Topic: CW8(8.5)....The winds of war blow again.....

[Cleaven]

My thoughts on scenarios (sadly I can't get to the stuff I wrote about scenarios in the old forums) were that players should start in CL's. If they stuff up, they get a DD. After a quarter of the server has passed they should be in CA's and halfway through BC's should be the ships of choice. DN's should have something special, whether it be lucky numbers or PvP kill rewards or whatever. Assuming a large amount of PvP, by the end there will be a fair proportion of players in BC's, most will be in their third or fourth CA, and a few poor souls taking command of their tenth CL.  

[DH123]

The end of the world is near.   Start investing in canned food and shotguns folks.

I actually agree wholeheatedly with both Dogmatix and Cleaven  

Doesn't SFCx have a shiplist with "Andros" in it?   I know I got it from one of you a year ago or so.  I think a server where the Galactic powers take on the Andros would be wonderful.  I suggest using FS's OP+ X-ships as they are from the SFB era that the Andro invasion took place.   The "Taldren" X-ships are too advanced for what that Galactic powers had.  

[Fluf]

I agree with Doggy and Cleaven and DH123.   I know Moggy and SFCX had been working on the Andros and I think it would be fun.  But I alsowould like to see some good X-ships.  Either taken from SFB guidelines and/or the Taldren ones reworked to be more balanced with each other.  I know there are some good SSD's out there on X3 and X4 ships based on SFB that might work nicely in this scheme.  It would definitly take some work to do and some major play testing, but I think worth it in the long run, to bring players in that despise the Taldren X ships as they stand, and hence do not play OP for that reason.

[Cleaven]

And to divert attention again from large campaign servers for a minute, I think that the shorter scenarios should have replay value. Long servers require a lot of work to 1.) design and 2.) admin during play. After a few go's at it, the Four Powers War short scenario should become a neat little one week session that requires virtually no admin effort to set up and run, and use almost stock player configurations, with most of the changes being server side. Same goes for the ISC invasion scenario and Romulan attck on the Feds and Rom-Gorn war scenarios. Replay value also allows people to get around the issue of only having to play their favourite race for whenever the good servers come up, in so far as you can play Lyran this time around if you want because you know that you can have another go if it doesn't work out. As I think about it now it sounds more like a Tournament server, with a lot of emphasis on balance.  

[jdmckinney]

Yes, we would save successful settings and maps and have them ready for future runs. One idea is to go through a General War-style history in roughly chronological order, and then restart at the beginning once it has played out, taking any lessons learned into account.

One of the keys to a ToW model would be to make sure map changes during one run affect the next mini map. We had been planning to have one master map (which Stumpy has already designed), and then keep track of the map changes on our master so each new chapter would have a map based on the latest territorial shifts and relative strengths. If SQL were enabled for OP, we could also start to get into a true OOB with ship assignments, prestige or ship carryover between games, on-the-fly map adjustments, etc.

Even done in small parts, this is a big project, which is why I bring it up as an idea for cooperation among admin groups.

On the Andros (and Tholians, and WYN), SFCX had worked on them last year, but we probably need to revisit them for a fresh look. We would need custom shiplists depending on what races are used. If I ever finish it, we would use a single SFB-based shiplist as a master list that corrects default shiplist errors and adds many ships (though probably not as many as FireSoul's list). The SFB list would be designed specifically for D2 play, though it would be good for GSA play -- just not optimized for it.

However, until we can get such a thing off the ground, we need more good campaigns on OP to rebuild the population.

[CaptStumpy]

Quote:
And to divert attention again from large campaign servers for a minute, I think that the shorter scenarios should have replay value. Long servers require a lot of work to 1.) design and 2.) admin during play. After a few go's at it, the Four Powers War short scenario should become a neat little one week session that requires virtually no admin effort to set up and run, and use almost stock player configurations, with most of the changes being server side. Same goes for the ISC invasion scenario and Romulan attck on the Feds and Rom-Gorn war scenarios. Replay value also allows people to get around the issue of only having to play their favourite race for whenever the good servers come up, in so far as you can play Lyran this time around if you want because you know that you can have another go if it doesn't work out. As I think about it now it sounds more like a Tournament server, with a lot of emphasis on balance.  

Exactly! Part of what makes this campaign method so cool is that each mini-campaign is separate from the uber campaign permitting each "module" to be plugged in when it's ready. This should reduce the considerable headache required to produce the big boys. One the campaign ends in late X-era it can be restarted and the modules used again with new ones written in and the old ones refined. Like a wine it should only get better with age and has great replay value.

-CaptStumpy