Game : Privateer Online
Setting : Wing Commander Privateer series. The Kilrathi have banded together once more, and begun the arduous task of rebuilding from the ashes. In a distant section of space, they've laid claim to a great many planets, and are slowly working to become great once more. Unfortunately this section of space was remote enough to be attractive to more, and has been the home to a multitude of pirates. However, Pirates and Kilrathi both konw that their presence will lure Confed, as it does. Now the sector is filled with the three powers, Kilrathi, Confed, and Pirate. Which means Mercenaries (Privateers) have found a new haven.
Player Factions :
Confederate Alliance: The Confed alliance is the 'good guys'. They won the war, y'know. Confed is big on technology, their ships are faster, more nimble, and highly shielded, but their weapons are slightly weaker and their armor not so thick. Trading is more heavily influenced within the alliance than the other factions. (Confed mission terminals will give you more Trading missions. Trading will pay more.)
Pirate Clans: The most 'neutral' of all. Though they're KoS to everyone except themselves, they have a good array of ships, weapons, and armor. They also have the unique ability for their light and trader ships to 'disguise' themselves as either of their rival factions. However, there are limits to its use. Trading in contraband, however, can be lucrative. They emphasize combat and trading equally. (Pirate mission terminals will give an equal balance of combat and trading. Both pay equally)
Kilrathi Empire: The once-proud race of felines from Kilrah. Kilrah lies dead, but the kilrathi are far from beaten. Pulling together renegade and loyalist forces from all over the galaxy, they band together to form a very formidable front, with a decentralised nation. Though the front is small, they're powerful, and with new technology from the terrans during peacetime, more of a threat than ever. Kilrathi ships emphasize greater weapon power, shielding, and armor, than they do speed. They emphasize combat greatly. (Kilrathi mission terminals will offer better pay for combat missions, and offer more of them).
Gameplay : This is what makes or breaks an MMORPG. There's two areas of play. Base-side, and space-side. In base side play, there's no combat. This is where you can deck out your ship, get missions, et cetera. In space side, you fly. You fight. You trade, whatever you want.
Missions are obtained from the mission terminal. By siding with a guild, you can get specific missions relating to that guild, or you can stay undecided and get a good mix.
Terrans: Siding with the mercenary guild means you will get mostly combat missions. Siding with the traders guild means you'll get mostly trading, with a rare bounty mission thrown in. Siding with Confed gets you a good mix of each, but you're in more danger due to proximity of the pirate and kilrathi fronts.
Pirates: They have no guilds, all missions are equally important.
Kilrathi: Side with either the traders or the empire. With the traders, you mainly run supplies. With the empire, you get the same mix and danger of siding with confed.
Missions generally range. In sectors of the 'front', the sectors between factions, scouting missions run high. Finding the enemy when they try to send in ships for scouting or an offensive, pays big bucks. And is mucho risky. Even riskier is taking on an assault mission into enemy territory, though the reward will make it worth it. Trading and such will generally not pay off as well, but is much safer. Base defense will give good cash too.
Aside from mission terminals, you can go totally freelance as a trader or mercenary. Bagging pirate or kilrathi ships when not employed, will net you a bounty depending on the strength of the ship. Trading will be free-form, like in privateer. Spend your own cash, buy goods, fly to another planet, sell them. Certain places need certain commodities more than others. (IE : Bases need entertainment, military outposts need medical supplies, etc.) And if you're pirates, you can take a BIG RISK... and go for contraband trading, which pays off big
PvP is even better. The game world is dynamic. Players influence it greatly. By flying missions, you can weaken a military force in a certain area. If players fly enough assaults into one sector, that sector may be weakened enough for players to band together and launch an all-out offensive. Sectors can be captured, pushing back the war front. To capture a sector, players will need to commandeer every base in the sector (Planets don't count, of course, and are automatically considered captured when all bases are). Bases are the hardest things in the game to capture. To take one over, all guns on it (Which are powerful and track you very well) must be destroyed. Every sector will have between 3-5 bases, making it difficult, but possible, to conquer one. Players can use strategy to weaken and conquer outposts too. If you can capture all sectors surrounding one, that surrounded sector slowly becomes weaker as supplies are cut off. After a while, taking it becomes much easier. This is the best way to take over a military base.
Conquering sectors will give you one big advantage. Prices drop. Conquer one sector, it may drop by 20-30 credits. Conquer 5, you're looking at 200 credit discounts. Those add up. Considering the size of the world would be around 200 sectors or so, this means that prices are always fluctuating, and gives players a big incentive for banding together for big attacks.
Players don't have levels. They do get ranked according to points, rather than kills. Big kills (Base guns, heavy ships) get more points. Small kills (Scout ships, trade ships) get less. Doing missions can also earn you points.
