Hero system - rpglike elements

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Sziklamester
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Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Sziklamester » Wed Apr 22, 2015 6:52 pm

First of all excuse me if I made mistakes in grammar (I am not an englishmen) secondly this subject interest me because my favourite game types the rpg's and I like almost every combination with them especially with strategy games. In moo2 there was a minor "herolike" implementations like colony leaders and fleet captains and I just want ask there is an option if not the vanilla game but as mod to be implement somehow?

I feel this can be an amazing idea but not sure how hard to code and implement things like this because I am not pro dev still and I am just tried the very basics on other games so need some time to study those things. I imagined this captain/leader module with random pilots and racial units whom could be recruitable and insert them to a colony and to a ship (still no talk any limits of this). With every turn those leaders and fleet captains can given experience points which can be spend to improve their skills or give them traits which could give some small but significant boosts to a part of colony/ship.

For this subject but not really the latest ideas it would be cool also a random ship generating or own maded ship types for races with option to raid/salvage/refit other race ships and implement our systems into it.

Thanks for reading and hope some way this could be in game at least as mod.

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Gyrfalcon
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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Gyrfalcon » Wed Apr 22, 2015 8:07 pm

I haven't really seen an implementation of the leader concept that was particularly satisfying. Either they're fairly incidental, like MOO2, in which case it's just decoration. Otherwise, when they're more central to the game, they end up being a micromanagement task, like SotS2's admiral system. I tend to find that, with a sandbox game like this, making up my own story is often more satisfying than the game trying to make one for me.
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Arioch
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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Arioch » Thu Apr 23, 2015 1:02 am

Gyrfalcon wrote:I haven't really seen an implementation of the leader concept that was particularly satisfying. Either they're fairly incidental, like MOO2, in which case it's just decoration. Otherwise, when they're more central to the game, they end up being a micromanagement task, like SotS2's admiral system. I tend to find that, with a sandbox game like this, making up my own story is often more satisfying than the game trying to make one for me.

I really liked the leaders in MOO2. It was a very light system that required minimal management -- each leader had a preset group of skills that scaled based on level, and you could assign leaders either to planetary governorship or fleet command (there were two types of leaders). For me, the bonuses provided by the fleet commanders were actually secondary to the "humanization" (if you can say that of alien characters) of the fleets; instead of random fleets A and B, I had Cyr's fleet and Jarred's fleet. I liked needing to designate a flagship and then remember that this ship was not expendable. It helped rather than hurt in making up my own story of the game. It was also fun to discover or rescue leaders as part of planetary or monster encounters - such as discovering Loknar, the Last Orion.

Endless Space had a similar system but with a large pool of abilities that you had to choose from each time the character leveled up. I thought this made the management of leaders a little bit more trouble than it was worth, as well as removing some of the uniqueness of the individual characters. Each one was just a blank slate with a name and an icon, and was otherwise identical to every other one. I think it's nice, especially in a replayable game, when you know that Cyr is the Fighter Ace and Tulock is the Bounty Hunter, each with appropriate abilities.

What we plan to do in SIS (time and resources permitting) is to have a fairly simple system similar to MOO2, in which leaders have pre-set abilities that scale with experience, and allow the player to assign them to any of a variety of available jobs, such as Adjutant, Research Director, Fleet Commander or Planetary Governor. In addition to the small bonuses that the leaders provide, they also put a face on the gameplay; the appropriate character reports to you what is happening, in his or her own words. My goal is to make the system as lightweight as possible (both for us to implement and for the player to manage) while providing maximum fun factor.

We also want to eventually add a (optional) feature in which you can give ships individual names, allowing for separate ship names and class names. I generally don't bother to name every individual unit in games like this, but it's a nice feature to have for flagships, and to give a special name to that plucky destroyer from Taffy 3 that survived the encounter with the Yamato.

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Gyrfalcon
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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Gyrfalcon » Thu Apr 23, 2015 2:38 am

Are the chief scientist characters the first part of that? Although I don't think the bonuses listed for them actually work right now.
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rattle
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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby rattle » Thu Apr 23, 2015 7:29 am

Great news, I loved the heroes from MoO2 for their simplicity and usefulness. It was always exciting if I was going to get Megatron to put him in charge of Orion or not.
Will ships / crews gain experience? Star Drive 2 also gives out medals as in passive bonuses for units that performed well under some given rules, like defending a planet, killing X ships, etc. Gives your assets some unique touch in which you may want to protect a highly decorated and high crew experience ship to refit it later.

