After @urquan's recent post about participation on TheMotte not being as enjoyable anymore, I dropped a comment suggesting a group creative activity, to take our mind off the Culture War, and give people other reasons to come here. The idea to make a mod for Freespace 2 got fairly good feedback, so I'm making this post to give you my pitch, and to coordinate development.
High Fleet (in Spaaace)
Freespace is a space fighter sim that sends you to fight alongside massive capital ships duking it out with each other with giant beams, shells, and missiles. It does a very good job making you feel like you're a part of a bigger war machine, doing your part to fulfill a grander strategy... the problem is most of that is accomplished through good mission design, scripting, and storytelling. You might sometimes wonder if you could have turned the tide by knocking out a beam cannon, or disabling a ship's engines before it gets away... why yes, you could, and this is why these subsystems have been made indestructible during that particular mission. Such are the joys of story-driven games, so I'm not even mad, but this made me feel there's something missing in the game.
By contrast High Fleet is a part-strategy part-action-arcade roguelike, where you take your fleet behind enemy lines to strike at their heart. The combat mechanics are the least interesting part of the game in my opinion, but the strategic view in which you spend most of your time feels very compelling. You can split your fleet, and have your detachment clear up the area to prepare for the arrival of your flagship, gather intelligence, or look for allies. You do all of this while dodging patrolling enemy strike groups.
So why not combine them? FS2 had been open sourced, and now features an extensive Lua scripting API, and an optional libRocket based interface. It is possible to implement a High Fleet-like strategy game in libRocket, and dynamically generate a combat mission upon encounter. The lore of Freespace has a few things that lend themselves to this sort of strategy game:
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FTL is done through subspace jumps. Throughout the vanilla campaign there are references to ships needing to power up their drive before they can make a jump, and while to my knowledge rules governing subspace drives have never been hashed out (and may in fact be contradictory, in service of the storyline), setting up something simple like “bigger ships need more time to charge their drives” will already create quite a bit of strategic depth. Maybe you have a destroyer that's more than enough to deal with a threat you detected, but if you use it, it'll be comitted to that battlefield for an extended period of time, what if they're just luring you away from their true objective? Do you scramble a few fighter wings, and send them instead, since they'll be easier to recall if necessary?
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Inter-system jumps rely on “jump nodes”. This limits where you can travel to from the current system, and allows for blockades which you might need to break through (or set up yourself if you want to make sure your enemies won't escape).
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Subsystem mechanics. Each ship has a bunch of subsystems, typically: weapons, engines, sensors, and navigation. You might not have enough firepower to destroy an enemy ship, but maybe it's worth it to sacrifice a few fighters to knock out a subsystem? Maybe you're want to raid a freighter convoy, but there's a patrolling anti-fighter cruiser nearby that will make mince meat out of you. If you knock out it's engines it will give you enough time to deal with the freighters. Maybe you're trying to lose a pursuit, and there's no way you can jump out of their sensor range - why not knock out their sensors then?
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Ship specialization. It's hard to give justice how much room to play there is here, even with just the vanilla assets. Some capital ships are very good at taking out fighters, some are very good at taking out other capital ships. Bombers are a threat to even the biggest capital ships, but are vulnurable to fighters and interceptors, and need to get into point-blank range or there's a high chance their payload is intercepted. Reconessaince will be very important, and the player will need to adapt their strategy to what they have vs. what they're up against.
Hopefully, the result will be the best of both worlds - dynamic strategic gameplay, with a fun combat system.
What we have, and who/what do we need?
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I'm a developer, and I'm happy to handle to coding side of things, although the more, the merrier
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@FCfromSSC has offered to handle the 2D/3D art. I don't know if you can/wan't to handle this side in particular FC, but we'll need someone who can design a nice interface.
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@netstack has provisionally offered to join in unknown capacity.
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a writer would be nice to have. A strategy game could still be fun with no/minimal story, but if we're cloning High Fleet I think it would be nice to have a storyline. If nothing else, can someone please come up with a title for this project!
What's the plan?
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I'd say step one would be the UI, and the intra-system strategic gameplay, and dynamic mission generation.
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After that we have to decide about the inter-system/"high level" strategic gameplay. Do we indeed just copy High Fleet, or are we adding/changing something?
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Do we use the Freespace universe or make our own? The former is easier, and we can reuse existing assets, but maybe our artists want to run wild?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Heh, this takes "High Fleet in Space" a little bit more literally than I meant it. I really like the design, but I'm a bit obsessive about having art, mechanics, and narrative in relative harmony, so the giant fuel tanks make me wonder:
Is fuel-to-rest-of-ship ratio a constraint all factions are subject to?
High Fleet was using 2D to cheat with exposition a bit. You could see the tanks from the screen, but they were covered by armor from the sides. If it's so exposed in 3D, how vulnerable does that make the ship? Is landing a blow on the tank going to destroy the whole ship? Just lose it's fuel?
