Our game has no quests, NPCs, and no rounds, no factions. There is no wealth, only budget (no national debt of surplus allowed here!). We are not going for a linear story (sure there is a back story, but you could say there is no front story), its a pure strategy game.

The power of a player (in FG's context, it would be the usable output resource wise of their economy AKA, the size of fleet they can support) in any game follows some mathematical model. In the simple level based RPG realm and in RTS before hitting resource/pop based limits, a player generally tends to improve in power exponentially (growth rate proportional to their power). In an MMORTS, that would mean that if you doubled your power every 30 minutes (thats super slow paced for an RTS), a player who started only 1 day before you would crush you in a second, and be about 250 thousand times more powerful than you regardless of how long you play. Fail. If you could afford one unit after 30 minutes, after a day the server would be killed by one person's fleet if they choose to make low cost units. There is no strategy in unlimited growth; playing longer always beats being smarter. This is an RTS game, thus it can't have unlimited growth.

Basically we need a non exponential power function. The obvious choice is a logistic, with a carrying capacity determined by how good of player you are. I'd aim for a short time constant so your nation grows (or falls) in the matter of a few days (though it would depend on the server). Its true a non convergent but less than exponential power function could work, but I don't see a good way or reason for it.

The design is simple: some places are better (produce more resources for the extraction costs) than others. Your carrying capacity is higher if you can hold better planets. Unless you already have the best several planets in the game (making you the top ranked player), there is always a better place for you to go, but taking+holding it may be more expensive than the gain, in which case you will start to lose forces and lose some planets (likely your new better one). Planets slightly better than yours will tend to be held by players slightly better than you, and those planets will afford them slightly more resource for a slightly larger fleet. Its really just a PVP ladder. There is no real grinding/leveling. Its a strategy game: longer playtime should not make you better than someone assuming they have had enough time to stabilize their nation. In effect, everything after the first few days until your nation stabilizes out in the bad/uncontested planets is endgame.

For this to work, you simply have to prevent taking hundreds of bad planets from being an effective strategy. The only way to do this is to have some cost to having more planets that grows with the number of planets you have. My proposed explanation is bureaucratic cost, but the explanation really is a minor issue.

In my opinion the best solution to the problem of player limitation is either to constantly expand your universe, which can be done through quest packs etc.. which you could possibly charge for, or better just reduce the concept to a round based game, which in and of itself would introduce some other fun aspects into the works.

Imagine setting various variables as far as planet types, nebula, asteroid fields, distrobution of resources, NPC factions, quest hubs, black holes, white dwarves, what have you.. that you might like to see in a universe, setting a list of these variables and building a randomising program as opossed to a static universe would free you to make a complex and varried universe, yet completely different each round.

The over arching story can be the same, certain factions may continue, but it gives the players a chance to sieze land, build empires, and actually play the RTS factor of the game without being limited to instancing.

As far as questing, trading etc.. you could even integrate a randomisation of quests.. say only 30% of total quests created will appear in any universe generation, and factions may change in strength, wealth, or even personality.

Just some thoughts as it seems you guys are right at the start up phase of operations, and I do hope I didn't offend anyone.

-AlfonzFred-

Will the position of the weapon on a ship affect its line of sight (cannot fire through own hull)?
When does a ship get assigned to a node? Will its node ever change?

The answer to both of these is not until the AI is smart enough to deal with it. I'd like to allow both eventually, but it ups the complexity quite a bit. restricting firing arcs should not be too hard for the AI to tolerate, but letting ships move around in formations requires quite a bit more in configuration settings and AI. Its also not really needed for the pure ship combat game, but would be necessary for more realtime systems that may come later.

What is the difference between a designated formation positions (blue) and a node?
I see the formation position for each ship, but could there be another marker (red?) for the macro-formation?

All formation positions, including those occupied by sub formations as well as ships, are marked by the blue indicators at the moment. That marks where things are trying to fly to, vs where they physically are. Color-coding the formation positions based on type is a good idea. I'v probably been using "formation node" and "formation position" interchangeably. There will be a distinction at some point in terms of how the editor works I guess, but don't worry about it, I haven't been consistent with the terminology.

Would this move the 'base' of the Fighter Pack (Formation)? By 'base' I mean the average position of the ships.

That particular stat would just effect targeting AI (focus fire on enemies doing the most damage, not those damaging you, or ones easy to hit). If the fighters were set to strongly try and stay in formation, but their sub formation was set to easily leave formation, then the whole fighter sub formations would go fly out there. The base position for a formation is not set by the average position of the ships. Is what controls where the ships go (unless they leave formation), not the other way around. There may be options to bias the formation position toward the average of the ships to help keep formations together though.

Does each Formation have its own 'base'?

Both ships and formations are instances of the "FlightNode" class, which basically represents a thing with AI that flys around. Formations however don't have to obey any physics (they can specify their position where ever they want), and the ships have to thrust around to try and get to places. You will have many (sub)formations (and ships too) and they are essentially independent except that they may/will be configured to listen to or make requests of their parent formations.

In other words, how are you going to make sure that a Formation with low 0.0 weighting on Maintain Formation priority is not going to disperse the positioning of the rest of the fleet?

Thats a downside of having a low weighting on Maintain Formation. There may be other priorities you can use to help compensate (perhaps some cross formation blobbing/flocking priorities), but having low Maintain Formation priority should have serious downsides as it wrecks your spacial organization. Setting it to 0.0 might be pretty poor strategy in most cases, but thats an issue for the player to try out.

Kiting is pretty much the basic strategy of ranged combat. It would be foolish to leave it out :)

Thanks for your comments!

I've been busy with work and haven't been making any progress lately. Its kinda hard to get excited about it when my work involves mostly the same programming languages and working with the same engine. Next in line is getting the AI system really functional, which does look pretty fun though.

the nodes in the formation (grid points in them etc)

What is the difference between a designated formation positions (blue) and a node?
I see the formation position for each ship, but could there be another marker (red?) for the macro-formation?
Does each formation have a node for itself, or do only the ships have nodes? I remember you explaining this to me as a hierarchy: [Hanging_Mobile_2_sq.jpg http://www.architonic.com/imgProSat/davidweekssat/Hanging_Mobile_2_sq.jpg]

Target Overall DPS: .9 -Make the fighters focuse on ships damaging the fleet as a whole far more than on those damaging themselves

Would this move the 'base' of the Fighter Pack (Formation)? By 'base' I mean the average position of the ships.
How does this Target Overall DPS 'priority' interact with the Assault (Formation) Maintain Formation 'priority'? Does each Formation have its own 'base'? What if the Artillery (Formation) and the Assault (Formation) are very far from each other. Since the Artillery (Formation) has no Maintain Formation weighting, then is only the Assault (Formation) responding to the Maintain Formation priority? My point is that the Maintain Formation weighting should not be mutual between all sub-formations, because when the Assault (Formation) gets too far away from the Artillery (Formation), then the Front Defense (Formation) might abandon the Artillery (Formation) in favor of a position halfway between the Fighter (Ships) and the Artillery (Ships).
In other words, how are you going to make sure that a Formation with low 0.0 weighting on Maintain Formation priority is not going to disperse the positioning of the rest of the fleet?

