ArkisVir

So we've had some huge updates since the last time we posted, I'll post a few gifs so you can see: Battle updates (UI, explosions, aiming, controls) Asteroid destruction (Just a first implementation.... but here it is!) Last, we are launching a Steam Greenlight campaign on Tuesday, as well as a Kickstarter to help raise funds for tools and other stretch goals (should we reach the goal). Our goal is as much to build a dedicated community who can be a part of development as it is for tools, so even if you can't pledge please check us out! If you can pledge, we have some (we think...) really cool pledge levels. I will post an update on Tuesday. In the meantime, we have brand new forums for people to post feedback and ideas on, so please check it out! http://forums.lightspeedfrontier.com

Ill pm you the link

More goodies for you guys! this time... black holes! We're working on a new explorable area that's only accessible through a black hole.. and once you're in, it's a fight to the death to get out! Here's the full album: http://imgur.com/a/yJ9WV

Got another update! This time it's the ship info panel. Here you can find the various stats for your ship to easily compare the effects of swapping out modules, equipping new modules, and it also calculates your ship class. Ship class is determined by the size of your ship (the number of modules you have equipped) and later on, certain missions will only be able to be completed by a specific ship class.

Starmade and Lightspeed Frontier share custom ship building, but Lightspeed is more along lines on Rebel Galaxy and Terratech, whereas Starmade has more of a minecraft focus.

That's great! There's some "hidden" goodies around in that build that aren't covered in the tutorial, so that should hold you over until the next update! We are working on a TON of different fronts right now too. We've gotten some great feedback, and you can expect a lot more to be in the game every few weeks, whether it's bug fixes, features or content.

Woohoo!

There are no graphics options currently, so while the game will run on almost any setup (including integrated graphics cards), a decent card is recommended in the range of a GTX 760 or higher for the smoothest experience. Alpha 1 may or may not contain the ability to turn off certain graphics options, but obviously as the game moves along players will be able to turn many of the settings on or off.

Hey it's just entering alpha! Give the dev a few good reasons to add it and maybe you will convince him head to the forums at http://lightspeedfrontier.com Yeah I actually read about that. Crazy P2W schemes and the whole "chest" craze. Other than that I see a lot of cool ideas that can be taken from the game. If you know of any robocraft players or communities, give lightspeed frontier a shout out Tomorrow Ill have more screenshots for you guys btw!

As of right now I don't think that's in the plans. Your player stays in his "command pod" and interacts with other NPCs and ship captains by scanning them and engaging in dialogue, which all happens in space. Also, players mine rare materials by finding and scanning various asteroids, so there isn't really any reason to go on the planets. I wouldn't rule anything out in the future though I would post the question on the forums and see what the main dev has to say!

New trailer to support the upcoming closed alpha (which you can sign up for at http://lightspeedfrontier.com)

Hey guys I've actually joined the dev team since I finished my game Falling Stars, so disclaimer there. I'll continue to update this thread since I had some people from this forum that were interested! Here's some more screenshots for your viewing enjoyment: We are also accepting alpha testers now! Head over to the home page and sign up there! We will be releasing the alpha build in a few weeks, and there will be a contest to win a free version of the game + access to all test builds when it launches, so don't miss out! http://www.lightspeedfrontier.com

Someone from my game dev circle is going to be going to Greenlight to get their sandbox RPG on Steam. The game honestly looks awesome, here's a small imgur album he put together with some of the graphics and humor. Also I have a link to his site below. I think this could be really big! http://imgur.com/gallery/5r8gn http://www.lightspeedfrontier.com/ Let me know what you think, I could always get him onto these forums if there's some interest.

Here's the full series:

Patch 2 is out! Added · * A new line on the battle result panel indicating when a victory point is gained · * Acknowledgements in chat for gaining victory points through technology bartering and capturing planets Fixed · * Political agendas will no longer claim to give Victory Points when political VPs are disabled · * When trying to move a single carrier the transfer options did not come up · * A bug where barter options displayed numbers as if they were fractional (ie. 2.0 instead of 2) · * The optional conquer / barter choice upon transporting ground units will no longer come up during an all-AI simulation · * Sustained damage on ships were drawing black boxes around them · * Dreadnaughts could not sustain more than one hit · * Sometimes transporting carriables was blocked claiming insiufficient carrying capacity despite there being enough · * A bug where the button to initiate battle remained greyed out despite having a battle about to happen · * AI could previously purchase technology they weren't supposed to be able to Changed · * Opacity of faded-out interface compoenents reduced (to previous levels) · * The victory point line on the political agenda screen will now be in relation of your vote not the colorfulness of the portraits above We've got some lets plays up too:

