INTRODUCING: Rebirth of the Federation

[cleverwise]

Sure the Breen had an upper hand for a time being, according to canon. Again their weapon neutralized Romulan and Federation ships. It is not hard to win a battle if one shot can simply disable a ship's ability to fight. I will repeat the statement made by Sisko that only around 1500 Klingon ships were holding the line once the Breen entered the war.

That was a huge issue for the Federation Alliance. However clearly the Dominion nor the Breen had the power to finish the job. That was their golden opportunity to change the war. They obviously could not; again according to canon.

Winning a battle is not in of itself meaningful. Many armies in human history could win a battle but not a war. Sure one side masses up all their forces (or most of them) and takes out the overall stronger force in one engagement. It happens.

The Breen were clearly a power in their local region but not across the quadrant and that is the point. So sure like a heavily armed cavalry can ride behind enemy lines and cause damage destruction the Breen punched the Federation. That is not winning war. Also it sounds like the Federation wasn't ready. That too can change the balance of power in a given engagement. Again that does not by itself win the war. It can decide a battle. Think Pearl Harbor. The US had massive amounts of ability but was asleep and totally not ready for combat.

Finally when DS9 was ending the Federation Alliance bottled up and trapped the Dominion forces to the Cardassian system. There was a debate by the field commanders should they just hold them trapped in that system, because the alliance could indefinitely, or go in for the kill. The "mighty" Breen weren't much of a factor. According to canon no Breen fleet was coming to save the day from the surrounded system and the Federation Alliance still had a huge fleet waiting to go in or maintain a long term blockade.

As for the Dominion welcoming the Breen. They were desperate for any allies after they lost their huge fleet in the wormhole. The Breen were willing to join their cause to grow their terrority. Fair enough for the Breen. But they are more like a great white shark. A threat to one person or a small group of people? Sure. A threat to humanity itself? No.

The Breen had some claws if you will, sure. They killed some ships. Of course. But on the balance of the situation they were only a short factor. If they had the ships they could have overrun the Klingons holding the line and taken the alpha quadrant. A small religion power. Meh they are overrated. Interesting sure. Localized powered... sure.

[trevtones]

Anyway, while I'd love to have more options, 4 empires already is a great number to play!

4 is a nice round number speaking in computer terms and the best way to get started. I just would hope that it is left open or made to be easily modable to add more later on if possible. A proper Borg hive mind devouring civ sounds like it would be great fun! I also liked the idea of having a sort of generic 5th UI that can be shared for other races!

[trevtones]

If there was another Federation or Romulan type level empire both sides (Dominion and Federation) would have been trying to talk said empire onto their side.

Maybe the silicon based life wanted nothing to do with the carbon based lifes wars

[cleverwise]

If there was another Federation or Romulan type level empire both sides (Dominion and Federation) would have been trying to talk said empire onto their side.

Maybe the silicon based life wanted nothing to do with the carbon based lifes wars

Well there is species 8472 in canon. Trek liked to mention non carbon lifeforms. Still they discuss major past powers like the Iconians. So one would think at least in the Alpha quadrant any major powers would have been reported by some group: Q, Klingon, Romulan, etc.

BotF takes the view that the Alpha quadrant is the galaxy. That is silly but I get it for gameplay. One could endlessly program forever. Although imagine bigger maps with Delta quadrant spices. Voyager ran across many powerful species like that dinosaur type one (I forget the name and don't want to look it up - Vorrians or something).

In Voyager with the two part "Year of Hell" it showed the changing empires in that area due to the temporal ship. So yes ultimately it would nice to have hundreds of species on a huge map say 250 x 250 or something. But programming, design, and time just aren't on the side of that short of possible help from AI.

I do like the idea of a 5th generic interface. Then say a logo (AI could do this) could be altered. But even just a text name is fine to start. The bigger issue are modeling the ships. Again AI excels at this kind of thing if you use the right model.

[Flocke]

I will repeat the statement made by Sisko that only around 1500 Klingon ships were holding the line once the Breen entered the war.

From what also is documented, the Klingon fleet was outnumbered 20:1. Question only was how many ships the Dominion war alliance would order to battle in time and what powers they had.

When you assume that the Federation and the Romulans had comparable fleet sizes, and consider that the Breen could not target them all at once but had a rather slow refire rate for their special energy drain weapon, already the fact that both the Federation as well as the cloaked Romulan fleet stayed away from the front lines tells alot about the Breens fleet strength.

