A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

I had an odd dream Last night that I was playing a new game based on Space Empires. It was a RPG, alla Dungeon Siege style game play but crossed with SEIV technology and characters.

Basically you were a player playing a RPG quest game and you could recruit other members for your team to help you find the lost artifact. Along the way you would journey to planets, buy star ships, upgrade them, do battle in space, land on planets to carry out your quests, and gain material to sell and upgrade your weapons, armor, and so on. Do battle on planets, in space, and on bases and ships.

You could board enemy ships and take them over, steal cargo from ships, and have tactical combat similar to Star Fury.

You create your character, and of course it will gain experience and improve over time. There was a Phone scientist in on my team that instrumental in discovering how an ancient weapon worked. A Xiati engineer who installed the device on our ship, and of course a few Eee for sport.

Ok it wasn't all in the dream, but it was an interesting dream non the less.

Basically you would be combining aspects of DO with SEIV with Star Fury and adding in a hell of a lot more content.

Think of the scope that a game like this could have. It could literally go on and on and on. Unlimited character development, quests, ships, team members, etc.

You could buy drones, droids, better ship, planets to put your loot, etc.

For the love of God Aaron you should really consider making a game like this before someone else comes along and steals your thunder.

[ January 06, 2004, 07:04: Message edited by: Atrocities ]

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

Then we'd have to name him Derek Smart, and everyone would have to hate his games. Hate them partially because they have so much wasted scope and potential, and partially because they are boring, buggy, and generally suck. Then people would have to hate HIM, because he has an ego the size of several countries.

No, its important to stay focused on what can actually be made. With a full development team, whom all shared a common vision, something like that might be possible. But Battle Cruiser 3000 and its spawn HAD full blown dev teams, and funding, and they bit off more than they could chew. Aaron is one man. Thankfully, he seems to have a good handle on what he can realistically acomplish.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

Man you have completely lost me. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

Let em stick to what they do best 4x space strategy games.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">sounds like you have more interesting dreams than me...and Last night, i dreamt that i was a wizard with nanotechnology and a terminater was coming after me. and that's about par for my dreams. there was more before that, but that's what i remember.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

Ok that would be fine and dandy say for the fact that other than there is really no money in the 4 x gaming out side of the niche market.

In order to survive Malfador will have to grow and expand developing new games that go beyond the 4 x market.

There will be no SE VI if Malfador cannot survive.

I looked up your BattleCruiser 3000 and the idea I had is nothing like that. In fact they are so far apart it is pointless to compare my idea to it.

Think Han Solo adventure but based on Space Empires. You play the lead character much like you would in any RPG. You build a team, adding or removing members as you see fit. Developing each characters skills and abilities as the game progresses.

In stead of being solly planet based, the game will allow the player to take his team to other worlds, discover acient ruins, fight bad guys, complete quests and missions, puzzles, and generally explore a vast space environement.

Combat can occur on a planet, a ship, ship to ship, bases, and moons.

Space combat can be done simular to Star Fury, but if you attempt to board an enemy ship then it would be standard RPG combat close quarters style.

Quests can vary as they do in most RPG's, and occur during the process of a much larger over all mission.

Players can upgrade their team members, the ship they buy or steal, weapons, armor, you name it.

They can buy a planet, asteroid, base, bigger ship, to use or hide things on.

The goal of the game could be as simple as earning enough money and buying enough ships and crews to control or take over a small empire. Or simply to become the best in the buisness of smuggling. Or defeat an enemy or save a empire.

The potential for a game like this is great, to bad the support is not.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">sounds like you have more interesting dreams than me...and Last night, i dreamt that i was a wizard with nanotechnology and a terminater was coming after me. and that's about par for my dreams. there was more before that, but that's what i remember. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If you dreamed what I dreamed, you would commit suicide.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

ah, its totally like that, just missing the party aspect. get to run around on a planet, or on a base, or on a ship. get to fly the shuttles, get to fly the ship. get to do quests with aliens. its a shooter. its a flight sim. its a rpg. its a trading and economic game. it walks the dog, it mows the lawn.

anyway, perhaps you are more after something along the lines of Traveller or Mega Traveller. computergames made after the pen-and-paper RPGs of the same name. did a really good job, manage your party, run arround in cities, upgrade your ship, go to different planets and fight off pirates and aliens. you might be able to find old copies on abandonware sites.

or maybe you just want to make a SE4 mod for Runesword or Dungeon Odessy. only thing you woud be missing is the 3d space combat, though you could have 2d tile based stuff.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

So wouldn't you enjoy having a game like this based upon SEIV and moddable like SEIV? Come on now, why not expand the market for SEIV beyond 4 x and Flight sim?

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

Battle Cruiser 30002.6
terrible
It will go down in legend as the most bug-ridden, unstable, unplayable pieces of software ever released. - T. Liam McDonald

I read the review of the game and it does not sound anything like what I suggested. I think you got your games crossed Puke. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

I had a cool idea for a game a few years back, wher eyou were raiding wrecked ships for bits and cobbling together ships out of salvaged parts. It had strategic elements as well, let's call it "junk empires".

