   Space shooter mixed with turn-based strategy
  Random idea I thought of while playing Advance Wars. It annoyed me that air units can't fly over/under enemy air units, which got me thinking of what it would be like to have a turn-based strategy game where you can move in three dimensions. Then I started thinking of creating one. This is what I eventually decided:The player will be the captain of a starship which is part of a fleet tasked with bringing down a rebellion. From your starship, you can deploy various fightercraft and support vessels. (I'll get to the list soon.) Coordinating these ships takes Control Points. Launching a unit expends one or more Control Points, and you don't get them back when the unit is destroyed. You can gain additional Control Points by launching Wing Leader units. Be careful, though: Wing Leaders are rather expensive, and if you lose a Wing Leader, you lose all the Control Points it generated.The game is played in a pseudo-first-person perspective. Your view cycles through each deployed unit. You can give commands to the unit you are currently viewing from: You can tell it to turn either horizontally or vertically, to accelerate, or to decelerate. After you've ordered all your units, each of them will fire if they can hit an enemy. Then the AI (or other player, if in multiplayer) will take its/his/her turn. I might also add a top-down view which shows all units.The unit list:-Interceptor: Very fast and agile but relatively weak combat unit.-Fighter: "Tank" unit. Interceptors are the best counter.-Shield Drone: Has no attack. Nearby allies take one less damage point from all attacks.-Wing Leader: Expensive unit which provides Control Points. Passively gives nearby allies 10% bonus damage. The bonus damage effects are calculated from the ships original attack, so two Wing Leaders provide a 20% damage boost.-Turret: Cannot be deployed. Your ship has a few Turrets scattered around its hull. Turrets are immobile but can change their orientation and have decent range.[Edited by - TassadarZeratul on April 8, 2010 8:05:51 PM]
  The image that stuck in my head right away is Valkyria Chronicles in space.I guess you probably haven't gotten any bites because the devil is in the details.  I imagine just about any idea can be made to work with enough refinement, so develop the idea some more and throw out some specifics.   ;  Better now?   ;  My disorganized thoughts:Quote:Original post by TassadarZeratulAfter you've ordered all your units, each of them will fire if they can hit an enemy.I'm a bit confused about this part.  The player won't order them to fire?  What if they have multiple targets in range (which is likely to be the case if the AI uses support units reasonably)?In general one issue I see is lack of cover.  There won't be much variety if every battle is fought in empty space.  You'll probably have to sacrifice realism in order to get interesting gameplay, by having things like stationary asteroids or debris littering the battlefield.  I guess that also depends on what the map looks like.  Is it an Advance Wars-style grid of cubes, like 20x20x20, or is it a huge 3D arena with no set grid?  I was assuming the former for simplicity reasons, but I guess it doesn't have to be.I don't think the top-down map idea will work very well unless up/down movement is pretty heavily restricted.  A simplified 3D map that the player can rotate, pan, and zoom seems like the only way to do it.  Maybe it can show the locations of units and lines of sight to other ships, and some representation of the debris acting as cover.Hope this helps, though the image in my head is probably wildly different than the one in yours, so this may not make much sense.   ;Quote:I'm a bit confused about this part. The player won't order them to fire? What if they have multiple targets in range (which is likely to be the case if the AI uses support units reasonably)?Good question, and one which I hadn't thought of. I guess I'll just make it so that ships will be manually ordered to attack at the end of each turn.Quote:In general one issue I see is lack of cover. There won't be much variety if every battle is fought in empty space. You'll probably have to sacrifice realism in order to get interesting gameplay, by having things like stationary asteroids or debris littering the battlefield. I guess that also depends on what the map looks like. Is it an Advance Wars-style grid of cubes, like 20x20x20, or is it a huge 3D arena with no set grid? I was assuming the former for simplicity reasons, but I guess it doesn't have to be.Cover... Interesting. How about I add preplaced stationary asteroids like you suggested, and also make destroyed ships explode into debris, which functions like an asteroid but looks different?The map will be a huge 3D arena with no set grid. However, if you move a ship too far from the center, you'll get a warning message saying that it's losing contact with the ship. Move it out too much farther and it self-destructs. ;oQuote:I don't think the top-down map idea will work very well unless up/down movement is pretty heavily restricted. A simplified 3D map that the player can rotate, pan, and zoom seems like the only way to do it. Maybe it can show the locations of units and lines of sight to other ships, and some representation of the debris acting as cover.That's actually what I meant.   ;  It sounds like you're describing a 3D version of "Flight Commander 2", except it's in space. Check it out, as well as "Over the Reich" and I think some other game that I forgot from the same developer.They are all of the type "give your orders and watch the be carried out." In FC2 you decide when to fire missiles, but the computer controls the cannon, since it's so short range anyway. For movement you control the stick for each plane on each move. A plane that is behind another plane gets to see his opponents path before planning his own. Great game, really.   