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 Well it's been an interesting week to say the least. But don't worry, the mechanical Synth unleashing a behemoth on us puny organics will make our policy squabbles look pretty petty. #MakeSpaceGreatAgain For them we wanted to go Deathstar. But without an exhaust port. Never go full Deathstar.
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Nov 13, 2016 03:48
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 We've been chugging away at LoR as usual. Migrated things to a new build server, updated the 2d scenes like the lab and galactic council to work for ultra wide HD resolutions. Plus we're slowly but surely working on space monsters. The above is a scaled down version of a 4k wallpaper of Earth. Along with finishing up species dialogs I've been working on various homeworld textures.
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Dec 16, 2016 23:50
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Have you checked out Stars in Shadow? It's another moo2 re-imagining or what we're calling them, gets a lot right, but also a lot wrong.
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Dec 16, 2016 23:51
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Yep been playing the beta. We're both being published by Iceberg. I've really been enjoying SiS but I'd say we're going in different directions in a lot of ways. There's some interesting parallels like their Humans and our Synth play similarly due to the exiles traits. In terms of feel and art style, we've gone with a more B5 type route than SiS which has embraced a more cartoon look. But they have an enjoyable background and feel. I've also been going through a lot of Stellaris and Endless Space 2. It's good to always consume as much as possible and see what works and what doesn't. Then again my opinion of "what works" may differ from every player's but that's a risk 
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Dec 16, 2016 23:55
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Yeah I just got it yesterday. I can't stand the art and "comic book" look and fonts throughout the game and find the interface pretty bad. Combat is trying to be nice and moo2 turn based but some how misses a lot of things and isn't half as fun or interesting, probably due to the very shallow ship design. Not a huge fan of the planet management either, and the only valid strategy is "spam colony ships until there's no more planets to colonize". They also lack any custom race option or any way to really personalize your empire in any way, you're even stuck playing a pre-defined leader. If you're going to be re-making moo2 at least have all its features then build on that. I do like a lot about it though. On my first game as humans the first habitable planet I found was a massive abandoned hive world inhabited by some feral little kobold dudes. It was a great home planet and it felt really cool to be colonizing the still mostly functional ruins of a long dead hive world. But then I found this was just really lucky and every other planet was just a size X ocean or tundra or what ever planet with zero character. Obviously haven't had a chance to play your game, I really do hope you can make planets and colonization interesting. It's often been a problem in 4X games where the best strategy is just to spam colonies as fast as you can, and every colony feels the same. In moo2 oddly enough I found this almost balanced, rushing too many colonies and colony ships early game could see you hosed over by someone who built a battleship instead of a colony ship. There were actually risks involved with hyper-expanding. Long term it was obviously best to claim as much as possible, but it made you extremely vulnerable in the short term and the AI would often exploit that. Moo2 had mineral richness, gems, gold, artefacts, and of course the planet's climate. But other than that a planet was a planet. How has your game addressed some of these issues? Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 00:01
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For the base game we're keeping it with it pretty similar to the MOO2 system and economy. There's planet size, gravity, mineral richness, and climate. We have a few more climate types than MOO2 (Minimal, Inferno, and Dead worlds). Post-release we'll likely toss in some crazier types. Specials are pretty similar to MOO2 as well, we've added a few more modifier types and again this is an area where we'll be expanding on once the base game is out much like Endless Space did. We have expanded a bit with superstructures. Ringworlds and Dyson spheres are a central part of the game. So stellar engineering at those scales is a big part of the end game. The galaxy is also quite a bit more hostile than most other 4x games out there. Habitable planets (even minimals) aren't as common as the MOO:CTS or GalCiv. Outposts, much like in Stellaris, are pretty important and can take on listening post (scanner range bonus), mining, or research roles. There are some systems without any planets or asteroids, but in general outposts are a good way to build an empire before going gung-ho on colony ships.
