Markus Reese
Caldari
Lorentzian Expeditionaries
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Posted - 2009.11.29 07:06:00 -
[1]
Alright, this might be a long one.
Walking in station leads me to another thing seen with the dust mission loading screen. What I would like to see are complex and large space mission ops designed to be given to you remotely to your office or HQ.
Either by special event, or just selectable like normal missions, you first get a mission information map that shows targets for things like hack this mainframe, or escort ship from here to here, etc. From this map, you can plan fleet beacons etc for your fleet plus get tactical information.
Now, The missions will have a sort of difficulty which would give you a rough idea of the fleet size and firepower you will need. There could also be some scaling depending on how many people and what you bring in. These will also effect rewards. Reinforcements shouldn't be preplanned. Instead, along with the new AI, forces will be countered to what you bring in, but of a certain value. IE if you come in with a bunch of cruisers, you might get a battleship gank squad. Go all BS, maybe faster close in cruisers. This would make fleet mixing important.
The reward wouldn't be on the bounty system with immediate payout and if done by a certain time. Instead, as you kill. get objectives, etc, your reward pay goes up. With time, it goes down. This rewards skilled and diverse play setup as well as team. With a team, a higher peak difficulty mission will mean more spawns, but the more dps etc means that in the end, your isk earnings total for the team would be higher. Of course would be at higher risk. Plan well, and you will succeed.
More dynamic "terrain as well, imagine having to manually fly your ship into some structures, heck, maybe even some dock walking for long in the future but for now, I might give an example of standard space with squad formation.
Alright, mission is to recover a captured battleship from an enemy base. Difficulty rated extremely dangerous and recommended for a fleet of say 8-16. At first, you warp in. What you see is a massive structure, if possible (or an accel gate for first stage of development). Players need to fight their way in through the base defenses. You see this and a base layout in your mission area and some defensive info. FC decides to do a blitz squad for first part to get in and get area control before reinforcements can be called, with heavy long range on stand by.
The blitz manages to take out the guards before a full lockdown can occur, if that happened, the gate would need to be hacked, or door, whatever. Have some control structure. Blitz squad goes in, heavys stay at gate to guard. (npcs aren't magic, they gotta get in the same way). Blitz team goes in and clears a route to the battleship and frees it up. However, they missed one ship that got through a gate to the security area and activated reinforcements. The gate out is knocked out and other ships come through from security area to attack.
Some of the heavy squad comes through for cover fire, while part of blitz squad enters the security room to reactivate gate. The security alert triggered a distress though resulting in a spawn arriving on site. Since fleet was mixed, so was reinforcements. Too much for the remaining gate guards, so they fall back through the gate. Depending on composition, etc, the enemies can storm through (if more fast and close) or hold out. This is some of the variation as the AI would have some tactics. They get ship out, knock out the outside fleets warp bubbler, and rescue is a success.
Reward for this. For not triggering an initial distress, what would be bonus for the ships warping in, is instead a fleet mission reward. This means that if you are a fighty fleet, can try and complete that way, if want to be more covert, etc, can try and finish that way as well. Point is for fight or sneak, reward to be balanced. Also if some sort of lego style module system was made, that would be win, no predictable missions.
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