The Ultimate HW2 Meta-Game - WE HAVE REPORTING!

[Starfisher]

I'm sure people tried to do this for HW - create a persistant online universe where the outcome of individual battles effected the outcome of some larger war. I remember the good old days of the Total Annihilation Boneyards - and they were GOOD days. I sincerely hope we can get a good meta game going for HW2. I'll start here by laying out the groundwork.

Online persistant universe

Battle Map
Basically, this would be a map of nearby solar systems and stellar objects, divided into zones centered on something significant. Each zone would be assigned a different map according to its character. For instance, a zone that has a nebula in it would be assigned a map with a like-colored and compositioned nebula. Click for example (http://members.tripod.com/dr_phil/map.gif) (Copy the shortcut to the address bar, then add a space after it)

This hasty map is just an example; the real sector map would either be zoomed in on a few objects or much more cluttered. There would have to a battle line of sorts, whereby the only zones open to play would be those in contention.

Another way of doing things would be to link each object to its neighbors, thereby creating a sort of web. Objects in contention would be those linked to other objects controlled by differing factions.

UI - Chat and Game finding
A nice HW themed GUI. It would perform all the usual chat functions, as well as provide a
way for playerS to seek each other out and pick a zone to fight in. Trappings such as stats and rank according to a win loss ratio could be added.

Main server
Basically, this would keep track of how many wins for each faction there are in each zone,
and provide the backbone for the chat server. It would keep track of each faction's wins and losses for each zone. Every twenty-four hours or so, it would update the battle map to reflect changes in control according to the win/loss ratio of each zone.

The Game

Eventually one faction would take over all the zones, or capture a command zone, or in some way decisively end fighting in a sector. That sector would be declared captured, and a new map would
be loaded. There could be an overall galaxy map to provide the possibility of one faction completely winning, or there could simply be no end to the sector maps. Either case provides for a very long overall struggle.

As individuals accumulate wins, they gain rank or are rewarded in some other way. This would serve a double purpose:
a) motivation to continue playing, however small
b) differentiate between the experienced/uber-skilled and the noobs/bad players
Of course, there's not much you can do to prevent smurfing, but this at least gives people a chance to actually play someone else at their skill level.

Players could also simply ignore the meta-game and play games for fun. There's already a matchmaking service inherent in the whole idea, so creating a game outside the game universe wouldn't be too hard.

Main Difficulties

(A) Unobtrusively monitoring game results. You don't want to lag the game by constantly pinging it. Preferably, players would start a game which would be played independent of the main server. When it finished, a report of the winner's faction would be sent to the main server for scorekeeping, and they would be reconnected with the chat.

(B) CODERS! Unlike most mods, this doesn't call for a major overhaul of game content. Instead, a semi-complicated GUI must be created, along with the main server and monitoring functionality. Artists will be needed to make the GUI pretty, but coders will be needed to make it work and properly implement the server.

Call to arms! (begging for interest)
Hopefully I've sparked your interest. If you think you could contribute something to a service such as this, fling a post. If you tried to do something similiar with HW and have dire warnings, lets hear the story. At the very least, a service such as this would replace the evil that is Gamespy...

[Retroboy]

It sounds very interesting, and could actually be well adapted to a sort of singleplayer kind of game too - a campaign to conquer the galaxy, of sorts, using skirmish maps.

There are probably some more challenges that should be identified before diving in - lemme think a bit and get back to you on what some of them could be.

-- Retro

[Ammon Ra]

it's doable. a similar MP idea was implemented for TA (total Annihilation) with dozens if not hundreds of comanders batteling it out to conquer the other side.

never had the chance to try it though. apparently it's stil active ;)

[Magus]

I mentioned my own idea like this somewhere else, but one of the problems I came up with is people could sabotage one sides war effort just for the hell of it. The main difference though is I was thinking that one battle would decide a system, so the battle lines would change constantly.

[SvK]

This sounds a lot like Empire vs. Republic (http://www.empirevsrepublic.net), which is a big turn-based campaign that uses the Star Wars: New Rebellion (http://swnr.themaw.net/) mod to decide the battles. I hope something like this gets started for HW2.

[Proxzee]

MMORPGs are really popular because of the idea of a persistant universe. The problem is that a dedicated server is required to track all player stats.

Your suggestion about having the smaller games sending information back to the server is good, but I wonder if such an archetecture could be implemented.

I have a few ideas to contribute though:

In order to have a good persistant universe there are few things that must be considered.

on interest of the player:
To keep a player interested gameplay must be involved. Homeworld's persistant fleet is a good idea since it gives each player a sense of personal belonging. There fleet is their own.

another idea is to scrap the idea of controlling a fleet. Instead the player is given one ship which can be modified througout the course of the game. This will allow more players to play at the same time because their are less ships to process.

Modification of ships would involve trading salvaged reckage from battles for RUs or salvaging useful technology. Technology can be bought from bentusi tradeships, earned through a Diablo II type quest, or salvaged from wreckage.

Eventually a players ship would become a representation of what that player has accomplished. Certain Rare parts would be like trophies. And the ships stats would be tweaked to the players liking.

I would gladly post more if you are interested. I have concepts of battle system mechanics and stat tweaking methods. as well as a few other intersting ideas.

[Starfisher]

Hmm... that last post is a departure for what I had in mind, but interesting.

What I am suggesting is basically the Boneyards for HW2. For those who don't know, the Boneyards was a service for Total Annihilation, an RTS. It provided a battle map, which consisted of ~20 planets. Players would chat in the provided rooms, and battle on the planets. Two factions were available, and as one side built up wins the map would change to reflect it. Eventually one side conquered the map, and a new one was loaded. There was a whole rank structure implemented: You had to have a certain ratio of wins/losses to advance, play 'training' games with other players to advance in the higher ranks etc. It was a lot of fun, but it died when Cavedog started to founder.

So this isn't really an MMORPG. It's still an RTS, albeit one with slightly more of a purpose ascribed to individual battles, and a MMORPG-like community.

I think you misunderstood me - I didn't mean that there would be a persistant HW2 in-game universe. I meant another layer on top of that where players could find oppponents, play a game of HW2, and have the results matter.

Interesting idea though. Reminds me of EvE. There might be some insurmountable limitations... namely the six-player limit to multiplayer games.

[Retroboy]

'fish - I too was thinking of some kind of persistent game-state universe, but the problem with this is that you have to save that gamestate. So here's a mechanism that might help avoid a lot of work behind that process. The issue is that this one would require the "shell" to send the game some starting conditions, but it doesn't require a "map".

For a very simplistic approach to create an empire with ranks that matter, I like the idea of the online scrabble-like game "Literati" - where you win a lot of points if you play someone higher ranked than you, but win only a few points if you play someone that's lower ranked.

My idea extends as follows - you start as an empire controlling, say, 10 mcyl (million cubic lightyears) of space. If you win, you control more space (and get bragging rights), but you also extend yourself a bit to rule the new space. This means you might not be able to defend yourself as well in your next battle, since your available defensive fleet is more scattered across your greater volume of controlled space. However, if you lose, you find your ability to fight on a single front is actually (randomly) increased because you have less overall front to patrol and can therefore get more resources to the battle site quickly. Of course, if you lose too much space, you lose your empire and the other player gets a much more massive one - which spreads his forces even thinner.

Further rules include not allowing one player to play more than two matches in a row against the same opponent.

Here's a four-player example "persistent" universe, based on the this formula. Each player starts with 10mcly. All games start with 500 resource units, a momship, and a resource collector, unless otherwise noted.

Match 1:
Player A vs. B --> A wins
Player C vs. D --> D wins

End of Match 1:
Player A: 10.5 mcly
Player B: 9.5 mcly
Player C: 10.5 mcly
Player D: 9.5 mcly

Match 2:
Player A vs D - D has a smaller empire and so starts next game with additional 200RU
Player B vs C - B has a smaller empire and so starts next game with a corvette hull already researched
A wins
B wins

End of Match 2:
Player A: 11.0 mcly
Player B: 10.0 mcly
Player C: 10.0 mcly
Player D: 9.0 mcly

For the next battle, some penalty might apply to A, such as a lower number of resources to start, or a damaged mothership - depending on who he plays.

...and so on. Other random starting conditions that convey advantages or disadvantages could include a short freeze on the build queue (assume a system broke down), already-functional subsystems, a bonus for all ion cannons of one hit point damage, a very close resource deposit, and so on.

-- Retro

[Dawn Falcon]

The two current, FAN MADE, Metagame services for TA can be found at www.gamingbattleleague.com and www.phoenixworx.org

I helped create PW.

Something similar for HW2 would rock.

[Starfisher]

Yes. Exactly that, but for HW.

[Dawn Falcon]

I'll prod the guys and see if any of em are interested in HW2 :P

[Dawn Falcon]

Okay, spoken to Mecha. Reporting games will NOT be in for release. Maybe in a patch. So until then, no point considering this.

[Ammon Ra]

reporting games??? well, i guess that wasn't implemented in TA when it was created now was it? :p
create a small program that saves, and sends ending stats to a central server after each game. a Seperate program/modification that would allow something like that. That's how the GBL got around that problem...THe winners, loosers, and "trainning" hours are saved to a file, sent to a server, and the respctive player's stats are updated. not usre if exactly how works...but u get idea.

[Dawn Falcon]

Ammon Ra, actually yes - TA had a DLL for services such as MPlayer from day 1 to retrieve results. The Boneyards DLL was far later on reverse-engineered by both Cire and the Swedish Yankspankers and ended up in GBL and PW respectively.

So while the TA DLL's can hook the game results directly, it's something which was allways intended to be possible.

[Voidhawk]

Ah yes I remember years ago crying out for a HW version of Boneyards. TA sales and replayability was extended by YEARS beyond the normal lifespan of a good RTS because of it and CaveDog and gamers reaped great benifits.

To this day I shake my head and wonder at shortsighted devs who fail to implement the simplest of procedures to help extend the life and popularity of their RTS games.

[Swifty]

blame the marketing dept and serria- to them every game is the same - money

[Retroboy]

shortsighted devs Point the finger in the right direction, Void. ;) It's the game's manufacturers that decide ultimately what is in and what is out, not the devs. Something that seems like a simple change can add a month to the release cycle, and cost a lot of money in the process. Devs must get permission to add anything to a game in progress if it's not designed in from day one, otherwise they can singlehandedly blow the schedule.

-- Retro

[Dawn Falcon]

Depends on how the change management process is handled - good teams have a procedure for it, yes

[A176]

New multiplayer game styles: Since multiplayer games use script code, the user could create new styles of game play using our scripting system. To implement capture the flag, for example, they could keep track of who has the various flags and declare a winner when the game is won. Because this may require tuning of MP options, we will be providing specific support for this type of mod in our MP game setup screen.

How in-depth this will be, I have no idea...if somehow we are allowed to retrieve the data from these games, we can send it over the net to a central server to be stored.

[Tagar]

would be nice also if the border regions would supply renforsments (tho a 1 region player would get more than a 10 region player with 3 regions border the area that is attacked tho more often.)

that consept was nice in Emperor Battle for dune tho was not good in the game.

[pack_mule]

You could take it even further as to implement shipyards, dedicated to constructing ships, so the more teritory you gain, the RUs you get, and the stronger your manufacturing muscle. The shipyards would continually churn out fleets, ready to battle, since the idea of engaging the enemy with nothing but a mothership and a few scouts is ridiculous. And, on top of that, Relic could add new structures as headquarters, which, when destroyed, would result in that empire to lose control of that sector (only to be restore when the structure is rebuilt)


However, just having a persistent world online would probably require Relic to charge a fee for playing. Boo.

[Starfisher]

Its not an everquest-like persistant world. There's a rough battle map with territories players would fight over. Like a Risk board. I would find someone in IRC or some attached chat client, say, "Hey, lets go have a game in the blue nebula", we'd play a regular old HW2 multiplayer game with the map designated for the blue nebula region and the results would be added to the overall tally. After 24 hrs, if my side won more games in the blue nebula than the other, we would take control and open up other regions for combat.

So its not like you join and then start hyperspacing around a huge galaxy looking for bad guys. The 'persistant' part is the overall battle map.

And of course, this idea is on hold until there is some sort of reporting mechanism patched into HW2.

[Zefram]

i like the warping around looking for badies idea

[Starfisher]

You get to buy the server farm and pay for maintainence.

[Dawn Falcon]

The server would NOT be a problem if I was involved.

[Starfisher]

Hmm... if we actually had a dedicated server...

Nah, the game would have to be uber-hacked to allow for something like that to work. Unless...

This is just me rambling, but what if we were to write a simple game that mimiced Homeworld? Essentially, this would be where you "hypered around" in until you found an enemy. Then, when you entered within a certain range of said enemy, the game would fire up Homeworld on a map that resembled whatever area of space your encounter occured.

It wouldn't have to be much more complex than the sensors manager on a larger scale. It could even be as simple as a top-down representation of the galaxy. Each jump would move you some small distance. You would have a detection range, and if anyone showed up within it you could attack or run away or what have you. Hell, I could write something similar to that in Java right now. I think I'll wait till I learn C before attempting anything though.

Depending on how powerful the scripting language is, you could store the fleet you had previously and load it up on the next map... although that brings up all sorts of balance issues.

Tying in the original meta-game idea, there could be key installations scattered all over the place that factions could fight over... supply lines and what have you...

I'll stop rambling, write all this down, then read it and see its worth keeping. It probably wont be once reality sets in, but this would be a very cool idea.

[Style]

This is a pretty cool idea, but, none of you seemed to consider this:

The "persistant map" could (should?) be 3 dimensional, possibly with 3 or more "factions".
A 3d map of a galaxy would be pretty good...
OpenGL rendered?
I'm thinking something like you see in the HW sensor manager, not a cell system.

