Open Realm of Stars 0.17.0Beta

New version of Open Realm of Stars is available.

Open Realm of Stars could be the very first game direct support with Philips Hue lights. I did not implement light support so that what colors are visible on game screen would be visible in lights too. I tried this at first but average colors in game screen stay quite stable so there wasn't much change in light. Instead of that lights give out the game mood or state. For example each race has their own light which tries to emulate lights on their ship's bridge. If there war declared during diplomatic screen lights start blinking red. Also during combat lights are blink red alert. On map screen light cycle through calm blue, purple and green colors.

Most of light effects I did by using sin and cosine waves for hue coloring and light's brightness. Since it is using sin and cosine intensity level can be also adjust. For example that red alert with highest intensity it goes almost pitch black to bright red and on lower levels it keeps pulsating the between two red levels.

Second biggest changes is the AI. AI wasn't earlier that good, and reason was that it did not do well on colonizing new planets. There were two issues it exploring routine was not good enough and it spent too many moves on sectors that were already visited. Second problem was that AI tried to look new planets from upper left corner of the map. This was due that I use for loops looking for new planets. I changed this that AI now calculates center of it's realm and selects planets which are closer to that point.

During test games AI(Single AI realm) was able to colonize up to 11 or 12 planets where it previously might get 3 or 4. This is major difference. First test game after these changes I actually lost the game for AI. Teuthidae Horde conquered half of the home world in the galaxy and won the game. I had no way to stop that realm. Their technology was much higher than I had. When game ends it now has new sub page which show statistics for different ship design.

That screen shot shows my best design had 45 of military value where Teuthidae had 79 which is quite much more than I had. That particular game there were two ancient realms Teuthidae Horde and Centaur Democracy. These two had best ships. Other AIs had regular start as I did have and those designs seem to be quite in line with each others.

Another game I started with settings where each realm was ancient so it means that galaxy will end up in certain situation which is being played by AI till there. Then the actual game starts. I was playing with Greyans and I was in war with Sporks. I only had corvettes as war ships. People was getting tired for war. I tried to persuade Sporks to make peace with me but it did not work out. So I need to start research more military equipment and skip all non essential technology like scanners.

This caused problems later in the game where two of my planets had cloaked ships orbiting. This prevents building new space ships from that planet. Since I did not see them I couldn't hail them and ask them to leave. Couple of turns later one of those cloaked ships did this:

It seems that improving AI helps a bit on common problem that quite many 4X games encounter at the end or middle: ending the game starts to feel like work. You already know that you have win, but you still need to do it. Also events that AI might do, like above the terrorist attack during war time on your planet is something that keeps the player on toes. Open Realm of Stars also has random event for terrorist attack but game make difference between those and done by other realms. Random events are considered done by your own people. Espionage missions done by other realms are not random nor scripted they can happen if AI is able to do it.

There are still ways to improve AI. AI currently seems to focus more on mining metal than on production which eventually will make all production times grow. This is something needs to be done something with future releases. Another issue is that technology that allows winning by technology AI does not value that higher than another technology. So it is pretty easy to trade these away from AI if one is in good relation with the AI. This is something that needs to be fixed later.