21-09-2002 08:32									#1
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I was musing on the possibility of a campaign mode where you follow the plight of Humanity, on different worlds... prehaps you could build military forces kind of like in Caeser3, you dont actually manually control your spaceship military but might be requested by "Earth Command" to send a fleet to defend a friendly world or contain a rebellion or some such... as well as getting warnings of a hostile fleet bearing down upon your world...

I'm thinking that such a campaign mode would have potentional to be ultra cool but you would be limited to one world at a time, and the other worlds would interact in a more abstract way, probably trigger based.
And ofcourse you could share your world with other factions and for some missions "unification" may be the goal, you have to unify the world under the banner of whatever interplanetary faction you work for...

This campaign mode should be famialler to players of the Dune2, C&C, etc series where you go from region to region fighting the enemy but at the same time the empire would play a role and other worlds would weakly interact...


Multiplayer mode would be one world with all the players on it... and prehaps some sort of co-operative play through the campaign and ofcourse scenerios...


Some ideas for the Campaign:
Obviously the empire has to be designed and would be dynamic over time, initially this would be the expanding shell of colonies created by the fleeing earth spaceships, so the first missions would be on AC and later ones, well, somewhere much further away... and in fact using this model there would be an infinite number of new worlds to colonise along the time line....

But anyway, as the human empire grows we can say it splits into broad factions, for example Earthers, Centurians etc. We can say that Earth desires new worlds to colonise due to it's high population (assuming earth doesn't experience sudden population control in the form of hostile aliens). The Centurians dont want interfernence from earth, and especially dont want to be a dumping ground for Earths population, and the Centurians (being the second most developed world after Earth) support other colonies and bring them into the Centurian alliance, and meanwhile Earth is keeping it's more loyal colonies loyal...
As the campaign progresses some of the fringe colonies desire independence and break away... (generally peacefully) and ofcourse there could be allien menances from beyond, and some human worlds may become corrupted by the power of alien technology and also break away... lots of room for imagination anyway...

Now a good basic measurement of development is based on population size.
Year - Centurian Pop
0 - 100,000 (5 factions, 20000 per faction)
50 - 700,000
100 - 5,000,000
150 - 36,000,000
200 - 255,000,000 (Approx. Population of US today)
250 - 1,800,000,000 (Approaching Capacity of Planet)
300 - 12,000,000,000 (Definitely getting overcrowded)

At around 200 years AC will have fairly massive industrial output, plenty for extra-planetary activity, with a society geared around breeding like rabbits to fill an empty world the growth could increase until it becomes uncomfortable at around 300 years.

It would be reasonable to expect that at around 150 years Humanity develops true interstellar capacity, and at around 200 years develop the ability to move large amounts of population across the voids, at this point immigration could be added to population growth of new worlds, meaning that population growth would be way faster and reducing the number of years required to meet objectives...

A basic scedule, measured in years since the first colony ships leave earth (the number is how elapsed years since the campaign started)...
0 -> 50 Tutorial on Mars
50 -> 250 Unifications of AC
~250 The two main human power blocks form
250 A military campaign on some world prehaps 50 ly from Earth.
~300 Conflict between human factions start as resources becomes incresingly scarse.
300 -> 350 Colonising a planet some 100 ly from Earth, immigration plays a part.
350 -> 400 Back closer to Earth and a large interplanetary conflict between Human alliance's vying for power.
~400 Agressive alien military actions vs the Humans
400 -> 450 Fighting off aliens at the fringe worlds about 200 ly from earth...
~450 Battle for Earth against massive alien Invasion...

Now the somewhat cool thing about an interplanetary empire is that at basically any time the action can jump from less, to more, developed worlds by changing how far from the "fringe" of human colonization the mission takes place. At 300 years both Earth and AC will be overpopulated systems with massive industrial resources and in large alliances... but at the same time 200ly from Earth the colony ships will be just setting up shop, the technology level will be higher than the first missions, but not that much because alot of technology is setting up infrastructure, but immigrants will be arriving and trade may be happening due to more interstellar activity...

Now... the reason that I'm now thinking a campaign mode will be cool is that the engine is going to make it very easy to use different tilesets, having the world look different just makes it much more convincing.

