[Focus] The Alliance System

The “Rise of the Automatons” add-on is coming soon. But hang on a minute! Good things come to those who wait. For now, we would like to share with you an insight on the making of the add-on: we have prepared for you an interesting Questions & Answers with Rémi (obyguane) and Maxence (Meedoc), members of the Amplitude Dev Team. They both worked on the “Diplomacy Improvement: the Alliance Mechanics” that you guys have voted for in a previous GAMES2GETHER VOTE.



Rémi and Maxence, can you please introduce yourself and your work at Amplitude?
Rémi: I am currently Senior Developer at Amplitude. I have worked in the game industry for about 4 years now. I began at Ubisoft as a Gameplay Programmer working on third person shooters (like Ghost Recon Future Soldier). I came to Amplitude this year, in February and when I started working on Endless Space I was mainly in charge of the integration of faction traits effects. Now I’m still working on improvements for Endless Space and I was in charge of this new Alliance System.
Maxence: Rémi is a programmer that you can consider as my personal pet/slave. He has to strictly code what I think. And more seriously, I’m currently Game Designer on Endless Space, and was before that Gameplay tester. For years, I‘ve wanted to design games. I began when I was 14, trying to prototype ideas with Game Maker, developing with Basic and making board game that I playtested with friends.

What was your reaction when you found out the Diplomacy Improvement on the Alliance Mechanics won the G2G vote?
Maxence: Awesome! We’re going to refine some mechanisms which are a bit tedious! And I have a lot of ideas to deal with…
Rémi: First I cried, then I tried to kill myself but I failed. After that I read all the Game Design proposals written by Maxence: second suicide attempt. Failed again (I need to change my methods…). Seriously, I thought it was a good vote because we knew our diplomatic system wasn’t perfect. My main concern was about the way we could deal with this kind of big system to improve without breaking the base of our mechanics.


How did you guys proceed to work together?
Maxence: I first designed several systems at a high level (without going in depth but more offering different philosophy to solve the issues) and then we discussed them with Rémi and Laurent (our awesome associate producer [alsoknownasLt_Miles]).
We decided to go in one way and then I deeply designed the solution and how the AI has to deal with it. Then, Rémi developed it, gave me feedback and found new issues related to the implementation. So we worked together to advance step by step. Finally I went on holiday and when I came back, the result was awesome!
Rémi: Maxence made few proposals. At first, I tried to give my feedback on the complexity of each feature and how we could incorporate them in the game. During the implementation, I spotted many issues we tried to fix together.


Can you tell us how the old system used to work?
Maxence: The old system was quite simple: everyone in an alliance could sign a treaty involving a status’ change. Then, a rule says: every person in an alliance shares their worse status regarding factions outside of the alliance. That’s why you could be involved in a war because of an ally without any warning.


What did you improve on the new system?
Maxence: Now, when someone in an alliance receives a request which involve a status’ change, its allies are warned and can choose to either accept, or simply leave the alliance. Thus, players are not subjected to the AI’s decision but they will also have to deals with their allies’ will. At the end of the turn, we still applied the worse status if there are divergences inside the alliance.
Rémi: We just removed the automatic spread of a new diplomatic status obtained by an ally with another player. Instead we send notifications to all the allies allowing them to accept the request (and share this new status) or leave the alliance and keep its current status with the external empire.
At the end of the turn, if a player didn’t respond to all of the notifications he received, we automatically accept them and (if needed) synchronize the allies status with other empires using the previous rule that keeps the worst status.


Did you encounter any major difficulty?
Maxence: We encountered a lot of difficulties because of the previous rules but I’ll let Rémi explain his suffering. =)
Rémi: The global idea of this new system was not, theoretically, too complicated to implement. The most difficult part was to make sure it would work properly in every possible situation players may encounter. In multiplayer especially, several allies can express different simultaneous diplomatic requests, and sometimes even conflicting with a same empire. The goal being that at the end of the turn, every ally shares the same diplomatic status as the other players.


Do you think players will be satisfied with your hard work?
Rémi: I hope they will!
Maxence: They better!


Anything you would like to add?
Maxence: I would like to thank my rabbit, Pooky.



We will give you more details on the Alliance System Mechanics in the upcoming days!