My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

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Cdiplayer
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My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by Cdiplayer »

Hey everyone, figured I'd post this since I have over 5,000 hours in Supreme Ruler, and over the course of those 5000 hours I have really narrowed down what I like most about this series, and what I would like to see going forward. First off, I have spent about 4000 hours on Supreme Ruler Ultimate, and 1000 on the rest of the series combined. Of this 4000, over half has been since the addition of the map editor. Were it not for the map editor, I would have stopped playing this game years ago. The map editor allows me to easily create my own custom scenarios and effectively turns Supreme Ruler into a geopolitical sandbox game. Any future Supreme Ruler game needs a map editor and modding suite, preferably with a more streamlined interface. An easy way to create and test events in real time would be nice, because I personally find that to be the most frustrating part of modding. Anyway, on to new feature recommendations!

1. The ability to change your national flag in game. This is such a huge immersion breaker for me. If the AI can change its flags in game through events, why can't I? I think that the interface for this would be relatively simple as well, if you want to change your nation's flag, just click on the flag itself, and then scroll through all the flags in the flagbits files in the graphics folders. You could either set it up like it functions in the modding tools, where you scroll through one flag at a time, or you could set up a whole menu that has all the flags on it. That way, you could add flags as you play by editing the flagbits files to put in custom flags. Why is this so immersion breaking for me? Well, I'll give you an example. If I am playing as a monarchy in 2020 and I liberate China, they are now a monarchy with a communist flag. That doesn't make any sense. I should be able to load in as China after liberating them so that I can change their flag to something more appropriate.

2. Being able to create colonies out of battle zones. We can release independent nations from battle zones, we should be able to release colonies from battle zones as well.

3. The ability to create custom colonial nations in game. If I am playing as Japan for example, and I want to resurrect Manchukuo as a colony in northeastern China, I should be able to create a custom colonial nation, choose a flag and a name, a capital city, and assign battle zones to it, regardless of loyalty. To be clear, I'm not saying that the loyalty should change when I assign a battlezone to a particular colonial nation, it should remain the same, the colonial nation just takes ownership over that battlezone. Another example of this would be if I wanted to recreate French Indochina or French West Africa.

4. A custom unit creator. Many other grand strategy games have this feature, Superpower 2, Hearts of Iron 4, etc. I think Supreme Ruler would really benefit from this. It could be structured around researching certain modules and then using an in game editor to select pieces (for example, for a tank you could have a gun, turret, chassis, and engine) to put together to create a custom unit with its own unique characteristics. You could do this by either creating a certain number of generic modeling pieces, like X number of generic looking tank turrets, battleship turrets, rocket engines, missile warheads, superstructures, airplane fuselages, jet engines, ship hulls, etc. OR slicing up the existing models you have in game into these various component parts. Alternatively, you could just allow the player to select from any of the already existing models in the game to use for their custom unit.

5. More government types. Absolute Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy, Theocratic Monarchy, Theocratic Republic, Federal Republic, Unitary Republic, Direct Democracy, Confederation, Totalitarian Dictatorship, Authoritarian Dictatorship, Elective Monarchy, One Party State...I could go on and on but you get the point, more government types, and more direct control over government policy, would be cool.

6. Population control. Dear god are all these games Malthusian, the wealthier your country gets, the more your population grows! I need the ability to halt, or at least slow down, these forces. Give me the ability to ban or limit immigration either altogether or from specific countries. Give me the ability to drive down the birth rate by raising the cost of living, or in extreme cases, give me the ability to enact a one child policy. A population pyramid feature would be cool as well, perhaps that could effect your country's GDP?

7. The ability to build cities. I should be able to build new cities that gradually attract more population from surrounding hexes (and to a lesser extent faraway hexes too, as well as immigrants). Perhaps this could be dependent on nearby economic factors? (like if I've built any local industry for people to work in)

8. The ability to build colossal structures. Tourist attractions are already in the game, Trump Tower is already in the game, I wanna be able to rebuild the Tower of Babel! I want to be able to rebuild the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World! Make them super expensive to build too. It would give the player something fun to do besides go to war.

