Fun fact: I can't code to save my life.

Fun fact 2: I love coming up with ideas anyways.

I talk with a handful of guys on the development team, and I ask them questions and bounce ideas off of them, few if any making it into the game (it is crunch time afterall). So in this thread I'm just going to muse.

Individual site values for the metagame: Should be rather self explanatory. As it stands, all scenes are worth 1000 gold per day you hold them, regardless of how much gold they contain or how easy it is to mine. This value cannot be changed, nor will the option be made available to do so. EDIT: Apparently you actually can edit the value of a scene. TLB done did me wrong telling me otherwise.

While it won't happen, having the option to set daily values for sites would have been an interesting way to throw a little more strategy into the metagame. While most players would target high value sites, a willing player could sidestep the major firefights and collect a number of smaller, lower value sites, to establish a wider operation and launch attacks on high value sites once the other teams had established themselves in fewer, higher value zones. Spreading your zones out would also mean the enemy would have to spend more time tackling individual sites, while you can launch concentrated attacks on his fewer sites.

Scene values feed directly into my other, more ambitious musing:

Corporation Contracts: This idea came out when the gameplay video of B27 was first released. When I first heard that technology and bodies outside your own corporation would cost 4 times as much, I asked a few of the dev team if 'friendly corporations' would be an option, that is, having those same resources made available to you at regular rates for 'friendly' teams (Browncoats and Ronin, Imperatus and Dummies, Coalition and... well they don't quite fit with the undead but you get the idea).

That was a no go, but I'd already thought up the idea so I went ahead and fleshed it out.

Corporation contracts would have added an extra layer of strategy to the metagame by having the unused factions offer contracts to the warring teams on the planet. After all, even if they aren't there, they still want a piece of the pie.

For our example, let's say Player 1 is Browncoats, and Player 2 is Dummies. Once a day, one of the non-present corporations will offer an open contract that both players can choose to actively pursue or ignore at their leisure. On the first day, 4 sites are revealed, 2 of these sites are high value (see, told you the site values fed directly into this) while 2 of them are low value. In addition to this, the Coalition is offering their weapons and soldiers at a discounted rate for the first player to take and hold one of the lower value sites, as well as give them a 25% cut of all profits from that particular zone.

At this point both teams have a decision to make: Do they chase the higher value gold sites, or opt for the lower value site and accept the contract, giving the Coalition a 25% cut from that zone in return for cheaper supplies and units? Do both teams ignore the contract?

If it's the latter, a new contract will be made available from any of the non-present corporations, for any of the discovered sites, and with a random percentage of 'tax'. To ensure no one can simply ally with all the other factions, the contracts will be timed deals. That is, the effects of the contract will only be available for a set amount of turns, perhaps 3 days. That would also encourage players to push the offensive and make use of their active contract benefits. Any additional contracts from the same faction would simply add to the total period of time that discounted materials would be active.

More will come as I muse onwards.

Hehe, what if buying from a foreign faction directly transfers the funds to that faction, rather than the Tradestar.

Something I wouldn't mind seeing is a banking system, with simple interest. When you have too much gold, it makes allocating funds quite annoying, thanks to the ever shrinking allocation bar. Or, if one were to go all out, investing in other techs could decrease prices by a small multiplier per stock.

I don't know, but I'd love to see a bit more economic intricacy brought to the metagame.

what would be cool is if there was a merc faction available to all factions.


you'd have to do some mission/s for them but in the end it would be worth it with a set of conventional and cheap clones and weapons. also you'd be able to post them at your bases for cheaper than your own units.


think of the mercs as like a cross between the coalition and the ronin.


you can't actually be the mercs though, you can just hire and use them.

CC world problems.


Ballistic Weapons, perhaps?

I was just myself wondering about how the whole cash-to-Tradestar/cash-to-factions thing would work, and I've also been playing around with putting different factions on the same team (though that second is not quite so relevant) so Dauss, you raise some very, very interesting points.

You can change scene income by altering RoundIncome property of the scene. But I guess you won't be able to see it on strategy screen unless you occupy it.

Oh, look: what weegee said;

They're at 1k all probably because the AI/GUI don't account for it yet.

I too would enjoy some more control over tech relationships.
Being able to affiliate a mod of guns only with a particular tech or similar ability would be useful, and generic per-tech foreign/black market costs could be used as a balance tool.
Having some basic flavours to factions such as "aggressive"/"balanced"/"defensive" and "manpower"/"balanced"/"tech" used to determine AIvsAI battles could be cool. Would allow modders to describe their factions to the game, as well.

All sorts of interactive events, such as non-playing techs pitching in as Dauss suggested (daily seems a bit frequent though) would definitely spice things up. Right now the metagame consists of land on enemy brain, grenade the sleeping bunker guards, shoot invading brain into his tunnel repeated arbitrary amounts. I hope Abdul can teach the AI some basic bunker defense tricks, but still, it's a bit plain as is.

What's the fate of the scenarios, though?
First Signs, Zombie Cave et al seem to imply a plot of sorts. Will this be a tutorial-esque introduction into the game, or what?

