Depth, Ship Loadouts, and Tech Generators
TL;DR: To maximize replayability of an EVx scenario, designing "layers" of ship loadout choices can help; this requires lots of outfits, which the Tech Generator can help create.
Quick Progress Update
This month, I've continued working on the Tech Generator, and relatedly on the spreadsheet listing of weapon & outfit stats in EV scenarios. The work has become grindier than anticipated, and life has been very busy, so progress is slower than I'd hoped– however, progress is happening, and the Tech Generator is getting very close to version 1.0!
I also had a major conceptual breakthrough this month, related to using design concepts from Magic: the Gathering in an EVx context, and specifically for Orion Skies. I think a lot of these ideas could work for any TC, and wanted to write a blog post about them.
"Depth"
One trait that I always find really valuable in games is "depth" – the idea that someone can play that game repeatedly, many times over an extended time period, and still encounter new discoveries, new challenges, and new things to explore or try.
When designing "cubes" for drafting in Magic: the Gathering, I always try to design them to have as much depth as possible. I want each person to end up creating a brand-new deck every time they play the cube (except when they intentionally want to re-create a deck they previously built and liked).
This month, I had a breakthrough for adapting some of the concepts I use to maximize deck possibilities, and therefore depth, into an EVx context. Instead of building decks, in EVx a player builds "ship loadouts", arming and equipping their ship in a specific way; I've been hoping to design Orion Skies to maximize the variety of different ship loadouts the player will naturally be drawn into, so that someone can play it over and over again with a different ship loadout each time.
As of this month, I have a theoretical framework for how to do that, which I'll describe below.
Ship Loadout Layers
When thinking about a "ship loadout", it's essentially a combination of what ship the player is flying, and what outfits and weapons the player puts on that ship. So for example a UE Destroyer with anti-shield weaponry (so it can fight well in the Crescent) is a different "loadout" than the same UE Destroyer with anti-armor weaponry (so it can fight well against Voinians).
A huge part of the EV gameplay experience is trying to set up the best loadout for your ship, and experimenting with different ships and different ways to equip them. By maximizing the number of different meaningful ship loadouts, a TC can maximize the amount of experimentation and learning a player can experience related to equipping their ship.
Translating some of the "cube" design concepts I use into EVx concepts, I think it should be possible for ship loadouts to be driven by player selections at several different "layers", and the combination of the different layered choices result in a unique ship. The more open-ended each layer can be, and the more you can find a balance where each layer affects the others without overly restricting them, the better.
My current thinking is that there are 4 primary layers that one could design this way in a TC– Ship Classes, Strategies, Synergies, and Factions, described below.
Buying your ship is just the starting point. How you equip it is the bigger challenge. (Image source.)
Layer 1: Ship Classes
The starting point for setting up your ship is picking a ship! And each ship tends to fall into one of several different classes– for example, Fighters vs Heavy Warships. Many ship classes are the same across all 3 EV games, and players will be looking for them. It should also be possible, if desired, for a TC to use a completely different set of ship types; for example, Ares has its own unique classification system, which makes perfect sense within Ares's universe.
Ideally, as many ship types as possible should be viable, especially in the late game, to give the player the maximum number of viable choices of playthrough-ships. Generally speaking, EVC and EVO focused primarily on Heavy Warships as the one truly viable ship type to complete the game; EVN added the Starbridge/Valkyrie as a compelling alternative. In EVO: Expanded, the purpose of the new outfits and weapons I added was to increase the viability of Fighters, Freighters, Aradas, and Scoutships as potential endgame ships, with mixed success.
It's also worth noting that there's room for ship variety within a given type. For example, an Igazra and a Voinian Cruiser are both Heavy Warships, but have many differences (and great tradeoffs!) in comparison to each other.
In any case, to maximize ship loadouts, a starting layer is to maximize ship classes, and to design the TC in such a way that choosing a ship class leaves the other layers wide open.
