Potato Man Many Idea Dump

First off, gas giants need to be sprited, for gas of course and such. I also think asteroid fields should be treated like a planet. As in they have a map inside a system. Asteroids I think should be high mineral rich areas, while Gas giants being high fuel, and lastly planets being with smaller amounts of fuel, but on all planets (and maybe green energy like windmills later which also boost culture or something). Also Solar system maps would be cool but are not a priority. Also I think we need space buses to track citizen flow, especially for units such as celebrates and missionary transport. Plus lets face it; you can't spread culture with out a connection and citizen flow. Plus closing borders could be a thing then (but as a balance so you don't always have closed borders is that you can't trade if you don't let citizens through). I suggest Buses to be placed as routes and not the actual vehicle though, so we don't have to keep track of them, and they may have a very low culture production of 1 both ways. Mostly they would be vessels for your celebrates and missionaries.

My input for resources vote:
Ordnance unknown (or changes with faction types allowing for different factions to have different weapons)
Minerals Metallic (I don't care for crystals)
Fuel well gas clouds of course, but one planets I like liquid fuel rather than coal.

Oh and eventually I will make another texture pack, green Anno 2070 style (don't expect soon products through)

The Gas Giant preset has been sprited.

I agree there should be an Asteroid Field "planet", but there might also be a couple asteroids in orbit of some planets, like Gas Giants (which would give extra space to build G units on). Though, how big should asteroids be? What're the limits to their sizes? They have to at least be big enough for one Mineral deposit. These questions are crucial to the S Processor and S Refinery, as well as the Asteroid Planetary System and the possible asteroids within other Planetary Systems.

Regarding the Gas Giant, I think we should add an S Platform project that you can use to build G units "on" a Gas Giant. These would be sort of like the Terran's space platform things in Starcraft.

Also, I think we should add a G Bridge project; normally, non-flying units cannot pass through water or lava. The G Bridge would allow you to build over water/lava so your regular units can pass over them. Beware, though, anyone would be able to use the bridge, and you wouldn't be able to destroy it remotely (like your buildings). It'd also be 100% immobile.

I've gone through with a first pass on the raw resources, focusing on the planetside versions.

Ordnance is to be left up to the player to come up where it comes from, personally I think it may be some sort of mixture of Minerals and Fuel.

Currently, the Planetary System maps are utterly massive. Migrating to a Solar System map is effectively impossible with our "engine". I advise we just assign each solar system one to three planets, reflecting their real-world scarcity and also perhaps implying that in each system there is only so many planets that are "useful".

Space Buses sound good, perhaps you'd require a Colony Space Station or a Trade Space Station or even a sort of Space Bus Terminal in order to be able to connect a planet to the Space Bus network. Having your borders closed also disabling trade sounds good, I doubt most factions will be able to domestically produce all of the resources they need, plus the Culture branch of the Tech Tree is an incentive to trade and forge alliances.

The Space Bus network could also possibly be used to ferry small amounts of infantry between planets or just into orbit, as I doubt you'll always have Transports readily able to move those five squads to your Shipyard above or to that other planet to beef up your military presence.

Looking forward to that texture pack!

What I meant by a solar map was basically listing out the planets in the system so it really doesn't matter. I think the ordnance should be uniform, like made from minerals and fuel or something, I just meant spriting and such if that ever happened depends on the faction, and in universe reasoning is also up to the player, but the actual resources should be standardized. Bridges are almost a necessity, and cloud city should be possible, so the gas platforms are awesome! Everything said about space buses is what I was thinking.

Oh and maybe racial and factional bonuses, but those are for a latter date.

Well, currently, Ordnance is made in G Factories and S Production Space Stations. As of now, they consume Fuel and Minerals in their upkeep. The conversion rate is 3O=1M+1F.

I think that moving Potato Man into Unity would be a good move.

It'd make the game more centralized, which not only makes it easier to develop, but also to play, and also allows anyone to play as instead of a bunch of Google Docs and a few .psd's it'll be an executable.

However, similar to Cortex Command, the game will only have local multiplayer. And, depending on the difficulty of adding AI, that may be the only way to play.

To consider:
- What will units look like moving? Will they visually move, or just 'teleport' to the destination?
- Units will need a maximum area they are able to cover in a turn, what will this look like for the player?
- What will be the "theme" of the GUI? Will they be unique for different factions?
- What will it look like when a unit is selected?
- What kind of control scheme should it have? As in, should it feel like a Command & Conquer game or more like Starcraft or more like Planetary Annihilation... the list goes on.
- How should the Planetary System Editor and Solar System Editor play, what should they look like?
- Other, already posed, questions regarding core development.

Conceptual GUI v1:

Conceptual GUI v2:

Conceptual GUI v3:

Conceptual Title Menu (2 Versions):

Unity sounds good to me if you want to code it! In fact with that involved it would actually feel like a video game and not a board game on the computer. Unity also would make sure all the annoying management and such which would be great! I sure though that we will eventually be able to work through the local player problem.
GUI I do not think we should make factionally specific, at least yet. Lets make sure all the core functions are worked through before we worry about something like that. But so far their looking good (personally I'm more of a fan of V1, but V2 is also nice). Unit movement: just make it teleporting for now, and once you get all the controls worked out we can move onto visuals.
But when we do get to visuals, I personally think that GUI should be factionally specific, and the person making the faction textures should be responsible for the GUI, along the premises of the original (aka no new shapes and features and such, just the original version with more decor or something). Movement would be nice, but I personally do not want to sprite all of the pictures needed for the animation, just images moving across the map seems lazy tho me, but I really don't want to animate!
Unit selection however is important, circles do the job, but I like the idea of overhead arrows. Any other ideas I will post as I come up with them.
Controls I going to take out planetary, because its controls are more designed for real time, which we don't need yet. The I can't think of one that absolutely love though so it is all up to you.
Not sure I get what you mean by editors...
And I'm going to be away for a few days as a heads up! So I'll see more updates I think on Saturday.

The game would still be turn-based in Unity, as the game has been structured for turns, and it'd take some major reworking to convert to an RTS, reworking that would involve scrapping a lot of stuff, because there really isn't an effective way to manage an empire that's gone interstellar without the time turns gives you.

The v1 GUI was just a proof of concept, throwing ideas onto the canvas to see what looks nice. v2 uses the lessons learned in v1 and makes it actually a candidate for a final GUI. v3 is just the logical progression of v2, taking the functional thing and making it look decent.

I personally am okay with units teleporting to move, as the game has been designed like a board-game-gone-wild, and animation is a slippery slope. Maybe one day we could add animations, but that'd be very far future stuff.

For faction-specific GUI, all they really have to do is mount every core element of v2/3: the Resource Index (counters for your resources + research points), the Nav Menu (in order to move the viewer over the landscape), and the Manager Interface (buttons to access the main menu, the research menu, the projects menu, the empire management menu, and the rule book). Their Manager Menus also have to contain all the same information. Aside from the actual data and text, the GUI can look like anything you want. I was going for simple and out of the way with my concepts, but that's just personal preference.

Though, now that I think about it, the Nav Menu is extraneous as we could just use the keyboard.

The Editors are what is used to build a Planetary System ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) and a Solar System ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]). For now, the editors, like most things currently, are .psd files.

The v3 Upper Display: