Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

For updates and discussion of Terra Invicta, a grand-strategy alien invasion simulator
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Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

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Pictured here is most of the "top bar" of the Terra Invicta UI, with the major strategic resources depicted. Starting at the dollar-looking symbol and going left to right, they are:

* Money: Has a variety of uses, such as building stuff to put into space and buying orgs (organizations, or "orgs," are your councilors' "gear"). It's generated by your councilors and by nations you control.

* Influence: Used to bring nations to your banner, acquire certain types of orgs, and turn enemy councilors to your cause. It's generated by councilors.

* Ops: Used to conduct small-scale tactical operations. It's generated by councilors.

* Boost: Used to move stuff from Earth's surface to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. This is the major bottleneck to getting your space industry started. It's generated by nations you control and possibly councilors (still making my mind up on this one).

* Mission Control: Earth-based (initially) command and control centers that are required to manage operations of your fleets and habs. It's generated by nations you control, councilors, and habs.

* Research: How much your faction contributes to (public) science and (private) engineering efforts. It's generated by councilors, habs and nations you control.

* Projects: How many individual engineering projects your faction can manage at once. This mechanic will get explained in a future post.

To the right of the divider bar are space-based resources, which must be extracted from asteroids and planets and catapulted to manufacturing stations and habs to build ships and hab components -- without the use of boost. They are:

* Water: Used in life support and propellant.

* Volatiles: Reactive materals like Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Sulfur. Used in life support and some advanced types of carbon-based armor.

* Metals: Base and relatively abundant metals such as iron, nickel, lead and copper. Used in manufacturing.

* Nobles: Valuable and uncommon metals such as platinum and gold. Can be sold on Earth and used in specialized manufacturing. For you chemists, we're using a fairly loose definition here that includes stuff classified as noble, precious and refractory metals.

* Radioatives: Used in nuclear drives and nuclear weapons.

The last two items on the bar are developed later in the campaign (and won't show up at the start), so I'll hold off on describing them for now.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

As an aside, I went through and updated each nation's democracy score today in our configs and realized real-world events are conspiring to make the game a little harder. Our source is the Economist's Democracy Index, which published its 2017 figures recently, and many, many countries dropped from their 2016 scores.

Our model has lower democracy scores reducing research and economic growth, on the theory that free exchanges of ideas contributes to science and state protection of individual property rights contributes to economic growth. Middlin' democracy scores (in nations we're calling "anocracies") are also less stable than pure democracies and authoritarian states. That said, the military is more effective in reducing domestic unrest in nations with lower democracy scores.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by JOKER »

I'm very unsatisfied with #3.

A complex resource system will always be hard to balance and frustrating for players. It also eats a large chunk of UI. I hope we can cut it to 2-3 types, plus some special resource that players don't have to keep an eye at. For example, we are going to resolve things on earth once for a while, then we can have a "launch schedule" at that time, and assign how much and what we can send into space there and then, rather than keep an extra resource type.

Also, considering what happens in recent years, using "Democracy" as measurement for research and economic growth is at least a very heavily biased method, the assumption that democracies are less effective in reducing domestic unrest is even more biased. It also unlikely to work in Terra Invicta's scenario, when earth is at an all-out war with aliens. From history of major war and conflicts, I would advice using an abstracted "Stabilization" value as measurement, which means a government's (in)ability to maintain social order, redirect resources and get its will done, no matter what extreme method it takes.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by FireStorm1010 »

@Joker I disagree with your statement about the number of resources. Endless Legend was for me one of the best 4x ever created , and it had plenty of resources.

I disagree also with your points about democracy, but i can understand its arguable.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by chonkypot »

Just off the top of my head, XCom 2 had:
-supplies
-intel
-elerium cores
-elerium fragments
-alien alloys
-engineers
-scientists
-avenger power
-resistance contacts

Plus managing all the corpses, the weapons, mods, and other fiddly bits for the soldiers. Oh, and the soldiers. (but that's less on point here)

Anyway, I'm not too worried about keeping all that straight. If the purpose of everything is clear, it's not too hard to remember. Plus after playing Long War and Long War 2, I trust these folks' attention to detail and balance.

The end of the list felt a little like StarCon2 (radioactives, nobles) - made me smile.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

As it happens, one of my deep temptations is to add more space resources, so we can break out stuff like alkali metals, deuterium, helium-3 and other materials that are interesting from a space development and warfare perspective. That also leads to more tradeoffs in deciding where to build (and seize) mines. But we were running out of space in the UI :) (and there is a point where it's too much to keep track of; I don't think we've hit it, though).

As for boost, in my mind it's better to have it as something you can accumulate and spend. We really didn't want to require the player to delve into logistics and scheduling, so we have some abstractions -- like boost that can be spent on demand and a common pool of mined resources that are coming from a variety of sources at multiple points in the Solar System.

