DEEPNET: A GRAND STRATEGY GAME

Overview:
A Turn-based grand strategy game played on a hex-grid.
Takes inspiration from the Civilization series, the Endless series and other similar strategy games, as well as
Pokemon. In short, Deepnet is about adapting to changing conditions, deep random generation for replayability,
encouraging players to interact, and a variety of distinct gameplay styles.
Deepnet does not aim to distinguish its gameplay through some gameplay gimmic, but through a series of design
philosophies. I call them design pillars. From these pillars, game mechanics have been derived.
The 3 design pillars:
ADAPTABILITY and REPLAYABILITY and ACTIVITY

Table of Contents
Design Pillars.............................................................................................................................................1
ADAPTABILITY:.................................................................................................................................1
REPLAYABILITY:...............................................................................................................................2
ACTIVITY............................................................................................................................................2
Core Mechanics..........................................................................................................................................3
Biases and Faction Customization........................................................................................................3
Combat System......................................................................................................................................4
Technology Tree....................................................................................................................................6
Militarism..............................................................................................................................................6
Global Events........................................................................................................................................7
Exploration and Intel.............................................................................................................................7
Map Layout...........................................................................................................................................8
Drafting.................................................................................................................................................8

Design Pillars
ADAPTABILITY:
One of the design focuses of this game is to force players to adapt to changing conditions. The purpose of this is
to reward player's skill and strategy over following a set build or sticking to one playstyle no matter what
happens. One of the ways of doing this is through randomization.
Unlike other games which have a rigid set of choices (the available buildings, units and technologies are the
same each game) this set will be randomly generated from a pool. Players will still be able to follow a specific
strategy, but the players that make the most of what they have will be rewarded over those in rigid strategy.
The tech tree is a good example of this. When the game begins each player is given a unique set of technologies
they can research. These technologies aren't researched individually but in groups. A group might have 1
technology core to your strategy, and 2 that are not. Naturally, a player who utilizes these unwanted
technologies despite not being part of their core strategy will benefit over a player who simply ignores them.
See the tech tree section for more.
The draft mechanic is another example of this. Very rarely will a player be able to make selections that fit in
with a single strategy. Clever players will develop a sub-strategy during the draft to ensure that their selections
can be utilize

REPLAYABILITY:
Unlike many single player games, strategy games are designed to be played over and over, improving
your skills each time and exploring new ways to win. In games like Civilization V once you choose
your nation you are stuck in a specific strategy. You can optimize your build each game but it will
ultimately feel the same.
One of the ways I looked at replayability was what makes each match special: what was the narrative
of that match. Often you will reminisce about previous games with your friends "Remember the game
where I was driven off the mainland into isolation for 100 turns and then came back and conquered the
globe with technology?" or "Remember that time when we all were locked in cold war until you
assassinated all each other member of the council and won diplomatic victory?"
These narratives are what make each game distinct and what I believe causes players to play over and
over. The mechanics of the game can't create these narratives but should facilitate them happening.
It is hard to say exactly what causes these narratives but the majority are based on the interaction
between players. No one remembers "that time I sat in my city for 100 turns and then got a science
victory". This isolationist gameplay is dealt with in the activity pillar.
This isolationist gameplay is something I aim to heavily penalize. One way to do this is through global
events that reward players who participate and punish those who do not. An example of this would be a
plague where the antidote is scattered around the map. After a certain amount of turns you lose
population based on the number of antidotes you collected. This allows players to make tactical
decisions like saving their own population or taking those in an opponents territory to weaken them.
Another way replayability will be implemented is through a very wide array of victory conditions
which can be read in detail later.

ACTIVITY
A criticism I have on many strategy games is that once you have set the wheels in motion your best
option is to set back and let everything take its course. Especially with non-military strategies, this
encourages hermit style gameplay and that player has very little effect on the game at a global scale.
The activity pillar is about encouraging players to be proactive throughout the entire game. The first
way this is achieved is through combat.
The mechanics of combat are detailed elsewhere but the premise is that it is quick and tactical. In most
grand strategy games playing combat is a bore and autoresolve is often preferred or enforced. Players
often have very little to gain from combat compared to the risk of losing their units and there general
distaste for the combat system. In Deepnet, the combat system aims to reward all strategies, not just
military ones.
The first way this is achieved is through combat effects. Units will often have some bias. Take for
example the Asimov unit. Each time it kills an enemy unit you gain a bonus to your science. However
the Asimov is quite weak so it requires support from stronger creatures. This leads to a strong strategy
where you use your units to improve your research and use this bonus research to improve your armies.
The second way combat promotes activity is through looting. More information can be found in the
relevant section but basically there will be neutral armies roaming the map as well as dungeons that can
only be pillaged once. Some dungeons may require special technologies to open while some may be
invisible until you have sufficient intel.
Defeating armies or clearing dungeons will give you loot. Loot can come in many forms. By clearing a
dungeon you can receive:
A resource bonus
A temporary booster
Secret technologies
New units
Insight into some global event
Bonus population
These are just some of the possible loot items. Loot items will most likely be biased, meaning that if
you have chosen a production bias, you are more likely to receive a production biased item.

