Where are the Hard Science 4X games?

News & General Discussion
1

Something occurred to me the other day.

For the life of me I can not name one single 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate (Civ, MoO, MoM)) that is galactic with hard, real life, science.

Games like Master of Orion or Galactic Civilizations always delve into a mixture between Star Wars and Star Trek. Both are fine, but both are firmly a fantasy setting. (Yes, Star Trek is fantasy and not real science).

It’s all good and fun, but I want to know why no one has tried to do a game where all the tech is anchored in reality.

So for starters, no FTL.

I REALLY don’t want to get into it, but let’s just agree with 99% of physicists and say FTL is impossible.

So rather than making all these ships to zip around the galaxy and making contact by moving from location to location, it’s more about exploring from your solar system and leapfrogging around start to star and converting them into mega structures over time.

Things like Dyson Swarms, Dyson Spheres, Ring Worlds, Disc Worlds, Solar star ships, Stellar Cannons, Matrioshka Brains, and ultimately Kugelblitz Cannons.

Real quick, that’s:
Dyson Swarms - A star surrounded by a cloud of solar collecting satallites to gather all the energy.
Dyson Spheres - A solid structure around a star that gathers 100% of its energy.
Ring Worlds and Disc Worlds - Duh.
Solar star ships - A star surrounded by satalites or a structure that allows it to move the entire star by light.
Stellar Cannons - Pointing the energy out of a sun in a direction as a weapon.
Matrioshka Brains - A series of Dyson spears around a sun that converts all energy into computation power.
Ultimately Kugelblitz Cannons - Pointing light from multiple stars at a tiny point to create black holes which would make the ultimate weapon AND allow you to create black holes for power.

Then the technologies developed could be more realistic like instead of “Warp Drives” (which is nonsense, sorry), you have things like space elevators and mass drivers.

Obviously the game would take place over billions of years, due to the limitations of c.

Some other huge tech that would play a part would be:
-Simulated reality
-Immortality through medicine
-Nano technologies
-Self replicating robots
-Grey Goo
-AI
-Antimatter
-Perfected Genetics
-Augmented intelligence
-Fusion Power

Ultimately I see the game playing out as you start in one star system.

You search your observable area for useful stars.

You looks for other races and can obscure your location to avoid conflict.

Eventually you re-purpose your system for a mega-structure for power/production, research, exploration, or warfare.

And as you explore the galaxy you gobble up star system after star system creating an armada of star systems used as giant star ships.

And at the end conflict become inevitable and you blow each other up.

What do you think?

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Sounds like fun to me. Though a bit depressing too (I like to think that by the time we’re immortal and hyper-smart, we can think of nonviolent ways of resolving our differences).

But, yeah, I’d play it.

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Hard Sci-Fi 4X would be hard to classify as 4X since the scale is significantly less ‘grand’ - a cornerstone of 4X.

Stellaris is probably the closest to what you’re asking. Hard Sci-Fi is also really slow, FTL travel concepts are what keep sci-fi interesting enough to enjoy at a good pace.

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Well, that’s true if you place it in multiple star systems. However the solar system is far larger and richer than most people imagine (see the video in my sig). There are room & materials for trillions of people living comfortably in millions of city-sized space habitats (or artificial realities the size of entire worlds). And the travel time between them would still be measured in hours.

So, you could place quite an epic (yet realistic) 4X game right here in the solar system.

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“Real science” when thinking of future science is rather subjective. Are your enemies aliens? Do you even have any enemies at all since there is no scientific evidence of aliens? (making the game more sim city than strategy)

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Unless your enemies are also human (or some future branch of humanity). That has an interesting implication: instead of starting out widely separated, as is traditional in 4X games, you’d all be starting in the same little corner of the galaxy, bumping elbows from the very beginning, and fighting to capture more and more of the wilderness that surrounds you all.

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So basically, The Expanse: The Video Game

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Umm, “duh” what?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11183/could-we-build-a-ringworld-17166651/

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11098/could-we-build-a-dyson-sphere-17110415/

What do you mean by this? It’s easy to just throw up seemingly advanced ideas, but how do they tie into the world, or the game?

What is the purpose of simulated reality? The only purpose this has is entertainment, or perhaps creating things we can’t create in real life (read: entertainment). How would this be a useful tech for a space-faring species?

Immortality through medicine. Good luck with that one. Your body automatically dies through apoptosis. The name for apoptosis inhibition…is cancer. You might do something through telomeres, though.

Self-replicating robots. What does this mean? A robot that can build another like it, if you put in the necessary materials? A robot that magically has the materials to build more like it without drawing them from somehere? The second is impossible, the first isn’t really all that special (and I would like to see a situation where it is used).

Grey Goo. This might have wartime potential, but it’s difficult to see any other use for it. Especially considering that in space the only living things are going to be humans. Basically you purposely design your robots to eat people, or you have no reason to design them to consume organic matter at all. it’s not a problem of runaway robots in either case.

AI. I think this is valuable, but we know little enough about it to be able to determine where it will go and how possible it is.

