Hi

Im doing a post-ww2 adventure game where you control a small band of ships (up to 5 in endgame) and engage in piracy and privateering (main powers being britain, japan, germany and usa) in a post-ww2 "total war" kinda scenario (1950s).

Looking at traditional games of the genre (im thinking pirates! and port royale series) the scale of the time period is harder. Gameplay such as:

- Attacking settlements

- Settlements are dynamic

- Affect settlement governance (what power controls the port/settlement)

- Erecting buildings there (factories, docks etc)

...becomes strange when the settlements are real actual large cities like calcutta and singapore. Solutions might be:

1. Have smaller settlements (outposts, naval bases etc) which can be more easily affected alongside more static large cities

2. Not use a real location world map. Some "unclaimed" land offering elements of small dynamic settlements and land-grab. But where would this be?

3. Use a post-apoc setting. After a nuclear war (or whatever) many former cities may be gone and newer and smaller ports springing up.

What are your thoughts? I want another layer of gameplay rather than just ship combat. Somewhere to envest your resources and build something.

Best regards

Erik

You might want to make it well AWAY from the front lines where both sides have major assets ready to blast anything that remotely looks wonky. You have to remember that even merchant ships in WW2 were much more armed than in peacetime (when such things ate into the profits, which might not be as much a consideration during war).

Privateering might at least NOT have everyone after you (and a source of supplies/equipment/intelligence)

Thanks, but how is that related to settlements and their scale?

You could try setting it in a smaller setting, like an island chain, maybe somewhere in southeast asia where most of the powers don't have major influence, and where piracy is actually still a problem today: http://time.com/piracy-southeast-asia-malacca-strait/ (If you scroll down, it even has a nice map)

(And I'd still probably lean towards your option 1, I think players would want to see a big city, but know it's pretty much not an option to go in and take over Singapore, except maybe as some sort of endgame, though I suppose you could just alter history, and Singapore got bombed and needs to be rebuilt. )

Yeah im leaning towards no 1 as well. Maybe with some of no 3 mixed in. Maybe at the start of a campaign, X cities are declared as victims of nuclear attacks, so reduced to rubble. This can lead to a more varied starting field. Other cities can be damaged to the point of being weak enough that a player with some transports and around 1000 troops can claim it (without beeing TOO silly).

The game scales from a small coastal craft and 50 guys in the beginning to commanding cruisers in the late game. I want this scaling, but it makes some stuff hard to mix together.

I find the problem is always having a samewhat "real" feeling to the gameworld (even with "simulation elements" when it comes to events and economy), but still wanting liberty with the gameplay mechanics. I use real ships and weapons and cargo...

Yeah, I've had a very similar game that I've been very slowly tooling on, except tanks instead of ships. (roughly 8 tanks max). I thought about doing a mix of WWII and apoc. I thought if perhaps some asteroid(s)* hit right during the height of WWII, it would alter the landscape both physically and politically and it could allow for smaller bands of mercenaries/armed forces to arise. Nuclear war would also work, either is likely to cause a global winter, with people forced to fight over scraps. Asteroids let me set the impact to any period of WWII, and hit whatever countries I feel like.

Either way, instead of doing right in the midst of the apocalypse, I could jump ahead some amount of years, to where things are starting to be rebuilt, and nations are starting to draw their boundaries again.

*Obviously not extinction level big, but big enough to put a halt to the war, and alter and change the nations.

Though going the Valkyria Chronicle route, and just having something that's eerily similar, but not quite the real world might work just as well.

Your ideas about smaller settlements, combined with Nuclear War, seems pretty cool to me. If the major port cities have mostly been nuked already, and other big cities are in imminent danger of being nuked at any point, smaller settlements make sense. It probably wouldn't end up being a very realistic setting, but having a kind of extreme 'what if' setting could be very entertaining. A world with a crazy ongoing amount of chaos seems like a nice fit for pirates, micro-military organizations, plenty of weird factions, interesting high level goals for the players etc.

What about an alternate history where instead of nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project developed infectious bioweapons? After dropping bioweapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the resulting plagues go out of control and take down a lot of the more heavily-populated areas on Earth.

So you could maintain much of WW2 history, just make one change that gives you a completely different 1950s, one where the major remaining population centers of Earth are surprising, out-of-the-way places like Sao Paolo and Sydney, while you can convincingly menace severely diminished cities like London and Shanghai.