Sid Meier's Starships

[Koyaanisqatsi]

So, is this MoO or Ace Patrol in space? I'll sign up for the former, not so much the latter.

[Ellestar]

So, is this MoO or Ace Patrol in space? I'll sign up for the former, not so much the latter.

A continuation of Star Control 2 concept would have been awesome i think.

It seems ( the User Stats from Steam back this) that Firaxis lost a lot of Goodwill with Beyond Earth. The Concept exploring Fleet sound quite familiar. I think several games scheduled in the near Future have the same basic concept.

I think the main problem of Firaxis for now is that they can't keep their game designers. It's always the new guy designing the new game instead of an old, experienced one. And strategies are all about a good game design (as long as you have the money, but Firaxis has probably the biggest budget of all 4X games).

So next Firaxis games are not really better than previous ones. Or you can say that they're becoming consistently worse. Col2 is worse than Civ 4, Civ 5 is worse than Civ 4, BE is worse than Civ 5...

Just look at Paradox in comparision, both Crusader Kings II and EU4 are strictly better than CK 1 and EU3, and they're better than previous Paradox titles. Total War series is a hit and miss (one good game, one bad, one good, one bad), but at least it's improving over time so each good game is better than previous good one. But with the latest Firaxis games, i don't see that constant improvement. That's just sad.

[FlameFlash]

I'll step out and defend BE happily, but then again, my coworkers are mocking me for not using mayo on sandwiches so clearly I have no taste...

[Nikolai]

Some gameplay details: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...or-pc-mac-ipad

Turns out you do missions to get planets into your federation.

[N35t0r]

A turn-based sci-fi strategy title for PC, Mac and iPad

[DaShi]

I'll bet that the cross-connectivity with BE gets abandoned during development as they discover that it is too challenging to do well and not even worth the effort to implement poorly.

[Dinner]

Interesting. Will they botch it?

Don't they always?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

The issue is that we are not the target market. Civ Rev is where it's at for Sid.

[H Tower]

sounds like an interesting story premise. Even kind of early Star Trek, I'm just not sure I trust the company making the game.

[Elok]

The difference is that it's you who are traveling with your fleet, not sending out fleets.

Okay. What difference does the time effect have on gameplay? IRL it'd mean troops were missing several decades of their families' lives (losing most of them forever if there's no increase in lifespan), so I guess they'd be either berserk or despondent. Also, the target you get to may bear little resemblance to the target you set out for; most likely it will be fifty years more technologically advanced than you, and therefore blast your rinky-dink antique fleet out of the sky.

Also, it sounds like they felt they weren't getting enough CivBE sales, so the marketing guys shook their magic marketing eight-ball and it came up "My sources say synergize." The integration really doesn't make a lot of sense to me otherwise, given the big difference in scale between the games.

[Dr Strangelove]

No domination victory?

[Nikolai]

No domination victory?

"Then there is the classic Civilization domination victory, in which you eliminate your opponents."

[Sava]

this sounds like a giant facepalm

turn based space game?

can they do better than FTL?

probably not

sounds like firaxis is gonna be 0 for 2

[Sava]

BE. That sucked

QFT

[Ellestar]

Also, for an interesting tactical element of a game they need a good AI.

"The key elements are designing and building your own starships," Meier explained. "Develop different kinds of weapons, stealth abilities, armour and shields. Put all the different pieces of a ship together in different ways, to get different kinds of ships. Some will be fast, others will be powerful, some are used for stealth, and your role will to be the admiral of this fleet.

They promise a big variety of ship designs, and to make tactical combat interesting they need to teach AI how to use all these different kinds of ships with different features like speed or stealth. I think they should have made combat semi-arcade, like in Star Control 2 or Space Rangers (in hyperspace). It's not as fast-paced as in fighting games, and different abilities of different ships make it tactical rather than just a pure fighting game mode.

Tactical arcade doesn't need a good AI to be fun - in Star Control 2 it was fine on 80286 20 Mhz in real time, with a very taxing (for it's time) sample-based music that was played on PC speaker, so it had a really primitive AI. Faster Than Light doesn't really have an AI (other than the simplest random target selection and patchfinding for invaders), but it's tactical and real-time so its fun as well.

However, most turn-based tactical games with complex mechanics suffer from a bad AI, ranging from old Archon Ultra to a recent Blood Bowl (which has rather good AI for it's genre, but it's still far beyond human capabilities). I think it's also the biggest weakness of tactical JRPGs - they have an interesting game mechanics but AI in tactical JRPGs is just abysmal. I really hope that Firaxis doesn't make the same mistake...