Diplomacy Goals. With its war-game roots, the AoW series featured rudimentary diplomacy systems which generally resulted in you either being at war with others or in an alliance, with little in between. For Planetfall we want to take diplomacy to a new level and set the following goals:
- Support Multiple Roads to Victory: Base game Planetfall offers alternate roads to victory in addition to conquering other players. In AoW3 basically every war resulted in a fight to the death. Diplomacy should help people achieve alternative victory goals, by protecting them from aggressors and achieve short- and longer-term goals through non-combat means.
- Foreshadow Behavior: The diplomacy systems should clearly manage and communicate the changing disposition between players and foreshadow likely (AI) behavior like war declarations. In AoW3 wars were often declared with no forewarning and with few counter balances.
- Increase Player Survivability: Keep the game fun through diplomacy even though the player might not be the ultimate victor.
- Living AI Factions: The diplomacy system should make AI players and NPC factions feel like living entities through logical behavior and situational messaging.
- Meaningful Trade: The diplomacy system should facilitate meaningful Trade between factions. Find peaceful resolutions to border disputes by exchanging provinces.
- Non-Mutual Relations: The Player vs Player relation should be a non-mutual relation. This gets around the problem that a trespassing player would start to dislike the faction whose land he/she's trespassing. Every player has its own view on other players. They are only connected with each other through their diplomatic state.
- Expose the Diplomacy system with variables and modifier rather a black box approach with fuzzy messages. This helps people understand the mechanics behind the systems and is in line with approach taken with other game systems.
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Marauder Behaviors
- Marauder armies become active after 5-10 turns. It is very important to scout the surroundings and know if you need to prepare for attack. Of course, the new scan-range helps give an early warning of movement in unexplored or fogged terrain.
- Marauders can be both opportunistic and suicidal, but there is some prioritization in their targets: First they prioritize Armies (Scouts), then Sector Bases and then Colonies
- When they first enter an area, they'll pause, given you one turn before they attack.
- Marauders will park on resource nodes, denying income.
- Marauders will raze sector bases. This takes 3 turns so there is a possibility to stop them.
- Marauders taking over Colony Centers, plunge the settlement into anarchy. If the anarchy timer expires, the colony will be reduced to a camp.
- Marauder strength scales as the game progresses.
- Typical marauder units have two mutations, equipping them with mods of increasing power
- Also, marauder army composition changes during game. More and higher tier units will spawn.
- The overall threat level the timing these mutation event can be changed with the World Threat Level difficulty setting.
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History:
The Dvar originate from mining consortia sent out to strip worlds of their natural resources. Dvar pride themselves as being the hardest of survivors. Visitors to their home world will support that claim, as after the collapse the Dvar' were marooned on a barely habitable planet with an elliptical orbit, causing it to be scorched during short blazing summers and then frozen by eternal winters. To make matters worse, their world passes through an asteroid belt, causing a yearly bombardment of giant rocks. This environment made the Dvars to evolve as a bunker dwelling species and see nature as something that needs to be distrusted and looted as soon as a window of opportunity arises.
The Dvar are organized in Consortiums, where each Dvar is a partner in securing their group's survival and wealth. The Consortiums are led by an upper class Oligarchy of the richest families. Although the cynical, hard-working drinking Dvar regards the rich with distrust, their sense of company community is strong. They live for the competition with the other Consortia and work hard to further their Consortium's wealth and standing.
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