Flexibility and Tonnage Curves

TL;DR: Tech Generator can now be configured to generate weapons that are different from EVO. It's currently a little clunky, so I'm improving its flexibility, particularly enabling users to create a "mana curve" / "tonnage curve" for their TC, and also enabling really unique weapons like the Plasma Siphon.

 

Most Recent Progress

   At the last blog post, the Tech Generator was successfully creating EVO-style weaponry. At that time, all of the values were hardcoded – EVO-style weapons were the only types of weapons it could ever produce.

   This month, I hit another big milestone: the values used to generate weapons are no longer hardcoded, instead being provided by the user in a "Weapons Configuration" table. This means it can now produce weapons for a TC, based on the user's specifications! Woohoo!

   With that said, it's currently a bit clunky and restrictive in how it generates weapons. I'm currently in the middle of making some revisions to streamline it and improve its flexibility. I'll talk about one of the big concepts I'm trying to support below.

Overall Status

   When I started working on the Tech Generator, I really wasn't sure what exactly it would involve or where the project was going; part of the point of building it was to figure all of that out!

   This month, I've identified a lot of what this generator will need to do, and I now have a rough outline of the stages/milestones it will need to go through:

    🟢 Generate EVO-Style Weaponry: I had to figure out how to do this as I was building it.
    🟢 Generate Weaponry Per User Specifications: Now it can produce a TC's weapons! Sort of.
    🟡 Streamline & Improve Flexibility: Giving the user a lot of power to define what their TC's weapons should be like.
    ⚪ Test Flexibility by Generating Weapons in the Style of Frozen Heart, Ares, Nova: I anticipate I'll have to add some miscellaneous features as I do this, especially for Nova, whose weapons are often complex.
    ⚪ Generate Outfits: These should be comparatively simple compared to weapons. 🤞
    ⚪ Add a "Specials" System: Inspired by classic RPGs, this would be a system whereby the player can find modified or upgraded copies of a given weapon type – for example, discovering a one-of-a-kind customized Blaze Cannon that deals extra damage with each shot.
    ⚪ Explore Design Concepts from Magic: the Gathering Using the Generator: In theory, the "Specials" system will enable a lot of strategy-design concepts from Magic; I'll have to test that out once the "Specials" are ready.
    ⚪ Streamline, Reflect, Miscellaneous Updates, add Documentation, Etc: Basically the nuts & bolts of making it a fully-developed, user friendly, helpful tool.

 

Balance Concept – "Tonnage Curve"

  I play Magic: the Gathering, and I like to build themed "cubes". A cube is essentially like a Magic mini-game, a customized play environment that a group of players can use for a play session. Each cube has a unique gameplay feel, and unique card interactions, compared to playing the game normally. In some ways, a cube is the Magic equivalent of a small-scale Total Conversion plug-in, so I was wondering if I could transfer my cube-design approach to my work on Orion Skies.

What is Mana Curve?

   One of the foundational concepts to designing a cube with an interesting strategic environment is called "Mana Curve". In Magic, each card is a spell, and each spell costs a certain amount of mana to cast. The player only has so much mana available at any given time, and part of the game's strategy is managing your spell costs to make maximum use of your mana supply.

   To make it possible & interesting for players to maximize their mana usage while also pursuing all of their other strategic goals, cubes are designed with a "mana curve", which is essentially a plan for how many cards of any given cost will exist in the cube. When you take an ideal distribution of mana cost numbers and plot it on a graph, it makes a curve:

An ideal mana curve for a cube, as described here.

Likely EVx Equivalent: Tonnage

   I think weapons and outfits in EVx can be roughly analogous to cards in Magic. In Magic, you try to build the best deck possible by choosing what cards to put in it; in EVx, you try to make your ship as good as possible by choosing what weapons and outfits to put on it. It's not a perfect analogy, but I think there are enough parallels there to do some interesting design work.

   If we're equating outfits to cards, I think the closest equivalent in EVx to mana cost is the outfit's tonnage. In Magic, you are trying to always make maximum use of your available mana supply; in EVx, you are trying to always make maximum use of your ship's available weapons space. (Mana supply and weapons space work a bit differently, but again, I think there are enough parallels that it's worth exploring.)

   Based on these ideas, Tonnage Curve would be the distribution of outfit tonnages and quantities within an EVx scenario. It's something worth thinking about when designing a TC, although different TCs would likely want their "Tonnage Curve" to look different:

• EVC, EVO, and EVN all generally limit their outfits to about 40 tons or below, with a few exceptions.
• Ares, if it were used as the setting for an EVx scenario, would feature numerous weapons over 100 tons that smaller ships simply couldn't fit.
• In your TC, do you want to have lots of larger weapons like Ares, or do you want to keep the weapons smaller like the base EV series?
  
• Within the range you choose, do you want to have more smaller weapons, or more larger ones?
  
• Do you want the player to gain exponentially more power by mounting larger weapons, or should there be "diminishing returns" as weapon size increases?
• Maybe you want to have a few really big weapons, which take up a majority of a ship's weapon space, along with some smaller weapons that players can use to fill in the gaps?
• Etc...

Tech Generator Updates

   I've done some pondering of these questions for Orion Skies specifically, and I don't have any final answers yet, but I do know that I want the Tech Generator to be able to support whatever I decide on. As such, some of the flexibility improvements I'm making to it now are focused on giving the user more options to control the distribution of weapons tonnages.

Some experimentation with possible Tonnage Curve ideas for Orion Skies.

Wrapping Things  Up

   That's it for this month's blog post, folks! For those who read all the way through, thanks for indulging my wild ideas. I'm looking forward to continuing the work and seeing where all of this leads. :)