Space Conquest

Foreword
This is a 'skirmish' game based on Christian Mumenthaler's Colonial Conquest (Amiga PD game). It can be described as a turn based space fleet sci-fi strategy game with components from sim city/civ. I've tried to condense the play time so it's more similar to that of Advance Wars.


GFX WIP, curved up to work with GBA display (240*160) <64 colors used so far.
Note the dot definition for the ships (refered to later).



Flow of the game. There's 2 main screen which are accessed with the L and R buttons. A is usually positive (ok, select, increase), and B is negative (cancel, back, deselect, decrease). Select is used to pop up a context menu. Plus pad is used to navigate in general, and Start pops up the game options menu which is used for ending turns, saving and loading.


Flow of the main menu and surrounding screens. Not as fleshed out as the one above.

Ships

Dot definition
For consistancy and ease of definition, each ship is designed graphically with a number of dots corresponding to the size of the ship. They can be stored with RLE.

OBJECTFUNCTION
Guns Gun dots may be grouped, this adds their damage together.
Armour Details on armour dots below.
Transport Storage space for 20 food, power or resource units.
Colony transport Storage space for 1 colonist.
Special Used for ships with a special function, such as the colony ship which can deploy.
Dead weight Just extra cost, used for older ships t balance their cost in case they can be produced

The cost of a ship is calculated by the following formula: 
Total_dots_exl_armour_dots + ( Total_dots_exl_armour_dots / 4 ) * Armour_dots

Transport dots are worth 0.5. The whole thing is multiplied by 5 and rounded down to get the actual resources needed. This means a Battleship with the dot definition 6G+4G+1G+1G + 6A will cost: 
( 12 + ( 12 / 4 ) * 6 ) * 5 = 150

The number of hitpoints is simply proportional to (Total_dots_exl_armour_dots), but the armour is very important as weaker weapons will have a much harder time to penetrate thick armour. 
if(Damage < Armour) Damage = Damage * (Damage/Armour)^2;

Fleet combat
Each ship will fire its weapons on a suitable foe (matching damage and armour). Ships from both sides are shuffled into a list and fight in that order. They're racked up on opposing vertical halves of the screen. May or may not be random.

If the hitpoints are lower than 25% the armour will be halved and each weapon only fire 50% of the time. This will be shown graphically with either smoke or a red health bar. Same with buildings, except they only work 50% of the time.

Possibly, the debris from destoyed ships could be scavenged with a transporter. Debris left floating could either just stay or gradually decrease.

Ship variants
Seen on the screen WIP gfx batch. There's mainly 4 available sizes of military ships, fighters, dreadnoughts, battleships, and battlestars. Battleships are hard to build and the player is only likely to have a few. The battlestar is total overkill, and a feat to build with a cost of 700, compared to a fighter which costs a mere 6 (with the current formula). A fighter doing 1 damage against the 8 armour and 56 hp of the battlestar would need... uh... 56 / (1/8)^2 shots to destroy it (3584). Of course the battlestar can only destroy a maximum of 6 fighters per turn with it's overkill weapons (mainly meant to deal with larger ships). 700 worth of fighters might get a 1000 hits before they are all destroyed (this assuming nothing is random). Of course, fighters are meant to deal with smaller ships.

A Dreadnought (not flak version) costs 40 (4G, 4A) and 7 fighters will get 28 hits before destroyed by it. They need 16. The flak dreadnought (4x1G, 4A) on the other hand will pop 4 fighters per turn, but won't be able to damage larger ships much.

Space map

The map initially has (?) icons scattered around. To find out what they are a ship or fleet has to move into them.

OBJECTFUNCTION
Planet Planet with a surface.
Derelict fleet Up for grabs. May contain some older outdated ships.
Asteroid field Impassable or just a damage inducing indestructable zone?
Space monster Can be destroyed, but is dangerous if run into.
Variants are: Sentient nebula slime, Space grazers, Crab ship, Space brain, The Zorg, Hostile greymen, Pirates, Living asteroids.
Resources Just some resources floating around. Must be fetched with a transport.
Nothing Just a false reading!


Production

Construction lists
Construction of buildings and ships is managed by linked lists (one for each planet/colony). Buildings need to be placed, and that is done by placing scaffolds (similar to Utopia). Each scafforld has a priority, so it's possible to plan out a base ahead of time, reducing the need of micro managment. Items in the lists can moved around, paused, deleted, appended etc. It's also possible to make the factories produce X or an infinite number of ships, but not buildings since they need to be placed. If an item in the list is half completed, it can be moved down and still retain its progress. If it's deleted the resources will go back in the storage.
Buildings or ships can be repaired by the factories (if near a planet), and goes into the construction list in that case. They appear as 50% + % of HP left / 2. This means a 50% damaged ship would be 75% completed. This could also mean that a >50% completed ship or building could be released as 'finished'. Fighters need special treatment there because of their low stats.

