4X on Fire: About

4X on Fire
A Galactic Strategy Game,
or at least it will be...

    I am trying to make a highly configurable game in the 4X style, in the style of Stars! or Master of Orion or Galactic Civilizations. The general idea is to build up an empire among the stars and become a dominant force in the galaxy. The current version, 0.1, is not playable, but it's a decent demonstration of what I'm going for. Since it's built in on the Gecko rendering engine, it's written in the required combination of XUL and Javascript.
    Licensing: This game's code is licensed under the Gnu GPL. The images in the Shapes and Stars directories are made by me, and are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 license. All of the astronomical pictures (earth, mars, asteroids, etc) are from NASA, so they're in the public domain, as all US government-produced documents apparently are.
    I intend to have a whole lot of options in the game. Since this will make the game hellishly complicated for those who are new to it, it's going to be possible to turn the complexity down. What this will do is to turn some of the complicated options to their simplest settings. This will become apparent as I go on.
    The most important configuration option in the intended game is that the technology tree is not always the same. You heard me; the technology tree will be different from one game to the next. Not only that, but you won't know which technologies are allowed and which are not until you try to play. In medium-complexity games, this option will turn into a static tech tree which you know beforehand. In very low complexity, the way it works will be simply a "tech number" representing your overall level of technology without ever specifying what those technologies represent. The aspects of research that allow this are discussed in more depth in the Research page.
    Mining valuable materials from planets will have several settings. At the simplest setting, there will be no mining at all. The next setting is to simply have a "metal" quantity on a planet, which is easy to mine off, and building ships etc. takes a certain amount of metal. At the highest complexity, mining operations will follow a "Hubbert peak" type of pattern, and there are several different types of materials to be mined, which are needed in different quantities for different technologies.
    Recycling is the reuse of old materials, and what exactly you get for your old ships.
    Prototyping is the generic name I've given to the way it's easier to build machines you've built before than ones you haven't, even if they're at the same technology level.
    Research is the way new technologies are discovered and developed.

This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.