Ramblings

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~~Title:Revamping First Strike - Why Stellar Commanders is the better First Strike~~
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<fs xx-large>Revamping First Strike - Why Stellar Commanders is the better First Strike</fs></WRAP>

I'm part of a community of the video game //[[First Strike]]//. First Strike is a nuclear war sandbox real time strategy game that lets you take command of a nuclear superpower and duke it out with nuclear rockets until your nation is destroyed or the last man standing*. I discovered this game back in 2017/2018 and fell deeply in love with it. The game satisfies a specific fantasy I didn't know I wanted to experience in a game setting.

First Strike was made by Blindflug Studios, a swiss indie studio which really tried their hardest to make the best of it. Unfortunately, even though the game was extremely popular during its peak, it never really had any proper traction behind it. Over the years they tried and tried again to push the game forward, they remastered it, added multiplayer etc. etc., but it always seemed like they came too late. They had a window of opportunity during which they could have kept the game "alive", but the gears over at Blindflug grind slowly, so when a big update finally dropped, everyone had already moved on. They even went out of their way to develop the long-awaited multiplayer game mode which literally 95% of the community had been asking for for the last few years. Granted, it did bring some new life into the game, but that too quickly faded. Now, it has been another few years and Blindflug has finally moved on to their new flagship game, [[Ground of Aces]].

However, there is also the often forgotten game [[Stellar Commanders]]. As a game designer, I find Stellar Commanders interesting. Stellar Commanders is a real time strategy deck building game in a First Strike theme, and I am convinced that the design of Stellar Commanders lets us see deep into the thought process Blindflug must have had when designing that game. I will say that the following little rambling is aimed at players who are familiar with First Strike and that I won't make too much effort explaining some of the gameplay details to those who don't know or understand it. Play it [[https://store.steampowered.com/app/587000/First_Strike/|on Steam]], [[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.feinheit.games.firststrike&hl=en_US|on Android]] or [[https://apps.apple.com/az/app/first-strike-nuclear-rts/id1434281598|Apple]] (Classic version preferred, only on Steam or Android it seems?).


So, what's this about? Well, I think that First Strike is a great game, but that it has a few problems. I've thought about these for a long time and I think the best way to talk about these problems is by talking about some potential solutions. Basically, what would I do with the game if I was in charge?

  - Problem: Gameplay is strenuous and primarily dictated by the player ability to perform actions per minute
  - Intended design goal: First Strike should be focused on strategy and decision-making
  - Solution target: Change the mechanics of the game to not be limited by actions per minute, by identifying the mechanics that are limited by it. Do not remove the ability to do a lot of things at once and instead make actions per minute limited naturally by strategy. In other words, it should be better/more strategical to do things slowly rather than all at once in rare but spiked bursts.

What do I mean? In First Strike, players can use their owned territories to take actions: Build rocket, destroy rocket, acquire a neighboring territory, research, shoot rocket, defend against incoming rocket, build superweapon, deploy superweapon. The //problem// here is that there is nothing stopping you from doing all of these all at once. This, in my mind, disrupts the strategy aspect of the game because your primary ability in the game is to //do// all of these things at once. No amount of strategy will beat a player who is capable to click through all the menus so quickly and do everything at once. There is no cost involved with most of these actions so the only cost is your willingess to sacrifice your hand and finger muscles to play "faster".

  - Identified problem cause: Almost all actions in the game are only limited by ApM. Especially building, expanding and shooting rockets have no inherent restriction and are only slightly discouraged in that building and expanding can be intercepted by a wary player (well, at least expanding. If you cruise spam then there's nothing an enemy could reasonably intercept)
  - Proposed solution: Tie most actions in the game to a limited resource, ie. money. My solution is that players have a steady stream of financial income and can spend it for example to build a rocket. This would immediately solve the actions per minute problem but still allows one to accumulate money and spend it all at once if they want.
Money is accumulated over a period of time and based on held territories + held (intact) cities. Maybe we could even factor in total number of humans in general, so China would be extremely powerful as long as their cities stand.

