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.