I can imagine an odd Zombie Cave, Surplus Brain Vault or Mu-Ilaak Ruins being an interesting twist into the metagame. Perhaps players should bid a certain amount of gold for these Event Locations, and the highest bidder gets one shot at the particular scenario, and is rewarded with gold, brains, faction discounts, whatever, should he be successful. The scenarios should probably scale their difficulty according to the player investment, though. Zombie Cave is a bit simple when you roll in six Heavy Sniper troops.
Examples in these cases would be Zombie Cave's controller chip giving you a good bunch of hard oz, Surplus Brain Vault having some extra brains for your band, and the Mu-Ilaak artifacts giving you cred boost to the Techion, or a good oz/brain reward if you're playing as Techion already.
Forementioned tech flavours could be used to determine AI success, along with bid size and Random Number God.

These are rather high-flying ideas though, and seeing that we're nearing 1.0 some input on these ideas from the devs would be cool.

tl,dr; hi im findude and im hijacking your thread with my own ramblings :>

I think I see where metagame is moving, and I see there's still some space left for alternative metagame with Bender and Jack Black. Also I've read all of this, and here's what I have to offer:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1741337/Unmapp ... ncepts.rtf

Just a concept, but quite possible to implement of not abandoned )))

UPD

In case this will be ever started or even finished, it will have even bigger faction files incomatible with everything else.

I can't really comment too much on how the metagame stuff will pan out, since that's almost entirely up to Data (and apparently last time Dauss asked me whether a metagame feature existed, my answer was completely wrong).
The scenarios, at this point, are kind of relics of what the metagame was originally planned to be -- a mission-based campaign. I don't imagine they'll find their way into the metagame, really, because there would need to be more of them, and we don't really have time to expand on the missions. That said, I talked with Data about possibly including a moddable mission-based campaign mode post-1.0. No guarantees that'll happen, but I'd certainly like to see something like that. In the meantime, those scenarios will probably just float there as standalone levels, since they're at least playable.

Prices are massively inflated for out-of-module purchases even if the module you're buying from isn't a Tech. For example, if I want to use an Air Support Transport as the Coalition, that costs me 1040oz. What do I get for that investment? A fairly fragile and only lightly armed transport ship that makes flying a dropship look like a walk in the park.

We need Mercenary/Unaligned Techs/Modules setting. Modding things into Base.rte to sidestep extremely high costs is going to be hideously inefficient and impractical, after all.

AI definitely needs a 'panic' mode for when you start invading their bunkers, now that I think about it. The closer you get to their brain, the more frequent reinforcements should be. Those reinforcements should be coming after any intruders in the bunker and/or hunting your brain instead of just milling around on the roof like a bunch of idiots.

I know for a fact I have seen the dummy AI on dummy assualt react somewhat to you getting close to the brain, if such a thing was added on an automated basis to campaign, that would be very interesting.

I wish the game looked more like the concept art. (esp. the guns/tools)

Also are we going to get these, or am I going to have to cry?


EDIT: more thoughts >>

Whose idea were the Ronin? Is it just me (it is), or do they not really REALLY fit with the rest of the techs?

> most of that is the faces. The faces seem weird.

>>> Because there isn't enough pixelspace to make them look normal.

>>> And because it makes them not-faceless. Mia, Dimitri, the others seem like characters in a game that is based around endless platoons of alien robot crab clones exploding each other like flies in a lawn-mower.



EDIT:

I hope this stuff makes it into the final game.


METAGAME: I hate snowy scenes.

Ronin tech has been in the game well before pretty much any other.

I still remember when the words 'Robot 2s with AKs' struck fear into the souls of many players.

Yeah but seriously we all know it's the Coalition that DEFINES CC.

I mean seriously.

Also the dummies and crabs.

Ronin never show up on HB art or anything. (or any art now that I think about it)

That's cause the Coalition is the best.

The Ronin were intended to show up occasionally in the mission-based metagame, and not much else. Promster put up some art for their heads, though, and numgun ended up sticking them on bodies. People liked them, so they eventually got names, and their faction was almost fully fleshed out. At this point, it seems silly to ditch them considering how popular they are, and also the fact that we need as many fully-complete factions as we can get. That said, I'd like to see them go back to being nameless. You'd buy a Ronin soldier, and it would randomly select one of the actors. I can't really guarantee that's going to happen, but it would make more sense than how it currently is.

I agree that the Ronin don't quite fit. Given that each of the factions is supposed to provide mass-produced clones, it seems strange to have a group of named soldiers with distinct faces.
I also hope it returns to "buy soldier, get random face", because that's cool, and makes more sense. It's like you're actually getting some random soldier from a ragtag bunch of losers -- which, if I recall correctly, is exactly what the Ronin are supposed to be.

On a different note, anyone else disappointed that the Undead got assimilated into Base.rte? I was really looking forward to seeing them fleshed out as a faction, with Uzira and all that good stuff.

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing --
Hell yes.