{SNIP}
I just typed out an incredibly long description of how this game would work, but I soon realised that it is actually just Elite with a whol load of fleet/ management/ 4X stuff bolted on.

Imagine Elite with the following additions:
-The Ability to board wrecked ships and carry away cargo & components.
-Ability to buy/sell ship components like you can with cargo.
-Ability to own a workshop and use it to build components into new ships/ upgrade existing ships/ perform upgrades for paying customers.
-Space stations/ asteroid bases/ planetary bases that you can own, develop and manage. (Ownership by conquest, purchase or colonisation)
-Consistent AI Commanders and organisations that operate just like human players and remember their standing with you (ie diplomacy)
-Consistent and evolving political backdrop that you can affect.
-Ability to crew multiple ships and send them off individually or in fleets to carry out your instructions.

Basically you could start off as a guy in a ship and through careful trading/ piracy/ mercenary work/ scavenging build yourself up into a galactic force, moving from single tactical encounters to large scale 4X strategic operations. Ministers and AI would have to be excellent to make this really work, since it would soon become impossible to handle everything personally, but just imagine how cool it would be...

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

Interesting: http://www.lostinflatspace.com/

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">instead of reading the revies, go read the intended feature lists for Battlecruiser Millineum and its Gold Version, at www.3000ad.com. sure it didnt turn out great, but thats my point about biting off more than you can chew.

Anyway, as indicated on another thread, dig up an old copy of Sundog: The Frozen Legacy at the same time you are looking for an old copy of the Megatraveller game. Its got everything you want, too. Fly your ship, fight pirates, walk around a city, get in gunfights with robbers, go to a bar and buy black market goods, drive your rover across town, but be careful not to get a parking ticket.. They really knew how to make games back then.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Best Elite inspired game ever:

www.egosoft.com

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

Great, now I have 2 new demo's to try! So many games, so little time.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">sounds like you have more interesting dreams than me...and Last night, i dreamt that i was a wizard with nanotechnology and a terminater was coming after me. and that's about par for my dreams. there was more before that, but that's what i remember. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If you dreamed what I dreamed, you would commit suicide. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I don't know about that. I've had a few winners from time to time. Like this morning, before my alarm clock woke me up, I had some sort of 24 inspired dream in which for some reason, I was helping Jack, then like in most dreams, things start going Salvador Dalish and start getting really weird. Then the alarm went off, and I didn't finish my dream. Sometimes I'd like to shoot the guy who came up with the idea of clocks designed to wake us up too dang early.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">sounds like you have more interesting dreams than me...and Last night, i dreamt that i was a wizard with nanotechnology and a terminater was coming after me. and that's about par for my dreams. there was more before that, but that's what i remember. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If you dreamed what I dreamed, you would commit suicide. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I don't know about that. I've had a few winners from time to time. Like this morning, before my alarm clock woke me up, I had some sort of 24 inspired dream in which for some reason, I was helping Jack, then like in most dreams, things start going Salvador Dalish and start getting really weird. Then the alarm went off, and I didn't finish my dream. Sometimes I'd like to shoot the guy who came up with the idea of clocks designed to wake us up too dang early. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">there are techniques to control dreams. you could probably find a webpage somewhere.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

generally, controlling what you dream about involves controlling what you think about. I always make a consious effort to keep my thoughts 'decent' but my subconsious is usually pretty grizzly. thus, so are my dreams - when i can remember them.

most of the time, im lucky enough not to be able to remember the things.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

i've found that practice helps, so does falling asleep while concentrating on something, although that takes practice to work.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I can't go to sleep while I'm concentrating on something. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif I need the complete absence of mental activity. Of course, once I fall asleep, that's a different matter. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

well, just try keeping it somewhere in your mind.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

I realize and can control about a fourth of the dreams I have. I often, upon realizing it is a dream, start to laugh at the power I possess. The people in the dream look at me like I am insane and that makes me laugh even more. I took one former boss and propelled that jackedassed weasel MF through a wall and that was so utterly and completely satisfying that I did not want to wake up. I wanted to continue beating him to death.... Oh wait, its a dream.... CRAP! Now I am awake!

Dreams are a lot of fun, source of a lot of pain, and seldom remembered. Nightmares, well they are far worse than one can imagine, and seldom do I realize they are what they are until after the catastrophie has occured.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

my dreams aren't too much fun. I realize they're dreams, but what happens in a dream is usually what you expect to happen. not what you want to happen, what you expect to happen.

and thats almost always bloody murder.


