X-Wars is back...

The beginning

X-Wars was originally invented by Sebastian Lagemann and developed together with Nils Mitoussis in 2002 (see Wikipedia). Initially launched in German language and later translated into French, English, Polish, Spanish and Portugese it had quite a few fans.

Now, a decade after X-Wars was shutdown Sebastian “Degola” Lagemann decided to resurrect X-Wars initially as a hobby project with the hope to attract and excite a few players to play a well-working, sophisticated and complex game with certainly some old ideas resurrected but enriched with a lot of ideas which haven’t been possible 20 years ago.

Storyline

The massive exodus due to tremendous heavy fights between Terrans, Xianian, Bugserianer and Noberian left the original universe behind with completely eliminated and destroyed planets. A super weapon developed by the Bugserians to destroy every life in the galaxy except Bugserians was sabotaged by Xianians and ended up into creating a massive black-hole which sucked in every single sun, planet and life which left nothing other than blackness behind.

Fortunately enough a small delegation of all 4 races, at that time busy with lengthy and never-ending negotiations, was hidden in secracy at the border of the galaxy to find a way out of thousands of years of meaningless destruction and terror. Lucky for them and life today, they noted that something terrible was going on and managed to get away.

Another thousands of years within a sophisticated stasis bubble the last remains of civilisation managed to find a new universe and something which looks like a home. This new universe behaves differently than what they knew before though. Resources are even more scarce and with the limit-less urge to survive it will just be a matter of time before new conflicts arise…

The main mechanics

X-Wars Resurrection will become even more complex than the initial version and while it starts with a similar UI/UX there are some ambitions to make it more interactive and more visual over time depending on the game’s success.

The main elements are:

Resources

There will be 4 major categories of resources.

Raw resources

Raw materials are the good old resources:

• Pig-iron
• Crystal
• Frubin
• Orizin
• Raw Frurozin (on some planets, requires refining)
• Gold (scarce, not available on starting planets)

However, the efficiency of mining and collecting resources is hugely depending on the planet itself. While the starter planets will be sufficient for early stage space travel it will not be enough to stay alone at home. Read more in the section Universes & Galaxies.

Melted resources

It is possible to melt materials with a lot of different combinations. This is new and specific constructions will allow to melt solid, liquid and gas-based materials with each other. Additionally to that it will be possible to melt already melted products with each other. While there is a given set of expected melted resources required by constructions, research and other basic requirements the possibilities of melting become almost endless and a major component to construct more powerful spaceships.

The tech-tree, and it’s not final yet so please bare with me, will allow to have a melting complexity depth of a maximum of 4. As you can imagine, there will be already quite a bit of combinations possible and it wouldn’t be X-Wars if you can’t name combinations the first time someone crafted it successfully ;-).

To give a simple example, instead of Frurozin becoming just another resource, mined from nowhere, needs now to be melted by a corresponding factory which not just creates Frurozin but also consumes Frubin and Orizin accordingly.

Fuel

Spaceships will require fuel, and certainly really a lot of it. As bigger and faster a spaceship needs to get as more fuel is required. Frurozin is certainly the resource required to ensure your spaceship can actually do anything.

Planet energy

While the initial basic constructions don’t require energy this changes with increasing level of these constructions. Energy production is required to support more sophisticated constructions and if not taken care of the constructions will stop operating and working. While there is the possibility to switch off constructions for a period of time it will certainly impact every aspect of production, exploration, trading and war. Obvious that opponents of course see everything related to energy production on the planet as a prime-target.

Constructions

Constructions consume as usual a bunch of resources, you can level them up but next to that you’ll also be able to construct multiple constructions of the same type which can be levelled up accordingly. This becomes quite important to support multiple melted resources at the same time. But, every planet has a limit of constructions and there are some planets around which have a more supporting atmosphere for specific melting combinations.

Overall the following constructions categories will be available:

Basic constructions

• Planet Management
• Mining
• Melting
• Factories
• Energy
• Storage
• Research

Advanced constructions

• Communication
• Trade
• Alliances

Fleet & Player vs. Player

• Spaceship parts/components factories
• Spaceship assembly
• Fleet Control
• Espionage

Spaceships & Components

The design of spaceships is the crucial part of X-Wars Resurrection. The variety and diversity of spaceships is tremendous and highly complex.

