When I was a younger man, before I became the old and decrepit 24 year old before you, there was a little-known game not much unlike this one. It was fun, nerdy, made by a small yet very active company (before Microsoft got it, I guess), and had a small, dedicated community of players. Okay, not "Holy crap there are 200 people on ICO at the same time?!" small, but you get the idea. The game was Mechcommander and one of the leagues formed around it went by the name of Steel Command.
The SCL was a heavily role-played league which used Mechcommander as a vehicle to wage an enormous interstellar war between the various Battletech factions (faction websites still exist today, in all their 1998 glory). Factions would fight for territory and resources. They would commit Mechs and other resources to battles, then play out those battles in the game. There was diplomacy and even an enormous map which was manually updated to reflect faction ownership changes (this was back before the web was "dynamic"
I think a league like this would work well in Sins for a few reasons. First of all, it is asynchronous. That is, factions can schedule games or just issue orders ("Explore this planet", etc.) and won't need to randomly have a whole lot of players on at the same time (this is the main reason clans don't work right now). Secondly, Sins is very customizable, which is required for this sort of thing to work. The Map Designer is quick and dirty, but the real power lies in Galaxy Forge (assuming it gets fixed) which allows maps to be custom-tailored to battles. With this customization combined with the fact that different battles can have different supply caps, sizes and so forth, games can be long or short depending on the battle setup and include any number of other variables.
Sins games can be incredibly long, back and forth, intense experiences even though the action isn't necessarily constant -- that's what I love about it. You have to make big decisions -- do I build up and dig in or rush? Do I save that planet being attacked or do I counter? -- which can affect where you are an hour later. But what if the game didn't end in an hour, a day, or a month? What if there were an entire Universe to conquer and not just a star or two at a time?
If there's a game out now that could be used to resurrect the enormous scope and breadth of Steel Command, it is almost certainly Sins. However, this is no minor task and will require dedication and effort from many -- not to mention players! I'm not sure if we have enough people yet, but we'd have to start somewhere. This would be a considerable undertaking and I am already extremely low on free time, so I'm putting this out now to see what sort of interest there is, if any. Please provide feedback!
P.S. If you're wondering who would actually make the site for this, the answer is me. I do it for a living so we've at least got that part covered.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!
Like what you've read so far? Then check this out!
Okay folks, it seems like we have enough people interested to make an official inquiry here on the boards. The way I see it, we need a minimum of 25 people to start really getting the ball rolling in an official way on this thing. To that end, I have created a form that interested parties should fill out. It shouldn't take more than 30 seconds and will give me a way to keep track of people with serious interest.
One of the questions asks what you want your "role" to be; I have created the following roles with my recommendation of minimum numbers to fulfill in parenthesis (assumes 3 initial factions; one for each race):
Fill out the form here: http://binjured.wufoo.com/forms/sins-league-signup/
Thank you in advance!
(Entrenchment required for membership for the time being; with more players, hopefully we can have two leagues... but that's a dream for now.)
As I said in Carbon's recruitment thread (oops!) the boards will be up this weekend. Something came up last Sunday night when I planned to set 'em up. Look for an e-mail!
Sweet!
AWESOME!
MAGNIFICENT!!!
heu........finally ? LOOOL
J/K
Careful, this has already been a horrible weekend! If there are as many disasters tomorrow as there were today, .... ugh.
Sorry to hear that, do you need any one of us to help you get it up and running? if nothing something temp till you get the proper time to get it up and running right?
You know me I'm on standby for anything you want to send my way!
PS: sorry if I've havent been on much lately, it's my final week at university (exams) + I bought DEMIGOD and LOVE IT! lol
This sounds so cool! Too bad I'm not awesome enoguh for this kind of stuff yet.... Do you think that you could add a new position? A Historian/Librarian/Scribe who would record the battles and the (Slightly dramatized, of course) events that happened therin? This would make for an awesome story.
Samurye.
SURE THING!!!!
You're the official historian!
You'll get replays of the battles
Thank you for the offer, but I must decline. I don't have enough time to view so much as one full replay. My writing skills are also fail. (I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, so don't think that I am some kind of idiot.) I don't have the skill to be of help in combat either. I can only fucntion on custom made multi star maps with a whole system to myself and a lot of time to build up my empire. I also have gotten used to playing the Mad Scientist mod, so my vanilla Sins skills are pretty weak too. I was just making a suggestion. Best Regards.
Samuyre.
Recently I played a game with binjured and he pointed me towards this forum topic. Both my friend and I are interested and want to help get this up and running. Im not that quite up to speed on this but if their is still lacking a faction leader in any of the races, we would love to play that part as we both like to role play. What can we do and what has been done so far?
Alright! After FINALLY reading those 4 pages and getting further up-to speed I feel a bit more confident on the going ons and WANT TO BE A PART OF IT! Seems like the advent has yet to have a faction made. I'll talk to my buddy about it but I know that I am most definately interested. Who else is interested about an Advent faction? Or is all the love for the TEC and their Vasari invaders?
