I’m a fan of three things:[1] Video games, space ships and Horatio Hornblower. Now the world being a varied sort of place, I can find things to satisfy any one of these particular desires at a time[2], occasionally I can get two of the three. I have not however ever been able to find anything that satisfies all three, and I think this is a damned shame.
So I’m going to spend a bit of time describing my ideal space capital ship game. It would be a combination simulation, roleplaying and action game set in a more or less open world. It would feature Career, Quick Battle and (sigh) multiplayer.
The main mode of the game would be Career. You’d graduate Officer Academy (read: tutorial sequence), run a few missions as a 2nd Lieutenant for a bit more drill with maneuvering, repairs, weapons and so on, then be put in command of your own destroyer.
Now the game starts to open up. See your nation, the Space British[3] is embroiled in a desperate war with somebody or other, and it needs lots of eager young laser fodder, er, patriotic young officers to fuel this war. Thus you and your destroyer SBS[4] Tincan are to be dispatched to some front or other where you get to do your duty by colliding with missiles meant for more valuable ships. But which front?
This is where the RPG aspects come in. As anybody who has read Hornblower knows, political influence is key to a successful career, and thus your interaction with other officers will help you further your own goals. The more officers like you, the more of them will request your services and the more choices of assignment you will have. Be popular and you might get three or five offers with various rewards, be unpopular and you’ll be stuck guarding sewage transports from giant sentient spacegoing dung beetles[5].
You can gain favor with officers by doing what they want, being nice to them, and generally behaving like Lieutenant Patriot. This of course requires a rudimentary dialog system allowing you to either show a stiff upper lip or tell your superior to pull his lip over his head and swallow. Of course some officers don’t like other officers, so occasionally it may be to your long term benefit to piss one person off if you are currying favor with his rival.
So you get an assignment. Your commanding officer gives you a brief containing a description of your duties, which could be ‘kill all the smugglers around Vates 5” or for example. How you do this is of course up to you, you could sail in guns blazing, lurk around the asteroid field, tail freighters to wait for the raiders, or just park yourself in orbit over the strip joint and let yourself fail the mission. Succeed and you advance your carrier, moving closer to a promotion, succeed really well and your commanding officer likes you more. Fail and people will like you less, and quite possibly desire your head to be delivered to them on a silver platter carried by a pair of trained monkeys[6].
So let’s say you find the smugglers and, as everybody who has ever played a videogame knows, criminals always opt to fight until the death. Now that the all natural monkey projectile has hit the oscillating air movement device, it’s time to talk combat.
Combat is handled in real time, with you commanding your spaceship in general, and occasionally taking over the use of some system or other. Your ship is generally divided into the following sections:
· Weapons. Well you should have remembered these, otherwise this is going to be a short fight and I hope you like the taste of vacuum. Your weapons are grouped by type (missile, energy, projectile, phlebontinum) and mount. Thus you might have a pair of fixed lasers facing forwards, and a spinal missile turret, which would of course have the appropriate restrictions placed upon their firing arcs. As captain of the ship, you can set a general target for the ship, or for the anal-retentive out there[7], you can target each weapon system individually. The latter sort of order would override the former, so if you wanted most of your weapons to fire at one target, but needed those lasers to handle that one frigate busy shoving missiles up your ship’s exhaust ports, you could tell your ship to fire at the first target, then manually switch the lasers to the frigate.
· Defenses. Defenses consist of Point Defense and Armor, but no shields. This encourages aggression, not hiding behind asteroids[8]. Point defense would be able to shoot down incoming projectiles, depending on their type. Thus lasers would be impossible to intercept, railgun slugs would be hard, and missiles would be easy. All you do to manage your point defense is to tell it what enemy to concentrate on defending you from the most. Armor simply reduces the damage dealt in the unhappy event that a shot gets through your point defense and hits your ship. Each component of the ship has its own armor score, and if the component takes enough damage it will no longer function. This brings me to:
· Repairs. Get the crew to make the various pieces work again. You want to do this because there can be some nasty side effects of component failure. To many hull breaks and you might need to set them to filling up holes so there will be some air left to breathe after the fight. Or maybe a hit shorted out the capacitors to the railguns in Turret B, and now half your ship is spitting sparks. You of course have a rather small damage detail, and now need to decide how best to use them.
