Announcing Eos4x

[MasonMac (OP)]

Eos4x is a derivative game inspired by Aurora4x and will be written in Rust and use the Bevy game engine. Though I had initially come up with the idea while trying to get better performance out of the game, I realized that this is an opportunity to create a game that suits my desires. It would also be a great learning opportunity and a great project to show off to my friends. I'm sure they would be ecstatic to play a spreadsheet simulator

Anyways, this is only the start and I'm researching a lot about graphics programming. I only have experience with traditional software development, so this is uncharted territory for me. These are the primary distinctions, I think, between Eos4x and Aurora4x:

- Parallelized AI. Yes, this idea has been brought up in the past and has been shot down for various reasons, but I believe that it is much more feasible in Rust with the ECS (Entity Component System) model. Logic will be split up into distinct stages to accommodate for this, but not everything will be parallelized as it doesn't make sense in all cases. This is something that will very much be benchmarked throughout development. Gigantic battles are my dream.
- Procedurally generated history, civilizations, etc. inspired by Dwarf Fortress.
- Introduction of magic that will supplement the existing technology and battle mechanics, but may also lead to "quests".
- Random events of varying scale; from one of your characters awakening magic to a gamma ray hitting one of your planets.
- Optimize gameplay for larger and longer wars. Ideally, most civilizations will have tens of thousands of ships by endgame.
- Characters (equivalent of officers) are going to take after how it's done in Dwarf Fortress. They can have relationships, learn new skills, have history, have personalities, etc. This could lead to more complicated game mechanics such as your chivalrous characters rebelling against you if you decide to commit genocide or something like that.

Obviously, this is a massive undertaking despite how small that list looks. This is compounded by the fact that the amount of time I'll be able to dedicate is not that much, but hey, progress is progress. It will be open-sourced under a dual MIT and Apache-2.0 license once I have an MVP. When that happens, I will post it here.

If you're wondering why I made this post at all when I have nothing to show for it, this is only just to gauge interest. I'm primarily developing this for myself but it's nice to get feedback.

[nuclearslurpee]

If you're developing primarily for yourself, by all means go for it. I'm sure many on this forum have thought the same from time to time.

That said, a couple comments from someone with a lukewarm take on the idea:

• Personally not a fan of "magic" in my soft sci-fi, logistics-nerd space opera computer game. Mechanically, I'm not sure what it offers that TN "wizardry" can't already with some imagination.
• Mixed feelings on procedural generation of lore and flavor, and similar for random events. For some this would be a big RP boon, but personally I like to make my own RP in Aurora instead of the game telling me what the lore is. This is obviously a personal feeling (I know others here would love random events in some capacity) and isn't a slight on your own ideas of course.
• My biggest concern as a player however is the multiple scales you're trying to implement. It's great to have a game that can model 10,000-ship armadas and WH40K-scale epic battles, but the challenge is how to have that game and a game where individual ships or small fleets are manageable - let alone individual characters and their own stories. Right now in Aurora even managing more than 1-2 carriers and their associated fighters is an exercise in patience, speaking kindly. I will stop short of saying this is impossible, since that would be a false statement, but it's going to be a tremendous undertaking and a huge amount of work will have to go into automation and reduction of micromanagement, which I think is likely to rapidly become the single biggest drain on development time very quickly.
• That said, anything that can bring a game AI up to the level of fighting a player race on even footing, let alone competitively, is an exciting prospect. Aurora tries hard, but NPRs still get away with avoiding any number of game mechanics just to remain barely viable as an opponent.

Best of luck on your project!

[MasonMac (OP)]

I agree with you on the exponential difficulty in managing your empire, and that'll definitely be interesting to explore. While micromanagement is important to my RP experience, I think that this will be something Aurora4x will be better able to offer than Eos4x. I will likely have to sacrifice some micromanagement for these huge battles to happen. Still, this is something I'm keen on addressing somehow through various forms of automation in the later stages of the game.

And to make it more enjoyable to other people with varying playstyles, I'll also make the features affecting RP optional. With everything disabled, it will be nearly identical to Aurora in terms of it being a blank slate. From this discussion, I think I'll also limit the scope of my features for an MVP to make it more manageable: only changes to AI and combat.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Carthar]

It sounds like an interesting project.   I like the idea of history, relationships and quests.   Aurora is more like a framework for RP and you plan to do more of a story.   I think there is a place for both.

That being said, I'm also not a fan of 'magic' in sci-fi, but psionics and sci-fi are quite commonly paired.   

Good luck with it.   I'll keep an eye on your progress.    :)     

[MasonMac (OP)]

I'll probably not include magic after all, I'm in agreement that it's not really that enhancing.

[Garfunkel]

Sufficiently advanced technology is magic.

Good luck with your project. I would recommend you look at the original Master of Orion trilogy and how the three games varied the scope of the games with MoO2 being more micro focused, MoO3 being more macro focused and MoO1 being somewhere in the middle. They are after all the benchmarks for the 4X genre but comparing them to each other is quite revealing about game design and how to focus it.

[kingflute]

Sounds really interesting. The addition of magic is something that would have to be implimented carefully as it could either become really OP or really under-powered, but if you could pull it off...

[Vastrat]

Not a fan of magic in sci-fi either, that said this sounds like a very interresting idea, and I look forward to seeing it develope. Best of luck to you. 

[Blogaugis]

Although I am personally more in favor of sci-fi rather than magic, it is still interesting to see what kind of magic system You would want to implement...
Endless Space does pretty well with it's magical 'dust' thing, so maybe You can do too..?