Sparks wrote:
Don't push my argument to its absurd extreme. You're better than that. Especially because the opposite is that every system is random, every planet is just spat out by the RNG and the game becomes a long, drawn out dice roll. But no-one is arguing that either.

I am not pushing it to it's extreme, you have just assumed that I continued on that way, the extreme would be turning it into a 4 hour version of tic-tac-toe.



The anomaly add a set number of variation to a set of pre-detirimined planet stats, increasing the choice to the games turns rather then shoehorning in the correct choices for each world and system use.

You know full well I wasn't advocating for a completely telegraphed game. I still want random chance and strange events, but within reasonable, logical boundaries that allow for a deeper level of strategy. Just because you don't want everything to be 100% predictable, doesn't mean that everything should be 100% random. You're making a classic logical fallacy. There should be some element of predictability that allows for risk. Risk is a core of all strategy games, and if lava worlds can have gardens of eden and gas giants can have rich soil then you can't really risk anything, because there is no way you could have predicted that scenario. Not even a little bit. It would be like playing poker except you can't even look at your own cards, let alone anyone else's.

You have taken this argument into a 'all or nothing' type of position, not me.



And your argument that the random nature of the anomaly reduces strategy within the game precludes the point that adapting is key, strategy cannot be doctrine and you must expect the un-expected, the idea that these anomalys reduce strategic choice is completely untrue, because if anything, the ability to predict the possible strategy before the game has even begun reduces choice greatly, it becomes predictable and boring.



The risk is the possibility of a positive or negative anomaly, not in its predictability. Predictability is in its essence easy to know, so it there is risk, you would always avoid it.

Star lanes, constellations, system compositions, galaxy clusters, wormholes, star types. These are all mechanics designed to funnel gameplay alone pre-determined paths. This is a 4X game. It takes real skill to be able to maximize what you have, and to strategically acquire what everyone else does. And some things should be predictable, within certain tolerances. Gas giants shouldn't have rich soil. Lava worlds shouldn't have gardens of eden. Not just because they don't make sense from a thematic standing (the mental gymnastics required to reconcile these anomalies is proof enough of that), but because they do not align with our intuitive understanding of how the game systems should work.

Then adapt, you sir are not an insect, lined in to a particular path, adapt man, adapt!



If you didn't predict a planet to have X anomaly, the adjust. The ability to adjust to changing circumstances is the essence of skill, the ability to function above the rest in spate of the odds.



Your ability to evaluate the field becomes more complicated because the terrain is more then meets the eye, and natural high points like Garden Of Eden or Rich soil make excellent positions for your empire to operate from, it makes those systems more valuable then they would have been, they would be actually worth using.



The terrain is a obstacle in the game, and often not a good one either, so why reduce the variation of the terrain via these modifiers?

Exploration, expansion, exploitation and extermination. All activities that define this genre, and all made more effective by a better knowledge of the game. I know that in Civ 5 wheat tiles are twice as likely to spawn on a floodplain than on lowlands. Neither is certain but this knowledge helps guide my scouts, it helps guide my settlers. It doesn't win me the game but it aligns with my expectations, it aligns with a logical consistency and it aligns with the rest of the game's mechanics. Other resources are more likely on other tiles, and direct my strategy accordingly.

Tell me, what is the chance of getting Iron on a particular tile?



What tiles are you likely to not find it on?



Because in all fairness, civilization isn't like a space 4X game. Space is filled with wonders and hazards, catastrophic events and miracles of science, as is the theme with science fiction set in space.



Alien worlds don't conform with what really makes sense to humanity, and so your expectations will be adjusted. The random nature of the anomaly's echos that expectation, as in, what one might not expect. Space isn't like a river flowing to the sea, and nor is it like the possibility of wheat in the flood lands, its science fiction, and the sky is the limit.



As for the strategic considerations, 4X games have never been about punishing you for 1 wrong move, training you to use the signs to move or act a particular way, but seeing how you cope with the circumstances.

In Endless Space, everything is available everywhere. At the moment it is almost completely random. This doesn't work in the game's favor. It makes things less meaningful, because they cannot direct strategy until they are uncovered, eliminating a level of strategic depth to 2 out of the 4 Xs. Exploration. Expansion.

What like strategic and luxury resources?



If anything the inability to predict where they shall spawn and in what quantity gives the player the incentive to compete for them once the discovery's are made, the ancient cave man didn't settle in a particular place knowing the oil stashed there would make him rich (A personal gripe I have with the civ series), but he settled there for other reasons like food, and safety.



