allow you to control migration and poltical leanings. You could use 'em to shore up your own culture or "attack" another player's.

I haven't really thought this all the way through, just throwing something out there to prove that we don't need the level of detail you have in order to have something that approximates the kind of gameplay you desire. There could be many wrinkles to this (for example, maybe if a system if filled you can only use a marker to destory a pre-existing marker--then next turn you can place a new one in the now empty slot.)

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#29 Post by Geoff the Medio »

drek wrote:Er, there's no geometry in what I described above.
I assumed it was implied by the references to Samurai, which is very much dependent on geometry.
You can place a culture "marker" in to any blank slot, at a money cost based on many factors.
However it's done, engaging in cultural or diplomatic war shouldn't just cost money.
You can only place one marker on to a planet in a turn. If there are already max markers on a planet, you can replaced any other marker with your own. A player who produces ample money and markers in a turn will be able to slowly erode planets to his side.

The player gains markers from his homeworld (1 per turn) and special structures. He can also gain some 3rd party markers (the Spice Guild, the Space Pirates, Cult of Xenos) through special buildings. The game sometime places markers as well, as a result to random events.
If every player is limited to one marker / turn / planet, then you just end up alternating placing markers and destroying markers with another player on a particular world, which is a stalemate, or ends up being a contest of who has more money / whatever to spend on placing markers. If a player can increase their markers / turn limit, then doing so guarntees victory if not matched by the opposing player.

If you can only place one or two markers per turn, but you can move your ships around and attack at 5 places at onces, then you can't possibly win by culture war. Conversely, if you can start putting culture markers on all your planets from the start, then when you finally do meet someone, your planets are basically unassailable due to being full up with markers. The other person could only knock out one or two markers per turn, which you could immediately replace.
1 marker is a minor presense. 2 or more is a major presense. max markers means you can flip control of the planet, by placing another marker.
This doesn't model different races in a satisfying way. The most important situation in this area, imo, is when you capture a planet that has a race of another empire on it. My understanding of what you propose is that when you capture a planet, no matter what the population of the original race was, it becomes represented as "major presence" marker. The world's population then represents your people on the planet, and the number is, I guess, zero? If you brought a colony pod with your attack force, you'd be able to drop some people and have an actual working colony.

That's silly. You sould be able to take over a world and run it with just military ground troops. After destroying any opposing ground troops, you'd be in control, and the population of the planet would be essentially unchanged. Be default, most of the planet wouldn't like you, however, as you just invaded their world. Unless, of course, you'd been buttering them up beforehand with espionage. As well, even if they dislike you immediately, if your political system and culture, and your propeganda are nicer/better than the opposing empire's, then slowly you'd start to convince the people to work for you. This can't be simulated with just putting down markers... this doesn't go instantly form "hating" to "liking"... it's a slow transition with each turn a few more percent of the population of the planet changing their loyalty from their original empire to yours.

On the other hand, if the empire you'd attacked had been doing some good espoinage / culture warfare beforehand, your worlds would have begun to develop large numbers of people loyal to or fond of their empire, rather than yours. (Loyal to you but fond of them is different from loyal to you and fond of you is different from loyal to them but living on a planet under your control.) When you declare war, or more likely when you actually take some of their planets, those groups of your popluation that are loyal / fond of the empire you attacked would go into civil unrest and stop working for you, or lower the happiness level on your planets or other such effects.

Actually flipping control of a planet is a separate thing from making people on a planet fond of you. Flipping requires making a large portion of the population of a planet loyal to you and not fond of their current empire. Just being loyal to you, but still fond of the current empire isn't enough, nor is just being fond of you. This is similar to what happens after one of your planets is invaded... a large portion of the population would be loyal to you and not fond of their current owner (the invader). A large military ground force would be necessary to keep control of the government... The size of this force being dependent on the security meter, most likely. Thus militarily invading the empire of someone whose been waging a cultural war against you is a rather risky proposition, as keeping the planets you take will require huge expensive ground forces, the planets you take won't actually produce anything for you, and your own planets will likely be significantly reduced in productivity as a result.
(more unrest on planets with markers), so allies can be expected to place markers on to each other's systems as a form of insurance.
The problem is how much unrest... and how fast and suddenly the unrest becomes a problem. It's no good if you can just plop down a marker right before a war and isntantly get 20% (one marker of 5) unrest on a planet if they attack you, or 20% happy that you invaded if you attack them.

The loyalty groups and fondness levels thereof on a planets needs to work a bit like the population growth, except that the combined effects of all cultural and diplomatic effects add up to give a "bias" for the world. This bias determines both the rate of change of loyalty group proportion of the popuation and fondnesses levels for the loyaltly groups, as well as the maximum or steady state proportions if the current biases are kept indefinitely.

Thus, you can't cause a planet to flip by just having a tiny bit better espionage working on it than its owner... the net result of this would just be a small increase in the unrest levels or decrease in the number of people loyal to their rulers. As well, if a planet is completely loyal, and you suddenly start doing a bunch of stuff to make it not loyal (a culture war attack), it wouldn't immediately go to to the resulting loyalty levels... rather the size of the group with loyalty to you (tracked separately for each race) would slowly increase, and the groups loyal to the current empire would slowly reduce.

As an wrinkle, perhaps different espionage and cultural acts have different effects on the rate of change, and on the steady-state condition... so that to quickly change the popluation to be loyal to you, you wouldn't just do lots and lots of anything you can do the planet, but rather would do a combination of things that make the steady state loyalty have a higher percentage favouring you, as well as things that cause people to change loyalties faster. Perhaps the security meter would only affect the rate of change, and not the actual steady state loyalties (though this would need some consideration...)

