u/Idleverse

I am building Orion Online, a browser-based, tick-based MMORTS in the Utopia/OGame style of games. Like every 4X game, it has to deal with snowballing: an early lead that compounds until a player becomes untouchable.

Possible fixes are hard caps or rubber-banding, and I do not like either, because I do not want players to "feel the developer's hand on the scale". When I redesigned Orion's economy I implemented something I call counter-acting forces which are systems inside the game that push back harder the harder you push them, without becoming a hard stop.

• Employment (idle citizens pay no tax but still eat)
• The guns-vs-butter trade (soldiers pay no tax, but requires wages)
• inflation on stockpiled credits(money)
• a end-game population growth equilibrium

I wrote an article that goes more in-depth on this: https://blog.idleverse.gg/solving-the-problem-of-4x-compounding/

The game itself is in Early Access, and free to play in the browser, if you want to see how it feels in practice: https://orion.idleverse.gg/

Orion Online - Round 2

I am building Orion Online: a browser-based, tick-based MMORTS in the Utopia/OGame style of games. Round 1 ran through July, and I was able to gather lots of great feedback from first-time players, and for the first time I was able to play my own game start to finish, which gave me a lot of great insights.

Today round 2 starts, and after an intensive month of bug-fixing, tuning, and development, the game is shaping up nicely. I still consider it early access, but now is a great time to try it out if you like these kind of games, and want to help shape the future of Orion Online.

Play here: https://orion.idleverse.gg/

TL;DR of a month of live iteration:

* Pacing retuned: faster early game, faster-to-reach endgame, shorter wars
* Many UI/UX fixes, visual feedback and animations added, etc
* Balanced many of the mechanics
* Many Performance improvements
* Better onboarding experience

Full write-up: https://blog.idleverse.gg/orion-online-round-2/

this is a re-write of this post

Background

I'm building Orion Online, which is a browser-based 4X MMORTS where you manage a planet.

In most 4X games you pick a race or faction up fron. I tried to lean in on this, by front-loading this decision before account creation. My idea was "the earlier I can get the player to commit, the less likely they are to quit early".

Pushback

Needless to say, this is bad design, and I got pushback on this when floating this idea in the r/gamedev subreddit. The obvious issue with this design is that it requires you to make an uninformed but permanent decision before you understand the consequences of it.

So I re-designed it from the ground up.

Race Select Screen Discoveries

Instead of picking your race up front, in the new system, your identity emerges from "Discoveries". A Discovery is a decision like "Where do we land our Colony ship?" or "Do we build fortifications or solar panels first?" Each option leans toward one of six axes: Warlord, Economist, and so on.

Axis alignment (and abilities)

Your Discoveries accumulates toward an axis alignment that provides passive bonuses towards that direction, plus a unique ability tied to your axis alignment: a Warlord gets a Blitz Attack ability, an Economist can Cipher Resources to teammates, and so on.

This also means you can shift identity mid-round. Early on you can pivot more easily by selecting a few discoveries towards a certain axis, but the deeper into the round you get, and the more points you've put into one axis, the harder it becomes to change.

Discovery Phases

Discoveries are grouped into 7 phases tied to population milestones (the first on landing, then 1M, 10M, on up to 1B). Each milestone triggers a phase, which doubles as a celebration of progress and gives the early game a steady run of meaningful decisions to come back for.

Re-rolling

There's an undo window, which was suggested by a few people in that original thread. You can relocate your colony and redo your early picks until you cross the second milestone (1M population). After that they lock for the round, so you only have to commit once you've had time to learn the game.

Why I like it

By the end of a round you've made roughly 50 of these decisions, and your colony's identity is something you discovered, not something you selected from a list before you knew what any of it meant.

If you want to read more, I have full writeup on the blog: https://blog.idleverse.gg/discover-your-identity-in-orion-online/

Feedback

If you have any feedback on, or experience of, emergent vs upfront identity selection, I'd appreciate hearing about i!

note: I am building a mmo 4X. I probably should have included that

One of the X's of 4X games is of course "eXpand". However, in my 4X game, you are managing a planet, and I really struggled to implement expanding in a way that felt realistic and thematically consistent.

For example, you cannot just "steal" land from another planet, and transport it back across outer space. And even if you could, why would you? There is plenty of land on your own planet to urbanize.

The solution, once I thought of it, was to drop the concept of land entirely, and instead center the game around population. Your planet's size is simply how many people live on it, and land (buildings) are just a derivative of it.

With this, raiding other planets and kidnapping their civilians makes total sense. You can either grow your population organically and/or by attacking your opponents for theirs, which fits right into the expansion mechanic of your typical 4X game.

Also, once I pivoted to a population-based system, a lot of other interesting mechanics emerged, which I tapped into, such as civilization tiers, and other fun stuff.

This honestly took way too long (embarrassingly long) to realize, and I almost re-themed the entire game around managing a space-station instead of a planet, but I am super happy I didn't.

I have a longer version of this in my devlog if you want to read more: https://blog.idleverse.gg/in-orion-online-population-is-power/

I wrote a blogpost on why we decided to not include the concept of alliances in Orion Online, our browser-based 4X mmorts.

TLDR:

When a game allows players to form alliances, it concentrates power, which eventually leads to stagnation. Ultimately, it caters to a (relatively) few powerful players, and creates a hostile environment for the rest of the player base, and most of all, for new players.

In Orion, you're placed in a planetary system with up to 19 other players, and you cannot control where you land (but it does carry over rounds (eras)). Your system have to communicate and collaborate to prosper. Any coalition beyond that, to whatever extent they exist, are social agreements, not a built-in game mechanic.

There are formal relations though. For example, hostility between rivaling systems emerge from actions: mutual raids and cyber ops push a hostility meter, and either side can eventually declare war, which ultimately leads to peace via truce or surrender. In other words, relations are organic and emergent.

Players can relocate their colony to another planetary system if they don't like their team, but ultimately, you have to collaborate to prosper. Planetary systems are kept across eras (game rounds), so groups that do collaborate, grow into well-oiled machines over time.

This system is largely based on the one in the old (and amazing) browser mmorts Utopia, and I do understand that you cannot fully prevent players from creating alliances outside the game, so this might all be for nothing. I'm interested to hear others experiences, thoughts and critic against this. There might be other games that have better solutions/system for this.

Full post: https://blog.idleverse.gg/kingdoms-systems-and-emergent-diplomacy/

A short write-up about monetization and p2w mechanics in (browser) 4x mmorts games in general, and our own game Orion Online. Nothing ground breaking, but sharing some thoughts / observations: https://blog.idleverse.gg/why-pay-to-win-killed-the-browser-strategy-genre/