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I'm back. Now that the pleasantries have been dispensed with, on to business 
I want to discuss the ideas of multiple worlds, for numerous reasons it is better to have multiple planets in the game universe, things like space battles and launching planetary invasions. But also realism and more strategic depth.
Designing such a game is a different matter, but I think/hope I have worked out a viable framework.
The game is basically divided into two levels:
Planet Level: Where you can affect a single planet directly, things like founding new cities, moving armies, building improvements.
Space Level: This is a view much like MOO I/II/III or Stars!, the interface between planet level and space level has to be quite well defined, iow the external effect a planet has on the universe has to be reduced to a few variables. For example the planet would devote a certain amount of resources to space operations, produce a certain amount of research, it would have a certain capacity for building space ships (space dock, space station, space elevator etc) and some sorts of collective stockpiles of resources like food and metals.
First important concept:
Avatar. You have an avatar in the game universe, you have a fine flagship built by some kind hearted aliens (or alternatively must be built before you can go out and do stuff in the big wide universe), at the start your flagship is small and weak, but it can be upgraded with better hulls, cargo capacity, engines and of course an assload of weapons. And what would a flagship be without a fleet to go with it (lonely?). When your flagship is destroyed, either the game will end, or you’ll escape in an escape pod, depending if the setting is regicide or not.
The important thing is due to stuff like the speed of light, you only have precise control over the planet you are in orbit of, if it's a friendly planet you can plan new cities and change terraforming objectives and ordinances, if it is infested with enemy you will be coordinating an invasion or maintaining a blockade. Some worlds will be cohabitated by two factions, which would make things tense if they aren’t too friendly.
You will have some control over other worlds, but only at the space level, and if there’s a space job to be done, but you’re busy elsewhere, you'll have to send off a fleet and pray the captain doesn't mess things up.
The point of the avatar is to reduce the potentional for micromanagement, even if you have 50 worlds, you will only be able to micro one of them each turn, just like every other player in the game.
The planet level in detail:
How I envisage it is something like this, visually the map of a planet would be a large rectangle, much like civ games, however the word "tile" will not be mentioned, the primary reason for this is it allows circular, variable, radius on cities and units.
An army would be surrounded by a circle indicating it's area of influence, large armies could cover a lot of ground, an armies units can considered to be anywhere inside it's area of effect, so if you send a big ass army into an area densely packed with many cities, it will attack and (try to) conquer all of the cities inside it's area of effect, meaning you don’t need to split it up. Basically a large army will act like a steamroller.
Armies will move at realistic speeds, meaning they can be mobilized to any point on the globe, provided an open route is available, speed wont really be an attribute of units, rather things like mobility matter. Send infantry into the mountains and tanks onto the plains, or just nuke everything from orbit, that works too.
Naval power may or may not be present
Terraforming and natives:
Worlds should have a great amount of variety in this, some planets should be covered with vast tracts of jungle, swarming with hostile native beasts. If you found a colony in the festering jungle you could get messages every turn about how the terrible native beasts are killing off the colonists, until you become sufficiently intrigued to mosey over in your flagship to greet the natives with some nukes from orbit. Now that’s what I call terraforming.
Different worlds should have different challenges, jungles could host dangerous natives, barren worlds would be good mining, but cities would grow slowly and at great expense, frozen worlds would attract only the hardiest colonists, some worlds could feature alien relics which can be claimed by the adventurous explorers.
Cities and Improvements:
As has been pointed out numerous times, cities don’t need a large amount of land, as such it would be my inclination to ditch all farm and mining type improvements, and while we are at it lose the roads too, with high mobility units wont need them and the colonists will build them anyway between cities, the advantage of losing the roads is also the map looks a lot cleaner and draws faster.
Most improvements would therefore be military or space related, things like defense clusters (shoot at spacecraft) and space ports (build spaceships, receive trade), space elevators, fortification lines (slows down armies), and terraforming, thermal condensers, boreholes.
The reason for these being separate to cities is they are fairly dangerous or undesirable neighbors; everyone loves ion cannons scorching the sky above them, space craft crash landing on their house or being under a 40000km tall terrorist target. Being fairly sizable they would have their own towns attached and so use some population.