I like that you include kiting as a setting/priority. Kiting is my favorite strategy in most videogames, second only to the "upgrade my stuff before fighting" strategy.

Great work! I look forward to playing with the app.

Thats a 14*14 grid formation, each node containing a single ship. It is placed inside a parent formation which contains it and a single other ship just behind the front grid. Basic thrust control AI is working so the ships 'try' to stay in formation by both attempting to fly toward their designated formation positions (shown in blue) as well as thrusting to match the velocity of their formation position. With a significant mass and limited thrusting power, there is a limit to what accelerations the ships can follow. Pictured here are the ships after the formation has exceeded their maximum acceleration by stopping and turning rapidly, just before all the ships regain formation.

As the battle simulator can run fine in slower than real time (this fleet of 197 ships did manage to run in real time though), it is possible to simulate and render battles of essentially unlimited scale. It might take a long time, but it could model (and render to a video) a battle of hundreds of formations and thousands of ships. I ran a little test with 40000 ships and it seemed to work (But it ran really slow as expected). 250000 ships works, but is really slow. One million ships did not work (Out of memory error)

I've been doing quite a bit on both the editor and battle simulator recently. With a bit more progress on the editor, and some more AI, we will be starting to have a real game.

Discuss here.

We can start by making a data structure that can hold the data for each fleet.

We should begin with just three ship classes (and graphics) and no graphics for the equipment (except for weapons-fire). It won't be hard to come up with some numbers for that small number of items.

Also the AI needs to start simple. If we initially only have two players the fleets could just start flying toward each-other and the AI should just shoot the closest ship.

Here would be the parts:

• Game client
  • Battle sim (place ships on the map where each player would get points to spend on "buying" ships from their loadout and battle to the death!)
    • Graphics for three ships
    • Graphics for weapons-fire
    • Graphics for ship death
    • A rudimentary AI
    • A system of keeping track of each ship's hit-points
    • A UI for selecting/placing the ships for battle
  • Fleet creator (just for making all the different ships in your fleet kind of like a "Fleet Loadout")
    • Data Structure for ships/fleets
      • Ship class
      • Ship class "cost"
      • Ship equipment
        • Which hard-point the equipment is attached to
        • What kind of equipment it is
        • What stats the component has
        • What "price" the component has
      • A UI for creating the ships
      • A UI for making squadrons
• Fleet file exchange website
  • Upload fleets
  • Download fleets

Did I miss anything? (probably a lot in the specifics) Let's get this list of what to do completed before moving on.

Where do we want to start? I suggest beginning with the non-campaign single-player mode because it would allow us to test and develop all the systems needed in the other modes. (except for p2p communication for multiplayer and campaign quirks)

I see 2 main approaches of getting to this point:

Approach 1) We start with getting fleet design and AI working. Once thats done, we can have autonomous fleet vs fleet battles (to battle someone, you just need their fleet file), and let people upload fleet files to tournament servers and we can use the data from what people over use in those to auto-balance the pricing and strengths of components. As soon as real fleet vs. fleet stuff is working though, we can start making (and accepting from the community) various single player maps and campaigns (and potentially mods to the available components and such as well). This pretty closely matches what we would need to drop into the FG MMO to add space combat

Approach 2) Screw fleet and AI design, and just do ship design. Then make a multiplayer 1st and 3rd person space shooter with custom ships (Initially it can not use custom ships). Add in AI to allow for single player then add in control of a full fleet with semi autonomous AI later. (With a bit of work on an modified physics engine and control AI, you could also make an in atmosphere fighter dogfighting setup if you wanted)

Both seem pretty good to me. Approach 2 basically starts as a generic multiplayer space shooter game, then gets features (custom ships, single player, fleet combat etc) where approach one really starts as more of a design and simulation type project. The end result would be the same as once it has all the features from both, we can enable all the play modes: autonomous fleet battle, rts, fps, first person swarm shooter (fps with a fleet instead of 1 ship). All of these could be both multiplayer and single player running on the same engine (if we design it correctly!), and single player campaigns could mix all the play styles as desired.

just single player and player to player multiplayer

Ahh, like in Civilization IV, I see what you are getting at. I see three different modes: Campaign, Multiplayer, and a randomly generated game (like a regular game of Civ with a randomly generated universe). This will make development much easier.

Where do we want to start? I suggest beginning with the non-campaign single-player mode because it would allow us to test and develop all the systems needed in the other modes. (except for p2p communication for multiplayer and campaign quirks)

Let's make a good plan before we jump into development this time. We can make this a semi-fresh start.

Any thoughts?

With my shift to free and open source development tools, as long as we can manage to crawl along with unpaid developers, our costs will stay at basically 0$. Its true that I'm paying a bit for the web hosting, but I use it for several other things too, and its darn cheap.

I agree that having alliances greatly adds to a game. Fortunately for us, once we have things working, adding co-op, and 2v2 etc should be pretty easy. And for the mmo aspect, alliances will be crucial for good gameplay.

If this new project goes forward, there will need to be at least one single player campaign,

Yes. I see this quite broadly, as the single-player campaign could be the main part of the game, or an introduction to the multiplayer aspects like being a tutorial. Games which have implemented fleet-design along with campaigns have been Battleships Forever, Gate 88, Star Knights, Gratuitous Space Battles, and Celetania… I liked their approaches to fleet battle, yet it was really disheartening to see Celetania go bankrupt. Games which require high processing-power on the server-end require investors or high-quality personal servers. I was just dismayed that Celetania never had a success when it hit the market, and I think that this was because players needed the incentive of being on a team to donate, instead of doing a free-for-all. Me on a tangent: The point of donating for non-subscriber games is to obtain power in-game, but if nobody is in your alliance then there is nobody to show-off to, and nobody to support. In the games I have played, people (including myself) have donated primarily to help out their alliances.

So somehow, the concept of alliances should be kept, even if the focus is on 1v1 battles. For example, I am participating in a 2v2 team-elimination tournament tomorrow in a 1v1 cardgame named Alteil :)

I always liked your writing Matt. Great to still have you!

Agreed!

I have some ideas on how to design the user's perspective of space gameplay. We should talk about it sometime.

Hey Tristan :)

The fuzzy focus of the project has also been my fault too. I did not produce much in terms of GC design in the span that it was my responsibility.

I am very sorry about how little time I have spent on FG. Unfortunately college has been taking up all my time. I am trying to structure my time this term so I can actually dedicate some time to FG.

I always liked your writing Matt. Great to still have you!

I have some ideas on how to design the user's perspective of space gameplay. We should talk about it sometime.

As for your new idea, I think its cool. One thing that popped into my head was if you had all these people creating custom AI and then testing them in battles, you could combine all that data and effectively develop a sophisticated computer-driven AI modal. Essentially you could monitor which player-set AI settings produced the best battlefield results, and use that to create computer-bot controlled fleets that are intelligent enough to be challenging in battle. Could be interesting, and would make the single-player campaign more rewarding if you integrated it into that. Just a thought.

