This is more a 'what do people think', not necessarily a suggestion thread/question. Though I do like the idea myself.
Quite often when I am playing I have certain regions of my empire consisting of groupings of planets/starbases/shipyards collectively working together doing specific goals. Yet I have to manage them all individually. As the game progresses it all becomes a little overwhelming and often confusing keeping it all organized.
What do people think about a grouping function where you could select multiple planets and/or starbases that are adjacent to one another and form a state or province. Each state could have its own production wheel and perhaps a screen to manage the region as a whole. I have provided some screenshots below:
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HOW WE SEE IT NOW:
So the image below is how it is now in the game. Though I can manage it is a bunch of scattered icons on the screen... It works but the more stuff that gets colonized and built the tougher it is to sort out...
MY MOCK-UP:
This is something I whipped up quickly. Basically when zooming out into the tactical view your 'states' could be outlined with shaded hexes and make it easy to differentiate between important regions you want to have do different things. Also as you can see on the right I copied what is being done in the Diplomacy/Trade screen with collapsible menus. So upon defining a state or region it would create a collapsible menu that you could expand - where only the planets and/or starbases from that area are visible. This could really clean up the side menu and make things easier to manage.
Also when getting into larger galaxies with tons of stuff on the map to manage, if a particular planet or starbase is listed as part of a specific state you will know from memory what area of the map it is on without having to keep going back to the map to see where it is.
As you can see I named my initial expansion area Terra Prime so if I get an idle colony message and click into the planet screen of say, a generic name of 'Morgellon V', if the planet screen states it is part of Terra Prime I know where it is. This memory association of regions would streamline my planet management not sure about other people.
Also a Region Screen could have all your planets/starbases/shipyards at a glance and you could manage higher level things in that screen and adjust production for the state as a whole.
I dunno - just a thought. What does everyone think?
You know how many times I read a post title and think, "No." Only to then read the description and come to agree with the post? Lots. I support this idea as it makes management easier and thus makes the game better.
I like this idea very much
One of the sweetest ideas yet!
Agreed 100%.
+1.
This is similar to a concept I call "theaters", which I find useful when playing any 3X, 4X, Empire-like, boardgame, or other game with buildables and exploration (including some RPGs). Any map-based game with lots of things going on naturally demands a narrowing of scope (or you'll get overwhelmed by the complexity of interactions). Evidently, US and other militaries have encountered the same problem and found the same solution, for similar reasons.
Hence I advocate for a UI with "player-defined slices" of stuff, where a slice is both a map region and/or a subset of your units. A region is whatever you want to handle with a bit of tunnel vision, seeing everything germane to that region, and not-seeing anything else. Theaters evolve over time, because you eventually make progress (or give up), which changes your interest.
For the boundaries between adjacent theaters, maybe you simplify or abstract them away as (haha, here we go) input/output interfaces, or flows of stuff, or dependencies in a graph. Yes, it becomes a bit like OO-design with UML use cases I think that's not a coincidence. Humans simplify complexity, and it seems that we often do it the same way, across many domains and endeavors. Maybe hoomans are soft-wired that way.
Separately, the "theater" concept also makes sense for an AI architecture. A monolithic AI could do without it, and just try to solve the entire connected graph-of-everything every turn. A competing philosophy, which should appeal to *nix / agent / team programmers everywhere, is to model an AI as a generator-of-theaters, which spawns 1 "general" sub-AI for each theater. (I leave for future research the fascinating question of how the AI recognizes, pattern-matches, or deduces when to spawn a new theater, or to delete or merge an old one.) Thereafter, the sub-AIs compete for limited resources, and essentially float proposals upward, where each proposal demands some stuff, and promises some gain or effect. The "master AI" would then be like a CEO or king (or Joint Chiefs), and make grand strategy decisions for these-proposals and not those-proposals, presumably to maximize total (projected) return under the current constraints. This might not actually be the strongest AI in playing strength, but I conjecture that it would be the easier AI to develop. I think a human dev would go bonkers trying to implement the monolith as a monolith.