· Helm. This lets you plot a course. The computer does this automatically in order to optimize weapon facing against your assigned target, but you can do this manually as well for best results.
For those who have played it, I’m essentially describing a more complicated version of Battlestations: Midway. For those of you who have not, shame on you. Get thee to Steam and proffer thy credit card to the tune of $20 and all will be forgiven. As in Bs:M[9] you can take direct command of any of the weapons systems at any time, because damnit there are far too few games that let you shoot things with ginormous death rays.
So you complete your assignment, and then get to pick your next mission from the list of offered positions. After a while you earn a promotion and get a better ship. When your new ship is commissioned, you get to customize it a bit. The engines, reactor and some of the weapons are standard to the class of ship you’ve been offered, but if you really like those plasma Gatling guns, and think that the forward section has too little armor, now’s your chance to do something about it[10]. So up the shipyard ladder you go, destroyer, heavy destroyer, light cruiser, heavy cruiser, battlecruiser, battleship, dreadnaught, heavy dreadnaught. About the time you hit heavy cruiser you earn an escort destroyer, which you can give general orders to, such as attack target, movement and formation. When you hit dreadnaught, you are in command of your own small flotilla, and every third mission allows you to pick your own target as a senior member of the Space British Star Navy.
This of course gives you a much larger role in shaping the overall progress of the war and lets you direct the offensive towards the enemy homeworld. Take this and you win the game, let them take yours and you lose.
Now how awesome would that be?
[1] Well, more than three actually, recent estimates give a figure as high as five.
[2] For example Horatio Hornblower books are a proven source of Horatio Hornblower, and video game stores often sell video games.
[3] Or possibly Space French. Maintaining Horatio Hornblowerness requires that the setting bear as much resemblance to the Napoleonic Wars as humanly possible.
[4] For Space British Ship of course.
[5] Because what is the point of a game if it doesn’t have giant sentient spacegoing dung beetles?
[6] It’s a space navy. Everybody worth their electrons has a pair of trained monkeys. Honestly some of the things I need to explain to you…
[7] Also known as people who don’t think Starcraft takes enough micromanagement.
[8] Otherwise it would play like Halo with spaceships, and admit it, you spent half of Halo staring at a rock waiting for your armor to stop beeping at you.
[9] There will be no jokes about this abbreviation. Now excuse me, I need to go clean my whips.
[10] Alternatively you could use your upgrade points to buy more trained monkeys. After your tenth monkey, you can even start to customize their outfits.
10 comments:
One of my dream game is this.
Something like freelancer, but we control a small carrier of some sort. Ever watched Cowboy Bebop? A game where we don't control Swordfish (the fighter), but the Bebop (the team's big ship).
So we play as a freelancer as usual, but the twist is, we play as a freelancer TEAM. At first we only got maybe, two member on the team. So one can control the carrier, and one can control the fighter. Then we can get new members for the team, get new fighters, upgrade existing fighter, upgrade our carrier, etc, as usual space sim.
Well, it's not really controlling a capital ship, but controlling a carrier. We can control the carrier ship manually, control the turret and leave the piloting on ai team member/auto pilot, or jump into one of the fighter ourself.
The closest thing we got is the space wolf series.
It's really close to what I imagine, but it's not a space sim, but more a... 3d (in homeworld sense of 3d) space rpg/strategy game? where we only control a carrier and up to 5 small fighter. We can upgrade the carrier, buy new fighter, recruit new team member like any rpg, and use exp to got new skills. the idea is really cool, but they don't really do it well.
The second game is a bugfest that eat my computer. Too bad, from what I seen it might be a real improvement from the first game.
if you want to check it you might want to check the first game. NOT THE SECOND GAME. IT CAN BLOW YOUR PC OUT.
