Do You Like This Sort Of Wargame? (Turn Based..)


skeezix

Internal Development
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hey guys,

I've been on and off 'designing' a space wargame for 5-10 years; just something I jot notes down in my own wiki every few months or years :) I've even started coding it sevewral times, but with such timeframes inbetween that the old code is usually thrown out whenever I get interested/free-time the next round.

I've been working on it for a couple weeks in the background, and have a lot of design nailed down. (Its very staged.. goal is to roll out basic features and get playable, then phase in more features and concepts over time as I get a feal for what people like.) Anyway, I've spent most of my time in the last few weeks hacking away on minimenu when I've had a chance :/

Anyway, I dont' want to reveal too much about the game right now (that'd be no fun to surprise you with later!), but I want to know..

.... if you like this 'play style' _at all_.

ie: Its multiplayer, and I'd need like 20 people per match (could run many matches at once); could have like 1000 people in a match if we wanted, but I was figuring running several games at once, with 20+ people in each.

- turn based; as in one turn per X hours, where I figure most games would be 1 turn per day. (But could do a hyper game with 1 turn per hour, etc.)
- at turn flopover, production is done, combat occurs, movement happens, etc. So whiel preparing your orders, not much _actually happens_; you're queueing up orders for your empire. (Think of it as.. sending out orders via courier to all the idstant corners of your empire; you can't make anythign happen in real time, you have to send an order out.)
- at turn flopover, player input (orders) are processed simultaneously, and the world updated; if you didn't submit orders, thats fine, you just deal with whatever happens when you do your next order set
- ie: when you run the client, it will pull down current world data so you can see what he current snapshot is, and then make your orders
- preparing your orders for your stellar empire woudl take say 5-20mins during early game, maybe more later as you have lots o funits to move around
- if you're really hyper and want to play 'more', but have done your orders already for the turn (ie: say you havbe onyl 1 unit and are done in 5 minutes, but want to 'play' more), then maybe some basic quests and such to keep you busy, but providing little perks and options as payback
- client server based

You can sort of think of it as an old style bbs game, with a client; or a facebook game (which are ripoffs of old bbs games, btw ;)

I'm just not sure how many peopel would love that sort of thign.. you build your orders and hit 'submit' (and can review/edit all day long), and then you log in the next day to find out what happened, and do your next batch of orders.

I can imagine a lot of people want real time, or turn based like Civ, but this is a more gradual thing.

A game would last months (you could be in many games at once, of course.)

Client would be for Pandora and other systems, so you could play it from your panda anytime, but also from non-pandora if you want to have more screen realestate.

From our community alone (so we can beat up gruso, that bastard!), do we have 20+ people who'd play every day for 20mins?

jeff
 
I like the sound of that. I am a massive fan of turn-based games like Battle Isle, shining force, and more recently Uniwar on the Iphone.

I wonder whether I would completely lose the plot if the games went on that long though, I would completely forget whatever strategy I was trying to go for.

If you received an email once the field had been updated, that would be cool.
 
It sounds like a possible future facebook game or like Email Chess. Sounds like it could be fun of course with my luck I'll wake up one day and find my army raped and broken in one move.
 
This sort of game was popular back in the late 80s and 90s .. like pbm and pbem games, etc. Mostly replaced by 'semi real time' games like FB games etc, where its turn based (like Civilization, where you take turns) or 'slow phased turns' (shit happens slow, you get action points dribbled out every few minutes.) This sort of design predates those, but works for my life style :)

ie: chekc in once (or more) a day, and submit order changes. Then see what happens the next day.

You dont' tend to forget strategy, since you are in for the long haul.

You can do in-game messaging all day long, to do negotiations etc (I don't see the need for diplomacy to be built into the game; you can negotiate with other players in-game all you like.) So there are things to do all the time, in a way.

Its just not sure if this sort of thing would work, in the face of stuff like .. Farmville etc :) (Not that we have flash; and I really hate all these new crop of games, but I'm in the minority :)

I'm hoping to see a pile of replies here, and that'll tell me if its likely I'll get enough people for the 'first match' :)

jeff
 
You should check out Pardus. It seems to do some of what you are talking about, so it might give you some ideas.
 
Mithrildor said:
Yes, I really like this alot. But it needs something fun, cause I dont like waiting 24 hours between each turn. So you need to be able to do a lot in one turn (half hour/1 hour work each turn)

As things move on, could take awhile; we'll have to see how it works when I get the UI working a lot better .. basic as it is for phase one.

In the oldest incarnations (10 years ago :) , it was pure pbem (play by email), so writing up orders and analyzing your empire from your report file, it took quite awhile per turn; but I think a lot of that was just crap-UI -- encoding your orders via typing them in etc.

