Brainstorm: epic space opera game

[Malagar]

Wow, thats a post title! Well, first of all: Im very busy with my main project (gods & minions) ATM, so this post is just for brainstorming. Im far from launching another project currently - its just too much work.

Recently, after playing Spore, Ascendancy, Alpha Centauri and Master of Orion I thought about our community space game project once again. I did not want to post this in r0cknes thread, as my idea is somewhat different, although it shares the same tought: Epic Space Opera!

Ok, now here are some thoughts for a possible game that aims to be innovative of some sort:

1. Pseudo Randomized Content for art and flavor text
While working on Gods & Minions (my main project) i realized how much time and care is required to build a background world including races, their cultures and technologies. This is okay for a medieval game that is limited to a single continent or planet. But a space game that features a whole galaxy or even universe, is too much work in my eyes. I want to keep this game expandable and would like to make this multitude of races a core feature.

In order to achieve this, some simplification is required. and a technique found in computer games - called "pseudo randomized content". I could imagine using random generators to creatte planets, races, names, descriptions, universes and more. this cuts out much of the development time required - and to be honest: most of the content is flavor text anyway. do we really require a background story-writer in a grand scale space game where the players are supposed to write the story themselves? But, this is a art/flavor thing after all and not important to the game itself.

Some links on the subject:

http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=alienrace
http://omniversegc.wikia.com/wiki/Random_civilization_generator
http://omniversegc.wikia.com/wiki/Random_star_system_generator
http://www.rancorpit.com/planetGenerator.shtml
http://donjon.bin.sh/world/

2. Mechanics with (almost) no tapping
I thought about getting rid of the tapping mechanic alltogether. Instead, the players would place tokens on their cards to indicate different states of advancement. in total there would be four or five different types of tokens in the game, some of them also represent the resources in the game:

* Worker tokens
* Resource tokens
* Time tokens

so, players put time tokens on cards to indicate how advanced a building or research project is. they spend resource tokens to bring new cards into play and use their worker tokens to get various jobs done. workers could be placed on a "civilisation/species" cards to breed (gain more workers) or draw cards from your deck, workers could also be placed on "planet" cards to grant their owner a higher resource income - and so on.

Being already more a boardgame than a card game, i would not care about the extra complexity at all. Using tokens that represent 1,5 or 10 at a time makes things a bit easier to manage.

3. Grand Scale Mass Production of units
When a player brings a "Space ship" card into play from his hand, it should not represent a sinlge ship. It rather represents the players ability to being able to build this ship type.

Once played, you can build as many ships of this type as you want - by putting worker tokens on the ship card. this helps you to keep track of three things: the amount of workforce required to build it, the time/advancement of the building task and finally: the amount of people you need to crew the ship.

this rule could be applied to all kinds of ships, personell and technologies: the card just shows that "you can build it", the number of tokens shows how many you actually own.

maybe worker tokens must be converted into time tokens and time tokens into ship tokens. the details of this process are still to be developed.

4. Research & development
Research works similar to Ship building: You bring a technology (or culture or whatever) card from your hand into play. this now represents merely a "blueprint", on the card it says that you require - say - 12 time tokens to finish the blueprint. the card enters play turned 180 degrees to show that its still in "research mode".

you can then place workers on the card. at the beginning of your turn - for every worker token on it, you may put a time token on it too. once there are 12+ time tokens on the card - remove all tokens and turn the card upright. it is now ready for use.

lets say we have a "space marine" card researched this way. once turned upright we can train space marines, also by putting workers on it. there could also be 1 resource token required to turn a worker into a space marine.

finished space marines are also kept on the card in token form. so with one space marine card, a player could easily represent 10-20 space marines - just by putting enough tokens on the card.

5. Removing pre-determined species and ship types
this goes hand in hand with point nr. 1 - why not remove pre-determined species and their technologies at all? instead, let the cards be blueprints for tech-bits altogether. and let the players research, design and build ships anyway they like.

When using the token system - this would not be a problem at all! you can have a hull card, a engine card, several weapon cards and special cards. stack them all together on your side of the table. this reprsesents the complete blueprint of your ship-design.

finally, by putting tokens on it - you represent the amount of ships of this type you have in your fleet. its not required to have one card-copy per ship in play at all.

this idea can be maxed out: remove species as well and let players combine two or three cards to build their own species. put tokens on the "species stack" to represent total population - thats it!

of course, there must be some cornerstones like the blueprints, tech-bits and planets. but this is still open for discussion, testing and development.

6. Final thoughts
Okay, thats a big wall of text, i better come to an end.

As a final note, i would like to add where my original idea for the community space game started: a game that is not focused on combat completely, but instead tries to represent intergalactic empire building at large scale. let there be diplomacy, intrigue, coalation victory, religious enlightment victory, managing the hapiness of your species as well as reaching transcendency victory by achieving technological god-like status - and then put a bit of space combat on top of it. but dont make spaceship combat the core of a project like this.

Malagar over and out!

[Cyrus]

In short, I like it

I've thought a lot about doing an empire building game using tokens for units and such much like you've described but never gotten around to it.
Species traits could be played on a blank species card that all players start with in play. They would have small but important effects, including possibly increasing or decreasing the cost of generating workers.
Ship cards could be advanced by placing weapons or other upgrades on them, but this would increase the number of workers needed to build one.
My only worry with the whole thing is that all the token tracking might become tedious or obnoxious. This might just be the case for some people though, whereas board gamer types probably wouldn't mind.
I've gotta get going to work so sorry my response isn't very well thought out!