Oh yes, defiantly. I have had success with evolutionary algorithms before, and I would love to employ them both for tuning and balancing the game as well as generating optimized fleets. I specifically intend to use tournaments to exploit player's strategic designing ability in helping with this. The idea here is design a fleet, and let it fight, so battles work with no player intervention (its a design contest, though other play modes could be added). At least in this basic mode, it is very easy to run massive amounts of battles with player made and evolved fleets.

For modes with more, evolving AI to combat the player in realtime would be an interesting challenge. I hadn't really though about how far we could take realtime interaction. As it is a short term battle game, fast paced semi first person control is not out of the question even. Interesting. We may have many modes. Really I just was thinking of doing the basic stand back and watch your fleet fight game, but with a system for making sub-fleets obey commanding fleets hierarchically, there is no reason we can't simply swap the highest level command AI with the player and have a multiplayer first person swarm shooter with custom designed fleets. I see a lot of games that could be made on top of a general purpose fleet/ship design and combat engine. (And a single player campaigns using all the different kinds of games would be cool)

FG is really only still around at all because you have continued to work on it. For that reason alone, you have the complete right to take the development in this game in any direction you want. I feel guilty that I haven't spent much time at all on this project in the past year or so, but at the same time I know I've been working on other projects that have allowed me to improve greatly as a coder, much like how you view FG as a conduit for your own self-improvement.

Note also that it is only around because I choose to call some of my projects part of FG and change the design to include them (Planets got added after I decided planet were cool for example)

I'm glad you are hanging around. It's always nice to have more minds working on design! If this new project goes forward, there will need to be at least one single player campaign, so when the time comes I may want to seek out our lead writer for that ;) We can of course have lots of campaigns if desired (they should be really really easy to make)

As for actual progress on the idea, I made some. I decided to implement the library of designs as a tree, a single tree. All your folder/file like organization of saved designs as nodes, fleet designs as nodes with sub-fleets as sub nodes… Tree structure is like this:
Thing - What thing can contain/have as children in tree
Library - Anything
Formation - Formation, Ship
Ship - Hull (only one, Hull subclassed from Module)
Module - Module, Part
Part - Nothing (Parts only specify stats)

I've got a crude tree display working with basic browsing filters (I'm very proud of my filters system, though making a GUI for it will be hard) and color coding, but no GUI to really do anything with it yet.

I'm really starting to like the versatility of this idea. There are a lot of potential game designs that it could work for (heck, you could do a first person ship combat RPG where you fight in tournaments to win money yo upgrade your ship.) The basic design based AI control version to auto balance the game helps a lot too.

FG is really only still around at all because you have continued to work on it. For that reason alone, you have the complete right to take the development in this game in any direction you want. I feel guilty that I haven't spent much time at all on this project in the past year or so, but at the same time I know I've been working on other projects that have allowed me to improve greatly as a coder, much like how you view FG as a conduit for your own self-improvement.

As a college student who is now expanding my interests and beginning to found businesses and projects of my own, I know that I won't be able to devote any time to FG from a coding perspective. However, the conversations I have had on some of these forum threads and the debates over design theories we have engaged in have greatly improved my own thinking process over the years and have been honestly fun. Because of that, I'd like to say that I'm always open to bounce ideas off of or to just talk to about anything. I still follow FG's RSS feeds, so as long as stuff is being written on these sites I will be listening.

Although I probably won't code at all, I love to write and so in addition to posting on the forums I would also be willing to continue developing the storyline or writing descriptions for the game if its ever needed.

So yeah thats where I stand on taking FG in a new development direction.

As for your new idea, I think its cool. One thing that popped into my head was if you had all these people creating custom AI and then testing them in battles, you could combine all that data and effectively develop a sophisticated computer-driven AI modal. Essentially you could monitor which player-set AI settings produced the best battlefield results, and use that to create computer-bot controlled fleets that are intelligent enough to be challenging in battle. Could be interesting, and would make the single-player campaign more rewarding if you integrated it into that. Just a thought.

Fragmented Galaxy has been an extraordinarily poorly focused and organized project. I know this, and it is mostly my fault. Also, I don't really mind. For me it has always been an impulse based project. I felt doing ground combat first would allow us to quickly get a functional game out. Without ground combat, there would be no resources, and thus no economy, ships, or game. Well, I went and made planets for a while instead.

Anyway, the plan for ground combat, which will be the source of all resources and ship production, really hasn't been designed to a point where I feel I can implement it. The designs just seem to gain complexity, and I'm unsure of how big of portion of the game screwing with ground combat stuff should be. Originally the plan was to make is super simple, but the idea of significance between different parts of planets was introduced, and things got messy. On that front the project has basically stalled.

Now, on a different topic: Why do I work on this project? The concept for Fragmented Galaxy (aside from the unrefined ground combat ideas) seems very elegant from my perspective as a programmer. It has a very simple yet powerful and realistic economic system, very powerful political system based on some simple building blocks, a rather different and clever technology/research approach, an truly clever and powerful AI setup integrated with the fleet design which mirrors the ship design system. All of these are built on simple principles that are combine either through a hierarchical structure, networking or both. From the programming perspective Fragmented Galaxy is in some cases a worst case game (massively server side, computational expensive, realtime), but those are issues related to computational load. As far as basic implementation and design, Fragmented Galaxy is just a collection of fundamentally beautiful algorithms. This is why I'm still here, 3 years into the project.

And, as to why the project always gets sidetracked: I'm just here to play with clever algorithms. When I started generating planets, I ventured into the realm of procedural terrain generation, high end rendering, graphics card programming, and now the Python programming language. Any of these areas could happily consume years of my life, and I expect them to do so. As far as Fragmented Galaxy goes though, none of these are really very important to the game.

And that leads me back to a new idea. I'm going to want to get to play with those clever AI, ship and fleet design ideas sometime, and ground combat just isn't seeming very interesting at the moment. Thus, I came up with the idea of making a fleet battle game. Basically you would be given a fixed budget to make a fleet, and battle another fleet made with that budget (or potentially a different budget as a handicap). This could start without fleets, just with single ships, and fleets could be added later. Saving fleet/ship designs (including AI settings) out to files for sharing would allow a single player campaign (which could serve as a tutorial) of preset opponent fleets and corresponding budgets (you could score based on budget used, or losses taken, or both, or simply win/lose). We could allow players to battle their own fleets, battle over the network (Lan) or online, and we could host official tournaments (submit your fleet, battles run server side)

This would be a pure strategy and design game with no realtime aspects. Simply make your fleet (or select one you already made), and press go. Potentially realtime or turn based modes could be added where you could send in backup waves or something like that.

This entire system could be kept intact, but imported into Fragmented Galaxy to allow you to use your same fleets in the MMORTS. The only issue I see is with techs; not all nations in Fragmented Galaxy will have the same techs, and none will have the exact same development status on the techs. It is only an issue with integrating the fleet battling game with FG, and thus I'm not going to worry about it now.

Anyway, I now have an idea that will let me play with the AI, ship and fleet stuff, and make an interesting game that does not have serious hosting issues. It might happen sometime.

However, I clicked it again, verified the certificate, and it ran fine. The controls were a bit lagged, but thats obviously because of the fact that its now running in a browser, and it wasn't too big of a lag anyway.

