Living Breathing WARRING Universe?

[CorruptUser]

So we've had the announcement that the various races will actively expand into new sectors based on the economy. Obviously there's only so much space in the X-Universe. Will the fight over the resources lead to wars breaking out? And not just pre-scripted wars like in previous games, but wars as the actual result from too much competition over certain markets, the rights to various sectors, that will vary based on different playthroughs?

So what I'm thinking is that any race could theoretically declare war on any of their neighbors, based on a number of factors. Boron will only go to war under the most extreme of conditions, but war can be declared on them. One faction within a race may declare war, while the others stay out or join in. The Split, however, are at war with other Split just as often as with other races. Teladi won't usually declare war... but will gladly push other races into war so it can sell supplies for profitsss. Each faction within each race would have a relationship status, perhaps invisible to players, that varies based on how much trade they do with one another, the relative strength of their navies, historical ties from the lore, the fight over resources, etc. If one faction gets too powerful or expands too much, the others will gang up on them, in order to prevent long playthroughs having entire races go extinct (unless the player is feeling particularly cruel!)

Factions can have "war demands" that the player hears about through rumors or announcements; Argon can go to war against the Split to outlaw slavery, or Teladi can go to war on the Boron to legalize spaceweed for more Profitsss, or the Paranid could go to war against the Argon in order to crack down on Space Fuel smuggling, or any host of reasons. The demands would factor in to the war, and would result in long-term effects when peace is negotiated, such as the production of space mines being banned in certain sectors. Likewise, if the player becomes strong enough, eventually demands of their own can be made on factions.

More importantly, we can have various missions regarding the war, if our reputation is sufficiently high enough, such as Teladi giving the player a mission to assassinate a Paranid dignitary and frame it on the Split, which causes those two factions to declare war. Or if you fail or get caught, rather than a fail mission, the Paranid declare war on the Teladi instead.

[birdtable]

I voted for Scripted, would have liked the first option but reality kicks in with regard to what could be delivered game wise without causing a myriad of issues. The Xenon Incursion was almost very good and I am sure (hoping) by the time X4 is delivered it will have been developed into a great strategy/combat experience.

[RAVEN.myst]

I vote option 4: BOTH scripted AND emergent. Scripted wars are really still currently the only way to deliver true story content, as that does require customized and intuitively adaptive human imagination to drive it; however, I would love to ALSO see emergent dynamics, although realistically they would have to include built-in scripted checks and balances to prevent the tiniest action or accident spiraling out of control - emergent systems tend to be based on logical feedback loops, and appropriate constraints have to be implemented to prevent exaggerative or downright catastrophic positive loops.

[PowerPC603]

I vote for both as well.

The GOD engine (which decides which station to be built at which location) may construct a new station somewhere as normal, but to remove it again when it's no longer needed, it shouldn't just disappear, it should be destroyed.

The game could be made in a way that a war can start near this station and the primary target is the destruction of that station, along with some other targets which have a lower priority to get attacked/destroyed.

There could be a BBS entry that lists the upcoming war (with a few versions of some story behind that specific war) and could also allow the player to join the fight, or just go there to grab the spoils of the war (loot resources and other stuff coming out of the explosions).

One story could be that this particular station has a manager that also has connections to a big underground drug network which has made a few million casualties and that he must be stopped and that he uses this station to hide his true operation.
Several other stories could be made up to justify a small war against a specific station or small group of stations.

And of course, there could be some scripted wars during the plot and sometimes also some random wars.

[X2-Illuminatus]

Relevant questions and answers from the Q&A thread:

Can a player influence relations between 2 different races/factions, and even cause war between them?
I'm fairly sure that, even if we don't add an explicit means to do this, players will find a way to make it happen (and I'm not talking about mods).

...

Is the end goal for the dynamic factions to create an always changing universe, or will they work towards an equilibrium that (without the player messing with things) will eventually settle into a fixed state?
The aim is for things to keep changing but remain in overall balance, i.e. we don't want one NPC faction wiping out another NPC faction just by chance.

...

will factions take revenge seriously when one of their ships, especially capital ones, are attacked and/or captured ?
Up to a point, possibly, but we have to be careful to ensure that every game doesn't turn into all-out war between factions due to escalating retaliation.

The GOD engine (which decides which station to be built at which location) may construct a new station somewhere as normal, but to remove it again when it's no longer needed, it shouldn't just disappear, it should be destroyed.

X Rebirth does not have the GOD engine, and from what has been said in the previous presentations, infos and videos, I doubt X4 will have it, too. Faction decision making with regards to station building is described differently.

