Saturday 7 July 2012

"Im Nebel einer Ungewißheit"

The game now has a... minimal implementation of 'fog of war'. At present the three reports can penetrate the fog, but it shouldn't be too hard to adjust them.

The basic idea is that you can only 'sense' out to your Sensor Technology rank in range. You can research Stealth Technology to allow your ships to effectively negate enemy Sensor Tech - meaning that the 'fog of war' shown in the above image is an optimistic estimate, rather than absolute. Fortunately you can always detect things in the same game tile as a friendly ship or world.

At the moment it is still somewhat... buggy, but hopefully this week I can get it tightened up to work more closely with how it should.

As you begin with 1 game tile of sensor range and 3 tiles of movement range the intention is, in the early game, to be very 'Star Trek'/submarine, with unexpected encounters near worlds while ships sail past each other undetected in deep space. Towards the late game there will be Special Technology paths like remote sensor platforms that can remove this uncertainty... But you always have the option of concentrating on Stealth (which, I hope, will play very nicely with the Jump Drive tech path) to allow out-manoeuvring on the offense.