Again, it is just a planet viewer, with just one planet.

Basic testing shows that it does run on Mac, Windows and Linux, though there are some rather ugly graphical bugs in some cases, possibly on all Windows and Linux computers.

I'll pack up another release and maybe zip it or something. I'll also try and make (or find) a much more minimal test app for you guys to determine whether it is a panda problem or a problem with the the FG client. I think I'll also try and stick some error handling in the networking just incase the server becomes inaccessible.

Also, if I can figure out the darn ssl certificate stuff, I'll make a version that you can play in the web browser with the panda web plugin. I think that should resolve most of the launching issues.

Also I wanted to add that the planet looks spectacular! My favorite is the quality of the reflection of the star on the ocean surface. Keep up the good work!

The reflection of the sun is just specular highlight, not a real (computation expensive) reflection. That planet is so full of gfx hacks and short cuts.

I just realized that I don't think I match the sun color with the spec color properly. I could make the water appear to reflect the sky colors better. (so sunsets would get colored reflections). I better not start playing with the graphics effects again….

So far it works fine on macs, runs with bad gfx artifacts on windows, and at least runs on linux (my tester did not provide much feedback). Pretty good for an initial release.

Just testing note: on my computer, after downloading the .pd3 file it was automatically converted into a .sh file, so the result was "FGPlanet-1.pd3.sh". Because my computer read it as a .sh shell file, double clicking it would cause it to be opened as a gibberish shell script in Xcode. I had to manually remove the .sh extension and convert it back to .pd3 in order for double-click opening in panda3D to work correctly.

It is just a planet viewer, with just one planet, but it does actually connect to the server and do a few other things you don't see.

Says
Welcome to the Fragmented Galaxy Website! This site is the home of Fragmented Galaxy (FG). Fragmented Galaxy is a massively multilayer online real time strategy game (MMORTS) which is currently in development. For an introduction to Fragmented Galaxy see the game section.

Should be

Welcome to the Fragmented Galaxy Website! This site is the home of Fragmented Galaxy (FG). Fragmented Galaxy is a massively multiplayer online real time strategy game (MMORTS) which is currently in development. For an introduction to Fragmented Galaxy see the game section.

I will try to have the server accessible again soon, but there are some annoyances with my new routing setup that make it very inconvenient to test things from here (Even when configured properly, my modem does not seem to properly forward ports for connections from its own subnet, so it appears broken from here, but can work for other people making it annoying to test and configure). Regardless, I should have it fixed in not too long, but that still does not make the currently released client any fun.

RTS shoot-em-up

That actually an interesting thing to mention. My design is kinda like that (I don't see any other tolerable approach other than straight RTS with world resets to revive/add players). Basically we have to have a max power a player can have (very vaguely defined and very soft capped, but it must be clearly impossible to expand/grow forever). It is kinda like a FPS where you spawn with crummy/no weapons. After a short while (if you survive) you can get more weapons/items, but you eventually pretty much max out (getting another rocket launcher won't really help). New players can join at any time without being too disadvantaged, and re-spawns are nor too bad off either. In FG, it might take a few days to start getting near your potential, but the gameplay design will keep you from getting pestered more than you want during that time. Players who wish to avoid getting wiped out can simply stay away from the violent areas (intended to be more resource rich planets near the center). This is kind of on par with power ups in FPS games. If a lot of people want them, you don't go there until you have some decently powerful stuff.

It really is just FPS game mechanics ported to strategy based combat on a longer time scale. Thats how you should think about it. If you die, so what? You gotta build your strength for a little while and you are right back in.

Anyway, its a strategy game. If you get owned, you don't lose any of your time invested in developing strategies (designing ships, treaties, formations, AI and even just general tactics). You can also keep your techs. You really just need to colonize some planets and you will be pretty much right back where you were, though it may take some time to recapture good planets and regain full strength. We can even tune the penalties for having large nations such that initial growth can be almost instant if we decide it helps gameplay. After all, a technologically advanced population in a unpopulated resource rich area should be able to grow exponentially. Potentially we could allow re-spawning players to start colonizing multiple planets (the number based on their past size. Consider it an ability to recruit colonists via reputation/fame) at once to speed things up if spreading out tends to take too much time.

Potentially we could simply change a few constants and make a super fast paced game where you would spawn a nation when you logged in and it would play more on the traditional RTS, or even FPS time scale. Choose some planets, place a few colonies, and almost instantly (seconds) get the max sized fleet they can support. Then attack other planets. Try and capture more valuable ones to replace your worse ones and thus increase your fleet size slightly. Really, once you have the formation and AI specs configured, there is no reason gameplay couldn't be on the week or second time scales with a bit adjusted tuning.

While I still support the idea, and it would separate our gameplay from the dead MMORTS games that I have played I'll hold my tongue until I have a better understanding of the points Craig and Matt have brought up, and feel motivated to design a working system that can successfully keep players from quitting due to the "I lost all my stuff" syndrome while still keeping the gameplay of FG dynamic and exciting. I fully believe that many of my ideas could work if I can find a way to build on your feedback.

Tristan: Phenoca, your plan may make a fun RTS shoot-em-up,

Ha - and I don't like first-person shooters for their violence. But it does sound like I'm advocating the respawn system. I still want to play with this idea since it has interesting implications for alliances (declaring war on an ally gives both of you research points)?!

Oh, thats right, I added it to the gameplay description already (no sarcasm there,

Haha, thanks.
I hadn't considered "Whether of not you are online at any given moment should have very little impact," since… In all strategy games I play there are always orders to send once you realize that someone has declared war. Not sure how general that statement is meant to be, or how far-reaching the 'design of your nation' is :)
Good idea to quote the description.

One of our old plans was to have Earth actually exist in the game, and have us (the devs) control it.

Yeah I liked that plan. I recall someone mentioning that if Earth got the best technologies first (after a game update), then other players could try to copy it by fighting Earth.

Earth could be the leading nation in an "interplanetary republic" of sorts, where members could communicate directly with us what they want changed in the game.

It would be neat to see GM Support in-game (instead of on the website).

don't forget that moderators can keep larger nations from decimating the rest of the players.

Ha, that reminds me of an old plan we came up with a while ago. Usually in online games abusive or otherwise troublesome players are normally punished, banned, etc, by some method outside of the game. In FG's storyline, Earth is said to be currently controlled by an advanced and mysterious race supposedly remnant from the ancient empires of the colonial wars.

One of our old plans was to have Earth actually exist in the game, and have us (the devs) control it. Earth would possess super advanced technology and ships more powerful than anything the players are capable of creating, though not impossible to kill. If a player is deemed troublesome in some way and needs to be punished, forced back into line, or just given a warning, a fleet from Earth could be dispatched to cause some havoc in their empire. If the player needs to be removed from the game, then Earth could send out a fleet to exterminate them.

In this way we can solve problems in-game in a way that is appropriate to the storyline and the environment of the game. In extreme cases, full account banning can be used after their empire is destroyed.

So, if someone was trying to take over the galaxy, Earth could simply declare war on them to reinstate a balance of power. Earth could also be used as a tool to communicate with the players within the game. Other games have instituted player "governments" whose leaders pass legislation that tells the devs what changes to the game they want made. Earth could be the leading nation in an "interplanetary republic" of sorts, where members could communicate directly with us what they want changed in the game.