[RAVEN.myst]

Thanks, Illuminatus. Looks like some emergent elements are being incorporated and with feedback-damping of the sort I speculated about - makes sense and is encouraging to see

@PowerPC603: The stations just disappearing could be construed as having closed down/gone out of business - I don't think they should be getting destroyed just because they are not proving economically relevant or viable enough. However, I WOULD have preferred if they didn't just vanish altogether, but rather went inactive/dark. (This could also provide all sorts of opportunities, such as squatting there in the owners' absence, or the station getting annexed by an NPC faction or perhaps even by the player via boarding - but obviously it's not like one can just put the station in a pocket and walk away whistling innocently - there would be repercussions... But anyway, my imagination is running away with me once again )

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

I don't mind if the factions have skirmishes, maybe even take over some sectors.

I don't really want to see all out war in the base game.

Either this is left to modders as in Rebirth or maybe Egosoft can supply a
WAR DLC later for those who want this.

[RAVEN.myst]

I don't mind if the factions have skirmishes, maybe even take over some sectors.

I don't really want to see all out war in the base game.

Either this is left to modders as in Rebirth or maybe Egosoft can supply a
WAR DLC later for those who want this.

Or... a slider in the game settings to specify how violent the universe should be. The farther left the slider, the stronger the retaliation feedback damping, the farther right, the weaker. Players could then decide between a peaceful, highly civilized and policed society, a bloody war-zone, and anything in-between (with the default being somewhere around the middle, I guess.) I know I'd enjoy then trying to make it as a peaceful trader in a war-torn universe, and as a warlord in a peaceful one (as well as trying more matched approaches, possibly.)

[Sandalpocalypse]

It's not a 4x. Once people start a playthrough they will stick with it for extended periods. That's the nature of the X games. Perforce you arn't making an informed decision when you set a war slider. So you could be 100 hours in and having been trading and building that whole time before you discover that the violent universe you selected cuz it sounded cool is making your game really hard to play or your stuck in the well patrolled sectors you are already in.

[RAVEN.myst]

Once people start a playthrough they will stick with it for extended periods. That's the nature of the X games.

I'm sorry, but that's a broad generalisation presumably based on your own style and experience. I, for one, go through gamestarts like I go through underwear (well, perhaps not QUITE as quickly) - but I'm also wise enough not to assume that my own play style is necessarily representative (for instance, I also have a strong aversion to mods, which are rather popular among the general population.) But saying "that's the nature of the X games" is dangerously generalised and reductive - it is NOT necessarily true, and thus cannot be claimed definitely.

Perforce you arn't making an informed decision when you set a war slider. So you could be 100 hours in and having been trading and building that whole time before you discover that the violent universe you selected cuz it sounded cool is making your game really hard to play or your stuck in the well patrolled sectors you are already in.

Fair enough, but I never said that the setting should be locked in at start. Furthermore, I DID mention a default setting somewhere around the middle, which would reflect the developers' concept of the "standard game" - keep in mind that first-timers *tend* to use default settings while they get their feet wet - so those who ignorantly go poking around things they know nothing about deserve whatever's coming to them. (*) So why naysay an *option* that could potentially enhance the experience by giving players more ways to customise the game to their own tastes, with little development cost? (And, please, none of that "development time that could be spent elsewhere" jive - I've heard it all before, and what I suggested above would be fairly simple and quick to implement - the slider simply tweaks certain constants in the retaliation determination algorithms, and such. Little additional programming, only tweaking of values.)

In line with that "uninformed decision at start" bit, I completely agree with you that players can get locked into decisions at "character creation time", so to speak, and that this is undesirable (especially for first-timers.) Last night I was thinking how much better it would be in X3AP if one could start any game-start, then through actions after some time decide whether to go off on the Commonwealth or the Terran campaign, rather than perhaps being a complete first-timer in X, not having a clue about what's what, and making a choice that may not be a perfect fit.

After years of playing X2, my next X game was X3TC (X3R wasn't available in my territory at the time, I had to come back to it later to fill in the gap), so I had missed a chunk of story, and starting X3TC even as a X veteran of sorts, I had no idea what implications my gamestart choice would have (luckily, I am the sort to replay the game with all available characters or equivalent and master it with each, as established above so in the end it didn't matter - to me, but to others it may have.)

I am reminded of an example (sadly, the game itself turned out not to be very good - a disappointment for a major fan of the series) - Command & Conquer 4 had a rudimentary 1P campaign (the game was designed primarily with team-based adversarial multiplayer in mind, so its 1P was weak to say the least) which however did do one thing right: it started off and allowed the player a couple/few missions to get his/her bearings and to have a chance to lean toward one or other of the available ideologies, and then came a mission in which the player had to choose between two courses of action (it was meant to be a moral dilemma of sorts, though again it was rather weak in that regard), and this choice would determine the player's path thereafter. This sort of approach could *also* be used to allow the player to affect the level of mayhem in the game on-the-fly, but I suspect it would require a LOT more work and creativity to get it in place - though I really like the idea (kinda akin to whether or not to end the Argon-Terran war in X3AP, but taken to a whole other level.)

