View Full Version : Online campaign?
ElmarkOFear
10-03-2003, 22:15
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I am working on building a campaign rules set with the following ideas:
1. Armies are raised, not retained;
2. Armies are given florins to equipe itself;
3. One army per area. Armies are not destroyed, until run out of cash or surrounded.
4. Sea area could be controlled by fleets or army with boats. Armies with boats can transport itself at sea, fleet can transport armies.
5. Armies could march to an area, or provide support to another army in neighboring area. If march to area, the army can claim the area. If meet resistance, the battle will be fought to resolve the "only one army can occupy an area".
6. All armies fought on same side in a battle will share the burden of lost and the spoil of war if win. That means standing to watch the ally fight and get killed actually costs you too.
Items still need to be resolved:
1. Rules of engagement if more than two factions claim the area. Who will be on defend, who will be on attack. What happen if more than 4 teams want to be on one side, etc. I have iron out most of the regular cases, rest some particular cases to iron out.
2. Rules on florins assignment, casttle seige, etc.
Annie
ElmarkOFear
10-04-2003, 03:39
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I want to get away from the current "techtree" builds thing, which is totally artificial and very hard to implement in current MP infrastructure.
I did read those old MP rules, and many ideas are implemented in my rules set.
The rules for 2 factions contesting an area is already work out. The rules to resolve who will fight along side with who when three or more factions "enter" the area is hard to resolve. And I don't want to resort to a round-robin between the factions involved...
Annie
Sjakihata
10-04-2003, 09:34
To answer #2 you could just auto resolve.
ElmarkOFear
10-04-2003, 19:03
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GAH
Vanya sez...
1) Keep game interface the same. Nobody wants two radically different games in a single box marketed as one. So, each player can do all the things current SP campaign does.
2) MP campaign: need central server. "Campaign" maintained on server... players, current year/status of each, etch.
3) When all playas hit "end turn", then battles to be fought are queued up. Each player is given a list of battles. He can choose ONE to fight, and the rest get an AI general to fill in for him. Your choice of command is NOT divulged to other players. When you fight your battle, it could be vs another human if he chose to fight the same battle, or vs the AI if the opponent(s) all chose to a different battle to fight and left yours to an AI subordinate. This way, each end turn has a maximum of ONE battle per playa. Of course, youz could choose to fight NONE of the battles, and if everybody did this, the turns would fly by fairly quickly... Playa with no battle might have to wait a tad... So, as a suggestion, Vanya sez give playa with no battle scheduled to "watch" one of the other ones, only without any units of his own and without the ability to inject commentary during the battle... Others don't even have to be informed of his snooping...
4) When all battles conclude, the new turn/year starts, and the server communicates all the updates to the various playa PCs. Go back to #1 and repeat until there is a winner.
Vanya sees no need to complicate things with "raised" armies and "moving money bags" as "abstractions of military might". Keep the game the same, just put central ***MP*** strategic AI on central server.
ALTERNATIVE A
Instead of using a central server, since whoever is hosting it might get the willies and try to extort money from youz or choose to shut it down because of such trivialities as "cost"...
We all know there will have to be some kind of server out there anyway... even if its GameSpy.
Well, tack on a little extra to allow people to "host a campaign". Once people connect to the campaign, the HOST PC becomes the campaign SERVER for the duration of the campaign. If people DROP from the campaign, then ask the remaining members to: 1) end campaign, 2) give dead faction to the AI, 3) divvy up dead faction among themselves as "inheritance", or 4) allow a new playa to join the campaign from the foyer and take over.
Clearly, the campaign would end when the host ends it. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mad.gif With a CENTRAL server though, you could pause the campaign and reconnect to it another day and continue it then. Doing that brings out all the timing things Elmo referred to. So, its cleaner to finish it in a single sitting.
Vanya not know how feasible all He mentioned is... or whether anybody at CA/Activision plans to devote that much extra dev/hosting work to support MP campaigning...
GAH
Quote[/b] (Vanya @ Oct. 06 2003,22:55)]1) Keep game interface the same. Nobody wants two radically different games in a single box marketed as one. So, each player can do all the things current SP campaign does.
IMO this as an important consideration in order to attract the large population of SP-only players to try MP campaign.. and then hopefully more MP players for custom MP games.
I for one have no interest in MP campaign.. need too much of my time.. however it will be fun for people like me to take part in MP campaign as ronin.. i.e. campaign server lists battles that need to be resolved for players vs ronins, probably without stating who the players are (to avoid cheating).. we can just hook up and play some short and fun games.
and probably the managing of ronin states during the strategic phase will be by AI.
MiniKiller
10-10-2003, 23:59
I hope more people in the us by this one. IT would be realy hard if I were to try to attack someobne who is like 6hours ahead of my time in real life.
Orda Khan
10-11-2003, 01:11
If it were Clan based, different members could sit in to finish battles. I agree with Tootee, an individual campaign would take up stacks of time. Nice idea about the ronin battles
........Orda
ElmarkOFear
10-11-2003, 01:41
//
MizuKokami
10-16-2003, 02:41
let us not forget the possibilty of hireing merc. armies. players that don't have the time to play full out campaigns could still participate and help speed up the campaign by playing in occasional battles. of course, they could be bribed before battle begins. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/eek.gif
oh, and annie, figureing out who ends up with the province when more then three armies are involved would of course be handled thru proper diplomacy channels. the two factions would still occupy the territory, and revenue could possibly be split between the two factions contending for it, but if no descent settlement was arrived at within a certain time frame, war, or at least battle, would eventually ensue.
MizuKokami
10-16-2003, 02:53
i think, i'm not sure, that i heard that the borders of rtw would not be broken down by set provinces, but rather the control of areas. this would/could be what's needed to make a mp campaign more feasable, as it wouldn't be a quibleing over set provinces, but rather zones of control.
Orda Khan
10-17-2003, 16:31
There was a thread here...now it's gone. Why?
......Orda
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