Welcome to the Glorious Return.

Sort of.
I've been exceedingly busy with the whole gamut of life stuff, from writing for [PROJECT], which should be announced anytime now... *cough*, to starting school and my new job as a role model for all the kids, as long as they live on my floor. Sir Sapo has apparently had a rockin' time at the academy, which you would know if you read his journal.


Life
Life is bleh... started school, which is ok. I go to NMSU, the state college here in New Mexico which for the geographically challenged, is located on the bottom of the Continental US. I'm majoring in Animation, which I hope will translate into an eventual job in the games industry. I'm also majoring in History, in the hope that I will become a history teacher/professor. Confused? Me too.

I also need a girlfriend.


Axis Shift Reborn
If you read Sir Sapo's Journal, you'd know that we're working on a super-sick new game, which is the successor to our old Axis Shift project from years back. A lot of the core ideas are recycled but simplified, so that it will hopefully be realistic to design and complete. Sorry, we aren't planning on having you be able to suppress a rebelling planet with an orbital bombardment to increase production that turn at the cost of morale... you get ships. They fight other ships. You still will be able to choose your fleet, but with the simple constraint of "logistic points."


Gameplay Design
We're working with a top-down turn-based strategy game set in space. Simple enough- you get spaceships to fight other ships (this, this, and this should help with your imagination). We're basing the gameplay roughly on a blend of early 20th century naval warfare, with Battleships, Carriers, etc. Sir Sapo and I have a particular interest in military history (he's in the Air Force Academy, and I want to be a History professor...), and it's a dynamic that appeals to the little kid inside of us reading captions in history books. Aww...

Anyway, WW1 era ship classes are a good place to start because it's a fairly straightforward dynamic- the bigger the ship, the better, unless it's fighting a much smaller and faster ship. The reality, simplified: torpedo boats kill battleships, destroyers kill torpedo boats, cruisers kill destroyers, battlecruisers kill cruisers, battleships kill battlecruisers. Each class gets beaten by a bigger class, basically, but of course things are a bit more complicated in the real world. Battlecruisers turned out to be a waste of effort*, and torpedo boats weren't as effective as everybody thought.

*History Dork Note [more on battlecruisers]: During the Battle of Jutland, in a couple hours after each fighting for only a few minutes, 3 British battlecruisers disappeared in enormous explosions. Their armor was too thin, and in each case a single shell pierced the turret armor and exploded, which, due to insufficient safety precautions, set off the main powder magazines- several tons of high explosive located near center of the ship. Each time it was literally tens of thousands of tons of steel getting blown in half in seconds, while containing billions of dollars worth of equipment and a thousand men. After the third ship, Admiral Beatty famously quipped "there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

A critical addition Sir Sap...er, we wanted to make was the introduction of carriers, WW2 style, with small aircraft meant to attack the enemy at long range. The war in the Pacific showed that carriers totally dominated Battleships and basically anything else that could float, but that's not terribly exciting. It's like playing Rock-Paper-Scissors with Dynamite. So, our goal is to balance carriers and battleships, so that neither has a net advantage over the other, and it's up to the player to play to the strength of each in order to win.

After paring down the classic World War 1-type line up and adding carriers and fighters into the mix, we have the following basic classes:

Ship Classes
Battleships- Too big to go very fast or dodge very much, they have more firepower and armor than any other ship. They fight cruisers well and destroyers pretty well, and carriers if they can get close enough, but are vulnerable to fighter attack, and to lesser extent, destroyers up close.

Cruisers- Faster than a battleship, but not armed or armored nearly as well. They are useful for finishing off weak ships and hunting down destroyers and carriers. They get eaten alive by battleships, but fight destroyers and carriers well. They are less vulnerable to fighter attack than battleships.

Destroyers- Very fast and hard to hit, they have a short range but are small enough to be able to fight fighters effectively.

Carriers- Mobile fighter base that's vulnerable to attack, but fairly fast. Required to launch and reload fighter wings.

Fighters- Extremely fast and small enough to evade most fire from ships, they are most vulnerable to other fighters. When attacking a ship, they are able to bypass it's shields, making their attacks disproportionately strong. They must return to a carrier to reload frequently.

In addition to these core classes, we want to spice up gamplay a little bit with special-purpose ships that give various bonuses to other ships around it, like a higher shield recharge rate or a larger sight range.



Goal
We're trying to create a scenario where every class of ship has it's place- where fleet of only one or two classes is going to get it's shit wrecked by more balanced group. While doing that, we're also trying to make it a little less cut-and-dry with the addition of SP ships and different "terrain" (more on that later).What I said above is all fine and dandy, but actually applying it to the game means translating that into numerical stats. This entry is basically all theory, we'll have to wait until Sir Sapo applies everything and tests it before we know how my guesses worked out.



Constants: Shield recharge rate is 30% a turn, accuracy degrades 5% a square starting at 2 squares distance from ship for normal terrain.

Here's an illustration of some of ship's weapon/movement range. The darker colors are the ranges for the weapons and the lighter colors are the maximum movement distance in one turn:



To get the actual chance of a hit, the defending ship's evade is subtracted from the accuracy of the attacking ship, and range penalties factored in. For example, a battleship firing on a cruiser at max range (5) has a hit probability of 55%. Accuracy of a battleship minus evade of a cruiser is 75% (85%-10%. 4 x 5% range penalty (range is 5, but 1st square is base accuracy) equals -20%, which means our actual accuracy would be 55% percent chance of hitting the cruiser at 5 squares, which is pretty low. Considering how much damage a battleship would inflict if it does hit is pretty extreme, though (35 damage, taking out the 30 shield points and 5 structural points).

If you see any problems or oversights, feel free to comment. Feedback = Good.


Moar Ideas

Sapo and I have a few ideas floating around to make gameplay either more fun or easier to fix. We're thinking of being able to arbitrarily change a ship's characteristics vs a different class, like making a certain kind of destroyer disproportionately good at killing fighters, despite it's base stats. Along with that idea, we want to have at least three different classes per type (confusing terms alert), like X Class, Y Class and Z Class battleships for each side. They would all be battleships, but they would all have different advantages and disadvantages.

We also would like to include special tiles that have different properties, like asteroid fields and nebulae that would make positioning a little more important in the game.

Teh Artz.

I guess it's what I'm famous for, so I'll oblige you with some eye candy I've made in the past month or so (and don't forget the new banner at the top of the page):

Future Navy Fighter Concept- MS Paint w/Photoshop background


Sort of Retro-Futuristic Rifle- Man-claw and Pencil


Future Strategic Bomber Concept- MS Paint



Well, that's it for me, hopefully Sir Sapo will apply those numeros to the game and he can fake a play test to see how they work. Leave a comment about whatever (like "I prefer x idea", "why did you draw it like that?", "I'll be your girlfriend- <3", etc.)

Ok- Goodnight!

-Mark the Artist