Dynamically generated maps...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maybe this is wrong, its probably just repeating a lot of stuff and taking up space, but maybe you'd get a useful idea here...
I don't know the best way to set up this system, but in my mind, it would work sorta like this:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Games could be created/joined through a gamespy replacement program.
Clients would see the map, choose areas of interest, and connect to the server to see where other players are (etc).
The server would decide who plays who, in which zones and what type of starting forces/reinforcements each side has. It could also track each user's stats and such. Maybe it could set up games with 3 or more players too.
Server rules could also disallow games in certain areas, or games with certain players/conditions as well.

Then, the client programs would dynamically generate a map on the fly (these maps are simple text files, right?). The map would include special features as indicated from the world map (nebulae, stars, planets, etc), and would reflect the amount of influence, control, or whatever each faction has in the map. (Side A may have a huge fleet here, while side B has three ships).
This may discourage players from doing missions deep within enemy territory (if the server allows them), as side A would have a huge fleet, while side B may have only 1 carrier and a fighter wing at the start.

Some sort of comparison by each client would help avoid map cheating:
if client A's version is very different from client B's version, the game would be canceled and this event could be reported to the server, flagging both players.
If the maps are similar enough, one would be chosen at random.

Games would be initiated with HW2's ip game option...

Results would be uploaded to the server by both player's client programs. If either player uploads differing results, then both could be watched for future problems.
The differing results could be saved, to implement if one player is found to be a cheater in the future, or just discarded.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The biggest problem I see is obtaining/maintaining a server (and the service) and getting the game results if Relic doesn't help.
Could be done though...

[InocPrime]

Thats what we're shooting for with Dark Matter.

[Starfisher]

Which part of that? Dynamically generated maps? Cheat protection?

[Ammon Ra]

well, afaik the entire mp structure like GBl for TA.

k, thx dawn :)

however, if the game creates a stats file like those in Hw, it shouldn't (??????) be dificult to create a small program that takes those stats and sends them to a central server. :2cents:

[theBlind]

One thing that has not been mentioned yet: Why not start the new MP game with your OLD fleet.
Persistant fleets in multi and I´d install a toilet in front of my PC... :D

If you are beaten, you could go to some backwater sector and harvest to re-build your fleet.
Also, you should not have a mothership, but start with a carrier and a mobile refinery or something alike
Then you order your capital ships from the empire, so you have to wait in line untill it gets delivered. Makes you protect them better and I think it would be a very fun addidtion. Of course there should then be some way to retreat from battle.

[Shooter]

I thought of this a year or two ago... just been waiting for someone else to think of it cause my ideas never work. Since you claimed the idea, it's your idea - that means it'll work!


Here's a contribution:
The whole pinging thing... instead, at the end of the game each player's computer sends the statistics (who won, 1st, 2nd, 3rd ect). This gets rid of the need to ping the game all through it while making sure the results get to the server.

Some sort of registration and char system will be needed to defeat alot of the sabotage. That should be rather simple.

an option to retreat(how'd your ships get here? Can they still leave?), and every game fought to the last hyperspace/escape capable ship... (who just scuttle's thier whole fleet when thier carriers and ms is destroyed?)

Depending on how hard it would be, it'd be cool to have the other race ships - kadeshi, turanic, taiidani, and other hiigaran flavors (kushan, somtaaw) - available to help differentiate between factions. Depending on how hard it is to switch around ships in mods, "custom" fleet styles for factions created through a mix of different ships/technologies would be awesome.

I also think the player's fleet should be be kept track of on the server... so they can start with say a carrier and some fighters. or, even better... a supply frigate, 2 more frigates, some fighters, and some corvettes (of your choosing)... more games you win, more ru you have to buy new ships(at a megalith, space station, mothership, carrier...) SUs to be based on ship class(fighter, corvette, frigate) would help allow for players to grow.

[VoDDe]

This looks like the campains in warhammer the table top game.

[DarthFelth]

ok, well im new to all this, but me and a friends are trying to create a turn based sim using hw2 for the mod, neither have much no how in teh field of modding, if anyone is interested in joinin, or helpin with the mod, contact, we were thinkin of a star wars one.

[theBlind]

IF (<-- and thats a big one) we are able to

* make direct ip-connections from outside the game (ie start the game via command line, specifying the map to use (relic?)
* read out players remaining fleets after the match(no idea)
* make it possible for players to retreat (maybe scripting an exit point?)
* create an outside gamebrowser and matchmaking programm (using p2p? central servers? Can we get the servers for something alike?) oh, and...byebye GameSpy :rip:
* create / modify maps on the fly (should be possible, they are text files only after all, maybe write the players fleet into the maps here?
* create a central database for registering players win/loss, fleets, (fleet positions?), maybe even a galaxy map to play in.
* All in all, create a persistant universe for the players to play in...

then, then we can create the very ultimate mod for HW2.
:D CS could kiss it´s top rank in active players goodbye :D
Seriously, I think there are LOADS of players out there waiting for a MMORTS type game.

[TheCaptain]

[Note: some of the ideas in this post are a bit unclear, considering I posted this one, then thought up solutions and rehashes to some of the problems and posted them in the errata below. I'm going to do my best to shorten this puppy, clear up some logic and consistency errors, clarify some bits that rereading it can be a bit confusing, and fix some spelling errors. I wrote this from appx 12:15 am to 4:15-30 am, so it's in need of a bit of work. If you manage to get through it, 1) You get a medal, and 2) You'll understand where my train of thought was going as I figured out some problems and posted some solutions. Props to Antagonist for figuring out some issues and working my brain to help correct them. The Captain 4:37am 13/09/03]

[note, I swear, this started as a short post. Just so you know what you're getting into: 69 lines, 3960 words, 22082 characters. [Edit, with both errats posts, it's 32836 chars, 5892 words]
Please, if you're interested in the meta game idea, give it a read through and either start correcting my ideas, flaming them, or give feedback other than 'That's cool'. Constructive criticism is fun. :) The more people that tell me "not gonna work", the harder I work on finding a solution. A lot of these ideas are either extrapolated from those posted in the thread, generated 'origianlly' in my mind (but are possibly common ideas or those already posted), or generated by me and not duplicated in the thread. however, I would bet some of you have had some of these same ideas at different times.
My current 'strategy', is to get a sp build working with mechanics nearly identical to the mp, generate some interest at relic, and say: "Look, to make this work, we need approximately two or three elements to let the game communicate in mp with the macro program. It runs great in sp, what would it be like in mp? *hint hint*". I can guarantee, that if we develop it for a little while, and it becomes fun, the hw2 devs are going to have fun. And, hey, if they have fun, they're probably going to help work on making the mp versiona reality. But, if it's developed from the get go solely with the purpose of mp, and only mp, 1) The scope would probably be off, 2) The mechanics wouldn't even be proven, even with one player playing, and 3) if pitching it to relic, it would end up in their "great idea" box. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. But, show them a prototype that has potential only they can unlock.. well. :) I can't do this all by myself. I know how to do some of the work required, I want to learn how to do the rest, but I can't do it alone. If we get a few more people with a few different skills to bring to the table, all rallying behind a unified design, then we win. As an exmaple, give me enough time and I can put together a text central alpha build of this in a month, sp only. But, I have other work to split my time on, and it would take me at least 3-4x as long as anyone else capable. On with the show. Please leave feedback, or send me a pm!]


All right, I've been working out a design for single AND multiplay for the last day while reading and thinking about this thread. Keep in mind, I did not play the TA persistent game, and I did now regularly play homeworld. However, religious player of HW2 demo, natch. Right now my company is developing an expansion for operation flashpoint, so I don't really have the resources to ommit directly to the project I'm going to outline (read, I'm doing one main thing at a time, development is consuming work if you want to do it right). However, I will contribute as much as I possibly can to the production of said idea in the form of money, time effort, cordination, etc, becasue I feel that this idea I'm going to propose is a worthy contender to the title of HW2 meta game: fully playable in single player or multi. Probably a better idea to complete it in single first, get the mechanics down, and petition relic to release a patch with stats reporting. who knows? A single player game such as the following could get into the first circle of the RDN, if a prototype is properly completed.

Ok, here goes:

The main concepts I stuck with while working out this design:

1- Simplicity. If it's mp, it's gotta be rock simple and repeatable
2- Personality. Each player *needs* a personal connection with the game, here in the form of a fleet, chosen "faction/race" in which player picks a race witha certain specialty (econ, fighetrs, tech, fighters, attack, defense, etc) and a certain homeworld where they respawn when they lose or change their fleet.
3- Progression. Players need to be able to progess themselves forward in the game. Here, shown in 'rank' and fleet size
4- Strategic values. Each star system has three values assigned to it that directly affect a player's performance in the map, and in future maps
5- Risk/reward factor. In a great game, you want players to make decisions. Hw2 already makes the player make desicions during a battle, where peopel start off generally equal. But, here, players need to make decisions about what to do before the battle even starts, and weigh the risk factor vs. the reward.
6- Teamwork. Doable in single player, with combining forces with ai's, but in multiplayer, the factors of risk/reward,personality/ego, strategic values, progression, and simplicity all come into play in determining what players decide in which battles to pick and who to attempt them with/against

Ok, here goes:
1) Two components to gameplay, macro and micro mode. Micro mode is the actual setpiece battle in homeworld2. Macro mode is the intersystem mode where players and ai's send their fleets to do battle over systems. I'll address macro mode first, and how it affects the battles in micro mode. The actual fighting in micro mode is exactly a homeworld 2 mutliplayer/skirmish game, with the key factors being 1) What fleet everyone starts with 2) What their unit limits are 3) The amount of resources on the map, and 4) How much of a regular injection each player gets.
In macro mode, each player picks a badge, avatar, and starts out at rank 1. They then pick their fleet through a 'point' system, only being able to allocate so many points to said fleet, based on their rank. The lower ranked players start out with just a carrier and strike craft. Level 10 players would have enough points to be able to buy multiple battlecruisers -> And their unit caps would be higher.
Each system has three values: 1) Raw resource capacity, always static. This determines how many resources are generally available to all sides to harvest during the game. 2) Mined res capacity: This factor is used to caclulate how much the injections are worth through a function: Mined res capacity of currect system, + 1/2 capacity of all 1 system away friendly systems + 1/3 capacity of all 2 system away systems.. etc. IE, you have a 'homefield advantage' if you have many nearby systems. 3) Industrial production capacity. This determines how long it takes to 'respawn' a fleet based on fleet points/min. A larger fleet will take longer to respawn at any current system. More on that later.
When players sleect their initial system, they can hyperspace in appx real time to nearby systems, say an average of 20-30 seconds per jump.
[Note: There are both a global 'chat' function and system chat function in the game. In sp, presumably ai bots would talk strategy to each other. In mp, people could talk globally, or with others in the system chat room/channel. When you enter a system, you enter the channel.]
When a player enters a neutral system, or empty enemy system, a timer counts down. When the timer counts down to zero, the system becomes converted to that side, and players can now respawn their fleets at that system, time allowing. If an enemy hyperspaces into the system, before the timer counts down, a new timer starts: Time until the homeworld game commences. While in the chat, you can see the avatar, name, level, and composition of the enemy fleet. If the enemy is too stacked for you, you have the option of backing out of the chat room and let them take the system. Once the timer counts down, a host must be decided on, probably by the game checking specs/bandwidth, and the game launches into the map (no lobby, methinks), with all of the initial settings. More on micro mode later.
When the battle is won/lost, the game sends the stats back to the macro program. The size of the remaining fleets does not matter, only who won. This is winner take all. The winner claims thesystem as their own, inheirets the production capabilities, and effectively 'respawns' their original starting fleet. The loser must choose a new system to respawn at, and have effectively lost that current system.
Score is calculated dynamically, and is what rank is based on. Players gain more score if they start the map at a disadvantage, and lose less score if they lose, and vice versa if they are advantaged. (Advantage takes into account rank/composition of forces, and also res availability and injections). If 5 level 10's gang up on a newbie and win, their score goes up a tad and the newbie's goes down a tad: You can't go below zero. Thus, newbies have everything to gain and really nothing to lose, while experts can have a lot to lose and still a lot to gain.
As to fleet composition, a few new intermediate ships would probably need to be added, like advanced carriers, but effectively, if you have higher rank, you can get more/better ships, such as super caps, capital ships, more carriers, higher in game unit capacities, and even motherships (perhaps larger units, I dunno).
Finally, the ultimate goal of each side would be to:
1) Capture the homeworld of the opposing side

Ok, those are the tentative design decisions I made, and I can back any of them up with reasoning if anyone wishes to ask. To me, this design would result in a high player connection to the game (mp or sp) in the form of their personal starting fleet and rank advances, addictive gameplay, and a constant array of choices to make, everything from which systems to hyperspace to, to which battles to join, to what the composition of starting fleets should be, to even which systems to attack and take first. Get the high ru manu regions, and your forces get more injections on the front line. Get the strategic respawning points, and you can start your forces closer to the enemy. Respawn at the front, and wait in line to respawn, or respawn at your homeworld (with a nearly unlimited respawn capability) and take longer to hyper to the front.

