"Enterprise: Two to beam up." I've finished the major rules for combat, stealth and trade that are the core underpinings of the open-ended space game I've been posting about. Now one of the final gameplay elements I'm working out is being able to do things at a distance, such as send a ship in your fleet off to trade goods or a survey team to scout strange signals on a planet below. Here's a sketch of how I think this could work. I'd appreciate your thoughts or criticisms. Basics Away missions become an option as soon as you can afford a drone, crew or extra ships. You deploy them using the same map you use to travel. The map view shares space with an inventory half-screen, and you simply drag cargo / equipment onto a ship or crewmember, then drag each ship or crewmember onto the map. You don't get to go with them or control them, but you get reports from them. If you've assigned a crewmember to a ship, you get a brief report which says which character(s) are leaving, what they're equipped with, what ship they're taking, how long they'll be gone. They'll suggest a path based on their equipment loadout and capabilities (so fat merchant ships don't waddle through pirate infested systems unless you so order it). You can overrule this and set your own path, and you can also set preferred paths based on safety or speed. Your job is to give them enough resources (fuel, repair material, missiles, etc.) to get the job done based on the route and mission. If they're short and in comm range, they'll tell you. Otherwise, based on their stats either improvise (which is a set of random event tests and outcomes) or head home. Mission Options Missions have goals and a style. The goals are varied and range from capturing another NPC / ship / colony to rescuing, assassinating, or locating them. There are also a bunch of special purpose missions which tie into story-like missions that you can take for a faction or empire. Some faction missions may be so time critical that you can only succeed by splitting your team up. The mission styles are: Assault, Diplomacy and Stealth. This is how the agent will try to solve the mission. Agents with certain skill sets, equipment, and personality types are more suited to one mission type than another, and based on loyalty may override your approach if things go wrong. Mission Results Your agents are just as subject to the semi-random events and changing galaxy as you are. This means that despite your best laid plans, your agents may end up with everything from engine trouble due to an anomaly or being kidnapped because you sent them through a volatile region that erupted into a warzone. They can even be simply wiped out by pirates, or if their loyalty and morale is low enough, skip town with whatever resources you gave them. You get a message for each leg of the journey, and a warning whenever they're overdue. If they're missing, you can choose to send another group to check it out, or go yourself. Who knows, you may find them half-starved and holed up on a planet full of xenomorphs. :) Anyway, this is the basics. I'm planning to do all of this using Risk-style rules based on stats and semi-random events which are atomic enough to be strung together into complex events. One of the things I'm most concerned about is player failure and control. While I really like the idea of being able to send your people, say to a base you have to get help, I'm not sure how accepting people will be if the agent just fails. For instance, if you're under siege on a small colony and you send your best man and fastest ship to go get help, for the sake of drama should they always make it out, or should it be possible that your agent simply gets captured or vaporized? I'm also wondering if when the agent fails the player should know about it immediately, rather than get a report. I can imagine a scenario where the agent was sent to get help, then the player clicks the "Pass Time" button, waits a week, then hears nothing but that the agent is overdue. Might not be good.

On critical missions:
I think there might be a slim chance of them not making it, even if sent on critical missions. Although it should be possible for you to set the chance of success/failure internally if the mission is part of a larger campain and only serves as a storyteller.

On mission-status:
Tell the player _almost_ immediatly. Not instantainiously, but relatively fast anyway. Maybe they managed to send out a message before getting vaporised or a crewmember managed to escape in a liveboat and get into contact with the player.
However, this can be exploited. If the player sends a scout out to scan for a huge enemy armada, the enemy can't stay hidden unless he is able to stop the scout to relay his position.

On mutiny:
I like the idea that the crew will jump ship and take whatever they can from you if they don't like you. If that happens, will they become a enemy/NPC ie. will you be able to bump into the same mutinous crew in your stolen ship/their new base and blast them to bits? Or will they just... disapear into the void?

It might be a good idea to have a threat matrix, the treat matrix takes into account the knowledge your character has to determine the threat rating of a mission. So if you want to send a ship to run the blockade around the planet your on, then the threat rating would show you the relative chances of the diffrent ships completing the mission. In this way the player has an idea before hand on how likly the mission is to succeed. You may even want to think about allowing joint missions, so maybe senting out one ship to run the blockade will always fail, but sending out three ships from the opposite side of the planet to forceable run the blockade should devert enough enemy ships away to allow your fastest smallest ship to stealth run the blockade from the other side of the planet.

