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[Sub]

Well, everyone only starts with one city.  The city spots are generated up front so that at runtime it's quick to figure out where the next city should be.

[Rarykos]

Okay,read it!

That's a great plan, very ambitious for sure, but it's not crazy.
I like your ideas, I'd love to see them in a game! I'm excited about that aspect with the leaders, that sounds really cool. I enjoyed rome 1, and it'd be awesome to see another game that brings that amount of fun.


I agree with you on the nukes, that's a good change! :D

I'd love to see how you'll handle unit movement, it was my biggest problem in middle/late game in civ and total war games. There's just too many units for me to care about. First war is fun, little wars are fun, but producing units in all cities and moving them all is hell... Maybe a "population limit" taken from RTS games would work

[Itharius]

I heard that 4X games are one of the most difficult to code. Is it true? Game looks good so far, keep it up!

[Sub]

Super late reply, but I didn't see the new posts until just now!

Okay,read it!

I'd love to see how you'll handle unit movement, it was my biggest problem in middle/late game in civ and total war games. There's just too many units for me to care about. First war is fun, little wars are fun, but producing units in all cities and moving them all is hell... Maybe a "population limit" taken from RTS games would work Shocked

Thanks for taking the time to read it over, means a lot to me.  I actually added a population limit in the other day.  It's funny, I never really realized the similarities between 4x and RTS games before trying to make a 4x game, but there are definitely a lot of similarities.

I heard that 4X games are one of the most difficult to code. Is it true? Game looks good so far, keep it up!

Thanks for the kind words.  I guess it depends on what 4x game you're making, and what type of game you're comparing it to. I don't necessarily think 4x games are more difficult to code.  There are some nice aspects about it, like I don't have to worry about syncing complex physics over the 'net for instance.  Prior to starting this, I thought the hardest part about it would be creating a good AI, but so far that's been going surprisingly well.

But yeah, every day this gets a little closer to completion.  The aesthetics have been pretty stable for a while now, but I recently decided to do another pass over it, and I think I'm finally happy with it.  I messed around with the colors a bit, and solved some usability issues like it occasionally being hard to tell the difference between land and coastal tiles.

[Sub]

Not much to look at yet, but I started work the other day on a tech tree GUI.  Each technology is defined in a json file, and the game generates the layout of the tech tree based on the order of the tech unlocks.  This was slightly harder than I thought it would be, but I've now more or less got the positioning down.  

It used to be a simple list


The WIP Tech Tree


The blue box is what's directly unlocked by researching the moused over box.
The red box is what's directly required to unlock researching the moused over box.
The purple box are what is indirectly required to unlock researching the moused over box.

In other words, all of the purple and red boxes need to be researched before you're able to research Astronomy.  

Next on the agenda is drawing lines from each box to their direct unlocks.  I'm thinking that I'm going to define a small (invisible) grid (with each cell being 10x10 pixels) and adapting the pathfinding system to make this happen.  The width/height of each technology box is going to be a multiple of 10 and the boxes in the grid which overlap with the tech boxes will be defined as obstacles.  Then it'll just be pathfinding between relevant tech boxes.  I suspect that with each line I add I'm going to need to update the grid to mark those boxes as obstacles to prevent lines overlapping.  

I'm not really looking forward to this, and I'm not 100% sure that it'll actually work and look nice, but we'll see.  I'm going to try to make that happen either Friday or Saturday.

Then I'll need to add icons / progress bars and try to make it look pretty.

[Sub]

Getting closer to where I want it to be.

[QOG]

This project looks really cool, posting to follow.