First I'll discuss downfalls with the design, then I'll move to potential.
1) We don't have stats reporting for multiplayer games. It can probably be jury rigged for sp.
2) I don't think we can host an mp game effectively from the command line with other players joining, without time waiting in the lobby selecting sides and screwing values. This all has to be automatic when you start homeworld. Once again, can probably be jury rigged for sp.
3) Would people exploit things in the game and unbalance it? Things such as taking forever to die in an mp game, prolonging everyone else's wait, or randomly disconnecting, forcing the playe rto navigate back to macro view, etc. I'm sure there are a hundred loopholes people could exploit
4) Would games be too long for people to idle in the chats? I dunno. A two hour game would be a while to wait, so would people choose to wait until teh battle ends to swoop in, or would they attack a new system and try to instigate battles. Who knows?
5) How do you control which players can enter into a battle at what time (pre battle). It would suck to have it be first come, first serve, where a bunch of enemies could mob a system, and prevent defenders from joining. It would also kind of suck to 'balance' the games where the number of fleets had to be equal: some players can obviously overpower a comparable number of smaller players. It would either have to be 1) Something simple and obvious to the player, like "only 1 level 8 can fight at once", or a complexish algorithm deciding how many players to allow to fight on which side based on rank/score. The 6 player limit would be a bit limiting. There is a solution somewhere, I just want to finish this post and think on it a bit.

I'm sure there are more downfalls present, both technical and gameplay wise. Please point them out. Love a good brain twister.

OK, potential:
1) We're addressing the persistent fleets issue. You have a persisten t fleet. It increases in size based on how often you play. You lose a game, you keep your fleet, but it gets upgraded or downgraded based on how much you won or lost. Your fleet directly affects how you play in the game, and especially its composition. It would rock to team up with people to get a balanced starting fleet. Hell, you could win a game in 5-10 minutes. For example, you have the guy with two carriers full of bombers, the guy with one battlecruiser, the guy with a frigate force, all fighitng against another guy.
2) There's action from the get go. You're spending time in macro view figuring out your force composition, but cone you zap into game, it's tense. You've got to worry about tactical manuvering and winning the battle from the start, and not just expanding into res nodes, building up a force form nothing. You've got a force. You can expand it by harvesting, yes. You know what the other guy has (from the chat). What are you going to do?
3) Winner take all. No p*ssy footing. YOu win, it matters. You lose, it matters. But it doesn't matter by how much. If fleets were truly persistent, it would SUCK ASS to win a battle and end up with one frigate, and have some newbie with a carrier kill you next match. No, if you win, it means you keep your fleet. Kind of like beting your car during drag racing.
4) There's ego involved. Can your fleet of frigates TRULY whup a guy of comparable level with fighters? If you go strike deep into enemy territory, can you knock out the enemy player before they get their massive injection bonuses? Ultimately, you want to see the results of your choices and creation of a truly balanced force.
5) You've got strategic value of terrain. Some places allow more people to respawn in a shorter amount of time. Some places have a lot of raw resources (which, I guess, total raw resources held by a side might contribute to starting res, but I dunno), and be easier to win in. Other places give your side that much needed injection bonus. Think of it as a homefield advantage, or critical if you're working to the enemy homeworld. Get a line of systems, and you forces will be better equipped to win battles further away from your homeworld. If you get deep into enemy territory, effectively, your supply lines are getting weaker while the enemy is getting stronger. Oops.
6) If you lose, you're not fucked. You just respawn at a nearby (or far away) system. You don't even have to do the everquest-retrieve your corpse crap. Instead, if you lose, you can quickly think about what you did wrong (or right), rebalance your forces, respawn, nd get back into the fighting.
7) Newbie friendly: Sure, people are going to get high in rank and get massive fleets. But then again, a newbie has nothing to lose. In a traditional hw2 game where you build from scratch, a newbie is wasting 1-2 hours of his life in a humiliating defeat. In this, you're wasting only 5-15 minutes if you're getting truly owned. And, as such, the guy that beat you is getting peanuts for newbie killing, and you're barely getting downgraded. Bigger players are going to want to go after more experienced targets to advance in rank, instead of just preying on newbies.
8) Teamwork. If players are balancing their forces, and they have a limited amount to work with (and at lower ranks can't get access to higher tech stuff for starting), they may want to concentrate in one area and focus on teammates to help them out. (Keep in mind that ship points aren't like spendable in game res: they'r emore like a percentage that you can allocate to your forces. You always have the same total number of points to spend, which cna increase or decrease, and there's nopenalty for completely overhauling your fleet before the game.) Example, you have been a fighter/carrier guy most fo the game, with say 4000 points to spend. But, you level up, and get 5000. So, instantly, you change your fleet to one 5000 point battlecruiser and nothing else. Suddenly, you won't want to enter into a battle against unknown forces, unless you start the game with some friends. As well, since you can modify your forces at will, people could idle in the chat thinking up perfect balancing arrangements, and THEN go into battle together. "Ok, you get bombers and a couple interceptors, I'll get gunships and ion frigates...". Likely, you wouldn't be able to modify your fleet after it was deployed, and if you did, you would have to re-respawn at a system. Systems would also have to have a capacity for players, otherwise everyone would respawn at one planet... Unless there was a penalty for respawning, but then... kind of ambiguous there.
9) Playable in single or multi. This game style would work whether you had one player playing alone, trying to help their side conquer the galaxy, or whether it was 'massively multiplayer', with maybe 50 people maximum per gameworld/server. If a player was playing alone, it resembles an rpg in which you fight battles, upgrade your character. At the beginning, you can only take on comparable foes. But, as you increase in strength, you can eventually take on the enemy homeworld. :) It would rock to start out as just a fighter or corvette carrier (or a frig squadron), and end the game with a massive fleet, with multiple motherships, super caps, and legions of craft... taking on a huge force in a battle to decide the entire game.
10) Simple-ish to develop. You could make the macro mode relatively simple coding wise, as it's really just a shell to set up hw2 matches.
11) Battles matter. Some battles would no doubt be key battles, deciding the course of the whole war, or similarly there would be key systems on which the fate of the war would rest.
12) Gameworld is somewhat small. Like, say, an irc channel, each gameworld would only support a couple dozen players, would be runnable off a single net connected computer (with med-low bandwidth), and the game world could be pickable at random, or players could migrate between game worlds (servers), and you could have one, a couple, or dozens of these servers running on the net. All you need is the server install and client installs... As well, the gameworld might take anywhere from 1 hour to days to play through, and each server would have its master players that favored certain servers. I don't know if player levels would stay on a server, and translate between gameworld resets. However, it would be a good idea to reset the world if someone won, otherwise it might be lopsided for too long. And, if a war ran for a week or more, that would be enough time for some players to rise in rank, and then once the war was won, everyone would start down at the bottom again, allowing for new people to get dominance. The best players would not be the high level whores who keep their equip, but the players consistently able to start out small and advance up th efood chain.
13) The hw2 limit of No join-in-progress is kind of worked around. True, jip might be nice, but the 2-3 minute period before the game starts where players can leave or join is almost like a join in progress, and partially explainaable: Fleets see each other at long distance and decide whether to engage or jump out... So, a battle is getting set up, and players join or leave depending on what they want to risk. Dare we say, gambling?

I like the idea of having *my own* fleet, with my own personality, and being able to develop my own strategic level tactics for winning. I prefer it to the idea of having static matches where everyone starts off the same and is forced to concentrate in certain directions, and follow a few general strategies otherwise you have certain defeat. (Like, fail to expand in a certain way, and get 0wned). In this respect, either for single or multi, I like the strategic latitude you get. Rush, build up, die slowly, fortify and wait for resource injections, strike deep into enemy homeworld, or push their front line back...

I love the idea of playing this design in just single player. Woudl be interesting to give some context-ai to the ai bots idling in the system channels. Why make it an uber realistic sim? It'd be great to talk shit to an ai fleet's bot, get it mad, or scare it off form the chan. At the very least, it would be intersting to pit yourself against player-like ai fleets, time and time again, who would probably follow some set fleet strategies. (OwnDethl0Rd, maybe, is a bomber whore, and that's the strat he usually follows.. etc). It would also be nice to have friendly ai fleets hyper in to your defense if you were getting attacked or attacking a system. It would be, in effect, a mini (or major) homeworld campaign, where each time it would have its OWN story, its own engagements, and its own basic plots and major characters. Why make static-plot charcters, when each game is going to have its own stories about daring commanders and picthed defensive battles? The game would generate stories in itself, which players could brag about or think about, instead of one major linear campaign. Anyone who's played X-Com, syndicate, civilization, Uplink, or any other dynamic start at the beginning-work your way up game knows the kind of amazing feel I mean. It TOTALLY blows away linear campaigns.
And, if you throw in a multiplayer element, you have the hiigaran and vaygr war being fought out in hundreds of servers on dozens of servers every-single-day, with a new outcome each time, new major players, and recognizable critical events and major 'plotlines'. Imagine living a scenario where a daring fleet capitain at a mid level broke through your lines and was headed right for your mothership. and a bunch of your best players just got owned, and are now waiting to respawn, while other players are hypering to the bad player but not quite getting there.. Or imagine orchestrating a perfrct raid on a major enemy system, and winning in twenty minutes due to a perfect force balance and predetermined or evolved tactics. Suddenly, it's less about building the right guys at the right time and harassing the enemy until you can push him off the res enough to win the skirmish. Now we're talking balls to the wall major fleet manuvering tactics. Sure, you can churn out a lot of a certain unit and perform a great strike like in any normal game, but the stakes got higher and the gameplay has the tendency to be faster paced.

Even in SP, I would play this for days at a time. There's got to be some huge satisfaction in starting with a meager level 1 force, maybe a carrier with some fighters and scouts that you'd use for raids or small battles.. to building a tailored large scale force that you can use *again* and *again* and *again* and finish the game with.Maybe it would be viable to have a horde of carriers, late in the game. (Guy with two battlecruisers says: "Mother of jesus" as you rape him with bombers and marine frigates. :D)

I want to mention that great ideas, especially for game design, are really a dime a dozen, and key comes down to 'is it producable?' and 'is it going to ever get done?'. I've seen so many great ideas over the years, and the most sucessful are the 'pretty good' ideas with flawless execution. So, let's get on irc or icq and start work on this puppy. At the moment, this falls into 'just an idea' category. However, I firmly believe that 1) It's simple enough, and 2) It's doable, because we already *have* the homeworld space combat engine, and we can already generate maps or persist..luas or whatever to modify the game. Such a game should be doable if you play campaign missions and the master program reads in the persist.luas and writes to them or somesuch. (Especially if you save variables into them!)

Good luck, everybody! I want this! It seems that the potential to expand hw outweighs the effort that would have to go into desiging just the SP client. MP coding would be a bit tricky, but hey, focus on that after the sp gets done. if you can stop playing the SP. :D

>-Note: Bot fleets in mp? :D

[TheCaptain]

[This is going to be my addenendum post, so people can read errata without me constantly updating the big doc]

1) Bud gave me the idea of having persistance being a server option. Servers could choose in their options (since the servers would be private) whether to allow the enemy homeworld to be destroyed and have game reset. Ine one manner, it would be a bit like shattered galaxy in that you couldn't take the enemy cap city, so players would keep their stats. The other way would resetthe battle every time someone won, sending all players back to newbie status and level. The individual players would likely pick which was most fun for them, and the individual servers would change their options to support it)
2) Another bonus: Small files size! Perhaps the mod would include a few new ships, a patch to the hw exe for the mp version by relic (if they get excited enough), and the gui itself. Since the major content is hw2 itself, we're talking a 10mb+ file size, or so.
3) More errata: The time it takes for a fleet to capture an undefended system in a function of the strength of the fleets in the system. 4 or 5 masssed players at high rank would convert undefended systems quicker than one lone player at 4am. And, since you can only increase in rank by battling, if you're alone on a server in the middle of the night, going to take longer.
4) The longer you hold a system, persumably, the defenses will increase, so it would take longer to capture a system. each player's gui would show a personalized number showing how many seconds it would take them to capture a system. Recently swapped systems woudl changehadns quicker.
5) What's to stop a player at 4am from capping all the systems? Thought about this one for a bit, then it hit me: Remember the bot fleets in sp? There would be a server option to sleect the maximum and minimum fleet populatiosn fora server, and bot fleets would fill in the gaps to get to minimum strength. That would keep the game from falling and collapsing overnight, and keep a bit of continutiy. Bot fleets would recycle when players joined. Perhaps the bot fleets would retain a similar rank to players previously on the map, or somesuch, so there wouldn't be a big discontinutity in having players leave.
6) Is there too much of a communistic feel in defending your side's territory? If the only gains or losses you get are arbitrary respawn points or res income, or if some teammembers doa LOT of work and you do a little, everyone gets similar system advantages on the side, maybe that's not personaly enough. Should each player be able to select a homeworld that 1) Gives them advantages, and 2) Gives them an advantage while they hold it in the game? Also, what if you're not playing and someone (or ai) steal your homeworld? wtf now?
7) great question: "How can you ever become super powerful if you are always resetting the server, and if you don't reset the server, what's to stop everyone from becoming super powerful?"
8) Would it be mroe fun in mp than in sp?
9) Possible personal incentive: Each player picks a sort of 'race' at the start. Each race has a number of homeworlds. These races would govern the point costs of your ships, special ships you could add to your fleet, etc. When the player would respawn athis homeworld, the time would be much quicker than if he respawned at another homeoworld not of his own. With the homeworld under the player's control, he would be able to add his race/faction's special ship to his fleet, and gain an injection bonus during all battles. Lose your homeworld, and you would lose the ability to have those special ships and you wouldn't get as many ru's during battles. Certainly an incentive to keep your homeworld. if things get desperate, you could change your homeworld to another, but you would drop down one rank. Possibly players could only respawn at their homeworld, and *not* all over the map, when they lost battles. Players would be able to rearm their fleet and take a certain amount of time in friendly systems.
10) More errata. Unit caps would always be 50 or 100% higher than your maximum starting fleet size, on average, depending on how you allocated your points. Lets say at l2 you have 4000 points, and you have a limit of two carriers. You could allocate your points onto two carriers, and not be able to build any during the game and start with less fighters, or have only one carreir, and more fighters. So, if you start with 5 or 20 fighters, and the fighter cap is always 20, that dictates how you play your game. And, there are res in the mpas, of course.
11) Still more. Research would be part of your allocation points. If you spend points on modules and research upgrades, you'll be able to start with less units, but you'll start off the game a certain direction in the etch tree already.