But when the time came, and oil was useful, the board changed and soon areas possessing the black liquid became very, very valuable. Worth fighting over. And so he did.



This is the embodiment not only "exploring" with technology to find out whats under your feet, but also the "expansion" and inevitable conflict to obtain these rare resources.



The civilization series hasn't been about true civilization for a while.

Not only that, the only upside to the mechanic being this way is that it somehow makes it more 'quirky' or 'fun' when you have to come up with imaginative explanations as to why a giant tree is growing in a gaseous atmosphere. I mean, I'm not saying that's inherently bad. I like Endless Space's strangeness, and 'A space wizard did it' has always been a perfectly reasonable explanation for me. I like sci fi because of its possibilities. But we're talking gameplay mechanics here and Endless Space simply has too many random chance mechanics in it. Some are far harder to eliminate than this one. So we must start somewhere.

The anomaly can change (Names, descriptions), yes, but the underlying bonuses applied have no reason to be removed.



Mechanically or otherwise.

You're wrong that predictable games become excel spreadsheets, or boring. It's the opposite. Too much random chance spoils any satisfaction in winning. The most enduring games are all heavily skill based. Chess. Go. Etc.

Chance is a key factor beyond skill, changing the way things work just enough that 2 games never end the same way.



Games like chess however are not entirely skill based, but could be comparative predicted down to thousands of moves and counter moves, without chance chess can never be a game of true strategy.



I am not saying we make X-COM 2, but rather we leave chance of stats alone, and rather change the way the mental gymnastics to better fir the genre.



Thank you, and have a nice day.

This is no weirder than Kirk making out with every Alien chick he came across...



works for me

From the horrid and grotesque goings-on that occur in my mind, I assumed that the colonies of gas giants were floating in cities.



Rich Soil, on a gas giant, may simply mean that complex gatherings of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and other silicas have combined to form rich soils and are being free floated or circulated throughout the upper layers of the atmosphere, collected by colonists for use on farms then recirculated towards the planet's core for recombination, in theory, this would provide an even better and more efficient system of waste removal/containment and soil revival than our current practices. The entire atmosphere becomes a giant recycling matrix.



Gardens of Edens on Volcanic Planets may be a result of dying cores creating excess thermal heat on one side of the planet but heating the other to form a "temperate ideal" zone of life.



Whenever I find these things, I always try to make something up to be plausible, let's remember there's a planet made of diamond out there IRL and one that's all water on one side and fiery barren on the other.

richardly108 wrote:


let's remember there's a planet made of diamond out there IRL and one that's all water on one side and fiery barren on the other.

Really ? i didn't know that. Sounds interesting, could you share a link to learn more about it ?

I don't wanna take the thread off topic..but here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2216196/Scientists-discover-massive-planet-diamonds-twice-size-Earth.html



Can't find the second one..might've been my imagination. But there's also Kepler 27 (or something 7) B.

richardly108 wrote:
I don't wanna take the thread off topic..but here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2216196/Scientists-discover-massive-planet-diamonds-twice-size-Earth.html



Can't find the second one..might've been my imagination. But there's also Kepler 27 (or something 7) B.

So image the Dust and Industry bonus on this thing!

That article is misleading. Just saying.

Igncom1 wrote:
An anomaly that is predictable is not an anomaly.



And besides, you cannot plan for the unexpected and that prevents the game becoming stale.



If you know what will happen in every game, because you can read the entire map from the color of the stars or something silly like that then your game will be the most boring and stale thing since Excel.



And I won't stand to see such a change happen, no way no how.

Don't push my argument to its absurd extreme. You're better than that. Especially because the opposite is that every system is random, every planet is just spat out by the RNG and the game becomes a long, drawn out dice roll. But no-one is arguing that either.



You know full well I wasn't advocating for a completely telegraphed game. I still want random chance and strange events, but within reasonable, logical boundaries that allow for a deeper level of strategy. Just because you don't want everything to be 100% predictable, doesn't mean that everything should be 100% random. You're making a classic logical fallacy. There should be some element of predictability that allows for risk. Risk is a core of all strategy games, and if lava worlds can have gardens of eden and gas giants can have rich soil then you can't really risk anything, because there is no way you could have predicted that scenario. Not even a little bit. It would be like playing poker except you can't even look at your own cards, let alone anyone else's.