Then again it is unclear how many ships they had in distant space territories that just didn't arrive in time or have not even been ordered to participate for whatever reason. And why should they participate in battle over Cardassia when to them the war already appeared to be lost anyhow?

The deal they made with the Dominion also was double-edged. The gain they'd have for winning the war was rather limited. So why send everything to battle they had? They even might have faced Dominion infiltration as well - the Founders surely did their best to take control. They actually even might have been happy for them to loose. Afterall none of their own territories were compromised.

And while I could not find much indication for their actual fleet size, at least the Daystrom Institute assumes they had more than 6000 frigates in total:
https://www.ditl.org/ship-page.php?Clas ... stID=Ships

Which is about half the assumed total Federation fleet size. With no clue on other ship types that might just not have appeared on the show...

All I want to say is that we just don't know much about them and one could very well introduce them as another major power that long has stayed in the dark and has been greatly underestimated.
It would have been great to have them appear more on the canon TV shows. But sadly we got little detail like so often.

But whatever, lets not further mess this topic with this. I was happy for the Ferengi being considered a major power in BotF and would be so for several other races as well. To me the present 2D maps we got to see might as well be considered Federation propaganda!

[cleverwise]

From what also is documented, the Klingon fleet was outnumbered 20:1. Question only was how many ships the Dominion war alliance would order to battle in time and what powers they had.

Well around and around we go. However 20:1 proves nothing. One can have 3,000 row boats vs a battleship or aircraft carrier. Raw size is meaningless.

3000:1 meh

Firepower, trained crews (repair, logistical), and ability to keep that fleet in action count way more than raw numbers. Plus if the Breen had such powerful ships then they would have been able to push the Klingons aside.

Nothing in original canon points the Breen as some quadrant super power. We also saw nothing in canon show the were great planners. Sure a little with the Founder but not that much.

Obviously we'll just have agree to disagree.

I don't buy pro Breen arguments and you don't buy mine. Impasse.

[Flocke]

Obviously we'll just have agree to disagree.
I don't buy pro Breen arguments and you don't buy mine. Impasse.

I never insisted that the Breen necessarily are a super power. Just I don't accept your points in that they can't be.
Space is vast. The majority of the Breen fleet might be located elsewhere. Even the Klingons only managed to send part of their fleet in time.

But all that is irrelevant anyhow. There are plenty good reasons to have the game limited to 4 major races.
Like already argued the galaxy view in BotF always has been limited to local Federation Alpha/Beta quadrant space.
And you can find plenty of scenarios where only the "big 4" are involved.

What would be more interesting in my view is how to best represent the many different other powers without overloading the game. There only are limited stars and way too many known races to include them all anyway. Still they differ alot in powers with certain races being known to at least have "regional power" like you say.

When we interpret the map as being only a fragment of the total galaxy, maybe some external empires like the dominion and also those that mostly are located outside the visual map like the Breen, can from time to time play a larger role by sending in some independent forces. Something we have not seen in Botf as of now, but might make a nice random event there as well.

So rather than to disagree on everything, lets try to agree on what we have in common.
Certainly none of big four I would cancel out. They definitely have the most representation in all we have seen in canon Star Trek.
And still we have many unknowns to be certain on a full galaxy scale.

[Axis]

One thing that bothers me in this is this resources list, I mean OK there is Dilithium and Deuterium, the other is crystal and the other fuel resource, but then it gets a little monotonous, the rest are all basically ship construction metals, also the names of these metals are too similar with each other.

So, I'd cut those metals in two, to my knowledge the most mentioned hull metals in Star Trek are Tritanium and Duranium (and Neutronium), so I'd keep those two and perhaps dig out two other resources for the list that have different purposes.

Latinum to give boost to economy comes first in mind.

[And this I dug from Memory Alpha]: Ultritium, a mined mineral used for explosives for ships with weapons.

In my opinion this would make it more interesting to have some variation in the list.

[Dafedz]

I spent the last few days wrestling with a silly glitch that consumed so much time, and in the end I had to concede defeat. It wasn't even the plan to work on this, it was one of those sidetracks/rabbit holes that draw you in and swallows you whole.

What I was working on was Minor Races, putting the final touches together on their basic utility. Until now, they were just a list of race names with functions, properties, statistics, descriptions, etc - which did practically nothing, they were placeholders. They had their habitable homeworlds, with populations, growth rates etc, and they spawned across the galaxy just sitting there doing nothing. Now, finally, they exist as living, breathing entities. Now they advance in Tech (similar method to BOTF's Evolution Levels), they build base structures, and shipyards, and dilithium refineries in systems that have dilithium, and so forth. They are dynamic. This was the basic hook necessary to put in place for the coming-soon diplomacy system.

