badboy

[Therlun]

hiho

Many games have some "badboy"-system.
The player get punished if he grows too strong, is too hostile or too treacherous.

After the human player has reached a superior position the only thing that might possibly keep the game interesting is to make all others hate and fight him.
However, in most games this is not successful.
If the threshold is set "too late" a human player is in a too strong position and AIs have a very hard time defeating him.
If it is triggered too early the game gets easily frustrating because the AI seems to act illogical and unreasanable hostile.

How does Horizon plan to handle this?
Especially considering that the races have different starting positions and power bases?

[Anguille]

Good question...
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I may not post so much...but i am here watching!

[Zaimat]

I'd like to hear what you think about it. What would be an interesting end for you after you read the rest of my post.

I won't talk about specific Horizon endings since you don't want to know it in advance anyway. But I'll share my thoughts or desires if you will as a player and you'll get an idea where we are going with it.

At some point the game has to end but there are many ways to go about it and there should be. None of which should be because you are too powerful and the game becomes meaningless to continue.

You may win wars, you may become powerful that some races will grovel at your feet. But not so powerful that there is no one to challenge you.

Horizon is about becoming a major space race and to survive the ascension of humanity in space. It's not going to be a race to who gets the most planets or first techs to win the game. The galaxy is old, many are already centuries more advanced. You are trying to catch up without losing your hide in the process.

No it's not your typical 4x game. Same genre different galaxy!
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Horizon - Lead Designer

[Therlun]

I would like a game that breaks the normal scheme of "growth->amassing forces->streak of wins".

I would love different endings besides the normal:
-defeat or subject all others, and
-research "the final tech" to win the game

But to be honest, will you be able to satisfy the normal mainstream gamer without these as aims?
And will you be able to make you game endings the basic of a game with high replayability?
And will you manage to embed some of the typical 4x features in such a game?

When I play an open ended or MP game I am happy to say that I can set aims myself. I am happy and entertained by things I decide to do and reach.
But I had to experience several times (especially in MP games) most players dont.
Most players want to win by defeating all opponents.

And to be really honest...
I would love to believe all the different things you describe.
But too often high aims to provide "alternatives" have led to little results.
See Anguille's avatar...
I really hope you manage what you want to do with the game.

To get back to topic:
I would really love if both the player and the AI would be able to lose a war without it being the end of their participation in the game.
A subjected race being a slave for a century that revolts just in the right moment to get its independence.
But until now I never have seen an AI doing something like that (neither as slave lord nor as slave).
Not because an AI is not able, but because the designers always reverted back to the normal "win or be destroyed" schemes for the simple reason of it being an established standard.

[Zaimat]

I think part of what you are getting at is that many players want clearly defined objectives such as 'defeating all your opponents'. And I get that. It won't be undefined where you just set your own goals. It should be engaging and you will still want to research fast, grab important colonies, build a military, etc all for good reasons. The core is still your familiar 4x game of exploration, exploitation, etc. Just the format is changed.

As for whether we will succeed, time will tell. And this is important: I'm not making promises that you should believe, I'm just outlining our goals and what motivates me as a designer and player. It would be pretty foolish to think we (or anyone) will succeed all our aims at first go but you try your best and hope to improve on it. And when we do testing we will get your feedback whether you find it fun or whether changes/options have to be made/added in this regard.

Now back to topic. And I have a few more questions:

1) Do you 'always' play a (4x) game to it's conclusion or do you stop when you reach a point where you clearly dominate.

2) Many games allow you to set the rules for the 'end', do you change them or just use the one setting. And if so which one?
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Horizon - Lead Designer

[Therlun]

1. Most of the time I do not play until the end.
Only if a session had something very special about it I will.
This includes both "directions", with me winning and me losing.

You could compare it to competitive strategy games. (RTS)
If it is 100% clear that it is only a matter of time until one player wins both sides expect the loser to type "gg" and give up.

Singeplayer 4X games are somewhat similar, although for different reasons.
Why would you bother conquering the other half of the galaxy if you have a huge technological and military advantage?
Some players do, simply for the sake of "ending it the right way".
The first few times I play a game I might do it, but I doubt many would bother on the 20th game session.
Many games have shortcuts to the end once you dominate.
MoO1 had its senate election (2/3s of the population), galciv2 for example has its influence victory (which is quite similar).

