[klausD]

Originally Posted by Ed Kolis

Modern screen resolutions: Yeah, I'm doing development on a 1600x900 screen, and we're trying to keep the game playable on as wide a variety of resolutions as possible, by using self-scaling UI elements, as opposed to fixed-size ones like in SE4 and SE5.

Sounds good.

Originally Posted by Ed Kolis

Big universe: I'm not sure what direction Ken has in mind for this, but my personal opinion is big universes lead to long, drawn-out games that get boring after a while due to the insane amounts of empire management required... Not to say we can't support them for folks who do like that sort of thing, but I really don't know what the plans are at the moment

Well, boring or not is IMO in the eye of the beholder and maybe to some users which dont have alot of time. But in my experience many 4x fans take their time to carefully complete even big games and traditionally dont care about the modern trend for immediate satisfaction. So it would be nice to have a game mode for those of us who love to play BIG and long games. IMO also the fact that Star Legacy offers big games with multiple connected universes would put it into a special position NO OTHER 4x game ever had. Such a feature is useful for marketing and an interesting unique selling proposition.

Originally Posted by Ed Kolis

Several FTL methods: Yes, we're planning on having warp or jump "zones" in each system (enter the zone and engage the jump drive, and you start zipping off to another system with no way to command the ship until it arrives), but we also plan on having some sort of hyperdrive which allows ships to travel faster than light without being restricted by jump zones.

Thats great.

Originally Posted by Ed Kolis

Turn-based tactical combat: Whether tactical combat will be turn-based or real-time is still up in the air, but if it is real-time then it's likely that it will be pausable with the option to auto-pause every so often so you get the best of both worlds.

Well. thats not great. Even that you consider to make it real-time is a reason for me to drop-out. SEV was realtime and I hated it. The same with Armada 2526. I didnt like the realtime portion of the game and deleted it from my HD after one game. So I really hope you will decide to go against the modern trend and make it good old fashioned turnbased like the grand-masters of the genre SEIV and MOO2.

Originally Posted by Ed Kolis

Ground combat: I'm not sure about that really...

Are you not sure that you will include ground combat at all? Or make it rather simple? I hope the second. Eg. its absolutely necessary to have at least a token ground combat system. But it should be better resolved than SEIV small ground unit system, which was not very clear, what the Aaron meant with it. My take on the topic is that with a not very complex BUT clever designed sub-system for ground combat you should have a winner. Even easy and simple rules could be a challenge for designers.

So ground units could have
-a transport capacity (like in SEIV)
-combat value (maybe one for soft targets like infantry and one for hard targets like tanks)
-a empire should have a reason to invest in additional ground tech (to allow the purchase of advanced ground combat units) and planetary bombardement tech
-a terrain modifier. (like Sand-troopers in Star Wars)

Such a basic system would possibly be enough. No planetary movement, no extra rules are really necessary. A more complicated system is only good if you have an excellent ruleset to back it up. (not like SEIV - which ground combat came with a very weak rule set)

BTW: A good and useful ground combat system was for me SEIII.

Originally Posted by Ed Kolis

Economic rules: Again, not really sure

Maybe I should elaborate what I mean with simple economic rules. SEIV and MOO2 economic system were better than ANY other economic system of any 4x game out there. Why? because you could calculate the planetary output in your head. Eg. in SEIV a mine produces xy metal modified by percentages. Thats a great system and very intuitive, because everybody with elementary school education can calculate percentages in advance before colonizing and after colonizing. In GalcivII it was the opposite. I never was able to pre-calculate possible outputs, so this was one of the reason why I lost interest in the game because the numbers were too hidden, too complex and too abstract and felt like constantly playing on cotton wool.

I hope this helped a little bit to clarify my take on the topic 4x games. In the last several years there was where several 4x games which came out but only one which was done 100% right and was able to get me hooked, CIV4.

The rest like galciv II, SEV, armada 2526 and whatever other had all the problem they had either a real time component or they had a cotton-wool over-complex economical or combat calculations.