Gameplay:
- Playstyle: x4 management game, your choices are which towns[tiles] to capture first, which to upgrade [different costs/efficiency], where to place your defenses / towers vs enemy
- Monopoly Elements: You gain +income per city per city improvement. These expand but require exponential more cost per build. Thus your management subgoal is to :
- Explore/Expand: acquire more tiles to spend money on, either though war or exploration
- Exploit: on your existing tiles find the ones that have 50% investment value i.e you get your money back after 2 turns, other choices are less effective and may make the ai snowball faster than you. More resource per turn => more improvements build
per turn. The balance of the economy is the investment value of
your buy i.e how many turns until you get your money back
Bug: Too snowbally, doubling your money every 2 turns, really? Totally unbalanced. - Exterminate: conquer enemy tiles to gain 100% of their tile stats. As you have realised, this is overpowered, it quickly twists the scales of balance and leads to snowballing. Currently it is too easy to gain 10000 incoming resources per turn after turn 10 and overcome any resistance. Bug: This element should be way stingier, to propably balance it, there should be -ownership rates for weaker tile acquisition i.e captured tiles should start by providing 0% of their stats (rebels, opposition, resistance) and scale with +10% per turn up to 100% of their stats like in endless legend
- Metagame Synopsis: The exponential nature of the game mandates that once one side gets an advantage, the game's fate is set, you have won, there is no need to continue playing to view the results of your actions, they are 100% predictable, and will always play out the same way across different games. There is no chance to come back. You just wait for the inevitable defeat. Trying to grind to become stronger will further expand that advange gap.
- Metagame Goal: so the genre's subgoal becomes starting with a weaker starting location than the enemy and struggling to survive, will you make it or die?. Once you have obtained the same power as the enemy, hit ALT + F4, there is no reason to play, no challenge, you have already won, why wait?, we already know who wins
- Snowball Moderation Idea: In spite league of legends works differently, the gold earned per minion death expands as the game time passes, the max item build is capped, therefore, you only have to delay the game enough to fix a gold imbalance. So the best playstyle is once you get a gold advantage is to use it to gank the opponent players, doing dragon etc. farming will lead your 500g advantage to get lost in the big picture.
- Diminishing Returns for Expansion: that 50% investment value on improvements should scale down per additional upgrade e.x 50%, 35%, 20%, 10%, 5%. That way it will encourage expanding your empire instead concentrating in one spot.
- Capped Power: finete amount of upgrades, generally a gameplay element that increases power should never scale with with already accumulated power = snowball. Add elements such as expansion disapproval, bureaucracy, empire upkeep that hurts your efficiency if you overexpand. Design the game around a certain ideal empire size.
- Alternative Income: Provide the game with fixed encounters [minions, respawnable objectives, procedural generated elements] that provides a constant set of income that scales over time. You can now grind until you are strong enough to face the enemy
- Capped army force: a fixed set of encounters have to be faced in order to "win" the game. example: The Sorcerer King. Here we have an asymmetric system, you can become stronger but the enemy force the sorcerer king cannot become stronger, so you can take your time to grind until you are strong enough to beat him
- Tiered Upgrades: new improvement tiers are unlocked later. A boss acts as a roadblock preventing you from switching tiers. Example:
Tier 1: 10 map tiles, max improvement upgrade 2, boss power: 20
Tier 2: 20 map tiles, max improvement upgrade 3, boss power: 40
Tier 3: 30 map tiles, max improvement upgrade 4, boss power: 80
a [grind wave] periodically spawns, you have to place towers / defenses to repel it, repair costs, defense upkeep, unit sustainance loss is the penaldy for taking too long, but you are rewarded xp, gold, items needed to defeat the boss. When you feel ready you can face the boss, and unlock the next tier era upgrade.
- Fun Factor: Minigames: each battle has a specific subgoal [different depending mission], like sonic shuffle or swords and sandals 4 minigames. This seems fun on paper but on large maps it gets repetitive quickly. You experience all minigames, again and again and again, and each turn requires playing 3 minigames, this is broken. Solution: in swords and sandals 4 minigames happened every 3-5 turns = Not so frequent. Plus it had a huge plethora of mini-games. Depending on stage used different minigames were unlocked/used, yes each stage had its unique selection of minigames. Also it was luck based if you fell into a minigame tile or not, depending on dice rolled. Plus you could choose different path to avoid it. The game would be funnier if they disabled minigames altogether and allowed auto-combat. This would allow you to focus purely on the management side of the game. Currently minigames feel like a "forced grind" in order to progress and view the results of your decisions.
- Critical Hits: delevel your body parts by 1 level [so your lv10 weapon becomes lv9, and so on, when it reaches lv0 it gets disabled, so it completely removes that weapon/spell/stat]
Quotes:
our ancestors crossed the great void milenia ago, pilgrims, world long since lost, their courage, struggle and fortitude, gave birth to our civilization, for many centuries our people prospered, peaced ruled the planet, have long speculated that, and enstablished a new home, but their searching has been met with silence, until now, the transmittion was weak and incomplete, what knowledge had our brothers developed during the long journey of seperation, ambassadors recruited but gradually the meaning of the message was clear, it was a desperate call for help, revelation that we are not alone, our fleet has been equiped, and we are ready to answer their call, what shall we find, we are ready as we set our course beyond our, seek intergalactic / interplanetary contact,
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