Procedural Expedition Leaders, Permadeath, and Genocide Paths — What I'm Adding to My Space Opera RPG
Hello, everyone!
You might have seen me here before, I am a solodev working on a political sim heavily inspired by Suzerain and Stellaris, except it takes place in a space opera setting!
You play as the first elected President of Altara, a once grand empire built on supremacy and conquest, now broken and shattered after losing a war against half the galaxy.
The war is over, but its consequences remain: economic collapse, political instability, and a population that is divided and desperate for direction.
You must now make decisions that change the path of Altara in a branching narrative, while also dealing with 4X strategy elements. You can create your own national companies, develop your army, enact laws, explore unkown space, colonize planets (if you wish to not play as a socialist hahaha) and a lot more!
My idea with Pax Astra is to build a space opera saga that mixes Suzerain and Stellaris in terms of gameplay, with a lot of inspiration from sci-fi works like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Star Wars and Dune.
Today I want to share a new system I just finished coding for my game, inspired by the squad and permadeath mechanics of games like XCOM or Darkest Dungeon.
One thing that always bothered me about strategy games is how they handle colonization and exploration. There's not enough charm or mystique to it. In Europa Universalis, colonizing feels like a chore, mostly administrative busywork, with no real intention to explore the complexity of what colonization actually means. Not from a critical angle on imperialist institutions, and not from the "romantic" perspective of adventurers pushing into unknown territory either. It's just... Paperwork.
With this new mechanic, I wanted to dig into that depth and add some emergent gameplay on top of it.
Here's how it works: once you colonize a planet, you can send expedition leaders out to explore its regions. Every single leader is procedurally generated, meaning no two are alike. They each have their own positive traits, negative traits, and personality traits for flavour, with unique stats to match.
You pick one of these leaders, send them out with troops, and they start encountering random events — and here's where the magic happens. Each leader interacts with those events in their own way.
A cowardly leader might freeze up during a fight, or let innocent expedition members die to save their own skin. A courageous one will throw themselves into battle without hesitation. A xenophobic leader will cause incidents with native populations, and depending on the event, things can escalate to atrocities.
And yes, these characters grow over time, develop their own arcs, and can face permadeath.
My goal with all of this is to make Pax Astra feel like a true space opera. For that, I need to populate this world with myth and organic life, not just systems and numbers. And the beautiful thing is that this mechanic has a ton of applications beyond expeditions. Fleet commanders with rivalries and personal relationships. Generals in ground battles. The possibilities are genuinely exciting to think about.
On the expedition side specifically, you also have choices when you encounter native tribes: you can work to understand their culture and assimilate them peacefully, or... you can go the genocide route. The game doesn't stop you.
There is a lot more to my game! It is a political sim after all, so this mechanic is just a small part of a much bigger experience!
You can play it for free here on itch: https://ben-cardino.itch.io/paxastra
You can also wishlist it on steam !
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4535930/Pax_Astra/?beta=1
Or join the Pax Astra subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pax_Astra/
Or join the discord server: https://discord.com/invite/CQtFhFh5f4
If you have any questions or any feedback, let me know :)