Star Dynasties – Crusader Kings In Space

[Life of the Party]

https://stardynasties.com

Spoiler

The Game

Humanity had taken its first tentative steps in space, but the inadvertent destruction of Earth has plunged the galaxy into a new dark age. Hundreds of years later, the surviving colonies have stabilised into a simple feudal society, unable to understand or extend the technological artifacts they use to survive. An aristocratic elite fight between themselves for the right to rule over the scattered fragments of human kind.

You are the leader of a faction of star systems, seeking to ensure the survival and prosperity of your dynasty. Expand your empire, herd your unruly vassals, build political alliances, and navigate a web of agendas and social obligations to emerge as the dominant power of the galaxy.

• Take on the role of the head of a political family through multiple generations, and lead it to dominance over the remnants of human civilization
• Uphold the traditions and laws of society and earn a reputation for honor, or seize power and risk turning the galaxy against you
• Interact with hundreds of characters with realistic personalities, emotions, and relationships
• Punish those that have wronged you, and reward your allies
• Experience an emergent narrative of personal and political drama

For more about the vision behind Star Dynasties, read the Core Concepts blog post.

Game Vision / Concepts

I’ve been working on building support for the two separate game modes that Star Dynasties will have, but in trying to write a post about it I’ve realized I first need to talk about the fundamental concepts and vision of the game.

What is Star Dynasties about?

A game about being a king that focuses on human drama



The initial spark was the thought, after countless playthroughs of Civilization and other classic strategy games, that history (particularly ancient and medieval history) looks very different from the narratives that arise in those games. Kings and emperors were much more dependent on social and political skills than they were on their technical and administrative skills. And in societies where political power was primarily personal or dynastic, kingdoms rose and fell as much on the basis of human foible and drama as on the basis of economic and military strength. Alliances were built on personal charisma and friendships, wars have been fought over a lover, thrones have been lost through social ineptitude, rebellions have started from feuds between a monarch’s rulers and their personal friends, etc.

It’s this personal dimension that makes a lot of history, fantasy, or future feudal sci-fi fascinating. When you strip away the context of a story about a medieval or fictional monarch, the narrative is full of human experiences that we can relate to. A king worrying about his heirs is no different from any father wanting the best for their children’s future. Acts of personal betrayal or indiscretions that lead to the ruin of a realm or royal dynasty, may be events with much higher stakes and on a much grander scale than our lives, yet in their essence there is something that resonates deeply with our own human experience.

A simulation of a feudal society that generates believable narratives



There is something deeply fascinating in observing, and interacting with, a complex system. In part, the “fun” of playing a game is the sheer thrill of working out patterns, and manipulating them to achieve certain goals. And what can be more complex, yet universally resonant, than a human society; with all those individuals trying to live out their own lives, seeking happiness, avoiding isolation and pain, and bending the rules and culture of that society to their personal benefit and wellbeing?

Games such as Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld have proven that you can generate elaborate and convincing stories from a world simulation that reaches a certain level of complexity. When a player experiences two events in succession, they will inevitably link them in their minds in a story, especially if the events have a logical sequence in a narrative sense. For example, if in the first event character A does something nice for character B, and in the second event character B does something nice for character A, any human observer would say that this is a reciprocation and that the two events are linked, even if the second event was not triggered explicitly by a simulated “reciprocity rule”. The fact that the player perceives the two events as a quid pro quo is an emergent property of the simulation, rather than something that was necessarily explicitly coded in the simulation rules.

This is also true for more complex event chains; a sequence of negative acts that happen to escalate will appear to be a planned strategy of conquest or harassment, a sequence where positive acts are unrewarded at a critical moment will appear to be a betrayal. The critical prerequisite is to make sure that the sequences of events that occur in the simulation are not unbelievable or immersion breaking – we can then trust the human brain to do the rest.

A feudal frontier sci-fi setting



The choice of a science fiction setting allows for interesting design decisions or world building that would not be possible in a historical setting. I love sci-fi because it creates what-if scenarios that couldn’t be set up in a historical context, and it allows us to strip away ancillary details to focus on the core properties of a social or political pattern.

