Here's an idea I'm thinking about. I'm curious what others think. It's a galactic turn-based strategy game (but it could work as well as an RTS). It's kind of like Galactic Civilizations, but it's unique in several ways. First of all, you don't control a political empire, but a corporation. The story for it is that in the future as humanity spread across the galaxy the dominant form of social organization became the corporation. These corporations range from the little colony corporations to galaxy-spanning trading corporations. Even though the player controls a corporation, the player can do everything he can do in any other galactic strategy game - build armies, etc. In the future corporations have all the power that previously only governments had. But it's different from other 4X games in that economics plays a very important role. Money is the most important resource in the game, but other resources must be utilized to make money. The game will have lots of different resources, but not every resource will be availible equally. Some planets might not have much water, for example, or uranium, or won't have arable land to make farms on to make food. This means that different players will have to specialize in different tasks and trade with each other. One player on the planet might hold all the oil-rich territory (which would be essential to run an economy - for transportation), and he'll sell it to another player in exchange for military protection. But the way these economic processes work in the game will be automatic and will not have to be micromanaged by the player. This is because the economies of all the players are linked (all the players that have made contact with each other). Any resource that Player A's economy produces is availible on the market for Player B's and C's economy to buy. Every building that the player builds is a subsidiary of the player's corporation (like a mini-corporation). It runs on the for-profit basis and will sell its products to anyone willing to pay the price. It will automatically adjust its price to achieve maximum profit (it will balance the price to achieve the most sales at the highest price). The buildings will need to purchase things too (for example in order for a Smelter to produce steel, it needs to buy ore from Mines; for a Nuclear Power Plant to produce electricity it needs to buy uranium from Smelters; etc.) The buildings will buy from the subsidiary that sells at the lowest price and won't make any distinction between external subsidiaries owned by other players from internal subsidiaries owned by the same player (but the player will be able to embargo trade with a corporation that he is at war with, and maybe be able to set taxes on inter-corporate trade.) The profits that subsidiaries make is automatically pooled into the player's corporation's budget, and in exchange the player's corporation needs to fund the subsidiaries so that they can purchase the resources they need and pay their workers. I'm also thinking about being able to sell buildings auction-style and stock markets. Another unique thing in this game is that the workers/employees/people will not be owned by players and will not be directly controlled by them. Instead players will offer jobs to the workers via their buildings/subsidiaries, and workers will decide who they want to work for. Workers can work for any player they want. And their population grows naturally - they're not produced by players. The workers run on a for-profit basis, just like the corporations. They will work for the subsidiaries that offer the highest wage, and subsidiaries do the same and adjust the wages they pay to maximize their own profit (they treat labour from workers like any other resource). The workers spend the money they earn on housing, food, water, electricity, transportation, and incentives/consumer-goods. Consumer goods are produced at the Shopping Mall building (not really produced there in real life, it just sells them, but anyway). The Shopping Mall needs the resource "industrial production" in order to produce consumer goods, along with all the default resources that all buildings consume (electricity, labour, ...) The resource "industrial production" is produced in the Factory building. It's a generic umbrella term for everything that's manufactured in factories. The other thing that workers need, housing, is "produced" in the building Apartment Complex. Apartment Complexes are owned by players and they gain profit from the rent they charge people/workers. It doesn't make sense that "housing" is a resource like electricity or metal, and that it is "produced", but it all works out. The last major difference is transportation. Transportation is an important part of any economy and is needed for every player. Unlike in every other 4X game, resources will have to be transported from where they are produced to where they are used. This will require a form of transportation - land, air, sea, and space perhaps. This requires cargo haulers, freighters, air-buses, and other transport units. These units are unique from other units in that they will move automatically and they will run on a for-profit basis like workers and subsidiaries. They will charge money to transport resources, which will depend on the distance and price (which again will be adjusted for maximum profit). They will be just like any other subsidiary and their profits will go to the owning player. In exchange for profits they will require funding to buy labour to operate, and fuel, or electricity (whatever the case may be), etc. They will also need roads, rails, spaceports, airports to work. The most efficient method of transport from resource-producer to resource-consumer will be chosen based on price. It will be paid for by the resource-buyer (this will be calculated into the resource buyer's consideration when he is deciding which source to purchase resources from by adding the transportation cost to the resource-purchase cost). The route to take will have been already calculated by the time the resource-buyer pays for the transportation (because the cost of the transportation depends on the distance of the route). The route may involve several modes of transportation, for example it may need to be transported on land and then across water.

It sounds very heavy on the simulation, but somewhat light on player interaction. What choices will the player need to make? How will the simulation aspect of it enhance the quality of choices presented to the player? The nature of choices presented to the player is what will determine if it's an actual fun game, or just a curious economy simulation.

Well, I derive fun from curiosity, so I would find this game fun, not sure about other poeple though.

This looks more like an economic simulation than an RTS, in the spirit of "Patrician II", but set in space and with a little bit of "The Guild" mixed in. The first iteration of my design was very similar, including corporations and economic model, but minus the complete automation, which is okay for NPC AI but will be taking the fun out of playing the game for the player.

If you are going to build this, I think you'll want to focus on giving the player control over the economic aspects. Taking the "Patrician II" analogy further, you could enable the player to construct and arm spaceships and send them on trade routes between the planets, which contain local industry as well as npc industry and the player industry. You could potentially have a manager hiring system to automate only small parts that are in constant need of micromanagement, or you could set up long-lasting buy/sell orders at your various industries with price floors/ceilings.