On a happier note, and back to topic:

I did have a cool dream about space empires a few years ago. I think it was after someone posted a shipset or a 3d image rendered from their shipset. This fleet of blue and grey angular ships and fighters were bombarding this bright blue planet with cannons and beam weapons, and I had a moveable perspective of the whole thing. I seem to remember drop ships moving in to land troops, and these massive ships lumbering passed me and fireing brilliant purple beams into the atmosphere. there was no sound at all, either because im well aware that there is no sound in vaccuum, and it really irritates me that sci-fi shows feed you engine noises and cannon sound FX, or because i usually play with the sound off. Or maybe i just wasnt dreaming with that night.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Yeah, I agree. It seems that often when I'm having an interesting dream, the alarm clock wakes me up. If you think about it, getting up every morning by the sound of the alarm clock is not very natural. It's so artificial -- the natural thing would be to sleep until you wake up by yourself each morning. Particularly in the winter when it's always dark when the alarm goes off, I find it difficult to get out of bed: my mind tells me that it's still night time because the sun hasn't come up.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

clock or no, you tend to get up when you train yourself to. just be glad that you dont have to get up before dawn every day to work on the farm.

or hit the graveyard shift at the factory, for that matter.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

12 plus years on Grave Yard and now I can sleep when I want, get up when I want, and you know what, I still hate the day light.

Winter time seems so dark, so blue, so depressing. Especially now that we are buried under a winter storm the likes of which we have not seen in nearly eight years.

But if I had a game simular to the game I started this thread for, then I might have a shining light at the end of the tunnel.

NEWS FLASH:

Do to fiscal cut backs, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off indefently.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif Just my luck. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">well, in dreams you can time travel. most of my dreams, well, close to all, don't actually have anyone dying, which, i suppose, means i have a peacefull subconcious. but that dream i mentioned? the terminater killed a kid. even asleep, i was shocked. so, i turned time back, put it in a hallway and dissolved it to atoms using a spell. at this point, i was semi-consious in my dream. i probably would have found it very satisfying if emotions figured more into my dreams, but their faint. i get color, sound(some), a few times dull, unspecific pain and faint emotions.

it was weird, even before i woke up. like i said, mostly my dreams are just weird. occasionally scary, but if they are, i'm the one in danger. anyone else turned into a ninja and gone slice&dice on the monsters? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif ( < insert happier note there)

[ January 07, 2004, 08:44: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Yeah, I agree. It seems that often when I'm having an interesting dream, the alarm clock wakes me up. If you think about it, getting up every morning by the sound of the alarm clock is not very natural. It's so artificial -- the natural thing would be to sleep until you wake up by yourself each morning. Particularly in the winter when it's always dark when the alarm goes off, I find it difficult to get out of bed: my mind tells me that it's still night time because the sun hasn't come up. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Tell me about it. I have to get up at 4:30am, so I can do the 3 s's (sh$t, shower & shave) so I can take my wife to work by 5:50 or so. Then on Saturday, I have to get up at 5:30 to get to my part-time job by 7:00. And Sunday, the only day I'm not working (right now, although that may have to change in the future), my 3 year old boy will wake us up by 7:30 at the latest. So I don't get much sleep, let alone time to dream. That's why I hate it when I get interrupted in a really good dream.

Re: A New Space Empires Game Idea
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">yes, I find that. What you expect to happen is what happens, hence that horribly feeling of inevitability in nightmares.

However once you realise you are in a dream you can control it. You just have to decide what's going to happen next and then let it happen. The trick is to realise that you're dreaming without waking up- letting just enough conscious slip in there, but not too much. And once you have control of your dreams... well, hehe... anything's possible. *lewd grin*

And about being woken up prematurely... yeah, I hate that, but I read somewhere that you only ever remember dreams if you are woken up in the middle of one. If allowed to wake naturally, you won't remember any dreams from that sleep.

Also, why is it that every morning I get up at 7:30 and spend half an hour hating work and hating everything because I'm not allowed to just stay in my bed, but on the weekends when I can stay in bed I either wake up early anyway (aaagh!) or wake up unnappreciative of the lie-in? I'm going to start setting my alarm for 7:30 on Sundays, just so I can get the satisfaction of switching it off, rolling over and going back to sleep.

Finally I hate all these "dream interpretation" books. They say things like "if you dream of a dog, then you are feeling safe." Well, if you like dogs, then maybe. But if you hate and fear dogs then a dream about dogs won't signify security at all. I do that believe dreams sometimes tell you things about your life as it is now, but the language of dreams is as individual as human beings.

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You know I hardly ever have a dream that I remember anyway, I would say only about once every six months or so, well that was the case until recently. But I do remember as a teen I could control my dreams, and when I would find myself in a nightmare I would usual concentrate and turn the table on the perceived threat; except this one reoccurring dream involving an on-coming car. I could never control that one.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">hmm...i've woken up naturally in the middle of dreams, but other thant that, i think that's right.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Argh! I HATE that! Every time, without fail!

Whats worse, are those f'd up dreams where you go through a full day (or more) or work, then wake up feeling like you need to go to bed or take a vacation, only to have to go to work in an hour.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Having to get up early is a nightmare! I'm up at 5:45 at the latest (variable start times http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif ) Sat-Wed. So I actually have tried your idea about the alarm dogscoff, and guess what its great http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif . Right up untill you start doing it when you are actually working http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif

THAT is the nightmare!