Layer 2: Strategy Types
Famously, the Starbridge in Nova can be armed to fight at long range with Railguns; or else it can be armed to fight at short range with things like Thunderhead Lances. This is an example of two different "strategy types" being viable for a single ship– i.e. the Starbridge has (at least) two different effective ways to try to win fights.
It's tough to precisely pin down what constitutes an EVx "strategy" – the very idea is inherently subjective/constructed, and I also don't think many people have tried to do a comprehensive exploration of what different strategy types are theoretically possible in an EVx context.
With that said, my work on the Tech Generator has forced me give some serious thought to the balance of weapons and outfits, and to look for traits that might make a weapon "more powerful" than others in different ways. I think that, by looking at these traits, we can get a sense of some "core avenues" by which a given ship could try to win a fight – these could be the basis for some fundamental EVx strategy types.
This is by no means a final or definitive classification of EVx strategies; this topic definitely warrants a lot of further exploration; and I'm sure my personal ideas will continue to shift and develop over time– but I think these five general strategy types are a good starting point for trying to design a TC with strategy options:
- 🔥 Damage Per Second: Similar to the close-range Starbridge example above, this idea is to set up your ship to pump out damage as quickly as possible, with the goal of destroying your target before it can hit you back as much as you hit it.
- 🏹 Range: Just like the long-range Starbridge example, and also infamously embodied by the Monty Python Maneuver, this idea is to arm your ship with long-ranged weapons and to stay far-enough away from your target that it can't meaningfully hit you back. Many players can find this boring, so I think it'd be wise for a TC to either limit how much this happens, or look for ways to spice it up.
- 🌊 Floating Damage: This idea is perhaps best explained with an example: In Override, Neutron shots travel very slowly and linger in the air for a long period of time; by continuously firing, you can actually suspend a lot of damage's worth of Neutron shots midair at one time, much more damage than you can suspend with any other cannon type. If you line up your floating Neutron shots with your target and close the distance quickly, you can ensure that all of your shots hit and do significant damage, while your target doesn't get much time to hit you back as you quickly pass over. There are other weapons that also work well with this concept, like heavy rockets, bombs, and EVOE's Burst Phase Cannons.
- ⚡ Disruption: This idea is that, instead of being directly powerful, your ship is able to disrupt your target's ability to fight back meaningfully. This isn't particularly viable in any EVx scenario that I know of so far, but in Ares the Cantharan Gateship uses it to dramatic effect (and it's also one of the primary strategies in Magic). This is also something that I could see many players finding boring, or even frustrating when they're on the receiving end of it, so I think it'd be good for TC authors to try to limit it and/or spice it up somehow.
- ☯️ Hybrids: Once you have a few different viable Strategies in your TC, hybrid approaches should naturally occur – that's how it works in Magic, anyway.
A starting point to ensure these strategy types have support in a TC is to create compatible primary weapons for each one – such as a high-DPS cannon, a long-range cannon, a slow-floaty-shots cannon, and a cannon that has a secondary ionizing effect. However, the ship loadouts and battle tactics will be more interesting if there are also relevant secondary weapons (e.g. javelin rockets, guided missiles, heavy rockets, and EMP missiles) and supporting tools (like tractor beams, repulsor beams, detonators that suddenly push another ship away from up close, and awkwardly short-duration "bomb" weapons that are best used on an already-ionized target).
Additionally, it's good to actually have multiple different weapons in each strategy-related role, so that the player gets to decide, for example, which high-DPS cannons to use in a DPS-based ship build.
The ideal here is for every ship class to be able to support multiple strategy types. So perhaps the Starbridge, in addition to multiple different DPS and Range builds, could also be effectively used in Floating Damage and/or Disruption -oriented builds.
Layer 3: Synergies
In last month's blog post, I talked about the idea of "MSCTT", which is actually an expanded version of this "Synergies" concept. You might want to go back and read about the full "MSCTT" concept; in this blog post today, I'll be talking mostly about how Synergies fit as a layer into the "Ship Loadout Layers" concept.
