I’m doing this again. I’ve got this whole setup I’ve been working on, a day here, a few hours here, over the course of about a month.
I think at this point I’m not actually making a game setup I’ll be playing and just crafting a sci-fi world.
It all started with me wanting to do a multiple player race start but not liking the flicking between layers. So I thought what if I just had different factions within my one race and just named what fleets belonged to which faction.
They could then compete economically by being the first to claim things. Then I thought, what if I limit them to direct weapons only then I could use the mark vessel as target feature to have them actually skirmish.
I’ve somehow found myself part way through handcrafting the Sol system to the level you’d see in The Expanse. With an imperial house that controls jump tech, fuel production and shipyards with great houses, minor houses and common houses all trading minerals/built ship components for access to them. So now I have small asteroid colonies with a handful of construction factories building fighter engines to earn enough to buy a new orbital habitat station and have it towed. Alongside a major house using it’s large mining operation on mars to trade minerals for orbital terraforming stations. With like 15-20 houses in total, I’m in the process of assigning assets and goals before I inevitably come up with lore for.
Then found myself adding Jovian houses who will be responsible for exploring outside of Sol but I’ve gave them minor house levels of assets so I can roleplay them becoming major houses.
I think I’m actually in real danger of the new release coming out before I’m even ready to press play. Does anyone tend to do this and if so what sort of stuff do you set up?
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Not to that extent. I do actually play my complicated setups though usually the campaigns fizzle out bit early.
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Mine tend to be “elaborate campaign ideas waiting on the ground air unit update that is surely coming eventually”. The complexity, rather than a bunch of limitations such as that, rather stems from my idea of wanting to replicate some of the sort of strategic considerations that come in real life. Hence, I would want to build out an entire galaxy before the campaign even began, with deliberate clusters of solar systems with plenty of planets (representing “land”) and systems that have no planets at all and significant distance between jump points (representing “sea”). Then effectively shape out “continents” and “oceans” with these sorts of system paradigms.
Then it’s a matter of filling out this structure with a bunch of countries that I would play myself, that would eventually consolidate power by both direct conquest and a sort of indirect “tributary” system that would be prone to collapse (the game doesn’t allow explicit subjugation of one empire by another, but if I’m the one playing all the sides then I can just do it myself). Eventually have some “regional” empires, things actually building up along strategic chokepoints and whatnot. A lot of work, but I think doable in time, and really the sort of thing that can only happen with a nice, built-out galaxy.
Absolutely the same. In fact, I came to the new forum to check whether I had enough time for a new game idea before the new patch came. Turns out not really, so I am now splicing it into an existing game that can be lore derailed after winning the NPR triangle war soon.
The thing is, this original game was already a Frankensteined monstrum with baseline Homeworld setting, Helldivers 2 ground forces, and a long waiting fleet composition idea of mine.(main fleet: Frigate PD+Carrier combos that deliver very efficient corvettes to the front)
Now NPRs will be absorbed as “houses”, RP given a colony each, so I can play a vaguely Mechwarrior themed, medieval European nobility game as well.
The things you must do to get ideas out. Time got so short, and my games go on for so long, I now just blend them all together. Don’t forget your immunosuppressants!
I’m guilty of throwing battlefront mechs into the ground forces of all my games. They just fit so nicely into the vehicle sizes and have a ready made list of names that’s not “medium combat tank (MAV)”
I think I’ll keep this game seperate when the new version releases and just use it as a world building tool while I play V3.0 like a normal person