The Next Great Starknet Game? How to Play Influence 🚀

Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs and the onchain frontier

Dear Bankless Nation, 

Two sci-fi games I’m a fan of are Eve Online and Stellaris—don’t ask me how many hours I’ve played! 😅

On our side of the block, I’m deep into the crypto gaming scene, and the Starknet games ecosystem is one of my favorites. 

A project I’ve been watching here with great interest is Influence, a space strategy colonization game that’s like a fully onchain cross between Eve Online and Stellaris. 

The idea? In Influence, players vie for dominance and control in a newly formed colony within the Adalian asteroid belt. The game’s Pre-Release is open and playable until April 10th, with the full launch coming soon after, so it’s a good time to dive in. 

Not sure where to start, though? No worries. I asked Jean-Paul Faraj, one of the builders behind Influence, if he’d like to create a beginner’s guide to the game, and he kindly accepted. 

Jean-Paul’s primer will get you up to speed on how to survive and thrive in Adalia and earn $SWAY, Influence’s in-game currency that will go live later this year! 👇

-WMP

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The gameplay of Influence consists of resource gathering, trade, and player-driven diplomacy. 

Players must make strategic decisions to expand their territories, establish trade routes, exploit resources, and build infrastructure and industries to generate wealth and influence within the game’s world. 

There are many different ways to play, but competitive play will be about finding your unique niche, whether solo or collaborative, and working to control your slice of the economy within Adalia.

Influence is a slow-paced game where every action has big impact and the player always has an abundance of choices. 

Players take on the role of a set of Crewmates, within one or multiple crews, consisting of five primary classes: Miner, Merchant, Engineer, Scientist, and Pilot. 

You can compose your crew of any combination of these classes, and from there your adventure begins. One thing to keep in mind: the more of one class you have, the more efficient you will be at undertaking their target actions, but at the cost of being slower and less efficient at others.

The game’s setting is within a realistic asteroid belt, where each asteroid has unique orbital mechanics that guide its orbits in real-time, leading players to make strategic decisions about when and where to travel within the game depending on the current or future positioning of these asteroids.

There are nearly 200 individual player-crafted goods, from ship hulls and electronics to extractors and warehouses. 

Each good will require potentially tens of processes to refine, manufacture, and craft. These have all been modeled from reality, with adjustments made to ensure fun gameplay. You don’t need a degree in chemical, mechanical, electrical engineering, or organic chemistry, but it may help! 

Influence will have realistic economic dynamics, as players will need to organize and collaborate on where to mine particular resources, how to deliver goods across the belt in their ships, and how to form liquid marketplaces to supply the demand of the other players. This gameplay element will ensure players can discover opportunities anywhere—find what’s needed and fill the gap!

As a slower-paced, highly strategic game, Influence is designed to be played over months and even years, and the goals are yours to decide. 

Each choice has many potential outcomes and the actions you take only make up a small percentage of the fun within the game. Additionally, every action will take time to complete. Building something isn’t instant and depending on the crewmates within your crew can take well past a day to complete. This also includes flights across the belt, as flights can take up to a month in real-time.

Influence is a sandbox environment, which is to say that it’s non-linear, and the story you get to play is not predetermined. Furthermore, Influence is a persistent and onchain world, giving your characters and game items permanence, as they all live on public blockchain infrastructure via Starknet. 

This onchainness allows the game to be continued and built around regardless of the creator studio’s upkeep, and since all actions are onchain, players have deep insight and access to all game actions taken. We will see stories of economic war, sabotage, espionage, empires rise and fall, and it will all be onchain for everyone to engage with how they please.

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In Influence, a player’s session can consist of a variety of actions: 

• 🪨 Mining 22 raw materials from 11 different types of asteroids

• 🏭 Producing items through the use of refineries, factories, bioreactors, and shipyards

• 🧱 Constructing and expanding settlements across the belt

• 🚀 Traveling and delivering cargo in ships across the belt

• 📈 Managing and trading on player-driven marketplaces

• ⛏️ Managing and leasing lots on controlled asteroids

Together, these actions allow a player to build out their own settlement steadily. However, it’s always important to remember that you’ll need to keep an eye on what the rest of the belt is doing. It’s a game of supply and demand if you are trying to compete and earn the most $SWAY!

Admittedly, Influence can feel like drinking from a firehouse at first due to the sheer scale and initial learning curve. To help here, we the creators at Unstoppable Games have provided a wealth of knowledge in our Wiki. We also have a series of tutorials on our Youtube, and our Discord community is filled with helpful resources and members, too.  

$SWAY is the core utility token and in-game currency of Influence and can also be used for any tool or game built around the Influence ecosystem. Players can earn $SWAY by:

• Extracting resources or building goods to sell at market

• Managing a market and collecting fees from each trade

• Leasing plots of your asteroid or members of your crew to other players

• Providing liquidity at markets to earn incentives set by market owners

• Trading and taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities

• Initial supply: 130 billion

• ~60 billion will be unlocked and liquid at launch

• The supply is inflationary per player activity to keep some stability, but it cycles back into the player base through gameplay

• $SWAY inflation goes into two buckets: Team & Community

$SWAY inflation is emitted programmatically via a “governor.” Simply put, inflation happens periodically, and the amount comes from either the increase or decrease in how much $SWAY is being used by the player base at a given time. The more usage compared to the previous period, the more that is emitted. If there is less usage of $SWAY in the following period, it goes back to the baseline. 

Remember, until April 10th anyone can participate for free in the open beta. There’s no need to download a client, as the game is fully in-browser. It is, however, on Ethereum’s Starknet L2 and requires players to download a wallet to play. 

While the game itself is complex and imaginative, one of its most salient pillars is how it’s built fully onchain, giving players, community, and third-party builders unparalleled access to contributing to and building alongside the creators. There are already close 15 third-party tools, and the game just hit open beta a few weeks ago! Look for more to come, then.

Also, as the game grows, so will its community, from which new ways to play will emerge. On top of this, over 50% of the $SWAY token is being distributed to the community, and some of that allocation is available to earn now through giving feedback, creating content, and completing missions.

Lastly, Influence is one of the first premiere games in the nascent Starknet ecosystem, and with Starknet’s recent announcement of 50 million STRK earmarked for funding gaming efforts, there may be even bigger opportunities ahead here for players and builders alike!

William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he writes the Metaversal newsletter on the onchain frontier, covering everything from AI projects to crypto games, as the team’s lead NFT analyst. With a background in creative writing, he writes fiction and publishes art on Ethereum in his free time. He lives in Washington.

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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

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