[more errata is going to be edited in. stay tuned.]

[TheCaptain]

Ok, I kind of ran out of errata space.

here's some more:

1) The galactic map would be EITHER a quarter galaxy (think pie slices), or a full pie. Hiigs in the middle, vayg's on the outside. I prefer the idea of a quarter galaxy, with the vaygs on the outer rim, and the higs at the center of the pie slice: dense systems, but they have a 'wall' at their back. Technically, the vaygr are attacking from the other directions on the other galactic maps anyway, and the higs on that side are defending too, so it probably would divide nicely into 4-5 galactic pies. The systems would be linked by 'hyperspace lines', and you have to travel along the lines to get to a new system.
2) how do newbies advance in the game? Valid question. Helped by possible server resets, but newbies still need to cut their teeth. for one, games can still end up being drawn out hw2 multiplayer games. Newbies can pick which systems to battle in. Aiming for a system that's heavy economic (has lots of unmined res). If you're an economic race, allocate to your cheaper econ ships, then build up a massive economy in that map, hopefully owining your enemy. Or, let's say we have ai pirate fleets in the outer reaches that players can practice on. rank is also decided by the difficulty of the battle, as calculated beforehand. If you run around with newbie fleets, and get underdog victories, your rank will go up. Ifyou play defense.. so/so. but, since everyone starts out at the start of a battle as a newbie, there's room for advancing.
3) Also, ai fleets will be for defense only, methinks. They defend what a faction has, while players can go out and attack.
4) Possibility: Allow player respawning only at their personal homeworld and the race's main homeworld? (Ie, hiigara). If you lose your personal homeworld, you spawn at the race homeworld (the eventual objective of the war), and you're farther away from the front.
5) to clarify factions: Factions are a subset of eitehr of the two races that you pick at game start. Your faction has certain strengths, which are shown in which unit caps get increased mroe when you gain in rank, which units cost less allocation points, and which special unit you get. IE, economic race, assault race, defensive race, etc. Perhaps 6 types per side, and 12 unique units.
6) To clarify the rank system: Higher rank, based on your faction, increases certain unit capacities and unlocks certain units. Econ class might get better res technology earlier
7) To clarify research: Research and modules are unlocked at certain ranks based on which faction you have, and are then available to spend allocation points on.
8) To clarify reasons to defend your homeworld: Your homeworld is the only place you can spawn besides your species homeworld. You also get higher resource injections during the game (100% higher? 50% higher?) "from your homeworld" if it belongs to your side. You also can no longer allocate special units into your fleet if you spawn from your species homeworld. As well, species homeworld is far from the front. You're looking at some very good reasons to protect YOUR system.
9) To clarify reasons to fight in general: A bit shady, as currently when you conquer territory, you're really only gaining in rank which helps fighting. Perhaps there should be another incentive when you gain territory... perhaps ru bonuses? If people are fighting selfishly to gain terriroty, the game will be a bit more frantic and competitive. Nothing brings people together like common self intrest. :)
10) There will be more research options and more modules, etc, that players will be able to get pre game and while in game, and will depend on which class you are.
11) What's in a name? Things like this are good with tentative names. Having "HOMEWORLD" as a sur-title is a must. A lot of the names that spring to mind, such as "Homeworld: galactic electric boogaloo" and whatever meaningless catch words sound a bit lifeless.
I think "HOMEWORLDS" is personally, a great, simple name. Anyone have anything better? simpler? Less cheesy? :)
12) Likely, the player limit would be 3 in combat per side, per system. So, you couldn't really gang up totally on another player and not give them a chance to start with allies. Plus, having three friendly fleets in a system could be pretty lethal. Three is enough. More than that, you'd get communication probelms, I think.
13) Strategy with picking a race and your homeworld: The different races have different advantages, and different possible homeworld locations scattered around the battle map. If a player selects a homeworld close to the middle, it might change hands during th war a few times, and the player is at a disadvantage while their hw is not under friendly control. However, they can respawn near the front if they lose a battle or if they 'redo' their fleet. If you have your hw farther away, closer to hiigara or vaygr, you're going to need to take longer to hyperjump to the front, but you'll probably be safer for more of the game. Multiple players can pick the same homeworld, but some of them might take longer to respawn fleets, especially if multiple fleets are spawning.

[Random thought: has anyone realized how RETARDED standard hw2 multiplayer deathmatch is from a 'realistic' perspecitive? Gameplay wise it's fun. But, seriously, who goes to a combat zone, sends their extremely important mothership, with no forces, then mines rp, builds up their force, and then attacks? The amount of mothership attrition in a suite of hw2 games in funny. Think about how many motherships get destroyed on a daily basis what with all the hw2 demo games... :)]

[Note, I'm going to slowly work these errata into the above doc, and shorten the ass out of the above doc. Both the doc above and the errata are almost 6000 words.]

[Still more errata awaits]

[Konnayr]

I've been stumbling across this topic a couple of days ago and it catched my interest from the beginning. I simply consider it a great idea to use HW2 as a platform to build a persistant universe, like
a MMORPG or one of those Database-driven Web-Space-MMORPG, but far better.

I've been thinking about some hours, reading all the other ideas, and i think this has the potential to become something great.

I have so many ideas that i can't even write them down all, and some of you brought up ideas similiar to mines, so i'll try to focus on new ones:



(A) Newbie - advanced Player Problem

With persistant fleets as a player motivation included, what would happen if a newbie and a much more advanced Player pick on each other? I think we should avoid something like:
Newbie's (small) Frigate Forces are outnumbered and got shredded by a pack of Destroyers, and 2 carriers launching bombers in dozens. To avoid this, I have another approach than permitting access to battles where the more advanced players compete...but it will take a bit longer to explain.

What if we would introduce FLEET SLOTS for every battle map and FLEET POOLS for every player? So players would'nt have to throw their whole fleet into battle, and would be able to think over their strategie and fleet compositions. To determine how many ships you can put into the battlefield's fleet slots, a new recource is used: COMMAND POINTS. There would be also a MAXIMUM of CP a player can throw into a battle. This would increase as the player gains a level. -> The size of the fleet he can use would increase. In addition, each player's FLEET POOL would be limited by a higher CP value. Let me explain by bringing up an example:

A battle between two players in a Sector. It's FLEET SLOTS value is 1000 CP.

One Player, the newbie, has a CP MAXIMUM of 1250, the other, far more advanced, 5000. If they would battle each other without the CP usage, the newbie wouldn't stand a chance. But now...:

Newbie choses from his fleet pool: which is (4 Torp.-Frigs, 4 Flak-Frigs, 2 Ion-Frigs, 5 Bomb-Squads, 4 Interceptor-Squads, 1 Scout Squad , 3 Gunship-Squads, 5 Pulsar-Squad)

5 Bomb-Squads: each 50 CP -> 250 CP
2 Torp-Frigs: each 200 CP -> 400 CP
5 Pulsar Squads: each -> 70 CP -> 350 CP


The advanced player ( 2 Vaygr-Cariers, 4 Vaygr- Destroyers, 10 Torp-Frigs, 10 Assault [and much more, you got the idea]) likes to use his destroyers and choses:

1 Destroyer: 800 CP
2 Assault-Frigs : each 100 CP -> 200 CP




The result would be a challenging battle for both sides where skill counts more than ship numbers. It's only a matter of how good the ship's CP values are balanced. You woudl have to spend time on your fleet composition as well as on what u buy next: Even if you would swim In RU, you would still have to think of what ships do integrate best in your current fleet and your current tactic.

Another advantage is that if you lose ships or maybe your whole fleet, you wouldn't have to start from zero. It would hurt for shure, but you may take time to recreate. Which takes me to my second idea.



(B) Recreation Areas

If your fleet is severely damaged or you are new to the game, you hyper in here ( theBlind called it backwater sector i think ) You would be able to harvest recources (to prevent a Player to become rich as hell there has to be either a time limit or a RU limit for this missions. You could meet other players here, chat and trade (someone mentioned the idea of players to e able to trade). You could trade ships and technology (see C for technology aspects).

Another point is that you are only allowed to build (low tech, no CapShips) in recreation areas. This would prevent someone from bringing in 5 carriers and pump out masses of ships which wheren't mentioned in the CP rules mentioned above.



(C) Technology Access & Capital Ships

Someone brought up the idea of Capital Ships to be ordered by Players to be build by the Fraktions Administration. I kinda like this idea because it is somehow implemented in the homeworld universe: Remember the Somtaaw in Cataclysm had no access to High technology and Ship Yard Capacitys in the beginning of the game? You could implement it in here, to: Players would have to by technology and Capital ships from the administration (maybe AI) or from shipyards. Technology should cost you much RU, and CapShips should take a (relatively) long time to be build, and, of course, you would have to enter queues to wait while CapShip Requests from other players. It would add to the long time motivation of the game and prevent that everyone has 20 Destroyers and 10 BC at hand after 5 Days of playing.






Of course that somewhat diffiult to realise. As Starfisher said in the beginning, we need as many coders as we can get....and a miracle




*phew* that was all for now. As i'm not a native speaker, please forgive spelling errors, i know there are some ;)

I would like to hear some constructive critique on what i mentioned above....so i've you have to say something, drop a line :)

[TheCaptain]

{Note, Konnayr, I'm reviewing yoru ideas as they pertain to my posted design, not on their own merit or combined with other ideas in this thread. On their own they are good concepts, I'm just responding personal taste wise.}

1) The limiting player fleet size thing is interesting, and would balance the maps more. However, I think that without that limitation, players would need to band together and fight multiple times to defeat a more powerful enemy. And, the closer the enemy got to the homeworld, the less res injections he would get, making the defenders have an advantage. Also, with three fleets per side max, I think you could get players to come to the rescue. I would prefer the idea of perhaps limiting low level participation in battles with high players, rather than crippling a high level's player's fleet or vice versa

2) Don't really like the idea of players harvesting resources and having to wait for ships to get built while out of the homeworld2 game. I think that building and resource harvesting shoul dbe limited to just hw2. I prefer the idea of having a player's fleet respawn in 30 secs to a minute back at their chosen homeworld, and being able to get back in the fight, depending on what they spent their cp on. Plus, ship building would give and advantage to the players who play more often. In the insta-request-ships-based-on-your-level-and-wait-a-couple-minutes-for-them-to-build, we're not rewarding players who play in strat mode for days building up their fleets. Someone who signs on every few days and keeps up rank can be just as competitive as someone of similar rank who plays constantly: they can both compose a similar fleet size and battle.

3) Fleet slots and fleet pools: interesting idea to balance some of the maps, but I strongly recommend giving each player one fleet, and calling it 'their' fleet, and making it very customizeable. Players shouldn't have to waste time and money on ill suited fleet combos, especially as a newbie. Instead, they should be encouraged to try out wacky cominations where the only real resource they're spending is the time it takes to spawn and hyperspace to the front.

4) Can't quite get into the idea of assigning a cp maximum to a sector, if worked into the beast up there. But, it's a good idea to allow some battles that newbies could play in. but why would an advanced player ever limit themselves and fight a 1000cp battle when they could get torched by a newbie? I don't really see the motivation, especially if the gain they get from fighting a newbie was minimal.

I see it like this, with The Beast ^ up there. A l2 or 3 player is defending a system, maybe he's the defensive faction. A l8 hypers into the chat room. L2 sees his force combination and spams global chat, meanwhile players in the lobby see markers on the map showing the enemy & friendly strength in that system. If reinforcements (ai, likely human) can't get to that sector in time enough before the 'game start' time runs out, the l2 player will probably retreat for fear of being wiped out and sent to respawn at his homeworld, and lose rank. This way, it's a bit realistic: outmatched players will feel outmatched, and won't fight someone bigger unless they have a trick up their sleeve or are desperate. For example, if you lock that player in a battle for 15 minutes, that's enough time for people on your side to gather aroudn the system and wait for the battle to end. That guy's problems are just beginning. :P

Will think up a few more critiques. I think we're really going in the right direction with a CP system and with persistent fleet makeups!

[Starfisher]

The core problem remains: there is no way to report win/losses. Until someone can hack that in (or Relic patches it in), this would be a SP mod only.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to work on this sort of a project, and I like a lot of the ideas that are getting thrown around. But until someone we get that reporting functionality this mod is sorta stuck in the hangar.

On the other hand, if we can get a decent enough concept together along with a well rounded mod team, maybe we could impress upon Relic to take an hour and patch in a reporting function. That would be enough to get the basic meta-game going, and features like persistant fleets could be added later once we had the fundamentals in place.

[SilentSam]

it shouldn't be impossible (though it won't be easy) to make a standalone app that simply wacthes memory adresses and records them for game reporting. I think this can be done :)

[TheCaptain]

1) I think it would be great in sp alone
2) If the sp is fun, relic will patch
3) Would be a pain to figure out memory addresses based on the wins/losses

[Konnayr]

Well, that's right. I read the Homeworld Modding Interview (http://www.relicnews.com/index.php?f_area=article&f_id=37) , it mentioned something about missions to be fully scriptable ( i think they use the .lua files (which are, in my opinion, plain text ) .

If we have access to all those script files and can do what is promised by the devs: create win/lose conditions, or entire new multiplayer modes (what is, in fact, what we are trying to do, :) ) , the whole script thing seems to be relatively powerful. If we could get it to write "Player1 won the battle" into a plain text .lua, it should be possible to read this out with a self-writen app.

What do you think?

[TheCaptain]

Exactly. :)

[verybad]

What'd be really cool would be to have multiple ship types for different fleets. For example you could get a bigger Mothership if you won enough battles, the newer mothership would be bigger, badder, etc. Maybe you might be ablke to build two capital ship facilities on it for example.

