DW2 - New Concepts

Distant Worlds is a vast, pausable real-time, 4X space strategy game which models a "living galaxy" with incredible options for replayability and customizability. Experience the full depth and detail of large turn-based strategy games, but with the simplicity and ease of real-time, and on the scale of a massively-multiplayer online game. Now greatly enhanced with the new Universe release, which includes all four previous releases as well as the new Universe expansion!

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Tom_Holsinger
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DW2 - New Concepts

Post by Tom_Holsinger »

This thread concerns proposed major concept and emphasis changes for the remake of Distant Worlds – DW2. Details such as interface ideas should be limited to “how-to” implementations of the new stuff.

And I haven’t played any version of DW yet – I first heard of it about two months ago, and got DWU working only last night. I have read a lot of the DW threads on this forum.

My priority request for DW2 is a feeling of “vastness” – everything else flows from that. I want “vastness” to emphasize the “wonder” sensation which is so important in science-fiction.

Here that could mean having random seeds in a game start for optional major events much later in the game, with “discoveries” during the game as to what those major events might be. Even when players have pretty well figured out what the major events might be, discovering just which ones are coming at them in any given game can be discoverable only during that game.

There are other means, not at all exclusive, to increase the sense of vastness and wonders. An obvious one is that players should worry about running into “worse” even in the end-game.

”And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.”
- Hillaire Belloc

It’s not just that new things should be popping up even in the end-game, but also that those should be proportionate to the scale of the game at the point those are encountered. Early on a single group of pirates, who wouldn’t count as a blip in the end-game, can be tough for players to handle, but in the end-game players should encounter new things which are challenging given the size of player empires and fleets built up over most of a given game. Those end-game encounters would be totally impossible for early-game player empires.

This will be difficult to design for a real-time game, so Code Force and MG should give a re-think to both the real-time vs. turn-based and open-space ftl travel vs. starlane “jumps” concepts. I believe one competitor has decided to its space 4x game from real-time to turn-based, and DW2 merits the same “from-the-ground-up” rethink.

I am familiar with the trade-offs here, and there is a conflict between scaling a game up and being turn-based. Steve Barcia himself told me how important it is that players face minimum lag time after pressing the end-turn button of a turn-based game. Brad Wardock addressed this in the early versions of Galactic Civilizations by using a multi-threaded AI. This is really a feasibility question addressable only by Code Force.

The second big change I’d like to see in DW2 is more of an emphasis on fleet combat and, particularly in the end-game, of full-bore wars between major star empires with lots of strategic decision-making. This necessarily includes greater emphasis on diplomacy than in even DWU, and on naval infrastructure aka fleet logistics.

The marketing advantages of a more naval-oriented Space 4x game are rooted in the major appeal of Space 4x games in general – it’s the spaceships. Space 4x gamers want to play with “their” spaceships in particular, not merely grow an empire. Designers of Space 4x games have to give the players lots of spaceships and space battles. Such games fail if they don’t give the player empires enough spaceships and interesting space battles.

Likewise 4x games are about four “x’s”, not three. That means big space battles, i.e., fleet engagements, during the end-game eXtermination phase. Space 4x gamers don’t want to merely build big fleets – they want the emotional satisfaction of using them in battle after all the hard work of building their empires.

The usual problem here is that, by the time the 4th X period rolls around, player empires tend to outclass all potential opposition. The challenge for all 4x game designers is to extend the period of relative power parity between player and AI empires as long as possible. While that is what difficulty levels are for, almost all 4x games do so with flat-rate AI empire production advantages which, to be effective in the 4th X period, really imbalance the game against players during the eXplore and eXpand periods.

The simple solution to that is to make the AI empire production advantages increase during the game based on a turn or time counter, but every 4x computer game designer I know throws up their hands in horror at the idea, almost always with nonsensical objections about the production cheats being open-ended. Obviously there can be a certain limited number of ascending levels of production cheats which kick in at discrete turn/time points, say 4-5 during a game with the final advance extending for the rest of the game. Games can begin at the Easy difficulty level, jump to Average after 25 turns/years, to Hard after 50 turns, Very Hard after 75 turns, and Impossible after 100 turns. Then a given Impossible Level game’s AI production cheats stay at the Impossible level for the rest of the game.

And at least make it possible for players to adjust a game’s difficulty level manually during a game, say by exiting and using an editor on the most recent saved game. MOO3 also used a surprisingly effective Heavy Foot of Government feature which imposed production disadvantages on the larger empires.

