Galactic News #3 – May 16th

Hi everyone,

In this week’s Galactic News we’re unveiling some of the new features and changes we’ve been working on for the new Skirmish galaxy we’re launching soon. They affect galaxy generation, player spawning and new player protection.

But first of all let’s take a look at the leaderboards!

Top Players – Main 2 Galaxy

For the 3rd week in a row there’s no change at the top of the Grand Emperor and Master of Warfare leaderboards. Those are commanding leads Rislem and Belisarius have – congratulations to you both (again).

We’ve changed the Climbers and Fallers tables so that they’re now based on points gained/lost rather then rank. It gives us all a good idea if anyone is scoring enough points to climb their way to the top! What do you think – will we have a new leader next week?

Once again another of the top players has been Scorched from the leaderboard. It was a similar story last week. Will one of the current Top 10 get Scorched this week?

News From the Devs

Originally the goal was that Skirmish galaxies would be shorter, faster, varied game types. Either to play alongside the Main galaxy or instead of it if you preferred.

But until now it’s not been possible to use different speeds for different galaxies. So Main and Skirmish galaxies have offered a fairly similar experience differing mainly in size and player proximity.

We’re now able to run galaxies at different speeds and will be launching a faster experimental Skirmish galaxy very soon!

As well as increasing the speed, we’re going to use this new galaxy to experiment with galaxy generation, player spawning and new player protection.

Please keep in mind that these changes will only be applied to this new galaxy for now.

New Type of Galaxy Generation + Player Spawning

Each galaxy we’ve launched so far has been pre-generated. All of the stars and planets were in place before any players joined.

However, this experimental galaxy will be dynamically generated:

• The galaxy is launched with no stars or planets
• A cluster of star systems is generated at the edge of the most recently generated cluster when a new player joins
• The player’s home planet and system are in the middle of this cluster
• The star systems in the cluster are generated in a way that delivers equal start conditions for players
• A new cluster will not be created for players that use a spawn code

You can see this in action in the image above:

• The systems to the left of the yellow line were created when Player A spawned into the game
• The systems to the right of the yellow line were created when Player B spawned in
• The yellow arrows indicate where their home planet systems are

As you can see, that’s a lot of systems for just two players – and not all of the systems generated with each cluster are visible from this view. We can tweak the parameters so that less systems are generated or there’s more spacing between them etc. but this is what we have at the moment.

Why we are trying this

We’ll still be able to use the pre-generated approach for Main galaxies.

But dynamically generating the galaxy gives more control over how players spawn in and provides more consistent starting conditions. For faster games it also prevents players colonizing far away areas of the galaxy before any other players have spawned there.

It will also make it easier to scale the size of the galaxy to better fit the number of players. It could also be used to provide alternative Skirmish game types. For example, we could do a team game where each team spawns from a different point in the galaxy, with a warp tunnel enabling them to travel to the galaxy’s contested/war zone?

New Player Protected Zone

In this new galaxy we’ll also test a version of new player protection. An allied guard/pirate fleet will aggressively patrol and defend the area around your home planet/system – the ‘new player protected zone’.

The image above shows a home system for a new player in the middle, the perimeter that marks the edge of the protected zone and the guard fleet itself – in pursuit.

• The protected zone covers the entire area within – any fleet entering that doesn’t have a treaty with that player will be pursued and attacked by the guard fleet
• The dynamic spawning algo takes into account the size of the protected zone to ensure each player gets a similar quantity/quality of systems covered by it
• This guard fleet has extra fast engines and is very powerful – but if it is destroyed another will spawn
• This protection is temporary (the duration will be relative to the speed of the galaxy) and the perimeter and guard fleet will then vanish
• Players that spawn in with a spawn code will not get their own protected zone. But if the friend that invited them still has a protected zone and they spawn within it they will also be protected in that zone because of their treaty with each other

We understand that some of you will have concerns about the effect this will have on exploration. We will add new automated fleet behaviours in the future to avoid fleets continuing into such a zone. But in this galaxy it won’t be such an issue. Because of the distance between players and the number of systems between you, it’s very likely you’ll see a protected zone while exploring the systems on the edge of your cluster. And in this game due to the increased speeds the loss of a scout has a tiny impact on your game anyway.

When Will this New Galaxy Be Ready?

This new galaxy won’t be ready next week, but as things stand it should be launched before the end of the month.

Next week we’ll bring you details of a couple of other changes the new galaxy will include.

Until then, have a good week and we’ll see you again soon 🙂