Branching Campaigns?

Finished working on the next round of Map Editor revisions. Here's the latest screen:

How would you like to play this map? Got the Drengin war machine breathing down your throat. Hmmm...fun.

I've also been asked to think more about events and triggers. Here are my thoughts so far.

Events

Events consist of a trigger and effect.

Trigger

When a trigger is triggered, then the effect happens. My triggers so far:

• "Occupy" a position on the map or a star/planet

• "Destroy" a particular ship

• "Colonize" a particular planet

Effect

Effects have immediate impact on the game. Here are my effects so far:

• Instant Victory/Defeat with accompanying text.
• Add/Remove resources. Resources are planets/ships/money/techs.
• Text. Just random text like "I love you" or something just as silly.

With this kind of syntax, we can specify events in a text file. What do you think? Not enough, too much?

Now on to the Campaign Editor....

The Campaign Editor wasn't really a product we planned on making. It just grew out of what used to be just a simple map editor. Now it's a map editor, scenario editor, and campaign editor. I wish I had kept the map and scenario editors as one package. Ugh. I'm a big fan of data driven design so anything that helps us generate content is a good thing.

The simplest campaign editor would make just a list of linked missions:

Campaign:

1. Scenario1 Map1
2. Scenario2 Map2
3. Scenario3 Map3
4. etc...

A more complex campaign editor would allow branching:

Campaign:

1. Scenario1 Map1 [Win goto 2][Lose goto 3]
2. Scenario2 Map2 [Win goto 4][Lose goto 1]
3. etc...

I think for now we'll stick with the first style. For a game like GalCiv, going through a scenario more than once doesn't make sense.