Slow multimedia realtime 4x strategy game
I enjoy 4x games like Endless Legend, Civ, etc. but have always hated the combat. My enjoyment comes from expansion, exploitation , and the logistics to enable both, and military conquest is really just a tool for the above. However, in most games once a player chooses to commit to training units and marching them about, the game quickly turns into a slog because of all the extra analysis and finessing of movements per turn sky rockets.
Meanwhile, real time games have a tendency to focus explicitly on the micro and macro elements of game play, and entirely ignore the strategic layer of player interaction, given that the player has a limited time budget and can't be expected to simultaneously manage logistics, individual unit behavior AND political/territorial decisions.
I want to go in the other direction: a real time game that never pauses, and never allows one player's avalanche of minor decisions to halt the game... but where things evolve slowly enough that decisions can be set up ahead of time and be played out through automation while the player focuses on strategic layer decisions, large & small scale logistics, and offline life.
- Multiplayer games are always online, and persistent over the course of about a week of gameplay
- Players can log in through the computer client to issue orders, and manage their gov. much like any Civ game
- alerts about encountering enemies, daily headlines, in game events requiring player input also sent out via phone/web browser
- Doesn't need as much player input or UI as the game proper, but allows ad hoc decision making or edits to unit behavior in important moments
- Ex: earlier dave sent a skirmisher fleet under orders to fight to the last man two sectors away to test the enemy fortification this morning. That afternoon his skirmishers engage the enemy, and report overwhelming enemy strength. They will continue to fight as per previous orders, but dave can issue a new command to retreat via phone. (text message or its own app)
- The goal here is to treat the player like the supreme general/emperor for their faction. Their purview is the high level day to day of their empire such as sending ships to new lands, settling new cities, managing the economy, technological progress, the roads, infrastructure and resources their empire has to work with, and the political treaties that enable them to thrive.
- They do NOT directly manage every soldier in every platoon on every war front. AI captains automate unit behavior based on player set policy
- EX: A player may issue orders to a particular group of units to explore a particular region, and engage any threats encountered until about 25% health and then retreat if necessary. When a fight breaks out a HUD warning would show up allowing the player to intervene with new orders (fight to the last, retreat now etc.), but it's not necessary.
- All troop behavior, scouts, surveyors miners, city Governors, ambassadors, construction crews, etc. should operate in this way. The empire is a big place, and outside of the player there are many submanagers who automate its growth according to the player's policy decisions (formed by specific orders, or responses to events/technological).
- The player may at any point order a construction unit to build specific buildings in specific places or a merchant to build a specific trade route, or a city to focus on producing a specific resource - but no unit should ever just sit around inactive without specific instruction from the player.
- While idle, scientists/engineers should just aid which ever city they belong to/are near with building whatever it's working on
- Think Shogun Total war/Endless Legacy without turns, and where all combat is auto resolved over time based on standing behavioral orders., or stellaris where you don't have to baby sit every single unit all the time.
- Edicts: The primary interface of the player will be commanding specific units bound to hotkeys or managing specific planets/systems/governments/menu options, but the empire is large and the player may want to make sweeping commands without hunting down the location of every science ship and giving it the same command.
- From the empire stats page, a player should have a host of sweeping commands such as:
- All military ships with available upgrades move to the nearest spaceport for retrofit and pay the cost of upgrade if able.
- All scouts set to auto explore and survey
- All engineers move to the nearest settled area and passively boost production
- All local governments prioritize X/Y/Z resource production respectively
- For reference: the empire screen on endless space
- Instead of #turns required to build a building/produce a unit/move a certain distance, everything is real time but slow.
- The world/universe is a big place! It takes time to march/fly at sublight speeds. Depending on how far away an enemy encampment is, it may take your army literal days to reach them, and another day to fight them off, during which time your enemy may have tasked them with retreating, moving, or sent reinforcements.
- Battles are not about microtactics or randomness. It's about what goes into the fight, and your tactics around how the fight escalates
- Going into the fight: do you have superior numbers? Do you have superior armaments? Are you committing archers against cavalry? Is your captain more seasoned than theirs? Are your units better able to use the terrain (cannons vs footmen in forests)?
- Tactics: Do you have reinforcements on the way? Are you using this fight to engage the enemy army here while the rest of your host invades elsewhere? How long is your supply line to this fight compared to theirs? Do you have shipyards that can produce more units close by so you can reinforce faster than they can? Did you build barricades and other defensive structures before they showed up?