Core Mechanics

Biases and Faction Customization

Choosing a Race/Faction/Civilization in most strategy games can be divided into two main categories.
Set Factions:
Games such as Total: War, Civ, Endless, Age of Wonders belong to this type. You select a faction which
has certain abilities, units and sometimes quest lines. Each faction is designed to encourage some sort
of strategy and gameplay style.
Customizable:
Many grand space games have this style such as Masters of Orion and its successors. Your choice of
race is largely cosmetic and your race attributes are chosen from a set, which will define your
gameplay. Usually in these games your early turns will determine your play style as much as your
pregame choices.
In Deepnet I land somewhere in the middle. The game will have a series of biases to choose from.
Players will have a primary and secondary bias that is less significant. Here is a list of the non-combat
biases so far.

Production
Science
Growth/Expansion
Economy
Subterfuge

There will also be at least three combat biases:

Horde
Titan
Hero
Horde focuses on producing lots of expendable units very quickly and overrunning your enemies. Titan
focuses on small army using very strong units and support units. The hero bias gives you a bonus to
exploring and fighting neutral armies and looting.
A player will choose a primary and a secondary from this list of 8. Once chosen your bias will grant
you the following bonuses, with the magnitude depending on whether it is primary or secondary.
faction traits, chosen at random from a pool.
More technologies of the chosen bias will be put into your random tech tree.
Loot will more likely be of the chosen bias.
Every technology, unit, buildings, unit moves and loot item will have at least one associated bias. Some
of these my contain 2 biases. You will get a bonus to the probability of receiving these if they fit your
chosen biases.

Combat System
One of the inspirations for making Deepnet is the poor combat systems in other strategy games. In
military based games like in the Total War series or Age of Wonders, the combat is very deep but the
empire building is quite shallow. In games like Civ or many city builders, the combat systems are quite
shallow and because of this players often avoid combat. The three main reason I believe players avoid
combat (or choose to auto resolve) are:
Combat takes too long (holds up the game for other players)
There is little reward for engaging in combat to offset the risk/time
Combat is shallow and the strongest units will win regardless of tactics
My aim was to design a combat system that would address all three of these issues. As a template I
used my favourite combat system, Pokmon. Pokmon has an extreme level of depth but is based on
several core principles.
Rock/Paper/Scissors: This is the principle that everything has a strength and a weakness. It is
very beneficial to a combat system because good players will exploit the strengths of their units
and the weaknesses of their enemies allowing weaker armies to win through tactics.
Prediction and Counters: Being able to predict your opponents moves and counter
accordingly should be very highly rewarded. In Pokmon this is achieved through switch in and
out. A correct switch can devastate your opponent rewarding better players. One issue is that for
prediction to be viable, you need to have some idea of your opponent's army's capabilities. In a
game with a large number of units and high level of customization, this needs to be taken into
account.
One on One: In Pokmon the strategy is distilled because (mostly) you will be fighting one on
one. You must still be aware of the other Pokmon but your primary concern is how to optimize
this current turn of combat.
With these ideas in mind I developed the following combat system.
Each unit will have a type that falls into the rock/paper/scissors category and a set of base stats
(Attack, Defence, Initiative).
Each unit can be equipped with certain moves (and possibly items to give abilities and increase stats)
1.
2.
3.
4.

An army can have any number of units

At the start of the battle each player shuffles their units into a pile and uts the first unit into play.
Each unit selects a move and the one with higher initiative goes first.
Each move has an effect out of (stay, pass, skip, select, shuffle). Once the moves are executed
the active unit is put into the used pile (is it survived) and the next unit it selected based on the
move's effect.
Stay: The active unit stays active. Pass: The next unit in the pile is made active. Skip(X):
Skips X units and makes the next one active. Select: You choose the unit coming in. Shuffle:
shuffle your used units back in.

