As promised, I wanted to discuss orbital and ground combat in the greater context of empire expansion. Since FATES: Carpe Moerae is a 4X space strategy game, expansion will be one of the key components of this game.
There will be four primary means of acquiring planets; colonization using colony ships, invasion using transport ships and ground forces, revolt as a result of high planetary discord, and diplomatic exchange deals.
Presently, only the colonization means exists in the live game client at the moment, so I will address this first. Colonizing new planets requires a ship that possesses a colonization module to be installed on it, as well as a set number of resources and population per module. Any ship can be equipped with colonization modules, including combat vessels, however, the ship is consumed upon founding a new colony, which needs to be taken into account when designing vessels. But a combat colony ship, capable of defeating light resistance is very much possible in FATES: Carpe Moerae. Another consequence of the modularity of the colonization process is that you can create heavy colony ships that deposit larger numbers of citizens and resources to assist in getting the new colony up and running more quickly. Depending on how large of a ship hull that you are willing to use, it may be possible to completely populate a new planet especially smaller ones.
The second means of acquiring new planets is through invasion of existing planets using ground forces. Presently, the only types of ground units are the militia and the marines. The militia are planetary population units who volunteer to defend their home against extra-planetary invaders. The militia units are automatically recruited from defending planetary population in the event of a ground invasion on their planet. The marines are population units specially trained and equipped at a military training academy and able to be placed on board transport star ships. These transport ships can be used to transport marines to other planets in order to invade and forcibly take over that planet. Each planet in the galaxy is possessed of three orbitals, which must be under control of the attacking fleet before a ground invasion can be initiated or maintained. The ground combat will consist of several waves that take place over the span of a few hours with each wave requiring positive control of all three orbitals to initiate each successive wave of ground invasion. Upon the successful completion of all waves of ground invasion, control of the planet will be transferred to the attacking player.
This leads to the third means of acquiring planets, high planetary discord. Discord is a measure of the planetary population's unhappiness with or fear of the current ruling government. The discord calculation will be one of the more complex in the game, with a very large number of inputs including fleets present in orbit, number of marines garrisoned on the surface, food rations, employment, subversion agents' presence, counter-intelligence agents' presence, nearby empire sways, cultural influences, economic influences, and diplomatic policies, among other factors. The discord is measured as a percent from zero to one hundred and a planet with 80%-plus discord is considered to be "in revolt", however the planet does not actually change allegiance until 90%. However, the player to whom the planet switches allegiance to is not precisely controllable. The empire that a planet in revolt switches allegiance to is controlled by an equally dizzying array of factors similar to the discord calculation with a bit of randomization thrown into the mix. As such, causing planets to revolt will be a fairly straightforward process, however, getting them to revolt to a specific player will be much more difficult to control.
The final means of acquiring planets is through diplomatic exchanges. Since planets are part of an empire's assets, they will be available to be exchanged as part of diplomatic negotiations. The planets control will be exchanged once the deal is agreed upon by both parties.
Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of the presently planned means of expansion in FATES: Carpe Moerae.
á na márië,
gumshoe, out.
23 February 2016
16 February 2016
Some Thoughts on Combat Mechanics
I have had several gamers ask me how the combat in FATES: Carpe Moerae works. Presently, it doesn't. The combat is not slated to be in the game until the Alpha 2 which is a long ways out still.
As far as attack and defense mechanics, the current plan -- which is subject to change -- is to implement a rock-paper-scissors damage model using four offensive types: beam, photonic (laser), missile, and kinetic and four defensive types: armor, shields, counter-weaponry, and velocity. The are three other additional mechanic statistics that will play into combat being: structure, CETU attack, and CETU defense. CETU attack and defense are special damage and defense types that trump all others. It is these damage types that give our "all-powerful" AI civilization in the center of the galaxy it's potency. More on CETU later though.
The combat mechanics will probably boil down to a summation of all allied attack types and allied defense types received by the server during a given second to determine the winner and loser of each second's battle with a black swan-style outcome randomization process. This means that all of the allied attacking ships that arrive in a specific thousand millisecond time period will be lumped together into one "attack" and will be pitted against all summed allied defensive stats. It is more-or-less an instantaneous determination based on overarching attack and defense stats.