The 'glitch' came up when I had the genius idea to make every homeworld planet look properly canon as best as possible. They already are canonish, i.e. Vulcan is reddish/brown, almost Mars-like. I wanted a further step. For example, create the Andoria from ST:ENT that gave us an Arctic moon rotating around a large ringed Gas Giant. Simple right? Not simple. Actually, it smashed me for days on end. The harder I hit it, the worse it got. I very nearly broke the existing planet spawning code structure. The basic (cheap, and it needs to be cheap) premise here was to 'borrow' a Gas Giant from the Gas Giant prefab pool and superimpose it over the existing Arctic planet for Andoria - thus retaining the Class-P Arctic designation. This superimposition trick resulted in a slew of weird scaling issues (Unity URP quirks and camera offsets). After much trial and error I had no choice but to abandon the idea completely. The Andorian ringed gas-giant system was out, but I did manage to put a ring around a standard Arctic plant to represent the Andorian world.

See? A stupid entirely non-important sidetrack that shouts "hey, do that, it would be cool" can send you off the deep end, be an endless time-sink and divert your attention from where it should really be focused.

Giant Andorian moon at the bottom on the planet strip


Andoria in final form


Minors now have Production, and a Build List to draw from. That's invisible, under the hood, it doesn't populate the player-facing Build List screen even in dev mode. The interface shows no buildings are manned, that's also fake - but see System Info panel bottom left. That's the true output of the system. Also, no minors have images yet for their unique structure lists (even their base structures are unique, they do not 'borrow' from empires, e.g. Automated Farms)


Due to work and other time-senstiive real life issues I haven't had a chance to answer any posts - will do so in coming days.

[Dafedz]

Back to a possible function would be continued research. In many games, including BotF, once you get to Level 10 that is that. However what would be interesting is some kind of bonus. So no need to keep unlocking new units but say keeping research in construction provides a bonus. This way empires, at least human, don't just abandon research so quickly. It would need to be some kind of bonus that is worth it yet not to over the top. Still many structures give Empire wide bonuses so I could see 25%, 50%, or even 100% increase to construction, intel, food, etc if research is left.

Good idea. "Future Tech", as it was called in BOTF, had no internal mechanics and so did nothing beyond Tech level 10. What you suggest is definitely doable: a fractionable modifier for each tech level beyond the research cap that in small increments boosts your base stats, e.g. +Food (Biotech), +Industry (Construction) and so forth. I'm definitely adding this to the game road map.

I have no idea if you can adjust the AI but the way it makes a treaty, breaks it a few plays later, then asks again for the same treaty, breaks it, and around it goes is ultra annoying and always has been. I just start ignoring them.

I am not sure if those are doable given what coding you can access but food for thought anyway. I have dozens of them for sure.

I see the AI being not quite so fickle in ROTF. There will be some rigorous morale penalties that de-incentivize treaty abrogation -- enforced on the player-side also. Unless a power you have a treaty with is deliberately provoked, then 9/10 times they will honor that treaty agreement, 10/10 if they were the ones who originally proposed it.

I am not sure if those are doable given what coding you can access but food for thought anyway. I have dozens of them for sure.

I have 100% access and total control, as I am the solo dev of this game.

[Dafedz]

Anyway, while I'd love to have more options, 4 empires already is a great number to play!

4 is a nice round number speaking in computer terms and the best way to get started. I just would hope that it is left open or made to be easily modable to add more later on if possible. A proper Borg hive mind devouring civ sounds like it would be great fun! I also liked the idea of having a sort of generic 5th UI that can be shared for other races!

I don't rule out adding other AI Powers to the game, like the Dominion or the Borg or even the Ferengi. A complex and labour-intensive task, but not an impossible one. I haven't catered for moddability just yet, no such tool exists or is in development. Let's just get a working Alpha up and running first, then we can talk about modding and possible game expansions!

[Dafedz]

One thing that bothers me in this is this resources list, I mean OK there is Dilithium and Deuterium, the other is crystal and the other fuel resource, but then it gets a little monotonous, the rest are all basically ship construction metals, also the names of these metals are too similar with each other.

Believe me I did wrestle with this resource list for a long time. It's changed on at least three occasions, the last iteration removed one (not a metal, it was completely different) and added Duratanium as the final building resource.

