Coming this week! Beta test version...
Work is proceeding apace on a beta test version. Should be finished by the time I move on sunday. I'm making it with Play The World, which will then be upgraded when I finaly get hold of conquests again.
Things that will be in the PTW version;
#1 Two eras, The Excelarando, and The Disporia. Later ages will be in the conquests version, such as The Conflict and The Consolidation...
#2 A large number of ships, both land units and deep space star ships for transporting between systems. There will be no air units at this point, and no faster than light ships.
#3 Techs & Icons for the first two Eras. I've simply followed the standard tech tree layout at this point, with a simple format of substitution.
#4 A map made up of nearby stars, roughly 15-19 light years away from earth. With correct star magnitudes and planets picked to be as acurate as is possible with no actual data.
#5 A finished terrain graphics set.
#6 A set of city improvements and a few wonders.
Each Star system will have a Star resource which enables me to set the food, shield and trade value to represent the absolute magnitude of each star, and allows the player to navigate around the systems. There will also be a number of unique planet resources allowing the building of specific wonders and improvements and, in the conquests version allows the production of treasure spawning improvements.
I'm going to be adjusting the Stats of the units to make sure that the eras have a certain character, for instance during the first era there will be plenty of missiles, stong defensive units and weak attackers. The only way to take enemy cities will be to subject them to a devestating barage of missile attack while they attmept to do the same thing to you. This means that anyone who tries to win through military victory in the first era must be prepared to suffer huge damage to thier infrastructre.
During the second era Attacking units will improve greatly, but will not be transportable between systems. This means that individual systems will quicky come under single rulership, but interstellar wars will not begin to happen untill the third era. Victory in the Beta test version therefore will be down to who can grab the most systems early on, and then claim them for thier civ. Although I may experiment with adding some victory point locations.
I still have a number of things left to make such as an early starship and some terrain buildings. But it should be finished soon.
Here's an update of the map, I'm using a huge map, 256X256 which allows a fair few more cities than my first version and leaves room for plenty of expansion;
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