Power
Some buildings need power to stay operational. If there's not enough power, random buildings may shut down. It's also possible to manually deactivate buildings.

Resource
Used for construction of buildings and ships. Produced in mines (with assigned colonist workers).

Food
Each colonist use 1 food per turn. If there's a shortage then some might starve to death. Food is primarely produced by placing colonist on crop fields, hydroponics, or a fish in the ocean.

Research (bulbs)
New technology can be purchased, or maybe there's just the usual tech levels. Can't be stored or transported.

Colonists
Colonists are assigned to various buildings to boost production.

OBJECTFUNCTION
Colony Base Made from the colony ship. Can house 4 workers, produces a little power and food aswell.
Living Quarters Can house 4 workers. If there's insufficient LQs, population will decrease. Morale will go down if they're too close to powerplants.
Park Increases the morale on nearby (8) LQs. Must be Normal temperature.
Low morale might cause production shortages. High morale will make the population grow more.
Arena Increases the global morale.
Poweruse: 1
Solar panels Produces more if close to the vertical middle. Takes more space than powerplants because you have to build more.
Power output: (1,2,3,4,4,3,2,1) Hot planets get +1, Cold -1
Powerplant Works better in cold areas (needs cooling).
Power output: 4, 8, 10
Hitech Powerplant Power output:20
Turrets Comes in 3 versions, 1*8, 2*4, 10
Poweruse: 1,1,2
Super cannon Made from 5 parts, but will function with 3 or more.
Poweruse: 3 for center part, 1 for surrounding. When firing 100 per unit (200,300,400) multiplied with distance.
Scanner Scans automatically with a radius of 2, revealing enemy fleets.
Poweruse: 1
Hydroponics Works anywhere (greenhouse), but require 1 power.
1-3 colonists can be assigned.
Plantage Requires topsoil and a normal temperature.
1-3 colonists can be assigned.
Irrigation Transforms the 8 surrounding squares to topsoil that can be made into plantages.
Heater Gradually(?) raises temperature (8 surrounding squares). Normal terrain can then be irrigated.
Cooler As above, but lowers temperature.
Health center Prevents virus outburst and population decrease to some degree. Morale can get lower when colonists get sick.
Poweruse: 1.
University/Lab Research for new tech. 1-5 colonists can be assigned to produce research units. Poweruse: 1.
Storage Stores surplus from production. Power, food, resource. Things can be discarded to make room. Possibly sliders could be used for setting max storage space for each type. All storages on the planet surface are added together (shared pool). If one is destroyed then a % of the goods is destroyed, unless the player destroys it, then as much as possible of the goods is moved.
Factory 1-5 workers are assigned, each allowing 1 resource unit to be spent in production, so with 2 factories with 5 and 3 colonists the total production power is 8. The factories use a shared linked list, selecting a factory will allow this list to be edited.
Poweruse: 2
Airfield Required for production of ships.
Poweruse: 1
Mining device 1-5 colonists can be assigned depending on the richness of the mining spot.
Terrain output: Cliff 1, Mountains 2, Metal mountain 3, Gold mountain 5
Oil 3 (flat desert, ocean), Gas 3 (Indigenous snow).

AI editor

Here's some ideas for the AI editor options.

Personality
  • Balanced
  • Impatient (offensive, attacks often)
  • Amasser (defensive, builds huge fleets)
  • Colonial (explorer)
  • Psycho (weird random behaviour)
  • Robot (predictable, attacks timely, same fleet)
  • Fighter (balanced, primarely uses small ships)
  • Heavyweight (balanced, primarely uses large ships)
  • Random (one of the above)

Intelligence
  • Stupid
  • Normal
  • Smart
  • Random (one of the above)

Handicap
  • Resources x0.5
  • None
  • Resources x2

Starting colony planet
Might override the one on the space map.
  • Use map planet (default)
  • Poor
  • Average
  • Good
  • Random
  • Specify (load planet)

Starting resources
  • Normal base
  • Large base
  • Rudimentary base
  • Colony ship

AI profile
  • Save (filename will be used as name)
  • Load

Space map editor

The space map editor lets the user define what kind of game s/he wants. A small map is good for short skirmish games.

Randomized map
This means the map will be different each time the player uses it.
  • Area size (small 4, medium 7, large tall)
  • Planets (none, sparse, normal, crowded)
  • Hazards (none, sparse, normal, crowded)

Initial colonies owned (for each side)
  • None
  • 1 (normal)
  • Specify (0-X)
  • Random (specify 0-X)

Space map edit
Can only be done if it's not randomized. Tile editor controls. Planets can be loaded and placed.
Initial fleet (for each side)
  • None (normal)
  • Spare colony ship
  • Small exploration fleet
  • Medium fleet

Possibly there could be ally options too.