This month has partly been taken up by the Chiron Gate Steam release, but I’ve also been working on the ‘Legacy’ part of Empire and Legacy.
You’ll play through the game as the ruler of the Galactic Empire. Once your emperor’s reign ends (often but not necessarily because they die), you’ll then get a few screens of non-interactive story about what happens afterwards. These will be formatted as excerpts from Galactopedia articles–the non-Galactopedia text is what your character personally experiences, but once that character is gone the game will go into a more zoomed-out, historical perspective.
My current plan is for the legacy story to be in three parts:
- Successor state
- Successor institution
- Overall picture of the galaxy
The successor state is what happens to the territory the Empire controls at the end of the game. This might be the entire galaxy, but more likely it’ll be the territory controlled by the old Imperial capital. Is it still a monarchy, or did you manage to steer it towards a republic or something else? If you somehow manage to lose all your territory there might not be a successor state, but that shouldn’t usually happen.
The successor institution is a non-state entity that the Empire leaves behind that influences the course of history. It might be some kind of alliance of newly independent nations (like e.g. how the British Empire ended but left behind the Commonwealth), or it might be something like a religious institution (like e.g. how the Roman Empire collapsed but its religion kept going as the Roman Catholic Church). The Foundation from Asimov’s series would be an example of an institution, as would a monastic order preserving knowledge through the dark age, or an order of knights fighting to keep peace between the planets. You might not manage to found any kind of successor institution, in which case you’ll probably be remembered by history as a weak and indecisive emperor.
The overall picture concerns what’s happening outside that state’s borders. (Or, if you did keep in control of the whole galaxy, what’s happening on the ground as opposed to in the government.) Is the overall galaxy at war or at peace? Is it generally prosperous or impoverished? How much of the old Empire’s scientific and cultural knowledge have been lost? The state and institution from the previous sections will have a lot of influence on this.
The endings you get will be determined partly by the visible stats (the power level of each faction and the amount of territory the Empire controls) but mostly by specific decisions you’ve made during the game. There will be chains of events that let you move towards different legacies, e.g. by gradually converting to a different form of government, or founding one of the successor institutions.
Some comments to my previous posts have indicated that people really want to be able to convert the empire into a republic, so the first legacy event chain I’m working on is the one that will allow you to do that. If you make the People’s Assembly faction powerful, you can have it transform into a parliament, which you can gradually give more powers to until the empire becomes a republic. Of course, this will anger some of the other factions, and you’ll also need to hold on to all the Empire’s territory if you want to end up with the Galactic Republic rather than just a small republic among many other states. I think that this is the ending a lot of players will consider to be the best one, so I’m going to try to balance it to be challenging to get!
Some of the legacy event chains will be things you might want to actively work towards, while others might be “deal with the devil” type things where you keep the Empire together at the expense e.g. of giving more power to sinister corporations. The state and institution at the end might be things you’ve worked towards but might also be things you’ve failed to avoid. I don’t yet have a list of all the possible successor states and institutions (and when I do, I won’t tell you, because this is the kind of game where some of replayability comes from finding all the different endings).
This month I’ve mostly been working on design work and implementing things with placeholder text, which is why there are no screenshots in this dev blog, but next month I should hopefully have some text to show you.