Game Design

Synopsis

4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate) Space Strategy Game. Players start out on a single planet ( their home planet ) in their home system. They begin with a single ship, an unarmed scout ship with the simplest type of interstellar drive available, which makes it useful only for exploring the closet neighboring star systems. As the game progresses, the range of these ships is increased by retrofitting them with new technologies, allowing these ships to reach farther into the galaxy at greater speeds. The player eventually encounters other races and can choose to either co-exist peacefully (using diplomacy), less peacefully (using espionage), or engage in all-out war. Possible victory conditions include a Total Miltary Victory, Diplomatic Victory, a Science Victory ( Creating a sentient AI entity ), or an Exploration Victory ( Creating a inter-galactic exploration ship to explore a whole new galaxy ).

Major Gameplay Elements

1. Exploring the galaxy.
2. Expanding your race's influence to areas of the galaxy.
3. Researching new technologies.
4. Improving colonies with improvements obtained via research.
5. Building ships to for exploration, colonization, and combat.
6. Engaging in diplomacy with other players.
7. Fighting battles in both space and in-orbit around colonies.

Exploring The Galaxy

The Galaxy is divided into Sectors, which are further divided into Clusters, which are composed of Systems, which are a number of planets orbiting a Star ( possibly have binary stars? ). Having this sort of staged zoom levels should make navigation on mobile devices easier, while not dramatically holding up players on larger screens. Additionally, it also creates some opportunities to create some different gameplay elements with regards to the different areas of the galaxy ( technological requirements to be able to travel across clusters/sectors? )

Expanding influence

Colonies can be created on any planet, moon, or sufficiently large asteroid that can be reached with a colony ship. Mining fleets can be used to extract resources from asteroid belts. Research ships can build research outposts in remote corners of the galaxy.

Unlike most 4X games, colonies don't directly produce new units. Colonies produce resources, which are then allocated towards "projects". These projects can range from building an improvement for a colony, to building a fleet of ships ( or event just one! ). Projects can be either a "civil project", which is either a colony improvement or some sort of civilization-wide improvement, or a "military project" which is the building of a new military facility or fleet.

Projects

Projects represent your civilization's current production goals. You can have as many projects going at one time as you want, but since they're all competing for resources, it's probably best to have as small a set of ongoing projects at any one time. Example projects are:

• Building an orbital shipyard at a colony ( Civil Project )
• Building a new colonization fleet. ( Civil Project )
• Building a scout fleet ( Military Project )
• Building a new Capital Ship

Fleets

Most 4X games operate in terms of individual units. We're going to deviate from that pattern and instead emphasize the concept of a group a ships together in a fleet. To support this, we're going to have 3 classes of ship: Capital Ships (Carriers, Battleships, Dreadnoughts, etc.), support ships ( frigates, destroyers, cruisers, etc.), and non-combantant ships ( colony ships, troop transports, cargo ships, mining ships, research ships ). Fleets can be a small as a single ship, and be merged and divided as needed ( as long as each fleet maintains the 1+ ship requirement ). Larger fleets with different types of ships receive combat bonuses, incentivizing the player to maintain diverse fleets of ships, instead of small numbers of death-star like mobile battle stations.