Not to bring it up again but...

[SWSF Hoppus]

I am hankering for a game. Something that doesn't require as much mental creativity as writing a full blown RP story. Traditional star wars sim. Something lifted right out of AOL era, with almost no modification.

What say y'all?

I know I know.

But these are desperate times, and I need a fucking distraction.

My desire would be to do AE, split ourselves up into two or three factions, no more than 3 ships per player, cant have more than 2000m & 96 SFs under your command. We can exclude regions of the galaxy from the old map, to reduce scope a bit.

Otherwise try to leave it all intact as it is.

AE is my choice here. Could we get 3 vs 3 going at least?

I really mean leaving specs and etc just as they are here, Get it up and running quickly.

Any takers?

[EmperorSeverus]

I'm in.

[SWSF Hale]

I'd be down for a mock battle in Flashpoint if you just want to blow shit up.

[SWSF Eidolon]

  Fishing for Hoppuses.

[SWSF Hoppus]

Probably not surprisingly I haven't felt motivated to do this. As soon as I start to look at the files again the nostalgia hits strong, then the realization that we have so few players, etc and the excitement fades quickly.

I've been trying to brainstorm a system that would work well for a text based forum. Things like grids and dice are out. It has to be a game set up to pleasant to play asynchronously, while being easy to understand/communicate a turn in text-only, that still allows for variability and strategy.

I think Magic the Gathering style of game hints more towards the direction that would work best for a simming forum, but using cards isn't ideal either... its a really tough problem to solve! I don't know that there is even a good solution for it, but I am tempted to try. Everything we've done until now hasn't quite hit the mark.

[SWSF Hale]

Are these the droids you're looking for?

[SWSF Eidolon]

Holy shit,

Donovan from Indiana Jones and Last Crusade is General Veers and if you turn the volume up blaring when he's talking to Indy at his house party and his wife comes in you can hear the pianist in the distant background playing Imperial March.



Ya Rebellion is pretty sweet.  FFG is awesome.  Would make a cool port for our purposes.

[SWSF Hoppus]

That looks interesting. Going to bookmark it to look into later.

That isn't what I'm looking for, though, no.

I want a game that is tailored to be optimal for:

- 100% text based; eg, a written post on a forum with minimal formatting.
- Asynchronous; turns/rounds are handled in a way that doesn't require being online at the same time.
- Long-running, empire building.

I want something of our old game, in terms of conquering systems, story-lining, manufacturing units, and what not. But the traditional simming format doesn't seem to hold up very well with 1 player representing an entire faction.

I would love to have a game that we built, that is our own rule set, that is tailored to forum plain text posts, and that can go on indefinitely in the way old sims did. Ideally with multiple players representing their own little empires and republics with whatever ambitions they want to imbue them with.

Things I am relatively certain of for a game like this to work:

- I don't think grids are conducive to the game.
- I don't think micromanaging combat is conducive to the game (i.e. firing 20 turbolasers at X)
- Our old game lacked any real strategy, the new one should choose strategy over 'simulator' like combat (arcs/individual weapons).
- A 'Turn' should be higher level and include combat (i.e. i post movement of units, contstructions, deployments, and so forth as part of a turn, a turn will also include an "attack" or "defense" round). Each player taking a turn should be a "simultaneous in time" thing. When we all complete our turn, the galaxy's clock ticks forward.
- The above means that a battle for a planet might only last 2-3 rounds, or maybe less for more minor engagements.

I have no idea how that looks, really, in the end, besides I would hope that in a "combat"

[SWSF Hoppus]

I was kicking around some ideas again today but keep running into a wall. I know what I really want is the massively multiplayer game from AOL hey-days with a dozen people in my fleet coordinating to attack the enemy. And that is what we will never get back unfortunately, it seems. Sad feels.

[SWSF Hoppus]

I want my old AOL sim universes back. What's wrong with kids these days! 

[SWSF Hoppus]

I am still feeling whiny about this. My brain wants so bad to figure out a way to recapture that and start up a game again.

[SWSF Hoppus]

It seems I am the only one that exists that still pines for this and wants to play an old game? Fine, you're twisting my arm. I am going to dig into the old warbooks again.

[SWSF Hale]

The solution, if we want to get a large-scale game going again, is to go Turn-Based Strategy.

The hex map above would make for a great Civ-style getup, no?

[SWSF Hoppus]

The map is great. Can you be more specific about what you mean by Turn-Based Strategy? If you mean what I think you mean, I agree. Rather than having intricate "simulated' battles firing 23 turbolasers here, etc, you have a higher-level game?

I once built an almost functioning Civ3 engine for star wars units in PHP. I could definitely write one today. Basically you put together the list of units, the order you want them in, and any flags/settings for those units, and the defender puts in their list, and the battle is automated in the same way civ battles are.

Faster units can retreat (unless you set them not to), you can choose to only bombard with something like an ISD, which means it can fire once without consequence versus its full attack which is a series of dice rolls based on Attack/Defense/Modifiers, each loss reducing a hit point, until one unit reaches zero. There are more things.

Then the strategy goes into which units you choose to build your fleet with and what way to set them up, etc. Like in Civ 3, you would use a strong defense unit to protect your shit, bombard units to soften up the enemy, and cavalry or fast units to attack and be able to retreat before dying. How you designed your stacks had some strategy in it.

[SWSF Eidolon]

Hex Gal Map?? Heeeyoooo, now we're talkin.


With turn based strategy you can easily make the 'combat' portion of the game more about positioning/dispersal of your Starships.

Give each starship a Hyperdrive Rating that determines how far it can move in one turn on the hex gal map.

Give each starship a Strength value. i.e. ISD = 10, VSD = 6 FRG = 3, CRK = 2, CRV = 1

Give players a static point value of Strength they can move in a given turn. i.e. 20.


So then if you have 4 ISDs, 3 VSDs, 7 CRKs and it's your turn to move, you're deciding what combination of those ships that adds up to 20 that you want to move and where to move them to.  THose ships add up to 72 (? i think).  So obviously yo ucan't move all your ships in one Turn.  And come your next turn, you're not confined to moving ships that you didn't move the last time, it's just a limit so that each player can project the same amount of might in a given turn.  Where having more starships than your 20 comes in to play is sort of like "Blockers/Occupiers".  Where you send your ships in your turn, an opposing player may have ships of their own there, the idea is to move ships to where other players have ships to force the 'simulated battle', and also move your ships around to your own planets so that they are 'guarded' so to speak.




Resolution.  So how do you get a determination of a 'Battle' in this gimmick?

Say something like to take control of a planet, you have to have 10 Strength value in ships there at the end of your turn, and they have to be there until the start of your next turn.  Once this happens, you Control that planet and gain that planets values (whatever they may be, economy is a separate idea/topic)

In terms of 'Combat Simulation'.  It's merely a matter of comparing strengths.  So say its your turn, you have 20 strength points you can move now.  Say you move 2 ISDs to Kashyyyk.  The opposing player has 3 FRGs there (strength 9).  The difference in strength is 11.

So make a chart that says what the results of the battle a