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Dec 17, 2016 01:25
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Have you ever thought about adding lots of little special traits to planets to make them a little more memorable and interesting? Stellaris has sort of started doing this. Like you discover a barren planet that has a thick network of underground fungal colonies that let you actually farm a little bit without terraforming or hydroponic farm improvements (or what ever dynamic you have with barren worlds and farming). Or a planet is very pretty and gives +10 moral. Or this technically terran planet has horrible storms that increase building upkeep. Or this planet has quite intact ruins from a previous civilization giving X Y and Z free buildings on colonization and a flat +2 science bonus from its study. Just little minor bits of flavour with some small to medium gameplay effects. I also really like in Stars in Shadow that there's not just the main empires, but there's minor powers and natives. The natives once again add some nice flavour to the game. Moo2 had it's blue-guy generic natives, but some slightly more fleshed out natives with specific abilities is really cool.
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Dec 17, 2016 02:07
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We'll be adding more special traits for planets after the core game is done. Even with Stellaris that's something they've been adding in We have two elder species and four minor species in the base game. Along with the various grand menaces. So a number of different groups that populate the galaxy.
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Dec 17, 2016 02:28
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That's cool, looking forward to checking it out. It's certainly hard to capture both the magic and have a result that's mechanically solid and balanced in an enjoyable way.
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Dec 17, 2016 03:44
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 For the holidays one of our space monsters, the space crystal! Friend to sociopathic androids!
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Dec 23, 2016 21:50
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Want to find the right frequency to make friends with it 
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Dec 23, 2016 21:51
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Been enjoying Stellaris a lot recently, but still looking forward to this a lot. I mean even the fonts LoR uses invoke the MOO1+2 style. You guys have really got the nostalgia touch nailed down. Stellaris is great fun and all but comes across as very unfinished (many event chains have huge promise, but seem to end abruptly/just as they are getting started) Wishing all the folks working on/contributing to LoR a merry Xmas.
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Dec 25, 2016 00:14
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Thanks! I've gotten a good kick out of Stellaris. It's good though that they didn't do a fantasy equivalent of CK2 or nothing would ever get done Also, as a second little present a look at our "Rag Tag Fleet" grand menace/pirate faction: https://twitter.com/LordofRigel/status/811350657558974464 We wanted something that showed a different tech base, partially because this group is the species who made the mechanical Synth and started doing things like eschewing artificial gravity and advanced weapons due to fear of Cylon-esque hacking. So Leonov-B5 Omega style centrifuges and bullets. Because you can't outsmart a bullet.
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Dec 25, 2016 01:45
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I'd love to see more realistic ships like that. Although it should have 2 counter-rotating sections to!
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Dec 25, 2016 02:05
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The flywheel portion we're actually going to make counter-rotate. Design wise though we're trying to have our cake and eat it too with some "realistic" harder scifi and more treknology type stuff in the setting.
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Dec 25, 2016 03:42
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I'd still kill for a 4x mooish game where yes you can colonize planets but you can just as easily (or easier) house millions in big ol' o'neil cylinders chomping down on asteroids. gently caress gravity wells and having to terraform or deal with gravity outside your preferred healthy range. 2 tall cans filled with people.
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Dec 25, 2016 04:14
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Baronjutter posted:I'd still kill for a 4x mooish game where yes you can colonize planets but you can just as easily (or easier) house millions in big ol' o'neil cylinders chomping down on asteroids. gently caress gravity wells and having to terraform or deal with gravity outside your preferred healthy range. 2 tall cans filled with people. I was thinking about how easy it would be to toast settlements, and it did make me want a game where systems had the depth of MOO 1 at most, but there were tons more of them and by the mid game major wars would see whole solar systems being glassed or made uninhabitable.
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Dec 25, 2016 04:52
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Well we do have constructing ring worlds and dyson spheres, and in terms of glassing planets and systems the "final war" mechanics of a slug fest between the elder races when the galactic council fails should lead to that. As for building O'Neil cylinders, as a step below artificial planets and ring worlds that'd be good expansion fodder along with stuff like a fully space-based civ (think barbarian hordes in Total War).
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Dec 25, 2016 05:28
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 Another look at our pirate/rag tag fleet this time hitting a convoy!
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Jan 11, 2017 04:46
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Atarask posted:Well it's been an interesting week to say the least. But don't worry, the mechanical Synth unleashing a behemoth on us puny organics will make our policy squabbles look pretty petty. #MakeSpaceGreatAgain Time to sue!  How are you doing your Dyson spheres? If they are "realistic" you could probably house your entire empire in one as an end-game vanity project.
