An alternative to mini-maps

Hey guys, Sorry if this has been said already but I've been too busy recently to read though the posts, at any rate I was watching the last live stream and I noticed that minimaps is continuing to be a problem.

Why not have a building that projects holograms of nearby planets with simplistic readouts of what's going on there, that way you might have a kind of command planet in the system that serves as your HQ.

I'm thinking something like this: (sorry for the sketchy drawing I have to get back on my own game soon so I don't have much time)



You could have a menu for which planet you want to see (in the solar system) and how big you want to projecting to be, so if there is trouble you can get over there fast.

You could also have diversionary tactics like this, so attack one planet, then when has looking attack the plant with all the monitoring beacons.

It's not a bad idea in and of itself, but I think a lot of people would be annoyed by it. Having to find where you placed your holomap might also be a bother. There's also the problem with redundant buildings and clutter.

Well, I guess if you can't find your hollow map with its big glowing planet on top of it then how are you going to find your factory! Just kidding

Also you could always just turn it off, like the shields in supreme commander.

I guess it would be a matter of organising your planets and giving them different reasons for existing, but really it comes down to how you operate, for instance, I might have a command planet where I spend most of my time, but you might have a holo-building on every planet.

While a holographic transparent projection of a planet sounds interesting I don't like the idea of building holographs for ingame resources.

I guess it could always have a secondary reason of existing, It might just be a "projection building" in general, so you could have decoy buildings around it. Like the Cardboard buildings from Red Alert or the fake tanks from Ruse.

It could become a thing you could do if you like to play a certain way, after all, war is information and deception!

I was thinking you would like this to be like the radar building in Red Alert which enabled the minimap.
I can't say I'm a fan of this mechanic.

Decoys are a whole other subject though.

well, a hologram building is a hologram building, why not have it make different kinds of holograms.

At any rate I don't think a radar building should be needed just to get a mini map , I mean why not just have a little button on the corner of the screen just to make it go and come.
The main thing that I'm thinking about is the logistics of tracking what's happening on all your planets, you could have a mini map window for all your planets but then you need to click though them, my suggestion would allow you to just go to the monitoring planet and look over all of them in one go, you could even have one that shows the whole galaxy and flashes planets that are under attack.

(And as for decoys I cant say im a fan, I know I suggested it but to be honest I prefer Wargame to Ruse if you know what I mean.) Its just an idea, and I like it because building them would not be arbarty its somthing thats up to the player, and I'm all about player driven mechanics

If you pay ingame resources just to be able to make holographic projections to be able to supervise your planets it is the same mechanic as Red Alerts Radar dome that enables minimap.

PA will support multiple views. Perhaps you will be able to have as many views as you like. I think it could be cool and maybe even useful if you could turn planets transparent to see on the far side of the planet.
Tying this view into a holographic building that costs resources to make seems strange for me.

What is player driven mechanics?
Player driven story I can understand but not player driven mechanics.

Oh, well its something that is a lot more rare then player driven stories, I'll try to explain concisely, but it might be difficult because the concept of player mechanics is just a theory/philosophy.

Basically it's the theory of making the methods that players control the game a player choice, example:

A non-player driven mechanic would be a radar in the bottom corner which tells you everything you need to know in the same way as your enemy. A player driven mechanic has you both figger out how you're going to get that information yourselves.

Another example of a non-player mechanic would be the zones from Wargame, they are an artificial way of guiding the way that people play the game and how they think. But don't forget that game story and mechanics are intertwined so there are a lot of middle ground gray areas.

An example of a player mechanic would be something like my suggestion with the holo-building, basically rather than have the devs provide a standard way of getting info they give you a choice on how you're going to get it, so one option might be your radar building, the other might be my holo building- do you want a mini-map or a hologram of the planet? Your radar building has the advantage of say showing what's happening on the planet your on really effectively but my holo-building allows you to monitor others worlds while you do your business here.

Another extreme example of player machines would be of coarse Garrys mod and modding in general in which the devs create a game that is designed to be turned inside out by the players, game play and all.

