03-06-2013, 09:01 PM
Another thought might be to make it more like an RTS.
You start off with a bunch of ships:
Big chunky battleship
3 destroyers
2 miners
2 fuel processors
2 agricultural ships
1 cargo ship
1 mobile shipyard
You can park in "deep space" which is basically like an invulnerable area (it's impossible for anyone to find your fleet in deep space). When you want to do something you can bring any combination of ships with you. You only "die" if you lose your last ship. So, for example, you decide to explore a moon for minerals -- you park your fleet in deep space near the moon. You bring in a destroyer to check it out and if it looks safe you bring in a miner to grab some minerals. Someone jumps in with 15 battleships you go oh shit and jump out. If you're too slow maybe you lost your destroyer and miner but you still have the rest of your fleet.
This way the game can be "permadeath" in a sense but it's going to be really hard to totally kill someone, especially once they've built up their fleet to have a lot of spare miners and cargo ships so if you wipe out their warships they can slink off and try to build back up somewhere else.
Since you have a fleet instead of a single ship, there's an endless amount of advancement available. Not only can you upgrade your ships but you can just get more. An extra shipyard will help you build faster. Extra cargo ships will let you carry more reserve materials, etc. Maybe you just upgrade everything with armor and guns and jump in your entire fleet everywhere you go or you play it cautious. And while your "deep space" fleet is invulnerable the real good stuff may require more permanent structures built on planets and moons which other players can readily find and attack. Like a mining ship can extract common minerals at a medium pace but a permanent mining base can extract common minerals at a fast pace and a lot of rarer things that mining ships can't handle. Anyone can make "Shield I" from common elements but "Shield IV" takes rare minerals that only a mining colony can dig up.
This idea might allow the combat engine to be somewhat easier too because players can fuss over the tactics and layouts of many ships rather than trying to make one big ship interesting enough on its own, and maybe it can even be heavily AI controlled, like Gratuitous Space Battles, which may solve the problem of "offline combat". I protect my base Trade Wars style -- by parking a fuckload of ships near it and if you want my base you have to clear out my ships first and it's going to be my AI versus yours.
I could envision something like battle zones being limited to 30 ships per side (ummmm, too much radio interference to have more than that! warp drive harmonics setup a destructive resonance! insert other treknology excuse here!) but as your ships die, more can warp in. So I could protect a base with 30 ships on station and 500 more in deep space with automatic orders to jump in as room opens up while I log off for the night. Someone coming to attack my ground base might not have any idea if he's up against 30 ships or 3000 and the guy with 3000 doesn't have as huge of an advantage over the guy with 300, other than he has a lot more reinforcements.
The fleet + deep space idea also means that a mining colony, for example, could warp out minerals to the fleet once every 30 minutes, automatically, rather than having to setup a situation where players build up (and lose) tons of goods due to a 4am strike by some guy in Russia. He can still do the 4am strike to wipe out your base but when you log in the next day you'll at least have whatever you pulled out of the ground before he killed it.
The Gratuitous Space Battles type combat (fully AI controlled) could also setup things like being able to have multiple battles going at the same time. I've got three bases under attack and I'm attacking two others all at the same time.
Of course now I've spun completely away from your original concept of a Freelancer type game.
The problem with Freelancer type games, though, is dealing with that whole "long term gameplay" problem. And for 24/7 universes you have to deal with what happens when your guy logs out.
I think a game of Trade Wars meets Gratuitous Space Battles meets EVE could solve a lot of really hard problems that plague other MMOGs. Dunno what the appeal would be like but *I* like it!
Step 1:
Build a client-server model where a server controls some ships that fight each other with AI while the client displays the action.
You start off with a bunch of ships:
Big chunky battleship
3 destroyers
2 miners
2 fuel processors
2 agricultural ships
1 cargo ship
1 mobile shipyard
You can park in "deep space" which is basically like an invulnerable area (it's impossible for anyone to find your fleet in deep space). When you want to do something you can bring any combination of ships with you. You only "die" if you lose your last ship. So, for example, you decide to explore a moon for minerals -- you park your fleet in deep space near the moon. You bring in a destroyer to check it out and if it looks safe you bring in a miner to grab some minerals. Someone jumps in with 15 battleships you go oh shit and jump out. If you're too slow maybe you lost your destroyer and miner but you still have the rest of your fleet.
This way the game can be "permadeath" in a sense but it's going to be really hard to totally kill someone, especially once they've built up their fleet to have a lot of spare miners and cargo ships so if you wipe out their warships they can slink off and try to build back up somewhere else.
Since you have a fleet instead of a single ship, there's an endless amount of advancement available. Not only can you upgrade your ships but you can just get more. An extra shipyard will help you build faster. Extra cargo ships will let you carry more reserve materials, etc. Maybe you just upgrade everything with armor and guns and jump in your entire fleet everywhere you go or you play it cautious. And while your "deep space" fleet is invulnerable the real good stuff may require more permanent structures built on planets and moons which other players can readily find and attack. Like a mining ship can extract common minerals at a medium pace but a permanent mining base can extract common minerals at a fast pace and a lot of rarer things that mining ships can't handle. Anyone can make "Shield I" from common elements but "Shield IV" takes rare minerals that only a mining colony can dig up.
This idea might allow the combat engine to be somewhat easier too because players can fuss over the tactics and layouts of many ships rather than trying to make one big ship interesting enough on its own, and maybe it can even be heavily AI controlled, like Gratuitous Space Battles, which may solve the problem of "offline combat". I protect my base Trade Wars style -- by parking a fuckload of ships near it and if you want my base you have to clear out my ships first and it's going to be my AI versus yours.
I could envision something like battle zones being limited to 30 ships per side (ummmm, too much radio interference to have more than that! warp drive harmonics setup a destructive resonance! insert other treknology excuse here!) but as your ships die, more can warp in. So I could protect a base with 30 ships on station and 500 more in deep space with automatic orders to jump in as room opens up while I log off for the night. Someone coming to attack my ground base might not have any idea if he's up against 30 ships or 3000 and the guy with 3000 doesn't have as huge of an advantage over the guy with 300, other than he has a lot more reinforcements.
The fleet + deep space idea also means that a mining colony, for example, could warp out minerals to the fleet once every 30 minutes, automatically, rather than having to setup a situation where players build up (and lose) tons of goods due to a 4am strike by some guy in Russia. He can still do the 4am strike to wipe out your base but when you log in the next day you'll at least have whatever you pulled out of the ground before he killed it.
The Gratuitous Space Battles type combat (fully AI controlled) could also setup things like being able to have multiple battles going at the same time. I've got three bases under attack and I'm attacking two others all at the same time.
Of course now I've spun completely away from your original concept of a Freelancer type game.
The problem with Freelancer type games, though, is dealing with that whole "long term gameplay" problem. And for 24/7 universes you have to deal with what happens when your guy logs out.
I think a game of Trade Wars meets Gratuitous Space Battles meets EVE could solve a lot of really hard problems that plague other MMOGs. Dunno what the appeal would be like but *I* like it!
Step 1:
Build a client-server model where a server controls some ships that fight each other with AI while the client displays the action.