Governor:
Because players cannot be at every planet, control must be left to competent governor. Rather than having the governor magically determine what the player wants, I believe a "task queue" would work better, some tasks could be very specific, for example laying down "shadows" of cities and/or improvements that will be built by the population as resources become available. If you are not at the planet you can still revise the governor settings, which could look something like this
---------------- Task List -----------------------------------
1) Found 5 new cities.
2) Build 10 new Dragon IV cruisers.
3) Acquire 50% of the planets surface.
4) Develop research infrastructure.
------------------ Settings --------------------------------
[x] Use military force.
[ ] Rush build
[ ] Emphasis growth
[x] Emphasis research
[ ] Emphasis economy
[x] Emphasis military
[ ] Emphasis space
------------------------- Misc -------------------------------
Empire Tax: 15%
Verbose setting: Chatty
---------------------------------------------------
The task list ordering would act as priorities rather than a strict order of tasks. The task list should update to indicate progress, ie "Build 10 Dragon IV cruisers" might change to "Build 9 Dragon IV cruisers" after 1 has been built, or it might just have a progress indicator.
Tick boxes would allow traditional governor control and tweaking, to prevent the governor doing things you don’t want them to.
Finally settings for things like tax rate (how much production is devoted to the empire), the verbose setting would be how many messages the governor sends you, chatty might be sending you a progress report every year, but you could also just have them send messages when something exceptional happens, like the task list running out, or a natural disaster.
Summary of planet level:
Try to make it as close to real life as possible, in terms of movement rates, population models, resources models etc. Minimize menial micromanagement, most player actions should have a fairly significant impact on the game.
Primary player actions involve building/planning cities/improvements, social engineering, economic policy and planetary engineering aka terraforming.
Visually map should be relatively uncluttered.
Governor should be based on more than a magical intuition of what the player wants. Primarily because magic doesn't exist.
Space level:
This is where you fly from planet to planet in your flagship, the most important thing is to have multiple play styles:
Builder:
Divides time between a few high quality planets, tweaking the social engineering, optimizing trade and generally ensuring a high growth and profit from all worlds. May have a few outpost worlds for early warning. The governors are most likely quite bored.
Explorer:
Leaves the empire in the hands of trusty governors and generals, and goes off adventuring, it is important that there be rewards for such exploration, things like alien relics and rewarding places to build research colonies.
War Monger:
Attacks everyone, planets are used to churn out warships and conquered planets are used to churn out more warships doesn't bother much with building because too busy coordinating planetary invasions.
Nomad/Trader:
It may even be possible to take a role where planetary operations are completely neglected (other than a source of income), and trading stuff (including information) between players, this would probably also revolve around upgrading your flagship and fleet to be very powerful.
And of course the Diplomat / Mastermind and other manipulative types.
Also there will be space combat, probably in a combat simulator. How exactly this works remains to be seen, Newtonian physics would be nice, although possibly in 2D rather than 3D to make things easier and less confusing….
Miscellaneous
Graphics:
The planet level will ideally be a 3D real-time rendered landscape (not like SMAC… I mean with proper blending and stuff), to look good it’ll probably need to use OpenGL (although because the camera always points the same direction, a software renderer, perhaps voxel based, would be equally viable). The big advantage of OpenGL is it makes stuff easier especially stuff like zooming (I feel smooth zooming is quite important).
Cities will probably be something like sprites, perhaps with suggestions of urbanization radiating out from larger cities (the terrain texture changes to look like a sprawling city…). The other thing is circles suggesting the radius of influence of cities and/or armies, just like in many RTS games, but most notably those with 3D engines (like Warcraft3 and Dune3000)
What about the terraforming?
What about it? While formers and stuff were part of the fun in SMAC, that model also resulted in 2+ hour long turns later in the game. It’s really rather pointless too.
It is my opinion that a terraforming game would be much better done in Simcity style, where you could have all sorts of fun stuff like laying water pipes and building solar panels.
The really short answer is that having a detailed terraforming model adds no real strategic depth.
Long, I know.