The "black swan-style" event generator will occasionally (presently roughly one in one hundred thousand) create a loss multiplier on the units lost on each side creating extremely rare and highly unpredictable results, such as a very tiny fleet defeating a vast armada. Under most normal circumstances (the other 99,999 times) the battle will go more or less as expected, e.g. the armada crushing the tiny fleet. The statistical models dictating these events scale the intensity of the change with the probability, so a low intensity event will have a much higher probability than a high intensity event. The highest intensity event that we are presently considering is around a 10,000x loss multiplier. This will prevent people from creating reliable combat mechanic predictors and also make for some extremely epic tales of unbelievable victories (or losses).
There are a number of other mechanics that are presently planned that will significantly influence combat.
First are the fleet admirals. The fleet admirals will be automatically created when a new fleet is created with a set of randomly generated statistics taken from the statistic pool for admirals. The admirals will be transferable between various fleets if you want to boost a particular fleet's combat performance. The admirals will level up based on their actions in game. In other words, if your admiral is in charge of a large fleet of frigates, then his combat performance with frigates will improve, thereby increasing the overarching performance of any frigates in the fleet. The fleet admirals will likely peak at around +20% bonus to combat statistics for ships, so that a very experienced fleet admiral has the possibility of making the difference between victory and defeat. However, the fleet admirals will be able to be killed or captured. If captured, depending on their loyalty, they will either resist -- making them unusable to your enemy, break -- making them yield information about your empire to your enemy, or turn -- making them join your opponent's military forces. So there is a risk and reward consideration when sending experienced admirals into battle. The admirals have one final way of being removed, which is through assassination. Your spies can assassinate enemy admirals and vice versa. When a fleet admiral is assassinated, a new admiral will be automatically created to replace him with the basic statistics.
The second set of mechanics that will influence combat is the technologies. Ships with more advanced technologies will be more destructive and durable then lower technology ships. So a smaller fleet of higher technology ships will be capable of defeating a much larger fleet of weaker ships. The technologies on the ships will be fully customizable based on a space and energy limited system. Each ship will be capable of housing any number of any type of weaponry or defenses, making player designed ships very important in FATES: Carpe Moerae, especially when used in conjunction with fleet formations.
The third piece of the combat puzzle is the fleet formations. Fleet formations will dictate combat bonuses for the fleet as well as the loss structure. The idea behind fleet formations is that you give attack bonuses to the ship types designated as the rear guard and defense detriments to the ship types designated as the vanguard. Some of the attack fleet formations under consideration are: Fighter Screen, Frigate Line, and Capital Phalanx. So, if you are running a Fighter Screen in a fleet with both strike craft, capital and super-capital ships, your fighter craft will be dealing less damage and taking more, while your capital and super-capital will be dealing more damage and taking less. We have no solid numbers for these bonuses at the moment, but it will fall somewhere in the +/- 5-30% range. The fleet formations will be a combat specific event, such that every time you order your fleet to attack, you can order a different formation. We also plan on making a rock-paper-scissors type bonus/detriment multipliers between formations, such that the formation chosen for the attack or defense will influence the outcome significantly. This will do two things. First, it will allow more variability in the combat outcomes based on the formation that each player sends their fleets into battle in, and it will allow fleet and military intelligence to play a hugely significant role. For example, if your spies discover what formation an incoming attack fleet is in prior to the attack, you can have your ships waiting in the appropriate defensive fleet formation to counter their attack formation.
All in all, the combat will ideally be mostly fair -- excepting black-swan events -- given that your fleet's admiral, technology, and formation are appropriately arrayed and equipped.
There has been some talk about us trying to do a turn-based, two-dimensional, ship-based, combat system, similar to what the classic game Master of Orion II did, but the issue that I have not fully figured out how to work around is the time element. Being a Massive Multiplayer Online game, each player involved in combat may or may not be logged into the game when the attack occurs. We could delay the attack until both attackers are present, but this yields additional strategic issues related to holding battle outcomes and potential abuse of such a system. So, long story short, we will be pressing into alpha and probably beta using the instantaneously calculated battle outcomes until I can find a balanced and fair workaround for a more interactive combat scenario.
One final note. There will be planetary combat, both orbital and ground-based, but these two concepts will take more space than I want to spend this week. So, next week.
This gives you an idea of what we presently have planned for combat in FATES: Carpe Moerae, but these are very rough ideas and subject to change as we move into development of combat models.
á na márië,
gumshoe, out.
