Sure, I'm a big fan of the paradox game lineage, but I'd like something a bit less focused on warfare, not that I don't think combat isn't important, but I'd like to see what focusing on different mechanics does.
So the game runs a simulation under the hood and my goal is to slowly build up it's complexity over time, talking to players about what mechanics they find interesting / fun to focus on initially =)...
The global market is modelled like a stock market, it's still very primitive, but the companies and organisations in it have their earnings driven by spending activities of agents in the system.
I'm working on also having these agents also acting locally against more commodity like goods, which provides local a more local market as well.
The real fun comes in when my demand system get's hit with the effects of supply chain, I'm still trying to work out good levers to give players so that they can interact with the underlying sim. Well more than hire a bunch of adventurers to set the local docks on fire anyway... ;)
This will allow for two main ways to play:
1) trading against the market and if players want to build bots to do this, have at it, just be polite to the server... Heck if there's enough demand I'm happy to bring trading bots into the game universe.
2) Travelling from location to location to trade against the local markets, I've got some ideas for maintaining limited information, but to be honest we'll see what's fun =)...
The server itself is currently running in "alpha" mode, what that means is that anyone who registers an account has their details stored, but their character data is ephemeral and gets reset when the server is rebooted.
I'm of mixed minds whether to have the game still run in "ages" where the world does get periodically reset, so players get a history of how they did, sort of like a high score board/achievements, or to keep data around. I'm more leaning to the first, but it's hard to say whether players will like that =)...
There's more that I've thought about, but to be honest I'd rather walk before I can run ;)...
This is awesome! This is exactly what I've tried to implement multiple times but got lost in details of how to actually build a market. I'm a huge paradox fan as well if that helps :)
My thoughts were based on this really old niche game called "hard war" in the 90s where a player owns a ship and ferries goods between systems trying to make a profit in between. It gets complicated by the fact that there's rogue agents trying to kill you, cops trying to nab you when you ferry contraband etc.
My thought was to implement something like that with real functioning markets and planetwide events affecting commodity prices with hundreds of planets. It could even have some Stellaris like flavor where different kinds of planets have different resources they need to import just to survive. However I couldn't really figure out what the "fun" bit of game play would be beyond reading game generated news stories and trying to make a profit by running a trade route.
I had a couple of thoughts around putting in a mission tree somehow along with trade routes, automating trade routes and making it about competing corporations (ala medieval strategy games) but didn't get too far w.r.t. how the game mechanics actually work.
To be honest I think it's super easy to get lost in the details, I'm constantly fighting the impulse to do something more than the obvious idea that gets something working and once the pieces come together, I'll be better able to see how things fit together =)...
I've never heard of hard war, but it seems to have that old-school elite gameplay?
In terms of finding the fun, it's hard to say? I believe a lot of that will come down to giving players a decent view into what's going on in the world around them, good ways to interact with the system and making sure that player has interesting things to do.
Automating actions such as setting up trade routes is something I've been thinking a bunch about, I've just got to be careful that it doesn't leave the player feeling like they have nothing to do, factorio and the zachtronics games do some cool things here, but one thing at a time ;)...
I don't have a public repo to be honest, at the moment I'm more fixated on trying to get enough of an mvp together that it feels like a basic game.
It's also all in clojure, which I'm sure someone will tell me is a terrible idea, but it's working pretty well so far and eh, work with what you know =)...
That's one thing, but also I'm trying to keep the narrative mechanically driven to an extent, so having the world move into a new "age" there's opportunity for players to explore alternative branches =)...
