Ideas for planetary invasion mechanics for a 4x space opera.

Hi guys and girls,

Disclaimer here, I'm totally new to unity and I'm slowly working my way through all the tutorials and have been busy learning from everyone's mistakes, thanks for all the advice. My first games are going to be very small and simple. This is just a motivational dream game exercise, I know I'm not going to have the skills to make anything like this for years and possibly not ever.

But I'd love to make a turn based space 4x game, with only two main very distinct factions. My spin would be to make all the characters tangible entities, people with stats and personalities which have a massive effect on the word and say a war fleets performance. Capturing or killing these characters would lead to some compelling choices, and profundity effect the protagonists. A militaristic General may be humiliated and depressed at being captured, but if he were tortured for information it may boast his resolve apon rescue. Star Wars Rebellion did this poorly and I loved it.

My theoretical hurdle is that in all the 4x space games I've played planetary invasions are deeply unsatisfying. Invading a planet should take more than a turn right? Or is that going to bore the player, would the feet bombard the planets surface or use it's fighters to help? Or would a Civ style system with units duelling one by one with plenty defence modifiers work better?

And ideas would be very interesting, Cheers.

 

Over the past 10 years I've rarely played any 4x games, but this part of your concept sounds very interesting. Would make me take a second/third look - if this was a core arc in the game.

 

Then you decide that the kinds of outcomes should be determined by characteristics, which balloon to cover a million different cases that inevitably no player could reasonably be expected to understand what any outcome would actually be. It really boils down to whether you want to make a reality simulator that's always twenty years away from being complete, or you want to make a game.

4X games, but frequently space games too, are something where people want to make something of infinite scale, like people want to play in the entire universe, but also want to zoom in to see every penny in a house. Total War games are good examples, because while the RTS battles are nice, they end up being a distraction from the real game. It's easy to start dumping low level decisions for the player to micromanage that just keeps the player from being able to operate on higher levels.

 

So you've got two separate design problems here. The first is using generals. The second is planetary conquest.

On generals I would say the idea is interesting, but I've seldom seen it work. Its been tried in everything from Age of Empires to Civ. The problem is that 4X games are typically about having huge numbers of units, major battles and grand strategy. Having to worry about the location of an individual unit works against this general game theme. Especially if loosing one unit has a significant penalty (I'm looking at you AoE2).

Some games have done it well. Supreme Commander is one that comes to mind, where everything in the game is about the one general. It still has its problems, but it does add significant risk-reward dynamics to the game.

On planetary conquest this is just a matter of time vs scale. The longer you make capturing a planet take, the less planets you can expect to capture in a game. Look at Civ for an example. Between evenly matched civilizations, it can take a dozen turns to capture a city. That gives the defender plenty of time to bring up reinforcements. The eventual effect of this is long wars can be fought over single cities.

Its also worth considering having a penalty for taking over new planets. Civ does this fairly effectively. AI Wars is another one that comes to mind with a heavy penalty for taking over planets.

Ultimately the more detail you add, the less grand strategy you can have. And vice versa. Decide what level you want the game to play on, and do everything you can to make it shine at that level.