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**Blake** · July 25, 2002, 19:09

hey, FreeAC will be multiplayer. The first version will have no AI players. Design decisions are made on the basis of how to make MP great. SP is actually fairly low priority.

If it´s clear that your units will conquer a base, the enemy units defending the base will give up after some fighting. If your military forces clearly outnumber the enemy´s and are technologically advanced, there´s little fighting necessary to take over a whole faction.

Strange idea. However, stack combat will mean that if you have a large army, it'll munch the cities defenders. Moving lots of units individually is not on the agenda

(ie armies are the default means of moving units). But full army combat ala CTP2 or HOMM or MOO2 or Stars! or AoW will remove much tedium and add realism.

The economy model has been redesigned from the ground up, using a system of "real costs". For example a chassis might require 100 "production", 50 metal and 5 uranium to build.
I'm keen on economics as well as computers, so hopefully it'll be possible to have a global "stock exchange" (for automating the exchange of resources) so players can sell surpluses and buy to make up deficits. This would make trading easier owing to the simultaneous nature of the turns. I'm pretty sure such a system could be made to work using simple supply & demand and some fudging.

Players give all the armies and cities orders, using a comprehensive orders system. All players submit their "orders" to the host/server which then generates the new turns (moving units and resolving conflicts using rules). The players recieve the new turn, set new orders, and repeat. Because the players play simultaneously it would be entirely possible to have 16 player games and a turn-a-day PBEM. Or much faster blitz play (via direct connect, or something)

On expanding radius's, we have a thread this very moment discussing it :
city/economy thread
The idea being a base (or city) forms the capital tile of a province, which is a number of tiles. As the capital tile grows in population more tiles are controlled, or you can zone tiles for a small upkeep. Provinces may be able to steal tiles from other provinces, or even asorb another province.

City growth is greater-than-linear rather than less-than-linear (SMAC, Civ2...) so a single city will grow large quickly, basically eliminating the incentive for ICS for growth purposes.
Getting back to provinces, many terrain improvements, like mines, will be built like facilities. You click on a city, put mines in the queue, and they will be built on the most sutible tile in the province. The population required for employment will be asorbed. Formers will become automated beasties which are built but only barely managed, you just assign them to a province and they'll work in that province until reassigned, automatically working on the next task in the construction queue.

Construction will work much better than in SMAC. You'll be able to build multiple things per turn, there will be full carryover, the system will be queue-orientated rather than current build orientated, so it'll be natural to put multiple things in the queue.

There will be considerably less improvements, but you'll be able to build more than one at a base. A facility will require a certain amount of employment and give a certain benefit. "Employs 20000 population, provides +10 labs/turn". So part of the strategy will be deciding how to allocate your population to the available facilities, and in what ratio to build those facilities. The queue system will have some automation of undreamed of effeciency (unless your a Stars! player). For example "autobuild research labs" would automatically build as many research labs as the population can handle.

Unit design will work differentely, instead you'll have chassis which have a number of slots where components can be added. Different components require a different number of slots, heavy weapons would require more slots than is available on a light chassis. This would make unit design a much more involving side game, because given identical tech two players could design quite different sets of units.

Weapons and armour will work in natural ways, weapons will have a combat range, damage and accuracy. Armour will have an armour rating which allows it to reduce damage by a certain amount. Chassis will have hit points which allow them to asorb a certain amount of punishment before dying. The cost of a unit will basically be the cost of the sum of it's parts (rather than generated by an abstract formula)

Reactors will work differentely, they'll require a slot or two, and allow the addition of advanced tech components, like energy weapons and forcefields.

The society model will be spiced up, with the idea of Talents as exceptionall individuals. On the whole talents will be free to roam your faction, or even defect to another faction. Research talents will provide research points and psi talents allow the construction of natives (just examples). Anti-talents are bad for your faction, they are criminals, swindlers, eco-terrorists and kin. Your SE settings will basically determine talent generation, positive research = more Research Talents. Being hypocytrical will generate anti-talents - for example if you have a positive planet, but build boreholes, the boreholes will cause eco-terrorists to start popping up. This may extend to who you choose as your pact mates or have as your neighbours.

All this will be very automated, due to The Quest to Eliminate Tedius Micromanagment. Things like unhappiness due to base population will also be eliminated (further reducing ICS incentives).

In the candy department, there will be a "Planet Gazette" which is a virtual newspaper, detailing world and local events, like changes in diplomatic stance, construction of SP's, research breakthroughs, the state of the stockmarket, the weather and the story about a man and his fish. Your probe rating will help determine which events are leaked from your faction, fx if you have negative probe, it is quite likely the world will learn about every research breakthrough you make. More important events will obviously be harder to hush up, and those with minimal importance will only randomly appear (mostly to add variety).

You'll also have a message inbox, which will full with messages from your cities, advisers, commanders etc, basically anything you might care about, you'll get a message about. Due to the potentional volume it'll be possible to filter message, you'll almost certaintely want to filter the message which tells you that a city has completed a number of mines

Well, that's basically where the design stands at the moment

**mloeschenkohl** · July 28, 2002, 14:40

Sorry if I got something wrong here... I only had a quick look at the design document and remember reading something like “more techs” or something. When I was playing multiplayer-AC with friends, we didn´t even research half of the techs, so I was afraid it could be even worse in FreeAC.

Back then, it seemed to us that a lot which was fun in single-player now ruined multi-player. After about 4housrs of gaming, everyone was like “Well, that was fun, but now let´s do something else.” Altogether, we did 3 or 4 games, never finished any of them, and then stopped playing because we felt AC isn´t really meant to be MP, although it could be really fun with a lot of changes. Perhaps other players think different, none of us is a hardcore-TBS-gamer, more like “common” gamers.

The problem was that RTS-games have short missions in single-player and short multi-player, while Civ-style games have an “epic” single-player part, which doesn´t work well in multiplayer – it´s a different concept. That´s why I´m thinking it may be better to do 2 different versions of FreeAC.

Anyway, I like the overall concept, especially that it´s possible to build a base improvement multiple times… The player could even get a bonus if he´s building more of the same type, so that it´s good to “specialize” a base in something, but risky, too. It´s also cool to give the population more personality – they always seemed like slaves, didn´t do a lot except of rioting now and then.

I´d be glad to help with the game – I could do some graphic stuff, I´m not a professional, but I start an education in multimedia-arts this year, so I hope I´m gonna improve in the next time. I´ll send
some stuff I´ve done if you like. The problem is I don´t think I can work on a regular basis because I´ll be quite busy, but I´d be happy to help whenever I can.

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