(move powerful effects like select will have to be researched and will not be available from the start)
5. Once all of your used units are used, shuffle the used pile back in.
6. A player loses when they have no units left.
The key concept here is the stay/pass/skip system which is designed to mimic the switching system in
Pokmon. Although I am unsure of the implementation yet, the amount of information about your
opponent's army that you can see will be based on several factors. This idea was designed to give a
strong combat advantage to those players that invest in scouting and subterfuge. This also allows for
contrasting playstyles. My goal here was to balance the strategy between "investing between subterfuge
and combat" and "Investing purely in combat and playing blind."
Unit abilities will be heavily linked with the skip/pass/go (SPG) mechanic. For example, you may have
a unit that is very strong, but loses health each time it is shuffled. This would favour very large armies.
Or a unit that when skipped adds a portion of its attack to the active unit, this would benefit a skip
heavy strategy. This would allow combat strategies to fall into 1 of 6 styles.
Stay Pass

Skip

Horde
Commando
If for example you unlocked a unit with an ability such as "This unit receives a defensive bonus for each other
unit in your active pile" it would encourage you to spec into a Horde/Stay gameplay style. So you would try and
research cheaper units' and moves with the "Stay" effect.

Technology Tree
The implementation of tech tress varies quite widely among strategy games. My goal with a tech tree
was to force the players into making meaningful, difficult decisions. This lead me to the following
design.
The tech tree is divided into several tiers.
Within each tier are groups of technologies. You cannot research techs individually, only in
these groups.
Each tier also has a list of revolution techs. The options to choose from are common for all
players and independent of biases.
Researching them gives you a strong technology and unlocks the next tier. If you are the first to
research that tech, you receive a very significant bonus.
Revolution techs are initially very expensive, but their cost reduces as you research more groups
in that tier.
Once you are in the next tier, you lose access to the previous tier.
As mentioned before the technologies come in groups to give players access to techs they wouldn't
normally have chosen. This gives an advantage to those players that best utilize these. The idea of
choosing when to advance forces players weigh up the early next tier, the bonus on the revolution tech
but skipping out on important technologies.
Another option for implementing this is to still have the techs in groups, but they can be researched
individually. However, the revolution cost will only decrease if the whole group is finished. This will
give players a little more control over what they get. It also presents two obvious strategies: Research
all your core techs from different groups, or research whole groups at a time to get to the next tier
earlier.

Militarism
Consider the following scenario. You have a 6 player in which only one player aims for a conquest
victory. Lets say the military player is behind and will only be able to conquer two undefended
empires.
As one of the other empires you have two choices: Sacrifice some momentum to bolster your defences
or continue relatively undefended and risk invasion. If you make the first choice you will fall behind
players who take the second choice. Since the military based player cannot defeat everyone in time, the
winner will be one of these players who risked no building defences. This makes the first choice a poor
option as you are unlikely to win either way.
In this scenario, the outcome of the game and which players are defeated is heavily introduced by
starting location. One of the reasons this problem exists is that military strategies only pressure one
other faction at a time. The best way to survive is to simply not be attacked. To combat this problem I
developed what I am tentatively calling void gates.

Each player starts relatively near to a void gate. Early on the void gate will function as a barbarian
camp, spawning enemy units to harass you. As more turns pass the gate spawns stronger creatures. You
can close the gate temporarily but to do so you will need to defeat a powerful army. This will force
players to be proactive about defending themselves, part of the activity pillar.
The key to the void gates is this. The first player to close their gate will cause all the other gates to
produce much stronger and more frequent armies for a short period of time. This design allows players
who focus on military to exert pressure on all other players through their military might. This will
be one of the keys of playing the Hero bias.

Global Events
Global events will be a large part of Deepnet because they address all three pillars. They will vary
greatly in magnitude and function. I will address them by each pillar.
Adaptability: Probably the main function of these global events are to reward players who best adapt
to some changing conditions. This will be some global reward which players must compete for, some
temporary bonus making some strategies temporarily more viable, or some drawback which makes
some strategies less viable.
Replayability: One purpose of the global events is to encourage players to interact with the aim of
creating memorable moments. There will be a pool of events, several of which will occur each game.
The combined effect of these will thus be different from game to game.
Activity: Endless Legend sported a pretty solid quest system to encourage players to be active. This
took the form of late game cooperative quests. This is a solid idea to apply to Deepnet, however events
will be much more random and significant. I plan on having events on the scale of "all units within X
tiles of a friendly city will take significant damage." Players will be alerted to these at different times
based on their level of intel.