Hey mods, let me know if this isn't kosher, but I figured I would ditch the old thread I had here: So 6 months and tons of feedback later, as well as numerous comments and PMs here, my game is finally on Steam!! It's got a positive overall rating which feels awesome, and I'm continuing to make tweaks and additions. What the game is in a nutshell: "Falling Stars: War of Empires is a fast-paced 4x turn based strategy game where each decision you make forces the game to evolve differently every time you play. Command hundreds of ships in battle, resolve intricate political agendas, and discover the deep interplanetary relations of the galaxy. With customization options for galaxy size, galaxy resources, technology advancement rate, victory conditions, game length, and more, you can choose how you want to play the game. Game lengths can range from 1 hour, to 40 (or more) hours. " So that's the "brochure" pitch, but to put it simply, you're pitted head-to-head against other empires in a battle to control the galactic council, wage epic space battles, and use your diplomacy with minor factions to your advantage. It's really easy to pickup, but also super strategically deep. A lot of the game is just trying new things, learning how they all synergize, then figuring out what you want to focus on. Some screenshots for you:

Hey guys, I know I was quiet on this for a while but I finally have huge news! We will be releasing the game April 12th. Here's the launch trailer!

Progress on Falling Stars went great in December, with some finishing touches on the Single Player version of the game, completion of almost all of the features, and tons and tons and tons of feedback from beta testers (much of which has already been incorporated into the base game). Hearing players frustrations about UI woes,lack of tutorials, unintuitiveness, etc in other games and getting their input on how we could avoid that is 100% the biggest takeaway from we had from this last month of work. Being the developer on a game and understanding every nook and cranny will always leave you blind to the player experience, so we logged every bullet point of feedback we received, implemented everything that wasn't a major change in the core game, incorporated some things that WERE major changes to the core game, and the rest we put on a schedule to either patch in post-release as little enhancements or even sneak in before release. One feature that our next beta build will make available to players is the diplomacy system, which is really a mixture of many systems but encompasses the majority of diplomatic relations especially with the lesser races in the galaxy. This directly influences your ability to expand your empire, because you need to interact directly with each planet you encounter when you decide to conquer them and use up all of the planets resources, or instead form a treaty with them where you get an offering in place of resources each turn. Whether or not you choose to "Barter" with them or "Conquer" them is dependent on a few different things, and it makes each decision meaningful but also very very important: *Who the allies of that particular planet are *Who the enemies of that particular planet are *How close the planet is to enemy territory *What your particular needs are at that point in the game To expand on what I mean by the above, when you discover a planet you have 3 options: Conquer, Barter, or... do nothing. Just orbit the planet until you're ready to make a decision on what you want to do. While orbiting a planet gives you no immediate benefits, it protects the planet from the grasp of another empire, and it also allows you use a very well-timed barter to take other players by surprise. Bartering can give you instant technology, resources, fleet, or even cause an uprising on another planet. So if another player takes their ground forces off of the ally of the planet you are guarding, and you cause an uprising, it will immediately revert it back to neutral, forcing the player to lose the resource benefits of the planet. That's just one of many examples. Conquering is much like your typical exploitation in 4x games. You take the planet by force, defeating any uprising and gaining their resources each turn. Pretty simple. But what you also much take into account, and why this is so closely tied with diplomacy, is that each planet has allies and enemies. If you conquer a planet, their enemies will rejoice and you can potentially gain additional bartering benefits from them. However, their allies will shun you, and can potentially reduce your benefits to zero, or even cause an uprising on one of the planets you've already conquered, temporarily costing you valuable resources. This really just skims the surface, but keep in mind every planet has their own unique set of allies and enemies, bartering benefits, resources, and influence and based on their random placement throughout the galaxy every game, it makes for a really unique experience and challenge every time you play.

Just checked out that game, and it doesn't really share many similarities other than that they both take place in space: Here's my steam page: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=387410923

While it's already late in development as the game will be released in the next 1-2 months, for an expansion I think it would be great to have some sort of persistence between matches, kind of like what Risk Legacy does. Say you are playing in a galaxy with 3 of your friends, and the winner of the game gets to choose some improvements or advancements that they want for the next game. But between games, the universe is transformed by AI through simulation, so what the winning player has really done is set a "seed" for the simulation to create the next game board. This gives a potential bonus to the winning player (maybe even potential detriment, but at least they had the decision!) and an ever-changing gameboard that has little bits and pieces inspired by all previous games you've played with friends in your "story". Good idea or bad idea?