Furthermore, it provides the freedom to solve some knotty game design or implementation problems by altering a detail in the setting. For example, Star Dynasties has a population control mechanic that serves both to limit runaway population growth in the simulation over time, and provides an interesting political tool by which you can reward your favourites.

At the same time, it’s important to note that the requirement to model a realistic feudal system that persists through multiple generations does create some hard constraints. Marriages and kinship relationships are the key enablers of legitimate power transfer and alliances, the economy must be land-locked (or planet-locked) and relatively disconnected to maintain the long-term stratification of the society, technological growth must be relatively stagnant, etc.

Similarity to existing games



Star Dynasties was inspired originally by a love of empire management strategy games such as Civilization, Total War, Knights of Honor, etc.

In choosing to focus on the human drama, I have drawn inspiration from roleplaying simulation games such as The Sims, King of Dragon Pass, and choose your own adventure-style games such as Nation States and Reigns. In understanding how complexity creates emergent narratives, games like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld have been instructive.

The game that shares the most concepts and similarities with Star Dynasties is Crusader Kings. To the maximum extent possible (I am a solo dev with some help), my intention is to build a game that has an even greater emphasis on, and mechanistic understanding of, stories of human drama. For example, the simulation in Star Dynasties understands the notions of empathy, simplistic morality, social obligations, grudges and favours; and uses that to build logically consistent sequences of events. I would also like the player experience to be focused on navigating a branching narrative that rewards strategic thinking, with less administrative micromanagement tasks such as troop movement.

 

[grimace]

"To the maximum extent possible (I am a solo dev with some help), my intention is to build a game that has an even greater emphasis on, and mechanistic understanding of, stories of human drama."

Life of the Party is this your game?

 

[Space Satan]

I am a solo dev with some help

 

[oscar]

This was a promising mod

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1361737018&searchtext=crisis

 

[Space Satan]

Dev seems to keep posting so it it not dead yet. I'd rather welcome a Paradox-style dev diaries with some bits of mechanics here and there.

 

[Space Satan]

I am kinda interested in the project so will try to track dev progress reports

[B

March Progress Update[/B]]

March Progress Update
Story Events Editor

The big news this month is that I’ve made good progress on an editor for adding story events to the game. I will be making this editor available to everyone eventually as a modding tool, and I can’t wait to see what people will come back with.

Let’s quickly put together a story event so you can see how it works.


Defining a story event’s “cast” in the editor

Fleshing out a story event’s details in the editor

Adding decision choices to a story event in the editor

And now we can try it out in the game
I’ve also been putting together a test pack of story events to thoroughly test the editor and add more content to the game. So far I’ve reproduced all the 18 story events that I prototyped in v0.4 via the editor, and added another 23. Some of those are multi-part stories that can span multiple turns. For example, if you have a hot-headed character as your head of military, you might get the following.



If you let him run the training as he wants, he’ll occasionally get you into further trouble…



Another benefit of the story event editor is that the game can show the player what the effect of a choice will be. E.g., the following is the tooltip you will see for a choice in a story about experimenting with a new medical treatment.


You can see in detail what may happen
Not all the stories I’ve added have fleshed out descriptions, I’ve been focused more on the functionality at this point. The rate at which I’m adding these story events is quite slow while I’m still working on the editor. But in future, putting together a story event should take me a lot less time than it would by coding it directly into the base game (like the core actions and events).

Early Access or Kickstarter?
I’m wondering whether to run a Kickstarter. I feel the game needs more work, and I need some help to get it past the finishing line. I would love to add some more art to the game. It would be nice to get some assistance on writing story events. And I could use some help with making the UI more digestible. I had been planning to open up the game to Early Access on itch.io, but another option would be to run a Kickstarter with beta access for backers. I’m still mulling over my options, so any thoughts or suggestions are most welcome.

Revamping Updates
I’m going to be working on revamping the way updates work internally. That may not be exciting from a player’s perspective, but updates are one of the oldest piece of scaffolding in the game, with many pieces that have been duct taped on over time. It needs to be given some tender love and care before I stack a bunch of story events on top of it. There are two impacts of that which will be visible.

1) I would like updates to automatically tell you what has explicitly changed in the world as part of that event, rather than just contain a freeform description.

2) I would like the game to be smarter in figuring out which updates to show you and which to hide.

