worldsmith
Augur
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2015
- Messages
- 107
You seem to have misunderstood what I was asking. I was specifically asking about the "fearsome alien race" tracked by the "doom timer" that pops out at turn 500. If they just appear out of nowhere (from the edge of the map or whatever) from who knows where at turn 500, then the "results of border skirmishes" (with the local aliens the player can see before turn 500) tells the player nothing about how strong this "fearsome alien race" will be when they suddenly show up -- unless you mean that the "fearsome alien race" themselves will engage in limited border skirmishes before turn 500? (But even then, that would only tell the player how strong their individual ships are and nothing about how strong the total force that will show up at turn 500 will be.)Due to asymmetric nature of most races strength would be frequently irrelevant
Of course, if you're setting up enough hurdles for the player that if they pass the hurdles then they will be strong enough to face the "fearsome alien race", then it doesn't matter if they don't know its strength beforehand.
The one suggestion I would make for such hurdles is to try to make it so the player is not rail-roaded into the same order of development every game (first develop thing #1 to handle hurdle #1, then thing #2 for hurdle #2, etc. where e.g. thing #1 is the same thing every game) or it may negatively impact replayability. One way to keep things fresher might be to make all of the hurdles scalable, and then in each game present them (or some subset of them if you have more different hurdles than are needed for any single game) in random order. For example, maybe the "get 50 planets" hurdle is actually "get N planets", where if it's the first hurdle of the game N=50, but if it's the third hurdle maybe N=150.Yes, indeed. I was thinking of a few "survival tests" on the way.
But there would also have to be some benefit to the player in the figuring-out/thwarting. So far it sounds like the player just takes over everything, so if some races are wasting resources doing something other than defend themselves or fight back (or take other supporting steps like research to do the same), that only helps the player. So perhaps these random things could be how some races get a big research bonus (or some sort of other large bonus) that would make them stronger - then the player has to either 1. take them over first (before it kicks in), 2. not take them over but thwart what they are doing (so they don't get stronger), or 3. let them get stronger and deal with the consequences later.to give them some kind of motivation for the player to figure out and/or thwart.
There's also the question of how does the player go about figuring out that a given race is attempting a given goal (and that by doing so that race will get a bonus).