Whether or not to let the player know immeditly is an important factor to consider. On one hand it lowers the realisim and tension since you known the results immeditly, On the other hand if you send a ship to find help and they get destroyed then waiting a week and hearing nothing could mean you no longer have the resouces to send another ship.

Perhaps you could weight the dice depending on the needs of the player, If they have a high needs rating then the a little bonous is applied to the roll allowing the rescue party to find help, when they would otherwise fail.

You could even weight the dice against the player when their needs rating is extremely low, to prevent them form becoming to powerful to fast.

I think you could also set something like the required frequency of reports from the people on that mission. Frequent reports allow you to control the men more closely, but also increase the chance of the communication being intercepted (which in turn can raise the chances of failure).

Frequencies could be a combination of a numerical value (establish contact every x hours) and conditions:

- When an unexpected event happens.
- When there's a chance of not being able to establish contact for a while
- Where the contact becomes possible again, and at least one contact has been skipped.
- When a mission objective is complete.
- ...

The frequency of reports is not a bad idea, it could also be used to affect the teams stealth rating, the more often they report the more likly they will be detected, for the missions demanding the most stealth the player may have to wait till the team returns for a report.

Actually, I don't think you'd be forced to wait for a report. For instance, you could order the stealth commando to do a particular, innocent thing (like turning one way instead of another inside a space harbor, or using a particular word in a public speech), depending on the success of their mission so far.

That way, their stealth rating would be safe, but the message would still have been sent across.

Maybe officers with higher stealth skills could come up themselves with such means of communications.

Also, maybe you should be able to select the level of secret of a particular mission. For instance, you could choose not to tell most of the crew about what they're going to do (what's inside these containers they carry, what's on this planet they spy on, etc...), so that only the highest officers are aware of the mission. This would go well with the following gameplay events:

- Mutiny when the mission handed out goes against the ethics or beliefs of a big enough proportion of the crew (like attacking their own home planet).

- Intrusive telepathy being used on a lowly private that allows spies to know everything about the mission.

- Drunk crew members saying the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong bar.

I think that sending a team would be a sort of mitigated way to do missions. You hear that there's a disabled craft in orbit around Titan, and the crew has only a few days of life support left, so you can either plot a course and go rescue them, ignore them, or "send a team".

I'm trying to decide if it would be possible to make these missions up, like "You three get in light fighters, fly to Luna, wait for the freighter PN4239184, escort it to its destination, and then return to this location for a rendezvous." That would be a real pain in the butt unless each of those actions were individually scripted in as action types.

Since this will all be handled behind-the-scenes with random numbers and such, you'll probably be able to handle a few dozen different "mission components", but maybe it would be better to have the missions structured automatically and just make the character design an away team to handle it.

EDIT:

So, what will it look like when you make one of these things? I'm guessing that you'd have a little assignment screen, vaguely reminiscent of the team-building system in Rainbow Six, where you choose personnel, equipment, etc. Add in what kind of supplies and spacecraft they'll be taking along, and finalize their primary and secondary mission objectives. Then you hit the "deploy" button and wait for the reports to come it.

So, for a strike on a pirate stronghold for the recovery of a stolen vessel, I'd send My security chief and five of his best men, three in powered armor and three in light fighters, to do the fighting. I'd also send along a three-man team of engineers, and two pilots, one for the transport with the engineers in it and one for the craft, should they succeed in recovering it. An extra pilot for the transport in case one bites it, an orbitting probe (expendable) to relay recon data to the powered suits and handle laser targetting, and a small nuke to leave behind after extraction. Since they'll only be gone about six hours, I give them the standard drugs, medical supplies and some water, but no need for food.

Primary Objectives:
1. Deploy probe over acteroid PSO4385.
2. Land mobile suits and engineers on surface.
3. Recover SS Helen.
4. Return to base with all personnel.

Secondary Objectives:
1. Destroy targets of opportunity.
2. Plant fusion bomb.

