Gauntlet scenario..?

[dogscoff]

Yes, I said a gauntlet scenario. for se4. Yes, Gauntlet, as in "Red wizard needs food, badly." You remember gauntlet don't you?
I really don't know how I got to thinking this up but...

For up to four human players controlling one human "empire". The human empire gets just four 'ships': yellow wizard, red barbarian, blue valkyrie and green ranger, with appropriate armour, weapons and speeds. Each human player controls a single ship.

Set up for strategic combat. No resources, no maintenance, no research, no construction (except by AI), no intel allowed. Everything would have to be built and set up by the person making the scenario.

Human-controlled ships get no tactical weapons, and thousands upon thousands of 1kt drones with very powerful warheads + a single launcher (one or two drone launches per game turn, none per combat turn). The ships can see through level three cloaking and they get a low supply usage, short-range warp-point opener. They don't get warp closers. Finally, they also get around a hundred armour components. All components supply 10 damage points each.

AI ships (the grunts etc) get no weapons, just a single kamikaze warhead that does around 10 damage. They are cloaked up to level three. Oh, and AI ships have masses of supply as well.

The game starts with no warp points, and AI planets (grunt generators) pumping out wave after wave of ships.

Since the human players can't defend themselves against the AI ships in close combat, they must destroy the grunts from long range using their drones. The grunts are equally unable to defend themselves against the drones when they get into range. Players can attack and destroy planets ("generators") but you will get the odd one that has point defence and therefore can't be killed, so you can never completely stop the flood of hostiles.

The players must explore the map by opening warp points (to find some objective, presumably). Here and there the players will find allied (Military Alliance) systems containing planets to resupply at ("food") and repair bases (These can't see through the AI cloaking, so you can't use them for remote recon) but these will inevitably be destroyed by the hostiles when warp points are opened to those systems. There would be a few rare AI monsters with warp open/closers wandering about, just to spice things up a little.

Not sure how to mod in things like Death or potions, because I can't really remember how they worked in the original gauntlet, and there would no doubt be other problems, for example knowing where the repair bases are in advance and damage to non-armour components.

If the numbers became too predictable, small random factors could be thrown in (IE give human players direct fire weapons with really low to-hit probabilities, or give grunts similarly inneffective point defence.)

So, there's the idea... who wants to mod it?