And yes, it is possible for one faction to completely conquer another. This is very, very hard. As you push back the front, yours gets thinner and weakened, making it easier for players to attack. It would take a MASSIVE campaign by a thousand players to do this, as you'd not only have to push 50+ ships into a sector to assault the enemy, you'd also have to guard every sector on your greatly enlarging frontier. Plus, when the enemy's frontier is smaller, it's more dense, harder to assault. When one faction is wiped out, then the server restarts, all players are retired. Some reward (Maybe a high scores list or something) would be implimented for the highest ranking players.
Since death is always a concern, here's how it would handle death. Your ship is your life. Your life is insured. When you die, your ship is lost and all weapons/cargo with it. You eject though. You're insured up to a certain point. You regain 3/4 of your ship's total worth, counting the ship, the guns, the improvements, and the cargo on it. If you're in a n00bie ship, then you're reinsured for 100% of the worth. You can never lose your n00bie ship. Even if you have the mightiest warship ever, and die over and over and over, you'd just end up back in a n00bie ship.
Ships are classed on several factors. Only certain ships get certain parts. Some ships have better armor, some have more shields, some have more guns. The better the ship can be upgraded, the more it costs.
UPGRADES :
Gunz - Your standard firepower. Guns are classified by power, reload time, and energy drain. The better the power and reload, the more costly the gun. Energy drain is pretty much self explanitory, how fast it drains your weapons. A very strong gun that fires very fast will drain them like nothing else, meaning you'll have to wait for them to recharge.
Missiles & Launchers - Launchers have one purpose : Storing and launching missiles. You can't launch a missile without a launcher. The better the launcher, the more missiles it carries and the more it costs.. As for missiles, bigger missiles take up more room. They're ranked in payload and tracking. The more powerful it is, the more space it'll take up, and the bigger the boom. Torpedoes are the only things that can kill a capital ship, so they take up the most room and boom the biggest. For IR and tracking missiles, they're weaker, but they follow your enemy. Better for ships. Dumbfire and rockets are better for slow moving trading ships. They pack more punch than tracking missiles and take up less space. Missiles cost no energy to fire.
Shield upgrades - They draw on your energy to produce shields. If you have very good shields, your energy will take a long time to regenerate. If you have very poor shields, your energy will regenerate fast, but your shields will be weaker.
Engine upgrades - They give you energy. The better the upgrade, the faster your energy recharges. Energy is essential for shields to regenerate and for weapons to fire. If you're getting powerful shields, better get a damn good engine upgrade or you won't be able to fire well at all.
Setting : Wing Commander Privateer series. The Kilrathi have banded together once more, and begun the arduous task of rebuilding from the ashes. In a distant section of space, they've laid claim to a great many planets, and are slowly working to become great once more. Unfortunately this section of space was remote enough to be attractive to more, and has been the home to a multitude of pirates. However, Pirates and Kilrathi both konw that their presence will lure Confed, as it does. Now the sector is filled with the three powers, Kilrathi, Confed, and Pirate. Which means Mercenaries (Privateers) have found a new haven.
Player Factions :
Confederate Alliance: The Confed alliance is the 'good guys'. They won the war, y'know. Confed is big on technology, their ships are faster, more nimble, and highly shielded, but their weapons are slightly weaker and their armor not so thick. Trading is more heavily influenced within the alliance than the other factions. (Confed mission terminals will give you more Trading missions. Trading will pay more.)
Pirate Clans: The most 'neutral' of all. Though they're KoS to everyone except themselves, they have a good array of ships, weapons, and armor. They also have the unique ability for their light and trader ships to 'disguise' themselves as either of their rival factions. However, there are limits to its use. Trading in contraband, however, can be lucrative. They emphasize combat and trading equally. (Pirate mission terminals will give an equal balance of combat and trading. Both pay equally)
Kilrathi Empire: The once-proud race of felines from Kilrah. Kilrah lies dead, but the kilrathi are far from beaten. Pulling together renegade and loyalist forces from all over the galaxy, they band together to form a very formidable front, with a decentralised nation. Though the front is small, they're powerful, and with new technology from the terrans during peacetime, more of a threat than ever. Kilrathi ships emphasize greater weapon power, shielding, and armor, than they do speed. They emphasize combat greatly. (Kilrathi mission terminals will offer better pay for combat missions, and offer more of them).
Gameplay : This is what makes or breaks an MMORPG. There's two areas of play. Base-side, and space-side. In base side play, there's no combat. This is where you can deck out your ship, get missions, et cetera. In space side, you fly. You fight. You trade, whatever you want.
Missions are obtained from the mission terminal. By siding with a guild, you can get specific missions relating to that guild, or you can stay undecided and get a good mix.
Terrans: Siding with the mercenary guild means you will get mostly combat missions. Siding with the traders guild means you'll get mostly trading, with a rare bounty mission thrown in. Siding with Confed gets you a good mix of each, but you're in more danger due to proximity of the pirate and kilrathi fronts.
