SE4 by Committee

[LazarusLong42]

Sounds interesting to me, though given my time constraints I'll be happy as a plain ol' senator. I will make two suggestions however:

1. Don't do it on the Shrapnel Forums. Unless you can get them to set up a special forum for you, the discussions and votes will get hopelessly muddled in one thread.

I'd be happy to host a forum for the purpose of playing the game.

2. Run the game on PBW, so that everyone can easily access it. We'll have to create a "public" user for the purpose, but I don't see a problem with that either.

Eric/LL

[Suicide Junkie]

Arkcon:
A 2/3rds Senate vote to expel a minister sounds good.
And yes, all open comms and votes will be taken via forum.

Only Generals engaging in tactical combat need Instant Messenger clients.

New players joining would have the option of taking any available minister slot, being a general or a senator, and would follow the same rules as players who previously died in game.

LazarusLong:
1) Seems fair enough. I wonder who is the person to talk to know that Richard's gone?
A dedicated forum would be nice, too.

2) No can do, PBW dosen't take sequential turn games, or tactical combat
I am going to be manually entering the commands, modding player experience in, and generating reports. I may just post the savegame for public viewing if its too much work to generate the reports...

Signups:
#1: Geo. (Local Planetary Minister or General)
#2: Arckon. (Science Minister)
#3: Matryx (General)
#4: Dead meat (Defense Minister)
#5: LazarusLong (Senator)

Minister jobs:
- Individual planets: small ones seem popular with RPers and those with little time to be in the spotlight. Manages ships in orbit.
- System lords: Rules all planets in a system that have no individual ministers. Manages ships making intra-system journeys.
- Political: One overall, or possibly one Minister for each race as an Ambassador.
- Finance: Watches over the budget and expenditures.
- Defense: Manages the overall inter-system distribution of warships.
- Economic: Manages resource generation, and general facility construction.
- Transportation: Manages the overall non-military shipping and travel arrangements.
- Colonization: Organizes colonization efforts.
Covered by Transportation if nobody claims the job.
- Science: Manages research projects.
- R&D: Designs ships.
- Covert Ops: Manages intel once researched.
- Construction: Decides locations to build at, and negotiates with local ministers.
- Naming Minister: Renames planets, ships, Design Classes.

[ December 17, 2002, 20:15: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Lemmy]

Sounds like the Democracy game thingie i posted a while ago, there have been games like this (community vs AI) on some civilization forums for a few months now..

ooh, i found my old thread..it seems i had some trouble getting the idea through to people link

I'm actually acting president for a SMAC democarcy game right now, it's fun, but also a lot of work...i'll post my experiences when i have read more of this thread.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
How is character movement going to be carried out? If we want to travel from place to place, will we need to somehow get an in-game ship to move from planet A to planet B? If so, we'll probably want a lot of little transports... which would be neat, and probably best with a mod to add tiny cheap ones, although again it might be more sane to just have SJ track it on paper.
PvK

For Ship Admirals it's easy enoough. They have a flagship. We can rename the ship's if they transfer their flag to a different vessel.

As far as the planet bound ministers, senator, governors, lords. Why not have personal ships assigned to each character. If we use some kind of unit to represent the player then it's asimple matter of having small cheap vessels that have a cargo unit on them. You could make the crew quarters hold cargo and then load the minister unit on them. For that matter the ship admirals could be done this way as well. Once we work out the specifics it wouldn't be that hard to do in game, and it would add a lot of depth to the idea I think.

Geoschmo

[Suicide Junkie]

As far as the planet bound ministers, senator, governors, lords. Why not have personal ships assigned to each character.

That would be up to the R&D, finance and transportation ministers, I believe

There could be a handful of tiny personal shuttles for some of the big ministers, and some high-speed passenger busses for the backwater governors.

Whatever the budget allows for, and the senate votes for

[geoschmo]

I think a person that has acheived the wealth and status associated with a position such as this could be assumed to have some personal means capable of such a vessel. Perhaps in times of great crises these could be "appropriated" by the local or empire authorities, but I think at least for some levels of positions these vehicles should be a basic perk of the position.

Geoschmo

[Lemmy]

k, after reading the Posts in this thread:
(beware, i'm mostly criticizing all your ideas here, don't take this the wrong way, i would very much like to see a game like this)

Too many cooks tends to spoil things.

Not really, in the game i'm in, there are currently 2 players who don't like each other at all, it's basically one thing they don't agree about, one says option a is good cos it will help us win the game, the other says option b is better, because it is "good" from an RP-perspective, adn we'll win anyway. They haven't resorted to namecalling or something like that, and for each statement they make against each other, they bring good arguments, so actually it makes the game better.

Tactical combat
How exactly do you want to do this? Over IRC or some IM program?
Even then, how long will it take for the secretary to move, say 10 ships? I mean the general has to be aware of the current situation to make the right decisions.
And you can't

Mortality, Game location
That's gonna be one big administration, keeping track of where everyone is in the universe, if they can do certain action or not

- Individual planets: small ones seem popular with RPers and those with little time to be in the spotlight. Manages ships in orbit.

What managing is there to do with ships in orbit?
Retrofit and disband (and maybe tactical combat).
They can't be moved, cos then the governor will lose jurisdiction over the ship.
Same goes for

- System lords: Rules all planets in a system that have no individual ministers. Manages ships making intra-system journeys.

Signups:
...

Whoaa, slow down there, it would be best to sort out jurisdictions and job descriptions first, how many ministers are there? What minister gets to control what? How are ministers chosen? Who plays the game? What exactly do governors do?

oh well, that's all for now, maybe more later.