So to sum up player driven stories are there to choose the destiny of your character/people, player driven mechanics are there to help you choose how to get there.

Sorry I know I went on a bit but it's something of a broad concept.

Ah, not to me, I grew up with Red Alert as you say so I'm used to it. Personally I don't have a problem spending in game resources on logistics buildings.

I played Red alert when I was a kid too. The minimap in Red Alert was basically a UI element unlocked by making a Radar dome. It got hand in hand with the low level AI functions units had. You couldn't patrol with your units nor could you attack move and this forced you to stay with your units and micro them to be effective.
You have to pay attention to your units as you move out on the map and uncover the shroud of darkness as the units will just keep running even if they encounter an enemy.
Locking away the minimap in the tech tree kinda works with the mechanics of the game as having a minimap really helps you see what is going on the larger scale were your main view isn't.

However applying the same mechanics to PA like if you have to build an additional command building for every new view or that you have to build another holographic building for every holographic view in the interface. It doesn't really make sense to lock away something that could as well be a UI element to me because the Commander already have all that information transferred to you.

If the player can already use multiple views without making additional buildings then I don't think a holographic building would be worth it. Why spend ingame resources to get a holographic projection when you can have 2-3 views on a planet instead? On the other hand if additional views require additional buildings...

Forcing you to make interstellar probes to scout out other planets in order to see their terrain or making a seismic detection unit to detect movement on the other side of an orbital body makes more sense to me.

In terms of 1 multiplayer game this sounds to me pretty much like choosing between bot or tanks, ships or hovers, nukes or long range cannons. Mm... I would just call it strategic options.
In terms of the Galactic War it could be something else I guess.

I wouldn't really call that a logistics building. More like an intelligence interface building. Which is why I don't think it makes much sense that the commander would look at projection that isn't inside the commander itself.

I suppose a satellite could unlock more kinds of data for the player to view that couldn't be obtained from the surface.

Well two or three screens would be fine, if you have two or three monitors... Also even if you do have two or three screens open at once on one monitor it won't help you when you have a dozen planets to deal with across multiple systems.

I understand that spending money on "Logistics/Intelligence" isn't how you like to play, but it makes sense to me that as your empire grows you so should your ability to monitor it. I think the heart of the holo-building concept is the ability to simply look over all of them without leaving the game window to look through your planet list in some other menu.

We could argue meaning all day but in the end the player driven story is about choosing your path and ending and player mechanics are about choosing your weapons and stats or what kind of house you want to build, ect, ect, ect. Even then we could argue that choosing weapons and stats are story choices and dialog options fall under player mechanics and we would be partly right but in the end the line is there because some games like minecraft and minesweeper don't have a story at all, so they could hardly be considered player driven story games, but at the same time you can't say that its not player driven because player choice is everything, thats when its all about mechanics and that is a player mechanic driven game. You could call them non-story driven games but thats simply calling it what it isn't, like me saying your not fruitcake!

That would be cool, but the satellite would have to unlock planets in other solar systems because it might risk making the holo-building redundant by itself.

Well a game only takes place in a single system at a time.

oh I see, then what's the galactic war?

A meta game, a series of single system games linked together.

We don't have much info on it.

Oh that's regrettable, still going to be good game though. Though when they asked for funding for it I expected a galactic war with systems you could go between. I don't understand why it would be so hard to have score carry over from one match to the next, I mean it was their highest stretch goal, Empire Earth 2 had a metagame like that years ago.

(I think it was called tug of war)

Note: I'm not being sarcastic Tug of war was the game mode name

We don't currently know what kind of progression features it will hold, score however should defiantly be one of them.

a way to distinguish points from killing a commander and regular points would be nice

Like skulls on your commanders frame from every kill?

Awww yea, now that sounds awesome, though knowing my luck I'll end up not playing the game for a month and come back to have a match with a guy whose commander is covered in the skulls of thousands of defeated opponents! :lol: