During the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working more and more on content for the next release, as opposed to features. The next release is going to add four new star systems – Arcadia, Eos, Magec, and Valhalla. David has done a lion’s share of work in mapping these out and creating the backstory – and now, it’s time for these to be populated with fleets.

When adding content, a key question that comes up is how much to procedurally generate vs hand-craft. Both approaches have their pros and cons; on a very basic level, hand-crafted content is going to have higher initial quality, while procedurally generated content is going to have more replay value. It’s not a question of which approach to choose, though. Every approach lies somewhere on a continuum between the two, so the question is exactly how to mix hand-crafted and procedural components, and in what proportion – in this case, specifically as it applies to fleet creation.

Before deciding how to do something, it’s not a bad idea to figure out what it is you want to actually do. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what we actually want out of fleet creation. There are two parts to it: what ships make up a fleet, and what kinds of fleets to spawn (and where, and how often).

Fleet Composition
First, the obvious: what ships go into a fleet depends on what type of fleet it is. A trade fleet is going to need freighters, a patrol is going to need fast attack ships, and so on.

Completely unrelated screenshot of the habitation glows on Sindria, along with some backstory

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In the parlance of the economy system, a market is any entity (generally a planet or a space habitat) that participates in the economy. One of the primary ways of interacting with a market is through the trade screen, which therefore needed a major revamp from its current incarnation. Let’s take a quick look at the new trade screen, and then talk about the details of how markets work.

 Trading with Jangala in the Corvus system

Please note that the market-related screens aren’t completely finished. Some of the artwork in the screenshot uses placeholders – for example, the top-right  icons for market conditions currently use hull mod icons. In general, things could change from what you’re seeing now, but I wouldn’t expect them to change too much. That said, let’s dive into the details!

Market Conditions
In the upper right, you can see a row of icons labelled “market conditions”. Market conditions are the building blocks that define a market – they determine what it produces, what it consumes, how much population it has, what type of planet it is, and so on. For now, buildings and installations are also rolled into market conditions, though later on they’ll probably receive more detailed treatment.

Jangala has the following market conditions:

• Urbanized Polity
• Regional Capital
• Orbital Station
• Military Base
• Autofactory – Heavy Industrial
• Organics Complex
• Orbital Burns
• Jungle World
• Population – hundreds of thousands

The “Urbanized Polity” condition, for example, increases demand for luxury and domestic goods, and reduces food production. (Rampant speculation on what the other conditions do may officially commence.) Read the rest of this entry »

An Aside
It’s that time again when I get to talk about stuff that’s going to be in the next release. This time, though, I’m going to talk about it a little earlier in the dev process than I’m usually comfortable with. Why is that? Well, for one, I’d like to talk about it. It’s fun! For two, waiting until it was mostly done would mean this blog post would come out a week or so before the actual release, and I don’t think anybody wants that.

In short, instead of talking about the actual implementation of something, we’re going to talk about the design and the motivations for why things are going to work a certain way. This also means that things almost certainly won’t work exactly as described here, because implementation gets in the way of finely crafted theory on occasion. Consider yourself warned!

Trade
Now, what was I talking about? Oh, right, trade. The trouble with trade is that in its most basic form, it’s boring. You go someplace, buy some stuff, go someplace else, sell whatever you bought, hopefully make a profit, and then repeat that until you have enough credits to do something that’s actually interesting.

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