EDIT: * Alternatively, implement it as an unlockable feature - once the player "achieves" some level of experience within the games (play X hours, complete the campaign, whatever), the feature becomes available for future playthroughs.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

Voted "Maybe; get the rest of the game working first". I like the idea but I don't know how close it is to Egosoft's existing plans.

[birdtable]

@ RAVEN.myst ...Being one of the ..quote " general population" as in not being averse to "mods" ... is not and I quote

"So why naysay an *option* that could potentially enhance the experience by giving players more ways to customise the game to their own tastes"

the definition of a mod.....

[Xenon_Slayer]

X Rebirth does not have the GOD engine, and from what has been said in the previous presentations, infos and videos, I doubt X4 will have it, too. Faction decision making with regards to station building is described differently.

I won't go into the details on the faction behaviours we'll have (e.g. wars) at the moment, but I do want to straighten out some of the terms just so we don't get confused going forward.

We actually do now have something called the GOD Engine, but it's mainly used for the initial universe generation e.g. generating stations and placing them. After the gamestart, it doesn't really do much.

The Faction Logic is the script driven set of behaviours which will trigger things such as wars and economic expansion. It's predominately emergent behaviour but I can't rule out triggering something based on story.

[RAVEN.myst]

@ RAVEN.myst ...Being one of the ..quote " general population" as in not being averse to "mods" ... is not and I quote

"So why naysay an *option* that could potentially enhance the experience by giving players more ways to customise the game to their own tastes"

the definition of a mod.....

Tricksy! But I wouldn't say so in my opinion, no - otherwise one would have to expand the definition to include the various gamestart scenarios, which customise the experience; likewise, then, the difficulty selection would also qualify as a "mod"; taken to its logical extreme, so would graphics and audio settings. I guess the lines are a bit blurry... I guess that I (admittedly arbitrarily) define anything that is in the official release and subsequent support, however tweakable, as "vanilla".

We actually do now have something called the GOD Engine, but it's mainly used for the initial universe generation e.g. generating stations and placing them. After the gamestart, it doesn't really do much.

The Faction Logic is the script driven set of behaviours which will trigger things such as wars and economic expansion. It's predominately emergent behaviour but I can't rule out triggering something based on story.

Thank you for the clarification, and I find what what you are saying to be quite encouraging.

[birdtable]

@ RAVEN.myst ... in my defence I only use mods to remove all mini games, all small talk and whenever I get my tiller out I don't wish to find the hand of yisha resting on it.... Blurry lines indeed ..

[RAVEN.myst]

@ RAVEN.myst ... in my defence I only use mods to remove all mini games, all small talk

Those are understandable, nay, laudable uses indeed!

and whenever I get my tiller out I don't wish to find the hand of yisha resting on it....

I don't even WANT to know what THAT means...

And speaking of Annoyisha - I actually do use one modlet: it makes the copilot look slightly less hideous (though this version of her looks a bit pretentiously chic - oh well...) It makes no changes whatsoever to game dynamics, so I don't mind it.

[Killjaeden]

X Rebirth does not have the GOD engine, and from what has been said in the previous presentations, infos and videos, I doubt X4 will have it, too. Faction decision making with regards to station building is described differently.

Isn't "GOD engine" just a fancy word for describing a logic engine/ state machine that handles spawning of ships according to pre-set informations? If they want a living universe they need some sort of state machine for all the AI stuff as well.

I found it always exciting when i saw a split patrol with flight destination to some boron sector... It was fun to watch the carnage.

Though i would say occasional skirmishes/border clashes with eventual ceasefire would be more interesting than just all out war... And also easier on the economy/ less destabilising for whatever is in the immediate area.

[Kitty]

Egosoft answered that there would not be things like diplomacy in the first versions. Wars without diplomacy is at best a smog screen, at worst a nonsense.
I don't expect much of this feature for now.

[RAVEN.myst]

Wars without diplomacy is at best a smog screen, at worst a nonsense.

Good point.

[sd_jasper]

I'm guessing that "wars" in X4 are just basically factions that "go hostile" to one another and seek to destroy their ships/stations. And there have been hostile factions in every X game. So, I guess that because there was no diplomacy with the Kahak and Xenon, that all the X series is nonsense?