Developer Log - Stardate: 23724.7
The Statement
Last week, in Dev Log #1, PDX_Ruk described the genesis of Star Trek: Infinite. But how do we actually build a grand strategy game of Star Trek? I love these kinds of games, and I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in Paradox games. If there is one thing that has always been clear to me about them, it is that they always allowed me to tell my own story. So my vision statement for Star Trek: Infinite is very simple: "This game allows the player to live their own Star Trek story" in the iconic timeline.
What is not simple is to execute it. Difficult decisions needed to be made. The first three of these being, When, Who and Where?
When?
Of these three questions, the real difficulty was to answer When?. In reality we considered all options, but the final choice was between two, the Archer Era or Picard Era. Archer had many reasons to be the winner, but our statement was clear: we wanted the player to live their own Star Trek story. We felt that if we focused on this era, the player was only going to be able to live their story as the Federation, and Star Trek is so much more than the Federation. The Next Generation era brings a lot of other challenges, but the political map it presented was the perfect canvas for the player to experience different civilizations’ points of view and develop their own story.
The choice was clear.
Who?
Not every species in the Alpha and Beta quadrants are equal or have the same capabilities. When it comes to choosing the other paths that the player can develop, in addition to the Federation, we looked for other Powers that have similar importance and means for fun competition. At this time, three new players joined the mix, The Klingon Empire, The Romulan Star Empire, and The Cardassian Union.
Now, does that mean that we leave all the other species in the quadrant out? No, many other species join our game in the form of Support Powers—species that have a certain degree of power, but concentrate on providing services to our Major Powers, such as the Ferengi.
In addition, we will meet other species with FTL capabilities, but are not so developed. These species are called Minor Powers and will serve as opportunities for expansion and conflict for the Major Powers. Among them you can find Bolians, Talarians, Boslic, and many others.
Where?
The Star Trek Milky Way is a vast space, mostly unexplored but with a rich lore. If we wanted to do it justice we had to focus on a smaller area and fill this with as much Star Trek as possible. That's why we chose to have our game concentrate on the Alpha and Beta quadrants.
Wait a minute! Exploration is iconic! If we present a galaxy that the player already knows, how much can they explore? Finding a way to balance the known with the unknown was one of our first technical challenges.
Seeing a familiar star system like Vulcan (also known as 40 Eridani) placed randomly in the map would feel jarring since we know its a close neighbor to the Sol system; a similar issue would arise with the relative positions of the four Major Powers, so we created a bespoke representation of the core neighborhood of the Federation where the series take place most of the time, and left the rest to be procedurally generated so players can’t anticipate what they will find when exploring the farther reaches of the quadrants.
But those 3 questions were just the beginning, and many decisions followed. Warp being the one that changed everything.
Warp Travel
One of the challenges of space strategy games is geography, how to give shape to the vast emptiness of space and how that shape affects its travelers. A very common and effective approach used by many modern games of the genre is the starlane graph we all know from Stellaris, and while this system can be controversial at times, in Star Trek it's simply a non-starter. You must be able to boldly go, in a straight line at warp 9, but then what stops you from reaching the extremes of the galaxy from the get go?
Well, speed is one, but Voyager was actually an inspiration for the solution! The difficulties of finding fuel, supplies and repair opportunities while deep in alien space far from home present a great challenge.
Warp range was the inevitable approach, provided by your space stations, forcing you to plan your infrastructure to enable your fleets to deploy and move about. Another factor in geography are political boundaries: you can’t just cross someone else’s space without permission (well, spies can…), even in a straight line towards a star outside of their domain. This of course changes war considerably, mostly doing away with choke points.
You can no longer amass a 200 ship fleet in the doorway to your empire, confident that the enemy cannot get through. Since they can simply go past you, strongholds and a more evenly-spread deployment of your fleets become paramount (pun intended), reinforcing that space geography. There is a lot more to war, thanks to our warp approach, but that is a story for another log.
Balance of Power
Another thing that comes with the territory of the Picard era is the political stage of the Alpha and Beta quadrants. Unlike many strategy games, in the Star Trek universe constant, all-out war is something even sworn enemies strive to avoid! There are reasons to seek peace, to quell the tensions between the Powers, and in part this tension is kept by a constant balance with no single Major Power ever gaining a definitive advantage over the others.
To reflect this in Star Trek: Infinite, we added two systems that interact with each other to push the galaxy into this back and forth in a way that seems organic and justified. The first is the balance of power, where you can clearly see the relative power of all four major players, and make decisions of who to befriend and who to ostracize, because the A.I. surely will…
The other system is galactic tension, because war does not affect only those involved in it! War pushes all factions into uncertainty and instability which, in turn, puts them under threat too! The longer the duration of a war, the more extreme measures will be considered, and the less you can trust that the crosshairs won’t fall on you next. Any action of aggression and violence increases this tension, and any move for collaboration and conciliation reduces it. If you let it go too far, society itself may crumble!
But if an all-out war is something we want to avoid, how can we expand without going to war? One answer we came up with is our new Principles mechanic.
Principles
Instead of having ethics, each “pop” (meaning population, the citizenry on your planets) may feel more attracted to the principles that represent each of the Major Powers. Among other gameplay elements, spies and governors become extraordinarily important in influencing how affiliated they are with these principles. Now why would I want a pop to seek to follow the principle of my power? A pop that follows a different principle than the power they belong to has a chance of defecting to his new affiliation!
I wanted to be brief and, much like sitting down to watch “just one episode of TNG,” time flew by and we ended up going through a lot. I would like to tell you much, much more but I think that is quite a lot for this week already! I hope we can meet again soon!