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Arioch
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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Arioch » Thu Apr 23, 2015 7:51 am

Gyrfalcon wrote:Are the chief scientist characters the first part of that? Although I don't think the bonuses listed for them actually work right now.

Yes. Some of the bonuses don't work, but I think most of them do.

rattle wrote:Will ships / crews gain experience? Star Drive 2 also gives out medals as in passive bonuses for units that performed well under some given rules, like defending a planet, killing X ships, etc. Gives your assets some unique touch in which you may want to protect a highly decorated and high crew experience ship to refit it later.

Yes, that's something we'd very much like to do -- again, keeping it relatively simple and straightforward.

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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Hakon » Tue May 05, 2015 8:29 am

another system to look at would be SotS II, though much maligned for it's rocky start they did get it into a fully polished state evenetually (even released an xPac) and it had a command system I found really intriguing. The system felt like an iteration on Moo2's take on the idea, each fleet needed an admiral, and the admirals had specialties as well as skills and drawbacks, one might be great at leading colonization efforts but not at combat, another might be good at combat, but also a loose cannon that'd commit deploy forward out of place. Moreover admirals could die, even if the fleet wasn't destroyed when their command vessel went down, and you could research technologies like cybernetics or cloning that would enhance their longevity.

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Arioch
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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Arioch » Tue May 05, 2015 7:56 pm

Games that require leaders to perform most actions can be interesting, but the whole game has to be designed around that concept. I enjoyed the old KOEI games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms which required exactly that -- the core of the game was about recruiting and retaining large numbers of generals who were necessary for everything from building local infrastructure to recruiting and training armies, conducting diplomacy and espionage, and of course fighting battles. Capturing and converting leaders to your own side was a significant part of play. In the old MB boardgame Conquest of the Empire, troops had to be assigned either to a base or to a general, which were generic units that you had only a limited number of, and which could each only lead a limited number of troops. Captured generals could be imprisoned for later ransom or exchange, or could be executed and permanently removed from play. In both games, you had to be very conservative in moving forces, because losing a leader unit was very serious.

The first problem with trying to implement a system like this in SiS is that it would mean redesigning pretty much every element of the game. Elements like exploration would have to be rebalanced to an RPG-like model in which system-level threats would have to be scaled according to the power of the leader -- you can't afford to lose leaders during early exploration to powerful pirates or monsters, and yet if the leader gains power with experience, later threats will seem trivial if they don't also scale.

The second is the plausibility of requiring local leadership in a high-tech environment in which automation and long-range communication are presumably commonplace. In historical games like ancient China-themed Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Roman-themed Conquest of the Empire, it makes sense that random groups of men can't accomplish much without a leader to organize them; the leader and his personal followers are essentially what makes up the unit. But in a sci-fi epic, I'm not sure it makes sense that a scout or transport needs an Admiral on board to be able to do its job. Presumably every ship must have a captain and crew that is abstracted to be part of the unit, which should allow that unit to perform actions on its own.

The third issue is that if leaders are optional, then there can be a relatively small number of them, but if they are required, then there has to be a much larger number. If you only start with a few leaders, and they all get killed by pirates, what then? You can build more ships, but you may be unable to do anything with them if you run out of leaders early and have no way to get more. Romance of the Three Kingdoms had more than 200 leaders, and those were all drawn from the same pool -- they didn't have to worry about having 7 different races, so an equivalent leader pool in SiS might have to be much larger. This presents a problem both in asset creation (200+ leader portraits is a lot of work) and in design (can 200+ characters really each be meaningfully unique?). If leaders just become generic units like ships, then they lose the qualities of uniqueness that (I think) make them desirable in the first place.

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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby Ashbery76 » Mon May 18, 2015 8:30 pm

I did not like the leaders in Moo2 because they are basically a stat and a picture.I much prefer trait systems that at least give some personality ala Totalwar, Crusader kings.Leaders should offer some immersion and not just about being a malus or why bother having them.

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enpi
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Re: Hero system - rpglike elements

Postby enpi » Tue May 19, 2015 2:30 pm

I dont care about leaders. If I want to roleplay I am playing a roleplaying game. IMO 4x games which features whole epic space empires are not suited for single hero management. Thats the wrong scale.


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