Or you might be able to stretch the research out a bit mroe, so the first level you could only research level one technologies (much like in the demo) the second mission you could research a new level of technology, etc.

Some missions might have alien artifacts or ships you can capture, or learn rare technologies from.

Other missions you might need to build a huge, immobile shipyard (one big enough to build motherships) or protect such.

Resources and Fleets would be persistent.

Over time, you might research new types of units, maybe a new type of carrier or battlecruiser, from that point on you can build the new types or old types.

Each player would gain a bonus from the number of other systems under control of their faction. If they built a command station they could gain more bonuses.

Each turn, you could get resources and research based on your sides performance and systems. Certain systems would be more valuable (eg, systems with megaliths might give science bonuses, some systems might have a resource bonus, others with a military training facility would give experience bonuses to fleets near them.

Megaliths might also have strange effects, such as the ability to jump multiple systems at once, to fleets in that system.

Players might be able to build multiple mothers, multiple motherships would be CPU controlled (with their experience going up over games) while the most powerful fleet would be the players. If they fought together in the same system, the players secondary fleets would be allied to his.

[theBlind]

I really think I have to point out again how much cooler it would be, imho, to not have a mothership, but instead be based on a carrier force. This would allow for much more versatile combat options (eg. guerillia style warfare from cloaked carriers for weaker players against stronger ones - This could not be done if you had to defend the clumsy MS) Ships should be bought from the empire just as shipyards are right now bought (they hyper in after buying)

Also, I prefer the idea of real persistant fleets over the fleet pool+respawning proposed by TheCaptain.
Reason here would be
1)suspension of disbelif
2)for players to better watch out for their valuable ships (if you loose that BC, you should feel the pain)

From loosing ships to rebuilding: We could increase capship costs by some factor (20-50 to say some numbers. So HBC would go from (afaik) 4k RU to 80k or maybe as much as 200k RU <--- now THAT would hurt to loose. And it would also keep players fleets smaller without any further. Note that this should NOT apply to smaller craft as well as it needs to be balanced with capship survivability against suprise attacks.

Research: Res could be an empire(faction?) level function, so what you can build depends on what your faction has researched (will we have dedicated empire-rulers) for the meta-game? So: moderated world or more of a simple matchmaking? Or should every player rule his/her own little kingdom? Maybe the second is more fun, but the first definatly has potential - orders from high command for players to attack a specific location?)

EDIT: sp

[TheCaptain]

[Edit: MP!

:D

I agree that in sp you might want to go with persistent fleets.. but remember that hw2 had a hard time balancing with persistent fleets (they send reinforcements every few minutes if you start losing). I like the idea of mirroring the mp gameplay in sp, but hey, you can do a hell of a lot more sp-wise, because you don't need to worry about people-dynamics. Even so, skirmish games can get pretty lopsided, so if fleets were persistent a player would definately need the option of hyperspacing out of the game. You couldn't do a winner take all + persistent fleets in mp, you'd have to give the player an out. In mp, well, you can't give the player an out, unless it's a given that retreating/retiring is the same as losing, and you respawn back at home anwyay.
]


While I agree that persistent fleets might work on a single player basis, in mp it *might* become a bit absurd. After all, we're talking doznes of people at once. Not sure though, as these mechanics are all unproven.

yes, there's more suspension of disbelief. However, if we make the fleets persistent, here are two main ways players can build up their forces:
1) Going into random sector and mining resources, building ships, and hypering out to the main screen
2) Waiting a while in macro screen for their forces to get built

Both of these give a huge advantage to the people who are living in front of their computer playing, which really detracts from the newbie experience and from the slightly more casual experience.

Also, I think that having persistent fleets would be *less* personalised. Think of the turnaround time on ships during a game of hw2. Ships die, you build more, etc. Especially during a large battle, player's fleets would likely change dramaticaly, and who knows? A winner might end up with a single ship. This would mean they have to spend time waiting for their forces to buidl again. Seems tedious.

I think we should definately punish or reward players for winning or losing the game of hw2, after all, that's what it's about. Players should be encouraged to try their damnedest to win at all costs, even if it's by a single ship, able to know that once they conquer the system, the local production facilities will build teir fleet up to its original strength in a minute or two.

I also think that if we kept player's ships from one hw2 game to the next, it wouldbecome a huge war of attrition. HW2 is already about attrition.. if you were trying to hyper your fleet deep into enemey territory, you wouldn't be able to have more than one battle without having to go back to base, wait, rebuild your fleet. After every battle, that would get *tedious*

And, also, when you win an hw2 game, you can't harvest the rest of the res, meaning you can't spend that tmie after your enemy is defeated on ships, meaning you just wasted your time if you didn't first max out your fleet, THEN win.

I think persistent fleets would alter the mechanics of the actual hw2 multiplayer games too much. Yes, there would be suspension of disbelief, and yes, there would be more risk attached to the ships... but if it just becomes attrition, we are in effect punishing the players for playing.

[The respawn idea has a bit of suspension of disbelief, too. If you lose your fleet, your homeworld will manufacture another one and send you on your merry way, after you as commander get back there somehow to lead it. If you win a battle, then the system you conquered or saved would rebuild your fleet to your normal strength while you waited the time for it to get respawned. I was thinking it would take maybe .1 or .05 seconds per cp you spend on your ships. So, a 5000 cp fleet would take longer to respawn than a 1000, especially if peopel were waiing in line to spawn at that system. Also, think about a game of hw2 itself: If you have an attacking force which is down to one ship, it's quicker to send out another force than escort the old one back to base and repair it and build another one around that one. Same way: If you had a battle between two fleets in this game, you lose most of the fleet but win.. We should reward the winner by building his fleet up in that system so he can retreat or press his attack but most importantly *keep playing games*. The loser shouldn't be punished by having less ships than every newbie just because some lamer rushed him early on or something. We want the players to recognise their own mistakes, not blame the game. "Oh, I didn't have eough anti fighetr defenses that time" So, he would go reallocate his forces and try to join another game. As opposed to "This is gay, I don't have a fleet left and I don't want to spend an hour building it back up again." That's why they let you go get your corpse back in everquest. Imagine a rpg like that where you had to start from square one every time you died. That would suck.)

And also, think about the newbie. With the respawn idea, a newbie can play without fear of losing all their forces and starting again. With persistent fleets, the players with more crap would almost always win, because with the persistents it would boil down to a war of attrition. Hw2 multi games wouldn't be fun if the guy that started with more crap always won AND it was difficult to build up a large number of stuff.

I think that the measure of a fleet's strength should be the rank of the commander. So, he who has played more and has won more battles against tougher opponents will always have more cp to allocate to his fleet/modules/research than a newbie. But, two people who are just newbies starting out will always have roughly the same potential for their fleet, regardless of what has happened in the specific battles. This does make the meta game feel a bit more like a matchmaking service than a persistent meta game... but that's kind of what it is, isn't it?

Imagine total annhiliation with persistent armies.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm just saying we want to encourage certain types of play and discourage others.

If everyone is so afraid of losing their fleet to attack anything, except the guy who has been turtling for a week who is running around blowing everyone.. well... :P

I don't think we need to try to make the player's fleets smaller on purpose (especially with a war of attrition, they would be small anyway but players would always try to max them out)

I think with respawn there are more tactics involved rather than just trying to spend money on an expensive fleet. You assign what you think is a good balance of forces (whether economic, or you get some caps with research, or a balance of a certain type of ship. Say, you could go ints/pulsar/ions, or bombers/gunships/torps, etc), and then you go battle it out and see if it worked. If you didn't, you go fix it and try to win again. The best fleets would be those able to both expand well during the hw2 game and take on many kinds of forces initiially. Part of the game would be trying to find the best fleet combo *for your rank*. Players would be constantly trying to improve their rank to unlock more and better ships.

Rank goes up, your unit cap increases for certain areas based on which faction you are, units, techs, and modules are unlocked, and you get more rp to spend on ships.So, it is still important to keep your ships alive and win a battle: If you lose, especially against an equal opponent, your rank is probably going to go down by one, which means ships get locked again, your allocation goes down, and your unit caps go down.

We also don't want to change the mechanics of playing hw2 that much. If players know during the game that every ship counts and that if they lose it they're going to have to build another one, players are going to harass other players just to kil important stuff for the intent of crippling their macro game play. HW2 plays, in mp, by encouraging the the players to win at all costs. That feel would disappear with persistent fleets.

I love the idea of making a player start out small, with justa carrier, However, I feel that as they gain in rank, they should be able to get mutiple caps (if theywish), and even motherships, perhaps shipyards. Multi motherships? Wow. :P. How would you counter a fleet with multi motherships? Time to recycle your fleet and make a new one.

If we have persistent fleets, that removes the idea of a quick restructuring. People would keep what's in their fleet just because they had spend time putting it there, not because they felt it was strategically viable. This, I think, would lead to people being less connected to their fleet and less proud of it. It's not really the fleet they wanted to design, it's the fleet they cobbled together and managed to keep alive throughout the game. Plus, they wouldn't be abel to do a quick change to fight an opponent who was different, and it woudl elad to people NOT experimenting with different combos. If one type of fleet had the greatest survival rate, people are going to build that, not wacky ideas that just might work. (Starting with all bombers? No combat ships, just harvesters? Teching all research, and then pumping out bc's when the game starts?)

We want to reward experimentation, not hoarding.

Did I mention that persistent fleets would encourage newbie bashing? As of now, high players wouldn't get a huge bonus for crushnig a newbie, and woud just send them bakc to their homeworld to spawn again in a few minutes. But if a big player could crush a newbie's entire fleet and put them out of action and possibly get them to stop playing altogether.. well.

it wouldn't be fun to lose... spend a while trying to build up your forces.. lose again... spend a lot of time and effort... etc.

We want a newbie to be able to fight a newbie on more or less equal ground, no matter what their performance in prior games. We don't want to punish people for losing, we want to give them a slap on the face rank wise and let them keep playing.

While I agree that there would be less of a sense of disbelief, I think we would be breaking a lot of the hw2 multiplayer feel, unbalancing adversaries, and ultimately jeopardizing fun, casual play.


[When I say casual play, I'm not saying we're gearing towards the casual gamer. More, with a more friendly dynamic of respawning, we can give players who play once a week just as much fun as players who play three times a day. Sure, the three times a day people will be higher rank, but both players can screw with their fleet and get into fun battles to the same degree. If you get em hooked, casual players turn into hardcore players. If you say that the players who play more have the fleets which survive and are the eral 'bad guys' in town, who other players try to stop.. well. Maybe that's more realistic, but no massively multiplayer game is fun when you have a few super powerful people and make everyone else smaller and prevent them from advancing in rank.]

I think reseach should be done on a per faction basis. Te research based faction of the hiigarans should get certain technologies unlocked a level or two earlier than other factions. Assault faction would get more assaulting technologies unlocked, while the sneaky one would get cloaking and sensor techs unlocked earlier. This would allow players to allocate money on certain researches and have their fleet teched in a certain direction. We definately shouldn't have a player 'leder' to a fleet that makes decisions. After all, if it's a game designed to be run independantly on many servers at once, that's too much reliance on a human.

Let's run through a bit of gameplay here. Player starts the game. Picks a name/avatar, a faction, then picks a homeworld for that faction. Let's say our player picks the speedy Hiigaran race and a homeworld midway between the 'front' and the hiigaran homeworld. Player is starting at level 1, so he only gets 5000 rp to spend on his fleet. (players always get one free carrier, due to all the mythos about hyper warping and rifting and needing a production thing anyway). So, he could buy 10 resource collectors at level 1, but he couldn't get two carriers, because even though a carr is 2800, he would have to wait until his capital ship cap was unlocked by advancing to a higher level. In game unit caps would probably be standard, but the starting fleet unit caps would depend on your rank. Let's say fighter cap is 8, resourcer cap is 10, frig cap is 2, corv cap is 8. However, the player has to spend money on facilities in this starting fleet... So, to unlock corvettes or frigates, tha player would have to spend part of that 4000 rp on a frigate facility, corvette facility, and research modules. Let's give our player faster interceptors and bombers by default, because they're the fast race. Let's give them 5 collectors, 5 interceptors, and a fighter facility (5000 exactly). Let's say he fights against someone who's a boomer newbie, and had 10 resource collectors and a fighter facility. That player would be at an advantage early on econ wise, but our player with the five interceptors would be able to attack those pesky res collectors from the get go. But, let's say our player attacks someone who has eight resource collectors and two mobile refineries... Those m/f's can fend off fighter assaults pretty easily, but at rank one, you can only get a max of two. ok, let's say our player ends up losing an hour into the game to the enemy's force of massed ions. Ok, so if we let the other player keep his massed fleet, the newbie would have a bunch of frigates. And, our player wouldn't have crap. But, if we respawn the other newbies original force at the system he won, and level him up (give him, say, 6000 rp and unlock corvettes), now he can start advancing up the food chain. Meanwhile, our newbie who lost to a couple refineries is going to get a force of all bombers, hyperspace back into the system against his opponent, and kick his ass. But, the opponent, now with unlocked corvettes, starts with a few gunships. Oops. If our player had built only ints, he would have been able to win possibly, but bombers get chewed up... so our player would probably retreat to his carrier with a couple gun platforms, etc The mmo stuff should be for starting the games, but it shouldn't be dependant on what happens during people's games. That would get unbalanced really quickly, and we'd have to impose limits so people coudn't wander around with max capped fleets. Ok, back to our newbie... let's say he's been playing for a couple hours on this server (50-60 people), and is now at level 4/10. Now he gets 10000 rp, and can prebuild up to an additional two carriers, as well as he would have enough cash to tech towards frigates and research facilities. However, to start with ions, he would have to spend 1500+2250+1000 which is already 4750, leaving enough for 7 $700 frigates, if that's all he buys. Then again, a player could buy 2 carriers for 5600, and put fighters and collectors in each... or maybe platform control modules... or research cloaking tech.. Let's go foward to level 8, when a player would get 20000 rp. With battlecruisers at 4000 rp, the player could technically get 5... But! There's research involved. Add in a unit cap of 2 bc's for a level 8, and that's still pretty hefty. But, fi that player loses a game, and they go down to rank 7.. maybe rank 7 only has a bc cap of 1. :P. 20000 rp is a fairly balanced force, meaning up to 36 bomber wings. :D With two extra carriers, that would leave 14400 for bombers, which is 26, which can easily fit in the 30 slots you get. 26 bombers is a lot of bombers. :P As well, a player at this rank could recycle their fleet at will, based on their success in previous battles, and fine tune the fleet to be an extension of their personality and workable tactics. If a player built up said large force, and then got wiped out making it a pain to build up again, well, that would suck. Especially because the player that beat them now has a fucking huge fleet. Talk about lopsided.

