Sophistication - 4X game

Hi!

I'm making a 4X-game mostly based on ideas from Civ 5 & Endless Legend. I started the project back in 2012 when I got frustrated with Civ's bad networking and constant lag despite the machine used. Later on I found similar problems with EL, so I guess this is an infinity project to make a 4X game I could play with my friends.

I wrote a post about in my blog a while ago: http://purrkki.net/introducing-sophistication/ with screenshots and a link to the github repo.

As you can see the UI at the moment pretty much the same as in Civ (just a lot uglier), but I'm going to remake it to make it feel less crowded by reducing window sizes and making them movable and resizable. I tried to make the UI with the new system Unity provided, but I've used the legacy too long to be able to use the click'n'drag-system. Pretty much everything graphical, except the hex grid, is a placeholder, if I just had th skill / time to make better graphics. There is no network code yet, because I want to have a working concept before starting to cram it with complicated stuff, although I try to take the aspect into account when designing or programming.

So what do you think? There might not be much to form a conversation on, but one thing in particular interests me: if I documented it well and provided clear design, do you think you or someone else would be willing to help me with this? I don't plan to make it cost anything at any point, but something like a patreon could be possible.

Thanks for your time

 

I agree on how frustrating it is to see even the state-of-art computers struggle playing Civ5. That game can use alot of optimization, I believe.

Sophistication is promising but I wonder how will you solve the edgy terrain issue?

 

By edgy terrain do you mean the solid hex style I used in the later pics in the blog post?

 

Yeap. Because your hexes have different heights the edges of the hexes do not meet. Unlike Sophistication, Civ doesn't use any height for the hex grid. Is it only indicative or do you intend to have a vertical axis in the game? That would bring alot of depth.

 

Atm it's only to show the height difference between different terrain types. Vertical axis is an interesting idea, but for now I'm focusing on making the crucial mechanisms work. 3D maps also require a different navigation system. Was it Warlock that had sort of vertical depth in game by dividing the map into free-floating parts that were connected by portals? Total Biscuit played something like that once.