I guess one way out of the above dilemma would be to say - the ships are carrying anti-matter, if you blow up the tanks, the whole thing goes to hell, but most of the tanks are armor, and redundant containment mechanisms, so it's extremely hard to punch through.
Otherwise the concept of long-range missile artillery should work pretty well with the FS engine, I've seen ships in action that work on the principle.
Or, if by "extreme range" you meant "effective even from outside the scope of a typical battle", we could have the missiles launched from the strategic view (like the A100's and Kh15's in High Fleet), which would force the target to scramble interceptors and hope they can take them down before they hit.
With appropriate caveats that I'm just the artist and am not trying to dictate game design...
I was thinking of it as a strategic-view cruise missile platform, but it could just as easily be used as a pocket carrier or a short-range missile-spam platform, as needed. I'm thinking of it as the sort of ship that really does not want to take a hit or mix it up with enemy fighters; it wants to harass from long range, and then skedaddle while its more capable escorts deal with any pursuers.
uh, maybe? Or maybe there's different sorts of drives, with a cost/compactness/minimum-practical-size/thrust tradeoff going on, and bigger classes of ships can use much more efficient and less vulnerable engines. That's what I'm leaning for here, with this being one of the smaller options that maximizes cheapness at the cost of pretty much everything else. Maybe different factions have different varieties?
...Can we do hit-location-based durability/armor/damage? subcomponent damage? Assuming the ship isn't just a brick of hitpoints, I'd say it's probably a good thing for ships to have weak points, even just from a theory standpoint. Evenly-distributed all-aspect armor is never going to be as effective as selective armor; all aspects aren't equally likely to take hits, and putting the armor where the hits are most likely to come from and around the things you least want to take damage means you get thicker armor where it's likely to do the most good: particularly the part you're aiming toward the enemy's guns, which is generally the front. Here's an annotated example of how I'm thinking about the subcomponents. The red section and green sections surround the bulk of the reactor in fairly dense armor, with the drive blocking damage directly from the rear. There's a relatively small area from the rear 3/4s angle that would be particularly vulnerable, with seems reasonable for a ship like this, but of course we can rework all this as needed for fluff or game mechanics.
There's also the question of what protection is relative to. the thin black rectangles spiraling around the hull are my stand-ins for the missile launch ports, to give an idea of relative scale. I'd assume a standoff anti-ship missile hitting pretty much anywhere on this ship is probably a catastrophic kill; the main hull is full of ordinance, and a big anti-ship missile can probably penetrate the reactor cladding regardless. Ditto for things like spinal-mount railguns or beams, or other dedicated warship weaponry. Presumably the armor it has is for fighter-class weapons and other light ordinance, but that's really a game design decision, not solely an art one.
I'd say puncturing the tanks just means a fuel leak (or disposable coolant for emergency heat disposal while rapid-cycling weapons or driving the reactor harder, if that's a thing mechanically or in fluff). tanks of this sort could even be a sort of armor, if they're loaded with inert gas or liquids used for reaction mass or coolant or similar; the old St. Louis cruiser used its coal bunkers in a similar fashion, if lore is to be believed. Reactors seem like the better "puncture this and the whole ship goes up" target. for this one, the reactor's buried under some pretty thick plating from the sides, and by the drive from the direct rear. So we could have:
tanks as volatile weak points
tanks as ablative armor, with no penalty to the ship's short-term performance
tanks as subsystems, debuffing or status-effecting the ship when struck.
...And then mix and match these as desired for a given hull. All this is just spitballing, though.
Don't hold back. I like the way you think, and brainstorming is good even if we run into a dead end occasionally. Worst case is that something sounds too complicated, and I'll put it on the "nice to have" list.
I didn't originally think of this when I was considering which parts of High Fleet to clone, but I think it's a great idea. Cruise missiles were pretty fun in HF. I think it might work pretty well with Freespace mechanics too - like I said fighters and "AA" guns can shoot down bombs. Also, fighters have afterburners that give a short boost, so if we balance the speed of cruise missiles, so fast fighters on afterburners can just about keep up, we could set up something like the missile intercept minigame from HF. You'd get two shots at the incoming missile - once facing it as it's coming at you, and the second time when you turn around and hit the burners, but if you don't shoot it down before they run out, the missile leaves you behind and hits it's target.
Oh, I completely misunderstood the design. I thought the main hall was a giant exposed fuel tank. This pretty much resolves all the doubt's I had.
I'll have to check what's available out of the box, but I know for sure there's a component system, and you can arbitrarily assign hit points to each component. I think you can also trigger reactions if they get destroyed. There's also a dedicated class of damage for them, so some weapons can be better at taking them out, than the generic parts of the hull.
There might be an armor system under the hood, but I'm not sure. If not I saw a mod that was advertised as having some new armor - based damage system. I haven't played it but it light be worth looking into.
Yeah, since this is long-range artillery it makes sense for it to be fragile, if anything bigger gets it's hands on it.
I like the second, and third option. Worth playing around with.
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