I wanted to ask people about the options for creating games. What simple extra options would you like added. Ideally things that need little or no new coding.
My Ideas.
Starting ships - 1 at each star.
Random gates - Homeworlds only.
Starting Cash - $0
==Slightly More Complicated.==
Trade Scanning - Trade with unscanned players only. The idea being you can only trade with people you don’t share a border with. Mad, but an interesting puzzle. I’m assuming the coding would be easy? Just reverse the current trade scanning check?
Development Cost - Unavailable. The inability to build a certain type of infrastructure. I’d love a game where each player only had 100 ships, or all income must come from the banking research.
I would like more visibility options, some of these would fall under the current “Dark Galaxy” setting, others outwith.
Full Visibility (Everything is visible regardless of scanning range)
Hide star ownership outside of scanning range. (semi-dark galaxy)
Invisible Ships
Dark but with visible home stars
Alternative victory conditions:
First person to obtain X credits (in the bank)
First person to research level X of a tech
Star-exact custom layouts have been mentioned. Creating games without needing to play them would be nice - this as a result of being able to have exact star layouts in dark galaxies.
Currently Experimentation, Banking, Manufacturing and Economy are production-locked. That is they become crap with long production times and better with short times. It would be nice if the scaling factors were customisable. These are:
Economy: Gain Economy * $10 every production.
Experimentation: Gain 72 research points every production in a random tech.
Banking: Banking * $75 every production.
Manufacturing: Industry * (Manu + 5) ships every production. Note: the help text is wrong!
The above highlighted figures could be configurable. In addition, I would love to be able to change tech in dark games to be:
Scanning: Scanning range is 3 + Scanning light years.
Hyperspace Range: Fleets can jump 3 + HR light years.
This would allow researching scanning and HR at the same progress. And make dark galaxy experiments a bit fairer.
This could possibly lead to scanning going from “no one cares” to “please don’t give it to me.” People would complain if exp went into scanning, and people would transfer scanning to their enemies to sabotage them.
I LOVE the “message scanned” one from @markwkidd. Ofcourse it would be relatively easy to sabotage if extra anonymity is not turned on, or if players enter together, but still, the implications are huge!
Here’s my shopping list:
Configurable AFK counters, especially in TB games are a big one for me
customizable carrier costs, or even, progressive carrier costs. Every next carrier being $5 more expensive, so carrier 60 costs $325. This would slightly slow down snowballing empires
message costs. If every message sent costs $30, especially the early game can force you to make some tough choices
@markwkidd & @xtrafresh This is somewhat related to fiddling with messages. The idea which I was responding to is making every message being global (sent to all players).
One thing which may be interesting is making messages limited to scanning range and making the leaderboard anonymous. Problem is people posting here saying “Anyone here playing game 534987428941234? Add me on skype”
Some very good suggestions for @JayKyburz … but the $64,000 credit question is does he have time to look into and implement some of these?
The last “Galactic News” is almost 6 months ago … there have been lots of suggestions since then on the IHG forum, so I gotta believe Jay’s list for NP is pretty long already … and he’s still working on Blight - software is never done!
Would be useful (if he’s OK doing) for him to share that list so we don’t duplicate stuff already there.
Love a lot of these suggestions. I am still reading the forums every day even if I don’t get a chance to contribute to the conversation as often as I would like.
The Blight work is keeping me busy right now, but I’m sure in a few months I will have time for Neptune’s Pride.
I don’t really want to publish the todo list because there is so much stuff on it and I’ll probably change the priorities of everything as I go anyhow.
But from a high level here is my current high level plans for NP.
Make a fun and interesting AI to play against. I want each AI to have personality, and for you to be able to trade and ally with them. I want much better interfaces for communicating and negotiating with them.
The reason this is a priority is because I want those free games where all but 1 or 2 players drop out to still be fun and interesting for a new player to play. Basically the game would go from multi-player to single player as people drop out.
Even the 64 player game would be much improved with Fun AI allies in the dropout positions.
One we basically have a fun game that starts MP but degrades gracefully to SP I want to prepare a version of the game for Steam and the iOS and Android App Store.
While doing this, I want to slowly implement fun and interesting features that grow the game and make it more interesting. But really there is all kinds of things
An editor where you can modify everything about every star
Finish off the API people keep asking me about
Team and Tournament Features (Friends and Enemies Lists)
Historical Replays
Wormholes or wrap around maps. Other Map Terrain.
Making Banking / Exp more like Manu - and killing Terra
Upgradable Wap Gates
Moving stars as just discussed a few days ago.
I think I do want to circle back around make each “Race” slightly different at some stage.
The list is endless.
But anyhow, please do continue suggesting what you would like to see. I’m reading and making notes.
I just need to try and balance making the game a business success with making the game fun for us hardcore fans to play.
Cool … here’s a couple ideas that I’m guessing is fairly easy stuff and everyone would agree improves gameplay. It sounds like you have several of these already have working in Blight, so just a matter of porting the code over.
Thanks Jay. As I mentioned I wanted to collect together all the little tweaks for game creation. I really wanted to make premium membership an amazing addition to the game.
Saying that, I had completely forgot about mirrored maps. They were excellent.
Multiple starting positions. That is, you start the game with several home stars in different parts of the galaxy. This should be really easy to add to the existing architecture. Just create X * players home stars, then randomly assign them making sure two home stars by the same player are not neighbouring.
to be able to change tech in dark games to be:
