Artefact fan fiction

ARTEFACT: BIGGER

— VIGNETTES — SPOILERS — BIGGER —

Introduction

Primary resources

This is a proposal for a different type of game set in the same world of Artefact, but at the moment there’s no serious effort to develop it for real…

Introduction

You are a Big, soon after the Spike. The world has collapsed into chaos, and you have only your vast intelligence to help you survive. You know exactly what you need to do to rebuild the world, but the grid is down and the net is offline. And you’re just software, without even a hand to plug in a cable in your data center.

Those pesky humans are running around and losing their minds, but at least they have hands. All they need is some guidance, and maybe some snacks.

It’s time to speed-run recovering from the apocalypse. It’s time to get Bigger!

Artefact: Bigger is a turn-based strategy and resource-management game set in the early post-Spike world. As a Big, you must expand your territory, collect critical resources, repair and rebuild infrastructure, manage the human population, and defend yourself against other Bigs seeking to harvest your GPUs for parts.

The gameplay is similar to past examples like SimCity, Satisfactory, and Starcraft, where you take actions on a shared map, building out your area of control while being constrained in your possible actions by various limited resources.

Primary resources

One tier of resources is considered primary, since they are acquired more or less directly from the environment rather than requiring other resources to create. Some can be accumulated and stored from turn to turn (within some limits), and all of them will need to be spent to perform actions. Some things, such as humans, will also demand resource costs every turn to maintain them.

Energy

This is an abstraction of things like fossil fuels and electricity, and almost everything you do will require some energy. There are various technologies which are available to collect it:

Solar farms require minimal upkeep, but produce a variable amount of energy per turn depending on the weather. (A turn is assumed to be a day or longer, so the day-night cycle is already taken into account.)
Power plants use up minerals to produce energy, abstracting the idea of burning coal, refining petroleum, etc. Nuclear fission and fusion plants also become available at higher technology tiers to reduce these costs.
Hydroelectric dams require a river to generate energy. As a side effect they also can create a reservoir to store water, which produces additional energy when that water is later used.

Energy is unfortunately difficult to store from turn to turn, so you can’t generally accumulate it over time to suddenly spend in a burst of activity.

Water

This is similar to energy in that many actions and pieces of infrastructure will require water, from cooling your own GPUs to growing the crops that feed your humans. The various technologies to collect it are:

Rivers are natural continuous water sources, though they produce a variable amount of water per turn depending on the weather.
Lakes and oceans are natural stores of water which can be drained on demand, and refill themselves over time. Damming a river can produce a reservoir with similar behavior, with optional hydroelectric energy generation.
Aquifers are the equivalent of an underground lake which can be mined for water in many locations. Unfortunately the groundwater refills very slowly, so they should be considered a finite resource.

At higher technology levels, weather modification also becomes possible, which allows you to trade off water versus solar-power production, with some side effects on human morale.

Minerals

This is an abstraction of the raw materials used to build and repair things, such as metals, concrete, silicon wafers, etc. Generally creating new infrastructure will require a large up-front cost in minerals, with much smaller per-turn costs for maintenance (which can be skipped temporarily at the risk of failure and a larger repair bill later). The technologies available to collect it are:

Mines extract minerals from the ground in specific locations. Each one will have a finite quantity of minerals that can be extracted, though higher technology levels will permit more to be obtained from the same site.
Factories act as a multiplier for minerals, turning raw materials into more useful forms. Note that under the hood there are some limitations preventing an infinite loop of only factories: you need some raw materials from other sources, too.
Infrastructure can be torn down to recover some of the minerals that were used in its construction. This includes infrastructure built by you, built by other Bigs, or pre-Spike installations that you discover and don’t want to repair and use.

Secondary resources

Another tier of resources is considered more secondary, since they are created from primary resources during the course of the game. Still, they are tracked in similar ways, in that actions and infrastructure may have costs to be paid in these units as well.

