This thread is for a mobile game, but it could be applicable to a solo board game.
I'll give you a bit of background story to make you understand where the design comes from.
Many years ago, there was a NES game called Overlord also known on the PC as Supremacy. Not to be confused with the recent Overlord game where you control minions.
It's a real-time strategy game that has no similarity with Starcraft and it's friends. You basically manage your colony buildings, your transport ships and your combat ships ( which ironically are only used to land troops). Combat is a dexterity minigame.
Many years ago I tried to make a board game out of this game idea. I wanted have a rotating stellar system to make certain planets closer to others for a certain period of time. The game would be multiplayer instead of 2 player and the goal would be to be the first player to make a colony ship with structure, fuel and population.
Deep Space Colonisation Prototype Picture
Unfortunately, it did work very well, I had to handle population and buildings of each planet separately which was pretty annoying because the information was kept secretly. Rotating the solar system was also annoying.
Now due to the real time rotation of the planets which seems like a very good mechanism, implementing the game as a video game made more sense. I was thinking in making a real time mobile game where like in overlord, the user interface is made of various custom panels.
Now, the video game implementation did impose certain restrictions itself. Since in a real time game I might not have the time to do sophisticated AI. Because I have little experience in AI, having to compete with other factions will be removed.
So basically, you are alone in the system, which brings me to the issue: Where is the challenge?
So I thought that maybe what prevents you from automatically succeeding is a series of pseudo random event that can occurs. Pseudo random because your choices could trigger or accelerate/slow down the occurrence of those events.
One thing I thought is that there could be rebels. They could control planets of their own, but they won't necessarily try to expand, mobilize fleets, etc. They will only trigger random events since they are everywhere. But if you keep your colony unhappy, rebel activities will occur much more often.
There could be complication on planets preventing easy colonization, like natives which could be a threat to your colony.
There could be internal politics issues. I thought of having some sort of advisor for each field (security, colony, logistic, etc) where some of them could support the rebels if you do not treat them well (like in Junta). There could also be a traitor in the group at the start of the game, and you have to find it.
Another issue was combat. In another thread we have discussed that it could be interesting to have ship duels instead of fleet battlers. But that would require the game to pause then resolve battle. I might not want the game to be interrupted, so combat would be auto-resolved. But the nature of combat will be much different now as there is no direct competition. It should feel more as assuring security to prevent bad events from happening.
Else player could manage their cargo transportation. I does feel like work, but with the need to escort the ships, and the rotating system which might require more complex planet jumping, handling the Logistic manually could be an interesting experience.
Questions?
So how could I make a solo solar system colonization game without direct opposition interesting to play? Because in the end, it will be very hard to lose, all the complications imposed by the game are just there to make it harder to win.
Does the handling of random events, production and logistic enough? You cannot ask too much because it's a realtime game, and I have seen the concept of random events in many solo games.
First of all, I want to keep the players in the game bubble. So the game will have an end, and will not interrupt the user's life by sending notifications at different time of the day.
There are some similarities with sandbox games, or production games like for example "World of Kefling" which is basically an RTS where you build stuff but never fight any enemies. But the problem with this game is that there is little replay value.
Or postpone negative effects?
By pseudo random events, I meant that the actions of the players could influence the occurrence of events. For example, if people are unhappy for a long period of time, there is more likely to have riots. If one of your advisor is a traitor, there is more likely to have negative events in his area of responsibility. So the user have a degree of control on the ocurrence of events.