Just a random thought which is probably not appropriate to this thread.

if everyone is trying to take over the galaxy… Only one person ends-up winning!

Even if a player can manage to manipulate their economy to potentially support a galaxy-sized nation, don't forget that moderators can keep larger nations from decimating the rest of the players.

I will side with Matt and Craig on this: the plan detailed in the first post is, for the most part, not appropriate for FG.

if everyone is trying to take over the galaxy… Only one person ends-up winning!

It has been a while since we solved that problem. It is one of the 2 main design problems for MMORTS games. You choose one of the solutions, and go from there (Soft capped size, or world resets). The other issue of course is online vs offline players. Solve those 2 problems, and you have a MMORTS design. I addressed both of them in your other thread. I guess we really should mention these issues and our solutions to them somewhere obvious in the game description. Oh, thats right, I added it to the gameplay description already (no sarcasm there, I actually forgot I updated that. It is worth a reread):

The goal of Fragmented Galaxy is to develop a powerful nation, what this means is left up to you. Generally the means of accomplishing this will be through optimizing your nation. It is a game of efficiency. The larger your nation grows, the higher the costs of maintaining it. There will come a point at which you can no longer continue to freely expand, and this will happen quickly. You will simply see your budget slowly get consumed by the various sectors of empirical maintenance as you grow and spread your forces and colonies across more colonies, planets and solar systems. To continue to expand, you will have to optimize, design your nation, and this is the strategy.¹

When you log off, your empire will continue to work toward your design, and follow your guidelines. Whether of not you are online at any given moment should have very little impact, as what matters is the status and design of your nation, not specific actions in combat. Any immediate reactionary actions that may wish to perform should be configurable through the triggers system. Generally you may want to login occasionally and check up on your nation and make adjustments as needed, though you may see it as a valid goal to make a powerful nation requiring minimal attention.²

I want to encourage a system where instead of players needing to destroy enemy players, players are encouraged to destroy themselves.

This is illogical, unrealistic and bad for gameplay. If losing is good, there is no reason to try any win, and thats the point of the game. Good ships, strategies and plans would be pointless. There is a huge difference between reckless aggressiveness (attempts to destroy enemies, with less regard for losses) and masochist suicidal attacks with the intent of loss. Even the most reckless aggressive players should not intentionally lose more units to achieve the same ends. The essence of strategy is to use units efficiently. It is not really a strategy game if the only good strategy is to spam units at the enemy one at a time with no armor or weapons as fast as you can. You brought up the topic of fast ship recovery to allow aggressive tactics. I like that idea, but this is completely different.

This is accomplished by declaring as many simultaneous wars as possible.

We must do the opposite. if declaring wars randomly is good, all the new players will get attacked (by people trying to lose though…). This is unrealistic, and bad for gameplay.

The more population you lose, the more technology is researched.

This is also unrealistic, and bad for gameplay. The point is supposed to be to survive and prosper through efficient and stable colonies, not mass murder. This encourages intentionally ineffective attacks and defense. The whole game is designed around players trying to do the opposite in order to grow their nation. Rewarding worse performance is one of the very worst things in game design. It is generally considered a bug or exploit (depending on who finds it). We can't reward massacre trading deals. (Thats worse than insider trading!)

Players can easily recolonize their population by logging in and choosing a new world to settle on. While players gain research points by creating planetary wars, alliances gain alliance points (used for alliance-funded projects) by preventing war.

Our research system does not involve points, nor is is practical to allot points for avoiding things where the game has no way to know you avoided something. Attempting to do such things would simply result and war/peace spamming exploits anyway.

I do intend to add appropriate exposure bonuses for working with and fighting against techs, but this is completely different from rewarding losing. It still applies if you win, even with no losses.

Uneven wars (e.g. you have low population) take very little time (2-8 minutes).

Insta-killing all new players as soon as possible. Great plan. Think of large scale wars on the several day scale btw. It would be a shame if your entire nation you build over months was destroyed while you slept/went to school/work…. Space battles might be on shorter time scales, but capturing planets entirely should be quite slow. While players are not really involved on the battle scale, I would like to allow them to strategize on the war scale, thus wars must span at lest a few days to people can login a few times. We can't simply let the online players win wars in one sitting, or it might as well be a match based RTS not MMORTS.

- Losing colonists —> research points

Already discussed, bad.

- Declaring war —> lose colonists

I didn't really intend declaration of war to be formally in game, but yes, people die in wars

- Planetary population decreased —> planetary resource concentrations increased

In people per resource terms yes, but net income goes down.

- Colonists on a planet exterminated —> can recolonize at any planet + facility production decreased

Production is dependent on production budget, not directly effected by such things. Ability to colonize is always there, just soft capped as efficiency drops off with colony count/size.

- Facility production decreased —> Maximum fleet cost decreased

The max fleet size is just based on the fleet maintenance/support budget. It is unrelated to production rates/spending.

- Recolonize a planet —> can pick a favorable location + population will regenerate over time

We must always allow people to abandon and create new colonies on new planets and in different spots. Otherwise we will have people requesting getting their undefended stuff killed so they can move. Please kill all my guys now begging is just dumb.
- High resource concentration + normal population —> high facility production

- High facility production —> resource concentration down

If such depletion were implemented, it would be related to resource extraction, not production. Having depletion over time as a factor is still up for debate (I oppose it due to a a rather complex and subtle issue with the economics of it, but it could be added later if desired). As already stated, efficiency does drop with growth through, so the amount of various resources you can profitably collect in an area is soft capped.

- High technology level + normal population + allied population —> boosted facility production

Techs can effect production rates and costs yes, and so can the budget. This takes population effects into account as labour is a resource needed for production, and having available workers makes it much cheaper.

Note: Sharing a facility with other players will divide the production towards each player. Yet sharing a facility with allies will provide a boost. If you have enough allies sharing one facility then the boost will be much, much greater than the loss due to sharing.

This makes no sense logically. How can having lots of allies around make building ships cheaper or faster than if you controlled all the workers? If 50 nations shader the city, why would it result in over 50 times the production as under one centralized government? Forcing players to split up all their facilities among vast amounts of players would discourage war completely and just make everyone share everything. There would be no benefit to conquest. We need to encourage a balance between war and peace so players must make choices and take action. I generally intend the ability to share colonies as rather bad, but necessary as it is needed to deal with colonies during militaristic takeovers. I would prefer to not encourage it as it only very rarely occurs in the real world, and tends to over complicate things for players. Allies might as well just build another colony right next to it.

Players at war take longer to die if there is a pacifist player on the planet.

Killing or avoiding pacifists is easy. Sad but true. Having people around that avoid the conflict should not slow it. Also, gameplay wise, it would cause militaristic payers to try and force other players to become pacifist and put colonies on their planets for defensive reasons. This is bad.

