How to build the perfect Galactic Empire game

from Stardock Forums
After playing a dozen or so games of GalCiv, I think it is a great game and is a lot of fun and (from what I can tell) seems to meet all of its design objectives. And it continues to grow and improve thanks to a dedicated development team.

Having said that, I'd like to open a discussion about what a true galactic empire game should be like. I don't think it has ever been done before. Moo3 comes the closest, but it ultimately failed because it wasn't willing to give up it's Moo1 & 2 roots. The results are well documented. In fact a lot of what I write below is what I thought Moo3 would be, so you may not think my ideas are terribly original, which is fine with me.

In my opinion, a galactic empire game should only on very rare occasions involve going to individual planet screens and futzing about with things like building transport ships or sports stadiums. Again, this is not meant as a complaint directed toward GalCiv, because GalCiv is exactly what it was intended to be, I am proposing something different.

What I would like to see is a game where I don't have to tell each planet what to do, but instead can craft a set of "rules" or "scripts" which govern what happens on a planet over time. These scripts would be more than just build queues. They would be instructions on how to behave in various situations. Under siege? Call for help. Enemy fleet activity nearby? Build planetary defenses. Economy in the dumps? Lower the tax rate to stimulate growth (or raise taxes to keep government projects on schedule). I would like to be able to build a library of these rule sets and re-apply them to different games as I see fit. A collection of scripts would be represented in game as governors. You could add or remove scripted behaviors to your governors at will. This would enable you to manage thousands of planets. Assign a bunch of planets to a governor. The governor runs the planets automatically according to your scripts. If you issue an order to the governor he executes the order on each of his worlds.

What's more you could build a hierarchy of governors. You could have say, one governor in charge of all your resource mining planets, and another governor in charge of all your research planets. You could then assign them both report to a higher level governor. The mining and research planets could have there own specialized scripts running for them, but they would share any scripts that the higher lever governor is set to execute, for example, a planetary defense script.

You could also build scripts that dictate the behavior of complex fleets of ships during battle. These scripts would be represented in the game as ship captains, group commanders, and fleet admirals.

A bunch of independant admirals and governers ignorant of an overall doctrine would be disaterous. Therefore, I'd include a set of "cabnet ministers" that would help manage your overall empire; for example a minister of finance, minister of defense, and a minister of agriculture would have scripts to ensure that the overall empire operations stay withing your specified guidlines. For example suppose you had a 100 planets decide that they need to build "Death Quasar" class ships (based on the scripts running for their governors). The finance minister may step in and override these orders because this will bleed the treasury dry and his script doesn't allow this. His script may then direct him to order half the governers to build a smaller class ship instead.

The key thing of course is to make the scripting language both powerful and easy to use. The player could still over-ride any scripted behavior manually, but better players would be constantly tweaking their scripts over the course of playing many games. The end result is that when playing a game after building a mature set of scripts the player as an emperor would be giving large scale orders to his Admirals and Governors, not micro-managing every flavor of the month on each of the baskin-robbins ice cream shops on 10,000 worlds.

Sound boring or fun?
713 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
*bows in awe and admiration for this vision*

My wife would want to kill anyone who produced this type of game because there would be a distinct possiblity that I would dissappear into it forever. :) If implemented correctly, this could also solve many of the MMRPG problems today. Much like a real empire, you could give your governers and cabinet ministers orders and take a vacation. Certain events could cause email, SMS, or even pages (alphanum pagers) to get sent to you. If you were gone for a long time, ministers could begin to suffer from corruption, moral would decline. Subversive elements (foreign and domestic) would creep in. Planets could defect. You could even be overthrown (i.e. you lose!)

The hard part would be designing an openended scripting language. I think that it would have to have addons and libraries for player submitted functions. Some people would live more for writing cool algorithims and logic than playing the game. There could possibly be an entire industry of creating and selling these to the highest bidder - as trained governers! Your empire might simply be a few planets, but you survive by 'training and educating' governers, ministers, military leaders, and selling their services to the highest bidder!
[Message Edited]
[Message Edited]
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Yes, I think that it does become more of a simulator at some point, which isn't a bad thing as long as there is still stuff for you to do. There would have to be a simulator running underneath the hood in order to free up the player enough to have an emperor-like experience. Your ideas are good examples of the kind of things a real emperor (and his wife) would have to deal with.

