Sitting down to block out exactly what we wanted to build happened over the next few months. We knew that we’d start work around January/February 2022 as a lot of our other professional commitments were coming to an end, so we had some amount of time for the odd meeting and catch-up to discuss what we were after.
As mentioned in the previous post, we’d decided to make a 4X game with enough depth to satisfy our own desire for complex systems, but with a lot of other aspects of the genre trimmed back and streamlined.
Combat
Combat was a major sticking point for us, we felt that combat in other 4X games tended to get a bit bogged down, so we wanted to make a system that combined more arcade-y aspects with unit management aspects. We looked to Advance Wars for the streamlined approach, but expanded that out across multiple units within each army clashing in combat rounds, with breaks in-between rounds for the player to take action.
The Advance Wars battle screen, both sides exchange a volley and take casualties in around 2-3 seconds
We’re in the middle of testing a few different ideas for combat, two competing systems that we think would both work well in different ways. Keep your eyes peeled for a future blog post where we delve into the whole process in-depth!
Tech Tree
No 4X game would be complete without a Tech Tree style system! Normal progression through a 4X title usually involves researching different technologies over a number of turns that unlock various units and buildings when completed. These then branch off down a sprawling tree, creating a “critical path” that you must traverse in order to unlock later technologies.
The Civilization V tech tree, completed technologies in gold, available technologies in green
As we’re looking to scale back a lot of the sprawling elements of other 4X titles, we discussed some more compact ways of handling a tech tree. We wanted to preserve some aspect of a critical path without forcing the player into a long slog to unlock a particular technology that they liked the look of. We discussed other games that have done similar systems in the past, and settled on a system somewhat like the “Talent Trees” from World of Warcraft. This functions more like a skill tree than a traditional tech tree, allowing players to specialise in a particular aspect of gameplay.
The three aspects we’re focusing on are Conflict, Commerce and Exploration. Each skill tree will reward deep investment through powerful unlocks towards the end, but also allow easy access to hybrid choices. If a player feels that half investment in each of the three trees is better for their playstyle than full investment in one and partial in a second, then we want to incentivise that experimentation to a degree.
An example of talent trees from Classic World of Warcraft, allowing the player to allocate points in each tree
With this system, we’ve opted to go for a “Skill Point” system instead of a more traditional research-based one. Players will receive a skill point for accomplishing certain early-game tasks, such as winning a small battle, fully exploring their starting region, upgrading their town etc. Once this list of early-game tasks has been exhausted, a steady flow of points will be provided, every positive player action filling up a progress bar to award more points.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of some of the systems that we’re developing for the game. Next time we’ll discuss Pantheons and goddesses, complete with some art that we think you’ll love!