Showing the Right Amount of Updates
This is a difficult problem. First off, the importance of an update depends on its context. It might not be important to the player to know that a neighbouring leader has promoted somebody to their council. However, if the neighbouring leader fired the player’s daughter to promote someone else, the player might be interested.

Secondly, its difficult for the game to know what the player is interested in. Different players have different interests. Its also difficult to work out how the “interestingness” of an update changes when it happens to someone you know or care about. And how does the game even know who the player cares about?

If the game shows you too many updates you don’t care about, it becomes difficult to pay attention. If the game misses some updates that are necessary to understand the context you’ve ended up with (“wait… since when were those guys at war?”), it becomes confusing. So there’s a narrow sweet spot where the game shows you just the right amount of updates. I’ve already experimented with various approaches in this area over the development of the game, and I think there is one last set of refinements I can put in to put this one to rest for now.

Social Media
Lastly, I’m going to try to be a little more active on social media and this blog. This is a struggle for me – I’m not an extrovert, and my natural inclination is to hide in my developer cave. However when people discuss the game and come back with comments I find it very helpful and rewarding, so I will do my best to do more of that.

 

[Space Satan]

Your spouse died.
- Extract his semen to give birth to an heir
- Order to make a clone.
- Make a virtual copy of his conciousness

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

It looks really customizable, could put that in if it isnt in already.

 

[Space Satan]

Spoiler

Progress this month has been about incremental changes to make the game more fun to play.

Changes to Security
You can now assign security team members to investigate a character, house, star system, faction, or league. During an investigation, you will gradually find out information about that object. For example, you may discover family members for characters, claimants to rule for star systems, the member systems for factions, etc... If the investigation is on a character, there is a chance that you will discover some of their secrets.

Investigations can give you more political options. For example, by finding a character with a legitimate claim to rule a star system, you get a more acceptable way to challenge its current ruler. Its also a way to discover more of the map, as investigating a star system or faction will reveal neighbouring star systems.



Picking an investigator

You can now use your security team to cover up secrets. Secrets have a base discovery difficulty (Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, and Never... the latter meaning that the secret cannot be discovered, only revealed by characters that already know it). When you cover up a secret, you spend money to make it one step harder to discover, and you can repeat the action until the secret cannot be discovered at all. This makes secret actions much more useful. In the current alpha build, secrets are rarely worth the risk. By being able to cover them up, you can now use tools such as murder or seduction where appropriate. Of course, since your Head of Security is covering up your secrets, you will want to make sure to stay on their good side (or dispose of them permanently).



Covering up a secret

Changes to Diplomacy
In the current alpha build you assign house members to diplomacy, giving you a universal bonus to opinion. This is too simplistic. To make diplomacy more about managing who to send your ambassadors to;
- I've reduced the size of this universal bonus (except for vassals)
- I've increased the bonus generated by having an ambassador in a foreign house
- Ambassadors sent to leading houses now have a small effect on your approval from the rulers within that faction as well

Lastly, it is now possible to swap an ambassador with another at a foreign court, without having to recall them and cause offence.

Update Refactoring and Visibility
I finished the work I talked about last month, and I'm comfortable that the solution is as good as I can achieve. One more interesting change that's come out of that is a tweak to the History panel. It now opens up filtered to the handful of most important updates about an object. This is much more digestible, and the History panel is now a great way to recap a character and remind you of who they are and why they're important to the story.



How has this character been involved in the story?

Game Balance
I've invested a lot of time this month to just playing the game. That seems like a funny thing to say, but finding enough time to play the game is tough. It's hard to get a real sense of the mechanics of any game without several playthroughs. Because a game of Star Dynasties is meant to last multiple evenings, "several playthroughs" is a lot of time. Given that I'm constantly tweaking and changing the game (and frequently breaking my own saves), its a real challenge to have a comprehensive understanding of what the game is like to play at any one time. Every now and then I come across something that's the consequence of a change I implemented months back.