One other point. Multi-player games could be very interesting... my scripts and empire "structure" running against thoses of other human emperors. Since the scripts do most of the dirty work, if it were turn based then the turns could be quite short or have a pre-set time limit (a Moo3 feature). If it were real time, again the scripts do most of the dirty work so it wouldn't be an RTS click-fest. You would be like a conductor, guiding things at a high level and only stepping in to specific battles and administrative functions when really needed.
TouchTasks - Access tasks with ease on Windows touchscreens.
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Welcome to Nand1's perfect game. This game is of course a strategy/fps/Space Simulation game. Here we's go:

The game starts out at your basic menu screen. Here you can select your race, what your avatar looks like, and your type of game. There game types will include: World Civilization, Galactic Conquest, Scenarios, Universal ConQuest, Explorer, Random Battle, and Epic Campaign.

In world campaign, you will start out in the stone age, and advance Civ 3 style until you are able to get hyperdrive. Even if you conquer all other civs you won't win until you get hyperdrive. The battles will be fought in either real-time or civ 3 style. If you choose to fight real-time, you will be able to give control of your army to a AI general and be able to take contol of one of your units. Say you were in WW2 age. Then it would basically be a battlefield 1942 battle! I would also like the cities to be completley controllabe, and the maps to be huge. There would also be an option to become an explorer and explore your world while the AI managed your empire. Time would go much slower if you were an explorer and it would be a fps/rpg Morrowind-style.

Galactic Conquest would be just like galciv except for the battles. Like the battles in World Civ, you would be able to fight the battles in real-time. You would be able to also control your ships Freelancer-style.
Scenarios would contain various scenarios for all of the game types.
Universal Conquest would be like Galactic Conquest except for that the Galaxy would encompass the billions of stars in our real galaxy.

Explorer and Random Battle are pretty much self-explanatory.

Epic Campaign would combine everything together with a few adjustments. Say if you researched hyperspace in 1976 and got out into space before say, the torians who got out in 2176, you would have a huge advantage over them. Now here's the big thing. Epic Cpnquest would allow you to take over multiple Galaxies. The game would be so big it would never end. The Universe would be the size of our real universe. Also, there would be several dimensions to increase the area four or five-fold. Big Huh? Also, there would be hundreds if not thousands of races, major and minor. That is my PERFECT game that no one will ever make in the next 10,000 years.
[Message Edited]
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
dang Nand1.....all I want in a perfect game are g-strings and cleavage.

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
so what you want is a game that plays itself, minus you programming your gorvernors and stuff.

~SDC~
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
purefx,
In a way, yes. I realize that this wouldn't appeal to everyone. It would go to the next level. Are you mananging the individual cititzens lives in galciv? No. Does that mean that the game is playing itself? Well, yes, that part of it. That frees you up to do other things. Do you think being a real galactic emperor would be boring? After all, you wouldn't get to do all the things you do in galciv, they would be way beneath your level. (Although you still could do them, just as in my game proposal)

Your attention would be focused on larger stratigic goals. While your personal vision of how the empire should work is put into motion by your A.I. assistants.


edit: speeling eroors.

[Message Edited]
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
The great problem with this is the A.I., it can't plan ahead!If you give it this degree of control you lose oversight, when I play a game of galciv I don't remember every detail but I get a feel for where my planets are when I read the turn summaries. If the A.I.:s were to handle this then I would be making poor decisions based on to little information or have to go through the entire turns orders manually anyway. The effect of this would be the same as in all versions of galciv prior to expanded universe, you couldn't see the tech tree but with enough effort you could figure it out anyway and thus gain the added control. A good player would do this and thus improve his game just as a good player would do the same in your scenario. Ultimately the performance of the player would be the same only with a lot of extra work and time spent researching information that should have been available beforehand, time and work that could have been spent on playing the game.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
The only way to get a perfect game or program of any sort is actually to write it yourself.. everyone has their own opinions of what should and shouldn't go into it. This is why there are so many games around that do things slightly differently.

Also there is an old programmers saying

"A computer program is never really finished.. there is always something that has to be fixed or that can be improved"