In the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to break down my thoughts and how they have been informed by issues in AI, economics, game design, and trek lore.
It’s a truism that change should never happen for change sake, but it’s easy to forget that when developing a mod. Without the constraints of publisher demands, customer requirements or time, everyone simply wants to do their dream project, and the hell with the ‘cost’.
Yet change has a real cost in mods, beyond the development time. Any change incurs with its new bugs and new balances. You lose out on your current stability, and with every change, you take a step away from the base game. Even with the launch issues, 2.2 had, the QA resources the developer can bring to the table will always be bigger than any mod. Simply put, any change we make, any time we drift further apart from vanilla, introduces more problems, and makes it harder to keep the game updates with future patches.
I am saying all of that to say that we do not take this upcoming change lightly or needlessly, but because there is a real need to improve the game pacing – and because there is room here to make a genuinely more enjoyable and entertaining game.
In the next blog post, I’ll detail the new cornerstone for the new overhaul, but for now, I want to summarize the goals I have for the overhaul – which is, really, a summary of the last few blog posts:
- The new system should give the player meaningful choices right from the start of the game.
- In order to make sure the AI will have no problem with the economy, the new system should be a new layer on top of the existing vanilla economics and not interfere with any of the basic production chains and mechanics of vanilla.
- This means the new system should deal with giving players bonuses and flexibility, not new features or unlocks.
- Since the new system should compensate for lower pop growths, it should be in itself detached from pop counts.
- Since the new system should not be tied to pop counts, it needs to have less reliance on, and less restriction on, buildings.
- The new system should still keep all the flexibility that exists in vanilla, allowing the players to play tall or wide, to min/max and to spam buildings if needed.
- The new system should give players a way to leg up quickly even if they lose pops, considering the heightened importance of pops due to the lower pop growths.
- Since the new system should be available at game start, when the player is still low in resources, it should give the player choices that are ‘cheap’ to execute.
- Since those new choices should be ‘cheap’ in term of standard resources, they should be limited in some other fashion (ie, time, tech, etc).
- The new system should give more weight to tech and tech progression compared to vanilla since technology plays a key part in STNH overall pacing and Star Trek lore in general.
- The new system should streamline the use of strategic resources as much as possible, making every resource be used for only one specific goal. This improves AI decision making and makes it easier for players to manage the economy.
- And finally, just because it’s good, solid sense – as much as possible, the new system should be intuitive and clear to the players.
You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. This is not logical, but it is often true. – Spock