And ofcourse I'd love some feedback
I want to discuss the ideas of multiple worlds, for numerous reasons it is better to have multiple planets in the game universe, things like space battles and launching planetary invasions. But also realism and more strategic depth.
Designing such a game is a different matter, but I think/hope I have worked out a viable framework.
The game is basically divided into two levels:
Planet Level: Where you can affect a single planet directly, things like founding new cities, moving armies, building improvements.
Space Level: This is a view much like MOO I/II/III or Stars!, the interface between planet level and space level has to be quite well defined, iow the external effect a planet has on the universe has to be reduced to a few variables. For example the planet would devote a certain amount of resources to space operations, produce a certain amount of research, it would have a certain capacity for building space ships (space dock, space station, space elevator etc) and some sorts of collective stockpiles of resources like food and metals.
First important concept:
Avatar. You have an avatar in the game universe, you have a fine flagship built by some kind hearted aliens (or alternatively must be built before you can go out and do stuff in the big wide universe), at the start your flagship is small and weak, but it can be upgraded with better hulls, cargo capacity, engines and of course an assload of weapons. And what would a flagship be without a fleet to go with it (lonely?). When your flagship is destroyed, either the game will end, or you’ll escape in an escape pod, depending if the setting is regicide or not.
The important thing is due to stuff like the speed of light, you only have precise control over the planet you are in orbit of, if it's a friendly planet you can plan new cities and change terraforming objectives and ordinances, if it is infested with enemy you will be coordinating an invasion or maintaining a blockade. Some worlds will be cohabitated by two factions, which would make things tense if they aren’t too friendly.
You will have some control over other worlds, but only at the space level, and if there’s a space job to be done, but you’re busy elsewhere, you'll have to send off a fleet and pray the captain doesn't mess things up.
The point of the avatar is to reduce the potentional for micromanagement, even if you have 50 worlds, you will only be able to micro one of them each turn, just like every other player in the game.
The planet level in detail:
How I envisage it is something like this, visually the map of a planet would be a large rectangle, much like civ games, however the word "tile" will not be mentioned, the primary reason for this is it allows circular, variable, radius on cities and units.
An army would be surrounded by a circle indicating it's area of influence, large armies could cover a lot of ground, an armies units can considered to be anywhere inside it's area of effect, so if you send a big ass army into an area densely packed with many cities, it will attack and (try to) conquer all of the cities inside it's area of effect, meaning you don’t need to split it up. Basically a large army will act like a steamroller.
Armies will move at realistic speeds, meaning they can be mobilized to any point on the globe, provided an open route is available, speed wont really be an attribute of units, rather things like mobility matter. Send infantry into the mountains and tanks onto the plains, or just nuke everything from orbit, that works too.
Naval power may or may not be present
Terraforming and natives:
Worlds should have a great amount of variety in this, some planets should be covered with vast tracts of jungle, swarming with hostile native beasts. If you found a colony in the festering jungle you could get messages every turn about how the terrible native beasts are killing off the colonists, until you become sufficiently intrigued to mosey over in your flagship to greet the natives with some nukes from orbit. Now that’s what I call terraforming.
Different worlds should have different challenges, jungles could host dangerous natives, barren worlds would be good mining, but cities would grow slowly and at great expense, frozen worlds would attract only the hardiest colonists, some worlds could feature alien relics which can be claimed by the adventurous explorers.
Cities and Improvements:
As has been pointed out numerous times, cities don’t need a large amount of land, as such it would be my inclination to ditch all farm and mining type improvements, and while we are at it lose the roads too, with high mobility units wont need them and the colonists will build them anyway between cities, the advantage of losing the roads is also the map looks a lot cleaner and draws faster.
Most improvements would therefore be military or space related, things like defense clusters (shoot at spacecraft) and space ports (build spaceships, receive trade), space elevators, fortification lines (slows down armies), and terraforming, thermal condensers, boreholes.
The reason for these being separate to cities is they are fairly dangerous or undesirable neighbors; everyone loves ion cannons scorching the sky above them, space craft crash landing on their house or being under a 40000km tall terrorist target. Being fairly sizable they would have their own towns attached and so use some population.
