|
|
Sharky Games: Readers can find out more about space combat on your site and in other interviews. What can you tell us about the ground combat? And will there be any ship boarding?
Alan Emrich: We're still planning on ship boarding, but it will occur below a player's level of direct control. As for ground combat, players will be happy to hear that they can rain down on planet with Space Marines, Armor, and Battleoids and get in there and kick some major butt. Or… they could end up in a protracted ground struggle that becomes the central issue of a vast inter-stellar war. Ground battles are not necessarily decided in a single turn. They could drag out indefinitely if both sides keep feeding the front lines. We factor in options for chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare, collateral damage, maneuver, leadership, morale, and a lot of other things.
Sharky Games: Space Marines…we bet the Warhammer 40K guys will love that. How many races will be in MOO3, and will they all be user-playable, or will there be a mix of player races and lesser non-player races?
Alan Emrich: Here's the math. There are eight distinct species in the game, like the Humanoids, Insectoids, Ichthytosian, and so forth. Now, the game will include four pre-fab races for each species, like the Psilons, Klackons, and Trilarians. Of course, players can just select a species and design their own race for it.
When playing the game, there can be up to eight sentient players in the up to thirty-two player positions in the game. The positions not taken up by sentient players will be run by AI players. Now, not all 32 are out there right from the get go. No. We keep a few positions open for civilizations to split because of civil wars, bring in nomadic races, rise up new Magnates on the map, and so forth. In other words, civilizations "come and go." There's a much more epic sweep of history in MOO3, and all those positions coming and going really helps us tell a big story.
Sharky Games: When you try as a designer to build balance into a game (such as in determining the abilities of races in MOO3), how often do you find that theory doesn't work as planned and what kinds of test and tweaks do you apply to find and address this?
Alan Emrich: You can only do so much in theory. It's all execution and playtesting. In the case of MOO3, we're planning on an open beta test and ingesting the feedback. Where we see trends, we'll obviously adjust (if they're unbalancing ones). Really, this is a very "touchy-feely" part of the design process. Invariably, though, the more people trying to break it over the longest possible time is the best way to find these things out.
Bill Fisher: Of course, experience helps. We've got a very seasoned design crew on the game. We're all able to draw on our knowledge of past designs, what worked and what didn't, so we're pretty confident that what we've put together is going to work smoothly when it all gets integrated.
|
|
|