In the multiplayer setting, I don't like the idea of giving the RL too much to do, I don't want to get in his/her way of actually playing the game. General things like setting an economy, or building a base are something that they can do in five to ten minutes once a day. I don't think the actual RL needs to be online all the time, most of the larger empires have multiple fleets that are on and can make most of the general decisions in their theatre without too many issues.
In the single player environment, it can behave the same way, although it's the player that makes all the decisions, rather than one player making decisions for the entire empire.
The Basics of the economy should be something like this:
Credits (whatever the particular empire calls is): This is the medium currency, you use it for pretty much everything.
Tritanium: Needed for ship/base hulls (pretty much everything)
Dilithium: Needed for Warp powered ships (monitors and Starbases wouldn't require this)
Hydrogen: Needed for Sub-light propulsion (and Starbases)
We could go into a laundry list of other things, but those basic resources should be in the game. Not to make it tedious, but to give a Strategic element to the game. Hydrogen can be gotten pretty much anywhere there's a gas giant. But Dilithium and Tritanium are a little harder to come by, which makes sources of these valuable to protect, and very good targets for objective raids. (as are the freighters moving the goods from the mines to the shipyards.)
Economy settings: These are essentially three buttons that set the production status-quo for the empire.
Peace-time: (Default setting) Ships are geared for the non-combat aspect of the game, science and exploration. Ships are sturdier, designed to last longer, often they are undergunned, but they are usually well protected.
War-time: Ships are built with battle in mind, but are still good quality, not as sturdy as peacetime ships, nominally gunned, still well-protected, but slightly less expensive than their piece time counterparts.
Total-War: Ships are built as cheaply and as quickly as possible. Overgunned, fragile because of the emphasis on Quantity over Quality. Designed to flood space with attrition units rather than quality ships. A few solid designs are built as flagships, but the rest are essentially throwaway units.
One of the things we get to do here, is as a community, we get to design the ships. And we can decide on a case-by-case basis just where they would fall in the production queue. Would a D7 appear at all in the Total-War Queue? or would it be dominated by Brels? How about the venerable Constitution? When do they stop building that ship?
The main issue for multiplayer is that the maps are going to have to be server side, we can't do the SFC2/3 randomly generated maps in each hex, especially if there's going to be any type of tactics involved in placement of bases and defenses. One of the things I think would be a must, is the RL telling a Captain to build a base in sector 221, and then letting the Captain say, "Well this is the most logical approach for any ships coming from (insert hated enemy here). So let me place the Base here, and line the approach through that Asteroid field with Phaser Turrets." Then the RL can come by and say, "I like it, here's a bonus. Or I don't like it, how many credits did you waste on that turret line?!"
Topic: Some changes (Read 19471 times)