I'm not a frequent member of these boards, but bitten by the OP2 bug I return and thought I'd express some of my thinking along the lines of this wonderful game.
Anyway
I'm an amateur game designer. Recently Civilization by Fantasy Flight games has come to my attention. I'm holding it for a friend (since he doesn't play it during the week, and he lent it to me to learn how it works), when I return it I kind of wanted my own copy. But wouldn't it be great to re-create the game myself? Perhaps re-theme it? WHy not an Outpost 2 re-theme?
No promises here, since I have a history of adopting personal projects and not following through with them. Unless money is involved, or someone is there to crack the whip. And really I don't have anything but a page of ideas with nowhere to start.
But here's some thought processes I have over the mechanics and how they can relate to Civilization.
Resources:
For the sake of gameplay Resources would be scaled down by a massive degree. For example, constructing a silo is still 1 resource, constructing a residence is 2, etx. These can be saved and stockpiled. RU harvesting requires building a refinery next to a mining beacon. You can build it further but it is -1 resource per turn per cell distant (to a minimum of 1). Trucks are virtually transparent in the game.
Food is recorded only if you are producing more than the number of colonists. Going under demand means impact on Morale.
Power means imposing a limit on how many buildings you can have, and won't break down individual points. This is to save on player computing and cut down on analsys paralysis. Might just be Tokamaks (requiring 1 ru per turn to keep functional), and advanced powerplants (Solar power?) MHDs would just remove the cost requirement from reactors.
A colony population is between Workers and Scientists. Children and civilians will not be represented. You need to have residential capacity for all of your civilians or morale will take a hit.
Production-Buildings:
Like Civilization you are limited by the number of cities you can found (Command centers in this case) by 2. Don't worry, these are just city centers and you can still build around them. You can construct other buildings but they MUST be connected to other buildings of your faction or to a Command center. The only exception to this rule are power plants, which can be constructed at maximum 3 cells away from another building.
ConVecs are semi-transparent. They aren't an actual unit but go on a play chart available to each player. One ConVec can either repair during a turn or place a new building in a location. Large structures (Spaceport, Factories, Refineries, Adv Lab) might require two turns before placing. When building a structure it is placed on the map with a ConVec on top of it to show it is being constructed.
When building a structure kit the intended building is placed on the structure factory space on the player chart. A player can only put so many resources per turn into building, and some structures take longer times to build. When complete they are available for placement by the SCVs.
Buildings of course require workers and scientists in order to function. Workers are automatically generated through event cards, and scientists go through training at a university (for 3 turns? Down to 2 turns when Hypnopedia is unlocked). Typically it's one worker per building and the tile lists the requirements for such.
If you can't fill the requirements, it's idle, and that's a hit to Morale.
Morale:
One of three ebb-flow graphs (the others being Food production and Population). Basically it's three elements: Terrible, Good, Excellent. Terrible accentuates bad stuff happening on Random cards. Excellent accentuates good things happening. Prone to fluctuation on event cards, while doing stuff with structures gives bonuses to Morale (And of course you can buy it with the Consumer factory).
Units:
Still pretty vauge on this one. RoboMiners are effectively rendered transparent for the sake of smooth gameplay. Same with Cargo trucks. ConVecs are pure building units. Spiders probably offer one free repair if you just have them and enable Plymouth EMP units to capture. Robo Dozers and Earthworkers might not have any representation except for making some structures easier maybe.
Civ has a unique way of presenting units. Units are both plastic flags on the board to represent armies and cards-in-hand that are played during battle. The cards themselves are square, and which side of the square you play depends on how far you've upgraded the unit.
My thinking is along similar lines, except that each card is one chassis and the facing is one kind of weapon. When built you play them up in front of you and arrange them as you will. This of course means you can't have every chassis with every weapon, but I imagine some chassis don't usually see that kind of weapon anyway (who ever uses Tiger Starflares?) Tigers naturally have heavier-hitting weapons you commonly see (railguns, EMP, Thor's Hammer, RPG), Lynxes are lighter and starter weapons with suicide platforms. Panthers have the weird and wacky special weapons (Acid cloud, ESG). As well as platform mainstays (RPGs, Railguns).
