One of the challenges that I can foresee is keeping the player's interest, like you say Scott, if there is no risk the game could get quite boring.
I always remember fondly my time spent on games like Sim City which rewarded upgrades with time. I think the key to is to start small, the gigantic structures shouldn't be available right away. A moon base is likely to start small, the essential buildings to keep it going and then as the size of the complex grows, things get bolted on - look at how the ISS has been expanded over the years.
The placement of building structures then starts to become a further challenge as you try and predict building deployment and growth as the needs of your colonists grow.
Sure there should be the uber sized moon buildings but not immediately imo.
I'd like to see an option to transfer staff with various skillsets between Earth and the Moon, after all everyone needs a break from the moon !
In Startrek online sub missions are allocated to your key staff based on attributes and the success/failure of those missions is based on who you allocate, crew members are coded in colour by their rarity/skillpoints. I think this would be a nice dynamic to add to the game, quite easy to implement because it's just creation of sub mission text and then a countdown for a random outcome based on percentage success. Colonists can be lost in accidents but recruitment missions would boost the numbers back up. I wouldnt' want a straight rip-off of the idea from STO but it would provide a welcome distraction from the building element and give that feeling that the colonists are actually doing something, science experiments, exploration, repairs, recruitment, training etc etc
Just throwing these ideas out there for comment, other backers might have some other neat ideas.
Thanks for the ideas.
The good news is that your idea for building the mega structures is already in place, the bigger and more complex the structure is the longer it takes to unlock it and the more resources it needs to build and then maintain in your colony.
To add onto this, the original idea was to have upgrades and add ons to standard buildings, the issue here is this could require a lot of work - the idea was simple 2D sprites for the upgrade options - this was dropped as it was going to add a fair amount of development time, I would not want 2D sprites for the PC version, I would like 3D add ons that are visible on the structure itself - I also wanted people to have a choice of add ons (was thinking 3 per building, I actually have a whole list of these) but this ends up as 210 upgrade options and assets to go with it - if we make the £15,000 this might be possible to do, but that is a lot of content that needs to be done.
The only alternative is to have a simple text based upgrade, on the buildings menu you have a level number and an option to upgrade to the next level - changing the base stats that the building provides at each level.
The uncertain news - The issue with the colonists, is compared to STO you will have several hundred (even half way through your first map) - an idea I had some time ago (again dropped due to time constraints) was for specialists, these could be assigned to buildings to improve their efficiency, similarly to the upgrade idea (again, originally a 2D sprite idea)
I agree the population could be a great way to add a unique feature to the game and something I would like to add - there are however a few issues, first being the current system - it would need a fair amount of change to incorporate this, how much I don't know and thus I don't know how long it would take to implement.
Over the next week I will look into what would work, how it would be implemented (technically) and how long a feature like this would take (the last few days I have already considered a full colonists management UI for features like this) hopefully by then I should have a better idea - and what sort of goal I would need to implement it.
Appreciate that time and finances play a large part in what has priority, so thanks for taking the time to provide some feedback.
I think the colonist management would be a great UI for as you say the specialist teams.
Perhaps the building structures could remain the same but with each upgrade the skin gets more detailed, additonal vents/lighting etc
I want to be able to feel the colonists have achieved something when they expand the base. Not sure the building level would convey that feeling if it was just text based. Appreciate that's a lot of new objects to create though !
I like the idea and may be able to work with that.
The only other alternative is to have upgrades that will fit more than 1 building - this may be better too for recognition of the upgrade itself.
Something to think about, the concept of building improvement should be visual as well as just raw statistics.
After playing the alpha version, I was just wondering what your take on your original idea of upgrading builds was? I know its still early days still as such if you want to see/progress through more of the game before commenting thats cool!
I also welcome anyone else's views on this feature.
Yes I like the idea that the bigger building's produce more resources and that they have to unlocked when you have enough resources/research points. It's not easy to test all the types as some of the building's are not implimented in this alpha. Do you have a timeline for availability, are we able to put in some requests for a preference in the next aplha releases ?
I wasn't sure on the size of the Agricultural Dome, whilst cool looking, it feels a tad big and quite a dominent size on the base.
(moonbase_a7 - building bottom left in screen grab)
I am open for suggestions to what building you would like to see in the next release, what you think would be helpful for progression at this point.
As for the timeline I hope to get them all implemented in the not too distant future, however their graphics may not be finished and may be just a white colour up to the beta, as this is aesthetics and I want to get the gameplay, mechanics and all those pesky bugs done before the beta is open
Some are not too far away from implementation, others are at this point.
sizes may change, and from your screenshot I can see your point, the thing I would say is there are buildings much bigger than that, with that in mind I want to wait till people have built a varied set of buildings to then compare sizes better.
For suggestions on what you would like to see implemented more than others, please post it in http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/3838-more-buildings/
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