I''ve got a design that I can''t seem to make good end game conditions for. Any advice? It''s sort of RPG meets RTS. You''re a fast, nimble privateer with high technology in a system filled with competing asteroid bases. You can mine, trade, build, negotiate, and fight. You can choose to work solo, or for a particular base. If you ally with a base, you can buy space for building stuff on their asteroids. Eventually, you can also control it in RTS mode as an "Advisor." If you stay solo, you can build your own base and compete directly with all the others. As you play, bases are fighting, trading, negotiating and building. The game is for 1 to 16 players. It''s cooperative or deathmatch, depending on how you ally. When you die, you automatically restart at a safe base (insurance policies lets you rebuild your ship). One obvious goal is "conquer everybody." You can do this by upgrading your ship and becoming a badass, or indirectly, by supporting and upgrading a base. I''d like some other victory conditions that directly end the game. I thought about economic or diplomatic victory, but I''m not sure how these end the game as decisively as combat does (i.e., all bases destroyed but yours). Maybe you corner the market on some resource like fuel, and everyone else has to surrender to you? Or maybe you try to get the most bases to ally with you? (this doesn''t make as much sense) Help? -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

I''d try something like a story based victory ... you have to discover some artefacts that not only give you an advantage in game, but also once all gathered trigger something much bigger, that bascially puts you in charge (I''m staying very vague on purpose, I have one idea but I keep it to answer your question in the Writing forum )

Another way would be the political/diplomatic victory : each faction has to be convinced that this is not some sort of holy war (because otherwise there is no reasonable solution), then each faction has to try to convince the other factions to gather around some table and settle peace agreements. I''d go for the Babylon 5 type Each faction would try to get the most money in resources, as well as the most influence in the council, and of course, try to be the one most aadmired by its own motherworld. All this would be difficult because, of the constant fights to get new resources, of political intrigue from the motherworld (some extremists faction decide to launch a big attack on your allies, etc).

Mmm, I''ll see what else I can find

Something w/ multiple play-styles practically begs for multiple endings. It would also be cool if you incorporated something like in Pirates!, where you are given a description of your later years if you choose to retire early that is (loosely) based on your career. It was mainly just a verbal scoring system, but it added alot, and didn''t look too hard to code. You could go for a soft limit on game-time, say no. of game years player has played, probably longer for a merchant than a hard-living privateer, maybe take a set amount of weeks off for combat damage sustained and other variables (poor living conditions, letting wounds heal w/out proper medical care, etc)?

In multiplayer, it might fit w/ the RPG aspects if scenarios ran until a victory condition was met in that arena, but players kept their characters until their life-span was up. If you wanted, you could even work in a perma-kill system for certain (very hard to achieve) conditions, just for that extra tension.

I like ahw''s artifact idea for an explorer type career. A good set of very specific goals like this can give your game a good appearance of depth, especially if you work it into the general atmosphere. Like you said, cornering the market is natural for a business career, but a really bad example would be something like: Raise 1,000,000 credits by the year 3450. A political victory could be to get elected to the highest office, like Grand Galactic Overlord, or whatever.

The main problem w/ this is that every distinct win condition you put into your game needs a complete system behind it, which is alot of coding. A couple of things you could do about this is to combine victories, and make each major win condition at least partially dependant on every other system. For example: there is basically a city-state gov''t in place, so there are thousands of tiny armies in the galaxy. A political win condition would require the players to develop a sizable military to leverage insurgents, which would require an at least stable economy to maintain, which would require a source of income through some form of trade, which would require some diplomacy, (or the player could hunt for those alien artifacts, rumored to be near-perfect perpetual machines ). . .and so on.

This helps the game to balance itself, and heightens competition. In an interdependant system like this, an economic powerhouse gearing up to corner the market is not going to inevitably lose against a warlord like in some games. A diplomat will be able to call in reinforcements, but his own military will have to at least be able to defend his bases. Also, in games where the victory paths are almost totally distinct, you are not directly competing against other players, which is bad game design, IMO. Victory conditions shouldn''t be mutually exclusive until somewhere near end-game. Otherwise you lose the tension.

A really bad example of this is multiplayer Alpha Centauri, where if one person is going for an economic victory and the other is going for military victory, the economist will almost always lose, because the game was weighted so heavily towards minerals. A good mineral city could produce a unit every 10-12 turns, while an energy credit city would take almost ten times that to buy a unit. Yet you needed a ridiculous sum of energy credits to win economically. So usually, you just beefed up your military and took out the competition, using the captured cities for revenue. In multiplayer, it is useless to play as anything other than a warlord.

Ok, this is getting really long, its getting really late, and I''m trying to beat Fallout 2, so I''ll stop there. Do you see what I''m getting at though? I''ll post again w/ specifics.



If you see the Buddha on the road, Kill Him. -apocryphal

Ok, I haven''t thought this through yet, so forgive me if its stupid:

How about a game where one player is chosen to be something special, but the other players don''t know, and the idea of the game is to wipe out that player, so basically, there is a big argument over who is that player, and perhaps they have some object that shows they are that player (like a flag) and they have to try and keep it hidden. Maybe they could be given more resources as well, to balance it and give other players a clue as to who it is.

A twist on the diplomacy/political game could be something like when you are killed, the time before you respawn is proportional to how many allys you have. Or you could make it the other way around, so when you die, all your allys must pay a fee, or get to a certain point on the map before you are respawned.

That''s all I can think of now



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