SuperPower 3
It's The Demography, Stupid! SuperPower 3 Important Feature in New Trailer
Watch the Demography Trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.be/KytEbIy7ReU
SuperPower 3 is in development for PC and will launch on October 7th, 2022 for an SRP of $ 29.99 / € 29.99 / £ 24.99. You can wishlist the game here:
SuperPower 3 Expounds Important Feature in New Trailer!
It's The Demography, Stupid! SuperPower 3 Expounds Important Feature in New Trailer
Vienna/Austria, Sherbrooke, Canada, September 22th, 2022: As the leader of a nation, you have to take many aspects into consideration. One of the most critical ones is the demography of your citizens. Any population consists of different cultures - in SuperPower 3, this is defined as a certain set of values. These values can align or clash with those of another group of people in your country, and you as a leader must find the best possible balance between each of these groups, respecting the will of the people if you are aiming for their support.
Watch the Demography Trailer on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KytEbIy7ReU
SuperPower 3 is in development for PC and will launch on October 7th, 2022 for an SRP of $ 29.99 / € 29.99.
You can wishlist the game here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1563130/SuperPower_3/
Enjoy & stay tuned!
For The Greater Good: Grand-Strategy Game SuperPower 3 launching October 7th
Admit it - when it comes to politics, you've thought at least once, "Oh, I could do better than our actual leaders!". Well, from October 7th, you can prove it in SuperPower 3, an upcoming geopolitical simulation game. In SuperPower 3, you can take control of countries in pre-made scenarios, for example re-establishing the British Empire, or decide the fate of one of 194 nations in the sandbox mode.
Today's gameplay trailer highlights one of the most important aspects of the game: Politics. Your decisions have a strong impact on your country, on your citizens, and on how other states regard your nation. Many factors are interconnected; an economic treaty can have a huge effect on the people in your country and how happy they are with your rule, and changing laws might anger other nations, creating new rivals...
Watch the Politics Trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SRv5MUZXRX4
SuperPower 3 is in development for PC and will launch on October 7th, 2022 for an SRP of $ 29.99 / € 29.99 / £ 29.99.
Dev Diary#5
A big constraint we have is that the game is in real time, and has multiple players (194 in all, human or AI). So, when large-scale conflict breaks out (and knowing some of you, it will!), there are dozens of combats that need to be resolved by the server. Therefore, we're creating a hybrid approach to combat in SuperPower 3, where you get to see and can control units directly on the globe. Because of these technical constraints, we couldn't have resolved these dozens of simultaneous battles in a pure RTS setting (imagine a game playing 12 Starcraft games at once, on top of the rest of the simulation). This is why we're aiming for a compromise between details and controls.
Please, keep in mind that the world is still in a simplified view; we're not creating the world to scale for technical and gameplay-related reasons. It would be simply unfeasible and unmanageable if we tried. To be sure, we tried to make the world as realistic as possible but within certain constraints.
This has enormous implications for games. When units get into combat, it creates a battlefield zone. Movement rules are affected in that zone, and the game creates a sort of mini-RTS for these units. Of course, you can send reinforcements, flee the zone, etc.
While this objective isn't achieved, and there are multiple units doing battles in a single territory, the territory will change status to "contested", meaning it produces less economically, is less stable politically, etc. A contested region will be retaken by the political owner of the region if it successfully defends the battle - meaning, if it pushes back the invading force. If the invader succeeds, and becomes the sole presence on a region, it can then start an annexation process to take control of the region politically and economically.
Note that airplanes need airports (or aircraft carriers) to take off and land. When a region becomes contested, its airports become unusable, so you need "feet on the ground", i.e., land units to occupy the zone. Planes are modeled in such a way to make bombing runs between airports and battlefields. They can swoop in, attack a target, and return to base. You can also bombard from afar using certain ships.
This system creates the notion of frontlines in SuperPower 3 - you can position units strategically to pressure a neighbor. It also creates the possibility of multiple frontlines and battles between large borders.
In smaller countries, there is the possibility of dragging neighbors into conflicts by accident. A battlefield is roughly 200 km across. In parts of the world where regions are small and multiple countries can be near, it can mean that depending on where the first hostilities occur (the center of the battlefield), a third-party country could be within a battlefield "zone". The AI will try to move according to its objective, and not necessarily drag neighbors into conflicts. But human players, on the other hand...
