The best of both worlds
What I really miss in a lot of games with multiplayer capability is the concept of having a long ongoing war and conquest for territory, that spans further than just single gaming session. RTS games are usually made out of matches, in every match you have to build your complete base from scratch. On the other hand, in a game like Factorio or Minecraft, when you're away, you can't defend your factory (disregarding mods that make entities unbreakable to other players). This renders Factorio unsuitable for conquest spanning over multiple gaming sessions.
What I've described here are two completely opposite types of online gaming. I'd like to make a mod that combines:
- Having the ability to conquer new land, either in order to improve your power, gain access to more resources or for its strategic value
- Doing all of this in multiplayer environment
The concept so far
- The map is divided into sections, like a chess board.
- Players are assigned a section when they join the server
- A section can be either player-controlled, alien-controlled (AI), or neutral
- An alien-controlled section will turn into a neutral section if all alien structures on it are destroyed
- (?) The first entity placed on a neutral section by a player is considered the HQ of the section. Destroying it renders the section neutral.
- (?) When you attack someone elses property, you are officially in war with that player, Of the player you are attacking is offline, you will be given a certain amount of time to conquer the the section. If you fail to conquer the section within that time limit, the damage you have done get reverted.
- You can request build permits on another players property. You plan your proposal by placing ghosts-entities describing what you want to build. If the other player accepts this, you are allowed to build according to whats allowed by the proposal.
- For example, this allows players to set up trade routes between each other. This can be nessesary if you don't have access to (enough of) a type of resource. It might not be worth it to try and conquer hostile territory.
Example: Pete might be sitting on massive amounts of oil, but joelmeijering might have an abdundance of copper. They could either try to conquer each others' land or set up a trade route. For setting up the trade route, they could cooperate by neutralising the alien territory between them.
The problem
As you might understand after reading the concept so far, I believe the biggest problem is how to handle conquest in absence of the player being attacked. There are multiple ways of handling this, for example by trying to schedule a battle. This could be at set times. The player being attacked could for example chose between 5 of the next open timeslots, with a minimum notice of a set amount of time. This gives the person being attacked a small advantage.
Obviously there are a lot of problems with this concept, what do you guys think?
