One of the things we took pride in with Supreme Ruler 2010 and 2020 was the level of research that we did to provide economic, political, and military realism to these games. Without the Internet, there would have been no way that a game such as ours could have been made without a HUGE team of researchers looking up this data. As it is, we have literally spent years of time mapping out political relationships, social values, population distributions, locations of military bases, where all the various mineral deposits are in the world, investigating the real world inventories of military equipment ("Order-of-Battle", or ORBATS), analysing the stats and locations for all of that military hardware, determining game specs for each type of unit, and even down to figuring out the locations of all nuclear power plants in the world and the quantity of materials necessary to make nuclear weapons (causing us to wonder if this would generate a visit from the RCMP - Canada's less scary equivalent to the FBI). Both previous games were set in the "near future" so we had some poetic license with the data, since the conditions that provided the story-lines for the games were bound to have some effect on the conditions of nations, but we did our absolute best to ensure accuracy.
Now we're working on Cold War... What's the difference? Well, the advantage we had dealing with the "near future" is that we could look at today's data and extrapolate it for five or ten years down the line, based on the circumstances that we described in our story lines. For researching modern-day information, there's the wonderful Internet. Virtually everything is available: National Debt, GDP, Literacy Rates, Key Import/Export Data, Political Makeup, International Relationships etc... etc... At this time I should probably give a tip of the hat to some of the key websites, in no particular order, that provided invaluable help in the previous games: The US Department of Energy; Nationmaster.com; Scramble.nl (Airforce overviews); Army.mil; US Energy Information Administration; Periscope; GlobalSecurity.org; and of course my favorite... the CIA World Factbook!
The problem now is we're not looking for current data, instead we're looking for data from 60 years ago! They didn't have the Internet back then... instead they had something called "books". Not as convenient as typing in a search engine, but it should work... Hmmm, I don't know about your local library, but ours doesn't stock many Atlases from 1950. Someone somewhere should have converted all this historic information to digital and put it on the Internet somewhere? You would think so, but good luck trying to find it! I know that this Dev Diary is now beginning to sound more like a rant than a Diary, so here I'll fess up and let you know how I've spent my past couple of weeks. From the 2010/2020 maps, we needed to redo the Road and Rail networks around the world for our 1950 map. I guess I drew short straw (although I don't actually remember doing that) and I've re-painting the roads and rails. First I spent a few days trying to locate a good source for Major Roads and Rails for ALL nations of the world in 1950 so that we could have a common standard one nation to the next. For some countries the Internet still provided the answers (1950 map of US interstates for instance), but for most, there just hasn't been a decent source. We picked up the "Complete National Geographic" set on DVD and I've been having to use old maps from that so that we could have something of a common standard. Don't get me wrong, they have the information I need, but most of them have too much other data as well and they are just scans of the old maps so I can't filter out the topography, or the river names, or the myriad of other miscellaneous data and they are "difficult" to follow at times. Bottom line... after about four or five hours per day of looking at these maps and trying to figure out which road and rail lines were key and then mapping them on our 1950 Game Map, my eyes feel like they're going to explode. And at the time I thought it was a pain doing this for SR2010... silly me!
That's just one example of our new research challenges (and it happened to coincide with the timing on needing to do a new Dev Diary)! So for all you would be Game Designers out there who think this is glamorous occupation, like every job, it has its good days and its "Loathsomely Tedious" days!
-- David Thompson, Lead Designer, BattleGoat Studios
Just some of the reference material for Supreme Ruler Cold War
Now we're working on Cold War... What's the difference? Well, the advantage we had dealing with the "near future" is that we could look at today's data and extrapolate it for five or ten years down the line, based on the circumstances that we described in our story lines. For researching modern-day information, there's the wonderful Internet. Virtually everything is available: National Debt, GDP, Literacy Rates, Key Import/Export Data, Political Makeup, International Relationships etc... etc... At this time I should probably give a tip of the hat to some of the key websites, in no particular order, that provided invaluable help in the previous games: The US Department of Energy; Nationmaster.com; Scramble.nl (Airforce overviews); Army.mil; US Energy Information Administration; Periscope; GlobalSecurity.org; and of course my favorite... the CIA World Factbook!
The problem now is we're not looking for current data, instead we're looking for data from 60 years ago! They didn't have the Internet back then... instead they had something called "books". Not as convenient as typing in a search engine, but it should work... Hmmm, I don't know about your local library, but ours doesn't stock many Atlases from 1950. Someone somewhere should have converted all this historic information to digital and put it on the Internet somewhere? You would think so, but good luck trying to find it! I know that this Dev Diary is now beginning to sound more like a rant than a Diary, so here I'll fess up and let you know how I've spent my past couple of weeks. From the 2010/2020 maps, we needed to redo the Road and Rail networks around the world for our 1950 map. I guess I drew short straw (although I don't actually remember doing that) and I've re-painting the roads and rails. First I spent a few days trying to locate a good source for Major Roads and Rails for ALL nations of the world in 1950 so that we could have a common standard one nation to the next. For some countries the Internet still provided the answers (1950 map of US interstates for instance), but for most, there just hasn't been a decent source. We picked up the "Complete National Geographic" set on DVD and I've been having to use old maps from that so that we could have something of a common standard. Don't get me wrong, they have the information I need, but most of them have too much other data as well and they are just scans of the old maps so I can't filter out the topography, or the river names, or the myriad of other miscellaneous data and they are "difficult" to follow at times. Bottom line... after about four or five hours per day of looking at these maps and trying to figure out which road and rail lines were key and then mapping them on our 1950 Game Map, my eyes feel like they're going to explode. And at the time I thought it was a pain doing this for SR2010... silly me!
That's just one example of our new research challenges (and it happened to coincide with the timing on needing to do a new Dev Diary)! So for all you would be Game Designers out there who think this is glamorous occupation, like every job, it has its good days and its "Loathsomely Tedious" days!
-- David Thompson, Lead Designer, BattleGoat Studios
Just some of the reference material for Supreme Ruler Cold War
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