As above, the security meter also has an effect on the number of military police on a planet you need to keep it from flipping. With very high levels of loyalty against you, you'd need tons and tons of police (probly an exponential growth curve as you get near 100% loyalty against), so you couldn't just prevent flipping with a couple of units of ground troops for a whole planet that hates you. The actual number of troops required would be reduced by a higher secruity meter...

As well, if there was a planet not owned by you, but with significant numbers of loyal people, you could start financing geurilla warfare or terrorist acts against the unpopular government... (obviously this isn't unique to my system)

Note that planets can also declare independence, rather than defect to a particular other empire. Arranging this would be easier than getting them to flip to you. This would be seen on a planet you own as portions of the population being loyal to the planet itself... ie. planetary nationalism.
Basically, the markers allow you to control migration and poltical leanings. You could use 'em to shore up your own culture or "attack" another player's.
Markers are fine to represent the political / cultural forces affecting the loyalties and such on a world, but they just don't work for migration and populations of different racial groups on a planet, or tracking what the proportions of the various loyalty groups at a given time, for reasons described above.
I haven't really thought this all the way through, just throwing something out there to prove that we don't need the level of detail you have in order to have something that approximates the kind of gameplay you desire.
It may be possible, but the system you describe doesn't do so.

Markers do do something though... and maybe that's enough for most people... But for me, the comparison to the complexity of ships / fleets and such still applies. If fleets get all the detail we seem to be putting into them, then cultural wars need to have about the same level to be as important.

As a side note, it'd be cool to have a theoretical technology known as "Psychohistory" that has lots of interesting espoinage and cultural warfare techs under it...

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#30 Post by drek »

However it's done, engaging in cultural or diplomatic war shouldn't just cost money
It should either a) cost something or b) carry a risk, otherwise placing a marker wouldn't be any more difficult on a enemy planet. Perhaps it costs more markers to place on nasty bad worlds, but that's just shifting the cost from a direct tax to maintaince for the cultural buildings.
If every player is limited to one marker / turn / planet, then you just end up alternating placing markers and destroying markers with another player on a particular world, which is a stalemate, or ends up being a contest of who has more money / whatever to spend on placing markers. If a player can increase their markers / turn limit, then doing so guarntees victory if not matched by the opposing player.
You could say the same thing about starships. If another player is vastly outproducing your starships, he wins. What do you do about it?

If another player is bullying your empire with culture markers, you could:
a: get an ally to use his culture markers to help
b: declare war
c: increase your happiness/change your government type to a more xenophobic setting to make it more expensive to place markers
d: increase your own culture production
If you can only place one or two markers per turn.....The other person could only knock out one or two markers per turn, which you could immediately replace.
You can only place one marker per turn on a single planet.

A culture heavy empire might earn five to ten markers per turn. If I place a marker on all of your planets, but you only earn one mark per turn, then you can only replace the markers on one planet.

Cultural take-overs should be alot slower (and much rarer) than conquest. Seems an obvious fact to me.
The most important situation in this area, imo, is when you capture a planet that has a race of another empire on it. My understanding of what you propose is that when you capture a planet, no matter what the population of the original race was, it becomes represented as "major presence" marker. The world's population then represents your people on the planet, and the number is, I guess, zero? If you brought a colony pod with your attack force, you'd be able to drop some people and have an actual working colony.
You are taking things far too literally. Everything in any 4x game is a huge abstraction compared to reality.

When you conquer a planet, the population amount remains unchanged (except those slain in combat). The markers remain the same, except you'd get one free marker of your own placed on the planet, representing the military control/presence.
This can't be simulated with just putting down markers... this doesn't go instantly form "hating" to "liking"... it's a slow transition with each turn a few more percent of the population of the planet changing their loyalty from their original empire to yours.
That's what the Happiness meter is for, with or without markers. There'd be a flag "Recently conquered" that reduces happiness. In addition, chances are you'll be at war with the culture that still inhabits most of the planet: meaning you'll get Happiness and Security hits for each hostile marker on the planet.
On the other hand, if the empire you'd attacked had been doing some good espoinage / culture warfare beforehand, your worlds would have begun to develop large numbers of people loyal to or fond of their empire, rather than yours. (Loyal to you but fond of them is different from loyal to you and fond of you is different from loyal to them but living on a planet under your control.)
With markers, this would mean you've placed a bunch of your own markers (or 3rd party markers perhaps) prior to conquest.
Actually flipping control of a planet is a separate thing from making people on a planet fond of you. Flipping requires making a large portion of the population of a planet loyal to you and not fond of their current empire. Just being loyal to you, but still fond of the current empire isn't enough, nor is just being fond of you.
Happiness and Security would stop a flip. You'd have to figure out some method of lowering Happiness and Security to below the threshold of 20--probably through spy actions.
Markers are fine to represent the political / cultural forces affecting the loyalties and such on a world, but they just don't work for migration and populations of different racial groups on a planet, or tracking what the proportions of the various loyalty groups at a given time, for reasons described above.
I'm saying it doesn't really matter if it's a cultural shift or actual people of the race in question. "Presence" can mean many different things.
It may be possible, but the system you describe doesn't do so.
As stated before, grouping populations into percentages has already been rejected. I've offered a system that *approximates* the gameplay you are interested in; but I'm not married to it. The idea is to show an example, so that you and others can perfect a system that:

a: does most of what you want it to do
b: isn't on the "rejected" list
But for me, the comparison to the complexity of ships / fleets and such still applies. If fleets get all the detail we seem to be putting into them, then cultural wars need to have about the same level to be as important.
I'd actually perfer that fleets be less detailed. Probably outvoted, so I'm concentrating on the making sure the details make sense.

In any case, it's been the decision across multiple public reviews to keep the economic/civilian side of the game relatively simple.

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