Post by Fishy on Jul 4, 2012 6:44:27 GMT -5
It's always easiest to start with Skirmish type games and work your way up. The reason is that it takes little monetary investment and allows for the rules to be easily and quickly playested. From a marketing point of view, if you ever wanted your game sold, it'd be best to start small and hook people.
What the game I was looking into building some rules for was based on special forces or small groups of elite forces from any background which all have missions to complete or can just choose to kill the others. They can compete against each-other for these missions if they like, or you could have missions with some sort of "game-master" which involves storming a building or something. (A little like the next but of the Pure Form story).
The idea stemmed from the story. You could have people controlling an individual character or have people controlling squads. This makes it flexible.
Building your squad
An idea which is a little different to normal is one where those creating their forces doesn't use "points" to kit out their squad. It's fairly standard system which lacks a bit of creativity. What could be more interesting is using money to fund it. So Battles will be given a "budget" which the person must use to fund their squad. That puts them in a commanding role both pre battle and during the battle. It also allows for avenues to be looked into regarding how many weapons you could potentially have in the game and how people choose to balance out their force.
Things which could be potentially bought are:
Armour
Weapons
Explosives
Utilities (Binoculars etc?)
Vehicles
Types of Squadmate
Each squad could have a limit on the number of people they have, or you could make that cost part of the army list and leave it open.
If people wanted to be most economical about it, they could plan ahead before investing in soldiers for building. That justifies the sheer variety of combinations.
This is obviously quite difficult to keep track of, as they will have potentially 10 different soldiers all with different statistics. I would suggest a card-system would be more appropriate. That means that you could produce cards which can hold the values of the character. You could even look into having programs for tablet computers or smart phones which could store the information for battles.
Weapons
When I was talking about weapons, I suggested that laser weapons never really made much sense. It was brought up that they are an important staple of sci-fi. Therefore we could look at how to make energy weapons more believable. One way was to look at the way in which they interact with enemies. An energy beam which could explode upon contact could do quite a lot of damage. That would open up a lot of avenues for how you can apply energy weapons to a combat scenario. There is the normal "they deal with shields better", but you could potentially have them doing damage on vehicles as well.
Weapons in the ideas that were noted down could be built by differing arms companies, both state owned and privately owned, which would give access to different arms to different factions. That in turn could make some squads better at different tasks.
There should be some fairly crappy bog standard weapons for people who choose to have lots of numbers in their squad. There is a huge amount of development to be had. A starting point could be developing tech trees:
Rifles
Automatic Rifles
Heavy weapons
Pistols
You could potentially dual-wield weapons. I see no reason not to so long as it is within the budget of the players.
Armour
As it's fairly customisable, armour is a good shout for being something which can be altered by the budget. Soldiers could range from no armour to top of the range armour (like a 40K Space Marine).
The jobs which armour can do can apply too. Active camouflage could provide a bonus for using cover, the technology is believable. Semi-active, like is discussed in pure form, is camouflage where the armour is able to change colour (even fabric can) in order to suit environments or light levels.
There are a lot of avenues again to go down. To narrow these down for factions, it may be an idea to make them species and faction specific.
Species
For species we already have 2 to work off of. They should have their own advantages and disadvantages. I'm willing to support the idea of developing two further races to allow for greater variety (as the Humans and Eirenians are meant to be friendly). Maybe one could use Dark Eldar models and another some unspecified (not got any idea of how Onians look).
Factions
This is fairly important. As there are meant to be a lot of factions, this could be difficult to develop. Obviously you have Governments, but there could also be corporations, paramilitaries and even pirates!
I'll leave that open for now. Obviously Government factions should have the advantage to access to certain arms, whereas pirates could be less species specific.
What the game I was looking into building some rules for was based on special forces or small groups of elite forces from any background which all have missions to complete or can just choose to kill the others. They can compete against each-other for these missions if they like, or you could have missions with some sort of "game-master" which involves storming a building or something. (A little like the next but of the Pure Form story).
The idea stemmed from the story. You could have people controlling an individual character or have people controlling squads. This makes it flexible.
Building your squad
An idea which is a little different to normal is one where those creating their forces doesn't use "points" to kit out their squad. It's fairly standard system which lacks a bit of creativity. What could be more interesting is using money to fund it. So Battles will be given a "budget" which the person must use to fund their squad. That puts them in a commanding role both pre battle and during the battle. It also allows for avenues to be looked into regarding how many weapons you could potentially have in the game and how people choose to balance out their force.
Things which could be potentially bought are:
Armour
Weapons
Explosives
Utilities (Binoculars etc?)
Vehicles
Types of Squadmate
Each squad could have a limit on the number of people they have, or you could make that cost part of the army list and leave it open.
If people wanted to be most economical about it, they could plan ahead before investing in soldiers for building. That justifies the sheer variety of combinations.
This is obviously quite difficult to keep track of, as they will have potentially 10 different soldiers all with different statistics. I would suggest a card-system would be more appropriate. That means that you could produce cards which can hold the values of the character. You could even look into having programs for tablet computers or smart phones which could store the information for battles.
Weapons
When I was talking about weapons, I suggested that laser weapons never really made much sense. It was brought up that they are an important staple of sci-fi. Therefore we could look at how to make energy weapons more believable. One way was to look at the way in which they interact with enemies. An energy beam which could explode upon contact could do quite a lot of damage. That would open up a lot of avenues for how you can apply energy weapons to a combat scenario. There is the normal "they deal with shields better", but you could potentially have them doing damage on vehicles as well.
Weapons in the ideas that were noted down could be built by differing arms companies, both state owned and privately owned, which would give access to different arms to different factions. That in turn could make some squads better at different tasks.
There should be some fairly crappy bog standard weapons for people who choose to have lots of numbers in their squad. There is a huge amount of development to be had. A starting point could be developing tech trees:
Rifles
Automatic Rifles
Heavy weapons
Pistols
You could potentially dual-wield weapons. I see no reason not to so long as it is within the budget of the players.
Armour
As it's fairly customisable, armour is a good shout for being something which can be altered by the budget. Soldiers could range from no armour to top of the range armour (like a 40K Space Marine).
The jobs which armour can do can apply too. Active camouflage could provide a bonus for using cover, the technology is believable. Semi-active, like is discussed in pure form, is camouflage where the armour is able to change colour (even fabric can) in order to suit environments or light levels.
There are a lot of avenues again to go down. To narrow these down for factions, it may be an idea to make them species and faction specific.
Species
For species we already have 2 to work off of. They should have their own advantages and disadvantages. I'm willing to support the idea of developing two further races to allow for greater variety (as the Humans and Eirenians are meant to be friendly). Maybe one could use Dark Eldar models and another some unspecified (not got any idea of how Onians look).
Factions
This is fairly important. As there are meant to be a lot of factions, this could be difficult to develop. Obviously you have Governments, but there could also be corporations, paramilitaries and even pirates!
I'll leave that open for now. Obviously Government factions should have the advantage to access to certain arms, whereas pirates could be less species specific.