Thanks for the input! Ive felt the same way, but just put it on the backburner because no one had commented on it before. Its an easy thing to swap out so I can probably come up with something

Some more info on the game (and just pm me if you want to play!) I'm a huge fan of Frank Herbert's Dune, and I tried to capture how technical and subtle galactic rivalries are. Because of this, you can be at total war with someone, but still negotiating with them at the round table. I think this makes the game more "realistic" (if you can call something so hypothetical and theoretical realistic) in that wars between empires are not one-dimensional. There various types of agendas you can resolve as well. You can hold elections which can have both positive and negative consequences, and affect one player in particular. These are especially fun because the player who wins gets a victory point, even if the outcome is negative. So one player might have to pay an extremely high trade tax, that will gimp them in resources, but they might take the hit and move forward in victory points. Players also vote on agendas that have positive and negative outcomes. Lets say the unions in charge of maintaining construction facilities are feeling undervalued. You can vote to only allow new constructions facilities to build this round (whereas normally you need to wait a turn for new OCFs) or else NO ONE can build that round. As you can see, all kinds of things can happen when the galaxy is living and breathing. Not to mention all of this can be modded too to support whatever other effects you might want!

I'll post about some specific topics in the game. Online Multiplayer and why we felt it was a critical part of Falling Stars Most people are reminded more of the huge issues that online multiplayer brings to a 4x game rather than what it adds. There's a good reason for this. 4x games are balanced towards solitary play (if they're balanced at all), they require a lot of time to manage your empire and each turn can take up to an hour to finish, if not more depending on the game and the player. Micro level games, where you are in charge of production for each system, or even each planet, are simply not geared towards fluid multiplayer games. Even ruling out turn-based games, RTS or pausable RTS have the same problems. Most of the games require you to either stop the game in order to decide on what you want to do (which would be horrible in a multiplayer setting). If they don't require that, they are just so darn long that 100 turns would take weeks or months to finish with another player. That kind of commitment is not reasonable to expect. So, why did we decide to have multiplayer in spite of these hurdles? Because the game was balanced to have the features of a contemporary video game, while also relying on the type of macro strategy and back stabbing that makes board games so enjoyable to play in one sitting. While I have personally been inspired by MoO and SoaSE, this is not the exact same type of game as those. You play a commander who makes 5-10 major command decisions per turn, which can take anywhere from 2-5 minutes, and each of which carries a huge impact and rewarding gameplay. All games I've played have required careful set up and strategic decisions in order to block another player, or make a huge play. I'm not spending tons of time reading through long tech trees, or checking up on every planets production, or even setting up governors. I'm planning how I can overthrow the leader of the galactic council, or flank the strongest military thread! These are BIG decisions that don't require dozens of turns to plan, it all happens fast. Ok, so that being said, how long does a typical game last? I've mentioned this before, and the only real limiting factor is how many AI opponents you have. A 4 player game against other human players will take 60-75 minutes, whereas a single player game against AI can be over 45-60 minutes. An hour seems to be about as long as most people can allot from their day, and we've tried to stay true to that. Now, what about those players who want a game they can drag on, and come back to later? There are multiple victory conditions you can choose from, some much longer than others. What I referenced above is our "vanilla" ruleset, which is what the game is balanced towards. This is a 20 victory point game where you gain VPs from technology advancement, battle, politics, and other in-game missions. But if you just want a total extermination variant, or a larger galaxy with more victory points, these are totally configurable, so never fear! Alright that's my spiel on multiplayer, I'll get back to the tactical actions next time!

Thanks! Yeah there is a closed beta right now, you can sign up at the forums here. It's a small taste of the game for now so I can leave something for the final version. http://forums.lnlpublishing.com/forums/falling-stars-war-of-empires.38/ If you sign up today I can get you in. Just shoot me a message

So 3 years ago, I decided to take my skills as a professional software developer, and avid board/video game player, and make the game I always wanted. It's a 4-player strategy game that takes place in a sci-fi setting that mixes the deep strategy of board games with the awesome visual simulation that video games offer.. and it has online multiplayer! You can play by yourself against AI opponents, or join some friends in a free-for-all or human vs AI battle for the galaxy. This started as a "passion project" and I think that's one of the things that will help make this game stand out in the competitive world of strategy games. It offers a new experience to players in the genre due to its disdain for strict rule sets and the balance towards faster games. You can play an entire game in 50-75 minutes, or set the victory conditions to any one of the longer variants that can last really as long as you want them to. And what I mean when I say "disdain" for strict rule sets.. there are tons of events in this game that fundamentally alter how the game plays based on players choices. Politics and diplomacy are at the forefront of the games design, and the outcome of these political agendas can gimp construction of space fleets, lock down a planet from being conquered, create uprisings, the list goes on. Any of the games mechanics can, and will, be fundamentally altered throughout the game to create a unique experience every time you play. There is a ton more I can talk about, but if you're interested in seeing some of the general gameplay, check out this preview video I made. Thanks for reading! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed9XbjEHPCE