What does the (Universe?) look like outside of your base? (Factions, companies, government, races, etc)

[kd7uiy]

What does the (Universe?) look like outside of your base? Why do you care? How do you change relationships with these parties? Per a discussion including @Tranberry @koosemose @vogonistic @bjubes and myself, here's a summary of what we discussed. As always, we welcome feedback!

Why do you care?

• Availability of some goods might be dependent on outside. This could be any level of goods, from primitive to complex.
• Factions might try to get you to take on other factions.
• Factions might plunder your base if opposing you, or even offer some protection if friendly with you.
• If you do favors, they might give you stuff

What does it look like?

• Some number of factions, including corporations, governments, guilds, pirates, terrorists, exist. They might even have an alien species associated with them.
• These factions will have a relationship with you, and with each other.
• They will try to persuade you to do things, or punish you for things you aren't doing right.
• There might be secret relationships (Lots of discussion on this one, not really sure what will happen with it)
• The complete state of the world might not be known. AI entities could be lying to you.

[sboigelot]

A good question to add is: is this universe populated with only one race? Or is there a multitude of alien races? Or something between the two, 4~5 main races?

[kd7uiy]

That's a really good question. At the least we were thinking there should be many external powers. As far as which are alien, there's a lot of work that could be done in that department. We considered having combinations of the various groups and aliens, but, well, I'm not really sure. It seems like a bit of a mess, having 5-6 species and 5-6 profiles, but...

[sboigelot]

There is also the eve-online style of aliens, multiples branches of the human races that evolved in different cultural (and a bit physical) ways due to distance between main home-worlds (and cut-off communications during a second midle/dark-age)

[Tranberry]

imo we should leave this as open to modification as possible (not just mods). I mean aliens and so one.

[abackwood]

I think conceptually a clean number of main factions is three. These factions would br mutually exclusive to some degree. This is easy to visualise in a triangle with the factions at the vertices where the player is placed according to allegiance (like in Hearts of Iron 3).

Within that there could be many smaller entities that aren't as black and white. Those might even have their own 3-point alignment to give an indication of what sort of faction they are.

The main factions should be static between games, for balance reasons. But the coolest would be if the smaller entities are randomised every play.

As for what the factions represent, to make the above make sense, the factions would have to be more ideologies than nationstates. For example:

• Merchants / Miners / Militarists

[kd7uiy]

The way that Freelancer deals with this is there are around a dozen factions. Each faction has loose relations with others, so if you are on the good side with one, you are likely on the good side for others. On the screen you see green, white, and red outlines around ships, signifying allies, neutral, or enemies.

I think more factions does help, but I do agree with the importance of not overwhelming the player. The groups of 3 factions might be an interesting idea as well, will think about that some. I do like the idea of 3 main powers with smaller sub-entities that fall within their main entity mostly, but not completely.

[Tranberry]

The main factions should be static between games, for balance reasons. But the coolest would be if the smaller entities are randomised every play.

What is wrong with unbalanced games? Looking at DF I don't see any balance at all between factions. I can see that balancing would be a huge issue in a RTS game, where two human players square off against each other, not so much in a game similar to Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress. I might be missing the point in your reasoning.

On the topic of overwhelming the player, should all factions be accessible to the player at start? Some factions could probably only make their presence known when the player have either done something they hate (like cutting all the trees) or done something they like (enslaving all visitors).

I'm basing most of my thinking along the lines of Dwarf Fortress obviously, which might be a bit narrow minded or unfair.

[kd7uiy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w is of some relevance to the balanced issue, BTW.

[abackwood]

@Tranberry I want the big three to be hand-crafted to make sure that they all offer an interesting trade-off. It would be very hard to not accidentally create one clear better choice with PCG. Smaller entities don't quite have the problem because they're not exclusive.

[koosemose]

I don't really see factions (for Project Porcupine) as something you join or owe allegiance to. At most you may be more favorable to one or another. At most I would see broad categories of factions, that would be roughly synonymous with your big 3, though I don't think they should be explicitly mutually exclusive, just hard to be on good terms with multiples. For example, the categories could be Corporations, Pirates, and Governments (I'm very iffy about the thirds, I want to say Free Traders, but they seem more limited on interactions). In general what a category could offer you could be roughly balanced, such as Corps being good for selling you stuff, Pirates good for buying stuff (gotta do something with all the wealth they steal), Governments good for providing official backing (these are all off the top of my head and not very thought through, just using for example purposes.)

But you don't deal with a category as a whole, you deal with individual factions, maybe you decide to deal mostly with corps, but manage to discover a pirate faction that mostly leaves those corps alone, so can manage to be relatively friendly with them, but none of the governments like those corps. And you may end up with a few outlier examples of each category, such as a Corp that has a strong alliance with a pirate faction, and may even do some things that are more piratey from time to time on the downlow.

[Tranberry]

I'm with @koosemose here.

[GamerGeeked]

Corperations are good for selling you stuff

@koosemose aren't corperations supposed to be greedy though?