Hello everyone!
Welcome back to the third iteration (part one, part two) of our Commerce Preview series. This time we’re covering the galaxy map, where you’ll be selling your robots.
To honor our publishing partner we did the most Paradox thing we could think of: Adding a strategy map.
Before we jump into the details of star map related gameplay, I want to alleviate any concerns about FOUNDRY turning into a different kind of game: Almost all your playtime continues to be about first person factory building. The star map is a complementary feature that adds a meta level of gameplay so that your factory serves a bigger purpose, but it doesn’t take away from the core gameplay. While it has some active gameplay choices, ultimately it won't confront you with any large difficulties as you might expect from strategy games.
The Galaxy
Let us begin by talking about how the galaxy looks and what it holds for you. First of all, our galaxy is procedurally generated, which means every game will be different as you play in a unique universe. Each galaxy is made of roughly a thousand planets, which are grouped together by sectors. Unless you want to play for a really long time, you won’t be interacting with all of them, but I believe that a large universe is important for it to feel authentic and alive.
Visually we decided to depict the planets without planetary systems and the stars they naturally orbit. That means the map view is not astronomical but instead abstracted for your convenience.
There are many different planet types, and the type of each planet has influence about its properties and demands. There is also quite a bit of background information about each planet, for example which faction it belongs to, how it’s governed, dominant industries, properties like day length or gravity and some more. Internally we use that data to generate planet demands, but they are not relevant to the gameplay itself.
Sectors are groups of planets, and their distinctive shapes help you navigate the map. Sectors are connected to each other by hyperlanes, which will be relevant for gameplay. As you explore the galaxy you will have to follow those lines.
Galactic Commerce
Now that we know how our galaxy looks, let us explore how you supply it with robots. Our previous blogs already covered space ships and the sales platform, which allows you to sell robots to casual customers passing by. But that demand is limited, and they also pay less than what you can get for your robots on planets.
Your space station, which acts as your gateway to the stars, is within your own starting sector. You will have to unlock one of the adjacent sectors to get started. Unlocking a sector requires certain space station upgrades to be built. The further you upgrade the station, the more sectors you will be able to unlock. Once you gain sector access you can start interacting with planets, but before you can sell robots to a planet you have to buy a planetary trade license.
Each planet has various demands, some might only need a single robot type, others may need many. Depending on the robots you decide to produce, you’ll have to find a good place to sell your goods. To finally start selling you need to assign a cargo ship to the planet and tell it which robots to supply, we call this a supply route. From now on you’ll automatically sell robots in regular intervals.
The way selling works is that there is a so-called “sales interval”, it happens once per ingame hour, which is every 75 seconds. For each sales interval we do a simulated sale representing the past ingame hour. That means that in regular predictable intervals robots are being sold from your station's inventory. The reason we went for this solution over having ships actively carry objects to destinations is very simple: It gives you predictable and regular sales numbers that you can plan with, which is very important for a factory game where many players want to plan ahead and balance production ratios. There is still gameplay attached, for example you need to assign more ships to your supply routes if the demand on a planet exceeds your ships capacity. Also ships assigned to sectors further away require more fuel.
Competitors
As you might imagine, you are not the only company to supply the galaxy with robots. If you inspect a planet, you’ll see if other companies are dominating the market (or parts of it). Luckily for you, your robots are just better and you’ll be able to push them out of the market if you decide to compete with them. Once you’re overtaking them in sales you’ll achieve market dominance and that will give you certain additional advantages. Once you’re dominant in the majority of the planets of a sector, you’ll achieve sector dominance, coloring the sector in your company’s colors and giving you even more benefits. It’s time to become the galaxy’s market leader!The competitor system is designed in a way where it does not pressure you or force you to actively compete with other competitors. They don’t expand and you’re under no time pressure to keep up with them. We also don’t intend to force you to take over sectors or planets in case it doesn’t suit your playstyle, as this will require you to produce many different robot types. The upcoming update is designed to encourage player agency and acts as much like a sandbox as possible. If you want to focus on mass producing a handful of specific robots instead of going for robot diversity, that is okay too.
It’s a very interesting system that might get expanded in future updates, depending on player feedback. For now it was important for us to not add mechanics that pressure the player, but since it’s been requested quite a bit I could see an optional mode where competitors are a little more competitive.
Thank you for taking the time to read the blog. As always, me and the team would love to hear your feedback, ideally in the Steam comments below or at our Discord. Regarding a potential release date I cannot yet provide specific information, but we are getting close to completing this update and I hope to be able to share more details with you soon.
See you next time,
-mrmcd
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