Pacifists are divided into five categories:

Forcing people to select a category, and having the game enforce it, or having the game decide someone's category are the only ways to do this. I don't like either. I also don't like formally defined group types like clans/guilds/alliance/faction… for the same reason. If it matters in game, then the agreements must be formally classified. As treaties are not enforced and often secret and likely somewhat conflicting, such classifications are impractical and unnecessary. The rather obvious/extreme example is that it make double agent type stuff impossible because the game would have to put the research points to one side or the other.

Player techs are different from clan techs are different from alliance techs are different from guild techs. They each have a different tech-tree.

We have a tech system designed. I love it. There are just so many issues do doing as you describe that I don't want to consider it.

Defending orbital fleets take a long time to regenerate if the player is offline (e.g. 50% of ships rebuilt after 30 minutes).

We should not have such differences between online and offline players. It was a design decision we were forced to make at the very beginning. The entire design is based around that.

Player clicked "Speed-Up" a second time. Had to wait e^(n*X) seconds for the "Speed-Up" button to recharge.

This is also a kind of thing I really want to avoid. Having to be online to press the button as a specific time means being online at a given time matters. We decided to avoid that, and made major design decisions around it. Having the button auto press when it is ready is pretty silly too. You might as well just have a "Go fast" checkbox, it is easier for everyone. I don't like boolean setting much anyway. It makes much more sense to have the wars take how ever long they take, though allow players to adjust their offense/defense ratios (already in GC prototype) and militaristic spending and military population sizes (already in GC prototype) instead.

Also, please use differential equations for everything: express everything in rates. We want loss rates, not death times. Growth rates, damage rates, production rates, resource collection rates, spending rates, movement rates….. The purpose of the game engine is little more than to evaluate (integrate) these equations over time. Thats how the combat, economy and even physics work.

"persistent universe" just means that if you never lose, you never start over, and when ever you start, there are already long established nations. That is it. The key is that (re)starting around established nations must be doable and fun. There are many factors in place to make sure this is the case. The main one is increasing maintenance costs as your empire grows. This means that is becomes increasingly costly to colonize, and thus only good/resource rich planets are profitable to hold. The slow rate of conquest of ground colonies requiring full capturing and control forces attackers to actually capture, and thus maintain all colonies on a planet if they truly wish to defeat it. Doing so gets more and more expensive as the nation grows and/or the planets are of lower quality, thus large nations defeating small/new nations on lower quality planets becomes prohibitively expensive.

Yes, new players will die, and even older nations will die. We simply have to make the recovery time rather short. The idea is to tune the shape and scale of the function describing national power as a function of time with player skill as a constant. Like most things in FG, it will end up as a somewhat logistic curve, where a player can achieve a power close to their potential in a rather short time, but the rate of increase decays over time as they converge to their skill level's respective max power. As invested time in a nation grows, the players skill becomes the dominate factor in their nation's power.

I'm open to running multiple servers with different time scalers for the various factors. We can have fast growth servers where recovery is quick, and skill (the quality of your strategy/national efficiency as a whole) dominates time investment very quickly, and we can have slow growth servers where the most powerful will be mainly the players who's nations have survived/played longer, and thus avoiding destruction is the key to power.

Of course, there are tons of other time scale related variables that are independent of growth rates. A simply faster or lower scaled game is another issues, and so is faster/slower combat. Those are another issue more related to login frequency.

Summary

I don't have time to read all these posts, but I read most of it. Generally I think the existing plan to give research bonuses for techs covers the research issue. If you are around allies that use some techs, you are more likely to discover them. If you fight enemies who use some techs, you are more likely to discover those. It is simple, realistic, very adjustable, and already well fit into the design. The treaties design does not allow favor such specific group classifications which have any actual impact in game outside the treaty itself. Encouraging self destruction/rewarding unit loss is simply a bad idea/horrible design choice. Encouraging lossy attacks is fine, but that is because it is still better to be more successful (higher kill/loss ratio, or even just higher kill total or lower loss total) in battle than less successful. We have already incorporated that idea into the design. It is tunable by adjusting build/production times.

Yes, you say that people will be motivated to form alliances and keep on playing because of incentives like alliance bonuses and such. However, just because there is an incentive, does not mean that people will want to follow it. If I was playing your game, I would be given the choice of continuing an endless cycle of fast-paced destruction and reconstruction, or quitting to do something more productive. I would most definitely choose the latter. I would not continue to play because I would feel like I'm not doing anything interesting, I'm not making a difference, I'm wasting my time.

You say that there are things to gain though, but what? Research points? To me, "research points" is just another name for a score I get for killing myself a lot. How is that fun? I have more research points than you, which means I'm better at killing myself than you, or I've done it more often. How is that at all desirable? It just makes no sense to me.

You developed this idea, as you say, out of a desire to make the game more friendly to people who are killed. I think this is admirable, but turning the game around to say not only will we be generous to people who are killed, but we will motivate people to kill themselves, is taking it to an extreme. We can certainly add more benefits to refugee nations if testing tells us we should, but the point is that it should be a bad thing to die. We want people to not want to die, because the threat of possible future death motivates us to build a better civilization to try and fend it off. It is the same in real life. If humans were immortal, we would not have developed all that we have, because there is simply no motivation. Modern society is based off of a principle of survival, which motivates us to improve our lives as best we can, and is the basis for all methods of living.

Yes, some people will be disappointed if they lose their civilization, but this will not happen instantly. The only way to die will be by a very deliberate conflict, and often after a long and arduous war. If you lose, then you lose. I don't believe that "persistent universe" should mean that you never lose, although some people do think so. People who play FG should remember that it is just a game, we are not trying to replace their lives, and if you die then you should look at it as being the end of a good playing experience. If you want to take a stab at another experience, then start again, this time with some new benefits. If not, move on to something else.

One of the most aggravating parts of a game is when you are destroyed and have to start from scratch.

Exactly. And this happens to so many players, and I really really really dislike it, because:
1) I will quit the game afterwards.
2) If I am a GM, my players will quit the game afterwards.
3) If I don't quit, then I spend the rest of my time wondering how far-ahead I would be if I hadn't lost everything.

Remember at some point I mentioned that players got a little tech-bonus by losing to a player with higher technology..? Well… If players receive a higher benefit for losing than they do for winning, then this completely eradicates the problem of having to "rebuild", because instead of focussing on maximizing your size (alliances can try to do this with the Treaty Bonuses idea), players instead spend their time killing themselves and rebuilding, which is actually more beneficial to them.

Also, in your kind of universe, there would be no stability, since there would just be constant war.

Now that's realistic :)
Actually, stability can be created by players who want to blockade a planet. The problem with doing this is that you need a lot of players in able to build a blockade that won't be destroyed within 15 minutes.

Even if someone does get destroyed, our current design states that the player will be given a "refugee" fleet to colonize a new planet with, and they will retain their tech level so re-building will be much easier the next time through.