As far as attack and defense mechanics, the current plan -- which is subject to change -- is to implement a rock-paper-scissors damage model using four offensive types: beam, photonic (laser), missile, and kinetic and four defensive types: armor, shields, counter-weaponry, and velocity. The are three other additional mechanic statistics that will play into combat being: structure, CETU attack, and CETU defense. CETU attack and defense are special damage and defense types that trump all others. It is these damage types that give our "all-powerful" AI civilization in the center of the galaxy it's potency. More on CETU later though.
The combat mechanics will probably boil down to a summation of all allied attack types and allied defense types received by the server during a given second to determine the winner and loser of each second's battle with a black swan-style outcome randomization process. This means that all of the allied attacking ships that arrive in a specific thousand millisecond time period will be lumped together into one "attack" and will be pitted against all summed allied defensive stats. It is more-or-less an instantaneous determination based on overarching attack and defense stats.
The "black swan-style" event generator will occasionally (presently roughly one in one hundred thousand) create a loss multiplier on the units lost on each side creating extremely rare and highly unpredictable results, such as a very tiny fleet defeating a vast armada. Under most normal circumstances (the other 99,999 times) the battle will go more or less as expected, e.g. the armada crushing the tiny fleet. The statistical models dictating these events scale the intensity of the change with the probability, so a low intensity event will have a much higher probability than a high intensity event. The highest intensity event that we are presently considering is around a 10,000x loss multiplier. This will prevent people from creating reliable combat mechanic predictors and also make for some extremely epic tales of unbelievable victories (or losses).
There are a number of other mechanics that are presently planned that will significantly influence combat.
First are the fleet admirals. The fleet admirals will be automatically created when a new fleet is created with a set of randomly generated statistics taken from the statistic pool for admirals. The admirals will be transferable between various fleets if you want to boost a particular fleet's combat performance. The admirals will level up based on their actions in game. In other words, if your admiral is in charge of a large fleet of frigates, then his combat performance with frigates will improve, thereby increasing the overarching performance of any frigates in the fleet. The fleet admirals will likely peak at around +20% bonus to combat statistics for ships, so that a very experienced fleet admiral has the possibility of making the difference between victory and defeat. However, the fleet admirals will be able to be killed or captured. If captured, depending on their loyalty, they will either resist -- making them unusable to your enemy, break -- making them yield information about your empire to your enemy, or turn -- making them join your opponent's military forces. So there is a risk and reward consideration when sending experienced admirals into battle. The admirals have one final way of being removed, which is through assassination. Your spies can assassinate enemy admirals and vice versa. When a fleet admiral is assassinated, a new admiral will be automatically created to replace him with the basic statistics.
The second set of mechanics that will influence combat is the technologies. Ships with more advanced technologies will be more destructive and durable then lower technology ships. So a smaller fleet of higher technology ships will be capable of defeating a much larger fleet of weaker ships. The technologies on the ships will be fully customizable based on a space and energy limited system. Each ship will be capable of housing any number of any type of weaponry or defenses, making player designed ships very important in FATES: Carpe Moerae, especially when used in conjunction with fleet formations.
The third piece of the combat puzzle is the fleet formations. Fleet formations will dictate combat bonuses for the fleet as well as the loss structure. The idea behind fleet formations is that you give attack bonuses to the ship types designated as the rear guard and defense detriments to the ship types designated as the vanguard. Some of the attack fleet formations under consideration are: Fighter Screen, Frigate Line, and Capital Phalanx. So, if you are running a Fighter Screen in a fleet with both strike craft, capital and super-capital ships, your fighter craft will be dealing less damage and taking more, while your capital and super-capital will be dealing more damage and taking less. We have no solid numbers for these bonuses at the moment, but it will fall somewhere in the +/- 5-30% range. The fleet formations will be a combat specific event, such that every time you order your fleet to attack, you can order a different formation. We also plan on making a rock-paper-scissors type bonus/detriment multipliers between formations, such that the formation chosen for the attack or defense will influence the outcome significantly. This will do two things. First, it will allow more variability in the combat outcomes based on the formation that each player sends their fleets into battle in, and it will allow fleet and military intelligence to play a hugely significant role. For example, if your spies discover what formation an incoming attack fleet is in prior to the attack, you can have your ships waiting in the appropriate defensive fleet formation to counter their attack formation.
