technical - Technical details of implementation strategic - Strategic layers: management of planets, fleets tactical - Tactical layer: fleet fighting h1. RUSTORION Rustorion is a project to implement "MoO":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Orion -like galactic empire management simulator. See "current state and roadmap":roadmap. toc. h2. Key values Things that are considered ultimate goals of the project. These should be always kept in mind. Headings have a link to more detailed description of what is wanted. h3. "Multiplayer":multiplayer The game should provide deferred turns (aka WEGO) multiplayer and generally provide good multiplayer experience. Deferred turns make it faster to play and it is hard to provide an AI that is challenging while keeping game still interesting for human players. Turns should not take a long time and should provide similar amount of things to do to all players, so that players can play simultaneously without getting bored. It should be impossible to cheat in multiplayer, as server does not trust player data and players are not sent any information that they are not supposed to know ingame. h3. "Performance":performance The game has to perform well even on weaker hardware, making it accessible to the widest audience and respecting users' resources. h3. "Economics":economics The game should realistically simulate real world economy, for realism, balancing, and exploring the possible economic relations in future society. h3. "Human Space empire":human-space-empire The game has to simulate a space empire. Other than just generally being an exciting frontier, this settings is chosen to be relatively easy to implement: having a well-automated economy is plausible and movement is limited to starlanes. Only sentient species present in the game are going to be humans. Aliens in fiction are often just humans in disguise anyway, and this limitation helps to provide a believeable setting. h3. "Internal politics":internal-politics There have to be interior politics: subjects of the empire should be not a resource but people that can self-organize and should be considered when making decisions. This helps to balance various snowballing issues. h3. "Science":science It should be possible to improve your empire through technological improvement. h3. "Space terrain":space-terrain Despite space being a simplified playing field, it still has to feature varied positions. Starlanes are proven to be necessary for any sort of sensible space game (see the evolution of Stellaris, for example), but systems should have special conditions like asteroid/debris fields, making them less or more suitable for certain maneuvers. h3. "War":war As war is the most ancient way for humans to interact, the game should simulate the war well. There is no goal to simulate extremely detailed ship battles, which often end up silly due to shortcuts taken. However, combat should require resources, be somewhat easy to calculate without using extra tools, and should not lead to extremely one-sided outcomes (armies should retreat with losses, not be destroyed on the spot if losing, and damaged vehicles should incur heavy costs similar to destroyed ones). h3. "Diplomacy":diplomacy The game should allow regimes to make automatically enforced pacts, agreements, trades, and such. It should be possible to back out of non-immediately enforceable deal, but this should incur heavy consequences. h3. "Covert actions":covert The game should simulate covert actions, like building spy networks and using them to disrupt your enemies. This brings another dimension to gameplay and helps to avoid snowballing based on secrets like technology. h3. "Modding tools":modding-tools The game should be easy to modify even without possessing programming skills. All data that does not involve executing code should be kept in easily modifiable format and GUI tools like map editor should exist. Of course, it should be easy to extend game by modifying the code, too. h3. "Soundtrack and graphics":soundtrack-graphics h3. "Logistics":logistics Game should feature advanced logistics. h3. "Monetization without restrictions":monetization Game should be open to be monetized to anyone, like making it easy to run own public server and reward players with cosmetics or preferential service for donating. At the same time, players should not be prevented from opting-out from witnessing such cosmetics or modifying their local code as they like. Current code: [:https://gitlab.com/rustorion/rustorion]