Losing vs an AI, on the other side, is a real pain. Not because its a shame or you had no chance to its cheating, but because most of the time it is plain boring.
One of the greatest flaws of MoO1 is its endgame AI.
In the beginning it is aggressive and nasty, but in the second half of a game it is not able to act as cleverly.
I played moo1 for years until I noticed it had a losing-cinematic. (Did you know that civ1 had one too? )
Not because I always gave up on the first sign of defeat, but because the AI took ages to finish me off once it was clear I had no chance.

And as I said in the posts above, I have yet to see a game where a "big
defeat" allows you to play on.
Sometimes it might be fun to fight a "pointless" war of survival and maybe turn the tide with your superior human intellect.
Most of the time its boring and a waste of time though...

An AI does not play for fun.
Nor does it play to win.
The singleplayer game that manages to include at least the illusion of both of these playing styles would be a gift of heaven.
(Galciv2 does a good job on the second)

2. I dont bother with winning conditions in "grand" strategy games most of the time.
I play to see if I can handle the unique challenge of a game (starting positions, individual enemies, enviromental challenges, strokes of bad luck etc.).
Once I did that and there is no challenge on the horizon anymore (Im in a dominant position) Ill start a new game.


Anyone else willing to post something? ^^

[Anguille]

1) For my part i don't like games where you have to conquer everything because after one point, it's just tedious...

2) I've done it a couple of times in MOO1 and MOO2 but my ultimate goal was always the diplomatic victory. In MOO1 i was often able to win the senate even if i wasn't very powerful but because of the diplomatic/intrigue approach. It is still there in MOO3 but much harder to understand and master.

Other options i've seen:

Knights of Honor: there are some great achievements you can aim for and that makes a small victory.

More interesting is the approach of the game Spartan by Slitherine where each party has very specific goals like buildings (Rhodos has to build the giant) or of conquest but never the entire map....the option to keep on playing is there but not a must. In that sense, those goals are not in competition...the other empires are just in your way to keep you from reaching your goal (maybe they don't even know which is your goal). Each party has it's own agenda...

Other ideas would be also to find some specific items which are part of a puzzle...once all the pieces together you win...in that case all the various players could take part to the chase and the first one to find the pieces/solution wins.

Just some thoughts...

I'd like to add this which i already posted a while back on the boards of Slitherine. I generally think that research in 4x games is wrong:

in most games, when you've got the biggest empire, you also get the biggest research which seems wrong to me. When we look at history, we notice that some small nations had the best research.

I would base research production points on 2 aspects:

1. We have 6 domains for research in Horizon: each domain would have a building which could be upgraded (for money) and generate research points. Now my point is that it could be possible to have all those buildings in one place (planet or city) and so even a small empire with strong trade agreements could be top notch in technology.

2. Education: the percentage of eductation of the population would be used as a multiplicator for the research points generated by the research buildings. To get that level it would should be necessary to buid schools, universities (real build or economic slides). Another option would be to make the production of individual planets/cities correspond to the quality of the education (even if the capital is top noch in science, a distant planet with litte education would not be able to produce the best ships, troops, etc...

My point is that, in the case of a space strategy game, it should be possible for a small empire to send a single top battleship against 100 weak battleships from a huge but retarded empire....

Cheers
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I may not post so much...but i am here watching!

[Breniir]

This is a tough topic since it basically calls into question how to end a 4X game - or rather: keep the experience entertaining so that the player wants to continue to the end.

One idea I had was to modify or add ways to win the game once certain goals have been attained. For instance, when 2/3 of all the races reach a total diplomacy score (or however the game metrics are decided), you can start working toward a grand alliance to unify the galaxy under a single government type/religion/whatever. You can use your spies, military, diplomats, or economic savvy to accomplish this, but it forces you to think a bit differently about your empire.

You can add all sorts of new goals: a giant NAFTA-like economic pact, some sort of galactic republic, a new religious movement, a massive research project to turn everyone into energy clouds... and you need to convince the other races its a good idea with diplomacy and battleships.

I kind of draw inspiration from the Civ series, where techs can usher in massive changes to your empire (gunpowder and nukes come to mind). I would like to see not only techs, but economic power, total galaxy population, military size, or whatever be the trigger for new epochs for each game. You don't need to take the new path if you don't want to, but at least the option will be available. The key will be to randomize the trigger items, so that you aren't waiting for everyone to get 100 billion people so you can then do something. It would also be good to give the option to disable stuff like this in the game creation.

edit: spelling!

