Thread by @craigperko

OK, let's try this again.

The point is that you will end up destroying yourself. This is not a competitive spreadsheet with a board-game skin. It's about how far you can go.

Most games use an external force to test you.

For example, Dwarf Fortress uses endless waves of monsters. And if you figure out how to deal with that using trap hallways, you'll get another bad shock when you find more monsters in your basement.

There are also stealth incursions of various sorts.

But at the end of the day, even DF knows it has to have internal mechanics to create stories, so it's infamous for its tantrum spirals.

However, these internal mechanics don't shift too much based on what kind of fort you want to make.

What if they did?

The basic idea behind this not-4X game is that as you pioneer a unique path, you create weaknesses involving the paths you didn't take.

For example, if you follow an alien biome integration path, the industrial path is locked on that planet.

Just... plain old locked.

The bigger you get, the more that's going to hurt... especially when you start building facilities that drag industry down even further.

This stands in stark contrast to the balancing mechanism of a 4X game, where it's a race to get the most resources in a competitive board game.

Even if a competitive board game has "stories" or "biomes", it is not the same thing.

At all.

Even vaguely.

With that in mind, the planets have two fundamental narrative mechanical drives.

The first is the idea that you must do a major project to make your colony appealing and economically viable to the population. These plus the slowness of people actually moving in creates long arcs

When you decide to integrate with the alien biome, it may take twenty years to do that, and another 20 to get your population up to the next locked level so you can choose another project.

But you're not on your ass that whole time. There's a local production queue.

The local production queue might seem familiar, because it's what most 4X games use.

The things you can create are based on your locally unlocked paths.

For example, endemic farms if you're integrating with the biome, or bioshields if you're cutting it away.

Although each facility has good and bad elements, the game is not focused on exact spreadsheet calculations.

The idea is that the facilities scale with the population. If you build a shipyard at 100 people and a shipyard at 10,000,000,000 people, it "costs" the "same".

Because it's about the path you're choosing.

Obviously one is going to be a rinky-dink little fueling station and the other is going to be a massive orbital fleet of space stations... but the people consider them to be the same indication of what their future holds.

And if the 100-person planet grows to be a 10-billion-person planet, the shipyard will evolve with them.

You're choosing a path, not a spreadsheet.

As the planet gets older it'll undoubtedly have more facilities and stuff.

The limitation on these things is twofold.

First, you can't build it if you haven't unlocked the path. So... do you go a short way down a lot of paths, or a long way down one? Which ones can be locked?

Second, the facility downsides are significant.

Some downsides might be things like drifting you towards a new species or creating political problems.

Some might close paths.

Others might be resource-related.

The shipyard might take one industry as upkeep. This may sound like a path towards spreadsheetdom, but the numbers don't inflate:

A strip mining facility will give you a point of industry, but close the environmental paths to you forever.

How will you get another point?

Now, my favorite little detail here is that not all paths are well-behaved.

Sure, you open up a biome integration path, it unlocks some new facilities, maybe you go further down that path later or maybe not.

But what if you unlock a thorny path?

What if you go down the psionics path? The AI path? The, I dunno, demon-summoning path?

These are "thorny" paths. They advance automatically.

You *must* build the next facility on the list before the path advances... or your civilization tears itself apart.

There's also a lot of potential about what "further down the path" means.

What's "further down the bio-integration path"?

Obviously, it means more exotic facility options, but how do you get there?

Do you choose it on the same planet, again? Or do you need a second planet?

Can you only reach second tier bio-integration by choosing bio-integration on another garden world somewhere else?

Or... can you now integrate with a more exotic biome on a more exotic planet, and that's how you take the next step?

Or is that another path?

It's fun to imagine how this can fork in order to drive the larger game and the stories it contains.

Yup yup, here's the idea: you can select the same path again on the same planet, but all it does is re-unlock the facilities so you can build them twice.

Selecting it on another planet doesn't advance anything, but you get a big discount on the time it takes to build stuff.

In order to get to the next level, you have to find a more exotic, dangerous planet.

So you can safely settle xeno-A biomes. When you go down that path, you can settle xeno-B biomes safely - until then, you'll have to actively clear the xeno-B out to live there.

Oh, you can mine that ind-A planet with its surface deposits of easy ore. But if you want magical space ore, you'll need to mine an ind-B planet... and you can't do that until you've completed the ind-A path.

Can you even find an ind-C planet for super-magic-space-ore?

You can settle these planets. You can settle a xeno-F planet. But you can't follow that path. It's too alien, too difficult.

You'll have to use it as a science outpost or something.

Pretty basic, right? But think about how this creates a story of a space civilization.

Can you even survive long enough to go down that xeno-C path? Your people are mutating and stuffed full of psychic spore juice and whatever else, and you've got almost no industry...

Because you destroy yourself.

Can you reach that next tier before you do?

If you can only reach that next tier, the path unlock can carry over to whoever you are after your civilization collapses... you can rebuild.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about today.