Empires in Space - A turn based MMO strategy game

[Skratti]

This is for 4X fans (Civilization, Master of Orion, Age of Wonders...) who are missing a good multiplayer game.

Empires in Space is like the mentioned games, but it's slow time. This means that only 6 turns are evaluated per day. One login per day should suffice, since all values stack up for multiple turns.

 

Having no influence on turn evaluation (contrary to single player, where you just click "Next turn") has some negative consequences (like not being able to play for hours), but also brings very great benefits:

 

- Thousands of players might play the same game. Nobody needs to wait for the other players to finish their turn. 

- Having so many players allow you to team up with friends, and still have a challenge against the other teams.

- One has as much time (well 4 hours) for each turn as one wants

- Slow time does make conflicts extremely thrilling. You move your units in defense positions, coordinate with friends and allies, prepare an invasion from an unobserved direction etc. And then you have to wait a few hours or a day to continue with your plans, all the while not knowing what your humans opponents are doing.

 

The beta is up and running at

www.EmpiresInSpace.com

 

I could need feedback on balancing and communication features. What features do you expect from a 4X that are missing in this game?

Aside from that, just enjoy the game.

 

Known bugs:

- The intro quest do show some images twice. All intro quests are about to be overhauled.

- Sometimes a data refresh is missing. E.g. after declaring war, a manual refresh (leaving and joining) is required

- directly after the first login, the ingame chat does only show the player number and not the player name (another data refresh bug)

 

Images:

A designer did only recently join the team (consisting of me until that moment), so most graphics are still basic.

 

The galaxy view:

 

The colony view:

The research tree:

 

About the technology behind it:
Typescript/Javascript + JqueryUI + Canvas (and a bit SVG in the research tree)
C# + SQL

 

 

 

[stvrbbns]

Looks interesting.

If you're looking for some design inspiration, consider comparing your creation to Ikariam and Global Triumph.

Some questions to consider:

• Does any game feature (e.g. research) ever get finished?
  (i.e. is there a finite number of colonies one can have or a finite number of technologies to research)
• Can a game / map / server ever be finished / won?
  (and, if so, what forewarning is there for new players that a match/map is about to end)
• What prevents a single player or alliance from dominating an entire game/server?
  (there doesn't have to be anything, but if a player or group becomes too dominating then it can lead to boredom and burnout as the playerbase becomes bifurcated into those who never win and those who never lose - if there is no mechanism to maintain hope for the losers and risk for the winners)

Good luck with your game (and with filtering spam bots out of the forum).

[Skratti]

Thanks for asking. It's the old, single player style - one technology can be researched only once. I'm not working with levels as most current browser strategy games do. Colony number is limited by increasing support costs. That might be a problem, since the map is huge and one can atm easily relocate to a position far away from the others. And that works against one of the biggest motivators, the battle for limited resources (in this case worlds to colonize).

In most major browser "strategy" games one sends military units to a target to raid or conquer. After sending the units, one gets a timer that shows when the battle will take place, and then there is a beautiful combat (with mostly no ways to influence it except army composition) and the winning (or loosing) army returns home.
In Empires in Space, unit movement is real time. One moves a unit to the next field, and gets directly the result of the new scan area. One attacks, and the attack is directly fulfilled. That might seem hard for the defender, but since unit movement is limited to a few fields (between 5 and 20), the defender is likely to have a chance to react. Wars in the last test games were balanced , but this has to be tested with bigger alliances fighting each other (or smaller defending against big ones).

Every game ends after several months with a rather unique ending scenario:

There is a research which allows to reach transcendence (well - this is SciFi after all). After unlocking the tech, one can build a special space station (the Transcendence Construct). This is a bit like a team project, where the owner decides who might help. A quarter of the players in the game would need two weeks to finish the construct if they cooperated.
To help constructing it, one has to send costly and slow travelling helper ships to that space station.

If several such constructs compete, the supporter ships might be easy targets...
Every player that has supported the transcendence construct that was finished first count as winner. 
I'm hoping to reach all players in this game with this ending scenario, giving everyone the possibility to affect the outcome of the game.

" What prevents a single player or alliance from dominating an entire game/server?"
The colony limit and the difficulty to travel long distances might help much.

Thanks for the link to Global Triumph, that seems to be a great game. I will definitely take a closer look at it.

 

 

[Marius]

Improve the UI, please ...