Apart from the previous issues raised, my main concern is player lifetime. For the scale of gameplay you are suggesting the player would have to exist for tens of millions of years, only viable if the player is considered to be a massive AI network, or we regard that every ruler in the galaxy has achieved immortality.

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Original post by SquareDanceSteve What would the game play of an MMO of this type be like? 1. Encountering an individual player once and only once.

So what of friends, who like to play against others together. Or clans?

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2. Players chasing each other from star system to star system in an endless cat and mouse game.

This sounds VERY annoying. We tend to like to know we can win.

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11. Very deliberate and calculated game play, mistakes could take hours to resolve.

I have strong feelings against this, as well. When you do something wrong, it's good to know it soon. The old Civilization is a great example of this problem, where you can play for days not knowing that you've already lost. This leads to some very formulaic powermaxing (build barracks, produce units, ad infinitum... it kills the spirit of the game).

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Massive ships containing all the capabilities to be remodeled on the fly is a desirable idea, but I fear an awake crew over a 100 light year journey may realistically be more of a problem then an the benefits gained by on the fly ship upgrades. (moral plummeting, internal power struggles saboteurs, you name it) A crew that awakes exactly as it was 125 years earlier, will have its original effectiveness and chances are the ship will have not suffered any sort of mechanical failure.

When you're as far out on a fictional limb as expected here, many of your conclusions will be based on what you want to have happen.

Consider:

How psychologically stable is the military society? Anti-depressants and mood control substances could be a regular part of managing morale. Furthermore, what about mind-machine interfaces connected to nearly frozen crew which direct robots aboard ship? We have the beginnings of mind-machine interfaces now. And what about AI?

Interstellar war is pointless, and I doubt any zealotry would be powerful enough hold sway over the people for 1000’s of years. Zealotry can last a life time, and for a crew that is in hibernation between targets, zealotry can last a million years.

Two kinds of people fight interstellar war, the first kind are timeless people who are only awake during ship refits, resource collection and during battle, and these people could either be fleeing other timeless people in and endless war of cat and mouse. The second kind are the kind of people who are playing for glory and mmo rankings.

Resources are not unlimited in a situation where your ship is massive and in a game where the economics system requires incredibly complex equipment to build your ship. If equipment is relatively timeless then trade is all right.

Nano’s can only do so much, I find it difficult to believe nano’s could make atoms. If they could resource market economics would be void and only technology would be traded.

People on planets will have no need for interstellar war, but in time of desperate need such as the detection of an incoming fleet, they will militarize very quickly, they horrible weapons will be built and crews will be trained to control this equipment. The war ends, and you win. Dismantle the fleet and risk having to build another? Keep the fleet orbiting your planet and risk a military coup that could end in the destruction of your planet? Or send your victorious fleet where the enemy came from and make sure you never have to deal with them again.

Remember a military can take whatever it needs from their defeated enemys.

Any civilian society would not want to be tangled with a military project spanning thousands of years, they would make the mission a fire and forget mission. When the warrior aboard awake they will be fighting for the world they left behind not the world of the present.

Your military personnel will remain stable by virtue of remaining frozen during the time between deployment and combat, they will awake in the state the were deployed in.

The subject of errors taking hours to resolve, I am at a lost to resolve the impulsiveness of people. Instead players should attempt to take advantage of the inaccurate deployment.



Before posting in this thread please read all of posts since your last visit to this thread.

You might look there for a little article about realistic wars.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.science/browse_frm/thread/5e2d3f1512703238/48c0ea55c26a324b?q=raghar&rnum=15&hl=en#48c0ea55c26a324b

As an aside, the problem of effective force projection already exists in current RTS games - anyone who's tried a zergling rush against a prepared opponent in StarCraft has discovered that the defending force has always had more time to build, so almost always outnumbers the attacking force...

