Hi Mike,


I stopped playing BOTF consistently about a year ago and I had no idea this kind of community had sprung up around my favorite game! I'm unbelievably excited.



That having been said, the game visually looks amazing, its streamlined, pleasant to look at, smooth and clean. I really, really, really love it, you've done a fantastic job.


My concerns are about the gameplay and I'm sure that these issues don't come up until later, I wanted to bring them to the front now.

The main problems with BOTF in its original form was

1) Very Buggy (obviously)

2) Didn't support fleets that reflected the world counterparts in the star trek universe. That is to say, the game didn't support large fleets

3) And this might just be me, but the ungodly amount of time it took to make a colony viable such that if you didn't stumble upon a great planet early on, worlds you colonize might pottentially never become a viable hepl to your empire at any point in the game.



I see that you made the cost to produce a farm, or foundry or whatever much lower (you can make one per turn, which is great) but they don't seem to produce all that much, thus repeating the drudgery of having to build 4-8 farms, 20-40 industrial structures, 4-8 energy structures, etc. etc. to get your planet to be productive. While I thought their was an elegance to this system in BOTF, the sheer volume of what you had to build made the process mind-numbingly repetitive and took away from the real fun of the game.

Also, I see that all the structures in the game are type 1, which obviously implies their will be a type II up through type IX, I assume like the original games. Are having different upgrades like this necessary? At the very least (and I of course, don't know you haven't thought of this already) will they at least upgrade automatically when your research levels up? Otherwise, its yet another mind-numbingly boring task that was a mistake in the first game.

I also hope maintenance costs on ships will be such that they could support large fleets,

Finally, and I don't know if any of you have ever played Galactic Civlizations, but I think what would really put BOTF II over the top would be to have a similar dynamic diplomacy system, where you can trade not only money but technoclogies, supply other empires with arms, wage proxy wars, etc. It is this type of mechanic that would let the game be truly multi-dimensional as it allows control of the galaxy through other means than combat. (Thus, making empires like the Ferengi far less ridiculous an inclusion).




I hope I didn't post this in the wrong forum/make this post too early in development/make another mistake. I think what you guys are doing is an incredible feat of populism by taking something that a lot more people than I realized love and more or less saying "free market be damned, I'm making it myself." Your commitment is amazing and it looks like oyu're going to make an incredible game. I don't know a lot of XML, but what I do know I'd be willing to implement to make the game play better. Best of luck to you, Mike, and I can't wait.

Welcome to the forums, bmercantile, and thanks for all the kind words about myself and the game . I understand your concerns about the time it takes to develop a colony and upgrade its facilities, and I myself share that concern. The building designs that I am including in the game are the ones that this community put together over the course of a year or two, and you can find them in the . That said, a lot of the resource values will probably need tweaking, and I think upgrades take a bit long, but there are others who like it that way, as it makes for longer, more drawn-out gameplay. Since you can't make everyone happy, here's what's likely to happen:

First, I'll probably tweak a lot of the build costs so that buildings and ships don't take so bloody long to build. I'll aim for nice, balanced numbers so you can't build them too quickly, but also so it doesn't take 30+ turns to upgrade your factories. Fortunately, it will be very easy for anyone to go through a modify the XML for the object database to tweak these values themselves.

Second, I may include a game option to enable auto-upgrades for players who don't want to have to go through the mind-numbingly tedious and time-consuming task of upgrading all their facilities.

Lastly, unlike the original BotF, new colonies will start out with *current* facilities rather than Tech Level 1 facilities that will need to be upgraded over and over again to catch up.

I hope this is satisfactory. As for fleet sizes, we'll see what happens. We'll need to do a lot of playtesting to balance out resource costs and availablity. The diplomacy system is still up in the air a bit, though I think I might aim for something similar to GalCiv2 crossed with Medieval 2: Total War. You won't be able to trade technologies because of how research works and because there frankly aren't that many. However, you might be able trade ships, systems, and other "tangible" objects.

Thanks again for your enthusiastic praise, and I hope you'll stick around and participate in the great feature debates .

The making colonies worthwhile issue in plain botf can actually be resolved to a certain degree and therefore requires a sophisticated build order handling and clever buy tactics. It is still a pain in the ass but I will give you the outlines here that may even help in botf2 (it never hurts to know good tactics doesn't it? ).

This applies to nearly every colony of every imaginable population size.
First, build 2 factories, 1 farm, 2 factories, 1 farm. Repeat that if pop growth is above 3%.
Then build fed replicators or all equivalent food supply extra buildings.
Now upgrade to level 2,3,4,5,.. factories by buying them as often as you can (you will get the money out of this rather quickly when considering the credits boost you'll get out of the improved colony).
Now you should have like 20 upgraded factories, 5 farms and 3 energy buildings. This colony is now able to fast-build ships for your fleets while others with upgraded intel/research can do that task now. Therefore you don't need to upgrade the new colony to 20 level 9 research labs for example.

All this takes no longer than 50 turns so with the new idea of mstrobel to already start with the highest tech level which makes sense since colonists don't usually neglect current technology which might improve their colony welfare for that matter, so with that new idea, it won't make for much than 25 rounds now which should quite resolve that issue thoroughly.

After reading this post, I'm a little worried that colony development will be too easy. I mean don't get me wrong, it was certainly tedious at times in BotF but it's the very foundation of your empire and as a result it always seemed to make sense to me that one should spend the most time on it.

So far from what you've said, the main thing I would agree with is that starting buildings from level 1 with a colony ship, including the colony ship 2, was painful. However, I think we should keep in mind that the colony ship cost should, imo, reflect the cost of the buildings it builds. After all, the cost difference between the differing levels of say factories grows and grows with each level in BotF and thus I don't see why a colony ship's cost should stay the same whether it's going to result in building a level 4 or 5 (for example) farm and factory.

I think the first thing to try would be to make factory production scale better - it takes A LOT longer for one level 9 factory to build another level 9 facotry than a level 1 factory to build another level 1 in BotF, that is to say that their production capability does not scale linearly with their cost.

And I'm with Malvoisin regarding the balancing - I don't see why there should be a reward to diversify colonies, specialisation is what makes our global economy far more productive than it was 200 years ago and I don't see a reason why it wouldn't scale to an interplanetary scale. I mean heck, if they didn't have replicators in Star Trek, it would make sense for systems with planets that are predisposed to farming/farmland to even feed other systems! (but let's not open that can of worms for the game :p)

You make some good points, Fedor. Keep in mind though that nothing is set in stone, and once the game is a bit farther along, we can start to really tweak and balance things. Also, the game is very easily modified, and there will doubtlessly be several mods that affect the rate of technological growth and production times.

How about using Hearts of Iron approach ? Every upgrade except the last one should be done at half cost.