Game Idea

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

OK, here's an idea I thought of yesterday while sitting in
Apple's orientation:

"The year is 2030 AD.  The economic expansion of the early
21st century has brought both the final extreme of overcrowding,
and the hardware to do something about it; the nations of Earth
begin to launch colony ships to settle the solar system.

"Alas, with the planting of new colonies comes new social strains,
and it is not long before each settled planet, and Earth itself, is
locked in a new set of wars.  With the discovery of faster-than-light
travel in the 40s, the struggle expands to the planets around nearby
stars.  As the leader of your nation, it is your task to survive
these changes and impose interstellar order, by force if necessary."

The game concept is a sort of Xconqified Civ meets Starcraft.  A game
consists of a sequence of scenarios, each played out on a planet's
surface.  Players engage on only one world at a time, and the outcome
could determine which world comes up next.  At the same time, research
is going on, so when FTL becomes available, a whole new set of worlds
opens up.  Worlds can range from the hospitable to inhospitable (with
terraforming research to help), and from thinly settled to urban.
Since it's near-future, military hardware will be similar to today's.
Space combat might be hard to fit into this and could just be ignored,
or left as a sort of background transition device.  The scale of combat
will be much as for Xconq's standard game, but units will be generally
faster.

To do ongoing pickup games over the net, just allow new factions to
appear when a player joins.  In theory, it would be possible to fork
off new games to handle multiple planets, but that seems like too
much at first, the single-thread campaign is itself a big step for Xconq.

Players' ultimate goal is to use their resources from the colony planets
to take over all of the Earth and thereby rule known space.

This game design will take some new implementation, but things
like campaigns are already on the wishlist, and so the focus can be
as much on adding some chrome and getting the AI to handle this well.

Stan