So, a player with upgaded bombers facing off against a player who starts with two bc's (and maybe destroyers). However, we could clock a mothership and the required tech at maybe level 7 or 8, and make it cost 6-8-10krp, with researches and upgrades. You would get a pretty fair advantage starting with a mothership, if you knew how to use it. A guy with carriers and supoprting forces could wipe you out early on... Levels 9 and ten would probably raise even more caps, making said player pretty powerful starting wise. But, if players face off agsint people near their rank, and level up, you can start taking on the larger frces in no time, especially because you can see the makeup of their fleet in the system lobby, and choose which ones you want to take on.


Not trying to flame you, just respectfully disagreeing.

[verybad]

Well perhaps there could be some benefit attached to risking persistent fleets.

For example, higher technologies could only be researched in certain maps, so people couldn't just turtle.

People that just collected resources would be "taxed" by the empire, and their resources sent to forces on the front.

I just think the lure of persistent fleets is worth finding a way to balance it rather than just throwing it away.

It might even be possible for particular units to be taken from a player if they pick only on weaker rated players (eg you have 3 Battlecruisers, and attack a player with just his mothership and a few collectors.

Once is OK, second time, one of your most powerful ships is taken away (aBC, third time another ship is taken, etc. This reflects the Imperial Navy (or whatever you want to call it) taking ships from individual commandes to be used in places where they are more vital. The ammount of ships taken could be adjusted based on overall levels.

These ships could be given to people that attacked forces STRONGER then themselves. Or kept at the nearest fleet base (a big megalith)

An interesteing concept might be the ability to switch sides, betraying vital systems to the otehr side.

It would be important to have each system be different and provide various benefits. A few neutral systems with "space Monsters (various powerful CPU controlled superships or megaliths (like the Guardian in MOO2 for example) would be cool.

[theBlind]

Ok, TheCaptain, you make some good points there.

1) The living-in-front-of-his-comp player is going to be a problem anyway (ey, I got th1s 1337 pl4t0rm rush... r00xxx000rrrzzz... arrrrrghh! [actually I´m just angry because *I* never come up with stuff like this ;)] ) Once we have established that this type of player is acutally going to be a problem balance wise we should take him into consideration, but not design to much around this particular one, it will be no more fun to play.

2) Newbies not loosing their fleets due to hitting the cold, hard metal of a vets cruiser ("Hey, thats nice effects coming from your ship over there... wait, WHERE´S MY FLEET???") This one I like, just as well as the extensions it has when helping more casual players.

3) More dedicated players not keeping the fleets they have build up within matches, this one I do not like. Why should I care for my fleet at all? Just blow them all up at the end to watch the fireworks(and then go to the forums complaining why there is no scuttle damage for your BattleCruiser-flying-bomb), they won´t do me any good anyway :( The very fact that this was not the case in HW1 SP was what set the game apart from many others back then, imho (and something I back then had been waiting for since the old C&C days... maybe even since Dune2, can´t remember). So I say we should keep this as a good feature.
Let me come up with a few more points as well:
- A player how has spend some time building up his/her fleet will not risk them foolishly, thus actually _reducing_ the number of cookie cuttter builds that are only weak agains a single type of strategy.
- A vet is likely to give in to a newer player if he decides the battles losses are inacepable.
- Cheap(sorry to anyone, just my opinion) tactics like scutteling a wing of fighters and re-building instead of repairing is reduced.
- War of attrition is not as bad as you make it sound: There should be a retreat point(as I said earlier as well) and players should, instead of blindly comitting their forces to battle, scout the enemy and decide wheather they want to fight this fight directly, rather go get some reinforcements or decide to go guerillia in an attempt to win (I assume the release maps will be large enough for this)

4) The player idling somewhere in a backwater sector, not doing anything but getting rich (anyone from Diablo2 here? Pindlebot anyone?). That is the second problem my suggestions face and yours are stronger.
I do not have a ready suggestion for this point right now that does not give the 1) player type an unaceptably unfair advantage. An idea I came up with is empire resource sharing (30% from everyones income is deducted - and they can count themselfes lucky, I would have to pay 50% in taxes, if I worked instead of studying) less fortunate players are then funded partly from this pool. Munchkins would actually be welcome to everyone for once :)
- now that I have written this, I have to come up with the idea that no player builds any capships themselves, but instead buys them from the empire. Just a though as I dislike the idea of building, manning and deploying a capship in less than 5 minutes - call me crazy if you wish ;)

So - not sure if I have missed some of your points, but this is long enough already, I´ll post more later.
Ah and just as you said - no flaming, just respectful disagreement. I believe that it is from this kind of friction the really great ideas emerge :sci:

[theBlind]

Originally posted by verybad
For example, higher technologies could only be researched in certain maps, so people couldn't just turtle.
Hmm, interesting... but still there needs to be a more... intuitive way... something...
Maybe capship production should really be possible only at Tanis-type megaliths. You´d be sure to have some action going on there at nearly all times. And those further back inside your teritory could be reserved for newbies per default so stronger players would frequent the outlying ones (note that I think we should stick to space lanes for simplicities sake as well as the nice tactical+territorial ideas they provide. Call 'em Jump- Routes between LaGrange Jumppoints and you´re set)

Originally posted by verybad

People that just collected resources would be "taxed" by the empire, and their resources sent to forces on the front.

Ah, it just takes me to long to type my posts ;)


Originally posted by verybad

It might even be possible for particular units to be taken from a player if they pick only on weaker rated players (eg you have 3 Battlecruisers, and attack a player with just his mothership and a few collectors.

Once is OK, second time, one of your most powerful ships is taken away (aBC, third time another ship is taken, etc. This reflects the Imperial Navy (or whatever you want to call it) taking ships from individual commandes to be used in places where they are more vital. The ammount of ships taken could be adjusted based on overall levels.

These ships could be given to people that attacked forces STRONGER then themselves. Or kept at the nearest fleet base (a big megalith)

/me likes. Good thinking, well explained. :thumb:

Originally posted by verybad

An interesteing concept might be the ability to switch sides, betraying vital systems to the otehr side.
Ohhh yeeeesssss... of course :flamer:


Originally posted by verybad

It would be important to have each system be different and provide various benefits. A few neutral systems with "space Monsters (various powerful CPU controlled superships or megaliths (like the Guardian in MOO2 for example) would be cool.
Allow for megaliths, some with defensive installations, some with shipyards, all *destrucable* and you´ve got nice terrain and differing, interesting maps. Space monsters are just so cheesy... I like them ;)
(just imagine leading a deep strike force, crippling the enemies shipyards deep inside their territory while your clan simultaniously attackes the frontier yards. One hard strike and the war is set. Now thats the stuff legends are made of! )

EDIT: [going overboard] Once I have killed that space-snake, I want a decent sized vessel with it´s head mounted on to display to everyone [/going overboard]

[verybad]

Certain Unique ships would be cool. As well as hidden systems that can only be discovered by players who've researched obscure technologies.

EG. The Beta Arculis System has no jumplanes to it, it's there on the map, but there seems to be some force that prevents hyperspacing to the system.

On the Tech Tree might be somthing called: Secrets of the Ancients, if you research it, you generate a random number, the server generates a random list of technologies that might be research. Each time a game starts. (to prevent cheating by putting the number in on the client side)

One of the technologies might be "Forge Jumplane"

Your fleet now can build a jumplane Megalith (once) that builds a jumplane to any system you choose. The Megalith can be destroyed (which takes out the jumplane) The Megalith costs a lot(naturally). But The rewards of being able to reach an unexplored system first might be great (or it might be empty :) )

Forged Jumplanes might appear a different color from natural jumplanes. Researching one wouldn't let you build a new Jumplane Megalith whenever you wanted however, as each system would require new research.

The reverse (Supress Jumplane) might also be researched, possibly taking a resource rich world subject to attacks from the enemy side away from danger. (unless the Supress Jumplane Megalith were destroyed)

*eyes glaze over*

Non fleet specific technologies would be a load of fun.

[Konnayr]

*phew* Spend my day on being with my girlfriend, and missed a lot of the discussion...but i like to read the ideas others have anyway...

1) i dislike the idea of having each player his own mothership due to realism reasons...250 Vaygr vs. 250 Hiigaran Players....each with mothership.... :hmm:

2) Tech restriction by the Empire was exactly what i had in mind.

3) I think persistant fleets are a must because they are one of the features which made Homeworld unique...and it adds to longtime fun/motivation. (but i understand TheCaptains contras, we have o work on them)

4) IF we use them we have to deal with problems like powergaming, newbiebashing, etc. (as you all mentioned)

5) Space Monsters/ai-driven Ships sound cool, but there should be a motivation faktor to kill them..maybe a "treasure", some sort of technology... because nobody will be happy to fight a powerful space Monster if it kills half of his fleet for nothing.

------

I'm currently updating my scripting skills and took a look into the HW2.big with the tools developed by delphy, spooky, crooky and the others :mag: ... quite a lot .luas in there...looks good, unfortunately they are all compiled....that means we have to wait for the full version anyway....which means for me (as i'm living in Germany) until the 26. of September... *sigh*

That's it for now, i'm off for school...cu guys

[TyrealMathias]

on the 'space monsters'(anybody dare say Naggarok and I shall smack them with a totem pole), they could be guarding a hyperspace lane to a hidden megalith or something.. they could be attatched to a megalith.. or if they are actual ships, then the players would have to attack the megalith in order to rid it of enemy presence...

Edit: 1 word: "T-Mat"

[TheCaptain]

:rant:
I understand why everyone wants to go the persistent fleet angle. And, it does make sense: Your fleet whomps on another and caps a few ships, you as the player want to keep those ships.
If the game takes them away (effectively nerfing you), that would suck.

However, I'm really strong on the idea that we need to keep player's fleets at a certain cap based on their level, so the fleet they build up during the HW2 game is really still a newbie-level fleet, or, at least they can only take so much away from the battle afterwards.

We don't want newbies building up massive fleets during an hw2 game and then keeping them afterward.

I also like the idea of players who get whomped (or anyone who chooses) can go back to their homeworld or a nearby 'fleet base' and trade in old ships for new ones, or rebuild their fleet. I understand you guys want to go the persistent fleet route, so I'm going to try to work with that and address a few issues. Who knows? Maybe one of these threads we'll hit the jackpot....


Also, I like the enthusiasm about space monsters and special events happening during gameplay (like forging jumpplanes), but we need to keep in mind that the solid, base game is what people will be playing most of the time, the special events are a bonus, if we don't work out the really basic mechanics, the special stuff won't matter, and that's what we should really make sure we do now.

Tangents are fun, and I don't want to discourage them, which is why...

I think we really really need a forum or IRC channel.

I'll put up a temporary "#homeworlds" channel on austnet, and idle there 24/7. If anyone can hook us up with a forum, that'd be great, otherwise we'll just make an ezboard.

Ok, back to the gameplay. We need to make sure that the mechanics are simple, and make sense. I don't like the idea of a powerful player being penalized for newbie whomping. Powerful people should be able to exploit their power to the full amount. That's why I think we should just make sure their power is limited in the first place. We should figure out a way for newbies to stand up to bigger players or at least let people on their team give it a shot, rather than just nerf people for whomping.

The design absolutely has to work simply, and flawlessly in sp and mp. I liked my respawning fleets bit because it seemed to work ok in mp and ok in sp. It's not the best, no, but it seems to have generated this discussion. Which is good. :) I think the more we 'constructively encourage' each other, the better the gameplay is going to be as a result IF it's simple and it's something everyone can rally behind. Obviously, my idea wasn't perfect because it didn't address some of the simple wants you guys had. It's true, I wanted some of them too.

