powerneg

An emperor rains down riches, entertainment, status and power on his most loyal subjects so he can eat, drink, sleep and reproduce while others do his job for him xD

He can also punish failures, though if his subjects fail that usually means he didn't delegate tasks very good.

He probably also has to deal with his (royal) family and royalty and/or ambassadors from other countries.

it would be nice if some events/audiences gave you the option to send one of your advisors to solve the problem, removing his/her advice(/options) from audiences for X turns.
(aka you can send your general to solve a rebellion, but then you wouldn't be getting his/her (good) advice on combat-related activities for say 3-5 turns

hmm, maybe instead have the ships underperform in hitaccuracy, something about targeting-computers not getting all the enemy locations in fast enough.
(or whatever you can make up anyway)

Logistically you could have a maintenance-bay/shipyard/building(my english fails me here) that keeps X ships in the sector functioning properly, if you wanted to attack a neighbour, you would need to build a lot of them on your border with him.
If he would notice this increase in maintenance-buildings he could figure out you're trying to attack him.

You can still allow as many ships in a sector as you like, they would just start detoriating after a while.

 

Actually carrying resource X(fuel?) to this frontline-area seems too boring for a game.

(Unless spiced up by, for example, the enemy capable of attacking the supply-ships,

you seem to be suggesting your empire is actually more "hidden" instead of "fortified" with a lot of empty space in-between)

If you want something simple implemented, you could have stealth-ships, the moment you would give them an order and they re in a certain range of enemies, they would be spotted. (So you could pretty much only send an "abort" when they re on a mission into enemy territory)

Same could go for reports going back, though range to enemies should probably be smaller for them to be spotted.

 

Delayed orders, although interesting, would be tedious to play i think.

 

Something else, although probably not fitting with your game, could be the breaking of an enemy communications-protocol, enabling you to issue orders to them.

If XP is awarded after the battle, why not just let the player divide it himself?
(I know, the problem would be that one character could be there doing nothing at all just being there for the XP,
but that would mean that the battles are too easy,

and i still don't see any real problem in it, since the player would just be using the game-mechanics to get ahead,

which is something he/she should be doing over the course of the whole game.

You could make only a part of the XP available to the player for distribution though,

and have the rest of the XP being divided equally over all the characters.)

The battle would *not* play out faster if the player is trying to make a certain character certain actions to make sure he/she gets a bigger piece of the available XP ;)

 

As for giving higher-level characters less XP, usually higher level characters require *more* XP to gain their next level,

it seems slightly less complicated for the player to me, but both systems can work.

i agree with orymus3, maybe you should first focus on what the player *is* supposed to be doing in your game(and what would be the fun in that) then whatever he shouldn't be doing should come out naturally.

having technology increase your efficiëncy *exponentially* is a matter of numbers-tweaking, in most 4x-games i win with technological superiority because i was winning the game already, it just took some time, and i didn't stop researching in that time.

numbers-tweaking can mean making every next technology cost more(exponentionally, often) or making the technological improvements smaller relatively.

 

if technologies becoming cheaper when an opponent already discovered them the new strategy is lagging behind, getting the same technologies(eventually) yet having more resources available for other things.

(although usually we implement a certain spy-element here)

 

lastly, having multiple technologies available but only implementing one at a time means a player makes choices, instead on playing on "auto-pilot" which most players will enjoy(not all), but, the same can be said about discovering new technologies, so i realy wouldn't scrap that(though given as an option for a skirmish-game to start with all technologies could be a nice addition)

sorry, but in my opinion, (and i think that of most players,) looking through the eyes of a hero and controlling him/her is just as unrealistic as looking through the eyes of a drone and/or controlling it.

are you only making an engine that could be used for one or more games or are you designing a game and is the engine just the first part of it ?

anyway, what i would do, is have minions/basic workers that can level up to work faster and project-leaders that can learn new skills(new potions)

a workshop should just be big enough to accomodate X workers, although there is no reason why a workshop shouldn't influence efficiëncy as well

can you give a description of your game ? thus far it s not even clear whether upgrades should belong to characters or buildings,or are you still trying to choose between the two ?

 

if anything, i wouldnt worry about processor-power over a formula, a decent computer should be able to make the necessary calculations all the time and show them to the player if/when the player wants to see them/needs to make a decision based off them

VitVito, on 07 Apr 2013 - 22:24, said:

and am a semi proffesional EU halo player

Irrelevant to game development.

 

not entirely true, for a balanced competitive game this is a nice skill(although it s better for the play-testers, and i presume a lot of gamers have made some connection between gaming and game-design while they actually suck at design)

i'm missing a fast unit(lancer or something)

possibly some kind of bomber(probably a bird) flying over enemy units dealing minor damage.
regarding some units, you might have to restrict which ones are available for each level, for example a cloudy level wouldn't allow for flying units(Plants vs Zombies uses this system, you could play through it to see how it works out)

you could make a gladiator a dueler/harvester, aka if/when he kills a unit your resource goes up(faster)

you could make a pirate capture enemies and let them fight for you

buy goliath's game-engine, it 'll be a lot cheaper then creating it yourself.

i would go for pause because i don't think mobile-players will want to immerse themselves into the game, they just wanna watch a pretty show and have some input into it, though you should be better capable of saying what kind of players you re (trying to) attract.