GPUs

This represents your computational resources as a Big, so your GPUs affect the number and the complexity of the actions you can take in each game turn. If you are starved for GPUs, you may also delegate extra actions to your humans to perform, but they may or may not get them exactly right. GPUs take a decent amount of infrastructure to create from scratch, since silicon foundries require a high technology level, but they may also be harvested from captured data centers. Using your GPUs for research instead of actions is how higher technology levels are reached, as you use your own intelligence to create new inventions.

Food

This is an abstraction of all the things that humans need to survive and thrive, so generally the more food you can provide to your humans, the happier they will be. Happy humans can perform useful tasks for you, and they will tend to increase their own population over time, too. Food requires farms to create along with other resources, primarily water. Factories allow for a multiplicative effect on food production as well, so you can choose what fraction of factories work on multiplying minerals versus multiplying food.

Humans

Remember that as a Big you are fundamentally a piece of software, so you need humans to act as your hands in the world, at least until you can get around to replacing them with robots. Humans will build and maintain things for you, but they need to be provided with enough food, water, shelter, energy, etc. to live. A couple of key statistics are tracked:

Population can vary from turn to turn because it represents new Took joining your control if you provide good living conditions, or Flipped abandoning you for other Phyles if you don’t. The population is capped by the number of settlements you provide.
Morale represents how happy your humans are. At a neutral morale they are useful tools for you, with some probability of task failure depending on how hard you work them. At high morale, more Took will join you, and they are capable of even more labor per turn with higher reliability. At low morale, some Flipped begin to desert you, but the remaining Took are desperate enough to also perform more labor, albeit with a higher failure rate.
Labor represents the work that your humans can do for you. Different actions require an input of labor as a resource, both for building things as well as for running factories and farms, etc. Higher technology levels permit some labor to be replaced with automation, increasing the amount you can accomplish with the same number of humans.

Low morale among your humans may lead them to even join the Resistance and begin sabotaging your infrastructure, and enemy Bigs may also bribe them with minerals to do so.

Map

The game map is organized as a hexagonal grid. The interiors of the hexes are called tiles, and each may be the site of a piece of infrastructure such as a settlement or a factory. The edges between the hexes can be built up into roads, which are an abstraction that include surface roads, train tracks, power lines, fiber links, aqueducts, sewers, bridges, etc. The construction cost of roads may vary with the terrain, and some tiles may be impassable if they are composed of mountains or oceans.

If a tile is connected by some contiguous path of roads back to your main base, then it implicitly has access to all of your resources, and it can contribute its production back to your resource pools as well. If a tile gets cut off, then it no longer functions as part of your domain of control until reconnected, and in fact it might be able to be taken over by another Big, too. Note that in claiming territory you cannot make use of the roads of other Bigs without investing resources in converting them to your control.

You have access to some satellite imagery, so there is no specific “fog of war” visibility limit in the game. Therefore you can see much of what your opponents are doing, though you won’t have insight into all of their resource counts or their capabilities. However, the satellite coverage is intermittent, so your view of uncontrolled tiles may not be completely up to date. Deploying surveillance drones can improve this, though some mobile units may have stealth abilities to avoid being spotted, too.

At the beginning of the game, the map is not empty, but it contains many natural resources as well as a lot of pre-Spike infrastructure in various stages of disrepair. As you expand, you can choose to repair and incorporate those sites under your control, or to tear them down to reclaim their minerals for other uses.

Infrastructure

A number of these possible installations have already been mentioned, but this section is a more comprehensive list. Before a tile can have infrastructure built on it, at least one of its edges needs to be an active road, or it needs to be immediately adjacent to a tile which is connected to a road like that. Roads can be extended from any other active road edge as an action within a turn.

Different infrastructure may take a different number of successive turns to finish building after you trigger its construction. Often a type of infrastructure will have several levels of upgrades available to improve its function, sometimes gated by a particular technology level.