While everyone will start with a simple set of initial spaceships requiring a specific set of components in the long-term you’ll be able to design complete new spaceships on your own just with individually produced components.

Components themselves need to be produced individually with the help of specialised factories on the planet. Each component has an unique purpose and therefore corresponding attributes.

These produced components ultimately can then be assembled to a spaceship within the spaceship assembly. But assembling a spaceship isn’t the only thing you can do with spaceship components: Trading and transporting produced components is an essential part and becomes crucial to benefit from each other race.

The following categories of components are available:

• Spaceship bodies
• Storage (Material and Fuel are separated)
• Engines
• Weapons
• Defense
• Shields
• Camouflage
• Communication
• Scanners

Universes & Galaxies

In regards to world creation the primary goal of X-Wars is to create a universe where old and new players can meet at some point. To avoid that old and super powerful players raiding new players the basic concepts are relying on resource availability as well as distance. While it is in theory possible to reach a player started 12 months later the amount of resources and the time it will take to get to that players origin is just not worth it.

However, the goal and idea is that resources are scarce and to increase output and throughput of resource mining & melting and the positioning of the most valuable planets will ensure that you’ll meet similar strong players and ultimately alliances.

Overall the concept of universes and galaxies are the following:

• Universe > Galaxy > System > Planet in regards to distance
• Each player starts in their own system with no-one close to them
• Each system has exactly 10 usable planets, depending on chosen race with different outputs
• Basic raw resources are generally unlimited available but efficiency of mining differs from planet to planet
• There are unlimited galaxies and systems within galaxies.
• Player distribution is depending on signup-date, as later you sign-up as more distant you’ll be from the first player, first by systems (every day increases), then by galaxies (every month a new galaxy)
• Players and in fact alliances are able to invite new players to their own starter galaxy

Alliances

The alliance system will allow to form collations between players to achieve milestones and fight together against other alliances and/or overpowered players. Alliances can have contracts with other alliances around trading and attacking.

Alliances have the following advantages and shared resource options:

• Alliance storage of raw resources and components to share with alliance members in need
• Alliance fleet where every player can contribute with ships
• Alliance diplomacy: War, Piece & Trade treaties with other alliances

Each alliance can choose of one of three government systems:

• Dictatorship: Basically the creator of the alliance is the first dictator and makes decisions in the name of the whole alliance
• Democracy: As soon as there is more than one member in an alliance each significant decision will be voted for, e.g. resource requests, fleets, treaties and alliance player memberships
• Anarchy: Everyone can do whatever they want: Yes, including throwing everyone out of the alliance, FUN! ;-)

Trade

Trading is an integral component and while you can trade easily with ships there might in the long-run a trading system available where NPCs or players themselves become mercenaries and executing trades.

Races

There are 4 races and currently no factions. The 4 races are:

• Terrans
• Xianer
• Noberianer
• Bugserianer

There are significant differences for developing and producing spaceship components for each of the races.

• Terrans are a good average of attack, defense and trade,
• Xianer are excellent in trading and camouflage
• Noberianer are excellent in defense and espionage
• Bugserianer are excellent in attacks

Footnote

X-Wars Resurrection is at the beginning, the initial work has started and a first alpha version is to be expected ready by the end of Q2/2023. If you want to signup for an early alpha version please follow this link: Alpha Signup

While there is some hope that X-Wars Resurrection will be able to make some money to cover costs and hopefully at some point makes it even possible to have a few people working full-time on X-Wars the idea stays to have a well-balanced, good working and stable game which doesn’t need to profit from cruel and hard pay-2-win mechanics.

Even though we’ll charge for a few features the idea is, as of right now, to have more a subscription like approach where everyone pays the same and gets the same but not over-powering advantages. The subscription price will be probably somewhere around 5 to 10 USD/month with some discount on a yearly subscription.

Keep in mind that the game concept as described here is a significant piece of work and requires constant motivation to bring it to life, so feel free to drop some motivating lines via mail for now ;-).

Please contact sebastian@xwars.net if you want to help with either graphic & user-interface design (ember.js), backend-development (event-driven NodeJS & MongoDB) marketing, social media & community management and/or translations.