Getting Started with My 4X Project

I mentioned a little while ago that I'd been back over some of my mental notes about a 4X game, so I thought I'd briefly write about where I'm going.

Core Idea

The idea I've had for a while now is the player acting as a fleet commander. The player issues orders to the other ships in the fleet, and relies on the abilities and competence of the captain and crew on board each ship to complete their missions. Due to the way communications will work, it may take several turns of orders to even reach other ships, and knowing where each ship currently is may be an issue.

Back Story

The idea that started it all is trying to rebuild a galactic empire after some catastrophic event. The player starts on what was some distant backwater that has managed to survive, and only has a basic shipyard and one ship at his disposal. The player needs to send the ship out to rediscover other colonies, trade with the friendly ones, resettle the destroyed ones and conquer the unfriendly ones. The planets will provide the resources needed to develop the various industries on the colonies, start rebuilding a fleet and the empire.

Getting Started

I've got lots of ideas about features I'd like to see, but I've decided I'm try for an extremely iterative approach. I'm going to start by focusing just a few core elements to begin with, and then once that's done, add the next few features.

Planets

I'm going to start with the planetary governing stuff. Each planet has some traits that describe it (an earth-like world is very different from a gas giant, but both may be equally useful to control) - environment, size, natural resources, existing facilities and current population.

• The population is the pool from which you can draw workers to build stuff, research stuff, extract stuff or fight stuff. Some planets naturally support a large population, others can't support any population.
• Facilities are the buildings that have been built on the planet. Farms, mines, generators, research facilities, ship yards, etc. Different planets will need different facilities built.
• Resources are the raw materials you can extract from the planet to use. They can either be used right there (so food grown on the planet might go straight to feeding the planet's population) or shipped off else where (metal mined on one planet may be transferred to another plant to be turned into more ships).
• Size and Environment determine the how large a population can be supported, how many facilities and how large the natural resources are.

And that's where I'm at so far!