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Alan Emrich interview (cont.)Will the game support spying and diplomacy? Oh, yes. Those are almost games-within-the-game. I’ve touched upon diplomacy already, so let me say that spying will take a novel tact. On the "State Security" side of things, you have to watch people. Yours as well as "theirs." It’s about capturing, squeezing, killing or turning enemy spies. It’s about disinformation and passing along intelligence to friends. It’s about deciding where your society should live on scale of personal freedom versus oppression (for reasons of state security). On the "Spy Master" side of things, you recruit spies and train them to their tasks. Once "inserted," they will travel within certain "circles" of foreign empires and then go about performing the types of tasks for which you created them. They have abilities, skills, and other personal attributes. Some are Agents, others are Moles. Some cost you dearly, others volunteer for your cause. And when there’s a mission to be done, there is always a story to be told about it. Perhaps one of simple insertion, penetration, and success; perhaps another of entrapment, escape, pursuit and capture. It’s fascinating. MOO was a streamlined game and MOO2 was a more detailed game. Both games have their fans. How will you please the fans of micro-management while also pleasing the fans that prefer a streamlined approach to management? Ah, the old, "slider bars versus production queues" debate. Quite simply, we’ll have both. That is, MOO3 will have lots more detail, but it can all be managed at a higher/simpler level. Since I just mentioned it, let’s take economics for example. You set high level policies that are translated into slider bar settings at the various levels of your Imperial Administration. Thus, if you set a policy that increases social spending, throughout the Empire, the Social Sector sliders tick over to the right. Now, next to each slider bar, there is a build queue. So, not only do you know what you’re spending in a particular economic sector (in both percentages and real money) based on its slider bar, but also what particular projects are in the build queue for that sector. For example, planets have multiple build queues, one for each slider bar/economic sector and, at a glance at this slider/build queue display, you can figure out what the long term plan is at that location. I guess the bottom line on this one is that we’ve added a lot more detail than MOO2 featured, but we’ve simplified the management so that it can be performed on more of a MOO level. Of course, players can get in there and micro-manage, but we think they’ll be happy they don’t have to. How will multi-player work? We're planning to support up to eight living, breathing players. Of course, that number will be supplemented with lots of computer players. In addition to computer player civilizations, there will be nomads, magnates, space monsters (perhaps some intelligent ones!) and other little "upstart" type players who might enter the stage to make trouble on the way to civilizing your corner of space. You’ll have lots of interesting encounters out there. There will be LAN and Internet connectivity. Hot Seat and play-by-email are still in the discussion stages, but I desperately hope we can accomplish the latter. We’re building multi-player in from the ground up in all of our design decisions, but we’re not sacrificing one thing that would enhance solitaire play.
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