Ok, I think a great place to start is to put down our goals. At least, before I disagree with some of the ideas in topics slightly above this one. ;)

Ok, here are some features which I feel everyone would be happy if we put in:

1) Player picks a name, avatar, homeworld, and subfaction, which helps aid his strategies. Think, a class in a team fps
2) Players have a cap on how large their fleet can become based on their rank. Rank is increased by successful battles.
3) Players travel their fleet around the galaxy, hypering between a web of systems. When they encounter an enemy fleet, after a timer counts down, a winner take all hw2 skirmish starts.
4) Players start a skirmish with their fleet they have been hypering around with, and at the end of the battle, the fleet they are left with is what they keep.
5) PLAYERS SHOULD BE ABLE TO RETREAT OUT OF A MAP. I don't care: If we have persistent fleets, we gotta give them a way out. Ok, they lose the sector, but NOT their fleet!
6) Players need to be able to hyper thier fleets back to bases, which would be permanently in systems and capturable by either side, to repair or refit their fleet.
7) Let's give players a 'command ship' or something which is always with them when they go anywhere (say, commanding the battle from a couple km away). Whereever their fleet goes, this ship goes, even if they don't have a fleet left.
8) Players have an RP pool that they can spend on their fleet. While at a base, it takes time to spend those rp on units (Say, at normal hw res speed, or half?). The rp pool is constant based on their rank, and they can spend it as I outlined above. When they go back to a base, they can repair their units for the % damaged/same rp time (90% damaged ship would take the time to repair as it would to build 90%).
9) Players can only take out of a battle a certain amount of stuff, based on the carrying space in their cap ships and their unit limits. If they leave or win a battle with x amount of ships, they would have to make a choice as to what to take out with them. We could say that for rank, your hyperspace core is only so powerful, or something. it would keep fleet size down and force the player to make choices about what he wants to keep. Better than automatically killing all their stuff.
Since players get rank (more ship points) for winning battles, they could just take their spoils of war back to a friendly base and trade it in for what they really want. The trade in/building thing doesn't really address the 'make and equip a cap ship in 5 mins' thing, but it does limit player's fleets.
10) Motherships are something only higher level players can unlock.
11) Now that we have persistent fleets and retreating in the design, lots of players could just engage a higher level player's fleet over and over, wearing him down successively the farther he got into enemy territory. That helps the newbie problem.
12) NPC enemies, bonus systems, easter eggs: Sure.
13) We want to keep the game edge and the main way for advancement on fighting enemy (and most of the time, player controlled) fleets. If we have players running around killing monsters, especially high level players, we're running into the same problems something like everquest has: the higerh rank you are, the easier you can kill baddiers, so the baddiers have to get harder, and you'd need a lot of them, etc. Now, some pirate, merc, or alien races holding a few systems and invading wouldn't be that bad. ;)
14) Tech should be limited by what faction a player is and what rank they are. IE, lower ranks on certain factions might have access to certain techs before other factions. For different factions different tech angles should be more appealing. No switching factions without making a new player. If you want to choose the race with cheaper/stronger bc's, fine. Just getto that rank first. :)
15) The ranks have to be set up so that a lower level player can sometimes beat a higher level player, but the higher level player needs that advantage. I like the idea of an rp limit for this.
16) Researching and building should be nearly identical in hw2 and out of it: Units should take a similar time to build, and the technologies you research out of game should all be mirrored in game, etc
17) No switching sides without making a new character. That would just get retarded, sabotage wise.
18) There should be ai fleets in the galaxy either to keep up a minimum population or as defense fleets. I think all bases should have a default defensive force guarding them, with certain caps. Hiigaran defense force might have 5-6 BC's, etc. :)
19) Unique techs, sure, just make them faction specific. Hidden systems? I dunno, maybe.
20) 10 squadrons per carrier is a bit light. I think this really needs to bump up to 15 or even 20 per carrier, because of the way people transport forces around. 14 fighters and 6 collectors is ok. 6 collectors and 4 fighters is just retarded. Then let's give the MS 40 slots, and we're ready to roll.
21) I don't think the rp's you harvest in game should have bearing on the meta game, even with taxing. You could say that at the end of the battle, they take all your remaining rp's and bump up your level of available res if you win. Or, if you lose, they take down the amount of res you can spend on fleets. Actually, that works pretty well. :) That way, you kind of have an unlimited 'pool' for your fleet, you just have to give them the rps you harvest.
22) If you retreat, the other guy wins, meaning his rp cap is going up. Not the best idea to get into a battle with a high level player and back out in game, unless you cause him damage. If his rp count goes up because he won, BUT he has to hyper back to base to use it, AND you just wasted some of his ships.. well then. More likely he'll lose when another guy on your team takes him on.
23) The tech you research during the game really does have to go away. :| The modules will stay, yeah. Maybe you have a certain cap for modules, or you can only unlock modules as you advance in rank. But if we want the rp people allocate for their fleets to stay reasonable, we can't leave them with an entire game's worth of tech. That would have to be worked out a bit..
24) The living in front of his comp player will still be a problem even here, but if we let newbies chip away at his Persistent Fleet(tm), and we make sure players know the kind of battle they're getting into (high rank, hyper out of system), we can leave them alone and if need be, let him take on some stronger ai fleets. I think the probelm isn't that big, especially if level 1 gets 5000 ru's and even level 8 gets 20000 (but he can now tech up, or get more crap, etc)
25) Actually, you know what? We could go with the RP fleet limit that hw1 had... That would fit ok. You can only build x rp's worth of stuff at any given time even during a mission. Similar to fleet unit caps, but more flexible. We could make the max rp during a game 2x of what their fleet cap is. However, the guy with the more rp in his fleet is kinda gonna win anyway, so that doesn't really work. I don't want to limit people are doing during the game, but then again, we have to because we have to keep people at their level
26) Scoring, to level up, is dynamic. Lets say that a win is 1 point, and a loss is -1 point. Then, you have different modifers based on the system, your rank and friendly ranks/strength, and opponents ranks and number. So, 3 level 8's might make the win points x24, but the lose points might be /10. End result being, if it's a strategic battle, and if the enemy is as strong or stronger than you are, you're going to get a lot more points toward leveling than if it was a pointless battle and you outnumbered your enemy.


Ok, I'm probably going to edit this a few times anyway, but there's your persistent fleets. There are inherent problems, but I tried to work around them. Comments?


[Edit: The way I see this design, is a way to make the fights unequal from the start and allow people to grow, win, lose, and specialize. A normal homeworld 2 skirmish I see a bit like a first person team game where everyone uses the same powerful weapon (basic ctf maps, operation flashpoint, g36). Everyone's on the same basic level all the time, the game is basically the same each time, and you don't really... advance. Same in hw2: Everyone gets the same techs, they start out with the same stuff. It's equal. That's nice, and it's balanced well.. but here, it's inherently unequal, but we're not terribly punishing and rewarding players for doing good/bad things, respectively. Here, there's absoultely *nothing wrong* with a newbie taking his carrier and bombers into a fight with a more powerful enemy. Ok, he loses, and he loses a couple xp, and the guy that easily won gets a couple xp. Oh, and a star system. But, hey, that means as a newbie, you don't really have anything to lose except the time it takes to hyper back to a nearby base, refit your fleet, and get back in the fight. You start having more to lose when you start going up against people of a similar rank to you. And, players *will* start trying desperate strategies that were not really totally possible in hw2 because of the way players are generally equal. You know, killing a battlecruiser would be a piece of work if you had to throw 7-8 different games at it to finally kill it. (We gotta track hp for units between games)]

[theBlind]

Originally posted by TheCaptain

we need to keep player's fleets at a certain cap based on their level

We don't want newbies building up massive fleets during an hw2 game and then keeping them afterward.

Make them build capships in metagame only, fighters and corvettes in-game. No really massive fleets, since we still go unit caps(this is a absolute must, even from a technical pov only. We can´t have players with stronger computers lagkill those without the hardware to hadle it. This needs some adressing and I have already thought about a few items, but I think it's a secondary right now.

enthusiasm about space monsters and special events happening during gameplay <snip> Agreed. Just dreaming :)


I don't like the idea of a powerful player being penalized for newbie whomping. Powerful people should be able to exploit their power to the full amount. That's why I think we should just make sure their power is limited in the first place.
What the verybads approach is doing, but from another angle: not disallowing something, but rather directing the player to the right usage we want.


We should figure out a way for newbies to stand up to bigger players or at least let people on their team give it a shot, rather than just nerf people for whomping.

Exactly. Fund them, penalize players for picking on them, make sure there are oppportunities for them to grow, like pirate hunting, attacking weaker opponents.
I´m not to sure if I made my idea about funding all to clear: Imho the funding would apear in real-time in the meta-game, so no-one would be penalized. If you only play once a week, you log on and your funding is there, let the fun begin. If you play every day, you harvest resources and your funding is again there.


1)

2)add damage done to rank increase to allow weaker players forces to fight a war of attrition.

3)
4)
5)
6)
7) Let's give players a 'command ship' or something which is always with them when they go anywhere (say, commanding the battle from a couple km away). Whereever their fleet goes, this ship goes, even if they don't have a fleet left.

8)

9)Fleet caps, as mentioned, sure thing.

10)

11)
12)

13)<snip> Now, some pirate, merc, or alien races holding a few systems and invading wouldn't be that bad. ;)

Did we already think about integrating more than two playable races in the maeta-game? As long as the fights are not between more than 2 races, there _should_ be no difference at all. Other races ships would just be in other ship-slots and be produced from other factories. I don´t see a problem but mucho potenetial.

Research: I think the easiest way is to implement research as an empire-level function: We got reasonable limiting to the players capabilities in the starting time after the world is created as well as less join-in stress on new players (to tech up, get their fleets running ect.) I think (nearly?) all units should be there from the beginning, but upgrades appear gradually. So no research at all by the player, all AI controlled/ pre-determined (without telling the players any dates on upgrades or something alike)

Ranks: Maybe rank should only affect fleet-caps, if we go with empire-research.

15) Depends on what ranks are going to do. If we got a limit there, no need for another one, imho. Use what you´ve got.


16)Researching and building should be nearly identical in hw2 and out of it: Units should take a similar time to build, and the technologies you research out of game should all be mirrored in game, etc
Hmmm.... I dislike this, due to the balancing reasons you gave earlier.

17) Switching sides / player-names: Maybe we can look up the CD-Key and allow one account per CD only? That would have been very nice to the main game in the first place and I think is a must have for our kind of game. And once you´ve got a fixed name, we´re set for sabotage. Players could simply get a "traitor" flag behind their name to warn others. And I´m sure there would be quiet some head-hunting going on. Which is no problem in my book, since the traitor had been warned...


18)
19)
20) You definatly got a point. There is some balancing needed here, after all the ships were balanced with exactly the build up every game style in mind we want to avoid.

21) Depends solely on implementation of ship-production, ihmo. Once we got a decision there, we should be able to agree on this point as well.

22)
23) Tech: as said before. Modules: The way I understand it, the module space is rather limited in the full game already. So you have to make decisions there from the beginning on. This means you should keep them.

24)
25) I think the other limits are enough if all are in place.
26) Jup, some mathematician can get us a working formulae to balance stuff like damage done, ships lost, player level and maybe even skill. Now if I just studied something else :D

I agree with your EDIT-points. The newbie-security net is a must, its just the implementation I sorta disagree with.
Tracking units health is (dare I say) not going to be a bigger problem than tracking individual units in the first place (which we still don´t know is possible or not. )There could be a most convienieant script command that just gives us the needed stuff back... or there could be no way in hell to do it. Although I do doubt the second one is true.

I think I see a bright future for this mod.

theBlind

EDIT: a "game"... the one who finds it first gets a cookie :loco:

[TheCaptain]

(I wish this forum had split screen) :P

I should probably get a browser with split screen.

I think cap ships should be buildable in the hw2 game IF the player is at MS level. I really think we should allow motherships for higehr level players. After all, after you work up to a high level, a ms v ms battle would be really really meaningful.

yeah, unit caps is the way to go, but I'm still scratching my head as to whether we make them smaller for lower ranked players or equal across the board during the mp game.

I don't think that taking away a player's ships for newbie whomping is the best solution. A powerful player should be able to use his power. if he wants to scare newbies, if they don't want to fight him, they can always hyper outsystem. Maybe they're dumb and WANT to attack him. Newbies are unpredictable, so are the advanced players. If we want to limit big-guy power, we should not take away their ships. (Which, I guess, would mean we'd have to lower their available-ship-pool) I'm convinced there's another, better way.

I think funding would be a static number you can spend how you wish. The amount you can spend/allocate goes up if you gain rank, down if you lose it. That way your funding is static no matter how much harvesting you do or don't do. Now, we could give a player an xp bonus at the end of a mission, same way we can track damage done, for harvesting res. But, I think there are problems involved with that. Hey, if you're conquering a system for your empire, you don't *need* to harvest it. Claiming the system is enough.

I'm a supporter of the two sides per server/battle idea. Two races is simple, fits in with the hw mythos. We add in some ai or *maybe* controllable smaller sides (be fun to be a pirate, arr!), but I really feel two races only is a must. Now, lots of factions within that side, sure.

I disagree with making research side level. i feel research should be done on a fleet-fleet basis. Give them access to more tech (or more fleet points to spend on tech as they level up). But, I really don't feel we should keep it that static. make it dynamic so the higehr ranked players will get an edge, or those that pick a certain faction get the advantage of tech x before everyone else.
Player controlled, not ai controlled. We want to put as much control over the fleet into the player's hands as possible, and give them the limits, and let them make the choices. The more choices the player can make as opposed to the game, the better. (technically)

Rank affects the amount you can spend on your fleet, whether you want to get ships, modules for your ships, or upgrades. So, you can have a high tech smaller fleet or a lower tech large fleet, or just give yourself an advantage when you start the game. And, we keep the same tech tree in place, so to start your fleet with a cloaking module, you have to havethe extra cash to spend on it. Remember, there's a whole hw2 multiplayer game that comes from what we're starting with.. so it might be an advantage to start with a hyper, or cloak, or whatever module. Then maybe you could do something unexpected, start your production, and wax your enemywith some interesting strat *not possible* in hw2 mp.

So, our main limit is how much you can spend on your fleet initially, and what units and techs are unlocked for both prefleet build and during game. So, whether you buy it beforehand or not, you can't get access to the hyper module until you're level x. Same with certain classes of ships and types of ships.

"16)Researching and building should be nearly identical in hw2 and out of it: Units should take a similar time to build, and the technologies you research out of game should all be mirrored in game, etc " -> What I meant was that we don't want to give players the ability to research odd technologies that give them some non descript bonus in the meta gam ebut don't affect the hw2 game. if they spend fleet points on a tech, they should have that hw2 tech in the game. Now, we can add new techs, but.. :)
Also, as to building units: I merely meant that if you want your new 5000fleet point fleet to be built, you have to wait a certain amount of time for the 5000 fp's to get built/researched in meta game while you're waiting at that system base.

