Beyond KSP

[omikun]

Having spent many hundreds of hours playing KSP, I find myself wondering about what other games there could be that would build on the intuition and skills I have learned. Has this conversation come up before? I didn't know what keyterms to use to search for it. If I missed it please let me know how to find them!

Anyway, I've been kicking around this concept of a Civilization type game crossed with KSP. Instead of turn based, it will be event driven. And instead of each unit having fixed movement per turn, they will generate new events based on time of arrival as determined by physics. The player can just warp to the next event instead of moving to the next turn. Of course, orbital maneuvers must be greatly simplified since you will need to do a lot of that. And since the cost of these burns vary greatly based on time of departure/arrival, there needs to be a simple way do that. In most games it's just click unit, click on destination. Two clicks. I have a prototype that does it in 4 clicks, but I can probably optimize it down to 2. 

With unit movement taken care of, the next step is doing something once you get somewhere. Docking, landing, drilling, sciencing, building, etc. What do you do in Civ anyway? Build a settler, move to a new spot, settle, make new buildings, research, make units, repeat. The interesting game play mechanisms are the choices you make. Do you build a scout or go straight for a soldier guy (it's been a while since I played civ). Do you expand trade route or attack a nation? I'm interested in how those decisions will change based on costs that are derived from material/energy/dV cost to harvest asteroids, settle on Mars, construct ships on planet vs in orbit. And ultimately, how space combat will evolve as these costs change with better technology. 

TLDR I'm interested in a true space civ style simulator that anyone can use to project what space faring nations would be like given a particular trajectory of technological improvements from modern day tech to future scifi tech.

Does anyone else share this interest? Let me know what you think! What are some other things I should consider? What would a barebones simulator necessarily include? So far I have a rudimentary ship editor with a couple of blocky assets to play around with and orbital mechanics basically working. The simulator is up on github if anyone's interested.

 

 

[0111narwhalz]

Looks like you're going for the strategy side of Children of a Dead Earth. I haven't put especially much thought into that, except for chucking lucrative asteroids at Luna for ground-based processing, but I can say that I'm all in on a game with porkchop plots!