For FS I'd be thinking of measuring money in Millions. An ICBM might cost 100M. IRBM's and Cruisers should cost the same. Expanding into a region might cost 500M. We can still launch all rockets all at once using the First Strike button, and maybe we can even add a button that switches between 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of the arsenal. Or maybe a button that can switch to only launch ICBM, IRBM or Cruisers. Auto-Defense might be removed from the tech tree and be given to everyone by default.

I also think of using money to limit the total possible growth of a superpower. Stationed rockets of any kind might cost upkeep and eat into your budget. Holding territory could also cost upkeep. The increase of upkeep for each rocket should be linear, whereas the increase of upkeep for territory should be exponential. Or maybe instead of territory upkeep, the expanding action itself could just get more and more expensive. The goal here is to encourage keeping your territory small, which means less overall clicking and more meaningful investments. As it stands right now in First Strike, there is no disadvantage to holding lots of territories, besides increasing the player workload //more// as they have //more// territories to take actions with. The more territories you have, the more you need to click around, which incrementally increases the player workload and quickly gets out of hand but doesn't even yield any actual //strategic// benefit.

Additionally, slow down rocket construction by a factor of 8 and make their travel speed 8 times slower too, this way rockets can be sent quickly, but it will give the receiving player a lot more time to prepare and to click the buttons once they are in range of the receiving player's cruises. Maybe we can/should axe the territory cooldown system, but maybe we shouldn't.

I'd also propose rockets be built in bulk somewhere and then you can go into a menu where you can just click where to deliver the rockets to. That way you don't have to open the build menu for every individual nation, you just build rockets in bulk and click once on every nation to send one of your stock there. That way we might even get something like supply routes where the target territory needs to be connected to the capital for delivery to be possible. That way an enemy could cut off some of your nations by striking strategically.\\
Oh, research! Of course research should cost money. Superweapon research should cost money too and constructing the superweapon should cost as well. Right now, superweapon research and construction is a no-brainer, but by tying it into the money system there is a tradeoff when thinking about building a superweapon each time you want to build it.

I will say that if you think about the money system I'm talking about, it will remind you a lot of Stellar Commanders, and I assume that's because Blindflug had similar thoughts when they thought about how to evolve the First Strike game. My idea is essentially like the Iridium bar from SC: You get more money constantly and you can invest it to build various forms of infrastructure. You can build a superweapon in SC but it requires you to sacrifice Iridium every time you do. Expansion in SC requires Iridium and is a lot more strategic because of the different ways the game lets you expand, each with their advantages and disadvantages. Defending in SC is done automatically but it too requires you to invest into defenses.

I really think that my design pitch for what the problems are and which focus to have when solving them is going to be really similar to BF's pitch when they thought about Stellar Commanders. It really is a straight evolution from First Strike and, in terms of design, in many ways //is// the better game.

I think there is a variety of reasons for why Stellar Commanders didn't land, one of which I think is particularly the fact that it is a deck/card builder and not First Strike. That makes it not First Strike. May sound dumb, but it really is that by making it a deck builder you are removing it from the freeform nature that First Strike gave you. Stellar Commanders is very different because it basically has "counters" and "win conditions" and preset strategies and dynamics with how each card interacts with the enemies' cards and synergizes with your own other cards. The First Strike-like elements in SC are now mostly accidental.

First Strike is good because it lets you have access to this big sandbox where you can do all kinds of things, it's basically a grand strategy sandbox game in that sense. In comparison, Stellar Commanders is essentially just the weak points (and only the weak points) of First Strike, made them better, and then added a deck builder.

Obviously that's not all the reasons for why SC didn't land and, also obviously, all of this is easy for me to say after the fact. I don't mean to be shitting on SC with what I'm saying here. In fact I really hold it in high regards for how it approached the attempt to take First Strike, take it away from sandbox and move it towards a proper, strategical game that you could genuinely play in multiplayer and have some genuine strategical gameplay in.