Anyway, I realize this is a lot, and I don't expect you guys to implement everything on this list, but hopefully I gave you all some ideas to toss around. Supreme Ruler is easily my favorite grand strategy game series of all time, so I am excited to see what you do with the next entry in the series!
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milivoje02
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Re: My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by milivoje02 »

Cdiplayer you have my support.
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Balthagor
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Re: My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by Balthagor »

I've added your comments to this thread; viewtopic.php?f=78&t=31379&p=199890#p199890
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Re: My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by frank33135 »

and the ability to change government types and adjusting interest rate and make nukes more deadly like superpower 2
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Re: My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by Balthagor »

frank33135 wrote: Jun 22 2021 and the ability to change government types...
This will always be problematic, and I'm not sure we should allow it. We curate the relationships between regions a lot based on real world expectations. For example, France, Canada and the UK like Australia. If Australia was suddenly a communist country, those starting relationships wouldn't make any sense. We also set AI influences. Australia is likely set to have a positive opinion of democratic regions and a negative opinion of communist regimes. If it is suddenly a communist region, those influences no longer make sense.

To do a "what if?" scenario properly requires more than just changing 1 value.
frank33135 wrote: Jun 22 2021 ...and make nukes more deadly...
We try and make using nukes realistic. I seem to recall someone saying that they are underpowered, so you might get what you're looking for, but even nukes should have limits IMO.
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Re: My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by frank33135 »

so what about interest rate I want to control inflation
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Re: My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by Balthagor »

It will be considered. I don't really have an opinion on that, I don't usually design the economic factors.
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Re: My recommendations for Supreme Ruler Next Gen

Post by Nerei »

Balthagor wrote: Jun 22 2021 We try and make using nukes realistic. I seem to recall someone saying that they are underpowered, so you might get what you're looking for, but even nukes should have limits IMO.
Sorry but in the SR series nuclear weapons are basically firecrackers with possibly massive diplomatic penalties tied to them. They have very little effect compared to reality. I can actually make aircraft "worse" by loading them with nuclear weapons instead of just dropping conventional "dumb" freefall bombs.

A unit of 12 B-36 dropping a few hundred tonnes of TNT equivalent explosives are in several ways more effective at turning a hex into paste than a 25 megaton thermonuclear weapon that can strike the entire hex with an overpressure shockwave that makes EF5 tornado winds look like a gentle breeze and a thermal pulse that makes all exposed organic matter in the entire hex, humans included, start burning.
That is besides the roughly 100 million Kelvin fireball that in a ground detonation will extend around 4km from ground zero vaporizing all soft targets and breaking hard ones enough that chances of surviving inside say a tank is basically nil and it is all but certain the tank will be a worthless lump of metal afterwards.
If the aforementioned tank is NBC protected though it is sufficiently resistant to vaporization and getting thrown around that a single B-36 aircraft (yes single aircraft not single unit) will more or less match the most destructive weapons built by mankind.
Yes a weapon that can erase a small island is less efficient than an early cold war bomber dropping roughly 20 tonnes of bombs as long as the tank is pressurized or the guys getting nuked wear a rubber suit.
For the record NBC protection offers somewhere around 0% protection against a thermonuclear weapon. The main effects are thermal radiation, a colossal shockwave and possibly a fireball that makes the core of the sun appear cool by comparison. For smaller nuclear weapons the radiation component is also mainly gamma radiation which NBC protection is not every effective against.
Cdiplayer wrote: Jun 08 2021 OR slicing up the existing models you have in game into these various component parts. Alternatively, you could just allow the player to select from any of the already existing models in the game to use for their custom unit.
The problem with cutting up the existing models is that you will probably end up with a lot of pieces that does not really fit together very well which will have to be fixed assuming that is even possible. The wings of say a Rafale will not fit very well on a F-14 just like the tracks of a M-48 will not really work on a T-90.
I can also tell you that by far the majority of the models I have made if something is not visible it is probably not there and certainly not designed to be seen. You might be able to fit the tracks of the T-90A I have made onto my T-55 but as the T-90 has skirts covering the top part of its tracks and the T-55 does not so you will end up with a T-55 that has tracks missing their top part.
Chances are the models BG have made also have some issues with mix and match.
There is also the texture issue. Say putting together any parts of the Panzers from SR 1936 you will get some quite mismatched camouflage patterns. Not impossible to fix but certainly time consuming.

That however is just aesthetics. The performance impact is probably a worse issue and that is problematic both with old and new unit pieces. If you get low FPS with a lot of models on-screen it is probably not due to the number of polygons but draw calls. The problem is cutting models apart means more draw calls. Even if you merge the mesh objects after assembling the models it will not solve the problem fully. 5 mesh objects with a single texture is not worse than a single mesh object with 5 textures.
The only solution I can see to this problem would be to try and build large master texture maps to try and keep the number of individual textures as low as possible. That does however probably require a lot of reworking say camouflage patterns to avoid the above issue with the panzers.

My vote if such a system ever happens is to stick with just picking models. That is also what Super Powers 2 did from what I remember. The only exception bring vehicles where you could mix and match turrets with vehicle bases from what I remember.
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