New Idea: Slowly but surely, Kroiz eventually gets the Merchants Guild to work with him and for him. The pirates are the only groups left that haven’t completely come into Kroiz’s fold. If we built a fleet large enough in good time, we can now begin to try and secure the last remaining strongholds of non-Kroiz-aligned systems. We can pick the largest gray zone pirate base not yet aligned with Kroiz, and offer them protection from Kroiz, in exchange for a commitment to align with us; which implies that they would only attack Kroiz’s shipping, that being mostly Merchants Guild ships. Murphy is the one that informed us of the bad turn the Merchants Guild took. She lost her job with them, which she was going to resign from, anyways. The pirates don’t believe our ability to protect them, so Monte suggests a show of force. We split our, by now, oversized fleet into two fleets: Leave one to protect our home-base, and bring the other to the pirate base, blockade it, and when the pirate leader comes asking what we want from him, we say “to be your protectors”. So now we bring also a few space elevator stations there, if the pirate base is a planet, or fighter base stations, otherwise, and make that the home port for our second fleet. We can now repeat the operation at other pirate bases and begin to choke Kroiz’s money supply. Soon he’ll have to make a choice whether to wait or attack. Meanwhile, we can start applying our base management expertise to develop the economies of pirate bases, and make them so prosperous that piracy begins to lose its allure. Once we defeat Kroiz, we can negotiate between the pirates and Confeds. Confeds to accept gray zone bases as legitimate, and to issue a blanket pardon on pirates retiring from piracy; and pirates to accept ceasing all illegal activities. Some pirate bases refuse and we destroy them. Then we quietly take our fleet back to the Tri-System.

Spiritplumber wrote:

PiArmada is an Armada remake based on, guess what, the VS engine for the flight portion, and Python for the turn based portion. I like all these ideas (reminds me a ton of Reunion, or the first Dune) but it needs a HEAVY dose of KISS if we want to implement this realistically... First off; are we only moving in the tri-systems, or also the neighbouring territories?

Chuck_starchaser wrote:

No KISS. I always say “‘KISS‘, MY ASS!”. I don’t believe in KISS. Often people say “let’s make it simple and we can add features later”, but often you need to consider all the features you’ll need, to come up with a design that accomodates them elegantly. Adding features to some existing piece of software is a nightmare; –usually anything you add or change breaks everything, and it takes days to figure out how to un-break it. It’s best to shoot for the stars, IMO, and get a good design from the start. Otherwise, the “we can add features later” becomes a euphemism for “let’s make it simple, never mind those features”, which is what usually people really mean. If we add strategy and simulation, we should do it right. It should be a great new gameplay style addition, or not be at all. Last thing we need is for LOAF and his ilk to start saying “that’s not Wing Commander, and it’s garbage”, and be right at that... :-0 If we take all the best features of MOO2, Civilization, Starcraft, Sim City and Homeworld and put them into a new RTS, our game should be better than that technologically, gameplay-wise and fun-wise by a factor of 10 to 1. No reason why we can’t beat them all to a pulp. First of all, we have a *NEW* idea: A “FIRST PERSON RTS”, meaning, you manage from planet to empire, from a wing to a navy, yet never leave the first person perspective. That’s a first in the industry, and should count for something. Secondly, we are solving the main problem that afflicted MOO2, as well as many other turn-based and real time strategy games; –namely, the problem of micromanagement becoming more tedious as the empire and/or army grows. As the empire grows we train leaders who finally take over and do the micromanagement for us. First planetary leaders, and finally a system/nation leader. So, as we get ready to start start building our fleet, the empire begins to take care of itself. And in terms of fleet micromanagement, at each stage of the game, from single ship, through wing, mini-carrier fleet, and all the way up to controlling a navy of multiple fleets, we train people to take care of details and be able to work from high level orders. Towards the end of the game, we won’t be telling each frigging ship what to do; we’ll tell our fleet commanders what to do and they will interpret the order and issue orders to their various task-force leaders, and each of those task-force leaders will tell his wing commanders what to do, and so on down to individual pilots, who will themselves be able to answer to fairly high level orders such as “distract boarding target” as meaning “take pot shots at it but don’t damage it seriously and stop shooting once our boarding parties arrive at it”; or “keep enemy interceptors busy while shuttles retreat” as meaning “start shooting at any interceptor flying towards the shuttles, closest to them first; take damage if necessary; the shuttles must make it back safely”. This hyerarchical way of subsuming lower echelons and incresing the level of abstraction of orders as the game progresses is also something that has never been done. Best of all, we DON’T have to program any of these orders! All we have to program is an interface by which the player can program the orders. Certainly not a simple problem; but once we figure it out it would be much less work than programming gazillions of actual orders at many levels. If we make the interface for the player’s programming really intuitive and natural, such as conversational, allowing use of examples, having the commander ask for clarifications, etceteras, it will make for a great addition to the fun of the game. And it will allow the player to come up with a small set of commands that suits his or her style of play and strategy, rather than try to include gazillions of possibly desirable commands that most people might never use. As for whether we’re in the TriSystem or moving into other territories, at the moment I’m thinking it should be a player strategy choice. There could be various ways of defeating Kroiz. One could be to build a mega-fleet and have a spy that tells him where your base is at the right time, so that he comes and attacks you and gets trashed. Another could be to offer pirate bases protection in exchange for their committing to only attack Kroiz’s shipping. Another would be to build a really, really big fleet and go attack his home base. Another could be to steal retired Kilrathi dreadnaughts and bring them along with a moderately sized fleet. The second of the above choices would imply spreading your forces into new home-bases (pirate bases), possibly begin managing those bases, build more ships, put together new fleets, and repeat at new pirate bases, and so it would be like a progressive expansion of your empire into Gemini. While I’m generally opposed to having branches in plot-lines, at this stage of the game it’s not “plotlines” anymore, –just strategies; and there would be very little extra work to do to enable a variety of ways to win the game. Let me just clarify one point, in case it isn’t clear: Just because you have multiple fleets doesn’t mean you’d be playing the role of generalissimo all the time. In fact, there’d be side plots and missions till the end of the game that you’d do by flying off on your FireSky ship, or even piloting a single ship. Most of the selling and negotiation you do on behalf of your empire you’d probably do by flying alone on your Excalibur, probably cloaked.