(edited to add second paragraph)
There are 2 factions ATM. A TEC one, -Ue_. and a Vasari one Sorrrowswarm. No offical Advent one yet. Best thing is to sign up using the website bingured has provided. Maybe he know if we have a Advent faction leader.
Your welcome to sign up for -Ue_ just head over to our recruitment topic. There will be a link to our personal fourms. Under the Rules and Guidelines there is a section on what to send to me or Xenon for recruitment. And Im not gonna lie, we all suck over here. Too much playing Distant Stars lol. But thats not gonna stop us from trying!
I suppose I would like to join. Would you be okay with that? I warn you, I don't have much free time, I sometimes have to leave suddenly, games can take days, and unless you add some kind of "protracted warfare commander" slot, I'll I can only function on huge maps with a looooong build up time. If you still think that I should join, I will.
Samurye you should join!!
Head on over to our recurtment page at https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/346132
We do still need an Advent faction, though as I recall Citizen and Ender have already joined Ue. Carbon, I think you have most of the players haha. Nice recruiting tactics
Yeah, Carbon had the benefit of both being well prepared and TEC, Ender and I (this is Citizen) favor the TEC overall.
As a side note, how is the forums for ourselves coming up? And when are we planning to start?
I'd still like to get the forums up this weekend, though perhaps Monday as well. I work 70-80 hours per week and this is my one weekend a month that I have to really relax, so I've been playing Sins more than setting up servers for it
TY, but Ive had help. Yeah current count of active members including our newest recruits stands at 5. And we are ready for more members!!!!!!
And I look forward to the league forums! So we can get some rules and such going!
Was just wondering how the league forms are coming? not to pressure anyone, just excited to get started.
Keep it up people....let's make this happen...my galaxy forge is itching to be used again +_+
Hey Everyone! -Ue_Mercury here!
Here's a quetion/idea I posed to my fellow Unified Explorers on our boards and decided it would be good to also discuss here as it would only make sense if we all role played at the same standard.
I quote...myself -
as a general question for everybody, what are we looking at in regard to the realistic representation of in game aspects. For example, how many people does it take to crew ships? Like say, if you were to lose a ship, how many lives where lost. And for another idea, I've always found that the planet population is not proportional to a space nation aside from those of the asteroids. I would think that the number of people the game tells you is a representing 100 people per 1 person at the least. Also, in regard to game time, one second of game time (or on ICO 1 phase of time in which you recieve credits) represents a half hour of time in real life. Think about how big a gravity well would be! It would at least take HOURS, not seconds, to cross a planet's gravity well. Just an idea, what do you guys think?
-end quote
In addition to the topics i bring up there are other ideas for in game role play, like limiting technologies, limiting comunication between players (like in order to 2 way communicate you must have a scout ship go from YOUR home planet to your ALLIE's homeworld inorder to get said message across). Ping's should not happen if we would play this way. I will add more later, but please discuss!
By adding all these "realistic" aspects you are in some way destroying the essence of the game.
whats left to play if we have to count EVERY SINGLE SHIP WE CREATE as the game goes and substract it from our total population...can we just keep it simple!
hahaha, well don't you think you would try to keep ships alive if you knew how many lives were on it? I'm not saying to keep a strict record, I'm saying as general knowledge when storytelling. As a figure we can all agree on, the average amount of warm bodies it takes to crew a ship, it doesn't matter if it dies or not what matters is the knowledge. Now say if you sent in a fleet of 15 Javelis only to be destroyed by 10 Transporters, and since the battle was so memorably terrible, you can say something like "The general sent them in without afterthought. There were so many, so fast. Only 1 of the 30 lifeboats ejected survived. But struck with a phase missle no survivors remained inside. Only the tatical records on the computer told the story of the terrible sense of battle, and how "???? many?" (I would think something in between 250-500) people lost their lives today." It would help the storytelling aspect (which is what I think we're shooting for here) If we had a figure of the number of people it takes to man a ship. In addition, what about timeframe? It takes a ship about 1 minute to travel in through a plant a phase jump. Is it so hard to consider that would probably take much longer then a minute. I think not. More like maybe 10 hours or so. Thoughts?
The ammount of crew per ship can be found in your SINS manual. For example, an Arcova Scout has 75 crew memebers per the SINS manual.(I dont think though the newer units and structures were given a crew count. So we may have to make up those numbers) As for the speed at which ships fly, I would say we would have to come up on some basic guess and decided on what we think is right.
I say its safe to say that flying from one side of grav well to another would take < 1 week. All of course depending on the size of the well. Phase lane travel should be quick with the longest travel being a < 24 hours. Between Star Travel should of course be longer say in the > 1week.
OK ...if you guys are willing to test it that way! fine I'll bend to it and try it out!
But only because im in a good mood! dont ruin it +_= lol
Ha! Well then it would of course need to be discussed. Now if only we had our own discustion board to work with that would be excellent. Currently on the Ue Forums I have a thread going on about it. However last time i checked you smelled of Sorrowsworn haha.
100th post.
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