Author Archives: T

Ephemeris got featured on perafilozof’s youtube channel, on a list of upcoming games. It is a very nice and well done summary of what the game is about, so check it out! The man behind the channel, Peter, seems to be very experienced with strategy games, so I’m hoping that in the future we willContinue reading “Featured by a YouTube channel”

It took some time to design the combat AI so that it can do something else than just to attack enemy ships one by one. Now it, well… attacks enemy ship clusters one by one. While that is already better than the last AI, the more important thing is that now the AI system canContinue reading “Start of better combat AI”

More nice looking technical stuff. Here you can see the movement of different clusters and how they are assigned together every step. This is how the AI will keep track of how the enemy moves and if the clusters split up or merge. Currently this does not depend on how the player has set theContinue reading “Cluster tracking”

The AI controlling the ships in combat has to know how its enemy’s ships are situated. This affects how it should do its attack a lot. In this short video I show how the AI sees its enemies’ (and its own) ships in combat in my game.

Until now I have had attack commands only for individual ships. But as I now have ships doing everything in groups I had to add logic for group attacking also. Here I demonstrate aggressive attack which means that the ships try to get close and match the velocity of the target group and then justContinue reading “Group aggressive attack”

Now that I have groups, I could finally add the whole formation system for them. The ships fly and stay in their formations and they reorganize in the formation as needed. This happens when formation is changed, a move command is given or ships leave or join the group. There are found kinds of formationsContinue reading “Formations”

I have known that there has to be some kind of ship groups that can be commanded like a single unit, so that it is easier to command big battles. But I wanted a flexible solution and not permanent groups which can’t be split or merged if needed. So the solution I came up withContinue reading “Ship selection and commanding”

Of course there has to be carriers, so I added them now. The ships form queues to dock to the hangars and precisely float in. Once they are in, any number can be undocked. Undocked ships then follow the carrier in formation, so that they are not left behind.

I refined the map generation process and isolated some parameters to be chosen freely when making a new game. The first one is naturally the number of civilizations in the game, called “player count” in the video. The next one is the number of star systems in the game. It can be chosen freely butContinue reading “Advanced map generation”

It is quite messy and complicated if ships can move from every star system to any other star system freely. Even if there is some kind of maximum jump range, I feel there are too many possible ways to move around and to attack to make playing it fun. This is why I want toContinue reading “Map generation”