Including other/different resource types beyond pure metals -- e.g. ship "components" such as phase inducers and plasma manifolds etc, and/or building materials used on planets/colonies -- isn't quite so easy as it sounds.

For individual starships to meaningfully use these components you would have to redesign the ship-building system itself; wire each and every component and how they slot together with other components for every individual ship game-wide, rebuild the Tech tree accordingly, then adapt a coherent ship-upgrade system that would also conform to this design flow, and then design new building types to manufacture/output said components. It becomes exponentially more complex and intricate if you take this route. And at the end, what you would have -- interesting though it may seem -- is not a BOTF-style 4x turn-based strategy game anymore, but a Crafting game.

I did at one time consider a more extensive and varied resource list and system, but rejected the notion on the above grounds, and the reasonably confident expectation: this isn't what people would want.

The only resources in BOTF/ROTF that exist in physical game terms that has value to the player in that more = success, less = failure, is SHIPS. A meaningful resource list means therefore that the list is entirely geared towards building (more) ships. My system is quite simple. You construct resource-extracting buildings to obtain the materials. This works the same as BOTF. I.e., build a Dilithium Refinery in a system that has Dilithium = obtain Dilithium.

I created six materials that are needed to build starships. Each material has its own resource extraction building that can only be built in systems that have that resource (placed procedurally at seed creation). Once built and powered, these structures (example: Dilithium Refinery, Deuterium Plant, Titanium Mine), output a baseline +1 Dilithium/Deuterium/Titanium per turn. This output accumulates to a global empire-wide pool, which is deducted from when building a starship.

The resources are tiered, in that (roughly) Tech 1-3 ships require only Deuterium, Dilithium, and Titanium to build. Amount per ship differs depending on ship type (Command Ships require more than Cruisers which require more than Scouts, etc). Mid-Tech ships require the addition of Tritanium. Tech 7-9 adds Duranium into the mix, Tech 10+ needs the rare and valuable Duratanium. I will also add: there is more than one way to obtain these materials beyond mines/extraction buildings. I won't say any more for now.

Deuterium, Dilithium, and Titanium are basic building materials, and are default for ALL ship types. They are common and easy to acquire. There latter three, Tritanium, Duranium, and Duratanium, are special materials that require some strategic management by the player. This not so many that it becomes a difficulty or a burden, and not so few that it's just simply easy-mode.

So, I'd cut those metals in two, to my knowledge the most mentioned hull metals in Star Trek are Tritanium and Duranium (and Neutronium), so I'd keep those two and perhaps dig out two other resources for the list that have different purposes.

I looked at Neutronium but rejected it on account that it was essentially beyond Federation technology until ST:Discovery (whenever that is set, I don't know, I don't bloody watch it). Latinum is primarily a Ferengi currency. It did cross my mind, but I thought it superfluous. If there's a purpose to Latinum you can think of, how it can be obtained and put to meaningful use fitting into a niche that Credits do not account for, and usable/scalable across a galactic theatre, then I will absolutely consider it. At the whiteboard stage, I didn't see a place for Latinum that would add anything to the game.

Ultritium is a chemical explosive, not used in either phasers/disruptors or types of torpedo. I can't see how it could be incorporated into ship-building or the game as a whole.

But I like the ideas and the feedback, so by all means keep them coming.

[Axis]

OK, if these empires have some kind of trade centers, Latinum would be required to construct them, then giving the percentage bonus to economy of that system.

Another idea came to me, that extra food resource on some M-class planets, could it be like Quadrotritricale? and as above with Latinum this would be required to build some kind of Star Trek granary, which would give the food/population bonus to that system.

And there's that energy resource which also did not have a name, maybe Geothermal Energy and it could be used to build some energy building.

I think these would give more strategic options.

[justanick]

How is AI supposed to handle those resources? I image that the currently envisioned system could prove a challenge for AI empires.

[cleverwise]

Well it all sounds good.

I do understand chasing a minor issue. As someone who programs I have done the same thing. You can easily go down the rabbit hole working on something you want to do but really is not all that important.

I am glad to hear you have access to the full code. I understand you are the sole dev for this project. However I did not know if certain parts of the code were still obfuscated. So it is great to hear you have free reign over the source.

I am not sure if you would like separate topics/threads for each new feature request. That could make them like a feature and later bug tracker. Then again perhaps that is to much of a pain in the rump to track.

You are doing amazing work with this project.