Yes. Yes, and this is the most annoying possible aspect of the game, because you lose everything.
What I want to see is more support for "refugee" status. Every time a player loses a colony they get refugee ships, which can recolonize anywhere. But… If we actually make it beneficial for people to kill themselves, then they will want to!
People won't mind losing battles! Instead, you will be logging-in, and saying to yourself, "Aww man, nothing happened today because nobody declared war on my population". Allies can co-operate to wipe themselves off the face of planet (for research points while other alliance members are offline). People can lose everything, and be in a better-off position than before because:
1) The planet they lost has a lowered resource-concentration (due to overextraction), so they find one which has a higher resource-concentration.
2) They have more research points.
3) They can recolonize, and in eight hours, everything will be rebuilt. That is enough time for you to sleep, brush your teeth, eat breakfast, and login again, and then harvest all that eight hours' growth by killing yourself again (which can take 1 minute to 8 hours depending on how many pacifists are on the planet), and you can do that once per every planet in your maximum number of planets soft cap.

Wars will mostly be fought for economic reasons, or to relieve over-population, or to eliminate a potential threat.

Yeah, well… There could very well be some serious flaws in my ideas, but I think that the reasoning is sound. Giving an extremely high benefit to killing yourself will cause players not to mind when they lose all their things. But we made a mini-game out of it :)

This could be a way for nations to cooperate on joint projects, which seems like something you would like to see.

Yes!
I am not sure how realistic it is to get more resources by having to split-up the facilities between players. But this actually gives large alliances something to do. Ever played those games where your team can run-around shooting players, but one team decides that they are going to find a hiding spot and all camp there? The reason for the resource bonus is because it is a joint-project and everyone participating has an incentive to be involved in colonizing and defending one planet.

There is no problem with players attacking and sometimes destroying other players. That is the nature of the multiplayer ecosystem. It encourages people to unite to gain mutual protection, it keeps people on their toes, and it helps to eliminate empires where the owning players are no longer actively playing or don't care about the game anymore.

It should be hard to kill someone off completely, and not completely to someone's advantage, which can be easily done through tuned incentives. Even if someone does get destroyed, our current design states that the player will be given a "refugee" fleet to colonize a new planet with, and they will retain their tech level so re-building will be much easier the next time through. But in a desired system wars will be ended with treaties, like in real life, where countries are not removed from the map but rather are forced to give concessions of some sort, etc. Wars will mostly be fought for economic reasons, or to relieve over-population, or to eliminate a potential threat. There will rarely be wars of extermination, although those are possible. However, the universe is a big place, and so it will be difficult to fully destroy a civilization.

The key idea in my post above was that the more allies you have on a planet, the higher your boost to facility-production is. This forces players to form alliances.

Again, we're trying to go for realistic gameplay. Adding random bonuses like that makes gameplay seem manipulatively designed. If there is a logical basis for adding a bonus like that, then we would consider it.

Like I said before, forming alliances is very advantageous for many reasons already, such as technological boosts from exposure to high-tech allies, economic boosts from trade agreements, and military boosts from cooperative defense agreements or joint offensive operations. There very little advantages for players who choose to pursue isolation, besides the obvious freedom to attack and take whatever they want, provided they have the power to do so.

The basic assumption I make is that since FG is a fairly obscure MMOG, people will mostly only play it if they are seeking a multiplayer experience, and so most players will naturally want to form alliances or make agreements. Most of the smaller MMOGs I have played are very big on alliances, even when there are no in-game incentives to make them.

Feel free to chew on my new idea also… Research Points :)

Again, increased exposure to high-tech allies will increase technological advancement.

It might be a good idea to add a diplomatic option to cooperatively work on certain technologies. This would be very simple, since it would simply add/compare the progress of involved nations with regard to certain technologies, as well as combine exposure levels, which could theoretically increase the rate of discovery. This could be a way for nations to cooperate on joint projects, which seems like something you would like to see.

if everyone is trying to take over the galaxy… Only one person ends-up winning!

Not necessarily true. I believe that if our game dynamic is accurately and realistically designed, a balance of power system will naturally form between the most powerful empires, with lesser empires acting as independents or client/vassal states.

Ground Combat

- Losing colonists —> research points
- Declaring war —> lose colonists
- Planetary population decreased —> planetary resource concentrations increased
- Colonists on a planet exterminated —> can recolonize at any planet + facility production decreased
- Facility production decreased —> Maximum fleet cost decreased
- Recolonize a planet —> can pick a favorable location + population will regenerate over time
- High resource concentration + normal population —> high facility production
- High facility production —> resource concentration down
- High technology level + normal population + allied population —> boosted facility production
Example: Low resource concentration + normal population + multiple allied populations —> high facility production
Note: Sharing a facility with other players will divide the production towards each player. Yet sharing a facility with allies will provide a boost. If you have enough allies sharing one facility then the boost will be much, much greater than the loss due to sharing.

So basically, every time you want to increase your population, you must declare a war, wait for your population to die-off, and then repeat the cycle by colonizing a planet that has not recently had its resources extracted. If your population is at war and wins, then they will start a civil war until your population dies-off. Larger wars take more time (1-4 hours) to lose. Uneven wars (e.g. you have low population) take very little time (2-8 minutes).

You can also avoid war, and try gaining research points for your alliance.
Players at war take longer to die if there is a pacifist player on the planet.
You gain extra research points by losing to pacifists.
Pacifists gain research points for their alliance by slowing-down wars.
Players at war can speed-up a war by halving the pacifist-modifiers every f(n,x) seconds (by clicking the "speed-up" button).

Pacifists are divided into five categories:
Clan Pacifist, n=1, research points go towards a clan, which is composed of two or more players
Alliance Pacifist, n=2, research points go towards an alliance, which is composed of two or more clans
Guild Pacifist, n=3, research points go towards a guild, which is composed of two or more alliances
Faction Pacifist, n=3, research points go towards a faction, which is composed of two or more guilds
Coalition Pacifist, n=4, research points go towards a coalition, which is composed of two or more factions
More categories (n=5,6,7, etc.) as the playerbase increases.

Note: You can fight with guild members (depending on guild policy) to gain research points, but it won't increase your guild's research points.

Now for the value of 'n' and 'x'.

Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * (your population) / (enemy population) * (1+planet clan modifier) * (1+planet alliance modifier) * (1+planet guild modifier) * (1+planet faction modifier) * other modifiers

Note: For multiple clans on the same planet, the planet clan modifier is the root-sum of each clan's tech levels.

For example, with one clan, the clan modifier might be 1.
For each clan, alliance, guild, faction, etc. the player at war can click on a "Speed-Up" button.
The speed-up button will halve the clan/alliance/guild/faction modifier.

Example:
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * (10,000) / (10,000) * (1+clan modifier)

After declaring war —> X=1

clan modifier = 1 / (2^(X-1))
clan modifier = 1 / 1
1+clan modifier = 2
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * 2
Time for population to die-off = 2 hours

After exp(n*2) seconds —> X=2

Player clicked "Speed-Up" once, after waiting e^(n*X) seconds.
This is a clan, so n=1
clan modifier = 1 / (2^(X-1))
clan modifier = 1 / 2
1+clan modifier = 1.5
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * 1.5
Time for population to die-off = 1.5 hours

After exp(n*2) + exp(n*3) seconds —> X=3

Player clicked "Speed-Up" a second time. Had to wait e^(n*X) seconds for the "Speed-Up" button to recharge.
clan modifier = 1 / (2^(X-1))
clan modifier = 1 / 4
1+clan modifier = 1.25
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * 1.25
Time for population to die-off = 1.25 hours

Note: There is one "Speed-Up" button for every single clan/alliance/guild/faction/coalition with a member on the planet. Players have to be online in order to click the "Speed-Up" button. Longer wars give more research points to the players involved (calculated before any "Speed-Up" buttons). Research points are distributed once the player declaring the war has his population die-off. Players declaring a war get research points, and the clans/alliances/guilds/factions/coalitions get research points for prolonging them by pacifism.