A satisfactory Space 4x end-game phase is not merely a disconnected set of gargantuan battles in which the only real objective is winning those without taking too many losses to preclude victory in the next battle. Some sort of strategy must be involved, which is usually achieved by creating strategic geography where specific territorial positions are worth fighting over more than other positions. This is one of the major advantages of starlane-based interstellar movement systems.

More sophisticated diplomatic systems foster the importance of strategy in fighting a series of related, as opposed to unrelated, fleet engagements. Making who you fight and when important increases the rewards in fighting for specific objectives, and so enhances players’ emotional satisfaction in thinking strategically during the eXtermination phase.

Here creation of major inherent animosities between the races of the various empires, and some sort of loose large alliance or league of star empires, a la Master of Orion III, is very helpful. MOO3 had a delightful absolute hatred between the various reptilian and fish races. Allying with a fish empire meant that all the reptile empires hated you too and vice-versa, so MOO3 players had real choices to make in diplomacy.

MOO3 designer Alan Emrich also created a Galactic Council of the initial galaxy core empires which was bloody important in that its members could manipulate the Council into really hurting other empires, chiefly non-members, with trade embargoes and even wars against most or all members of the Galactic Council. Try winning when no one will trade tech with you. Not engaging in diplomacy generally put player empires at serious disadvantages. Plus the fish and lizard empires kept trying to drag everyone else into their eternal feuds.

Diplomacy in most 4x games is pretty flat and boring because it at best provides minor rewards. MOO3 diplomacy was entertaining because it was important, and because of some major racial animosities that kept players on their toes staying out of other empires’ feuds.

A two year-old forum post on existing versions, by Gelatinous Cube, fascinates me:
RE: How-To Fleet Posture - 12/12/2011 7:31:49 AM

Gelatinous Cube
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quote:

ORIGINAL: Grisha

Excellent thread, GC! I've been using defensive posture correctly, it seems, but got the attack posture totally wrong. It seemed that attack and defense postures were just flip sides of the same coin, almost redundant in a way. Not so after your thread here. Now it all makes sense. Thanks for that!


Yep! No problem, man. Personally I find the postures are most useful for the following two reasons (on the attack):

1.) Allows you to do MASSIVE multi-front assaults without having to micro-manage everything.

2.) Gives you a visual reference for what is going on. This is maybe more important than number one.

The ability to have subordinate AI’s manage the details of “MASSIVE multi-front assaults” is exactly what a naval-oriented Space 4x game needs in the final eXtermination phase. Gelatinous Cube’s posts in that thread show that this ability exists in the DW game engine. It’s just buried too deep. A drastically reworked game using the DW engine, but designed from the ground up to emphasize end-game fleet engagements, might be everything we naval gamers hope for.

Here’s one example of how something the DW engine does wrong now – the ship range and refueling system - could be easily redone for such a game. DW’s existing ship by ship refueling system seems to be one of its most hated features from what forum posts indicate (fleet creation is another).

There is a big difference between “rationing by player’s time” which is inherent in real-time games, and “rationing by aggravation”. The latter should be avoided.

I understand why DW ships must have limited ranges, but it errs by doing so with its present ship-by-ship refueling system which rewards micromanagement while at the same punishing players with mindless work in doing it. That is passive-aggressive game design.

The trick is to take control of extending ship ranges away from players, while at the same time making those ranges variably uncertain, i.e., replace the refueling system with a “fog of war” system that reduces player control over ships as they start moving beyond “range” of refueling “bases”. Here I’d replace mere “fuel” with communications lag, ship maintenance problems, and logistics expense.

For every designer-determined increment of distance from a suitable friendly base beyond a certain point (which varies based on technology and possibly the capacity of the base), a given ship or fleet of ships (the more ships present, the faster the increment goes up) has its speed reduced by an ascending amount until it reverts to subordinate AI control. For that matter, a given base might be able to support a larger number of ships individually at a given range, but only a lesser number of ships massed into a single fleet.

Here I’d add some navalistic details. A naval base around a planetary colony world can support far more ships than a naval base at a non-colony space habitat. The size of the colony might make a difference too, but I’d make a very sharp distinction between planetary colonies and space habitats in terms of fleet support. Keep in mind that range in this proposed system is more a matter of ship maintenance and communications lag than fuel.