[r0cknes]

This is very funny... I was just talking to a few friends about making a board game based on intergalactic political and economical struggle, using no cards and only tokens and counters with low detail. The reason I say that is because the massive amount of back story is troublesome.

1. That being said back story is difficult and I like your thought of almost making most things generic to the player. If you did plan on having some specific races in the game, then it could be very easy to base them off of some other popular sci fi races, or you can do as the original writers did in some cases and base them off of historical earth empires such as the roman empire and others.

2. It would be interest how you get the tokens to work here. I don't think I understand the purpose of the time token, but I do understand the worker and resource idea, and I see much promise in them.

3 and 4. At first I wasn't sure about this idea, but it fits you theme well as you expressed in point number 1. You have have to decide how you want the "Battle" mechanics to work of course before you know if this will work. You could do something simple like it takes resources to buy workers or planets produce workers and those workers after being placed on the card are now trained to be a space marine. That marine can enter a battle with the states of that card with him.

So I want to enter a battle I have a space marine with an attack of 3 and 5 workers on it. I can choose to send any number of worker tokens into battle with that attack of three. if any die then they are discarded and the others return to the space marine card.

As far as the space ship blue print goes I am still unsure about it. I think it fits the theme, but the problem I am seeing is that you will be spending several turns just making the blue print of a ship which shouldn't have much to do with the game, because your concept is to not have large space battles. Better would be ship blue prints that fit your strategy that you can place in your deck. That is if you want this to be a deck building game.

I am all for more space themed games though so I will offer any support in your brainstorming efforts. Bye for now.

[Gargoyle]

I have a problem with randomly generated content.
All you end up with is a lot of stuff that sounds ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever. For example, I tried that Seventh Sanctum generator and the first thing it came up with was this: The metal-based, *avian race*. They have powerful hearing. They *move by dragging themselves along the ground*. Many members of their species are healers.
If they're a winged, avian race, then why the hell do they move by dragging themselves? I guess they are metal-based, but they wouldn't need wings at all if they drag themselves. My point is that this type of system inevitably ends up with outrageous contradictions. Also makes more sense for birds to have powerful eye-sight, not hearing.
In other instances the descriptions are too general to provide any real flavour. If you want to use this as a way to get started, then using this kind of tool for inspiration has its advantages, but don't expect the tool itself to provide good depth for the diegetical world of any given CCG. An opera always has a very dramatic storyline, so I honestly just don't see this randomised approach as very viable for this.

On a different note, the idea of a card being a blueprint does make sense, and helps the scale of things, but I'm not sure I like the idea of the Counters, as such. It would mean any inbalance on a card could be greatly magnified; it's hard enough keeping cards balanced when this isn't the case, but with a system like this it would be extremely difficult to keep cards from becoming over-powered.
Perhaps it should cost more to build a particular ship with each succession; that way player's would be encouraged to play a diversity, and abuse of specific cards would be hampered.

I like the idea of custom ships, but not sure it suits an 'Epic Space Opera'. In a more personal space game where you have a handful of ships, or maybe just one, I could definitely see that being a fun system. This game sounds more like a Civilisation game than a space opera. Nothing wrong with that, just a little confused as to what you're aiming for.

[Malagar]

Thanks for your feedback guys!

@Gargoyle

Well, you dont have to take the generators serious. It was just an idea. For example there is one generator that creates short descriptions for planets. this would be good to add flavor text to planets. something I think is a must have - but I would value it not important enough to write them all by hand. Its just a thought after all.

yeah the counter thing and balancing. thats why i have never tried that before. because the more counters you have on a card - the more "copies" you have in play. this means the special ablities are also more frequent. you can have many more copies in play as if you where using real cards and this "could" break the whole game.

regarding space opera - just ideas and brainstorm. i was searching for a name to describe it, but ended up with completely other ideas not suited the name at the end. wrote the text on sunday between preparing dinner and answer customer emails :-)

@r0cknes

havent thought about how the token idea could work in practice. maybe the time tokens can be removed, using just workers and resources. its just a foggy idea after all.

your ideas are welcome - i could especially see the counter idea expanded into something useful

off to work now - i try to add more info later

[r0cknes]

Well, Time tokens could be added to a card when it is played base on the info on the card itself. The time tokens could then be taken off based on how many workers you discard that turn to "research" or "build" the card. So a large ship would not only cost resources, but also workers to build it. The same would be true for HIGH tech stuff, like a space marine would take less time to research than a plasma cannon. You would also need to have a two separate card zones. One for cards in play and another zone for cards being researched or build. You could also have cards affect either zone in their card effects.

Or you could scrap the card idea and make this a board game all together. Point of reference would be Pillars of the Earth (Worker Managment), Power Grid (Resource Managment), Age of Empires 3 (Worker Management and some battle ideas). It depends on how much "movement" you want. Do you imagine a game with cards or token abstractly moving across space? Or do you imagine them moving to very specific points.

I agree you can't take the random generators at face value, but they will certainly help freshen your imagination.