Star lanes, constellations, system compositions, galaxy clusters, wormholes, star types. These are all mechanics designed to funnel gameplay alone pre-determined paths. This is a 4X game. It takes real skill to be able to maximize what you have, and to strategically acquire what everyone else does. And some things should be predictable, within certain tolerances. Gas giants shouldn't have rich soil. Lava worlds shouldn't have gardens of eden. Not just because they don't make sense from a thematic standing (the mental gymnastics required to reconcile these anomalies is proof enough of that), but because they do not align with our intuitive understanding of how the game systems should work.



Exploration, expansion, exploitation and extermination. All activities that define this genre, and all made more effective by a better knowledge of the game. I know that in Civ 5 wheat tiles are twice as likely to spawn on a floodplain than on lowlands. Neither is certain but this knowledge helps guide my scouts, it helps guide my settlers. It doesn't win me the game but it aligns with my expectations, it aligns with a logical consistency and it aligns with the rest of the game's mechanics. Other resources are more likely on other tiles, and direct my strategy accordingly.



In Endless Space, everything is available everywhere. At the moment it is almost completely random. This doesn't work in the game's favor. It makes things less meaningful, because they cannot direct strategy until they are uncovered, eliminating a level of strategic depth to 2 out of the 4 Xs. Exploration. Expansion.



Not only that, the only upside to the mechanic being this way is that it somehow makes it more 'quirky' or 'fun' when you have to come up with imaginative explanations as to why a giant tree is growing in a gaseous atmosphere. I mean, I'm not saying that's inherently bad. I like Endless Space's strangeness, and 'A space wizard did it' has always been a perfectly reasonable explanation for me. I like sci fi because of its possibilities. But we're talking gameplay mechanics here and Endless Space simply has too many random chance mechanics in it. Some are far harder to eliminate than this one. So we must start somewhere.



You're wrong that predictable games become excel spreadsheets, or boring. It's the opposite. Too much random chance spoils any satisfaction in winning. The most enduring games are all heavily skill based. Chess. Go. Etc.

+5 Insightful. Wait..whaddya mean this isn't slashdot?



Besides, I don't think you can read all the stars anyways, only the ones that are closest to an explored system correct? In Civ (and i hate comparing things to that series, endless space is good enough to be its own franchise) you could predict certain climates based on altitude and general geographic observations.



Dust is also the space wizard, I mean, who knows how that stuff might react to gas giants and form stuff like i previously said. There are some other threads such as the Tree of Life on a gas giant that I find my mental gymnastics fall flat on though.

Good post Sparks, but it may be more appropriate for /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12627-anomaly-wonder-pre-reqs

i think these kind of anomaly are fun to discover, at least for the wtf moment. I would prefer that the devs keep it that way

I was appropriately amused.

Honestly a lot about this game doesn't make a lot of astronomical sense, but I find it pretty easy to forgive it because it doesn't come off as trying to be realistic or taking it's self too seriously with regards to what's going with the galaxy generation. The game wouldn't even be able to recreate our own solar system, there is no consideration for multiple moons, moons the size of planets, more than 6 planets, planetary composition beyond terrestrial or gas, etc.



Is getting a Garden of Eden on a gas giant any more absurd than building farms on a gas giant?



I am all too often way too serious about such things, but with regards to ES, I see a lot of it as symbolic design rather than iconic, even with regards to naming.

Xanoth wrote:
Is getting a Garden of Eden on a gas giant any more absurd than building farms on a gas giant?

Yes, because I built the farms, probably in orbit because I'm not a complete idiot. A gas giant being a "lush and pleasant planet" with a "single year round season of pleasant moderate temperatures" is absurd.



But as has been pointed out before, this isn't an issue of "immersion" as much as it is "balance".

it's just a game. if there's a combo that's a little off, i'll grin and twist my brain around the unfortunate inhabitants and its effect on their lives for a minute or so.... then it's all boils down to the numbers of getting the most out of the system.

Waylander1982 wrote:




I was appropriately amused.

by what? i don't get it.

Yeah...I don't really see it....Unless you mean the irradiated lava world because of the dust nebula or something?

axhed wrote:
by what? i don't get it.

Igncom1 wrote:
Yeah...I don't really see it....Unless you mean the irradiated lava world because of the dust nebula or something?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who missed whatever IT is...

Xanoth wrote:
Honestly a lot about this game doesn't make a lot of astronomical sense, but I find it pretty easy to forgive it because it doesn't come off as trying to be realistic or taking it's self too seriously with regards to what's going with the galaxy generation. The game wouldn't even be able to recreate our own solar system, there is no consideration for multiple moons, moons the size of planets, more than 6 planets, planetary composition beyond terrestrial or gas, etc.