Parameters:
1. Silent approach.
2. Reduced radio traffic.

Then I just push the "go" button and find a nice comfortable orbit, or cruise to my next patrol route. If it works, I'll get my ship back and all my men, and I'll blow some pirates to hell to boot. Worst case scenario, I lose twelve good men, three suits of armor, three fighters, and gain nothing. Anything on the continuum between those extremes is possible.

I'm reminded of Final Fantasy Tactics, where you get the little "jobs" to do and have to send your soldiers to do them. They give little reports after the fact. I hope this will be far more sophisticated, and from what I see in this thread, I'm optimistic.

[Edited by - Iron Chef Carnage on June 16, 2004 1:49:35 PM]

Quote: Original post by Bangladesh
On critical missions:
I think there might be a slim chance of them not making it, even if sent on critical missions. Although it should be possible for you to set the chance of success/failure internally if the mission is part of a larger campain and only serves as a storyteller.

Yes, I see what you mean, if you're creating missions for others to play.

Quote:
On mission-status:
Tell the player _almost_ immediatly. Not instantainiously, but relatively fast anyway. Maybe they managed to send out a message before getting vaporised or a crewmember managed to escape in a liveboat and get into contact with the player.
However, this can be exploited. If the player sends a scout out to scan for a huge enemy armada, the enemy can't stay hidden unless he is able to stop the scout to relay his position.

Would you mind if the player needed a special device or character to get near instantaneous notice? Like a telepath or expensive tachyon comm gear?

I'm a bit squeemish about breaking suspension of disbelief here. If you send a team either into a communications null zone (say a planet with massive electromagnetic interference) or into the "outback" where there are no comm relays, story and gameplay-wise communications take days or weeks. This serves to make the universe feel large and sharply divide civilized and uncivilized areas.

Quote:
On mutiny:
I like the idea that the crew will jump ship and take whatever they can from you if they don't like you. If that happens, will they become a enemy/NPC ie. will you be able to bump into the same mutinous crew in your stolen ship/their new base and blast them to bits? Or will they just... disapear into the void?

It depends. There are three ways they will be kept persistent: Random encounters, where they may or may not pop up again at familiar haunts; if you mistreat them enough so that the game tags them as nemesis characters, who will start leveling up like you and opposing you; and if you pay to have them tracked down.

Otherwise, they're lost in the sea of sentients (making room for new characters to encounter).

Quote: Original post by TechnoGoth
It might be a good idea to have a threat matrix, the treat matrix takes into account the knowledge your character has to determine the threat rating of a mission. So if you want to send a ship to run the blockade around the planet your on, then the threat rating would show you the relative chances of the diffrent ships completing the mission.

This is a great idea. Actually, this should be an in-game simulation you can run. Maybe better equipment and personnel give you an answer closer to the truth, or a more narrow range.

Quote:
You may even want to think about allowing joint missions, so maybe senting out one ship to run the blockade will always fail, but sending out three ships from the opposite side of the planet to forceable run the blockade should devert enough enemy ships away to allow your fastest smallest ship to stealth run the blockade from the other side of the planet.

Yes, although I'm still trying to determine the level of detail I want to give you, you should be able to schedule and stack actions-- maybe even add conditionals (though I don't want this to get too complex).

So on the top of the action stack, you'd have ship #1 distract, which should lower some stat like perception or awareness, then next you have ship #2 flying in stealth mode, hoping it's stealth stats are now good enough to pass the defensive fleet's lowered perception / sensor stat.

Quote:
Whether or not to let the player know immeditly is an important factor to consider. On one hand it lowers the realisim and tension since you known the results immeditly, On the other hand if you send a ship to find help and they get destroyed then waiting a week and hearing nothing could mean you no longer have the resouces to send another ship.

Right. This is touchy because it's another situation akin to getting stuck, but much worse because you won't know if you're stuck until you get the results. OTOH, I have to factor in why you've gotten yourself into the situation in the first place.

Quote:
Perhaps you could weight the dice depending on the needs of the player, If they have a high needs rating then the a little bonous is applied to the roll allowing the rescue party to find help, when they would otherwise fail.

Well, as long as players didn't know or couldn't figure this out, it might work to check whether or not their reserves were low when they sent characters on a mission.