As for the effects of democracy, first I'll say that's just one part of a bigger model that has several variables in play, which I'll get into in the future, so don't take me saying "democracy impacts X" to mean "democracy determines X." It's one of the inputs into the model, but it can also change slowly or quickly thanks to events in the game.

The relationship between regime type and stability is very well documented in the academic literature (just google "anocracies" and "stability") -- democracies and autocracies are demonstrably more stable than hybrid state types (so a 1 or 10 score is more stable than a 5). The relationship between democracy and economic development is admittedly less well-established, but the underlying assumption is that states in which you have more guarantees the leader won't seize your property and give it to his brother offer a safer environment for private enterprise -- to a degree we're conflating "democracy" with "rule of law" but I don't think that's too much of a stretch given how power is typically exercised in autocratic states, versus checks-and-balances systems in democracies.

But regime type is really a secondary impact here; the bigger determinants of economic growth are how the nation invests its resources and the presence of certain types of regions within its borders. Ditto for research: a democratic regime type helps over the long haul, but the primary determinants include the size of the national economy and education level.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by JOKER »

Thank you for reply.

As a softcore Xcom2 vanilla player, I usually only have to keep track of supply, intel and soldier status. Other resources usually won't be playthrough-breaking problem when I follow strategy guide, and don't need constant management. In LW2, producing and managing weapons and equipments is quite painful for me, and I hope we can let our faction general staff to manage it in TI.

I hope we can learn a bit more about "a bigger model" for country and regime in later Dev Diaries, and how will you balance some major countries. As Paradox devs once said, this type of model are solely for improving gameplay; if they could create a model that can really predict history, they won't waste it on a game.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by XCOMrades »

johnnylump wrote: * Ops: Used to conduct small-scale tactical operations. It's generated by councilors.
Tactical operations, hmmm... LW3 confirmed?
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by Psieye »

johnnylump wrote:space-based resources, which must be extracted from asteroids and planets and catapulted to manufacturing stations and habs to build ships and hab components -- without the use of boost.
Hmm, a top bar UI would imply it shows all resources you have in some pool. But you mention the logistics of delivering resources from source to destination. Interesting how you will resolve this.

And I'm seeing wildly divergent expectations in the replies already. Here's hoping you stay on scope and deliver the project. I assume it's too early to consider which publisher you'll turn to, or have you already settled on 2K?
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

JOKER wrote:Thank you for reply.

As a softcore Xcom2 vanilla player, I usually only have to keep track of supply, intel and soldier status. Other resources usually won't be playthrough-breaking problem when I follow strategy guide, and don't need constant management. In LW2, producing and managing weapons and equipments is quite painful for me, and I hope we can let our faction general staff to manage it in TI.

I hope we can learn a bit more about "a bigger model" for country and regime in later Dev Diaries, and how will you balance some major countries. As Paradox devs once said, this type of model are solely for improving gameplay; if they could create a model that can really predict history, they won't waste it on a game.
I think you should expect Civ / 4X / Paradox levels of complexity in managing resources; this won't be an XCOM-like game with a thinner strategy layer that serves only to set up tactical combat. We're expecting space battles to be something like a quarter to a third of the game, not 80 percent of it.

As for the model, the goal isn't prediction, but it is plausibility, and the model is as parsimonious as I can make it while still having the potential to create a variety of plausible outcomes over a number of campaigns. (Edit) An example of something I already took out was a "centralization of power" variable that was supposed to serve as a y-axis to the x-axis of the democracy score. So for democracies a strong presidential system and a parliamentary system would be on different points on the scale; for autocracies this would scale between oligarchies and dictatorships. But I decided it was too fiddly and didn't add much, and there isn't a good mechanism to really manipulate it anyway.
XCOMrades wrote:Tactical operations, hmmm... LW3 confirmed?
Tactical operations like those in XCOM are highly abstracted into a single in-game event. Spending the "ops" resource is how you improve your chances of success.
Psieye wrote:Hmm, a top bar UI would imply it shows all resources you have in some pool. But you mention the logistics of delivering resources from source to destination. Interesting how you will resolve this.

And I'm seeing wildly divergent expectations in the replies already. Here's hoping you stay on scope and deliver the project. I assume it's too early to consider which publisher you'll turn to, or have you already settled on 2K?
Perhaps you misread? We're *not* forcing you to handle logistics; all those resources are drawn from a common pool.

... As we have been from the start, we're focusing on the geopolitics of an alien invasion along with space-oriented solutions to it. Because it's a bunch of intertwined systems, any breakout into a dev diary will have to allude to systems I haven't described yet (and that's a good thing; those serve as hints of future previews to keep the audience coming back :) ). But you're correct that it's harmful to create expectations that won't be met.

