GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about planets

Published on Friday, May 5, 2023 By Frogboy In GalCiv IV Dev Journals

GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #15 - Thinking about Planets

I feel like the GalCiv IV planet management is missing something.

I think the bones are right but seems like there’s a lot of nobs that ultimately amount to very little.

The philosophy of being king of the world

In GalCiv IV the basic idea is that raw materials come, you do stuff with them, and the output can then be used in various useful ways. The concept is simple. The execution is…complicated.

Adjacency Bonuses

The idea here is that the player should be rewarded for where they place their improvements. Putting them together should give the player a bonus and sometimes, there should be something there to naturally enocurage someone to put a certain type of improvement there.

Percentage bonuses

In GalCiv IV, the raw inputs that come in are upgraded as a percentage into something else.

For example:

My mineral input is 25. Lots of stuff happens to that raw input and at the end, you end up with 74.26 which is then multiplied by approval to get you to 46.

What about the people?

So you have a simple idea: Raw resources come in, stuff is done to those resources that are all % effects which are then affected also by adjacency and you have an output.

Here’s my problem with this: Look again at that screenshot. The worker. The worker provides a +5% bonus. What? Isn’t the worker the one DOING the work? Why is he just another bonus?

Finding the fun

I don’t know quite yet what the best solution here is. But here is where my head is at today:

See these guys:

I really like the drag and drop interface we have in the game for the improvements. I would really like it if we could drag and drop our people and even move them around as we see fit around the planet. Get rid of the districts.

Instead you would move your people onto the tiles directly and they would give bonsues based on their job. Players could spend control to force someone to change their job (which makes sense to me, you’re forcing people to change their job).

Moreover, we could make it so that what they do is based on the improvement you put them adjacent to. So you could only put people adjacent to existing improvements (i.e. you can’t just throw them into the woods and expect space ships to get built!).

My crude mockup

So the idea would be that when you place down an improvement, it unlocks the adjacent regions. You can then drag an drop your citizens into those regions and they will provide BIG buffs to any improvement they are adjacent to (Especially if their profession matches the adjacent one).

A citizen could still be adjacent to two different improvements and it would give a buff to both (because these aren’t individual people mind you, they represent blocks of people).

Thoughts?

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Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova Dev Journals