Developers
Planet
The planet is the main entity of the game. A planet may be "controlled" or not by a human player, which means the planet IS the player. Unless it is destroyed, the player do not loose. The player may even switch to another planet to save itself or change gameplay.
From an AI perspective, planets will be clustered by influence we can call "empires" or "civilisations" (cluster may be one planet only). AI may born at any time if a planet cluster takes independency from another (split).
Each planet is independant and centralise almost 100% of the resources of the game. Even fleet belong to the people than man it, so a fleet may change hands depending of the political changes.
In a gameplay point of view, every single decision should be applicable individualy for each planet, and should also be applicable to a cluster of planet, or the whole empire (species may be stratified on one planet specificaly, a group of planet may be specialised on some productions, the whole empire may forbid slavery, etc.)
Resources
Resources have 3 interactions:
- Storage (with limits of the infrastructure)
- Moving among planets (logistic network, speed and bandwith)
- Transformation (to fleet, technologies, infrastructures, other resources)
A planet have, depending on technologies and infrastructures:
- Storage capacity to keep it
- Production capacity to transform it
Moving resources should require a logistic: it could be a fleet, specific infrastructure, or resource.
Population and manpower
Population is statisticaly described. More population make it more heavy to change, more inertia.
Political power and material conditions
A planet has a population that is divided by species, which live with materialistic and historical conditions that will be the determining factor for its states (happiness, productivity, ethics, culture). Policies about job, productivity and culture is specified for each species, with the equality factor: fully equal society (no-racism communistic communities), inequality (materialistic or moral dependent lives), strong castes (feudal systems).
A society has social value judgement, which determine who is supposed to be happy, powerful, useful, and who is not. In a theologic state, high social value members will be priest and people with strong religious links. Within bourgeois democracy people with high revenu will have a high social value, while within communism social value is supposed to be equaly distributed. This is the main factor to determine happiness of population, high inequality will lead to a lower happiness for low social value members but increase the high social value members. Linked to who handle the power lead to stability or not (unhappy people with weapons, place to gather will shatter a community more easly than a strongly handled political power).
We abstract a population of a specie as a single entity with % of ethics and cultures to simplify this as much as possible.
Productive capital
Infrastructure are investment of resources to improve productivity. It allows manpower (population) to generate more resources and types of resources. Depending on species policy, different species will fill % of the "jobs" that produce resources.
Example: on a planet, we have 3 species, each having bonus/malus on different resources production. Infrastructure gives a production capacity for each of these resources. Depending of what policy is implemented, species may fill the most suited job for them (more productivity), equaly occupy them (more happiness overall), or occupy the most socialy valuable one depending on their cast (more stability), etc.
Techologies
Technology is local. Each planet has its own knowledge, industry, skills and people tend to do not migrate a lot. It is possible to improve technology, but each technological change will impact negatively cohesion and population growth because it also impact the mind and stability of the planet.
Cohesion
Cohesion is how traditional and ordered the society is. Quick change such as technological revolution, political change, etc. will reduce it a lot. It makes the society more stable and easy to control, making war and external treats much easier to handle and recover from.
Empire, planet clusters, civilisations
An empire is mostly a cohesive political entity. It has influence (usually 100%) over some planets and indirectly controls all its resources, fleets, etc. Its main mechanics are:
- Species policies (who can live, work, etc.)
- Ideologic policies (what is authorized or not)
- Technology and resources sharing (communication and logistic networks between planets)
- War (it controls the planets fleet so can make them work together)