All of this is a large departure from combat in SuperPower 2. You can always keep these battles on autopilot and not interact with them to have a more "SuperPower 2" feel to the military. But the extra controls, realism and tactical possibilities of SuperPower 3 are a new and exciting gameplay option that we're eager to build upon for the future of the franchise! Hope you like the new images and we can’t wait to show you more!
Dev.Diary#4 Data
The background of the team was diverse - we looked into economic, political and military experience as well as academic backgrounds. We also looked at political inclinations and life experiences. We wanted to have a dataset that would be as objective as possible. We also looked outside the gaming industry for pretty much all members of the team. We wanted to have a group that would be focused on the realism of the game outside of the gameplay considerations.
Even with such steps, the process has been far from smooth sailing. It turns out that the world is quite complex and translating that into binary concepts that the simulator would understand was quite a challenge. Numerous times, for internal laws, for the political landscape and mock-ups of government, we had to negotiate between realistic data and considerations of the game. One of the design prerequisites was that, even though the world is, by nature, unbalanced, we wanted to have some uniformity in gameplay. We couldn't, for instance, consider local concepts like the electoral college in the USA or the two tiers presidential elections in France. Such local realities, while adding to the realism of the game, would mean inconsistencies in gameplay considerations and game design. It's impossible now to determine the amount of time we had to go back to the drawing board because we had to either fit the data into the game, or the game into the data.
One of the things we started very early on with the research team was the weekly news overview. Each member of the team was given a region of the world to monitor, and each week we had a meeting when we talked about our region, and how the real-world elements could and would fit into the game. These sessions were meant to connect design and data, and to make sure we were designing something that could be expanded and would fit the news.
Of course, throughout the development, we had to adjust and cut back. The initial UI and presentation were very much like it was in SuperPower 2, and that was always very complex and old-fashioned. We didn't want to dumb down the game, but we also took the approach that "complex" doesn't have to rhyme with "complicated". Maybe we could have a complex game underneath, and still present it in such a way as to make it simpler. And, since the complex game was still running underneath, it could be expanded, by us and by the community, so that the hardcore fans could get more out of the engine.
The other consideration we had was maintenance. This huge amount of data that was referenced and catalogued, had to be maintained in time and as the considerations of the game changed. For this, we went through numerous different processes, from having a central DB of data that was fed through php tools to batch transforms of xls files, to now using SVN directly to maintain and order the data flow. Early tools took up to 8hrs to crunch all data! We're now down to about 20 minutes.
Data isn't just numbers and political parties. We also had to maintain huge maps of the world that is used much more intensely than for SuperPower 2. Some of you wondered why the game requests so much disc space. Well, we're using earth maps precise to a few hundred meters to know political terrain, weather, beach and borders, elevation, etc. All of that compressed and accessed in real time by the game to determine troop movement, annexation strategies, agricultural resource production, and other gameplay considerations. All of that takes space, of course, but also tremendous processing power. Modern computers are fast, but still limited when our goal is to refresh the screen every 1/30th of a second. Maintenance and reflection of all that data was a technological undertaking that we would prefer not doing again.
You might have read the Dev Diary about modding, so you know that on top of that, all that data is completely moddable, expandable, and accessible by the UI in a dynamic way. And gameplay equations are (mostly) scripted in data files that also have to be secure, fast, and realistic. These equations are the last steps that need to be undertaken by the research team - making sure that expected results are getting close to actual results, as much as possible.
In the end, all our efforts have also been on a collision course with the "Final Fantasy" effect on realism. For those who remember the movie, it was very realistic for the time, but maybe a little too realistic. Many studies concluded that the closer you got to realism, the more glaring the "imperfections" became, because you saw them more. Humans in "Toy Story" are almost as plastic as the toys for that reason - you can't compare it to the real thing. But when the character has emotions and realistic skin tones, you start to compare them with the real world. All imperfections become that much more glaringly obvious. In the same vein, if you played SuperPower 1, it was very simple at the time, so the realism "flaws" were more tolerated because it was clearly a simplified game. In SuperPower 3, we're getting closer and closer to the real thing, with the increase in computing power and our own expertise in developing these things. So, we hope that, for all our efforts, players will remember that it's just a game and that underneath, the simulator had to make simplified decisions, with simplified data, just to be able to "work" as a game.
