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Re: Hyperion's Colony Outline

#31
Hyperion wrote:I apologize for the long delay between posts, but Part 4, Group Mechanics is now up
It was worth the wait, although I only waited about a day since I discovered this thread yesterday :?. I really am enjoying the amount of thought and consideration that you've put into this idea. It's really cool to see an idea that is so well put together.

Hyperion wrote:Groups are dumb. Communities are dumb. They’ll purchase a random selection of whatever is available and they can afford.
Why is this the case? Should an owner of a group not be able to specify what they want a group to buy? Then the group will buy goods based on a random chance, but weighted (maybe based on the total sum of obedience in the group) towards what the owner wants. That way if you buy a group you don't have the worry of it destroying itself by just buying the wrong commodities.
A life well lived only happens once.
Seems deep until you think about it.
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Re: Hyperion's Colony Outline

#32
tl;dr: I am concerned that this idea does not at all mesh well with LT.


After giving this a more thorough reading, I'm now tremendously concerned about Josh adding this to Limit Theory. What you're proposing is basically a full-featured standalone 4X Civ game inside Limit Theory, from what I can tell. This is problematic because, not only are people not playing Limit Theory so they can play a colony management game, but it is completely at odds with the general feel.

Here's a good analogy. Let's say you're playing Witcher 3. Then, suddenly, while you're running around, you come across a village. This village is plagued by bandits and monsters. Do you take out contracts? No. In fact, everything switches to an above-cam RTS mode. You now control the village and the villagers within, and must deal with bandits and monsters yourself, trying to make the village stronger. The days roll by, and Geralt sits completely idle, his quests forgotten. You can switch back to him at any time, but you're aware that if you do, the village will probably suffer and die without your assistance.

This is a bit too large to be considered a minigame. I would propose calling it a "subgame" - a full-sized game within Limit Theory - and I feel that's an inherently bad idea.

What's more, 4X games like Civilization attract a completely different audience than a game like Limit Theory. However, understanding both parts of the game seems to be essential to playing LT well. This, in effect, alienates both kinds of players by forcing them to do something they don't find fun.
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Re: Hyperion's Colony Outline

#33
In my head everything that Hyperion has said involves a mod of LT, and not an actual game mechanic that should be in Limit Theory.
Talvieno wrote:tl;dr: I am concerned that this idea does not at all mesh well with LT.
A lot of mods are going to end up going against the "LT feel". I mean the fact that you have to mod something into the game has only one of two reasons, either Josh didn't have time or he didn't want to put it in actual LT. I think that a lot of mods are going to fall into that second category of things that Josh might have been able to put in LT but didn't really want to because of his idea of the game. This is one of the reasons we have mods, its to be able to extend the original idea of the game further than what the creator made.
Talvieno wrote:In fact, everything switches to an above-cam RTS mode. You now control the village and the villagers within, and must deal with bandits and monsters yourself
The way I feel about this mod is that it doesn't force you to play LT using it. It just acts in the background giving a little more depth to how colonies work. Like most things in LT it doesn't scream for your attention. Most things in LT will be things you can do but don't have to. I mean there are asteroids all over the place, but you don't have to mine them, just pay someone else. I hope that this mod will end up being similar. If you don't want to have to deal with colony mechanics then just hire an AI to do it for you or just ignore it completely, it'll handle itself. If you really want to have the depth that goes with this then you're quite capable of diving deep.

Side note, if you could wave a magic wand over the colony mechanics and make them however you wanted them with as much depth or lack of depth as you wanted what would you do.
A life well lived only happens once.
Seems deep until you think about it.
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Re: Hyperion's Colony Outline

#35
I understand your concerns Tal, and to an extent, you're right, what I'm proposing is in essence a full subgame within LT. This is likely too substantial to include in 1.0, which is why I said my proposal is for the Planetary/Colony Ownership Expansion. When you consider the scale and ambition of LT, when you consider how much it already covers, an expansion needs to really EXPAND the possible gameplay. Not to mention it being a major step towards MorrowJosh :monkey: Therefore, it seems perfectly reasonable for an Expansion to have a different feel from the Original.
Talvieno wrote:What's more, 4X games like Civilization attract a completely different audience than a game like Limit Theory. However, understanding both parts of the game seems to be essential to playing LT well. This, in effect, alienates both kinds of players by forcing them to do something they don't find fun.
Attracting a different, broader audience is not a bad thing in my opinion. I disagree that it alienates players though, as LT already has numerous components that affect gameplay but cannot all be mastered or focused on at once. I haven't quite gotten to writing out the ways in which these fine details will scale up to a larger picture and fit within the universe of LT, but things like HICUS indexes are similar to ship components in that you can fine tune them to maximize and optimize and specialize, but only if you really want to because you can get along just fine without them.

On a colony, HICUS is split into the many districts, but for somewhere far away, the HICUS compresses into a single value set for the colony as a whole. Even Further away, it's one set of values for the whole planet, the whole system, the whole sector. Which is why I think it's a great tool for worldgen as well, as you can just define the values for a whole sector of space initially, then when you get closer that set fragments into system values, then closer still each system fragments into planet values, each planet fragments into colonies, and each colony fragments into districts. The weight of each fragment is of course not just a random split, nor an equal split, but is determined by many other factors within the worldgen algorithm. But I digress...
vector67 wrote: It just acts in the background giving a little more depth to how colonies work. Like most things in LT it doesn't scream for your attention. Most things in LT will be things you can do but don't have to. I mean there are asteroids all over the place, but you don't have to mine them, just pay someone else. I hope that this mod will end up being similar. If you don't want to have to deal with colony mechanics then just hire an AI to do it for you or just ignore it completely, it'll handle itself. If you really want to have the depth that goes with this then you're quite capable of diving deep.
Exactly!
vector67 wrote:
Hyperion wrote:Groups are dumb. Communities are dumb. They’ll purchase a random selection of whatever is available and they can afford.
Why is this the case? Should an owner of a group not be able to specify what they want a group to buy? Then the group will buy goods based on a random chance, but weighted (maybe based on the total sum of obedience in the group) towards what the owner wants. That way if you buy a group you don't have the worry of it destroying itself by just buying the wrong commodities.
Weighting it via obedience? I like that. My thing on groups being dumb is that because a group is representative of a large number of actors but is only a single actor, the desire for a random selection of whatever is available and affordable is both to keep group AI to a minimum and to represent the varied desires of many members.
vector67 wrote:I really am enjoying the amount of thought and consideration that you've put into this idea. It's really cool to see an idea that is so well put together.
:D Thanks! I have been working on it on and off for almost a year now :p
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Re: Hyperion's Colony Outline

#37
No, I haven't gotten bored with this, I assure you. It is in fact going to be one of my top priorities in trying to work on after I get access to the mod editing tools. I still have the rough draft versions of a few more sections, but both issues in my personal life as well as the distraction of other ideas have had me put this on the back burner for the time being. My vision for the mod is still strong and I think the core ideas could even be expanded upon beyond my own capabilities if some others want to assist me in developing this.

I can look at finishing up the more complete posts in the next few weeks, but I'm waiting to see how reimplementing gameplay for vanilla goes until I return to a serious focus on this.
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Challenging your assumptions is good for your health, good for your business, and good for your future. Stay skeptical but never undervalue the importance of a new and unfamiliar perspective.
Imagination Fertilizer
Beauty may not save the world, but it's the only thing that can

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