It's kinda boring though. Not too much that we can do except ordering team member to attack one or other thing, use different weapon, or built in tactics (like defend or attack). And (maybe it's just me) you'll need to abuse the save and load screen. For me the coolest thing is the carrier ship itself. it's huge, got a lot of powerful weapon (we can equip it with fast firing machinge gun or slow moving cannons or powerful lasers that can blow fighter ships in one blow). it's definitely hardier than your fighter, but in the same time, most of the time you pull your hair trying to keep the carrier alive. since if it blown up, it's game over. it's huge and not exactly manueverable, so it can't dodge enemy shots. and torpedoes, oh boy. when the enemy fighters launches their salvo of missiles, you can only pray that a. the point defense can shoot some of them and b. you'll have some hp left at the end. because THE CARRIER IS SO FREAKIN SLOW. IT CANT DODGE AT ALL. But it got a lot of gun and can mow enemy's fighter! should we keep it out of battle or bring it to the heat of it? that's our decision.
The second game that's close enough, is Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/nexus/index.html
We play as, at first a captain I guess. But as the story goes, we got to be an admiral.
It's really pretty, with real looking space ships, especially at the first part of the game where we control earth's ship. It's definitely something that we can build in 100-200 years. The ships use thruster to maneuver, turrets to shoot depleted uranium slugs, etc.
Later, we got something... more sci fi.
It's straightforward game though. Basically, we control a fleet of customizable ships through a series of story driven missions.
They'll give us a few of ships for each mission with different class. Sometimes we only got our flagship, sometimes we got our flagship and two light cruisers, and sometimes we got full fleet, that is a few cruisers, destroyers, carriers, and everything. But never more than a dozen ship I think. We can customize the ships armament, like what kind of shield we use, what kind of weapon we equip, since different class of ship got different slot and different weapon do different things.
there are solid weapons that do hull damage but not much for shield
pulse weapon that make shield dissapear but not much for hull
missiles that can make huge explosion that can engulf your own ships if you use it badly
emp torpedoes that can make a lot of ships (including your own) lost their shields
lasers that hit precise things. like ships generator, engine, or weapon.
we can also launch fighters, gunboats, torpedo boat, or space marine to take control enemy's ship.
The freakin problem of this supposedly good game is...
WE CAN'T MOVE OUR SHIP TO A PRECISE POINT IN SPACE!
Or at least I don't know how to do it.
How to say it... we can't point an empty space and say 'move there, please'
we can only point at say, another ship or an asteroid, and order our ship to move toward it. we can stop at any point of course.
Or maybe I'm wrong/an idiot. It's been quite some time since I play it.
Oh, really amusing and entertaining article by the way. Now I'm going to check (and possibly buy) battlestation midway.
Nexus the jupiter incident is the closest thing to the game that you describe, at least for the combat part. It's a straightforward action/strategy game though.
I've always wanted to play a space sim like X3, but without all the trading parts. Preferrably I'd get to control something like a destroyer or maybe a small cruiser.
A few more notes about the concept.
1)Damage would be persistant between missions, you'd have to return to shipyards and get it repaired, or else jurry-rig a solution, in which case your ship's components wouldn't work as well.
2) While carrier based games are interesting, I specifically designed this to not include strikecraft or carriers for them. Remember that point defense? Yeah. Plus I don't find managing swarms of fighters as interesting as one or two or maybe five really big powerful ships, stately sailing through the black, exchanging teratons of firepower in searing streams of light. As I already mentioned, there's a rich history of various light craft sim games, but perishingly few good, accessible capital ship games.
3) One thought that drifted through my mind was the ability to assign different officers to different sections of your ships, depending on their skills- so you want to get the best gunners on your most important weapons, things like that. The implimentation would be problematic, and would also limit the number of weapons you could put on a ship in order to keep your officer corps a managable size. Maintaining Horatio Hornblowerness requires the presence of ships with at least 74 heavy guns however, so that idea's right out. I'd be interested in knowing if people had any suggestions for other ways to impliment this?
Well, you wont need an officer for every weapon. Instead you could divide them into sections, each with an officer in charge. Each section should be able to attack individual targets.
You have whips? (I'm scared now.)
Yes, I'm someone you know IRL.
Warty Goblin exists in real life? i thought he was an internet being? Lol
Personally i like the idea of keeping up troop moral over everything else, as in the real British Navy that was always a bit of an issue
Pour on the rum :D
re: in/out: Well, he may in fact be an internet being, but he has managed to project a manifestation into this plane. (He is, however, somewhat larger than a mouse.) Frightening, isn't it?
This theory would explain a lot, actually...
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