Supporting continuing development for Empyrean Challenge / Cluster Wars
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Here are some thoughts on what Vern and I wanted to happen in creation of the universe.
We wanted all home systems to be similar, but not completely equal.
But the real rub, is that we wanted each game to have generated a completely new & unique universe. The last game was the result of one such randomly created universe.
The number of systems would range between 80 and 200.
CW-2 had 200 systems, which incidentally I believe was way too many.
The universe's supply of metals and nonmetals and fuel would vary in several different ways. Each new universe would have a different mix.
The original EC games had a universe of 33% metals 33% nonmetals and 33% fuel. As you randomly raised or lowered the amount of fuel in the universe, it would affect your game strategy. In a fuel rich incarnation, energy weapons would be by far the best way to go, in a fuel poor situation, missile launchers would rise in value. If the universe was poor in metals,gaining control of metal producing systems would be a legitimate and valid strategy. Finding out the individual makeup of each universe the would result in quite different long-term strategies in each game.
I had also wanted to greatly vary both the average amount and the yield of deposits in each game. The same would apply to both starting population, available habitability,and variable birth rates.
New game = new strategy required for optimization.
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I like that idea-varying the population, deposits and hability
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I had always assumed we'd have mine deposits generated randomly. With large number of worlds and deposits, a random scatter becomes uniform enough when considered in total. I had also assumed that HAB was too rare and important (for game-play) to leave entirely to random chance. My understanding was that Vern had carefully balanced the HAB worlds, so each player had the same amount seeded somewhere in their "local cluster". Do we want to do that, or go with a completely random seed?
I really like the idea of tuning the resources up or down for each game, to be METS-rich or FUEL-poor (for instance). Really interesting! Had never occurred to me. What about having the resource mix set independently for each player's local cluster? Player 1 might be METS-rich, player 2 might be FUEL-rich, etc. That would encourage players to invade, or trade, earlier. And early combat might be especially dangerous -- if you're in a local economy that favors MSS, and you encounter another local economy bristling with EWP -- you both will have very weak defenses against your opponents weapon platforms.
In any case, I plan to make these types of inputs a point of configuration for each universe-generation. Either set the resource-mix, pop-growth-rate, hab-seeding parameters manually when generating a cluster, or set it randomly so as to surprise even the moderator.
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