One thing I am working towards is establishing the journey that the player goes through in a game. A big part of it is the way your empire's stability decays as it grows;
- When you conquer new territory and install your cronies to rule it, you build up enemies that can come back to try to recover their birthright
- Bringing new vassals under your wings makes you responsible for helping them with their grievances
- More vassals means more opportunities for internal squabbling
- An expanding and successful bloodline creates competitors to your throne
- The administration demands outstrip your house's capabilities, forcing you to carve up your empire
- A larger empire can be harder to defend military (not yet reflected in the game mechanics)
- Succession is a difficult time that tends to reverse some of the gains you've made. This is because allies of the old leader can be very cool to the new leader, and he or she is usually much less capable
- Etc, etc...

The player's challenge is to maintain political stability as they grow their empire, and to weather life's misfortunes.

One thing that's good to see is how the new Story Events play out in practice. Even the very small pool that I've implemented so far have started to flesh out the world and bring characters to life.

Next
My focus over the next few weeks is adding more story events into the game, and starting to work on a major system - Negotiation. This will emulate the way diplomacy worked in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. You make a request of another character, and they can refuse, accept, or counter with a request of their own. I will map all the current requests / offers to the new system. It should allow for some interesting trades, e.g. "give me Sirius in return for my son's hand in marriage". Also I'm trying to work out whether blackmail or threats could be a part of the system.

I'm building up to either Early Access or a Kickstarter (with beta access as a reward) in June, so I'm also working to polish some of the rougher edges of the current build.

 

[Space Satan]

Game seem to be alive with dev diaries releasing regularly. Which is a surprise nowdays as indies never reaching beta status are common

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Bibbimbop]

Ay yo, hold up. Is you sayin we wuz space dynasties an shieeeet?

Why so many brown people in this game?

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Ay yo, hold up. Is you sayin we wuz space dynasties an shieeeet?

Why so many brown people in this game?

A bias towards civs based around high UV stars. Gimme dem red dwarf clans and then we'll half a chat, no whut i'm sayin, homie?

 

[Norfleet]

Why so many brown people in this game?

I don't see an unusually high number of brown people. I see some generic white people, some generic brown people, but what I don't see are any generic YELLOW people.

 

[Xamenos]

I've been accepted into the closed alpha, and can apparently talk about anything as long as I don't include any footage. I've played for a couple hours, and the game so far seems promising if a bit too simple. Ask away if you guys wanna learn anything about the game as it currently stands.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

"a bit too simple" and you've already said it's pointless shit. thank you.
=_=

 

[Luka-boy]

I've been accepted into the closed alpha, and can apparently talk about anything as long as I don't include any footage. I've played for a couple hours, and the game so far seems promising if a bit too simple. Ask away if you guys wanna learn anything about the game as it currently stands.

Well some general impressions with the aspects of the game you like the most so far, what makes you feel the game is simple and if there's anything you outright don't like would be a good start.

 

[Space Satan]

too simple compared to what? CKII? Civilzation?

 

[Xamenos]

I've been accepted into the closed alpha, and can apparently talk about anything as long as I don't include any footage. I've played for a couple hours, and the game so far seems promising if a bit too simple. Ask away if you guys wanna learn anything about the game as it currently stands.

Well some general impressions with the aspects of the game you like the most so far, what makes you feel the game is simple and if there's anything you outright don't like would be a good start.

Yeah, that's reasonable. Probably should've started with that.

Anyway, what I liked:
Everything to do with the character system. Every character has traits and skills. Skills are like CK2's attributes, except they grow as a character does his jobs, and there's no learning or tech growth. Traits affect relations, but more importantly happiness. Happiness is pretty important, giving a bonus to everything a character does. And things you do that affect someone else's happiness also affect your relations. People like you when you do things that make them happy, and also when you do good things for their friends. An example of all this: On my first game my medical councilor was Proud and untalented at being a medic. As a result she hated her job and she was miserable. One of my vassals was her friend, and he hated my guts because every single trait we had was incompatible and I was making his friend unhappy. I later switched her to a different council position and gave her a husband she loved, she became happy, and my vassal (barely) stopped hating me without me doing anything for him directly.
The game also has a grievances and favors system that are generated by various things you do.And they can cancel each other out, giving a nice sense of "eye for an eye" and escalating vendettas. For example, you can ask any of your vassals for money. It normally generates a grievance, but if the vassal has previously given you a grievance (by refusing a call to arms, for instance) then the grievances cancel each other and the matter is considered settled. Unless you opt for a punishment more severe than the crime, at which point not all grievances are cancelled, and the matter may gradually escalate.
Secrets. Not everything is public knowledge. Everything clandestine starts as a secret that can be discovered. For example, I had an affair with one of my vassals. In the beginning it was a secret and everything was fine. But then people found out, my wife hated me, and I got a bad reputation for being dishonorable towards her.
Action points. Every turn you get a number of action points depending on your happiness. Everything you do requires various amounts of action points, from arranging a marriage to attacking a system. You, theoretically, can't do everything you want to do each turn.

