Outside of germany one wouldnt really come across the bm very often. Unless they were into reading about revolutionary groups.Baader-Meinhof phenomenon--you learn a new term and start encountering it everywhere.
Wanna hear something funny? You're talking about the even better Uncharted Waters II:New Horizons (I loved playing as Catalina@Sommerswerd I played the absolute crap out of Uncharted Waters! Favorite start was the Ottoman trader because even though Catalina started with the combat stuff you actually can't do very much with only a single galleon. Gotta build a fleet before your flagship, very inefficient. First playthrough with her I ended up stranded with no money or supplies because I couldn't keep up with my crew's appetites and wages. That, and the fact that you can't catch any merchants with just your slow-ass galleonThe Dutch cartographer was my other go-to because off-the-bat exploration and getting paid for it all the time was great
I would be so happy if that IP got a new game.
@tetley I'm kind of surprised that hasn't been done yet, Shyamalan did that in what, 2006?
I want an RTS with intelligent subordinate officers you can delegate tasks to.
A long time ago I had an idea for a massively multiplayer online game that's really several types of games glued together in a cohesive whole. The game would be set in an interplanetary war and in a typical mission you'd be dropped into an FPS war zone with other human players and bots to have massive high-tech battles with an opposing nation of players and bots. These types of missions would be centered mostly around taking and holding terrain and building up your own fortifications. As you make your way across the map, icons would pop up on your HUD pointing you to objectives or giving you instructions on things to demolish or positions to take up or things to build.I've wondered for years whether an RTS with more-realistic-than-usual (not to say completely realistic) command & control and battlefield awareness systems would be fun to play and not just frustrating. Several games have had some sort of morale system, although those still had "God view" of the battlefield, and your units always received, understood, and implemented your orders to the best of their ability. Communication between the commander and subordinate units is always flawless, the player can always see whatever your units can see, etc. Games that want to limit battlefield awareness will often implement a jarringly artificial "view range" system. In World of Tanks (not an RTS, but some similarities) you can't see enemy vehicles sitting in the middle of a flat field on a bright sunny day if they're a meter beyond your crew's view distance; but then those same enemies will magically spring into existence if one of your teammates either gets closer or has a better view range than you do (to the game's credit, you can shoot enemies you can't see - you can fire blindly into a spot you suspect an enemy is hiding, and if he's there, you'll hit him).
Finally, I leave you the idea that if you string all of these things together you could play a game where you:
Spend some time in an R&D lab designing a troop transport for an upcoming assault. You get bored with this so you walk your avatar over to the War Room where you sit at a console to engage the 4X mode to plan an interplanetary assault. You queue up ships to be built, allocate soldiers to them and plan their route across the solar system. You leave the war room and catch a tram to the stardock where you find the heavy cruiser you command. On the bridge of the cruiser, you are able to direct it and the squadron of escort ships in RTS mode during a brief space skirmish as you overwhelm the defending forces at your destination planet. Once at the planet, you load onto a troop transport to go down to the surface and have some quality face-to-bayonet time with the enemy forces in FPS mode while your buddy logs on an commands your squads movements in RTS mode.
I think this sounds fun.
A long time ago I had an idea for a massively multiplayer online game that's really several types of games glued together in a cohesive whole. The game would be set in an interplanetary war and in a typical mission you'd be dropped into an FPS war zone with other human players and bots to have massive high-tech battles with an opposing nation of players and bots. These types of missions would be centered mostly around taking and holding terrain and building up your own fortifications. As you make your way across the map, icons would pop up on your HUD pointing you to objectives or giving you instructions on things to demolish or positions to take up or things to build.
The twist is that those orders would be made by real people who are playing an RTS version of the same game. They'd be directing the battle from their headquarters and telling people where to attack, where to retreat and where to hold. They would also be in charge of logistics so they'd have to direct soldiers where to set up landing pads and ammo depots and barracks (which all confer bonuses and new hardware to the FPS players on the ground) and there would be some rudimentary base building, resource gathering and manufacturing activities going on. Again, they'd be telling people on the ground where to set up factories and hoping that the human players and their bots help out.
Probably most of the logistical funcitons will be carried out by a contingent of specialized engineering bots that at most require limited maintenance by FPS players. I also think it will be key to come up with fun minigames for FPS players to go through while executing non-combat (i.e. basebuilding) tasks. In the past, games like Mass Effect have been really good about coming up with a fun minigame for players to execute as a way of abstracting some menial task. The problem is that the developers usually only provide a single minigame which is used over and over and over again throughout the whole game.
For my scheme to get any human involvement in non-combat, non-command tasks, those tasks will have to themselves be 'gamified' to keep the interest of players. In addition to mini-games (or in place of them) you could also allow players to build things from a menu like in Fallout 4. A lot of people enjoy that aspect of the game (myself included) and a chance to do the same under battle conditions in concert with other players would be awesome.
Another problem to sort out is how to allocate RTS command slots so that everyone who wants to command a battle can. I think it will come down to battle size and player rank. You can split up the war zones and put people in charge of their own little slice. Higher ranked players get bigger slices, more important slices or can have overlapping slices with lower ranked players that allow them to supercede (to a limited extent) the orders of underlings. Bigger battles would have more slices to allow for more people to play the RTS mode.
