DESIGN DOCUMENTATIONS

Pods: Assembly & Organization

Combat Positioning
Each dot represents a slot a shape can fill. You cannot put more shapes into a position than there are slots to hold them.

Organization & Pod Structure

The pod is an assembly of shapes organized to work together as a group. Pods are what you see on the map, not individual shapes. Pods unite all shapes in that pod under one common mission and all shapes work to achieve the same mission goals.

Internally, the only structure that warrants any attention is the combat formation. Depending on the combat system that gets chosen (which is pending), shapes will be assigned a strategic position when the pod goes into combat. Currently we are leaning towards the representational combat system. This allows shapes in the pod to take one of 4 positions: Front, Rear, Side, or Center (F,R,S,C). Each position has strengths and weaknesses. Shapes are placed into positions when assembled, but can be moved or changed later in the game as well.

Pods can be joined or split once on the map. If for instance, there are two weaker battle-hardened pods that have few remaining shapes left, they can join together or trade shapes in the "Shape Trade" phase. This requires they be adjacent on the map. It is also possible for a pod to split and make two pods via the same mechanism.

Acquiring Shapes For Pod Assembly

There are 2 possible models for actually getting new shapes.

"Purchase Plan"

With the Purchase Plan, you use energy you collect out in the field to "buy" shapes. Each shape would have a specific price associated with it. You would simply pick and choose which shapes you wanted to purchase and click as many times as you wanted until your reserve was filled.

"Tetris Queue"

This model gets its name from that little queue in the game Tetris which shows which tetrads you are going to be dropping next. It displays the next 3 shapes you'll have the frantic chance to try to place at the bottom of the well.

In the AXIS Tetris Queue model of assembly, all shapes are the same in terms of energy costs. The difference is that you do not choose which shapes you want: they simply show up when they can be afforded. For example: If your harvester pods are out in the field trying to collect energy, as soon as you reach the minimum purchase amount for a new shape (let's say 5 energy points), a new shape is randomly created from guidelines set by sliders at the game's outset and placed into your reserve. This way, you never know what shape you'll end up with and will be forced to work with what you've got.

Assembly & Map Insertion

Either way, when you want to contruct a new pod, you should have shapes that you have "purchased" with energy sitting in your reserve (by either of the above models). You start with a blank slate for a pod and then pick and choose which shapes you want to add into the pod.

One major factor in pod assembly is the pod size cap and shape sizes. Each shape has a size value associated with it. All pods have a size cap. If say, the size cap is 10, the sum total of the sizes of all shapes in the pod may not exceed 10. This forces a strategic decision: do you wish to have more smaller, weaker shapes in the pod, or fewer but larger, more powerfull shapes?

When in the pod assembly phase, you click and drag shapes from the reserve directly onto a graphical representation of the combat formations. Each position in the formation has a limited amount of slots to fill. Thus, not all shapes can be in the center, not all can be in the back, etc.

Once the pod is to your liking structurally and you click FINISH, you then choose an unoccupied tile inside you home base to set the pod down to. At this point you can assign the pod a mission as you would any other pod on the map.