What I disliked:
The economy is practically nonexistent. Every system has an econ rating, current and maximum eg 50/60. You can invest to increase the current rating, up to the max, but there's nothing you can do to increase the max. Your system's economy affects your taxes, the size of your personal fleet, and the maximum size your house can be before it starts generating unrest. And that's about it.
Military is similarly simple. You have your personal forces and your vassal forces. Vassals cannot support their forces too far from their homes. You don't move your fleets directly. Instead when you click to attack a system, you automatically gather all available fleets in range, (unless a vassal refuses which generates grievances), the defender does the same, and you fight it out immediately. Admirals give bonuses and can generate events that affect the battle, but otherwise raw numbers are used to generate the odds of victory and the larger force generally wins. You cannot improve your fleets' quality, morale or even composition. It's all just raw numbers.
There's not enough to do at peace time. After a while I kept ending turns with half my action points unspent.
The world is too static. You cannot colonize new systems. Existing systems will max out their economy shortly after galaxy creation, and remain that way for the entire game. Economy decays a bit every turn, but not enough to affect anything. And there is no technology progression, no progression at all actually. Nothing to differentiate factions at all.

too simple compared to what? CKII? Civilzation?

Both.

 

[AgentFransis]

Sounds about what I expected from a solo dev CK in space. The CK part sounds like a good iteration on the system but the space part sounds way too simple. Basically this guy wanted to do his own take on the CK formula but didn't want to/couldn't do a straight CK clone so he put it in space which is a lot easier to do. But then you're left with the system but without all the historic richness to apply it to and also without the scope of proper 4X to make an interesting sandbox. A waste of a concept.

I wish he remade Emperor of the fading suns instead.

 

[Xamenos]

Sounds about what I expected from a solo dev CK in space. The CK part sounds like a good iteration on the system but the space part sounds way too simple. Basically this guy wanted to do his own take on the CK formula but didn't want to/couldn't do a straight CK clone so he put it in space which is a lot easier to do. But then you're left with the system but without all the historic richness to apply it to and also without the scope of proper 4X to make an interesting sandbox. A waste of a concept.

I wish he remade Emperor of the fading suns instead.

Sounds about right. The game is still in Alpha though, there has been lots of discussion on these topics in the Alpha channels and the dev is pretty active there. I doubt the end product will be identical to what it currently is, but it remains to be seen to what extend things are gonna get better.

 

[AgentFransis]

Sure. Clearly this isn't supposed to be any kind of 4X+CK nor is it feasible for one man working commercially to make. But he should still evolve the strategy elements to at least something like CK levels. Then I think he should make a large, detailed and beautiful handcrafted map. Write some lore. Rip-off every scifi setting you can think of, ideally Dune. Make a universe people can care about, not generic scifi universe #4063.

 

[Trash]

The character system actually sounds pretty good. Otherwise I'm not that enthousiastic. In the end its the different systems working together to create something entertaining. Most of the systems here seem to be pretty barebones. Will keep an eye on it though.

Been wanting a game with a setting like this ever since I read Dune. Emperor of the Fading Suns was a letdown and I was especially pissed when Mech Lords fell through. And then we had that really fun CK2 mod named Crisis of the Federation that really was going places before the modder quit. Oh well.

EDIT: Holy shit. They recently started work on the mod again! Awesome.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...confederation-crusader-kings-in-space.803651/

 

[IDtenT]

I am a solo dev with some help

You trusted someone who made pic related.

Just my smooth brain take.

 

[hoothoot]

Blowing up a planet and getting the planet-killer trait but some of its nobility escape later to kill you in personal combat could be cool. But you would need many and better possible scenarios like that to make it better than ck2 imo.