You can take this sort of idea further and try and set up systems where in you have people playing a 4X type of meta-game where they control not just individual ground battles but instead command entire fleets for space battles and direct campaigns and empire building across entire star systems. The space battles would be run similar to ground battles but would primarily be focused on vehicle combat at different size scales with limited boarding party raids.
A final meta-game would be to have a sector of 'design players' who come up with new guns, tanks, ships and other accessories. The idea is that they would use editing menus somewhat similar to what spore had to build complex new systems with base parts which all have resource requirements and appropriate constraints to prevent everyone from building superweapons all the time. Now clearly, some systems will be designed which incur a real advantage and the game should allow for that - it's a war after all and you want both sides working to outdo the other side when it comes to having the best equipment.
So:
4X: A meta-game with sector-level commanders responsible for governing systems, commanding fleets (out of battle), setting up deep space exploration, exploitation and settlement. These players set up and run the empire to make sure enough guns, tanks and supplies are produced to keep the war running smoothly.
Design Creator: A meta-game where people can put together components to craft new guns, ships, missiles and other war material. The designers have to consider the utility, resource requirements and aesthetics of the systems they are designing. Design creators can hold trial combat simulations (along with FPS and 4X players) to test new weapons systems. When the 4X sector commander orders 10 battleships to be built, the design creators are the ones who offer up their designs, test them out and then vote on which options should go into production at what level of resource allocation per design. There should be some sort of research/science mechanics for the design creators to work on as well to unlock upgraded components to make better weapon systems with.
RTS: A meta-game with battlefield-level command. These guys set up and run bases both on the ground and in space. They command tanks, aircraft and spacecraft along with foot soldiers and give orders to real life players and bots to execute.
FPS: A meta-game where people play in FPS mode. They execute orders given during battle and help set up bases and maintain logisitics bots and other duties behind the lines. These guys fly vehicles up to and including star cruisers and massive ground walkers.
I've wondered for years whether an RTS with more-realistic-than-usual (not to say completely realistic) command & control and battlefield awareness systems would be fun to play and not just frustrating. Several games have had some sort of morale system, although those still had "God view" of the battlefield, and your units always received, understood, and implemented your orders to the best of their ability. Communication between the commander and subordinate units is always flawless, the player can always see whatever your units can see, etc. Games that want to limit battlefield awareness will often implement a jarringly artificial "view range" system. In World of Tanks (not an RTS, but some similarities) you can't see enemy vehicles sitting in the middle of a flat field on a bright sunny day if they're a meter beyond your crew's view distance; but then those same enemies will magically spring into existence if one of your teammates either gets closer or has a better view range than you do (to the game's credit, you can shoot enemies you can't see - you can fire blindly into a spot you suspect an enemy is hiding, and if he's there, you'll hit him).
Cutting enemy lines of communication is a big part of real warfare that, as far as I can remember, has never been a part of any game I've ever played, because communications has never been a part of any game I've played. Total War forces your units into historical(-ish) formations, but doesn't really tell you why. One of the reasons for those box formations was command & control. The morale systems of games like Total War or Company of Heroes only partially represent real-world unit discipline, but when we play it, we just roll with it because it's a semi-historical game, and we don't want to see hundreds of Roman Legionnaires or British Redcoats breaking ranks and scattering for cover, even if the reasons for those tight formations aren't all modeled in the game. Company of Heroes allowed individual soldiers within a fire team to use cover while keeping themselves within (literal) shouting distance of each other, but there must have been some kind of invisible tethers creating an artificial limit to their spread, because command & control wasn't really modeled in the game.I think you would need to introduce a delay between the events happening on the battlefield and the news reaching your command post. In reverse, there would also be delay between giving orders and the units receiving them. That way, autonomy of the individual units would be necessary, because with the delay it would become impossible to micromanage distant units. This could even include a messenger system which carries the orders and news,and if you manage to interrupt an enemy's messenger system, they would have no information and could not give orders.
The ancient but entirely free adventure game studio (ags)![]()
Imo the best games to come from ags are the down fall series & fran bowThere was some pretty cool adventure games made on ags like "7 days a stranger" seriesThe program is pretty basic and I think anyone can make an adventure game provided he has some graphics to go with it.
This is a huge flaw in my meta-game idea. The RTS modes depend in part on people playing FPS to follow orders. Not sure how well that would work in practice to be honest. Probably not too well.Cutting communication isn't in games because it would be incredibly frustrating to issue orders and have the game be non-responsive, especially if you're not immediately sure why that is the case.
This is a huge flaw in my meta-game idea. The RTS modes depend in part on people playing FPS to follow orders. Not sure how well that would work in practice to be honest. Probably not too well.
Back in the day in Planetside 2 there were huge events called Server Smashes, where 240 or 288 players per server from a pair of servers (Planetside 2 is an MMOFPS for those who don't know. It still has a decent playercount but it has fallen off from where it was substantially). All of the players for each server would be in an elaborate voice chat setup with a command hierarchy and everything and the event was each team fighting to see who could take more territory from each other. It worked quite well for those two hours, but I doubt it could scale to a full-time mode on an MMO.This is a huge flaw in my meta-game idea. The RTS modes depend in part on people playing FPS to follow orders. Not sure how well that would work in practice to be honest. Probably not too well.