Pirates: They have no guilds, all missions are equally important.
Kilrathi: Side with either the traders or the empire. With the traders, you mainly run supplies. With the empire, you get the same mix and danger of siding with confed.
Missions generally range. In sectors of the 'front', the sectors between factions, scouting missions run high. Finding the enemy when they try to send in ships for scouting or an offensive, pays big bucks. And is mucho risky. Even riskier is taking on an assault mission into enemy territory, though the reward will make it worth it. Trading and such will generally not pay off as well, but is much safer. Base defense will give good cash too.
Aside from mission terminals, you can go totally freelance as a trader or mercenary. Bagging pirate or kilrathi ships when not employed, will net you a bounty depending on the strength of the ship. Trading will be free-form, like in privateer. Spend your own cash, buy goods, fly to another planet, sell them. Certain places need certain commodities more than others. (IE : Bases need entertainment, military outposts need medical supplies, etc.) And if you're pirates, you can take a BIG RISK... and go for contraband trading, which pays off big
PvP is even better. The game world is dynamic. Players influence it greatly. By flying missions, you can weaken a military force in a certain area. If players fly enough assaults into one sector, that sector may be weakened enough for players to band together and launch an all-out offensive. Sectors can be captured, pushing back the war front. To capture a sector, players will need to commandeer every base in the sector (Planets don't count, of course, and are automatically considered captured when all bases are). Bases are the hardest things in the game to capture. To take one over, all guns on it (Which are powerful and track you very well) must be destroyed. Every sector will have between 3-5 bases, making it difficult, but possible, to conquer one. Players can use strategy to weaken and conquer outposts too. If you can capture all sectors surrounding one, that surrounded sector slowly becomes weaker as supplies are cut off. After a while, taking it becomes much easier. This is the best way to take over a military base.
Conquering sectors will give you one big advantage. Prices drop. Conquer one sector, it may drop by 20-30 credits. Conquer 5, you're looking at 200 credit discounts. Those add up. Considering the size of the world would be around 200 sectors or so, this means that prices are always fluctuating, and gives players a big incentive for banding together for big attacks.
Players don't have levels. They do get ranked according to points, rather than kills. Big kills (Base guns, heavy ships) get more points. Small kills (Scout ships, trade ships) get less. Doing missions can also earn you points.
And yes, it is possible for one faction to completely conquer another. This is very, very hard. As you push back the front, yours gets thinner and weakened, making it easier for players to attack. It would take a MASSIVE campaign by a thousand players to do this, as you'd not only have to push 50+ ships into a sector to assault the enemy, you'd also have to guard every sector on your greatly enlarging frontier. Plus, when the enemy's frontier is smaller, it's more dense, harder to assault. When one faction is wiped out, then the server restarts, all players are retired. Some reward (Maybe a high scores list or something) would be implimented for the highest ranking players.
Since death is always a concern, here's how it would handle death. Your ship is your life. Your life is insured. When you die, your ship is lost and all weapons/cargo with it. You eject though. You're insured up to a certain point. You regain 3/4 of your ship's total worth, counting the ship, the guns, the improvements, and the cargo on it. If you're in a n00bie ship, then you're reinsured for 100% of the worth. You can never lose your n00bie ship. Even if you have the mightiest warship ever, and die over and over and over, you'd just end up back in a n00bie ship.
Ships are classed on several factors. Only certain ships get certain parts. Some ships have better armor, some have more shields, some have more guns. The better the ship can be upgraded, the more it costs.
UPGRADES :
Gunz - Your standard firepower. Guns are classified by power, reload time, and energy drain. The better the power and reload, the more costly the gun. Energy drain is pretty much self explanitory, how fast it drains your weapons. A very strong gun that fires very fast will drain them like nothing else, meaning you'll have to wait for them to recharge.
Missiles & Launchers - Launchers have one purpose : Storing and launching missiles. You can't launch a missile without a launcher. The better the launcher, the more missiles it carries and the more it costs.. As for missiles, bigger missiles take up more room. They're ranked in payload and tracking. The more powerful it is, the more space it'll take up, and the bigger the boom. Torpedoes are the only things that can kill a capital ship, so they take up the most room and boom the biggest. For IR and tracking missiles, they're weaker, but they follow your enemy. Better for ships. Dumbfire and rockets are better for slow moving trading ships. They pack more punch than tracking missiles and take up less space. Missiles cost no energy to fire.
Shield upgrades - They draw on your energy to produce shields. If you have very good shields, your energy will take a long time to regenerate. If you have very poor shields, your energy will regenerate fast, but your shields will be weaker.
Engine upgrades - They give you energy. The better the upgrade, the faster your energy recharges. Energy is essential for shields to regenerate and for weapons to fire. If you're getting powerful shields, better get a damn good engine upgrade or you won't be able to fire well at all.