Exploration and Intel

In most strategy games the rewards of exploration are obvious. The reward is that you find a site for a
new city, or discover some untouched loot. While these are all good and will definitely be implemented
in Deepnet, there are some ideas to reward the actual exploration itself (i.e. Discovering new tiles).
Units will receive a small amount of experience for revealing new tiles, more so if you are the first
player to do so. This act will also grant Intel points.
The concept of Intel points is tentative at this stage. Intel will primarily be used to find out about global
events. Spending a small amount of intel may reveal the type (bonus, detrimental, competition,
cataclysm ect.) and a rough time frame. Spending more intel will reveal what it is exactly and its exact
timing. Spending maximum intel will allow you to change some aspect of it, like pushing the timer
forward ore changing its magnitude.
The implementation of Intel may be hidden from the uses for simplicity sake, and exploration may
randomly trigger one of these intel events

Map Layout
As usual, the map will be procedurally generated. In most games players are placed randomly over one
or two continents. This creates a problem where some players will have good defensive positions while
others while be surrounded. To do this one of the map styles I propose is the ring.
The ring map will be circular. Players will be placed in a ring some radius from the centre. As you
move towards the centre the roaming armies will become stronger, and the terrain tougher, but the loot
will be better. As you move away from the centre the map becomes more barren and points of interest
become more sparse.
This type of map is designed to have the following effects.
Equal starting location for each player.
Players will initially have to stay in the ring, forcing them to compete for resources.
Players who focus on exploration will have more areas to explore, especially in the later game.
Players who focus on military can fight their way to the centre to be rewarded with better loot.
The centre of the map can be a focus for certain events, as it is equidistant from each player.
In addition to this, there will be more traditional map styles.

Drafting
Drafting was an idea that came out of the adaptability pillar. At the start of the game players take turn in
choosing different things from a pool of options. Drafting is great because it also promotes replayability, forces
players to adapt, and is inherently self balancing (in general the stronger options will go first, so each player
should end up with roughly equal choices)
It is inspired by Magic: The Gathering sealed tournaments and the ability draft mode in DotA2. (If you don't
understand drafting in card games at all you can skip this) What I loved about MtG drafts is that better players
will always make better decks from the same pool of cards. In the first round you may open a very powerful card
with a specific strategy. From then on you will most likely try to pick cards to compliment your strategy. Often
you will not have found enough cards to make your strategy viable. A better player will realize this early in the
draft and maybe choose a different strategy, or go for a hybrid strategy. A stubborn player will hold out for cards
that complete their strategy but will likely fail.
It is undecided how integral drafting will be but there are 3 proposed game modes that involve drafting.
Normal Draft
At the beginning of the game players will be given several choices that will define their strategy. These will
likely include:
Biases (primary and secondary)
Faction abilities
Special buildings and units
Players will have to develop a strategy based on the choices they have available.

Total Draft
This is one of the more extreme ideas proposed and it will likely exist as an optional game mode for experienced
players. Total draft mode takes the drafting concept to the extreme. In this game mode everything is draftable.
This will often replace some of the random elements.
In this game mode instead of your technologies being generated from a pool, the entire pool will be open. The
same will be true of many other options. Here are examples of things that are draftable. Keep in mind that all of
these choices are available at the same time, so players would have to choice between units, technologies,
starting bonuses and so on. Here are some additional things I aim to make draftable. Certain options will not be
able to coexist, so they will be destroyed upon their counterpart being selected.
Techs Groups: Tech groups will still exist and all technologies will be put into a group. If a player
chooses a tech group, that will become researchable.
Starting Terrain: There will be options to start on a certain type of terrain, have certain recourses close
by.
Starting Proximity: Players will be able to select whether they want to start close to other players (for
trade or conquest) or far away to be safer and have more room to expand.
Map Options: If your strategy requires a lot of space or say, oceans, you can bias the map generator
towards that. If you notice that several other players are looking for growth based strategies, you could
make the map very small to force them to fight over land.
Global Events: On the list of possible selections will be several global events that happen at some
random time during the game. Maybe a fog descends reducing sight and allowing you to sneak past their
defences and take their capital. Maybe a cataclysmic event kills half the ungarrisoned units on the map,
forcing militaristic players to play more carefully.
Auction Mode
This mode works similarly to the draft or total draft modes, but each player is given a certain amount of points to
place bids. Players still take turns in selecting and then the bidding starts, with the active player receiving a
bonus. For example a player may select some special unit they know is integral to another players strategy. With
your 50% bonus you bid 100 points forcing them to bid past 150 and overpaying. This gives you more freedom
to choose later on.