Additional navalistic details could be a “fleet train” and “convoy routes”. A fleet train would be an abstracted large number of fleet support vessels, either limited in number based on empire income or expensive to purchase and maintain, which extends the “range” a given fleet can operate from a naval base. A “convoy route” is an abstracted path from the fleet in question to the naval base supplying it which the abstracted fleet train operates on. This “convoy route” can be reduced in length by “interdicting” or “blockading” it with raiding ships of some sort, while deployment of escort ships along the “convoy route” protects against raiding ships to some extent Plus the “convoy route” is also an abstracted “courier route”, i.e., it affects command & control as well as maintenance.

If a fleet moves only a little bit beyond the current operational distance from a naval base, it has only a small chance of being impacted by fog of war problems, but players can’t control whether that happens. They can at best, with a limited number of “fleet trains”, reduce the chance of it happening, and the farther a fleet goes out of range, the more rapidly the chances of it being affected by fog of war problems goes up as does the severity of the problem. Individual ships are much less affected by fog of war and, when they are, it tends to take the lesser form more of speed loss compared to the greater form of reversion to subordinate AI control.

This is mostly an illustration of how a more naval-oriented game can achieve the same strategic-range limiting effect as a DW feature without honking off the players so much, and additionally provide a more navalistic feel.

Another means of achieving this effect is to have star empires bar entry of warships, or fleets, of other empires into their territory. This could be in addition to range issues, so that exploration of unknown territory is sharply limited. Plus limited permission by empires for small numbers of warships of other empires to cross imperial boundaries could be the subject of treaties, and even for one-time access.

CF should also consider adding “mercenary fleets” a la the Dendarii Mercenaries in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar science-fiction series. Players can hire mercenary fleets to look up secret discoveries beyond the range of their own fleets. That is why Barrayar hired the Dendarii Mercenaries in the first place – to have them do military and paramilitary things in places where Barrayar’s own navy was denied access. DW has pirates. DW2 should have mercenary fleets too.

This is long enough. Shoot it full of holes, and tell us what big new things you want in DW2.
Tom_Holsinger
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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by Tom_Holsinger »

Oh, and the "something worse" concept should definitely be used to balance the existing one-sided rewards for exploring. Players should not get find only beneficial things from exploring like mad. They should also find things they'd really rather not find, such as middle and late-game challenges that will either wipe out early-game player empires, or knock them back to blockaded one-planet empires. A real bad-*ss space monster such as a robot guardian or a plague would do fine.

It would be nice to trigger those if a player starts "over-exploring", with that trigger being subject to a random factor which rapidly escalates as players explore too much too fast.

Again, DW1 rewards exploration too one-sidedly. This encourages players to micro-manage exploration. Throw in some deterrents, such as the zoo lion in Hillaire Belloc's Jim who ate the boy that ran away from his nurse:

And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
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Spidey
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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by Spidey »

One small thing, mate. Would you mind actually playing the damn game just a tiny bit before telling people how you're hoping DW2 is actually going to become a turn based naval strategic simulater instead of a refined, improved, and expanded successor to DW1? That said, I think you've got a whole lot of good ideas. I don't really think I agree with them at all, but that's more of a subjective thing.

Let me just throw it out there that I think you're a bit too focused on what you see as "optimal gameplay". You want changes that don't just enable it but actively railroad every single game towards it. You're arguing for a much, much more closed down universe where people can't do their own things the way they want without running head first into arbitrary rubbish left and right. Explore too much? Then comes some totally arbitrary space monster out of nowhere and smashes you and there's NOTHING you can do to stop it. Don't explore enough? You'll get nowhere and get crushed when "arbitrary enemy #47" appears.

Another thing I dislike is when games focus so much on a senseless ambition of constantly having a suitable enemy that the game essentially turns into a glorified version of wack-a-menace. I don't think it makes a game more epic or more vast that random nonsense is made up so a new boogeyman can be thrown in every time you defeat the previous one. That's just really annoying and it totally defeats the purpose of getting rid of the previous boogeyman. By the way, the goal of DW isn't simply "to win", at least not to me. I care less about the win itself than I do about the process of getting my faction to dominate the galaxy.

And it seems to me that many of the changes you're suggesting simply makes the game more formulaic and away from the open but deep 4X experience we have in DW1. Turn based? Cheating AI? Wack-a-mole enemies? Less control over state ships? Using communication instead of fuel as a travel distance limitation? How is that game even related to DW?

