Project 4X

Brief Description:

Project 4X is a project, yet unnamed, being developed by Pedro Henriques consisting of a browser based 4X game inspired by the classic Master of Orion II and Galactic Civilizations II games.

The game will support 2 to 8 human and/or AI players in each session.

As a 4X game set in space, the players will explore a universe of star systems in search of colonizable planets in order to expand their empire.

During their efforts to expand the various empires will clash and have to either share or fight for the limited resources available.

The game aims to have a "complex enough" empire management, where the player has control but without it becoming a boring chore.

Finally, the game will feature an indepth ship combat system where placement of weapons on the ship's hull will be vital for success, as well as aiming for a balanced fleet approach where simply building bigger ships won't lead to better performance.

In the style of Master of Orion, the game will favor fast paced sessions, thus mitigating one of the common problems with the 4x genre: the game becoming a non challeging "mop up" in the mid to late phases.

Features:

• Simultaneous Turn Based: Both the empire management and the combat is turn based, allowing for strategic planning and easier multiplayer coordination. All players insert their commands and then they play out at the sime time.
• Quick Sessions: In order to avoid lengthy sessions, where players loose interest and challenge half way through, the aim is to have quick sessions full of fast action.
• Randomly Generated World: Each game will be different and present new challenges.
• Tactical Ship Combat: The ship to ship combat will feature the ships designed by the players in a turn based tactical map where positioning and fleet composition will be vital for success.
• Information asymmetry: Players will only have vision over the areas, both of the strategic and tactical layers, inside a colony or ship's detection range. This will increase the tactical component of the fleet combat and empire management layers.
• Complex Enough Empire Management: The aim is to have enough depth to make for an interesting and challenging game to master, but without being so complex that a session's play time becomes too big and the learning curve too steep.
• Easy multiplayer coordination: Supporting email notifications as well as creating public games where anyone can join.

Current Development Status:

• Core Mechanics design
• Random World Generator
• Basic In-Game GUI
• Race Design
• Research Tree
• Colony Management
• Empire Management
• Ship Design
• Ship Combat
• Diplomacy
• Random Events
• End Turn Algorithm
• AI Algorithm
• Out of Game GUI
• Multiplayer and Email Notifications
• Game Balancing
• GUI Polish
• Ship Combat Standalone Mode

Technical Information:

The game is built in NodeJS on the backend and React+Redux on the frontend, both cases using TypeScript.

Motivation:

After countless sessions and hours spent playing the classic 4X games of the 90s and 00s, with special focus on Master of Orion I and II, the interest in modifying those games to improve on some of their limitations, caused by the technology limits of the time, started to grow.

These limitations include limited AI, simplistic diplomacy systems and the lack of proper online multiplayer support.

While I was thinking about how to modify these games and being always on the search for a challenge I thought "why not build my own game?", combining my interest in being challenged with my desire to modify and improve those classic 4x games.

I knew it was going to be a big project, requiring several months to complete on my own and that I would hit several walls, but that is exactly what I love doing. Going outside of my comfort zone and being challenged by new problems to solve.