I'm very curious to hear opinions on whether this setup for resources, trading, and combat will achieve the objectives:

I'm including a lot of details that I *think* they are all important to trying to guesstimate the player behavior. I'd also be interested if anyone thinks the behaviors don't rely on some of these details.

The Environment:
1) It's a space themed game where players belong to a single faction and they can either choose to be hostile (in which case they can attack but not trade with players of the faction) or friendly (in which case they can trade with, but not attack players from the faction) with every other faction.

2) Every faction has their own Faction HQ sector which contains meteoroids of one specific resource. Extracting from meteoroids requires about 2 minutes of playtime and the resources are "free" (well, they cost 2 mins).

3) There is a main base in each sector and they buy resources for a fixed, minimal rate (they pay $1 for each unit of the resource in their sector, 4 for each resource from a neighboring sector, and 10 for each resource not in a neighboring sector).

4) Moving between neighboring sectors takes about 5 minutes. The sectors are daisy-chained (see image).

5) Players can establish their own trading post anywhere they want and establish their own buy/sell price for all resources at their trading post. Obviously, they need to stock the trading post with cash/resources but there's no other restriction on which resources they buy/sell.

6) There are different types of ships: pure trading vessels (high cargo, crap weapons/shields), pure warships (low cargo, good weapons shields), and hybrids.

7) Ships can be destroyed and when destroyed, on average half their cargo can be salvaged by the attacker.

8) Trading posts can be attacked, but in order to be successful it requires coordination of many attacking players, and some are likely to not survive the battle.

9) There is an equal need by all factions to gather all resources in equal amounts.





Objectives:

1) I want players to establish trade routes so that resources will be sold for cheap in the sectors neighboring their "free" sector and will be sold, but at very expensive prices in farther away sectors.

2) I want players to be able to choose different paths to gather the resources they need .... mine, trade, attack.

3) I really don't want f it all up to where for some reason it only makes sense to be an attacker or only a trader or where no players chose to buy/sell.

I know with the free resources, I need to constantly make sure there is a sink for the resources, and this is a challenge, but for this discussion, let's assume there is always a constant need for each resource.

Any wisdom/guidance is appreciated....

Seems like a cool idea. Do you mean it to be some kind of turn based action-points type system or a realtime system?

One idea for the resource sink is hostile aliens (not to mention players) that would randomly attack sectors or something. You would have to use resources to build up your defenses in different ways maybe. Like defense would cost mostly resource A, guns would cost resource B, fuel would be resource C. So then depending on your resource situation you would build your defenses.

As for making sure you don't just get marauders or traders, look at why these things happen in real economic situations: battle is expensive, so it's only worth it if someone is bering a jerk with their prices and you really need that resource; just blasting them always would deplete you very quickly. I imagine that getting this right would be a matter of careful balancing and testing.

Give us more on the mechanics of the gameplay (rts, turnbased, realtime html ... etc).

Sounds interesting, good luck!

Thanks for the feedback and ideas, apefish. If I told you about the type of game it would quickly get dismissed as "oh god .. another dreamer!" and then I wouldn't get any feedback :p

It's a .... "MMO". Ahh, shit. I said it. Oh well.

So, the actions are real-time. It's meant to be 75% sandbox/emergent, but with some missions and gamemaster-controlled faction relations.

Quote:

Original post by NateDog Thanks for the feedback and ideas, apefish. If I told you about the type of game it would quickly get dismissed as "oh god .. another dreamer!" and then I wouldn't get any feedback :p It's a .... "MMO". Ahh, shit. I said it. Oh well. So, the actions are real-time. It's meant to be 75% sandbox/emergent, but with some missions and gamemaster-controlled faction relations.

Cool. Have you seen those actually real time html/&#106avascript/database browser games? Where it's like dispatch army at lunch time, log on after dinner and your guys are just getting there. I can't think of what any of them are called, but i've seen a few. Anyways, they seem like a good way to make a MMO without being blizzard. Espescially for trading/diplomacy/strategy type games. Not much harder than making forum really...

I've got a few ideas for that kind of game, but don't have enough time now to really get into it. Good luck!

Sounds like an interesting system and I can't think of any obvious catastrophic flaws off the top of my head. Also, I'm glad at least our economies will be different.

How does combat work? Can a group of players say "arrr! let's be pirates!" and attack every solo player they find? If so, that might not be much fun for casual players.

Also, are there just 6 sectors/resources?

Thanks, apefish. I've designed/built and currently manage a few PBBGs (Persistent Browser-Based Games) which is the style you're describing.

For this game, though, we're going for real-time MMO, though with some characteristics of the PBBGs brought in. We have a core engine complete and I hope to be posting at least a quick video soon.

justkevin,

There's actually a lot more to the system, but I didn't want to go too deep in my posting ... was trying to put in the minimal info to get some feedback on the approach. Factions don't actually have a single sector, but they have a galaxy comprised of several sectors. I put together the above image to simplify for the sake of the feedback request. This image is from the design doc and we've increased to about 24 initial sectors in 6 galaxies to start.



As we build the playerbase, then our plan is to open new wormholes to new galaxies to expose more factions and more "space".

There are 9 resources. The cheapest resources that are needed in the highest quantities are spread out and available in multiple galaxies. But, each galaxy does have one specific resource available to only it. We're still debating on whether to also have goods that are a zero-sum trading system with no actual use.

How to manage griefers and rogue bands of pirates and let them co-exist in a world of casual players and active players that don't like PvP is one of many big design challenges. I don't know that we have it solved (actually, I'm sure don't!), but our approach is to have NPC security forces. When a player is traveling in one of his home sectors, he'll have sort of auto-bodyguards patrolling the area and will be very safe. In neighboring galaxies, he'll have medium security, and the farther out he ventures, the less security he will have.