On the naval stuff, all that is currently there I believe is the ability to be transported over water by the Maritime Trade Houses, I guess the Shadow Empire version of the spacing guild. Apparently some people were a bit upset about the lack of controllable navies currently, but it was too much for Vic to do at once.
That is an ambitious project if it ever happens, basically adding a space 4x layer on top. That is like the gaming equivalent of being hungry and ordering way more than you can eat. It sounds awesome, but I don’t know how the hell I find the time to play something like that, even if I was retired.
Man, I’d love to see someone with Vic’s imagination and design talent apply himself to a system like that. I’m still salty that it fell apart for me in Planetfall, but I’d love nothing more than to have a grand strategy game like Shadow Empire slotted into its own over-galaxy metagame.
He has briefly mentioned it somewhere before, but not much detail. I’m going to see if I can track it down again. I imagine it is still up in the air as to what form it would take.
Edit: I guess he was working on Shadow Empire a lot longer than I realized. He is talking about Shadow Empire stuff in this blog post back in 2014. I guess in the end he decided to keep stacking though. :)
I’ve been listening to some podcast interviews of Vic, and I love that the main point of Oceania for him was to be able to make the planet/map generation algorithms do oceans, and didn’t have a desire really to put navies in.
Edit: So he talks very briefly about Starfire on the July 31, 2023 Explorminate podcast interview. Not much beyond an idea involving multiple planets.
Interestingly enough, the planets in Emperor of the Fading Suns had oceans and I don’t remember ever bothering with navies in that game, although I’m pretty sure they were in there. But when you can orbitally drop onto a planet, a bunch of water doesn’t account for much. However, that’s not an option in Shadow Empire, so you can’t very well have oceans without navies. I wonder if the game has painted itself into a corner, frankly.
EDIT: I should say I haven’t tried the Oceana DLC, so I’m just musing here!
I haven’t tried one of the Oceania planets yet, so I’m not sure how it works completely, but my understanding is you are paying these maritime trade houses to explore the seas for you, and to deliver your troops somewhere. It might also be possible to poison the relations of a another regime with the trade houses (or possibly something in the future, but that is in my head from all the recent digging into blog posts and interviews). He does plan on adding actual navies, he just felt it was too much to do it all in one go with the Oceania DLC, and wanted more time to work out how he was going to do it. I get the feeling that he doesn’t want the navies to just be counters you are pushing around the map like land units.
AI for navies is especially challenging, isn’t it? Although I know from experience that coding AI for land units is plenty hard.
I actually once PMd Vic to ask for advice with the AI for a wargame prototype I made a few years back, and he replied that he was too busy to help, which was understandable. I wrote to him because I’ve always been impressed with his wargame AI, including that in Shadow Empire, especially his defensive AI. Of course it’s not as good as a human opponent, and it sometimes does dumb things, but it is capable of surprising me, and it gives me a good game.
Oh, I’ll take a listen, then. I’m amazed how his units form coherent lines, both on offensive and defense. And he also handles huge stacks in Shadow Empire. I find all that really hard to code.
It sounded like he has various “AIs”, I guess routines, that work together, with there being something focused on the strategic level, some operational level stuff, and then something that focuses on the economics. So the eco bit can look at things and say we need more metal, raise a flag to the strategic ai, and then the strategic ai will look for land or regimes that have a good supply and look to possibly grab the land. He also mentioned creating various mappings of values to hex locations to weight their importance for whichever criteria, and then some eval function uses those to make decisions.
This is in the July 31st, 2023 explorminate interview.
Yes, Battlemode does some GC4 videos and many other strategy games. Stardock liked him so much they hired him. 😁 He is a big fan of Shadow Empire, so should have some vids. Another I’ve watched recently for Shadow Empire is Edmon. He is a community manager at Slitherine I guess, but is a strategy game YouTuber.
I’ve just started listening to the explorminate podcasts on my walks, and like you discovered Battlemode with GC4.
My Shadow Empire game took an ominous turn last night when a minor regime declared war on me. A minor regime of arachnids apparently. This is a planet with a lot of forests, jungles, and rainfall. So just imagining the horrors of fighting these damn things.