[Sim-Mania]

1. Unless I am new to the game, I also do not play the game to its conclusion when I am clearly dominant. Even if there is another race or civ just as powerful, you always know you can defeat the computer through the sheer fact you can out maneuver the computer.

However, dominance maybe more interesting in Horizon because there seems to be three levels of races. The new space faring race like the Humans, the ancients, and the pre-cursor races, the original inhabitants of the galaxy. It's like you have to prove yourself before you have really made it on the galactic scene and can attempt to take on the big boys. Dominance may not be achieved so easily.

However, the main difficulty as already stated, in order to prolong an entertaining experience into the latter stages of the game is balance. The size of your empire must not determine your capacity to research, produce or remain economically sustainable. This must be through a genuine ability to create and manage a credible infrastructure of buildings, treaties and whatnot based on what strategy you are employing, such as military superiority or diplomatic influence. How you do this, I wouldn't have a clue.

This is also important when considering using certain goals to end a game. In Civ I always turn off the spaceship winning option, because of the fact that in Civ the bigger your empire, the faster you can research, so of course that immediately unbalances the game.

[Breniir]

The bureaucracy of a large empire and the inertia that it brings would be tough to model and balance. Moo3 had that "Heavy Foot of Government" number, that basically made things cost more the larger your empire got. They also envisioned (but it got cut in the final game) a limited number of actions, like adjusting the build queue for a single planet. This would have made it tough to do 'everything' in a single turn, while a smaller empire would be more directly managed.

Alpha Centauri had efficiency ratings for your faction, and if it was low, you had a limit to the number of colonies you could support. Also, greater distance caused inefficiency, and distant colonies would not make a lot of money.

Aside from inefficiency, the only other internal badboy limiter would have to be revolts or unrest.



Externally, an alliance of other races is ok, provided it is done well. In Moo1 for example, it bugged me that the alkari were allied with me, the psilons, and the meklars, even though I was at war with both the psilons and meklars. Games need more grades of diplomatic relations than the 3 or 4 many have. A true partnership alliance should be rewarding (lots of tech, economic, and intel sharing) but also limit what can be done with races that may not like your partner.

Anguille had a good idea stemming from that Spartan game. Each faction had a different special goal, but in Horizon it could be tied to your racial picks. Maybe the fanatical warrior humans see thier religion as the guiding light and try to spread it across the galaxy. Or the mega traders need X number of trade routes to achieve economic dominance, making it so no one would want to fight since trade is so profitable. Or the eco-adaptive farmers want to make each world pristine and reduces the industrial impact of their empire and others around them. Make it an option, something that gives the player a choice to go in a new direction with each new game.

[RobHuntingdon]

I agree to some degree with the Spartan approach. I think that's nice... but I didn't recognize that at first. It was only until I had a chance to see the lack of such easy way to end the game that I realized that the Spartan method was actually kinda neat. But even then in Spartan completing your goal in a timely fashion would still require you to capture a fair bit of the map. Which is why I like hearing the idea that your victory condition may be quite limited when you are the player in Horizon. Especially considering the actual amount of "available space" may not be much (if any). It brings a totally new paradigm to things that I like.

One of the thing that I dislike about most of the AIs in most other games is how easy it is to get way ahead of them by just coing on an early "rush" strategy of colonizing everything in sight. I hope that your efforts to curb that strategy in this game also prove effective.

But getting back to the point, I rarely try for anything except complete domination. But I do that by simply getting to the point where I build a huge fleet and then methodically wipe out everything in my way. I do often play it out, but not always. Depends on how I'm playing with modding to some degree, if I'm trying out a new mod I will almost never finish the game, if I'm just playing for fun it's a different story entirely. So, at least for me, in some ways you can make a fun game even with nothing but "smash everything in sight" as the only objective. And I don't think I'm the only one.

I don't really think endgame is the real killer of games. Making some way to claim victory early is nice, but not critical IMO. The council from MOO1/MOO2, for example, was simple enough to figure out and easy to grab if you wanted it. MOO3 was too weird especially with the fact few ever figured out how votes were even counted and many people not even always starting in the council. But frankly I'd rather you get down to a couple of enemies who look at you and realize you can take them at will and just offer to surrender. Then you have the option to just accept it and end the game if you want, but there's no 25 turn reiteration of voting when nobody's really a dominant force in the galaxy (yet).