Is getting a Garden of Eden on a gas giant any more absurd than building farms on a gas giant?



I am all too often way too serious about such things, but with regards to ES, I see a lot of it as symbolic design rather than iconic, even with regards to naming.

I agree, if you want to start talking about unrealistic things in endless space then you could criticize almost every aspect of it.

Good system to find on the first turn

We are talking about space here people, where theories run wild, imagination can as well. Once again its the work of the "Endless", do you think they care about laws? Besides that, who could prove me wrong if i said there was a planet out there in space made of pure delicious chocolate pudding and cake?

Igncom1 wrote:
Hovering moss clouds?



Gas bag jellyfish?



I like the idea, as before never change ES.

These things are not new to those that have read proper science fiction extensively; and are indeed possible, maybe even probable, in this universe.



Full marks to the devs, who ARE obviously well read, for including such things; and please, let's have more!

At first i found these things to be alittle off putting but then again who know's how the dust is effecting things in the galaxy. I'm fine with them now, even tend to try & keep them safe as they are more unique treasure's to my Empire.

Hovering moss clouds?



Gas bag jellyfish?



I like the idea, as before never change ES.

......really now, galaxy generator?



These are the sort of things that can cause me to restart a game.

For the record I'm usually a fan of the absurd.

KnightHawk wrote:
For the record I'm a fan of the absurd.

Hear, hear !

Troodon wrote:
......really now, galaxy generator?



These are the sort of things that can cause me to restart a game.

If this is the case perhaps it's time to broaden your creative horizons. :P

Yea, it really bugs me to find gas giants with "fertile soil".

I thought it was the planet Caesarus Maximus Gaseous

TheFrozenOne wrote:
Yea, it really bugs me to find gas giants with "fertile soil".

Depends on your definition of soil.



They could be floating kelp fields located at a pocket of mineral rich gases!

A picture is worth many words.







I was amused.

Igncom1 wrote:
Depends on your definition of soil.



They could be floating kelp fields located at a pocket of mineral rich gases!

A fair comment. But I think in terms of gameplay it needs to be changed.



There are systems in place so that you can estimate things based on known rules. Like the color/type of stars as a reflection of their planetary bodies. Or the upgrades only affecting certain kinds of systems.



If any anomaly can occur on any planet, then that removes a bit of that predictability. A 4X game needs a level of cohesion in that manner to allow for a directed strategy. It it's all random and you need to do mental gymnastics just to make it work, thematically, than it's a little annoying/surprising in a bad way.



For example, obviously rich soil could occur on a gas giant. Floating in the upper atmosphere, perhaps some kind of low orbit rocky body. Whatever. You can make it work in your mind easily, with anything. But it doesn't tie in with the rest of your strategy. You're never going to anticipate a rich soil gas giant and wouldn't ever accommodate such bonuses on a planet type so unsuited.

An anomaly that is predictable is not an anomaly.



And besides, you cannot plan for the unexpected and that prevents the game becoming stale.



If you know what will happen in every game, because you can read the entire map from the color of the stars or something silly like that then your game will be the most boring and stale thing since Excel.



And I won't stand to see such a change happen, no way no how.

I don't have the file but in the event that adds anomalies to your planets it gave me a Garden of Eden on a planet, which happened to be made of lava.

Imagination has been one of my greatest aspects in my life, i can easily get carried away in it. Any of these anomalies can be easily given a reason for their existence; rich soil on a gas giant could simply be a rich atmosphere or particles of soil floating around, floating island size rocks.

The more the better, if it makes me think and ask questions on how and why a planet has a said anomaly, even better. Since Endless Space is a sandbox you can just make up your own lore/ fluff for these things. It certainly spices up the game. Once again all i can say is "Endless", they did some crazy stuff sometimes.

At first I really felt these kinds of anomalies went against the immersion, but then I kind of felt it could be explained by all sorts of radical situations. And in a game where you can terraform barren rocks into verdant jungles and entire civillizations enjoy a "Permanent Vacation" what couldn't possible?

This reminds me of getting rich soil on a gas giant. lol

Think of the anomaly as a vague description and explain the weird stuff with your own mind.

stuff like this demonstrates just how much work the Devs still need to do on the game... although somewhat amusing seeing mixed up anomalies etc, it's also quite annoying at this point into development where the small bits and pieces should essentially be working so that the Devs can focus on the bigger issues...