	21-09-2002 15:11									#2
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where's the quest for the vital alien artifact from an old alien civilization ? You know what I mean : scouting old temples and discover unleashed mysteries, etc... It could be the reason of the huge alien invasion at the end

	21-09-2002 15:17									#3
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That could make for some interesting missions on the "outer worlds" (those several hundred ly from Earth), prehaps a desperate search for technology to defeat the alien invasion... or some such.

	21-09-2002 17:23									#4
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you could also put in that you begin as an high ranking officor in an faction (but not they faction leader/not a godperson) and you have to do some missions. then you get the order to colonize a planet or be a governer for a already settle planet. and then when you have enough loyal troops (not imperial troops) and have the people behind you enough you can declare independence to form an own empire. Ofcourse you need to take over the imperial spaceports and militarybases on your planet and repel the counterattack (and ofcourse worry about other 'factions') but then you would be a faction leader/godperson that can choose his own direction.

this all could happen you could also work yourself up to factionleader/godperson in your beginning faction.


just an idea what do you think?

	21-09-2002 18:55									#5
	Increase Your PM Length

It's possible to organize one (or more) "Official Stella Polaris Tournament" like MP-based games: having many worlds to colonize it's possible to give to every group (16 players or such) one planet to begun and a near "system" of 4-5 planets to expand. Between those 16 the winner with his planets can try to take over other group's winners. With 16 groups of 16 people that rule 5 planets, it's possible to have a universe of 1280 worlds!!!
Obviusly starting planets must be similar (lot of food/minerals/energy to become a rapid expansion), but other planet can be really hard to colonize (desertic/icy/volcanic/moonlike/...)

	21-09-2002 20:26									#6
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Vultur,

I would just remind how much extra work and coding that would require as a universe of 1280 worlds isn't a small task to do.

	21-09-2002 20:48									#7
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With a random map generator it's not a problem
StP will fully moddable so, to do an example, climat has the same rules on all planets, but changing some parameters (water, warmth or similar) the consequences on the map will be really strong.
The only limit is your immagination!
(...and your HD space... )

	22-09-2002 03:10									#8
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it would be great if StP was the next MMOTBSG (Massively Multiplayer Online Turn Based Strategy Game)

	30-09-2002 00:10									#9
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General feedback about the campaign model...

IMO it would be a better idea to limit the epic campaign model for the SP game as that would make the SP games more attractive, while multiplayer games would utilise the standard model, custom maps and scenarios.

A few words of criticism...

Blake,

why do you call the planet AC (= Alpha Centauri)? AFAIK there hasn't been any decision that the destination planet would be called Alpha Centauri?

Pande,

so far the plan has been that the StP multiplayer game would have a maximum of 16 players. Thus you should also remember that there has to be a good reason why you would want to have Stella Polaris as a MMOTBSG.

	30-09-2002 04:01									#10
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It's the logical first mission, as it's the closest system to Earth. (other than Mars, which could be a tutorial...)

And yeah, the campaign mode would be for singleplayer.... thats was my intention all along. Altough the maximum players is set to be 30, not 16.

	30-09-2002 09:10									#11
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I accept the maximum of 30 players, but I would like to remind that so far on FACF the amount has been 16, so I didn't know that you had changed that.

	30-09-2002 10:20									#12
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Really? It's been 30 for some time...

32 is a good number (power of 2), but it is likely 1 will be used for neutrals and 1 for natives, leaving 30 slots for actual players.

	17-11-2002 02:29									#13
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Does anybody know the game "Alien Legacy" it's quite old, but the story goes like this: earth (just starting to explore the planets and nearby stars) is under attack by aliens, they know they are losing the battle so besides a battlefleet they start building a lot of colony ships and start sending them all over the galaxy, the ships travel slower than light so by the time they get to their destinations earth will have been destroyed. multiplayer espesially this will make a good story as it will put players all over the galaxy (and the knowledge that earth is gone will put crew on the edge so that they will revolt and split into factions) and it will remove the "superpower" earth with all it's industrial and population advantages from the game. Also it creates a cool alternative victory: REVENGE by killing the alien homeworld.

you would first have to send a scout ship to earth to find clues as to who and where these aliens are, and then build a warfleet or create a killer virus for the aliens.
could anybody give their thought on this??