Anyway, those are just a few quick and fairly random thoughts on my part. We'll see if I get around to organize my thoughts and write something that's actually coherent. [:)]
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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by Icemania »

Tom_Holsinger
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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by Tom_Holsinger »

Spidey, you might try reading my post a second time. You seem to believe I advocated things I denounced, such as AI production cheats. As for turn-based, my contention was for an open-minded rethink of fundamental game concepts, and I also pointed out the drawbacks of turn-based.

I'd also appreciate it if you would consider my request for a feeling of "vastness" separate from my sample suggestions of how to foster it. You might disagree with the proposal for more vastness, or have better ideas on how to foster it than I do.

Icemania, thank you very much for the link to the related thread, which I had missed. Jimmy Jickers there has an evil mind. I really like his post No. 4 there:
Yes, I loved the politics from Emporer of the fading suns. I remember manoeuvring myself into being put in charge of the fleet that is intended to stop the alien threat, then promptly using that fleet for destroying my enemies.
That is exactly the sort of diplomatic scheming I want added to DW2.
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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by ChildServices »

You should play the game first and then reconsider this entire list. Spidey's pretty much on-point with the majority of what he said.

When it comes to the random events thing, it sounds like a suggestion that would add in the RNG of Sword of the Stars with the arrival of grand menaces and more dynamic random encounters. I'm okay with that, love it, even, as long as there is a slider that controls the frequency of these things, to the point of being able to disable it entirely.

When it comes to making the game turn-based; no. Simply no. I feel that, maybe, if you had played the game before posting this, you may have had a very different opinion.

Distant Worlds feels vast, as you had quite often put in quotation marks above, because it is in real time. At least from my experience.
The game would simply stop filling the niches that it fills if you made it into a real-time game. If I wanted to play Sword of the Stars, I'd simply go play Sword of the Stars (I'm not hating on that game, it's actually one of my favourites. SOTS-Prime is Kerberos' magnum opus).
I love this game to death because it's a real time grand strategy game in space. It's even on the /gsg/ thread's title image.

As for the things you've said about navy; you seem very focused on "kill everything else" as the primary means of winning the game. Except that in the original you have an economic victory condition, as well as numerous races with peaceful win-conditions, or at least ones that don't necessarily have to be violent.
I probably wouldn't play the sequel if they said "Alright! This game is now singularly about space battles and war! 75% of our development budget has gone into these space battles! All that you will do is have space battles! Everything else you do other than space battles is just a railroad to more space battles".
I'd have a far better time just firing up Homeworld 2 again.

The reason this game is so great is that you have a lot of choice with regards to obtaining victory. Your "eXtermination" phase doesn't even have to really involve literal exterminating. You can get other empires and pirates to do that for you if you play it well enough, or you can divide their empire through rebellion and social disarray using the intelligence features.
You want the sequel to essentially have none of the parts that put the original on the /vg/ grand strategy thread.

Other than that, large amounts of what you have said in that section is already basically in the game as it is right now. To name a few examples of this:
[*]Support ships technically exist, they come in the form of resupply ships which mine gas giants to refuel your fleets.
[*]The ability to toggle the difficulty of the AI to scale upwards as you get closer to winning the game exists. Hell, it's an option on the first or second page of game creation.
[*]"Full-bore wars between major star empires". Seriously. Play the game, you'll see what I mean.
I understand why DW ships must have limited ranges, but it errs by doing so with its present ship-by-ship refueling system which rewards micromanagement while at the same punishing players with mindless work in doing it. That is passive-aggressive game design.
It's not really that difficult to select the fleet in need of refuelling and click the "refuel and repair at nearest space port" button.

Anyway, yeah, please try the game first. Distant Worlds is nowhere close to a lot of your suggestions, and that's probably why a lot of us actually like it. If DW looked more like what you've suggested, I probably wouldn't be playing it as long as I have.
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Spidey
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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by Spidey »

@ Tom

Regarding the AI cheats

I'm sorry to say that I don't see you denouncing cheats anywhere. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The simple solution to that is to make the AI empire production advantages increase during the game based on a turn or time counter, but every 4x computer game designer I know throws up their hands in horror at the idea, almost always with nonsensical objections about the production cheats being open-ended. Obviously there can be a certain limited number of ascending levels of production cheats which kick in at discrete turn/time points, say 4-5 during a game with the final advance extending for the rest of the game. Games can begin at the Easy difficulty level, jump to Average after 25 turns/years, to Hard after 50 turns, Very Hard after 75 turns, and Impossible after 100 turns. Then a given Impossible Level game’s AI production cheats stay at the Impossible level for the rest of the game.

