Game Features

Well, now that I have written a bit about the foundations for the game, how about a little about the game itself. It is of course, still under development, but here are the features it will have when it launches:

• Support for any number of players in a game. There may be a practical limit, but there is no real reason that you won't be able to have 50 people in a game if you want to.
• Players can control one ship each or entire fleets each. So you could have two teams of 4 players. Each player is a "captain" of one ship. Or you could have two players each commanding 10 ships.
• Turn based, or "near" real time. The game is turn based, but it will operate in two modes. The default mode is what you are all familiar with from Begin or the Civilization series. Each player gives orders and then clicks on a "commit" button to process the turn, etc.
  
  The other mode is where the server automatically processes the next turn every X number of seconds. This way, there is no waiting for the other player to make up their mind. You just submit orders as you like and every so often the screen refreshes and your ships move. This will give it an RTS feel and will make for faster paced game play. This turn mode can be switched at any time. So you can start in near real time, and then when one player has to leave, you can switch to traditional turn based and process turns once per day or whatever as players see fit.
• All players don't have to be online at the same time. Being turn based, you can submit your turn even if your opponent is not online. You will get an email or text message when the next turn is ready. In this manner, it operates as a PBEM game.
• The game runs in Adobe Flash so any modern browser should be supported (FireFox, IE, Opera, Safari, etc).
• Online chat. You will be able to text chat with all players or just your teammates.
• Online scoreboards. What is the point of beating the heck out of someone if there isn't an online scoreboard to brag about?
• The game has the concept of "Eras". I want to use "realistic" technologies, but it is also fun to use more fanciful technologies like Star Trek. So I came up with the idea of having combat in multiple eras. So far I have thought of the following eras: Interplanetary -- slow ships in close combat with projectile weapons like missiles and bullets. No shields and only light armor. Interstellar -- faster ships with limited faster than light ability and some use of energy weapons and limited shielding. Galactic -- sky's the limit for technology, all the fancy stuff you see from the movies. At launch, probably only the interplanetary era will be available.
• Multiple ship types. Destroyers, battleships, carriers, mine layers, etc. Carriers play an important role in today's naval combat, so they probably will in future combat as well. So there will also be multiple types of short range craft like fighters, interceptors and bombers.
• AI. If there is no one to play with, there will be computer controlled players that you can play against for practice. Maybe the computer controlled players will even show up on the scoreboard, so there is that motivation to get your name above the name of a bot!
• Energy management. Transferring power between weapons and engines, etc. Maybe even heat management will make it into the initial release. Heat is a big enemy in space, so not overheating your drives or your weapons may be a big factor

That is it for the first release. Obviously, there are a ton of features I would like to implement, but I want to get the game out as soon as possible and see if people like it. I will post more later on some of the "future" features.

Tactical Analysis

Since I just registered the domain name fleetcombat.net, I was searching around to see other uses of the phrase and came across this series of blog entries from someone doing a thought exercise on the practical issues of space fleet combat.

They are pretty interesting, and the same sort of things that I have been thinking about since I decided to develop this simulation. Basically, given what we know about physics today, what is likely to happen in space combat (guided missiles, conventional guns, long ranges) and what is not (transporters, shields, beam weapons, etc.).

I really want the game to have a realistic feel of what space combat would be like, and the author of these articles reaches a lot of the same conclusions that I have. Beam weapons, while possible using today's technology are really not very practical for long ranges or against hardened targets. They take incredible amounts of energy to fire. Creating that much energy creates an enormous amount of heat -- possibly creating more heat on board your ship than would be applied to the target when the beam hits them.

So I have been developing Fleet Combat mostly around projectile weapons with the idea of using beam weapons for "point defense" against incoming missiles. This puts a premium on maneuvering, spoofing, and countering rather than who has the stronger shields and more phaser banks.

Welcome!

Fleet Combat Online is (or I should say, will be) an online multi-player turn based strategy game of star ship combat. For now, this site will be a developers blog of the work in progress. I will describe the features that it will have and post screenshots and answer any questions. Hopefully, I only have a couple more months of work to get it live and playable. I set up this site now to put some thoughts down on paper and to see if anyone is actually interested in playing the game. The greater response I get, the more motivated I will be to finish it!

First off, what is it? I have always been a fan of strategy games as they make you think and plan out how you play the game rather than just clicking and reacting quickly to what you see on screen. I am a bit sad that this genre seems to be dying out. I can understand that a strategy game is never going to sell millions of copies like Halo, so publishers and developers are not interested. But I think there is a place for them in the world of online browser based games. So that is what I am developing.

The game is inspired a great deal by the old DOS classic that I grew up playing called "Begin". Begin was a DOS based star ship combat game based in the Star Trek universe. There was also a sequel called "Begin2", (which I never played until just a few months ago when I started this project and searched on the Internet to see what ever happened to Begin). The original didn't even use any graphics, it used only ASCII character drawing. You issued orders to your crew and other ships by typing commands. I loved it and played it all the time on my original IBM PC/XT in the early 80s. Begin still has a pretty active community of people that sill enjoy its solid strategy game play, but it is definitely showing its age. I have never seen anything like it since then, which got me interested in developing something new.

Fleet Combat will be different from Begin in many ways, but it will have a similar game play flavor. First, it won't be based in the Star Trek universe. Partly because that wouldn't be legal, but mostly because I don't want to be restricted to Star Trek "canon". I want to be able to use different types of ships and weapons than the standard photon torpedoes and phasers. When you think about it, Star Trek combat is pretty limited.

Second, it obviously won't take commands by typing in orders. That had a certain fun to it in the sense of being "the captain" and barking orders to people. But it also meant you spent a lot of time making mistakes or trying to get the command parser to understand what you wanted to do. Instead it will have a tactical console style of point and click interface.

I don't mean to compare it to Begin so much, I am not trying to develop a sequel to that. It will actually be quite different in many ways. I just wanted to point out the starting inspiration. I would love it if other fans of that game became interested in Fleet Combat, but I don't want them to be upset when it doesn't turn out to feel like "Begin3" -- that is not the goal. I would be really happy if the original author would write a sequel for us all to enjoy.

Other games that I have been inspired by:
The excellent VGA Planets. Tim Wisseman was a hero of mine when I was a kid because of that game. It spoke to me. I played versions 3 and 3.5. I looked at version 4 a couple of years ago, but it seemed so complicated to get into, so I have never played it.

Master of Orion. Actually, I have never even played the original or the sequel. For some reason those passed me by (probably because I was a starving student and couldn't afford a computer in the early 90s so I still had that 10 year old PC/XT). But I did become aware of it during the development of MOO III. I was on the forums during its development and looking forward to it like crazy. I understand most people were disappointed in it after MOO II, but not me. I guess not having played the originals, I didn't have anything to compare it to, so I was happy with it. Maybe I should go back and play MOO II to see how much better it was.

Anyway, that is where I am coming from, and I hope other fans of those games will find this site. I also hope that I can develop something that is even close to the involving experience of those games. I will post more details about the game itself later, there will be plenty of time as I procrastinate on actually writing the thing...