As I’ve said in a previous post, the basic gameplay of War Worlds will be similar in style to Master of Orion. That is, you'll colonise planets, build war ships and meet, trade with and anihilate your fellow players.

But how will all this actually play out?

Obviously all of this is still just ideas in my head (the basics of the code is slowly taking shape...) so it's all subject to a lot of change, but below is a bit of a brain dump of a few of my ideas (all numbers and stuff are just pulled out of the air for now...):

• So as we saw last time, sectors will contain between 20 and 30 stars. Each star will have between 2 and 8 planets.
• Planets can vary in size, larger planets can support more colonists, smaller planets will generally be more fertile (which affects output). Fertility of a planet can be improved by terraforming, which obviously takes time/resources.
• You'll start out on an average sized planet, which will be of average fertility. You'll have a set number of colonists and a few scout ships and maybe a colonization ship (with which to colonize a second planet).
• Each planet can support a certain number of factories, determined by the planet's size. Each factory houses a certain number of colonists. Colonists automatically reproduce, at a rate determined by your food production.
• Factories can be set to work on different tasks. You can set some of your factories to produce food, some to produce ships, etc. The more factories you have producing food, the more colonists you can support. The more factories you have producing ships, the faster you can build ships, etc.
• The more factories you have, the more resources required to support them. You can mine for resources, trade, perhaps plunder, etc.
• If you run out of resources, your factories will stop working. If they haven't been working for a while, they'll go into disrepair. If they're in disrepair for long enough, they'll start to deplete. Once all of your factories have depleted, the planet will back uninhabited again and you'll have lost it. In this way, a player who gives up on the game will not monopolize the sector and once all their factories have gone a new player could start up there.
• There will also be NPCs around which you can attack, plunder and whatnot. The idea being that you don't have to join the "global" conflict and PvP is not a requirement to enjoying the game.

Obviously, I haven't thought through everything. Particularly some of the nitty-gritty details of how factories/resources/colonists will work, etc. But I think this is a start. Once the code starts taking shape I can start to play around with some of the numbers and see how things work out.