Idea - game where you play bridge officers

[Destructionator XV]

I used to love the idea where you play a game with each player being a different member of the crew.

Then I thought that wouldn't be so great, since most crew jobs are boring.

But today, I was thinking it might work if we trim it down to teams of three or four on a ship. These ships would be big beasts - the style of battle I have in mind is similar to TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise".

Let me do some detail about the ship, then I'll get into the crew:

It's a big ship that moves in Newtonian style - being big means it is sluggish, but it also can reach big speeds if you give it some time. It also can move freely in all three dimensions; it is a spaceship.


An idea of the maneuverability is I figure it would take ~10 seconds to turn itself around 180 degrees.


For weapons, it has a few turrets, some torpedo-cannonballs and some kind of fixed beast of a gun. The turrets do decent damage and turn independently of the ship (probably at a rate 2x that of the ship or so), but are unguided - you have to lead the target, account for your own movement, etc.

The torpedoes are guided and their damage is based on how long they've been maneuvering (their fuel is also their explosive) - a straight shot does a great deal of damage, but one where it had to run loops to hit is pretty poor. They can also be shot down by the other ship. (Shooting it with good aim is win/win - it either gets destroyed or dodges the bullet, burning fuel and reducing its damage potential).

The big gun is fixed - you have to depend on the helmsman to line you up for that. It flies at a pretty decent rate and does a lot of damage.. But, like the turrets, it is unguided.



For defenses, it has shields like in Star Trek 6, but broken up into a few sections. They regenerate when left alone, but always have some bleed through to the hull - more as they fail, until they are actually down and things go right in.

The game would have to keep precise info about the hits. A solid impact on a particular system can take it down, even with shields up, and the closer it impacts the better.


The engines have a lot of fuel, but nevertheless limited, so a battle can't last forever. They can fire forward in variable power (takes some time to get to full power) or in reverse in low power.

There might be a shared power generator, that the captain manages. If power is used for the engines, the guns won't work, or something like that.




Anyway, the crew. There's up to four players. The roles are: captain, helmsman, tactical, and engineering. If you have fewer players, you can combine roles too.


The captain's screen is a kind of external overview. He sees all the ships in the game and can switch to view other screens too. His job is to put everything together that the players and screens are telling him and to dish out orders to the others.


The tactical officer has a screen like a targetting system. He can hot-key to focus on or zoom in to enemy ships in range and rotate his turrets. He controls the fire of all ship weapons.

If the enemy ships are close enough, he can pin-point specific targets on the other ships. otherwise, he has to do the mental math to lead the target, etc. to connect the shots. He is responsible for conserving ammo, if needed.


Next player is the helmsman. He watches where they are going and fires the engines. His screen informs him of incoming weapons and headings to ease compliance with the captain's orders. The trick in playing this is doing the math to actually move in the direction you want, when you want it and conserving fuel if needed.

While it takes some skill to effectively fly the big ship, this seems to me to be a relatively simple job in concept. If you have 3 players, it might be the best one to roll in with the captain.


And the final player is the engineer, doing damage control and rerouting power, shit like that. His display is schematics of the ship with damage reports. He decides where to station the work crews, what to fix, and how to pass out the spare parts (damage control points?). He'd want to tell the captain what parts can't afford another hit.

To keep the gameplay a little more interesting, this might be combined with another player's role or involve some kind of activity rather than just clicking to spread points around. I don't know what that would be.



Anyway I just wanted to write this up since it was in my brain today.

[Stofsk]

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/11/a ... ip-bridge/

[Destructionator XV]

Amazing.