Player techs are different from clan techs are different from alliance techs are different from guild techs. They each have a different tech-tree. For example, an alliance tech may be to increase the size of the alliance by +1 clan, or to grant a production-bonus to all facilities shared by alliance members.

Wars are planet-only. After the war is done (i.e. attacker's population has died off due to losing, or due to winning and then civil war), the players involved are automatically at peace again.

Space Combat

- Maximum fleet cost increased —> can keep more ships in orbit
- Planet with fleet in orbit —> no non-allies may colonize
- Ships in orbit —> can attack another fleet in orbit (travel time between planets is instant; travel time between solar systems is not instant)
- Attacking a fleet in orbit —> fleet in orbit destroyed
- Successful attack —> can now colonize planet
- Failed attack —> your ships are instantly rebuilt at the nearest colony and can attack again
Defending orbital fleets take a long time to regenerate if the player is offline (e.g. 50% of ships rebuilt after 30 minutes).
Fleets regenerate instantly if you are online.
Attacks take 2-8 minutes.
Defender and attacker gain research points for space battles.

Key points: The more production, the higher your fleet cost, and the harder it is to destroy.
Lots of players or one player with lots of time can destroy a large enemy fleet.
Fleets regenerate instantly if you are online.

Emphasis on "instant". The game… Now revolves around killing yourself by attacking as many people at once as possible. The faster you lose, the faster you gain research points, and the better your research, the more stuff you can control, and lose more quickly —> faster research.

Summary:

If I want to get research points then what I do is destroy an enemy blockade (2-8 minutes), colonize the planet (instant), wait for my population to grow (10-180 minutes), declare war (instant), wait for my population to die-off (can take up to eight hours), and then repeat! Any clans/alliances/guilds/factions/coalitions with members present at the planet will also gain research points. When I log-off for the day, I want to be colonized at a planet with high resource-concentrations and setup an orbital blockade there in order to:
a) boost my allies' production-bonuses
b) hope that someone will attack me

As my research points increase, I can maximize my maximum number of planets. This means that I can have multiple wars running on different planets.

The key idea in my post above was that the more allies you have on a planet, the higher your boost to facility-production is. This forces players to form alliances.

Feel free to chew on my new idea also… Research Points :)
I really want to encourage pacifist gameplay features, because if everyone is trying to take over the galaxy… Only one person ends-up winning! Hmm, and I will chew on your ideas!

I made some updates to the treaties doc: (Private dev site http://f-g-dev.wikidot.com/doc:treaties-diplomatic-agreements). It is by no means done, but I added a few details. Anyway, I would like it to eventually be possible to make something on par with federal governments out of the treaty system (by having conditions that allow modifications to the treaty itself when supported by a certain amount of listed nations). Potentially this type of thing could be used to elect representatives to vote of revisions to constitution and law code type treaties… Ya, it could get really complex. If the plan is implemented as such, multilevel representative federal governments would be possible to formally implement in game (as well as pretty much any other governmental/intranational structure)

I like the tax instead of destroy/capture idea, but it has some issues. Potentially we could enable to have that choice via treaties/triggers, but I don't see how making it the only option could really work.

The plan is to have these treaties be trigger-based and able to perform as many operations as possible. For example, anything from exchanging control of colonies to specifying trade tariffs to trading technologies to sharing military intelligence. Hopefully, this system will allow players to create the strong kinds of bonds you are desiring in MMORTSs.

As for technologies, the current tech system design makes it so that increased exposure for undiscovered technologies increases the chances of that technology being discovered. So, for instance, if you are allied with a nation that has technology you do not yet possess, by interacting with that nation through trade, joint military operations, etc, you increase the likelyhood that you will be able to obtain that technology. This feature should benefit groups of nations that choose to unite.

In general, FG's goal is to create a game as realistic and open-ended as possible. That is why we put so much emphasis on procedural algorithms, and design features with soft caps rather than hard caps. We put a lot of faith in the fact that this kind of design can be successfully translated into a stable game dynamic. Of course, we cannot know for sure until the game is up and running and being played.

As for bankruptcy, that shouldn't be an issue for us. At least, not anytime soon. At the moment, we have little to no expenses, and operate on a 100% volunteer basis. We only have one real full-time volunteer too. So, we are not really worried about results, popularity, or success right now.

And I would say that Fragmented Galaxy is more in the MMORTS genre - http://www.mmorts.com/index.php?cmd=games

If someone wants to be a war-monger, the effectiveness of their taxation is increased by allying with players who also take taxes from pacifists.
If someone wants to be a pacifist, the effectiveness of their facilities is increased by allying with other pacifists on their planet (as well as those pacifists' Diplomacy tech level).
War-mongers can easily tax a lot of raw-resources and get rich.
Pacifists can control the most colonists, and can become war-mongers at any time.

Players can be both pacifist and a war-monger at the same time. The only reason to create the distinction is so that we can say which technologies are pacifist-oriented, and which are war-oriented.
Mostly-pacifist players want lots of mostly-pacifist allies.
Mostly war-monger players want lots of mostly-war-monger allies.

Summary:
1) The more allies you have with similar technology as you, the higher your benefit from facilities or taxes is.
2) Some technology benefit player-player treaties, while some benefit group-group treaties.

I'd like to see group-oriented technologies becoming just as important as warfare technologies.
Origin of idea: War of Conquest. If you allied with someone, you got to share their technology bonuses. In Fragmented Galaxy, technologies should give bonuses to your allies… And also very important: More allies (even with newbies) should always be better than fewer allies (of just a few high-tech players). Emphasizing large groups of players helps to avoid elitism in the community.

I would have to say that this will be more like a combination of EVE, Homeworld 2 and many other games that have influenced us.

Thanks for taking an interest!

http://f-g.wikidot.com/the-game

You will lead your nation through its founding and the numerous inevitable following conflicts over territory. Lead or follow, war or peace, explore or concur, fight in the core or wander on the fringes: The choice is yours (Once the game is available and you acquire it).

Should be:

You will lead your nation through its founding and the numerous inevitable following conflicts over territory. Lead or follow, make war or peace, explore or conquer, fight in the core or wander among the fringes: The choice is yours (Once the game is available and you acquire it).

• Green: Inserted word
• Red: Altered/replaced word

I've got plenty of spare invites left so if anyone wants one, I can send them out as well. If you've posted here though, best to take Phenoca up on his offer instead of asking me as well, as the last thing I want to do is to waste them by both of us sending the same people an invite.

I should have a look around this site and see what it's all about, but don't really have the time at the moment! :P

At first glance it looks like something a bit like EVE Online. Am I right there, or completely off by miles? ;-)

At least you have some progress, that's more than most games. Well, maybe not most… but it's more than plenty :P

Devs: Want to use it to edit the docs?