Now, who would be interested? Any comments?
And, would you want earth with nearly infinite resources but at a low rate, or maybe even all solar bodies, meaning that I set all resources not existing to 0.1 access and several billion tons?
Sounds interesting, but unless duranium and sorium are set to at least 0.3 no one is going to ever get off planet.
The everyone against the SM sounds good. I'm starting to suspect that multiplayer Aurora needs scenario setups to work rather than the traditional sandbox approach. It takes a lot of effort to make a game last more than 10 in game years once everyone goes interstellar, so giving everyone an object such as a colonization race, a scenario, or even just making a game an outright dual or arena match might be more exciting.
While most players seem to prefer indulging in the novelty of diplomacy afforded by multiplayer (and thus a Pacifistic tendency) I don't know if most SMs can keep a game running long enough to take advantage of this.
A few other thoughts:
- The interrupt system is not your friend. Sooner or later the auto-turn feature will disappear behind a perpetual stream of 'urgent' reminders.
- Civilians are evil because they can't easily be kept out of places and generate sensor checks. Half the sensor benefit of putting factions in different star systems seems to disappear as soon as their civilians start trading.
- Do not mix NPRs with SM controlled factions. The advantage of having no NPRs is you can safely deactivate sensor checks as you know when and where situations requiring them will come up. The advantage of having no SM factions is you don't have to every stop to think of ship designs or tactics. I'd suggest using one or the other.
- If you spawn a faction onto a body, that body will be flagged as geo-team-surveyed. I'm not aware of any other way to set that flag other than having a geo-team success.
- The two primary advantages of being the SM is 1) the chance to observe, compare, and contrasting different player tactics and 2) the freedom not to think too hard about ship designs or empire policy. Allowing a limited amount of player fleet/faction conditional/timed order requests offers a glimpse inside the minds and logic of the players improving #1 at the expense of #2. Think carefully on balance. Offering too much intervention will destroy both.
- Conventional starts are slower than you remember. The years may fly past in solo games, but in multiplayer community games the time will drag as you wait for the player to -finally- transit their first jump point.
If I had been playing, I would have crushed everyone on account of actually building a military in the first two years. You people are pacifistic to a fault.
Speaking as a member of the Trade Federation Alliance for the domination of Sol this is rather distressing. I mean, knowing the others would have been powerless to protest is a nice vindication of our plan, but since we thought our sectors were in the middle of a massive military buildup getting included in "everyone crushed" is quite scary.
Lastly, one of my own players dropped out of the Return to Sol community game, so I have an open slot (Venusian Faction).
Those brave enough to try or have attempted SMing a community game get first dibs if either of you have the time or interested.