End log,
Ezequiel Alejandro Maldonado
Game Director for Star Trek: Infinite
The Statement
Last week, in Dev Log #1, PDX_Ruk described the genesis of Star Trek: Infinite. But how do we actually build a grand strategy game of Star Trek? I love these kinds of games, and I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in Paradox games. If there is one thing that has always been clear to me about them, it is that they always allowed me to tell my own story. So my vision statement for Star Trek: Infinite is very simple: "This game allows the player to live their own Star Trek story" in the iconic timeline.
What is not simple is to execute it. Difficult decisions needed to be made. The first three of these being, When, Who and Where?
When?
Of these three questions, the real difficulty was to answer When?. In reality we considered all options, but the final choice was between two, the Archer Era or Picard Era. Archer had many reasons to be the winner, but our statement was clear: we wanted the player to live their own Star Trek story. We felt that if we focused on this era, the player was only going to be able to live their story as the Federation, and Star Trek is so much more than the Federation. The Next Generation era brings a lot of other challenges, but the political map it presented was the perfect canvas for the player to experience different civilizations’ points of view and develop their own story.
The choice was clear.
Who?
Not every species in the Alpha and Beta quadrants are equal or have the same capabilities. When it comes to choosing the other paths that the player can develop, in addition to the Federation, we looked for other Powers that have similar importance and means for fun competition. At this time, three new players joined the mix, The Klingon Empire, The Romulan Star Empire, and The Cardassian Union.
Now, does that mean that we leave all the other species in the quadrant out? No, many other species join our game in the form of Support Powers—species that have a certain degree of power, but concentrate on providing services to our Major Powers, such as the Ferengi.
In addition, we will meet other species with FTL capabilities, but are not so developed. These species are called Minor Powers and will serve as opportunities for expansion and conflict for the Major Powers. Among them you can find Bolians, Talarians, Boslic, and many others.
Where?
The Star Trek Milky Way is a vast space, mostly unexplored but with a rich lore. If we wanted to do it justice we had to focus on a smaller area and fill this with as much Star Trek as possible. That's why we chose to have our game concentrate on the Alpha and Beta quadrants.
Wait a minute! Exploration is iconic! If we present a galaxy that the player already knows, how much can they explore? Finding a way to balance the known with the unknown was one of our first technical challenges.
Seeing a familiar star system like Vulcan (also known as 40 Eridani) placed randomly in the map would feel jarring since we know its a close neighbor to the Sol system; a similar issue would arise with the relative positions of the four Major Powers, so we created a bespoke representation of the core neighborhood of the Federation where the series take place most of the time, and left the rest to be procedurally generated so players can’t anticipate what they will find when exploring the farther reaches of the quadrants.
But those 3 questions were just the beginning, and many decisions followed. Warp being the one that changed everything.
Warp Travel
One of the challenges of space strategy games is geography, how to give shape to the vast emptiness of space and how that shape affects its travelers. A very common and effective approach used by many modern games of the genre is the starlane graph we all know from Stellaris, and while this system can be controversial at times, in Star Trek it's simply a non-starter. You must be able to boldly go, in a straight line at warp 9, but then what stops you from reaching the extremes of the galaxy from the get go?
Well, speed is one, but Voyager was actually an inspiration for the solution! The difficulties of finding fuel, supplies and repair opportunities while deep in alien space far from home present a great challenge.
Warp range was the inevitable approach, provided by your space stations, forcing you to plan your infrastructure to enable your fleets to deploy and move about. Another factor in geography are political boundaries: you can’t just cross someone else’s space without permission (well, spies can…), even in a straight line towards a star outside of their domain. This of course changes war considerably, mostly doing away with choke points.
You can no longer amass a 200 ship fleet in the doorway to your empire, confident that the enemy cannot get through. Since they can simply go past you, strongholds and a more evenly-spread deployment of your fleets become paramount (pun intended), reinforcing that space geography. There is a lot more to war, thanks to our warp approach, but that is a story for another log.
Balance of Power
Another thing that comes with the territory of the Picard era is the political stage of the Alpha and Beta quadrants. Unlike many strategy games, in the Star Trek universe constant, all-out war is something even sworn enemies strive to avoid! There are reasons to seek peace, to quell the tensions between the Powers, and in part this tension is kept by a constant balance with no single Major Power ever gaining a definitive advantage over the others.
To reflect this in Star Trek: Infinite, we added two systems that interact with each other to push the galaxy into this back and forth in a way that seems organic and justified. The first is the balance of power, where you can clearly see the relative power of all four major players, and make decisions of who to befriend and who to ostracize, because the A.I. surely will…
The other system is galactic tension, because war does not affect only those involved in it! War pushes all factions into uncertainty and instability which, in turn, puts them under threat too! The longer the duration of a war, the more extreme measures will be considered, and the less you can trust that the crosshairs won’t fall on you next. Any action of aggression and violence increases this tension, and any move for collaboration and conciliation reduces it. If you let it go too far, society itself may crumble!
But if an all-out war is something we want to avoid, how can we expand without going to war? One answer we came up with is our new Principles mechanic.
Principles
Instead of having ethics, each “pop” (meaning population, the citizenry on your planets) may feel more attracted to the principles that represent each of the Major Powers. Among other gameplay elements, spies and governors become extraordinarily important in influencing how affiliated they are with these principles. Now why would I want a pop to seek to follow the principle of my power? A pop that follows a different principle than the power they belong to has a chance of defecting to his new affiliation!
I wanted to be brief and, much like sitting down to watch “just one episode of TNG,” time flew by and we ended up going through a lot. I would like to tell you much, much more but I think that is quite a lot for this week already! I hope we can meet again soon!
End log,
Ezequiel Alejandro Maldonado
Game Director for Star Trek: Infinite