A theater-AI could also scale up nicely to handle the "panic response" in Empire-likes. The exemplar scenario is where a loaded troop transport or other threat suddenly appears off your coast. This demands a regional response, probably by diverting local assets and changing nearby cities to emergency-build armies or other defense. I think this could be elegantly handled by panic-spawning a new theater and general, and giving it extremely high priority, so that it can boldly make sweeping local changes, until the threat is handled. (N.B. this same architecture might generalize to any other kind of civilian or corporate panic-response, e.g. firefighting, or a Storm Surge/Flood/Tsunami expansion module for a SimCity-like, or net security vs. a hacking attack, or a Flash Mob Blue Light Special in a shopping-race game, etc.)
I like it. Would make it easier to organize many star systems
I like it too. HoI 3 with expansions has a system like this where you can make user defined theaters, and assign units to them, then give the AI orders, and they control your units while carrying out your orders.
Never played a game like this so I have non thing to compare. This is at least realistic. The main reason for creating provinces is to take administration off one body. If we did this and didn't do the same then I can't imagine why. Every province has an ex pence report right I still want a total expence report. I think that you need to state ideas and examples for specialisation of states. This needs to reduce redundant management to makes since on the suggestion. Please tell me why as far as game wise. I also came up with an idea for empire wide Congress to vote on bills in democracy federation and republics.
I am going to bump this thread of my original post regarding states/regions as the topic came up in Friday's dev stream between Paul and Adam.
Adam was is in favor of this idea but did not give a compelling argument to Paul. I think the concept goes beyond superfluous naming but actually helps game management for larger empires.
Please keep this thread alive so the devs can see what we are talking about. It seems several other forum members were in support of it when I originally posted the concept.
Thanks! HAPPY NEW YEAR!
This is essentially what I posted - hence I am heartily in favor of something along these lines. I was thinking more about data mining, finding where my dang ships are e.g. but it is all good.
I like this idea. Anything they can do to help people with large empires keep track of what planet is where and doing what I support.
Yeah I think what Paul was talking about was something automatic (i.e. the "void")... But this idea would be fully utilized by the player. And it would be up to the player to group the star systems as he or she saw fit.
This would also help patrols. Imagine assigning a ship to patrol the outer border of a state/region, Once given the command the ship/fleet would just automatically travel along the border of the state/region in a continuous loop . If you spaced out your patrol ships accordingly you could have a pretty good patrol force protecting that region.
I am sure there are other ways this idea could enhance other aspects of the game.
Love this.
Finally bpatrols that worked. They didn't work in galactic civil two.
Besides automated but ifI was going to automate. I could see an advantage of having governors at this level. Where you choose how to allocate money between states. Otherwise I can still see an advantage of pulling up an area to micromanage at a time. When I play galactic civilizations many times I have wished I had CNN reports for specific areas. I could see an advantage if gnn reports were by states instead of the whole thing at once. This would be nice in areas where the exploration events seemed to drift toward whole systems.
Bumping this thread as I really want to see this in the game.
Pretty cool idea. +1
bumping once again cause this would be SOOOO freaking helpful on bigger maps.
Great ideas guys! The states/provinces/theatres concept looks like a rich gold mine of possible improvements to help those of us who like to play on huge maps and create really large empires. I especially love the patrol the borders of a state idea.
+1 for the idea to show and 'brand' regions on map
This, methinks, would be WONDERFUL! Great idea and great presentation in the OP.
I like this idea, but I'll echo Gilmoy that HOI3-style theaters would be even better. It would be great to assign commanders to user-defined theaters to carry out your orders, provide bonuses to military, econ or espionage, etc. It would add another strategic layer to the game.
This is an awesome idea. Managing a huge empire can become extremely inefficient and annoying in the late game, and these "states" seem like a great way to streamline and organize the process.
+100 Excellant Idea!!!!
Bumping to keep this post/idea alive...
I like this idea too. I would very much like to be able to create custom groups of planets/shipyards, and change their settings/production at once.
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