Governor:
Because players cannot be at every planet, control must be left to competent governor. Rather than having the governor magically determine what the player wants, I believe a "task queue" would work better, some tasks could be very specific, for example laying down "shadows" of cities and/or improvements that will be built by the population as resources become available. If you are not at the planet you can still revise the governor settings, which could look something like this
---------------- Task List -----------------------------------
1) Found 5 new cities.
2) Build 10 new Dragon IV cruisers.
3) Acquire 50% of the planets surface.
4) Develop research infrastructure.
------------------ Settings --------------------------------
[x] Use military force.
[ ] Rush build
[ ] Emphasis growth
[x] Emphasis research
[ ] Emphasis economy
[x] Emphasis military
[ ] Emphasis space
------------------------- Misc -------------------------------
Empire Tax: 15%
Verbose setting: Chatty
---------------------------------------------------
The task list ordering would act as priorities rather than a strict order of tasks. The task list should update to indicate progress, ie "Build 10 Dragon IV cruisers" might change to "Build 9 Dragon IV cruisers" after 1 has been built, or it might just have a progress indicator.
Tick boxes would allow traditional governor control and tweaking, to prevent the governor doing things you don’t want them to.
Finally settings for things like tax rate (how much production is devoted to the empire), the verbose setting would be how many messages the governor sends you, chatty might be sending you a progress report every year, but you could also just have them send messages when something exceptional happens, like the task list running out, or a natural disaster.
Summary of planet level:
Try to make it as close to real life as possible, in terms of movement rates, population models, resources models etc. Minimize menial micromanagement, most player actions should have a fairly significant impact on the game.
Primary player actions involve building/planning cities/improvements, social engineering, economic policy and planetary engineering aka terraforming.
Visually map should be relatively uncluttered.
Governor should be based on more than a magical intuition of what the player wants. Primarily because magic doesn't exist.
Space level:
This is where you fly from planet to planet in your flagship, the most important thing is to have multiple play styles:
Builder:
Divides time between a few high quality planets, tweaking the social engineering, optimizing trade and generally ensuring a high growth and profit from all worlds. May have a few outpost worlds for early warning. The governors are most likely quite bored.
Explorer:
Leaves the empire in the hands of trusty governors and generals, and goes off adventuring, it is important that there be rewards for such exploration, things like alien relics and rewarding places to build research colonies.
War Monger:
Attacks everyone, planets are used to churn out warships and conquered planets are used to churn out more warships doesn't bother much with building because too busy coordinating planetary invasions.
Nomad/Trader:
It may even be possible to take a role where planetary operations are completely neglected (other than a source of income), and trading stuff (including information) between players, this would probably also revolve around upgrading your flagship and fleet to be very powerful.
And of course the Diplomat / Mastermind and other manipulative types.
Also there will be space combat, probably in a combat simulator. How exactly this works remains to be seen, Newtonian physics would be nice, although possibly in 2D rather than 3D to make things easier and less confusing….
Miscellaneous
Graphics:
The planet level will ideally be a 3D real-time rendered landscape (not like SMAC… I mean with proper blending and stuff), to look good it’ll probably need to use OpenGL (although because the camera always points the same direction, a software renderer, perhaps voxel based, would be equally viable). The big advantage of OpenGL is it makes stuff easier especially stuff like zooming (I feel smooth zooming is quite important).
Cities will probably be something like sprites, perhaps with suggestions of urbanization radiating out from larger cities (the terrain texture changes to look like a sprawling city…). The other thing is circles suggesting the radius of influence of cities and/or armies, just like in many RTS games, but most notably those with 3D engines (like Warcraft3 and Dune3000)
What about the terraforming?
What about it? While formers and stuff were part of the fun in SMAC, that model also resulted in 2+ hour long turns later in the game. It’s really rather pointless too.
It is my opinion that a terraforming game would be much better done in Simcity style, where you could have all sorts of fun stuff like laying water pipes and building solar panels.
The really short answer is that having a detailed terraforming model adds no real strategic depth.
Long, I know.
And ofcourse I'd love some feedback
. I know absolutely nothing about these.
, a SMAC-like will be sufficent...
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