The solution is either to build an overwhelming force before attacking so that, by the time your victim knows you're coming, it's far too late to start building good enough defenses, or to send out a "mothership" capable of building an attack fleet on arrival - allowing you to react meaningfully to the course of events.

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"Footfall" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is a fairly realistic account of alien invasion - a generation ship arrives in the solar system, spends a couple of decades lurking in Saturn's rings, converting one of Saturn's moons into a weapon, and then come and drop it on late 20th-century Earth.

If you think parking as close as Saturn is too risky, there's plenty of material out in the cometary belt that could be used to build stuff with - or you could just sit out there and throw snowballs...

The motivation for the invasion? The alien equivalent of Jehovah's Witnesses, come to save our souls...


Another Niven/Pournelle concept - for the spin-off novel that just deals with asteroid (actually comet) impact - "Lucifer's Hammer" - written first but arising from a first draft outline for what would become Footfall - was hitting the Earth with a hot fudge sundae - 1 cubic mile in size... energy yield calculated at roughy 2/3 of a teraton - 640,000 megatons - and that's just at typical cometary velocities...

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It's just as well that the logistics of interstellar warfare give such a large advantage to the defending force - the chances of any invaders happening to be at exactly the defenders level of technology are pretty poor whether you allow for the century or so (at most) of lag between launch and arrival. Look at what happened in South America - and consider that an invading force is more likely to be technologically superior than inferior - they have the technology for interstellar travel.

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Interstellar warfare, by what we think we know about the universe is impractical rather than impossible. We have the technology today to build manned spacecraft capable of reaching nearby stars in a couple of centuries, and there are several plausible candidates for near future technology capable of bringing that time down significantly - sufficiently many that there are experts who believe we shouldn't launch anything with a flight time over about a century, simply because it would probably get overtaken en route...

Anyway, it's almost certainly possible to launch an interstellar attack fleet, even if we consider that it would be too expensive, too unlikely to succeed, and too unlikely to offer any form of profit, for any reasonable being to do so - the problem is that there are plenty of unreasonable beings on Earth, and no reason to believe that high-technology aliens will be any more reasonable, so it's quite plausible that someone will launch an invasion fleet at some point...

ops has considered the effects of einstein on a tactical lvl where the battleSpace isa stellar system.

to our knowledge the most significant tactical element is the uncertainty inna targets position induced by the light speed limit. bettr than any ionizd field to hide in.

one can also imagine difficulties in actually detecting a silent running needle inna very big black haystack.

thus, while no amount of armour will survive a strike, to our targeting is the real problem.

our, fleet0ps, solution is a spacially distributed cloud of semi intelligent drones, missiles nd sensors. for the romantics their ai's are modeled after earth animals such as vultures, sharks, eagles or killer whales.

regarding the motives for such interstellar conficts.

ops does not believe that military action will be a substantial part of an interstellar environment.

to our opinion intellectual property is the only tradeable interstellar good. the more happy engaged sentients innan empire the more i.p. it has to trade.

further, ops assumes a very limited ability to support life in space. w the consequent low space bourne populations scatterd through cosmological volumes sheer scarcity would demand going to extreme lengths not to blow stuff up.

in such an environment ops can imagine the monkeys need to socialise will make the control nd organising of assets in the political, ideological, economic dimensions the true victory conditions.

p.s. unless of course some homicidal xenophobic aliens show up.

asan educational resource has anybody mentioned the Atomic Rocket cite ? having just spent an enjoyable indeed nostalgic while in that place we discovered that, for instance, it may not be as hard to detect spacecraft in the void as our previous post asserted.

Hello SquareDanceSteve, I am actually working on something similar as well. I also take more effects than just "time dilation" into account. This should be published along with 2 papers on special relativity (one for lay and another for those who have atleast an understanding of Calculus) some time in September (although not through a game development venue) for the einstein year celebration.

Im thinking of writing a paper on the engine as well for the game development community. Ill begin chronicling this in my journal next week, incase you are interested.