|
I've tried to make the game much more interesting by
balancing the units and quantifying their expense. For instance, in the
original EFS pretty much all I basically built were Artillery and Anti-tank
Guns. All the "cool" units used way too many resources and were
destroyed too easily by Artillery and Anti-tank Guns. So I decided to create
formulas that generated the unit's statistics from the resources used to
create it. This way if I used 40 electronics to build a unit then it had some
good spotting, movement, accuracy, etc and would be much better than
an Artillery unit that only uses 20 metal. I also used a scoring system that
rated each unit depending on the number of technologies required to build the
unit. The Church like / dislike negative comes into play here as well because
units that require tech proscribed by the Church are bound to be more
powerful. There are two scores generated for a unit, one purely based on
technological research cost and the other based purely on the Church like /
dislike negative. The technological research cost score is normalized
(divided by 100) and the higher between this value and the Church negative
value becomes that unit's score and is utilized in the unit design.
As far as technologies are concerned, I applied a similar formulaic approach
to determining how many research points a technology requires to research. As
technology progressed, research cost increased.
I also wanted to expand the number of units in the game, especially space,
naval, and air units. There are now almost 200 new units in the game (160
House, 14 Ministry, 13 Church, 4 League, 6 Rebel, 2 Alien). Not all of these
units are available within the game but can be added with the Galaxy Editor.
The use of naval and air units are now much more interesting as well as the
new possibilities with space units.
41 of the new House units are devoted to the construction of House Flagships.
Each Flagship requires the Flagship Artisan to be built, and the Flagship
Artisan cannot be added with the Galaxy Editor. There are 10 different House
Flagship designs each with 3 upgrades for a total of 40 different House
Flagships. Add 1 Flagship for each House with the Galaxy Editor so that they
will have a Flagship at the beginning of the game. When a House is ready to
upgrade its Flagship, it can disband it back to the Flagship Artisan and then
upgrade it to the next available upgrade at the Shield city. Since there are
5 Houses and 10 Flagship designs (it is recommended that a House get only 1
Flagship at the start of a game), this new option leaves plenty of
variability in the Flagships seen in the game.
I didn't think the Symbiots were tough enough, and so I decided to make their
units much stronger. Attacking Symbiot planets will now be a risky gamble, as
well as attempting to capture ruins early.
The Vau also had anemic units and so they have been
toughened up as well. Also, the Vau can build Jet Bikes, War-skifs, and War
Towers as well as the new Vau Mercenary in Vau cities if someone goes to war
with them.
Another thing that I didn't think had a strong enough influence was the
Church and so I decided to make powerful technologies more likely to be
proscribed by the Church so that if you wanted that powerful unit you'd have
to pay for it by risking the Church's wrath. The Church Inquisitors were okay
units in the original, but I decided to make them a lot tougher, too, so that
you would really fear the Church's sting, especially early if you decided
that you could take on the Church. Now the Church also has 12 new units plus
their Flagship. The 12 other units are combinations of regular units with
psychic powers (i.e. psy tanks, psy aircraft, etc.). These units can only be
added with the Galaxy Editor or built by the Church if they control a
Monastery (Inquisitors, Psy Mega Tanks, Psy Laser Fighters, and Psy Killer
Gunships) or a University (Monks, Psy Hover Tanks, Killers, and Anti-Air).
This should make attacking the church much more interesting.
The Ministry positions offered nothing special except that you usually got
more advanced units with the Ministry. Now the Ministries have 10 new units designed
for each Ministry plus 1 Flagship for each Ministry as well. Most of these
units need to be added with the Galaxy Editor and most can be built in a
University provided the appropriate technology has been researched. Now
owning a Ministry should be a lot more interesting and fun.
The League also did not have any different units and so now they have 8 new
units plus a Flagship. These units can only be added with the Galaxy Editor
or built by the League if they control an Agora (3rd Republic
Enforcer, 3rd Republic Hover Tank, Tank Killer, and Anti-Air) or
an Alien Ruins (3rd Republic Siege Tank and 3rd Republic
Hyper Bomber). 2 of the new units are specialized Freighters and Bulk Haulers
that make attacking League convoys more difficult.
It was also brought to my attention that previous versions of Hyperion were a
little slow out of the gates with regards to unit selection versus
technological research. As a result, a lot of the technologies for the first
unit in a category have been moved to the second slot, so that the unit in
category one can be built sooner. This has the effect of increasing the
longevity for that unit and increasing the unit variety earlier in the game.
|