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Jan 11, 2017 09:01
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It'll be subject to balancing but right now they basically take every planet in a system, add up the mass, and make it a better than Terran climate. So equivalent to terraforming and maxing out every planet with some other bonuses added. So not quite "realistic" in that sense, but 100s of billions instead of the usual maxed out 20-30 billion. You'll also need one to have the energy for your species to ascend (basically AI upload into the substrate of a custom designed pocket universe).
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Jan 12, 2017 05:41
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So are these pirates just going to fly in and blow ships up? it always annoyed me that raiders/pirates/barbarians/whatevers always seemed more interested in outright killing everything in a suicide charge instead of looting and escaping.
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Jan 13, 2017 12:40
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It would be nice if you could have varied pirate bands, you could have 'Gentlemen' pirates that treat ships well and leave ship and crew unharmed and just take the goods, or you could have right bastards that take what they want and torch the lot!
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Jan 13, 2017 14:03
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Or issue Letters of Marque for pirates to go raid your neighbors.
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Jan 13, 2017 14:29
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Name one band of pirates "Hired Goons", please.
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Jan 13, 2017 14:56
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Fintilgin posted:Or issue Letters of Marque for pirates to go raid your neighbors. I like this, deniable plausibility.
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Jan 13, 2017 16:31
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King Doom posted:So are these pirates just going to fly in and blow ships up? it always annoyed me that raiders/pirates/barbarians/whatevers always seemed more interested in outright killing everything in a suicide charge instead of looting and escaping. They really just raid shipping and freighters and usually get scared off when fleets arrive. However, they're the vanguard for a larger force that may arrive in the galaxy.
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Jan 15, 2017 03:00
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I just found this thread and read the whole thing over the past week or two. I'm looking forward to the game coming out. I got scared when I got to the part about the kickstarter and saw that it didnt work out. I am glad that you guys were able to sign with a Publisher - did signing with one allow you more time to complete the game in a way that you will be happy with, Atarask? I am curious about the real-time combat. Based on what has been said in the thread, it is going to be total-war esque in that when the fleets encounter each other they fight an "instanced" battle, rather than like how it was in Stardrive 1 and Stellaris where they just fight an abstracted battle in space over what would be absurd distances to actually fight a battle at? I will be quite okay with that, especially if the combat and ship design have been built so that I can build long range sniping ships or fast moving flankers, or this thing or that thing that is cool and fun. Is there any sort of mechanic built in for if I prefer quality over quantity with regard to my ships/fleets? Would that be race specific or is it a direction I can go by researching certain techs? Also, will it be possible to build a "tall" empire, that is smaller but more concentrated? I'm sure I will have more questions but thats all I have for now, heh.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:24
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It'll be a total-war like setup where tactical consists of "instances" around planets. In some ways though the abstraction in Stardrive 1 and Stellaris might be more "realistic" if you're thinking about battles being fought in relativistic speeds and light minute distances though. But we're going for a Star Trek DS9 or Babylon 5 type feel for the combat. For quality over quantity, it's tech and special system based. As for "tall" empires, dyson spheres and ringworlds can allow for that. But overall population is the main resource in the game. Mechanics to try to force "tall" empires like morale penalties or the sectors in Stellaris just don't seem to work well to us.
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Jan 18, 2017 03:44
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Atarask posted:It'll be a total-war like setup where tactical consists of "instances" around planets.  Regarding "Instanced" Battles: That is awesome and I really dislike how Stadrive and Stellaris handle it, so that is really exciting to me. Regarding Quality vs Quantity: To follow up, (considering that every race has unique ship models) are any of the races built to have, for example: more smaller ships, fewer larger ships, or even something like more larger ships that are lower tech, brittle, or have some other sort of drawback? Along the same thought pattern regarding quality/quantity: Does older tech get an upkeep discount and/or newer tech have higher upkeep, so keeping older ships around for pirate patrolling or backwater system defense is a thing? Regarding "tall" vs "wide": That sounds wise. If you are designing responsible AI and build queues you can save/import to new colonies there is less to worry about if going wide. If Population is the main resource in the game is there going to be a racial trait like Subterranean in MoO2? Will there be techs that let me increase my population density?