Don't have anything for you on a publisher right now.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by Psieye »

johnnylump wrote: Perhaps you misread? We're *not* forcing you to handle logistics; all those resources are drawn from a common pool.
Ah, I read too much into "extracted from asteroids and planets and catapulted to manufacturing stations and habs". Thank you for the swift clarification, good expectation management. Especially "expecting space battles to be something like a quarter to a third of the game, not 80 percent of it" - there are so many games which care only about war that many players automatically hardwire "strategy" with "war".
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

Ah, right, so you'll be building habs on and around various Solar System bodies. The ones with mines will contribute to the common pool, which any of your other habs can draw from. (Or, possibly, we require you to build a hab module that retrieves resources from the common pool).

The tricky part about having a rich strat layer and a fun and challenging tactical layer lies in ensuring you don't win/lose every battle before it starts thanks to events in the strat layer. While good strat play should make tactical more winnable, we don't want the space battles to be a foregone conclusion. Got some ideas to address that.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by Psieye »

Good foreshadowing of a future dev diary (or many). We shall await for those ideas to be tested out and proven before we hear of them. It would be meaningless to talk of what the tactical layer will involve when such detail can change if an idea doesn't work out.

On a tangent, this might be a fair pair of questions at this point:
- What ballpark are you aiming how long a single (successful) campaign should take? ~10 hours? ~50 hours? ~200 hours?
- Expressed as a % of a total campaign's playtime, when-ish is the first space battle to take place? Is it a "midgame onwards" feature, or even lategame?

These may not be fair questions at this stage of development. Maybe they are better answered in a future dev diary.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

Psieye wrote:- What ballpark are you aiming how long a single (successful) campaign should take? ~10 hours? ~50 hours? ~200 hours?
Probably not 200. You'd have to be crazy make a game that long :p

We've got some targets for this, but it's also something we can move around a little more easily than you might expect, so I think our final call will come after we do some internal testing of the full design.
Psieye wrote:-- Expressed as a % of a total campaign's playtime, when-ish is the first space battle to take place? Is it a "midgame onwards" feature, or even lategame?
You've hit upon an interesting tension we're facing in the design, especially wrt to tech advancement, given we're trying to start the player at "today" (or, precisely, the scenario currently starts in 2020.) You want to get an important chunk of the game's content out in front of the player pretty quickly, but you don't want to defy plausibility by allowing it to happen on Day 1. My general thought is that you'll be able to get something that can fight up there fairly soon, but there will be tradeoffs in pursuing those techs.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by llll BlackFlag »

johnnylump wrote:As it happens, one of my deep temptations is to add more space resources, so we can break out stuff like alkali metals, deuterium, helium-3 and other materials that are interesting from a space development and warfare perspective. That also leads to more tradeoffs in deciding where to build (and seize) mines. But we were running out of space in the UI :) (and there is a point where it's too much to keep track of; I don't think we've hit it, though).
I think that is a fantastic idea - it reminds me of the strategic resources in Civilization i.e. iron, horses, oil, etc. It makes sense to require certain resources to build certain units, unlock abilities, or research technologies. If UI space is a problem you can always make an icon for space resources with a clickable drop-down to show each resource and the quantities. Forgive me for asking a stupid question as I know this was likely written in bold letters somewhere, but is this going to be a multiplayer game? Are there any plans to create a trading system between factions? And lastly, will conflict between factions involve ground units or purely political pressure/events?

On another note: tradeoffs are amazing for strategy games as they quickly become boring when players figure out how to min/max the system. What makes a strategy game great for me is the feeling that you are always behind in every area of development (military, economy, technology) while only being able to markedly improve one at a time. This creates a tension and suspense that keeps the player engaged and not on auto-pilot.

I hope there are enough unit/technology combinations so that combat is not a binary or rock-paper-scissors system (although that would be better than biggest army always wins). I'm thinking of games like halo wars (where combat is fun but not diverse) as something to avoid.
Sorry to include so many questions and thoughts into a single post . We are all reading and eagerly awaiting more news.
Psieye wrote:Good foreshadowing of a future dev diary (or many). We shall await for those ideas to be tested out and proven before we hear of them. It would be meaningless to talk of what the tactical layer will involve when such detail can change if an idea doesn't work out.
I agree that it would be pointless to talk about ideas that are impossible to implement. But it is important for devs to bounce ideas off of the community. Otherwise, how would they know what we want? I'm more in favor of having a larger discussion with rejected ideas than a smaller discussion with no exploration of alternative mechanics.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by JOKER »

It may be too early to ask it, but since the game start in 2020, how would you handle certain political and geopolitical problems in real life in TI? For example, who will be the president of United States in game, or will it be randomly decided?
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

Forgive me for asking a stupid question as I know this was likely written in bold letters somewhere, but is this going to be a multiplayer game? Are there any plans to create a trading system between factions? And lastly, will conflict between factions involve ground units or purely political pressure/events?
Multiplayer depends on our final budget. The basic architecture is there.

