That''s going to be INSANELY hard. Not just the game writing, but striking a good balance between detail and generaliztion. If you make it too detailed it won''t be fun because of the insane number of factors that the player will have to consider when playing it, but if you make it too general, spanning it across the entire universe would be pointless. How detailed do you want it to be?

NeoMage

It already exist.
a space MMORTS called mankind... I never played it so I don t really know if it is cool.

http://www.mankind.net

manumoi

I remember a long time ago hearing about a series of books that deals with something very much like that. The only brief bit of information I remember given was that by the end of the series, the combatants are literally throwing actual stars at each other.

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Start simple... Konquest.

True, The kind of battles would depend on the technology of the factions. After all it might be more encomical and effective for an transgalactic empire to retrofit planets with engines and weapons then to build warships. Then again if destuction and not conquest is a factions goal its probably easiest to simply cause a systems sun to go nova.


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Or rotate them out of three-space, like the imperial preator in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Neat story.

The problem is, by the time you have the technology and population to actually control multiple galaxies in a single government, you''ve probably got more going for you than just rockets and lasers. You''d have tanks full of psychics that would be able to vaporize stars, and genetically engineered space bats that would eat planets and write poetry.

I stay cut back the scale or the project will be absurd.

quote:

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Or rotate them out of three-space, like the imperial preator in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Neat story.

The problem is, by the time you have the technology and population to actually control multiple galaxies in a single government, you''ve probably got more going for you than just rockets and lasers. You''d have tanks full of psychics that would be able to vaporize stars, and genetically engineered space bats that would eat planets and write poetry.

I stay cut back the scale or the project will be absurd.

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A transgalactic empirial conquest game with genetically engineered space bats that eat planets and write poetry? Now we''re talking.

I think you could pull the game off as a giant CA or a Go type game. You would have a representation like Kylotan suggested, where each star is basically a pixel. This should actually end up looking good because you have large particle systems that form pretty galaxies on the screen.

The goal of the game could be cultural\genetic dominance of your species or it could just be survival, but the basic idea would be to gain influence over as many stars as possible. There are a million interesting sci-fi and political devices you could use in the game but basically you can either destroy stars or convert them. Because there are so many stars, anything you do would affect a lot of stars, if not whole galaxies, at a time. You couldn''t have any of the normal micromanagement these types of games usually have. There would be no building individual starships for example. This is interesting because each star would basically have it''s own (simple) AI to determine influence, resources, etc. and how these things affect nearby star systems. You can only influence these things indirectly by setting large scale policies, some global, some local.

Getting all this information to the player in a meaningful way could be difficult, but I think color coding all the stars like Kylotan suggested is a good way to do it. That way you can look directly at a galaxy or a section of a galaxy and say "they have x amount of hydrogen, I should select that section and tell them to start building y."

As for space travel, it''s not really an issue. You could just say your ships travel faster than the speed of light, but considering the scale of the game you could have turns that span 100 years (or, in a realtime game, say 1 minute = 100 years) without a problem. The only thing I can''t figure out is the tech tree. Like Iron Chef Carnage has said, any civilization on a transgalactic or universal scale will have all kinds of crazy technology that can do pretty much anything. I would say don''t have any kind of technological growth and give players access to all technology right off the bat. In that case, the major challenge is collecting the physical resources to build technology, not developing new technology itself.

quote:

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Original post by Raghar
to Kylotan
Hava you listened words 20 TB of disk storage? If you''d like persistent planet maps and have them uncompressed you''d need that.
Star could have 3D coordinates, and other things. Precision 1 pc is too low for star position. so count how many bytes, at last do you need.

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You don''t need to store everything.


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If you wouldn''t store enough, it will be unbrowsable in, add here some interesting program like FI or Celestia, maner.

You couldn''t view it in another program, but you could still view all of it from your own game. Procedurally created data lets you do that.

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