All in all, the combat will ideally be mostly fair -- excepting black-swan events -- given that your fleet's admiral, technology, and formation are appropriately arrayed and equipped.
There has been some talk about us trying to do a turn-based, two-dimensional, ship-based, combat system, similar to what the classic game Master of Orion II did, but the issue that I have not fully figured out how to work around is the time element. Being a Massive Multiplayer Online game, each player involved in combat may or may not be logged into the game when the attack occurs. We could delay the attack until both attackers are present, but this yields additional strategic issues related to holding battle outcomes and potential abuse of such a system. So, long story short, we will be pressing into alpha and probably beta using the instantaneously calculated battle outcomes until I can find a balanced and fair workaround for a more interactive combat scenario.
One final note. There will be planetary combat, both orbital and ground-based, but these two concepts will take more space than I want to spend this week. So, next week.
This gives you an idea of what we presently have planned for combat in FATES: Carpe Moerae, but these are very rough ideas and subject to change as we move into development of combat models.
á na márië,
gumshoe, out.
9 February 2016
Frame of Reference and Galaxy Details
This devlog is fast becoming a detailed Frequently Asked Questions, but such is life. The dimensional frame of reference chosen for our game is two. We chose a two-dimensional reference frame because of the simplicity of the graphics design, -- which is necessary for a four-person team to bring a game to market -- the simplicity of new players to quickly pick up the user interface controls, and the mirroring of some of our model games in the past.
FATES: Carpe Moerae is designed to be easy to learn and extremely difficult to master, and having a two dimensional frame of reference is a significant part of fulfilling the former. The 2-D frame operates on a HTML5 JavaScript canvas with mouse and mouse wheel-based zoom and pan using mathematics to lay out a galaxy shape with any number of stars. I kept the generation algorithm as generic and scalable as possible in order to allow us the greatest level of flexibility when tweaking game universe parameters going forward through our testing phases.
As far as star numbers, I have tested development clients using 10,000; 40,000; and 100,000 stars, so at a minimum there will be ten thousand stars with anywhere from zero to ten planets available for individual players to colonize. So, we are looking at around 70,000 and 1,000,000 planets available for players to colonize. Assuming players run up empires of 100-400 planets under administration at a given time, we expect to have anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 players per server.
The galaxy generation algorithm itself clusters stars heavily near the center of the galaxy with stars scattered much more sparsely further out from the center. We have input parameters that can be tweaked to control variational density each time we generate a new galaxy, so these parameters can be tweaked based on player input.
The stars are possessed of specific colors, which are based on scientific astronomical observations made over many centuries with us utilizing six basic star colors, including: red, orange, yellow, white, blue, and binary. Each star color has been assigned a set a statistical input parameters that control how each specific star color generates planets orbiting it, such as biosphere, resources, planetary special properties, etc.
Going forward into the future, we will be working more closely with the scientists that the MMOS.ch guys have access to in order to further hone the accuracy of our stellar and planetary models and to help bring awareness of these scientists work to our players. All of this will take place in future development cycles though, as we continue pressing forward.
This should give you an idea of how the galaxy will be generated and what you can expect from FATES: Carpe Moerae in terms of play field.
á na márië,
gumshoe, out.
FATES: Carpe Moerae is designed to be easy to learn and extremely difficult to master, and having a two dimensional frame of reference is a significant part of fulfilling the former. The 2-D frame operates on a HTML5 JavaScript canvas with mouse and mouse wheel-based zoom and pan using mathematics to lay out a galaxy shape with any number of stars. I kept the generation algorithm as generic and scalable as possible in order to allow us the greatest level of flexibility when tweaking game universe parameters going forward through our testing phases.
As far as star numbers, I have tested development clients using 10,000; 40,000; and 100,000 stars, so at a minimum there will be ten thousand stars with anywhere from zero to ten planets available for individual players to colonize. So, we are looking at around 70,000 and 1,000,000 planets available for players to colonize. Assuming players run up empires of 100-400 planets under administration at a given time, we expect to have anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 players per server.
The galaxy generation algorithm itself clusters stars heavily near the center of the galaxy with stars scattered much more sparsely further out from the center. We have input parameters that can be tweaked to control variational density each time we generate a new galaxy, so these parameters can be tweaked based on player input.
