I've noticed some recent postings on the board with speculation about how some of the ginormous ship designs would fare against an equal mass horde of smaller, more specialized combatants. This reminds me of the fun I used to have designing fleets with the Trillion Credit Squadron module of Traveller. It occured to me this evening that it might not be that hard to put a "Trillian Credit Squadron Deathmatch" mode into Aurora. It could be played with only two players (or more, for a triangular battle), but having a SM would make life easier.
Most of the coding would need to be in the empire setup code. Basically you'd give a certain number of build points available for Instant OOB (actually, I just remembered that I think you've already done this). Missiles and fighters would also need to count against the instant-OOB. You'd also put in my suggestion about a multi-human mode, where different players could log into the DB as different races, and SM-only functions were strict. There'd probably need to be a set-up screen for the SM to set initial tech points and build points for each player. The SM would probably also need to be able to change the DB pw, so that players couldn't get into it directly.
In setup phase, the SM would set up the player races, give them each a system, and give them the agreed-upon tech points and build points.
He would then send the DB to each player in turn. The player would spend tech points and BP to insta-build his squadron, specify a flagship, break it into TG (and maybe TF - the SM could then bump training levels up to an agreed-upon level when he got the DB back), and specify a set of transit times for the various TG (which might be "all TG jump at time 0" or "except for TG9 and TG10, which jump at T+5 hours).
After all the players had built their fleets, the SM would generate the "Arena" system, add jump points (with Jump Gates) to each of the player systems, and give them both Geo-Survey (but not warp survey) information about Arena. (The reason for doing it this way is so the players can't run a copy of the database into the future to discover the Arena system before building their fleets.) One fun trick on the part of the SM would be to put Arena in a nebula
The SM would move the player TG to the Arena WP in their respective systems.
The game could then be run one of two ways (Steve described one of these in a recent post, but I don't remember which):
1) SM-Heavy: The SM is the only one who advances Aurora and works with the DB. Essentially, the players are admirals, and the SM is they staff. The SM would send screen-shots and (significant) event reports to the players; the player would respond with e-mailed orders to the SM with instructions for the various TG. One of the cool things about this is that the SM could put speed-of-light delays into communications, especially if Steve added a utility that added a "speed-of-light-event" at a system location - specially flagged ships (i.e. the players' flagships) would generate an interrupt when they hit the light-speed shere around the event and announce the event's message text. The downside is that the SM would be the one that got to do all the fun micro-management stuff.
2) SM-Light: The players and SM mail the DB around between them a LOT (every time there was a significant event). It wouldn't be worth doing lightspeed delays here, since the players would have access to their DB. The downside of this one is that it would probably take a lot more wall-clock time, much more like PB(E)M.
I think this is doable or almost doable with Aurora as it stands now. I think Steve would only need to make a few small modifications to get it into a really workable state. I think it would be really interesting to see the ginormous Ogre-class leviathan battle to the death with the "clouds of fighters like stars in the sky" squadron.
Essentially, this is a suggestion for "Tactical Aurora", as an adjunct to the"Imperial Aurora" that we have now....
John
PS - I haven't discussed victory conditions. These could be something like orbiting a specified planet for a day, or getting a ship through the enemies jump gate (which would require doing a WP survey....).