It would be interesting to play Trevor Chan's Capitalism II (http://pc.ign.com/articles/167/167372p1.html) set in space. Not every aspect but at least stock markets.

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Original post by polyfrag One player on the planet might hold all the oil-rich territory (which would be essential to run an economy - for transportation), and he'll sell it to another player in exchange for military protection.

It seems to me that if this game represented a universe where colonization of other planets is possible and even prolific, that oil would no longer be necessary for transportation. Already, oil's time is limited. As a matter of curiosity you might want to check this site out:

http://www.teslamotors.com

This technology has been around over a hundred years since the time of Nikola Tesla but is just now being implemented. However, this brings up another interesting concept to consider for gameplay. You could make it the objective of certain corporations to suppress superior technology as long as possible so that an industry based on inferior technology can profit off of consumers.

I agree with WorldPlanter here. For a game where you're supposed to be able to build starships, you seem very stuck in a 20th century economic framework.

For example, oil - even if you don't go with controversial things like Tesla technology and antigravity, but keep to mainstream engines (and reaction drives), a future civilization would be likely to at least power planetary transportation by electricity, no need for petroleum. Why? Because already today we can build electric cars with the capabilities of a Ferrari, and there would be huge amounts of almost free power from fusion plants and possibly solar power satellites readily available.

Another example, uranium - what's the point of uranium when you have fusion power? A standard envisioned future fusion reaction is the D + D reaction (there are others), which uses deuterium only. Deuterium (or "heavy water") is harvested from water oceans or might be mined, for example from a planetary body like Mars.

For interplanetary transportation you'd probably want the D + He-3 (or deuterium + helium-3) reaction though, because it yields more energy and makes your spaceships go faster, and believe me, you will at least want fusion power if you're going to build a spacefaring civilisation (not to mention an interstellar faring one!).
Dueterium + Helium-3 and using hydrogen as a working fluid will be able to push your spaceships up to about 10% lightspeed. That's a bit on the slow side if you're going between starsystems (for instance, it will take for 43,6 years to reach Alpha Centauri this way, disregarding acceleration/deacceleration), however it's just fine for interplanetary travel. You'd reach anywhere in our solar system in weeks or months.

Basically, for powering a fusion spaceship, you need:

Deuterium
Helium-3
Hydrogen

So where do you get Helium-3 then? Some are at our Moon, but the largest and most practical resource by far is to farm, or "mine" it from the upper layers of gas giants (which are ubiquitious to star systems).

If nothing else, fusion will be a simple, even primitive technology for a civilization capable of star travel.

To make starflight practical, not to mention commerce, you obviously need much more powerful drives. Next in line from a traditional standpoint is antimatter. Beamcore antimatter drives can push you up to about 60% of lightspeed. This means Alpha Centauri in little more than 7 years. A photon antimatter drive on the other hand will in principle reach to the speed of light, yet because of relativistic phenomena end velocity will in practice be about 90% lightspeed. In other words, you'd get to Alpha Centauri (4.36 ly distant) in 4-5 years.

Antimatter is basically antihydrogen, which is manufactured (albeit today we are far from being able to store notable amounts much less produce it in meaningful quantities).

Okay, we could go on here for a while... what I'm telling you is that you need to think through the likely economics of a future society capable of regular spaceflight, what technologies and resource utilisation could be expected and what makes sense in terms of commerce etc considered its capabilities, before embarking on writing a game. The time we live and much that we are used to will seem as outdated in 200 years as the 1500's are to us.

P.S: Other than searching the net, a book which brings up some of these issues and which I can recommend is Entering Space by Robert Zubrin.

[Edited by - Crimson Lurker on April 5, 2007 11:32:11 AM]

I wanted to do a game with a similar idea, only I wanted players to run either corporations OR governments. The governments would have to keep their people happy, etc. (think Utopia, at Swirve), but would also have to provide business friendly environments. Corporations would have to build their business (like Capitalism II), and would have to expand into different markets--which are more or less hostile depending on the government.

You also may want to look at Tradewars 2002... it was an awesome BBS game--which you can still find all over the internet--where you ran around trading, building up your fleet of fighters, and formed corporations with other players, etc. If you can combine the elements that made that game awesome, with Capitalism II and some other things, you'll have a sweet game.

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Original post by smitty1276 You also may want to look at Tradewars 2002... it was an awesome BBS game--which you can still find all over the internet--where you ran around trading, building up your fleet of fighters, and formed corporations with other players, etc. If you can combine the elements that made that game awesome, with Capitalism II and some other things, you'll have a sweet game.

I actually remember playing the original Tradewars back in the early 90's. It was mostly texted based, but still a lot of fun. I think most gamers that have played it would consider it the grandfather of the MMO.

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Original post by WorldPlanter Quote: Original post by smitty1276 You also may want to look at Tradewars 2002... it was an awesome BBS game--which you can still find all over the internet--where you ran around trading, building up your fleet of fighters, and formed corporations with other players, etc. If you can combine the elements that made that game awesome, with Capitalism II and some other things, you'll have a sweet game. I actually remember playing the original Tradewars back in the early 90's. It was mostly texted based, but still a lot of fun. I think most gamers that have played it would consider it the grandfather of the MMO.

Yeah, that's the one I was talking about (I have no idea why it was called "TW 2002"). Man, I have some great memories of that game.

Since you only got a set number of turns each day, we would wait up until midnight--when our turns were reset--and try to beat everyone else on to get our turns in. Since most BBS's only had 1 or 2 lines, it was often hard to get through.