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Jan 18, 2017 14:39
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Subterranean was one of my fav moo2 picks. Or if I didn't, I'd always try to invade a sakkra planet early on and spread them to all my planets to boost the pop cap. I really liked making super cosmopolitan empires where every race fulfilled some sort of caste-like optimized role. Get the dinosaurs boosting your pop cap and farming, get the bugs working your factories, get the psilons doing your research, and have your primary species actually really lovely at most pop-level bonuses so you could put all those points into empire-level bonuses. I was really looking forward to doing poo poo like that in stellaris, but it's your classic paradox mess of poor feedback mixed with purposefully designed lack of control so poo poo just sort of happens in the background and trying to optimise anything is like herding cats in the dark that run away after you've got them sorted.
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Jan 18, 2017 19:30
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Baronjutter posted:Subterranean was one of my fav moo2 picks. I agree 100% regarding Stellaris. I was hoping it would be a lovechild of all the other Paradox titles fused together to build a cool space based 4x. Instead we got cool exploration mechanics and events and a bunch of garbage planet tile and sector management and poo poo-loving-awful combat mechanics.
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Jan 18, 2017 19:49
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:drat that was a fast reply, I was expecting it to take a few days Older tech has miniaturization so costs do tend to go down for construction. Command point costs are hull size based but a modifier based on tech level is an interesting idea. Probably not for 1.0 but something we could look into. Yes we have both AI management (pulldown from settings) which will auto build buildings and move populations, and also building queues you can load and save. Ship construction won't be auto-handled, you'll need to do that yourself as that's part of the whole "not having the game play itself" and "total war in space" thing. As for ship art, check us out on Facebook, we've posted .p3d models over the past year of the ships: https://www.facebook.com/LordofRigel/ We're doing one design per size class for each of the 12 species. The main reason for this has been time. It took about 2 years to model the fleets. We're now finishing up various space monsters and grand menaces. (ex. end game threats in Stellaris or the grand menaces in Sword of the Stars) Early on we wanted to do some alternative designs but we have more species at the get-go than other games so it just wasn't feasible if we ever wanted to release since we have 72 main ship models, plus another 24 strikecraft models. (bomber/boarding ship combo like BSG's Raptor) Then three starbase types so another 36 models there :-) That's excluding our space monsters and grand menaces most of which have a few meshes for different size categories. The pirate wallpaper is also part of a grand menace which is basically another full fleet. So yeah, a lot of art! Atarask fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 21:11
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Shame about the art being so much harder now that everything's in 3d. In moo2 you could easily give every class of ship its own art to quickly tell at a glance which was which. With all ships looking the same, it's going to be difficult in battles to tell what's going on when your long range missile ship and your close-in brawler look the same. Specially if the game ends up having a single "best" hull size (which is usually whatever is biggest) like moo2 did, so you end up only building battleships or titans or what ever so all your fleets look exactly the same. In real time combat I can see that being pretty annoying not to be able to tell at a glance which classes are different. I don't really care about battle being pretty, would rather have had a half dozen or so arts for each ship size but keep them as simple moo2 quality sprites vs cool looking 3d battles. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 21:23
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aah_Jf3OPw Well here's a video of the finished incoming ragtag fleet!
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Jan 29, 2017 07:56
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Atarask posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aah_Jf3OPw
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Jan 29, 2017 16:31
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They're the creators of the AI Synth species, but regressed their tech a bit because things like artificial gravity can be hacked and in the words of TF2's Heavy "Outsmart Bullet, No!" So we wanted a bit of a mix of the B5 Humans and BSG Colonials.
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Jan 29, 2017 19:14
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ3OawVUrbw We did show off the VN mothership before but here it's in action with its hyperspace window effect.
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Feb 3, 2017 02:08
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I find the ship design/graphics by far the least interesting thing in a 4x. Wanna see that gameplay.
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Feb 3, 2017 02:49
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Same Which is what has caused me to roll my eyes at a lot of this thread over the course of a year.
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Feb 3, 2017 07:26
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