The stars are possessed of specific colors, which are based on scientific astronomical observations made over many centuries with us utilizing six basic star colors, including: red, orange, yellow, white, blue, and binary. Each star color has been assigned a set a statistical input parameters that control how each specific star color generates planets orbiting it, such as biosphere, resources, planetary special properties, etc.
Going forward into the future, we will be working more closely with the scientists that the MMOS.ch guys have access to in order to further hone the accuracy of our stellar and planetary models and to help bring awareness of these scientists work to our players. All of this will take place in future development cycles though, as we continue pressing forward.
This should give you an idea of how the galaxy will be generated and what you can expect from FATES: Carpe Moerae in terms of play field.
á na márië,
gumshoe, out.
2 February 2016
Monetisation: How we plan on monetising FATES: Carpe Moerae
Another question that I have received frequently that I would like to address here is: "How are you going to monetise your game?"
Our current monetisation model is "free to win", implying that if you are willing to spend adequate amounts of time playing this game, then you will be able to win this game without paying any money.
The fundamental idea behind this model is that gamers, and really people in general, have only one of two resources available to them to spend: time or money. It has been an overriding design goal in FATES to maintain a healthy balance between people who have abundant time to spend and people who have abundant money to spend in order to prevent one type from gaining an unfair advantage over the other in our game.
Our present plan, which is currently unimplemented, is to have "Archons" available for purchase, which are little more than advanced artificial intelligences that will allow you to orchestrate your empire with a significantly smaller time investment of actual playtime. The types of Archons that are presently planned to be available for purchase in the final game include: Military, Defense, Trade, Finance, Logistics, Intelligence, Diplomatic, Expansion, and Federation. We may very well add other Archons or subdivide some of these into more precise tasks, but this is a starter list. Each of the Archons is presently planned to cost anywhere from three to ten US dollars per month, and you will be able to purchase as many or as few as you want.
We will not be adding the Archons until the Closed Beta testing phase, and they will all be available freely to closed beta testers, so there is a lot of time to fully flesh out the free to win model further.
At least this gives you some idea of our currently planned monetisation scheme and a glimpse into the philosophy behind our design decisions.
á na márië,
gumshoe, out.
Our current monetisation model is "free to win", implying that if you are willing to spend adequate amounts of time playing this game, then you will be able to win this game without paying any money.
The fundamental idea behind this model is that gamers, and really people in general, have only one of two resources available to them to spend: time or money. It has been an overriding design goal in FATES to maintain a healthy balance between people who have abundant time to spend and people who have abundant money to spend in order to prevent one type from gaining an unfair advantage over the other in our game.
Our present plan, which is currently unimplemented, is to have "Archons" available for purchase, which are little more than advanced artificial intelligences that will allow you to orchestrate your empire with a significantly smaller time investment of actual playtime. The types of Archons that are presently planned to be available for purchase in the final game include: Military, Defense, Trade, Finance, Logistics, Intelligence, Diplomatic, Expansion, and Federation. We may very well add other Archons or subdivide some of these into more precise tasks, but this is a starter list. Each of the Archons is presently planned to cost anywhere from three to ten US dollars per month, and you will be able to purchase as many or as few as you want.
- The Military Archon will manage offensive campaigns, scheduled attacks, retaliatory strikes, and other aggressive military actions.
- The Defense Archon will manage defense fleet shuffling, attack response, construction and maintenance of planetary or orbital defensive facilities.
- The Trade Archon will manage buying and selling of resources on the Galactic Exchange, making every effort to buy low and sell high.
- The Finance Archon will manage imperial finances including creation of currency, issuance of sovereign debt, as well as interest and repayments.
- The Logistics Archon will manage constructions and development of existing colonies according to player-defined templates.
- The Intelligence Archon will manage espionage, sabotage, subversion, assassination, and defensive special agents.
- The Diplomatic Archon will help manage relations with other players and with the Galactic Council.
- The Expansion Archon will manage scouting, discovery, deployment, and colonisation of new colonies to expand your empire.
- The Federation Archon will be specifically tuned for Federation leaders and officers with tools such as attack coordination, federation-wide resource management, Moira construction and deployment, and other federation tasks.
We will not be adding the Archons until the Closed Beta testing phase, and they will all be available freely to closed beta testers, so there is a lot of time to fully flesh out the free to win model further.
At least this gives you some idea of our currently planned monetisation scheme and a glimpse into the philosophy behind our design decisions.
á na márië,
gumshoe, out.
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