Devlog 2: Inspirations

Very few games ever made came from nothing and, like all cultural artefacts like stories, music, comic books, TV, movies, games are part of the continuing narrative of that we all build on and share. Of course, LEGION is no different. If it hadn't been for other amazing games and stories in the past, LEGION would not exist.

Real Time Strategy Games

Supreme Commander

Probably one of the most obvious inspirations, Supreme Commander stood out from the crowd when it came to its scale and economy. Resources were infinite and you were less concerned with a single harvesting unit carrying chunks of resource one by one and more about how many resources you got per second. This hoisted the economic game to a much higher macro level. Unit counts were also massive at the time (and still are in the current day).

The whole thing felt less like you were making 10 units and herding them carefully towards the enemy and more like you and the enemy were absorbing huge streams of resources and then fire-hosing each other with units. Few other games really successfully sold the "huge epic battles" like Supreme Commander did. FAF continues to bear the torch for this game into the future with a very strong community.

Command: Modern Operations

When it comes to thoughtful games that encourage you to plan ahead, C:MO has to be near the top of any ranking. You can clearly see CMO's influence in LEGION's battle map, with its topographic map and icons instead of rendered units. The other chunk of DNA pulled from that game is the deep weapons and sensors gameplay, where units couldn't just fire forever, had multiple different weapons and multiple different sensors. Electronic warfare is also a huge part of C:MO and it's almost as important in LEGION.

WARNO / War Game

So being a giant nerd, I do love me some cold war military hardware and you really don't have to look further than the WARNO or Wargame series. LEGION is set in around the year 2100 so technology has clearly progressed in that 120 years between a hot cold war and LEGION's time period, but I want to capture that same sense of the physicality of units, where tanks' tracks could be disabled, optics could be wrecked and ammo could run out.

One of the biggest inspirations for LEGION was these games' logistics system, where getting vulnerable logistics units to the front without them getting blown into very cool, catastrophic fireballs. Making a player think about how the bullets they fire at the front all have to be replaced DURING THE GAME really changes how you think about each round fired. It's not a projectile, it's an investment.

Homeworld 2

I think one of the most painful moments for me as a gamer was the seeming demise of Relic when THQ went down in flames, matched only by my intense relief when the whole Homeworld series was miraculously resurrected. So what made homeworld special? Three main things relevant to LEGION. First, intelligent unit formations. Depending on the situation, units would behave differently with only a few different settings.

Secondly, modules. All the capital ships had configurable modules to change how your capital ships could be used. On top of that, those modules could be individually damaged. The last one was the smart resourcing system and concept of carrier units with subunits that could work as teams to gather resources and front line construction units. Homeworld 1 was probably one of the bravest, most different RTS games and really a relic (hehe) of a time when people were prepared to make something new instead of chasing what focus groups wanted.

Other Genres

Factorio

Factorio, my beloved. I can't count how many hours I've spent in this game. Actually, I can, it's 550.8 (thanks Steam!). Maybe not as many as a lot of players but DAMN do I love this game. It really just gets the whole "set something up and watch it go" vibe so perfectly right. And of course, it "not going" is very much part of the game loop. This is something that was a huge inspiration behind the unit and munitions editors and the still in development taskforce playbooks.

While LEGION doesn't have conveyor belts, the MSRs that players draw from resourcing rear areas to the front lines operate just as importantly when it comes to maintaining structure and throughput. A badly planned or supplied MSR will lose you the battle as fast as any enemy army. LEGION also borrows the idea of coming up with an idea, building the components needed for that, testing, reviewing and refining as a core part of the gameplay, not a side gig.

Kerbal Space Program

"Build, test, fail, repeat, succeed" is something this game just gets so right. KSP is half flight simulator and half engineering puzzle. Now, I'm an unapologetic MechJeb user (fight me!) and I'm absolutely awful at staging correctly when reaching max-Q but I LOVED the engineering puzzle. Adding more stuff added more mass, which meant more fuel, more rockets, which led to MORE FUEL and MORE ROCKETS. The cascade could be so severe that adding a single tiny scientific instrument suddenly meant a complete rethink of the entire propulsion system and that was AWESOME.

The other thing that KSP got right was it genuinely taught you about orbital mechanics, both unintuitive and quite dry, with tiny frog people and fireballs. By the time you realized you'd learned something, it was too late; You were already a rocket scientist. The other thing that KSP really nailed was that when you made a good spaceship, it usually looked like a proper spaceship. Nothing was decoration, everything did a job, big or small. You had a working ship that looked like a working ship and that felt incredibly right.

This ties strongly into how LEGION's unit and munitions editors have been designed. They're not a core part of the game, but if you like engineering puzzles there's a lot of interesting design choices to solve.

Dwarf Fortress

I don't even know where to start talking about this game. The misery spirals? Cats getting liver disease from licking alcohol laden puke off their paws? Leg hair curliness being inherited from parents through a genetics system? When it comes to simulating EVERYTHING Dwarf Fortress really is leader of the pack and second place is not even close. Everything that happens in the game usually has a simulated reason for doing so. Dwarves throwing punches in the tavern aren't doing it because they got a random "start a barfight" event. It's because you didn't make a bedroom for them and when you ran out of booze it was the final straw.

It takes a little digging to find the reasons sometimes, but they are always there. And that makes the simulation something you can trust. You aren't getting smacked by the RNG, something you did (or didn't do) led to this and you can learn what it was and do it better in future. That makes you and the game partners rather than adversaries (some of you might disagree with that, but Losing is Fun).

Everything in LEGION is, as much as possible, simulated from first principles. If your units are too slow, you might have added a weak engine or too much armour. If your tanks aren't able to see their targets, maybe consider making their turrets a bit taller. If your harvester is generating matter too slowly, it's because you gave it the smallest harvester module you could get away with. And LEGION gives you the tools you need to find out exactly why this is happening if you want to find it and use that knowledge to succeed in the future.

Final Thoughts

All of these games have contributed something to the game. The biggest challenge has been finding a way for all of this to co-exist in a way where they work together without stepping on each other's toes. That has been one of the biggest, and if I'm being honest, most rewarding problems to solve. I'm immensely grateful to the developers who came before me and so honored to be a part of that process, big or small.