So instead of the endgame per se I think the key area comes down to AI. If you have a flexible AI that can keep the player from just running completely over it willy-nilly, then no matter how you design your endgame it will be fun and worth playing. If you can keep it from getting to "ho hum another game won in 100 turns" (exaggeration of course) by keeping the game difficult longer and the decision unclear, it becomes more interesting. Make diplomacy more than just marking time until you betray them and conquer them, yet above all don't make it too complicated. I think the latest iteration of SE has gone too far with trying to give too much flexibility in diplomacy to the point I just don't even bother, I just ignore it completely because it's too complicated to mess with figuring out. If you can figure out a good happy medium between an overagressive AI that's too powerful and a wimpy AI that can't challenge you at all, and a good medium between powerful diplomacy and overcomplicated diplomacy, then as long as it doesn't end up in a boring "exterminate the galaxy" I don't think the endgame will matter nearly as much.

How that translates into Horizon where you simply won't end up in such a situation, however, I'm not sure. Since you really couldn't go conquer the galaxy in Horizon (at least not very likely) it seems that all the traditional stuff is already set on its ear and I wonder if there really is a need for any fancy new end-game paradigms in the game as well. I'm not so sure it really is needed.

RH
_________________
Robert, the Earl of Huntingdon

Tarry here, my merry men, whilst I seek what adventure await in yonder greenwood; but look thou listen for my call, for I will blow my horn if I become hard-pressed.

Adapted from Sterling, pg. 45

[AerionIstari]

I rarely ever finish a 4X game if I'm obviously far ahead. The only time I force myself to finish is just to get a look at the higher level units/technologies.

Lots of good ideas here to help keep the end game more interesting. I like the idea if self-limiting restrictions - like inefficiency for a larger empire. I also like the idea that once one empire gets ahead of the others, the lesser empires gang up on it. Seems pretty realistic.

[RobHuntingdon]

[AerionIstari]

As Robert said, the ganging up can't be "too little, too late" or a "barbarian Swarm". And they have to actually attack you. How aggressively they attach you should be determined by the difficulty level you're playing on.

Robert also has the right idea, but only if the AI can accurately measure the relative strengths of the two civs. I recall many games where I had a tech advantage so high that one of my ships could defeat ten of the enemies best ships. (think MOO2 pre creative patch) Yet the AI seemed to evaluate our civs as either even or me slightly behind. It seemed as though quantity counted more than quality.

As an aside, in Battle for Antaries, the Antarians had a nasty habit of pestering the civ farthest ahead. Got to be really annoying until you got powerful enough to defeat them. Even if the victory conditions are not actually met, if you've defeated the Antarians you might as well end the game there.

[Breniir]

I always like that about MoO2, the semi-random attacks from the Antarans, until you can stomp their ships (usually by the time neutron blasters are available in large numbers). I think my favorite fights were actually capturing antaran ships and stealing all the tech goodies.

I will be interested to see how the GalCiv II expansion does with mega events. Too many will be annoying, too few won't really improve the end game.

Back to the topic, there have to be more ways to "gang up" on the 1st place person than just military action. Diplomatic isolation? Trade embargoes? Concerted spying efforts or maybe a revolution supplied by outside parties.

[RobHuntingdon]

[Anguille]

Do you think of MOO?


Knights of Honor isn't bad either in diplomacy and espionage...
_________________
I may not post so much...but i am here watching!

[RobHuntingdon]

[Zaimat]

Lots of good suggestions. I think an important point being that what the AI is doing has to make sense to the player at some point and that it have a chance of succeeding (or failing).

Coming back to the end-game topic: The intent is really simple, it's much more about discovery, exploration, contact and ascension. Therlun and others mentioned replayability. Well there is a lot of that but it's not about 'winning' the common end-game scenarios so much but playing the game itself and dealing with the cards you are dealt, making decisions and see where it leads to. What goals you persue, what goals become available based on your play and the random factors such as where you begin, the galaxy generation, what you discover, responding to AI threats etc.

Of all the ideas (my own and yours) of how to end the game, the one I like the least is where the humans become so powerful in such a short time that they can wipe out the galaxy. As a designer I don't like 'you can't option' so yeah it will be possible technically but not realistically. In other words it's like your chances at winning the lotto except that it's not as easy as buying a 1$ ticket.

[RobHuntingdon]