Antimatter. What is the purpose of using this as a technology? The only outcome I see is energy production, and I imagine there are a lot more practical ways to get that (such as nuclear fusion as you mention).

Perfected genetics sounds a lot like “immortality,” or perhaps you’re referring to the idea of designer babies?

Basically, are these supposed to be random techs in a tech tree, or are they ideas you’re planning to explore during the game? If they’re supposed to be in a tech tree, okay. If they’re something you plan to explore in game, half of them are not feasible in some way or another.

How do these city-sized space habitats relate to one another in spatial distribution? That’s a significant part of the 4X experience - that various things such as resource availability or simply habitable zones require some strategy in the location of “bases.” If everything is a base that receives supplies from earth, I don’t really see how you include that element of it.

Where does the eXplore go, basically. Or the eXploit for that matter.

Ultimately the problem is that real, hard (edit: and practical) science is either kind of “boring” or kind of “scary.” Look at how science is portrayed in media.

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They’d be arranged in pretty much the same way as the physical matter in the solar system: mostly in the plane of the ecliptic, with a heavy concentration in the main asteroid belt, around each gas giant, the trojans ahead of and behind the gas giants, the centaurs, and the Kuiper belt. Plus the Oort cloud if you want to include that.

Yeah, that certainly wouldn’t be the way of it. The Earth would be a tiny part of the economy by this point.

I agree, to some extent — particularly socially. Humanity has been getting more and more peaceful as it matures (current presidents notwithstanding — we’re talking broad trends here). Extrapolated a few centuries or millennia, and it’s reasonable to expect that war will be mostly a topic of historical games.

However, you could easily reject that notion, and still make a war (or other 4X) game where the science is hard. It’s just an additional constraint on your creativity… but if you’re creative enough, I think you could design an interesting game (or plot or whatever) anyway. I don’t expect life in the future to be boring, so I don’t see why games set in the future should be.

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Fair enough, fair enough.

I’m probably looking at it the wrong way. I’m looking at it as if the OP is focusing on the hard science as the focus of the game. If it’s a “normal” game against a backdrop of hard science the OP is arguing for, then sure. If the OP is arguing for a game about hard science though, I don’t see it being particularly successful.

And ultimately, unless you’re making it the focus of the game…then why? What is the benefit of it? Moving to science fantasy allows one to make a more engaging game through the features mentioned by the OP. That’s part of why those games exist - it isn’t just because developers are only interested in science fantasy.

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So a game where it actually takes 6 months to travel to another planet?

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I’d assume we have fusion drives — so, it only takes days (or weeks) of game time to get around within a solar system. Or years/decades to travel between the stars. But 6 months? Nah…

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You want a game based on hard, real-life science where the player does things we’ve never done using technologies that don’t exist, on a time scale that exceeds the entirety of human existence and indeed the existence of planet Earth itself?

Even if we could see billions of years into the future, and we precisely duplicated the actual state of affairs at that time, Clarke’s law would just jump up and eat your game alive. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And everyone would handwave your game as fantasy.

It’s just so much easier to say “I made some shit up, because it’s fun.”

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Nah, that’s been done to death.

Dyson spheres and solar systems made into ships has not.

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Where to start?

Take your pick:
-Seeded organs
-Printed Cells
-Bionics
-Cancer cell targeting resonating microwaves
-Nanobots
-Digitized brains
-Basic genetic treatments

Yeah, I watched that same documentary, “The Immortalists”. Those people are clearly dumb, but that doesn’t mean that immortality isn’t in our future.

A lot of people are expecting us to cross the singularity within 30 years. After then, whatever is possible will be possible.

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I’m pretty sure it has. “No 4X game has ever let you build a Dyson sphere” simply doesn’t pass the sniff test, even if I can’t name one that did.

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But this is what you asked for. A game based on real science. Why are you upset that the real science is inconvenient?

I mean, maybe that’s why this doesn’t get done.

I do have some game or other which I found rather interesting… The Last Federation, that was it. You’re expected to spend months on certain tasks. Instead of landing on some planet and helping them out in a day or two, you hang out there for months getting the job done.

It would be relatively simple to scale time up to a factor like, every second is a decade. Or a century. So when you want to go to Procyon at 0.05c, which would take 224 years, you’re not looking at a long boring wait. But then you have the problem of simulating the passage of centuries on planets - a minute from starting the game, you’re looking at a difference in technology like someone from the high middle ages waking up in a Holiday Inn.

We can’t simulate that. We don’t know what it looks like. We’re no more able to predict it than Chaucer was able to foresee the internet.

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Okay, not “ever”. But there are WAY more Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Trek, and Star Wars settings out there.

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Imagine that a time traveler went a thousand years into the future and came back, then made a perfectly accurate game about how technology progressed over that time.

How would you tell it apart from those?

EDIT: Also, what about Kerbal Space Program? It’s probably the single most realistic space game ever made.

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When it breaks unbreakable scientific laws I’d call that “magic”.

FTL ships is magic.

Automation and mega structures are not.