Civ uses the little flags as armies and when you go into combat you randomly choose 3 units to do battle with. Since randomosity would not work really with the way I figure units would work, players might select up to 4 units they wish and go into combat that way with limitations (2 Lynxes, 1 Panther, 1 Tiger, or something). One unit is played at a time, combat damage applied against defense. Survivors come back for a second round of play and continues until one side survives or both sides retreat. Tigers cannot retreat in this way and have to be in battle.
Like Civ, flags don't represent units as-is, but more a concentration of forces in your colony. I don't want to be producing hundreds of tokens of every weapons combinaiton under the sun. And as appealing as it might be, I don't want to create turret tokens and generic platforms to mix-and-match when building. It would work for a tactical combat simulator, but not for a strategy title.
Random events:
At the end of every turn a player draws an event card which shows how their colony is effected. Some effects don't apply if they don't have structures to affect them (for example, +1 worker would not affect the player if he/she has no universities). Since I rarely have random events land directly in my colony and mash up my structures, Tornadoes and Earthquakes would just remove units from hand, not from the board. Meteorites have their own scatter table from a player's command post and if there are no repair units available stuff might get destroyed.
Morale takes effect here. Morale makes bad things (colonists dying, loosing resources, going back on research tracks) even worse (doubles or adds one to that effect) when bad. Good things are effected the same way. However Morale changes on Random cards are not effected, and the impacts are felt next turn.
I can't think of a way to simulate volcano eruptions. Could be something like the nearest volcano goes up and starts putting lava markers in cells of a certain color until they are all filled. It would be nice to keep pieces count low however...
Research
Like Civ you'll be maintaining a layout of cards you've unlocked in a pattern and it'll be arranged like a tree. To keep card count down some cards will be cut, since there are many techs in the computer game and I'd rather not produce hundreds of cards.
Still, each card would have what lab is needed to research it, the benefits of such, what it unlocks, and what technologies branch off or go above. Arrows would point to one side of the card (Up down, left right) on which tech they came from and what other techs they unlock.
All research cards have a scientist track on them. If you have all the scientists you need you can allocate them for that turn and the research is complete on the next. But if you don't have them you fill up the space from left to right as much as possible. On the next turn, the whole line is advanced to leave the spaces originally occupied, empty. If this reaches the end and there is excess, the last space on the track still needs to be occupied and the scientists taken up before the research is completed. When finished, the research is added to the tech tree and the scientists are free to do whatever.
Yes you can reassign them. They are removed from the right side of the research in progress and reassigned to whatever. One lab per technology at a time. Basic lab and techs there are, of course, removed.
Map Tiles:
Like Civ the map is comprised of square tiles. Unlike Civ, diagonal movement is allowed. Tiles have terrain on them which doesn't restrict building capabilities like Civ, but impacts unit movement.
Now that I think about it I wonder if I should have the flags on the board be groups. Organized from 0-3, with three flags and 0 being base defense. Units in the 0 portion are at the base and defend tiles there when attacked, and the flags have those units. A flag cannot move if it gains units on its turn.
So if terrain happens it is affected by the slowest unit. Tigers in a blob moving across rough ground then only go one space per turn.
By now you should have figured each cell is not going to be a 1:1 comparison with the computer game. They are going to be general locations, and all base connections are interconnected with tubes.
Turrets if implemented can be placed on the map and contribute to defense in the eight surrounding cells to their placement, and the ninth they occupy.
Walls are transparent. If anything there might be a space on the player sheet where you can allocate resources with your earthworker, and that impedes mobility for all units moving through your town tiles.
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*Transparency here means that it has no effect on the game. One point of RUs, one colonist, is not going to make a difference based on the zoomed-out scale nature of this game. To do a full-blown Outpost 2 boardgame that represents every nuance would probably take days to play and many mechanics to simulate. That's why computers do it after all. The focus of an OP2 board game would be to simulate the feel of the computer game on a tabletop without getting trapped up in the nuances. Civ does this with Civ the computer game.
Bleh, I think that's everything. A massive outpouring of ideas but not much substance to back them up, since I'm searching for a job now and that takes paramount importance. But as one who often thinks about game mechanics (on the fly, often), I thought I'd present this to a community who would appreciate it best.
But if someone did want to help out one pile of resources I'd appreciate is all the building and unit sprites. Has someone managed to unpack all the game assets somewhere? That would be helpful if something like this was to go beyond just theory.
:op2:
