It is nice to know exactly what your ally on the other side of the galaxy is doing, but it is not very realistic.
How about fog of war?
You start out, unaware of your position in the galaxy, only with knowledge about the stars in your scan area. So you start colonizing these stars and eventually stumble in the path of another race.
You don’t know anything about them at first. You can establish diplomatic relations or seek confrontation. If you become friends, you learn more about them, if you start a war, the following battles also give information about their weapons tech for instance. If you win a battle you have the chance of getting some intel in the wreckage of their ships.
What do you think?
1 Like
I think we have this in the Dark Galaxies.
Meh, I should have paid attention before posting. Thanks for pointing it out.
No, this is still a valid point, as even in Dark Galaxies you see all the stats for other players:
Stars, Infrastructure, Technologies…
I can imagine a very Dark Galaxy where this information is also initially secret.
Edit: Typo correction
1 Like
Nope. This would be “Darkest Galaxy”, where you don’t even have intel on other races until you have some contact with them.
I liked the idea. Just addind to it:
- Stars: you only know the amount you can see.
- Ships: you only know the amount you can see.
- Carriers: you only know the amount you can see.
- Economy/Industry/Science: you only know the amount you can see.
- Scanning: you only know when you take a star.
- Hyperspace Range: you only know when you take a star, but if your scanners pick a carrier jumping from one star you can see to another star you can see and this jump would be impossible by the last update you had on his Hyperspace Range level, then you update to the minimal level required to do this jump.
- Terraforming: just by seeing a star.
- Experimentation: you only know when you take a star with Science labs.
- Weapons: you only know when you battle.
- Banking: you only know when you take a star that had Economy infrastructure.
- Manufacturing: you only know when you take a star with Industries.
Also, in this game should have a way to find out more. Maybe a technology or an infrasctructure named “Intel”. This would create a chance to discover some random stat from some random opponent.
5 Likes
I do not think other players need to know about the total amount of Manufacturing, Banking, Experimentation, Terraforming, Hyperspace Range, or Scanning techs that a player has. A player should only be able to see the Economy/Industry/Science and ships on the stars they can see. The total amount of these is not needed to play the game.
What is important is the amount of stars and the weapons tech. In order to attack a player, you need to know if you will win a battle or not by calculating your ships and weapons tech against their ships and weapons tech.
You also need to know how close a player is to winning so you need to know the total amount of stars for every player.
The total carriers a player has can be optional. I don’t think it will make much of a difference if this is hidden from other players or not. The total amount of ships should be hidden from other players to allow for surprises.
If all this is done, this game would have a great dark galaxy that will allow for surprise attacks and prevent players from having similar Economy/Industry/Research. The game will be harder to win and players will have to come up with a different strategy to play the game.
I agree that knowing the least possible would be very interesting. But I disagree with the argument above. If you go that way, you should also know the Manufacturing level so you can calculate how many ships he will have when your carrier arrives, the Scanning level so you can know which stars the enemy can see and the Hyperspace Range level, so you can know which stars the enemy can reach. The last two are very important for defensive tactics.