Once you get a newer UI like I'll have here -- clip a unit, clip a point to move it to, hit go .. shoudl be much more streamlined; but once you have piles and piles of units, could take awhile to complete. But I also hope to add things to do during the day, that don't require turns at all, but get you achievements, perks and minor powerups.)

jeff

BC - Pardus seems pretty impressive; there are piles of these sorts of 'web games' around; they're all of the form .. like old bbs games, which are all 'spreadsheets with a basic UI' :) As I wrote a few back in the bbs days, I'm just enjoying fiddling with doing one now. So mine will be different to those, but similar in a lot of ways, and probably greatly diminished (since new.) Still, mine will also be pandora-oriented, and hope to draw in artists and such from our community and such if I get anywhere.. so could be cool.

(But I also have other games and things on the go, so we'll see; I've got quite a lot of people wanting multiplayer BattleJewels for their pandora too :)
 
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I like the idea games like travian use. Those games are a combination of turn-based and real-time. You can do stuff realtime, but it takes this many minutes (or hours and even days sometimes) till that action is resolved.
 
This type of gaming i never got into really, strategy war games.

But i think mainly as they sooooo sloooow

However with the pandora, i think i could get into one of these, just check back in each day for half hour and plot my attack - and wait for the outcome the next day, right?

If its not too complicated to play, for those of us that havnt grown up playing these type of games, you can count me in.

Ill put half hour a day into commanding my army of cyborg astronaughts to kick your arse :)






...my army will be made up of mainly cyborg astronaughts yeah?
 
skeezix said:
From our community alone (so we can beat up gruso, that bastard!), do we have 20+ people who'd play every day for 20mins?

jeff

I like this idea, though in the time honoured tradition of wanting something for myself... I'd like either the games to be finishable in some fashion or to be able to drop out / loose and drop in again if it is open ended.

makes me kind of think along the lines of Animal Crossing:WW and the time that damn game stole from my life for 2 *ahem* years (maybe 3, possibly more, i wouldnt like to say)
 
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Similar to Neptunes Pride though that doesn't allow order queuing (unfortunately). I don't really see the point of a device specific client for this. Just make it as a web app and customize the layout depending on what browser agent is detected - if you even need to do that. Then everyone can play together and you can make money off ads at your discretion.
 
skeezix said:
..., do we have 20+ people who'd play every day for 20mins?
I think so. Few years ago I played TribesWar (or so), it begun promising but it took a lot of time lately so I must drop my account to stop playing it. If this game will be 20 minutes per day at maximum, then I like to try it. Oh, and allow make some command queue for a holidays, and some kind of scripting or conditional commands or so - but it can be added lately.
:)
 
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I'm a big fan of turn based strategy games like Battle Isle, Advance Wars etc. so this sounds great, I'd definitely be in.

The best time for me to really get involved in something like this is on the train (about an hour every day) but there's no wifi and I have no mobile internet. Would the client support offline play? i.e. sync with the server at home, play enter my moves on the train and then submit when I get to the office?
 
Oh goodness yes, I would play this So Hard. I love turn-based strategy, but usually can't abide multiplayer games because of the commitment. But 20 minutes per day is something I can commit to (although I would appreciate some sort of order-queuing for those days that you don't even get 20 minutes).
 
dadioflex said:
Similar to Neptunes Pride though that doesn't allow order queuing (unfortunately). I don't really see the point of a device specific client for this. Just make it as a web app and customize the layout depending on what browser agent is detected - if you even need to do that. Then everyone can play together and you can make money off ads at your discretion.

Naturally, web client is one option; I think it'd go in tiers really.. a base CGI client or dedicatedc client, just to get things moving and proven, and then a good solid web app. (That said it doesn't need to be too fancy, since its not a real time game per se; so its not like heavy ajax woudl be needed per se.)

Anyway, I'm a backend and infrastrucutre guy, and dedicated clients guy; webapps are not my strength (I generally do only as much js as I have to). So I think splitting myself across too many things at once is likely bad (backend+webapp), so working mostly on backend and a simple client to start with, and will work on fancier pure web client later. (ie: consider.. for such a game daemon, most of the server side can be regression tested without a UI at all.)

Anyway, yep, I fully agree a fancy webapp UI is probably the way to go, but I'll likely hold off on kicking that part off a bit :) ... but we'll see, I might just switch full gears onto that approach; pandora css, and full desktop css good to go, right? (but mostly I get spoilt by things like .. python + qt using a Graphics View, means you get matrix transforms easily; rotate and scale the display, with near zero work; doing that without html5 can be a right pita, and adds a lot of performance issues in network latency pulling artwork, etc. Again, another option is to leverage google maps for the map viewer part, etc and so on.) "Scope" is somethign to be managed in a project like this ;)

jeff
 
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