Based on the layers above, we have a ship and we have a plan for what strategy type to use with it, and we have a variety of weapons and outfits to choose from to make that strategy work. Hopefully, those weapons and outfits have interesting tradeoffs compared to each other, and hopefully some of them have Synergies.
Synergy is when two different items benefit each other, such that together they are greater than the sum of their parts. Probably the best example of a Synergy I can think of in the EV games is Afterburners + Fuel Scoops... the Fuel Scoop means you can use your Afterburner much more liberally and for an indefinite time period; while the Afterburner means your Fuel Scoop is useful not just for long-distance exploration but also for combat.
If you can find items with Synergy that fit the overall Strategy you're using, you can leverage that Synergy for higher performance. For example, if you're going for a DPS build on your Starbridge, maybe you have a choice between a conventional high-DPS cannon, or an even higher-DPS cannon that uses fuel when it shoots; if you go with the fuel-using cannon along with enough Fuel Scoops to support it, you can get a higher total DPS output than you would have with the conventional cannon.
You could apply that same example with each of the different Strategies – perhaps there are fuel-using cannons with even greater range, even greater floating-damage potential, or even greater ionization.
And there can be different Synergies as well – maybe you have some weapons that push your target away from you and make it difficult to sustain continuous fire for your DPS strategy, but other weapons that apply a counterbalancing pull effect, similar to a tractor beam; or maybe you have some extra-powerful weapons that also hit your own ship with a little bit of area damage, along with enough shield regeneration to protect yourself from these weapons. Etc.
This is another area where I don't think anyone has ever done a comprehensive exploration of what different types of Synergies are theoretically possible in an EVx game, and I'll have to do some brainstorming, experimenting, and exploring as I build Orion Skies. But ultimately, the more Synergies are available for a player to leverage in their Strategy, the better.
Now that we're thinking about different Ship Classes, and different Strategy Types to use on a given ship, and different Synergies to leverage to maximize the effectiveness of those Strategies, the last layer in this concept is to think about how the Factions' unique technologies factor in.
Layer 4: Factions
In all three EV games, the vast majority of weapons and outfits are universally accessible, and working with a faction grants you access to a few "bonus" technologies. This means that, each time you play, you mostly have the same outfit and weapon options available as you did on any previous pilot.
The one major exception is the Polaris, who have a full suite of unique technologies if you align with them, which revolutionizes what you are able to do with your ship.
If we were to do things in the style of Magic, every faction would be like the Polaris: whichever faction you align with, you would get an entire full set of unique outfits and weaponry that you wouldn't have had access to otherwise, with unique strengths and weaknesses compared to the outfit sets of the other factions. Each faction would be better than the others at certain Strategies and Synergies, or would pursue them in a somewhat different way– think of how different the Igazra and the Voinian Cruiser are in their "Heavy Warship" functionality, purely from their different factions' styles.
If we gave every faction a full unique set of weapons and outfits like this, and if we used Override's open-ended setup for letting the player choose which combination of factions to work with and in what order, it would add an entire additional layer to the "ship loadout" puzzle, in which the player would be exploring all of the other layers via the unique, faction-aligned technology set(s) they have access to on each playthrough, which would dramatically increase the variety of experiences to be had on repeated playthroughs, and create a scenario with tremendous Depth.
Usefulness of a Tech Generator
Now that we're talking about every faction having a full set of technologies, with multiple primary and secondary weapons to support a variety of Strategies and Synergies across a range of Ship types, this is adding up to quite a lot of weapons and outfits – hundreds of them. This is where a procedural technology generator becomes very useful.
I aim to implement these concepts in Orion Skies, and I foresee the Tech Generator being quite helpful in facilitating that process. I still need to figure out the graphics side, though I have some ideas for that which I'm eager to explore further.
If I'm successful, and if my theories are correct, it'll mean that players have a lot of fun ship-equipping dynamics to explore in Orion Skies. Hopefully it'll all work out! :)
As always, thanks for reading, and take care.
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