Yes, the plan is to have trading between factions.

Conflicts between factions can manifest between councilors via spy-and-assassination skullduggery, politics inside nations and habs, in space combat, and between national proxies. So you can gain sufficient control of a nation to be able to initiate a war with another country controlled by another faction, and then you can use your nation's military to invade and impose a regime that supports your faction.
It may be too early to ask it, but since the game start in 2020, how would you handle certain political and geopolitical problems in real life in TI? For example, who will be the president of United States in game, or will it be randomly decided?
It depends on the problem. Existing interstate alliances and rivalries have been set up. Some of your councilors can also be politicians in a particular nation, but we're not simulating leaders in a way that would detail the U.S. president as a specific person; instead, the mechanisms of internal politics are handled via a distribution-of-national-resources framework, which factions will be able to manipulate. I know that's pretty vague -- there are a couple of systems I'd need to explain to get into detail there, so I'll hold off on doing so until a future post.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by Romegypt »

I am learning c++ currently. Is that what you are coding in, and if so would I be able to help once I am past a beginners standpoint?
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

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We are coding in C#. We may be looking at a dev hire soon.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by NephilimNexus »

Image

Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but the way I'd do it would be to have democracies better at research but autocracies better at production. Free-exchange of ideas is great for science but there's nothing like tyranny for getting stuff built bigger & faster.

Who you befriend will effect how your own forces turn out. Do you want a small number of efficient, high-tech, overpriced units? Or would you rather just overwhelm the aliens with insanely large battleships and sheer numbers?
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by JOKER »

NephilimNexus wrote:Image

Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but the way I'd do it would be to have democracies better at research but autocracies better at production. Free-exchange of ideas is great for science but there's nothing like tyranny for getting stuff built bigger & faster.

Who you befriend will effect how your own forces turn out. Do you want a small number of efficient, high-tech, overpriced units? Or would you rather just overwhelm the aliens with insanely large battleships and sheer numbers?
"That's not what the Empire would have done, Commander," Han said. "What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."
As johnny said, that's just one part of a bigger model that has several variables in play. There are more than 200 countries on this world, each have their own pros and cons. It is ridiculous to use a single measurement.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by Psieye »

NephilimNexus wrote: Maybe I'm oversimplifying
Yeah, that level of over-simplification won't fly at all when the game is being marketed as "Paradox-level grand strategy".
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by NephilimNexus »

JOKER wrote:There are more than 200 countries on this world, each have their own pros and cons.
Psieye wrote:the game is being marketed as "Paradox-level grand strategy".
I've only got 16 gigs of RAM, man. I'd like a wee bit of simplification to keep my computer from melting.
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by johnnylump »

In an earlier iteration of the design we had separated out a nation's research score from an engineering score, but did away with that as too fiddly. The current design largely tracks back to GDP, with research set by several additional factors -- education, democracy, unrest and a concept called 'cohesion' which tracks ideological and cultural unity in a society.

At the moment the world starts with 93 nations. It has 185 regions. The number of nations is not fixed; the number of regions is. In numerous cases real-world nations are merged into an agglomeration so they can be relevant at the level of the game, and interstate politics within those agglomerations are abstracted away. In North America, for example, you've got Canada, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, "Central American States," and "Caribbean States." There's also "European Caribbean" and "British Caribbean," which are small regions belonging to Europe and the UK, respectively. (Those regions are still pretty relevant because you get bonuses for building boost facilities near the equator.)
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Re: Terra Invicta Dev Diary #3: Resources

Post by JOKER »

I hope that we will talk a bit about warfare in next Dev Diary of Terra Invicta.

Based on current information, it seems that we will have Black Ops, large scale ground warfare, then Fleet Operation in space. Black Ops is abstracted, so we will mostly focus on the other two.

I'm curious that how will devs balance ground warfare and fleet operation in different stages of game. When we start the game, what we call "fleet" will, at best, consists some satellite, space shuttle and ground-launched missile. Most battle would be HOI-like on the ground, but it is not hard to guess that we must do our best with the pitiful "fleet" to maintain human presence on earth orbit and interrupt enemy orbital operation - like, launch new satellites to keep global communication network running, or stop some alien ship from glassing your frontline. However, in mid to late game, space become the new battlefield, would our regular ground army become obsolete?

Also, how "realistic" will the space battle be? Would it be somehow KSP like, or just typical "navy in space" SF setting?
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