Daily Archives: March 30, 2016

BB73 – New Eden Diplomacy

This month’s blog banter, #73 in the series, asks:

So soon(tm) we will have Eve Online, Valkyrie, Gunjack and the as yet untitled FPS to replace DUST514/Project Legion. Are we missing anything else? Are then any other games CCP should be looking into? Colony building simulators in the style of Sim City or Rimworld. Should it be on a grander scale link Civilisation or Stronghold Kingdoms. How about RTS games ala Command and Conquer. Survival games such as Rust? Planet based combat like World of Tanks? Would you like to see other game types expanding the Eve Universe or should CCP stick to what it knows?

Well, given the popularity of the past week’s events, I am going to have to go with a strategic title, something of a New Eden version of Diplomacy.

Who gets stuck with Feythabolis... I mean Turkey?

Who gets stuck with Feythabolis… I mean Turkey?

(Diplomacy board and screen shot likely the property of somebody somewhere.)

I wouldn’t/couldn’t/shouldn’t condone a direct knock-off of the game, but there are clearly aspects that one could borrow, especially the simultaneous movement and the diplomacy phase.

The game should be focused on the strategic aspect of the game, which necessarily means a top down strategic map.  Maybe they could get Rixx to put together a nice strategic map for the game.

New Eden done Rixx Javix style

New Eden done Rixx Javix style

New Eden is broken up into its various spheres, and the game should try to somehow incorporate all of them, including high sec, low sec, null sec, wormhole space, and that bit where the Jovians live… because Jovians!

Hat tip to Rhavas...

Hat tip to Rhavas…

In my vision a multiplayer game… with maybe six players total… would start with each of them getting a null sec region worth some amount of resources.  I would try to keep resources simple, with maybe some way to improve yield via infrastructure, but nothing more complicated than in, say, Civilization II.  Jump bridges for roads, other enhancements for improving mining yield or keeping down the local pirate factions.

From there players can expand their null sec holdings… I might actually chop things down into constellations within regions as the level of play… until they come in contact with low sec space.  From there they can influence low sec to their will, something of a reverse on faction warfare, to be able to use that space as a connection to high sec.

Connecting to high sec grants an economic boon that allows greater expansion.  But, in a twist, your foes connecting to high sec also boost high sec output overall.  So you want your foes to have access, but you want more access through more and more secure low sec avenues.

Wormholes should have a technology threshold, after which you can exploit them for resources or use them as temporary access to other regions, including high sec.

And then there is high sec space, the NPC empires.  I don’t think they should be conquerable, so maybe just a level of influence over them that affects your economic relationship.

Finally, there is the victory condition.  I wouldn’t want to make outright conquest a requirement, or even possible.  You might be able to eliminate a couple players along the way, but over-extending yourself ought to come with consequences or infrastructure costs.

And I like the Civilization V idea of having multiple victory conditions.  So maybe a conquest based one where a player wins if they control a given number of resource generation points in null sec, as in Diplomacy.  Then an economic influence victory where you end up with one of the NPC empires aligning with you.  A surrender option where you get/force your player foes to support your reign.  And perhaps some sort of technological possibility that brings in the Jovians on your side.  Can’t forget about the Jovians after I used that picture.

So that is my general, broad strokes idea for a strategic/diplomatic game based in New Eden.   I’m not sure if the starting empires ought to have fixed names with special attributes or not.  What would you do to distinguish Band of Brothers, Ascendant Frontiers, Goonswarm, Pandemic Legion, Solar Fleet, -A-, CVA, or whatever current or historic groups you might want to represent?  Plus, you should be able to roll your own alliance.

Finally, the whole things should be multiplayer, obviously, with a chat interface that lets you have individual, group, and game-wide conversations. Seems that CCP might be able to manage that by taking chat straight from EVE Online.  It also should have some sort of AI player support and allow 4-10 players.  Then it should be on Steam and cost $29.99 at launch, $17.50 at the first Steam Summer Sale, and $19.99 there after.

And, if I really want to ask for the world, it ought to have an in-game client so you can play it while in a fleet in EVE Online for a truly meta experience.

That is what I’ve got.  The details are left as an exercise for the reader… like a title.  What should the game be called?

Others have answered the question as well.  You can find them at the Blog Banter 73 page or linked below as I see their posts.

Will EVE Online Get a Bounce from M-OEE8?

In the history of EVE Online, when there is a giant battle in the game subscriptions go up as sure as one thing follows another.  The first Burn Jita, Asakai, 6VDT-H, and B-R5RB all got headlines in the gaming press and, in many cases, the general media.  Articles at the BBC have not been uncommon.

The fact that these giant battles happen on their own and aren’t staged by CCP (unlike certain record setting events) is part of the magic of the game, the draw that attracts news players and reinvigorates old ones.  It is one of those special aspects of New Eden.

CCP certainly got into the spirit of things as the big battle kicked off.

Old news, but The Scope reporters are hacks...

Old news, but The Scope reporters are hacks…

They had people on scene to watch the battle and the EVE:ISDIC Twitter account posted great pictures of the fight as it went on. (You should go look at them.)

And after the fight, CCP was at it again with the battle stats.

The war that started LONG before Easter...

The war that started LONG before Easter…

Granted, they might have jumped the gun on that last item.  B-R5RB.  According to CCPs post battle figures for that fight, there were 7,548 unique characters involved in the great titan massacre.  Though, to give credit, they did cop to that error when it was pointed out.

(Also, Easter War?  This war has been going on since January.  I know that CCP doesn’t want to use “Casino War” because that will inevitably shine a light on the shady RMT and gambling aspects allowed in the game, but Easter just seems wrong.  New Years War maybe?)

And they want you to have talking points ready, just in case somebody asks you about EVE Online.

So CCP is prepped.

And there are certainly rumblings within the community as old players who left for various reasons (Fozzie Sov and Jump Fatigue get mentioned a lot) consider coming back for a big war.  Having nearly every non-Russian null sec entity jumping on the “shoot Goons” bandwagon at last is certainly a draw.

But what about new players?  Will the M-OEE8 battle have the same halo effect as the other great battles before it?  I am starting to wonder.

CCP keeps linking to and quoting from a rather tepid article over at PC Gamer that pre-dates the battle.  During the battle the Polygon Twitter feed posted an EVE Online link, though it turned out to be to a 2014 story.  They wanted to ride on the EVE Online gravy train, not the other way around.

And… that has been about it.  Even Massively, which covers MMORPGs, only has their own tepid post, which amounts to “Somebody on Reddit said there was a war.”  And they haven’t even gotten around to something about the actual battle that happened.

In fact, nobody outside of the core EVE Online focused media and bloggers seems to have bothered.

If you Google “B-R5RB” you get results from PC Gamer and Wired and Polygon.

Do the same for “M-OEE8” and you get… DOTLAN, zKillboard, EN24, and me.  My post is the the 6th result.

So what happened here?  Was the battle not big enough?  Was the spectacle no grand enough to suit?  Did we not amuse sufficiently?  Was there insufficient internet spaceship drama?  Should CCP be calling the Guinness Records people?  Do we need to tally up the losses and convert them to dollar amounts to get some attention here?

Or are people just over internet spaceship battles?

Addendum:  The war is starting to get some traction now on gaming news sites now.  It just took a couple days.