As to switching sides: Remember, goal is to have a game people can host on a typical server and leave on. We Don't want to do a central server checking cd keys... and I don't know if we'd be able to check someone's cd key anyway.. well, accessing the registry, but.. :P Maybe that is an option... but, decentralized servers all the way.

yeah, #21 does depend on the ship building system. I'm still touting mine or a derivative. :)

Well, tech = modules. You build the module, you keep the module. But, we do need to keep a fleet limit... So maybe after a game, the player could reallocate his fleet, picking which technologies and ships to keep to jibe with the new limit, and the rest would get "sent back to the fleet". Since, obviously, a commander of his rank couldn't keep whatever it was anyway over his limit or specific unit caps. But, I guess, the higher your rank, the more spoils you can get and keep. :) There will definately be an equilibrium point around the mid level where players can field a decent size fleet at start, slug it out, and then keep most of their stuff at the end.

yeah, regular unit limits are probably the way to go. RP is just overkill. :)

As to a sort of newbie net, I think we can figure out an implementation we're happy with. We just have to remember, compromise can sometimes be the bane of good design. I'm firmly against games which are 'designed by committee'. I think the best route to go is to keep pounding until we can have a core of people very happy with the basic points.

Also, I'm a big stickler for prototyping. I want the main gameplay points nailed down by the time hw2 comes out and most of have it. (16-20?). I want to get something basic as hell out the door for internal prototyping asap. The only way to figure out whether our mechanics work is to play it. I vote we get some basic mechanics agreed on, and then *work toward prototyping*. After all, if someone says that mechanic x won't work, the rest of us would realize that once we had it coded in in some basic form. The most important thing in my opinion is to get something tangible done (yes, just for the sake of having something tangible). I've seen a bunch of mods which live in forums. They don't really exist, they're just ideas going back and forth for *years*. Often, part of that is because the designs are so damn "complicated", and "dream game." But, even so. Basic mechanics, doable in sp and probable for mp, and we've got something in the "bright future" department.

OK, a way we could simulate a working version in mp? All of the designers and testers act 'nice' and post the win/loss reports as well as stick to the starting game conditions (side, slot, etc). After all, we're developing it, so we all want to see it work. The technical implementations can come a bit later once we involve relic or start full blown hacking into hw2.


-> As to the system map, I want one like ev/ev-nova: Big web with little circles which change color to show side, with some info bars on the side, where players can set coords for a jump by clicking on adjecent system or shift clicking on a bunch in a row. Then , they hit jump, and the sim does the work as it slowly moves their little line in real time from system to system.

I still vote that systems act like 'game lobbies', have a timer until game start so people can hyper in or out, certain systems are designated as ship production and are where players rearm/refit, there are only two main playable sides with multiple factions/classes fighting to capture one homeworld on either side, hyperspacing is done in 'real time' between systems, we've got a galacitc pie slice with the hiigarans in the middle and the vaygr on the rim, that there are roving/static computer defense fleets to keep both sides competitive, servers are independant and decentralized (with certain options that server admins can change), and that we have a limit of 3 players to a side for games. Any disagreement on those points?

Of course, then there's the whole 'fleet-point' system (as I've named it), the method of ship building, the ways we limit fleet size, and the ranking system, which are all up for contention.

...still idling in #homeworlds; austnet.org


Btw, blind, did a blank mean no comment, or a disagree?

[theBlind]

just a quick note: a blank meant (general)agreement :)

[TyrealMathias]

guess we got the designated Team Leaders, eh? theBlind and TheCaptain... hehe..

one big question: what happens if one faction's homeworld is captured? :)

[verybad]

I think games should go till "Total Annhilation" Look what happened in HW1- the Higarans just got POd and found themselves a new homeworld... Homeworlds should be well defendd and have loads of resources, but taking them shouldn't end the game.

Speaking of which, capturing worlds intact should require large ground forces- they already have a ship ingame for that- the transports.

[TheCaptain]

Well, Blind and I are/were going back and forth in irc about our funding systems for the fleet commanders. Anyone's welcome to join in. #homeworlds on austnet. :P

Blind's leaning towards a more capitalist view where fleet commanders get res they mine (or they geta salary), and then they spend it on ships (at least, I think that's what he meant). Call it fleet level harvesting.

I'm leaning towards a more communist view, where when you cap a system, the empire does all the harvesting, and takes all your excess resources. If you win a battle, they'll raise the number of 'fleet points' you have available to spend on research, ships, and modules to put into your fleet before a match, and your fleet has to stay at this resource limit. If you win a battle and end up with lots and lots of stuff (or lose, and end up with stuff), you have to pick what you want to keep, and the rest goes back to the empire. You can recycle your fleet or things you picked at any shipyard system. With the discrepancy towards harvesting in games and the fact that people are probably going to spend their res anyway, we don't want to encourage them to hoard while playing hw2. After all, they're a military fleet, not a mercenary fleet. Leave the harvesting to the empire's harvesters, and let's reward the commanders who take systems by boosting their fleet limits.

I'll let blind himself argue for his system, as I think it could be viable.. I just prefer mine, obviously. ;) But, to each his own.

{edit: I love the idea of needing transports to help cap a system. I think if systems have a default time in seconds to be captured, idling in a system with transports (in meta game) would be the way to speed capture. Obviously, it would take much more time to capture systems without transports (depending on the system). So, if players wanted to keep you from rampaging around, they could attack yoru transports. very very very very nice idea.
I also think games should go until one side's homeworld is captured, and then the server resets. We're talking decentralized servers here, so each game shoudl be self contained, and just load a new section of the galactic map and reset everyone to newbie. But, it could be a server option to reset player rank, reset the map, or not do either.}

[TheCaptain]

I'm dedicating a new reply to the fact that I'm in love with players needing to have transports to take systems.

I love it: With the fleet point system I proposed, that means players have to make a hard choice as to whether to include transports in their fleet and how many... having many transports means you could blitz through systems. But, if transports cost 1-2k, and your limit is 5k, that's a lot more risky than if your limit is 20k. This means that you could have players working together: One guy has the transports and one guy has the defensive fleet. This also means you could cut down on the system capping by an invading enemy by hypering into systems with him, waxing his transports, and hypering out.
Also, system capping is done in meta view, btw, not during the hw2 game. After you win a system, though, you still have to wait a certain time before the system becomes yours.

[TyrealMathias]

oohhh... there we go.. a nice way of managing how many vessels you can take out of a battle... it all depends on how many ppl you have... in order to take a vessel, you must transfer a skeleton crew to it.. and you must have enough ppl onboard your 'command ship' to do so with... yes, yes...

as far as the ship limit total, me thinks that a player should have a 'warehouse' where they have to pay to keep certain ships there, for future use... kinda like real-life storage warehouses... dont pay, then bye bye BC... also, you can buy bigger warehouses.. in different systems.. and the closer you are to the warehouse, the less you have to pay to maintain the vessels...

[TyrealMathias]

also, as far as toasting the enemy homeworld, after this occurs, perhaps the remaining systems of the losing faction could be absorbed into a pirate faction.. Turanic, for example... during the transition, however, chaos entails... prices for things gets higher, stations arnt as well defended, etc...

...'n' stuff...

[TheCaptain]

-I don't think it's a good idea to track money, force the playe rto spend it, and reward hoarders. They're not mercs, they're fleet commanders.
-After an enemy omeworld gets capped, I think you should just reset the battle.

Of course, a lot of this discussion is moot, as starfisher wants to take this in a basic boneyards direction, which is his perogative. I'll let him lay out his proposed plans (which are pretty durn workable).

Oh, and I'm a gonna plug the channel, #homewords on irc.austnet.org :P

[Starfisher]

I say we start with a basic boneyards system. Nearly everything above and beyond a HW2 boneyards that has been discussed could be grafted right on top of the basic boneyards functionality. Though making a HW2 boneyards won't be easy, it is a lot simpler than implementing the myriad of ideas seen here. Once we have a good foundation, features could be added as needed or requested; but the foundation would be where we garnered interest and support.

[aphrochine]

Well I didnt read all of the posts, thats alot of reading. I skimmed as best I could. So if I cover something thats already been covered, no flammin.
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Well, there are a couple of design issues I'd like to discuss. First I'll share my opinions on Persistant Play with an MP universe. I'll also get into persistant fleets and pros/cons of them and my thoughts how to limit each.

First, a persistant universe would just not work. It is too dependent on people who log in an play all the time. In fact a persistant universe and persistant fleet could exist in the same design, not realistically anyway. Fleets would be left unattended and would be left to the mercy of AI or other players when attacked or involved in combat. Second, a persistent universe would require some sort of turn system, give players time to schedule their battles, so it wouldnt really be persistent anyways.

My view is to make the unverse in MP a clan based match type set up using a web interface, somewhat similar to the old ClanWars site of Brood War. Throuw in a clan leader, 1 week turns, limited resources, persistant fleets and you'll have a clan war that will be the coolest thing on the internet since pron.


Now, persistant fleets are awesome, you can name ships/squadrons fine tune your force composistion. It will also make the game more personable, which is always a design +. However, players will be hesitant to risk their hard earned ships in battle, unless rewards were great and in all honesty, in warfare, killing the other guys ships is the greatest reward. This would force players to only attack when they have an absolute strategic upperhand.

My suggestion is this, all fleets will revolve around a production ship (carrier, MS or shipyard) right? So a fleet will have the ability to build ships so why not give each fleet some working capital (RUs). Capital they can spend on ships in-engine for 1 battle use. **For design sake, ships made out of engine (in Meta) are of higher quality and can be carried from battle to battle while ships made in-battle are lower quality and must be disassembled after some use. The engine tracks units by ID, so it'll be easy to tell which ships are "high quality" and which arent. This could be similar to the Elite units found in the Campaign.

Technology. Players research their own technology. However, they can be given ships beyond their research limits. I prefer to split up the researches. You can be given ships beyond your tech ability. Example: JoJo has a Carrier Strike Force he named Alpha Squadron (starcraft fan). In it he has the Carriers Enterprise, Yorktown and Saratoga (history fan also). Each carrier is laden with quality strike craft. He has researched Improved Bombs and level 2 speed for all his fighters. So any fighters he makes in the battle will receive those upgrades. However, JaJa (JoJo's brother) likes capital ships, so he spends his time researching upgrades for them. Having individual tech levels can help create an identity for each player. A good way to get started is to give each player 5 free researches at the begining of play.

------------------------------

First someone needs to build a 3rd party meta game asap to start test some of these feasibilities. I'm gonna try to write up something rough, but with school and everything, I may not get the chance. But dont let that stop anyone else. A final version should be in java though so it can be ported to web easy. I may write it in C# though just to show some of my design ideas.

[Starfisher]

Interesting conversation in IRC:
<Starfisher> thought: on mp, you could get a file written out of the game saying who won etc?
<Thought> Starfisher: Yes.
<Starfisher> sweet
<Starfisher> SWEET

Its ongoing. More later.

[Fool2]

The issue is resources. Personally, I think resources are the ideal thing to fight over, which are located in territory. Not only would it give you something really tangible to fight over, they would actively (and logically) contribute to your strength. It also allows for great soft targets for geurilla style attacks.

[mandrill]

There is a site for those wanting to drive this idea forward and an IRC channel too :)
go to: keithneilson.co.uk (http://keithneilson.co.uk/)
or log in to IRC and join #hw2metaverse. There seems to be alot of interest in this idea and the more people we get involved the more likely we'll be able to make something happen. You can also contact us at metaverse@keithneilson.co.uk (mailto:metaverse@keithneilson.co.uk)
I'd especially like The Captain and TheBlind to get in touch.

[kurtdewolf]

Capn, Blind,

If you are going to have "Planet Capture" check out this thread:

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20843&perpage=15&pagenumber=3

I was thinking, Platform Defence on Planet (Rank = ## defense items) And have it a map limited to Fighter/Transport/Corvette/Platforms?

Just an Idea.

Could even add something in the Metaverse ??

[Mikail]

Maybe the game, cEvo, could be modified to work with HW2?
Thoughts?

[Mikail]

I downloaded Xconq. Will check that out later...
Also, I found out that if you add the -dumpPlayBalanceStats flag to the end of your HW2 shortcut, additional end-of-game stats will appear in the "Bin\LOGFILES\" directory in the form of .CSV files (would probably be useful for such a project).

[Elukka]

Ok. This thread is what... 2 years old. Anyways, does anybody know if it would indeed be possible to do a meta-game for HW2?

[adamstrange]

Yeah is anybody ACTUALLY working on this or is this just talk :fight:

[Zatch]

@Elukka:

Possible: yes.

Likely: no.

@Mikail: You get this week's gravedigger award :).

It would be nice to see some work on this project, but it's quite an effort and will require several dedicated people to get anywhere with it.

[Mr. Pete]

I would do some VB work on a UI and such but know nothing about server shiart.

Thus sorry!

If i could, i would.

[Mikail]

I've started looking into it with more detail.

[troff]

To all readers of this post, what was described in the first post reminded me exactly of Ferion (which is one way to do it).

Simple, not resource heavy yet effective. Do check it out and play a few rounds to see the mechanics (in a nutshell it is like a turn-based Masters of Orion but done in online format with up to 50+ human players).

[Mikail]

Well, I think it should be playable offline, too.

[dagonweb]

Please have a look at my post on this thread

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=12772&page=2&pp=15

[Zatch]

You only need to post once about a topic, unfortunately both of your posts were bumps of very old threads. Please don't bump old inactive threads.