Thanks a lot keith, that sounds great. 
The only question I feel wasn’t answered was this one:
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I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “moving battles” and, well, the old forums don’t exist anymore 
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We’ve talked about them on the old forums. …
Pretty much the objective moves so the battle arround/about it has to move too.
Some examples:
- A capital ship moving to: Attack a Space/Ground Base, Flee, Reinforce a fleet battle.
- A resource rich (Ancient)Freighter / Asteroid deorbiting.
- A BIG BOMB/MISSILE shot from a attackers base.
This forces people to fight while the environment changes around them. Experiencing that what makes the I-Novae engine unique: Transitions.
According to that description we do have moving battles. Players will be able to build factories and stations wherever they want thus creating new locations for conflict. If a player buys a large capital ship that ship will obviously be moving around and the opposing team may want to use a focused strike to destroy it.
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So many lessons can be learnt from that game I feel, I do hope though that Battlescape will allow for a more dynamic strategy game to play out, rather than having to follow such set paths, while still allowing the new/more casual players to jump into the action and not be too lost as to where to go / what they should do to help.
If the game has the tools to allow those who what to command to be able to make plans and set objectives for those who want to jump into the action, it could be pretty epic.
There won’t be any set paths and figuring out how to make it easy for new players to jump into the action will be a big part of playtesting.
Well, sure, battles can move naturally, but that would be the exception. Most battles would stay focused around a single point(the factory/station).
The idea was discussed so that the interest point that had to be defended would move automatically by the server, be it a wounded npc capital ship that had to be escorted, or a fleet of drop ships that was moving to capture a target. That way you could start a fight on the surface, transition to space, maybe to an asteroid ring, then fight in open space, and maybe even on the surface of a moon, for example. The outcome of the battle(capship destroyed or saved, for example) could then result in extra resource points for the winning team. These could be special event battles, that could actually be triggered by player actions.
Since the winning team(with the most factories) would have an advantage due to having more resources/gear, turning the course of the game would be hard for the losing team. Maybe those special events could happen favoring the losing team, giving them a chance to acquire the resources to try and capture some factories to even things out a bit.
Having the most factories won’t automatically mean you win. If your team spends all its resource points all at once on factories there’s going to be a period of time where you can’t afford more advanced ships and weaponry. That would give the opposing team an opening to come in and destroy all those new factories. The server will only determine the starting location of the initial set of stations and factories. After that players will place them and they have the freedom to place them wherever they want.
A team wins the game by completely destroying all of the stations of the opposing team so that they can no longer respawn.
This isn’t really on the topic of “metagame” but…
I STRONGLY suggest against using auto-balance. It divides up the people who want to play with each other and lessens the team-play experience. Yes, this might lead to some unbalanced teams, Yes something needs to be done to keep things fair, but taking the easy way out by splitting up friends who want to play with each other is the wrong thing to do.
I thought it was discussed on the old forums that you would gain money by playing the game, then you would buy a ship out-of-game using said money, then launch back into the game with your ship using some sort of battle-value system? I may be mis-remembering though. Actually, I might be thinking of Star Citizen. Who knows anymore.
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If some sort of squadron system is implemented, auto-balancing can be done in a way that doesn’t split up squadrons, corporations, or registered player groups. That would leave the auto-balance to deal with the “independents”, or people who have opted to have their squadron or IPO affiliations ignored.
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Looking at the metagame you intend to make (if stretch goals are met), there are strong similarities with Allegiance : building factories for spawning and/or more advanced ships, ultimately building capships, mining resources, varied places of interest separated by long distances…
I’m pretty sure some evoked Allegiance in the old forums, but I’m curious. Did you play it, or was it an inspiration? While their servers are alas quite empty today, some people are still playing and refining it more than a decade later, so there are probably interesting things to learn from it.
I have never heard of Allegiance, I’ll have to look into it.
Are you planning on making the factories indestructible?
You did mention that you could destroy them here:
But if they are not indestructible, then the losing team will be the one that loses the most factories, and they would either have to buy worse ships to save resources to rebuild them, or just not rebuild them and maybe lose the war in the long term because the other team would get more resources per minute.
Conquest type games on large maps, like on battlefield 3, work because the more capture points you have, the more spread thin the winning team is to defending them, so the team with the most points usually changes many times during a match. The problem with this factory system is that even though the winning team would be spread thin, they would also have more resources to defend the factories.
I know this could be fixed in a few ways. Im just saying that those special events with the “moving battles” idea could be a way to prevent battles from ending up with one team getting more and more powerful while the other just keeps losing factories and income up to the point of it not being fun anymore.
What would a factory even consist of? just a place to pump out ships? must they be built on resource nodes? are there separate mining installations? are there turrets, stationary defenses, etc, what stops people from just placing everything in the same place?
What i want is for there to be a very basic factory with nothing else. It’s up to the players to upgrade the factory and add turrets and shields and armor. Everything would require player resources and player action to do.
… Or it could just be a DOTA in space with NPC ships going at it.
That’s a point actually - do we know if NPCs are confirmed for I:B? @INovaeKeith? I mean, I know there should be a large number of players allowed in the system, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be at all times of day. Besides, if I-Novae want to create massive space battles like the movies, I suspect some juicy NPC cannon-fodder would make things much more fun.
For the usefulness of fun-by-shooting-lots-of-NPCs, I point people to [this game][1].
[1]: http://www.bruneras.com/games_swboe.php “this game” It is very fun. And almost impossible to complete. But the point is, despite having played games that have poured millions into development, I don’t think any has managed to match the level of pure entertainment and challenge this one presents. And I think that’s largely because blowing up wave after wave of TIE Fighters never gets old!
So… NPC fodder.
The involvement of npc’s will be determined by the amount of money we raise.
I’ve heard about this game, now is a good time to try it out.
For NPCs, if actually possible, it may actually be quite fun, by giving players lots of ships to shoot at while not dying too often themselves. I’ve heard that the upcoming FPS Titanfall does that (weak NPC soldiers) with good results, but it’s hard to judge before it is out.
For factories, in Allegiance, you have your command station which gives basic fighters, utility drones and constructions as well as serving as a spawn and resource hub. It can build basic buildings on the right type of asteroids, including research centres, floating turrets and secondary spawn points, which them can unlock more advanced buildings, up to capital ship docks.
They also have two type of fighters : fighters and interceptors, and generally only one is developed for more advanced models. Also, base ships are free but not more advanced ones. The third type of light ship is scout, lightly armed but mandatory for detection, sensor deployment and shooting other sensors down. The fourth one is bombers, heavier bad in dogfights, generally having turrets. That said, with I:B, ships may be less specialized and their role determined by their equipment.
I’d suspect it would be a good start for the gameplay : factories (and later carriers?) can serve as spawn points, more advanced ones unlock better and different ships and buildings (and equipment?) ; base ships free or cheap while advanced one are more expensive, mining (and/or rigs) for resource gathering, possibly sensor probes…
Factories just generate resource points, that’s it.
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