Hello,
This is my attempt to come up with a fun and new and refreshing multiplayer idea for X-Com.
The idea is as follows:
1. Each player gets one base.
2. Time proceeds as normal/reality.
3. The game has a pager lol (I made that once lol) which sits in the tray bar.
4. When a ufo is detected the player has the choice to intercept it or let another base intercept it.
5. UFO is shot down, and player proceeds and recovers it.
Players can see each other performance, number of shoot downs, number of recoveries. Maybe they can even share/trade recovered alien equipment for research and share research efforts/reports back and forth.
6. The alien threat/terror proceeds with a certain pace... players who cannot keep up are at risk of getting annihilated by the aliens, and they loose their base. From that moment on they can only be spectators of the world and will have to wait until the game is over and reset (this could take weeks or months).
7. Other players could also try and recapture lost bases, or try to recover those bases, or rebuild them for friendly players so they can get back into the game.
8. Other players could also try and rescue them... for example the losing players get abducted and interrogated. If losing players traded with other players then the other players are at risk of their base getting expoised to aliens as well, so they might be next on the target list of aliens, this makes communication and trading with other players, especially weaker ones, risky and more interesting lol. Perhaps encryption technology can be researched to try and prevent aliens from getting grip on locations, this still leaves human mind as weak point. Perhaps moving/abondoning base and making a new one might be an option, it would be expensive but not impossible in case of major security breach at end game situation or so.
9. At a certain point the aliens are defeated, or the humans are defeated, at that point the game gets reset, and everybody can join in again.
10. New players start from scratch... other players can help them and equip them and provide research/tech and weapons for them... so other players could produce extra weapons for new players to try and increase chances of surviving an alien threat/terror/invasion... (if this mode proves to be bad, then developers could introduce a second mode, where new players jump straight into the common/current general/overall techtree, but this sounds a bit too easy to me).
11. Fighting actualy alien combat mission is done in single player mode to prevent having to implement that or so... unless developers wanna try that too
12. If the country financing the x-com decides to choose the side of the aliens, then all players in that country get whiped out
13. Each player has a "security clearance". As the player levels up and does more alien missions, his level increases, as his level increases more and more friendly bases are revealed, so the most powerfull players/bases are revealed last so they run the least risk of being infiltrated by alien spread/interrogation of weaker players. Weaker/new players only receive information on a need to know basis and level clearence/security clearance and performance. Weak performing players are kept in the dark to prevent jeapordizing the whole operation.
This creates an incentive for the players to play well and perform well so that they can discover who else is playing this great game, which should be a hell lot of fun and perhaps get new trading opertunities.
14. Perhaps the game idea could be split up into: "aliens" versus "humans", where both sides are actually played by human beings, that would be cool. Unfortunately "traitors" could infilitrate each other's situation, so perhaps this idea is a bit bad or maybe it's cool lol. Maybe it's better to have everybody on same side, or maybe internet address checks could be applied to prevent same ip from joining both sides at the same time. Or maybe leveling up takes so much time that it's nearly impossible to do both or so... but don't underestimate players, they pretty nifty !
15. There could be a ranking board on the web, indicating who are the top 100 performing players or so. This does reveal some information about what players are in the game, and could be nice so players know that they are not the highest ranking yet, and there is more to explore or so... or this feature could be left out and simply indicate how far they are from highest security clearance... for example currently : 5 out of 7 which could change later to 6 out of 10. Security levels go up as players become stronger.
16. After each reset of the game, the game becomes thougher and thougher... the next time the ufos will be bigger, stronger, faster, smarter aliens maybe. So people can try again, they learned from last time, let's see if they can do it again. Perhaps the difficulty level could go up each year, after year, until everybody starts to loose, that would be cool, a last man standing type of event until total destruction. At that point the game's difficulty level is halfed so that everybody can join in and try again.
17. Noobs will have to practice single player first if they want to have a chance in the multiplayer universe, once they have noobed-out at level 15 or so they can try the universe too or something So they need basic training first.
18. Perhaps if multiplayer combat is introduced as well, then players could flee from their base if the alien threat becomes overwhelming and can find safe harbor in somebody elses base and stay there and fight together against larger and larger threats, hopefully they can survive together, otherwise maybe even more fleeing needed
Until 4 players are in the same base or so... at that point it's full. If no safe harbor can be found the player diiiieeesss and will have to wait for game reset.
19. Transferring of equipment from base to base in case of flee or feeling that we might be targetted could also be cool, for example increase alien activity in the vicinity... lots of alien scouts trying to find our base... if we think we gonna die we need to transfer out or so... For example the aliens found our base, they assaulted our base, we managed to fight them off, but now we are weakened, we cannot sustain another attack, we must abandon and flee before the aliens attack again, once we have been discovered by aliens we are in deep ☺☺☺☺ and will get assualted a lot. Secrecy should play a fun role in the game trying to keep conceiled from aliens and perhaps other human beings as well. We are a secretive organization after all.
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Originally Posted by Rtron
