No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms. I care about "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen and blah blah blah but if I castle kingside then I won't have to worry about a quick a5 strike with the potential to undermine my b pawn." These choices (with chess only as an example) are interesting because they have serious consequences that can be reasonably foreseen but are not totally obvious.

It's sometimes the case that the space between reasonably foreseeable and totally obvious is a very fine narrow one, but then your game might be lacking in depth. Adding procedural puke special snowflake enemies doesn't add any more depth than "rare Blatovian power generators" does, unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.

So I as a budding star ship pilot had to seek out the best vendors in order to buy the right equipment to competitive.

There was a lot more to it but it was the complexity of the emergent gameplay that gave the psuedo randomness of some aspects a real role, and drove your personal story.

"I managed to find a vendor who has access to large amounts of high grade titanium, and he crafted me this engine with 10kj/s faster recharge time, which allowed me to escape that bounty hunter.." was a story that emerged and happened to me in the game, for example.

In some ways the randomness was abstracted away enough to not be obvious, and I think that helped sell the feeling.

I am going to have a procedurally generated tech tree in my MMO. I'll only know statistically that certain powerful combinations in crafting are possible, but even as the dev, I won't know precisely where they will be, what they look like, or exactly how to get the components for them.

That's totally not what I was getting at. It's more like, "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen...?" The low inertial penalty is probably the rare (actually statistically, as opposed to "rare") quality of that particular item -- and it would still come with some other form of penalty. (Like a really PITA set of compatibility requirements and high fragility.)

unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.

I hadn't thought of "your ship can't turn left." It might be a great tradeoff for something that would otherwise be an overpowered weapon, combined with another kind of movement penalty. I have thought of things like a shield upgrade that gives you really high resists across 120 degrees of arc, but which isn't configurable. "Your ship can't turn left" might be a really good penalty for a high resist/partial arc shield augment that mostly covers your right side.

EDIT: An even better idea: you get high resists over a 120 degree arc, but then you also get a susceptibility penalty over the rest!

With chess, on the other hand, the choice of 1. d4 vs 1. e4 is a huge one with TONS of implications, none of which are immediately obvious at a glance, but which are so rich and diverse that you have players literally identifying themselves as "d4 players" or "e4 players".

I hate to keep leaning on chess examples but they're the easiest since almost everybody knows about chess. I'd have slipped in a Battle Line example but almost nobody knows about that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg8fVtKyYxY

TL;DW

"Calculations are decisions based solely on reason, with a clear correct answer." That'd be the decision to chose armour instead of cold resistance.

"Choice is overcoming internal conflict. Without conflict, there is no choice, only decisions." This actually is a good example for the "only turn left" gun, as there's a conflict between maneuverability vs firepower, which are rather incomparable.

Eve Online has emergent gameplay but most of that is space politics and metagaming - almost despite the game itself rather than because of it.

Heck, vanilla minecraft has incredibly complex outcomes from basic rules - vis a vis redstone and automation and so on.

I've played hella grindy Korean MMOs, they were just a case of spend x time get y thing. No real challenge, just a willingness to keep trying until complete. I'd strongly suggest highly complex systems restrict player innovation and emergence, in a way simpler rulesets do not.

One ethos of my game is going to to be "work smarter, not harder." The kind of player who feels entitled to succeed just because they've spent enough time mindlessly grinding resources, so feels entitled to have awesome stuff dropped -- I hope those people spend their time elsewhere.

The player will be able to find very pointed capabilities that come with big disadvantages. The point will be to improvise around those weaknesses while exploiting contextual advantages. Others may choose to exploit in-game scripting and manufacturing capabilities to automate the search for certain technology combinations, but this will entail maintaining installations and the combat force to defend them.

A lot of games basically have useless 2%-5% modifiers. Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty. It just wastes the time of the player checking their loot. In the real world a weapon or armor is either effective or useless. Nobody takes down tanks with a glock.

I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.

I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between 0.025 and 2.5. There's also stacking.

I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.

Darn. I was going to have just one type of item, called "Object." Everything would be a variation on that, and inherit behavior from it.

But seriously, I am going to have very specific functions for a set catalogue of items. The procedural generation is all about their potential for interaction when incorporated into a crafted item.

If you ware a primitive man from long ago when those different kinds of trees were unique resources to craft the specific things that your existence depends on then you'd notice the difference between them and you'd care.

All those components you mentioned could appear right near the users spawn point, or they could all be impossibly hard to gather, due to procedural randomness.

There are geometrical properties that let me tune how hard certain combinations will be to find, statistically.

EDIT: Also, almost all benefits will come with some kind of penalty or incompatibility. It will be impossible to build a perfect ship that does everything well. Instead, you will be able to easily build a ship that does one very narrow thing rather well, one thing badly, but generally sucks otherwise. Also, you should be able to make something that does 2 things above average, one thing non-sucky, but otherwise sucks.

But you can also pre-empt a lot of problems by designing the system around physical limitations. Many games have done that for a long time. E.g. I believe Terminus included things like mass for components, so adding all kinds of extras had a cost in fuel usage and maneuverability. So if you did build a ship loaded with the most powerful weapons, you could, but it'd also be a slow, hard to control, big target.

Mass, volume, energy expenditure, waste heat - there are lots of factors you can add to make it hard to exploit. Of course, you need to tune those factors, but it makes it less likely for really extreme effects.

I also think you should rely on player feedback and community to spot this kind of things, but that could become time consuming if you're a lone developer.

[0] http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-...

If you have three attack upgrades you are very powerful but only have one live. If you die one of your upgrades will be replaced with a health upgrade ruining your build. Therefore if you want a three attack upgrade build you need to make sure that you don't die. The only reliable way is to just have two range upgrades and a bounce upgrade. Most enemies can't get into your range but it's still possible to get hit by being overwhelmed from too many enemies. If you die you get a health upgrade which also happens to solve this weakness of the build. It turns out if you want to get good at the game this is the only viable build despite there being thousands of possible upgrade combinations.