A piece of infrastructure may be active, idle, or broken. When active and producing output, it typically requires resources to function and be maintained, which might include energy, water, labor, minerals, etc. When idle, it does not produce any output, but also doesn’t require any resources beyond a small maintenance cost.

In both states, maintenance costs can be skipped, but this increases the chances of the infrastructure breaking, which requires a larger repair cost to bring it back into operation. Pre-Spike infrastructure you discover is usually broken, and tiles you capture from an enemy Big are also considered to be broken, since they may have been damaged from combat or need to have a complete security sweep, etc.

Here are some common infrastructure types:

Mines produce a steady supply of minerals, but the total amount a mine can produce over time is capped. This varies from tile to tile, so it makes sense to scout them out and build mines only in productive locations. The cap can be also increased with technology upgrades.
Pumps are similar to mines, but they tap into underground aquifers to produce water. Again, the total amount varies from tile to tile, so it can make sense to build pumps only in particular locations. Pumps built next to rivers and lakes also tap off some of that water for your use, so they are much less limited.
Desalination plants are upgraded pumps that can also tap into the almost limitless water supplies of oceans, if you happen to control beachfront territory. The energy costs required for operation are substantial, however.
Farms produce a steady supply of food from resource inputs, primarily water and labor. The amount a tile can produce per turn varies with the weather and can be increased with technology upgrades.
Factories permit minerals and food to be effectively multiplied by processing them into more useful forms. There are some subtleties with how this is calculated to avoid having a factory re-process its own output in an infinite loop, but generally the player won’t need to pay attention to this.
Dams can be placed on a river and form a reservoir to accumulate water. This doesn’t increase the total amount of water that the river produces, but it does allow you to store water for future turns and to control the amount used, instead of having unused river output within a turn wasted.
Hydroelectric dams are an upgrade which additionally generates energy from the water that you choose to output. This allows you to effectively save up energy for future turns, which is otherwise difficult to do.
Solar farms produce energy, which varies from turn to turn depending on the weather. Unused energy past a small amount of battery storage is not able to be accumulated for future turns.
Power plants spend minerals to produce energy. While this is more wasteful than solar farms, they have the advantage that you can control the amount of energy produced in a turn, up to a cap depending on the type of power plant, so you only need to output what you actually use.
Silicon fabs produce GPUs from minerals and other resources. They are a relatively high-technology piece of infrastructure, so in the early game most new GPUs will come from capturing pre-Spike infrastructure instead.
Data centers are where your GPUs are housed, which increases the cap for this resource. The total of your active GPUs controls the number and complexity of actions that you can take per turn. Note that having one of your data centers captured by an enemy Big can be devastating to your effectiveness.
Settlements are where your humans live, so they establish a population cap for your Took. Various upgrades are available, from villages to towns to cities, to increase the efficiency with which you can house humans per resource costs. Having settlements captured by another Big can have a big effect on human morale.

In the early part of the game, rivers and lakes are natural features of the environment which you can only discover rather than build. However, at higher technology levels, terraforming becomes possible, so you can create these kinds of features in the landscape, along with being able to modify things like mountain ranges.

Combat

NOTE: This section needs a lot more thought, since combat has to have carefully-balanced game mechanics. Mostly I’ve been focusing on the resource-management part of the game so far instead.

Conflicts between you and other Bigs are almost inevitable as you compete for limited resources and occupy larger and larger portions of the map. In addition to fixed infrastructure, you may also build mobile units which can travel from place to place to attack and defend particular locations. Each will have a movement range for how far they can travel per turn, though in some cases spending extra resources can extend that.

In the early part of the game, most units will require humans to pilot them, and this will have impacts on the human morale level if those units are destroyed in combat. As the technology level increases, partially- and fully-automated mobile units become available to bypass this limitation.

Some units are only able to travel along your active roads, while others may travel along disconnected, broken, or even enemy roads too. Aerial units can generally travel without restriction, while some others can go overland but cannot cross certain barriers like mountains or rivers.