Work continues on Empire and Legacy. I’ve written a bunch of placeholder text this month…but more excitingly, we now have cover art:
This is by Tom Morley, the same artist who did the Beyond the Chiron Gate cover art.
I’ve also been adjusting the look of the game itself, changing the plain grey colour scheme to one that’s more a kind of muted bronze colour, and adding a starfield in the background like the one in Chiron Gate. (Compare to last month’s screenshots to see the difference.)
IMPERIAL STAR DREADNOUGHTS: …The Navy’s most powerful capital ships, the Star Dreadnoughts, were built between the 8th and 9th millennia IE. After the 9th millennium the secret of their construction was lost, and by the 12th millennium only half a dozen of these ships remained in service..
— Galactopedia
The Star Dreadnought Cleansing Obliteration fills the sky of Novaion as it returns from its centuries-long tour of duty. A sleek, kilometres-long manta ray shape, moving with a grace that belies its immense size, it represents a vanished golden age of shipbuilding that make more recent ships looks crude and unwieldy. It will spend the next year being repaired and refitted according to the Naval Engineering Corps’ secret rituals, before setting out again, not to return within your lifetime.
As you stand on the palace observation deck watching the spectacle, the head of the Academic Council comes to you with a proposal. If Academic Council archaeologists were to study the ship, they might rediscover some of the lost principles of its construction. Studying it properly, however, would mean disassembling it, permanently taking this irreplaceable naval asset out of service.
- Decommission the ship and let the archaeologists study it.
- Keep the ship in service.
The eventual game will also have custom icons to replace the placeholder ones in the screenshot.
Barely relevant side-note: I’ve started re-reading Asimov’s Foundation series in the hope of getting inspiration, and wow, younger me did not pick up on how sexist that first book is. Hari Seldon gathers the greatest minds of the galaxy to save civilization, and it doesn’t occur to any of them that women could contribute except as wives and secretaries. That’s one idea I won’t be using; my game’s Galactic Empire has more gender equality.
That’s all this month. Hopefully next month I should have more to show.