Very early on in the project, we watched an episode of “Band of Brothers”, and talked about the fact that the characters, in this episode, were removing their helmets when they talked to one another. This is clearly not realistic - no soldier would have removed their helmets in a warzone. But we talked about the fact that, to make a TV show, the audience had to see who was talking to whom. The makers of the series had to sacrifice some of the realism because the media they were using demanded that they acknowledged the audience. Ever since, when we discussed the game, we asked ourselves, "Are we making an online encyclopedia or are we making “Band of Brothers”? ". Our goal is not to forget our medium; we're making a game, and we're making it for the gamers. You guys always win in the end!
Dev Diary#3 Modding
We chose to go in a different direction for SuperPower 2, where we also released a full C++ SDK that enabled modders to recompile part of the gameplay code and offer even more complex mods. While many people enjoyed that, and that some cool mods are still in use today, it opened the door wide for nefarious uses. Some mods were openly destroying the games and ruined the community for many players.
For SuperPower 3, our aim has been to continue offering extensive capabilities, while making the experience more robust to prevent malicious uses of the game.
First, distribution and installation of mods will be greatly simplified for SuperPower 3, thanks to the use of the Steam Workshop. You will be able to simply click on which mod you want and install it. We also plan on supporting instant update, so when you connect to a server that has mods you might not have installed, they will be installed automatically on a temporary basis so you can play on that server.
Second, we also plan on continuing our support of mod cascading. Mods have an order of initialisation that enables mods of mods (weird phrasing, we know). Since not everyone can make the mega mods that change everything, but would still like to offer scenarios on them, it becomes easy by simply putting the mods in the correct order.
So, how does modding works, and who can do it?
Most mods will be done using a simple text editor. We didn't want to have custom tools that would have needed maintenance and a separate distribution path. So, most mods can be done with Notepad.
1. SCENARIOS
We imagine that adding additional scenarios will be the main focus of most mods. A scenario includes the playable countries, server parameters, but also any modification of the data for that scenario. You can modify any of the start-up conditions - adding or removing treaties, changing any of the data of the game, but it can go as far as adding a country, changing region ownership, unit designs and placement, etc. A dedicated enough player could make a "WW2" scenario and recreate the conditions from 1939, in one single file.
2. DATA
You can also modify data itself for use in scenarios. This can be tricky, of course, because some modifications (removing or adding countries, for instance) can clash with certain scenarios. As with all mods, there is a possibility to create things that don't make any sense. One test mod we made was to validate if the system could create a brand-new resource, connect it to various regions, and it did, it all got in the game correctly! With the release of the game, we will also release the scenario model. We have hundreds of data points for every country (194 at launch), regions (more than 2800), designs, etc.
3. BEHAVIOR
Many of the equations that determine how data is managed, for instance government approval rates, or resource needs, are taken from scripts that are, again, in text files. These scripts are then compiled and run by the simulator. So, a modder could add variables or remove them, change the weight, or even completely add new iterations and scripts.
With the behaviour scripts we also include equations constants - weights of data, importance of certain things over others, etc. to be modifiable.
4. UI
We're not talking here about simply skinning the UI. Windows are created and called by scripts so you could, through mods, create entirely new windows that would track specific data, or new data, or whatever else you would like to see in the UI. Of course, there are protections to prevent you from seeing information that you're not supposed to prevent cheating through that option of the game.
5. SOME DATA FACTS
This is the starting condition of the data (all of which are moddable):
193 countries;
2816 regions;
4204 cities;
285 distinct Social Groups;
372 media outlets;
1082 political parties and groups;
231 designs;
89537 international commerce deals;
10718 international treaties;
7580 unique instances of units;
1843 moddable data points in all of the above.6.
IMAGES AND DATA MODS
While image and data modification would be possible, it would require the creation of more complex mods. All assets are converted by Unreal (we use UE4) to be accessible in game. This means that reference maps for border definitions, 3D models, lighting, and other stuff are generated using the Unreal Engine, and thus are more difficult to change than editing simple text files.
We hope to create a way to make this more accessible in the future - to enable you all to create a "Middle Earth - Lord of the Rings" uber-mod of SuperPower 3. We know someone out there will want to…
So, what are your impressions? What do you think? We hope it’s even better than what you imagined, concerning Modding! And we can’t wait to come back for the Dev Diary #4. See you soon, stay safe.