It's been a hot day so I'm in a serious caffeine deficit at the moment, but how is this not an advocacy of cheating AIs? If you didn't want it to happen then why spend an entire paragraph explaining how well it could work out to provide more end game challenge?

And my thought after reading that paragraph, which is obviously only as important to you as you want it to be, is that I don't really like this approach. It doesn't make the AI smarter, it simply provides a completely arbitrary increase in difficulty that shapes how I have to approach the game to avoid being overwhelmed by a cheating AI.

Consider for a moment that I might be a defensive and slow-but-steady kind of expansionist. How would that fare against an AI that cheats more and more as time passes by? It probably would end up being even less optimal than it already is, wouldn't it? I'm not a particularly slow expansions but I'm sure some DW players are. And DW doesn't really punish them for it. They can use diplomacy to stay out of significant conflicts and simply expand slowly until they're boxed in, and then slowly crunch through one border empire at a time until they own the galaxy. They'll lose some spoils of an unexplored galaxy but in the long run those bonuses are really not indispensable. In how many other 4X games is this true?

Heck, I've played a fair few strategy games over the years and I don't recall a single one where slow and steady felt as solid and reliable as it does in DW.

Regarding the rest
I quite understand that your suggestion of considering to go turn-based was less of "it must happen" and more of a "let's be open to everything". Be that as it may, it really would feel odd to have distinct turns in DW2. The current system is not quite real time and not quite turn based. It's a pause-inviting continuous time game where you can always just stop the flow of time and inspect your empire from top to bottom, and it helps give you that added feeling of freedom to think about your next move without the limitations of having to think about everything in terms of game turns or the constant pressure to make sure you've done absolutely everything you could do "this turn".

As for the concept of vastness, I don't disagree with what I think it is you mean by the term. I don't think it's really lacking in the game as it is, and a 15x15 sector galaxy does feel pretty big early on when all you have are snail mode warp drives, but of course it rarely hurts to add more. What I do disagree with is that overloading on the "epicness of conflicts" is a way to add more.

The way I see it, battles are really not all "strategy" is about. They're one tool in a strategic toolbox but they're hardly the only tool, and I'd get rather annoyed if they were the only way to get anything done. That's not to say I don't like space battles, because of course I do, but strategy is about the bigger picture. I don't mind fighting an enemy but I want to do it because I made the choice to do it rather than because that's all the game is about.

How would I improve the feel of vastness in the DW universe? I think some bigger space creatures would be nice, I think some literal pandora's boxes from the ruins would be nice, and I absolutely wouldn't mind dynamic developments between factions, such as mergers or combined research, if two factions find that they're both furious with the same enemy who has them both badly outgunned. I think a much bigger tech tree with a lot more technological variety would help a fair bit. So would slower drives and generally bigger solar systems that take a lot more time to actually explore in complete detail.

Final thing...
A drastically reworked game using the DW engine, but designed from the ground up to emphasize end-game fleet engagements, might be everything we naval gamers hope for.
That's not really Distant Worlds 2 then, is it? DW isn't all that intensive on fleet management and the "end-game", if you can even talk about that in DW, does very little to emphasize fleet engagements. And I don't think you'll find that many people around here who'd rather have the game focus on fleet management than strategic empire-building.
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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by Osito »

That is a remarkably long post about ideas for changing a game that you haven't yet played.

I want to make a comment on your point about the possibility of switching to turn based play. I hadn't really thought about this before, but since playing CK2, EU4 and DW, I have found it increasingly difficult to play turn based strategy games. Although I like other genres of games (i.e. other than strategy games), I would always think of 'turn based strategy' as my core interest (Civ1 was the most important game of all time for me). But the truth is that, nowadays, I find modern turn based strategy games quickly become tedious for me.

I think Spidey hit upon it when he said the real time 'helps give you that added feeling of freedom to think about your next move without the limitations of having to think about everything in terms of game turns or the constant pressure to make sure you've done absolutely everything you could do "this turn".' I tend to be impatient and careless, and with turn based games I generally do everything too quickly and press end turn before I should. With DW, and games like DW, that no longer matters (so much).

Regarding your point about 'vastness' I definitely agree that this is a desirable goal, but I think DW itself more or less hits this goal. It hits it much better than virtually any other game out there. It could be improved, but that may depend mostly on the ability of our CPUs to cope with the improvement.

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RE: DW2 - New Concepts

Post by DevildogFF »

Osito, I COMPLETELY AGREE. I love pausible real time now and I just can't do turn based for the most part any more.
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