Shadow Covenant

I’ve been feeling the urge for playing a good 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game for some time now, in the same vein as the old Master of Orion, Deuteros or Sins of a Solar Empire, but I haven’t found nothing that tickles my fancy…

Tried out “10 Min Space Strategy”, and although it was good, the AI made the experience a bit annoying (not hard, just annoying); it also lacked the depth of the aforementioned titles…

Although I’m still searching, I started thinking on the whole 4X genre and I had an idea that I haven’t seen implemented and I would appreciate: a mix of 4X and RPG…

First, for some definition: when I’m talking about RPG, I’m talking more precisely of the CRPG aspect of it, and more to the point, the stats and character building.

I’m aware that most 4X games have a certain RPGish characteristic to it… You evolve your civilization (character) through resources (experience). Some of them even have experience levels associated to your units, etc…

But the idea that came to me was more related to “character development trees”:

This is the World of Warcraft talent tree (for mages)… Every time you level up, you get a point that can spend on this tree. Although you select in the start of the game your class (and that effects what you can do, what roles you can take and how you achieve it), this affects the way you approach the game and changes a million things in the gameplay style (hence most high-level players spend an insane amount of time fine-tuning this).

There are 4X games that allow you to define “racial traits” when you start a game, but as far as I know, none of them allows you to have a dynamic/changeable tree that modifies the way you play the game while you play it, and I think that would be awesome…

I can think of several mechanics associated to this… Simple model, you get a point to apply in your “civilization tree” the first time you do some meaningful action (first planet explored, your first colony, your first defense against invaders, first death star, whatever). A bit more complex model would be to get some “civilizational experience” every time you perform a meaningful action (not only the first time). This would be a bit harder to adjust (for example, destroying a planet controlled by a weak opponent shouldn’t affect that civilizational experience that much). An even more complex model would be to have different trees and different experience levels (“Explore” tree, “Exploit” tree, “Expand” tree, “Exterminate” tree).

I think this would add an additional depth to the game, and an interesting one at that, specially if the designers would spend enough time thinking about the tree(s) and the elements within, considering all the four facets of the game…

Of course, this might be just a matter of semantics… there are plenty of 4X games that kind of do this through the tech-trees/research, but the fact you could change the civilization tree during the game, tweaking it to the particular needs (of course with some penalization, so you wouldn’t do that every 2 minutes) would lead to some interesting gameplay in my opinion…

Another thing I’d like to see in a 4X game (haven’t seen it yet as well) would be ground combats, although I admit that might add a layer of micromanagement that might not be suited to this sort of game… but it would rock to fight a battle in different layers (or more precisely, let the computer fight the battles, since I appreciate that more in my 4X… space combat strategy is a different beast in my opinion), having to decide before hand what kind of units my drop-ships would carry, and that could affect the amount of resources/facilities that could be salvaged from the planet (instead of just using an orbital bombardment to wipe it out).

Currently I have my hands full, with my spare time being occupied with “SurgeEditor”, “Something Fishy” port, and the “Cell.Ection” development for me to be able to tackle a new project, but I’d like to see this developed so I could play it, so get busy people!