So today was a work free day.
Yeah for living in a christian country!
And I polished a small game idea which is a mere attempt to bring NS to those without great reaction

Anyway attached to this post are 2 PDFs, explaining the basic gameplay mechanics for the alien and for the marine team. The next post has an PDF which covers objects that you can use/interact with/play as during the game. They also contain a small backgroundstory, explaining why the marines dont have a commander and why the cannot build structures etc.

I would like to hear some oppinions on this one and I am currently looking for people willing to play it and give usefull feedback so that balancing can be improved. I am also looking for someone who is a native speaker and thus able to put my "manual" into an easier to understand and much clearer english.

The game itself:
There are 3 parties:
Aliens, Marines, and the Host.
The game is played on NS maps. Aliens and Marines move from room to room through ventilation shafts and hallways. When members of the 2 teams meet in a hallway/vent combat occurs, which is handeled by the host. Both teams can utilize items found on the map to increase their strength, surviveability or gain valuable information. The victor is the last team alive.

Marines and Aliens vote for a teamleader. The teamleader PMs their teams moves and actions to the Host.
The Host then calculates what happens during that round. He looks up where aliens and marines meet, then checks for items/upgrade, calculates the combat results and finally PMs the teamleaders the results. He also creates a combat-log in form of a overview map, which shows all remaining items and chambers as well as the players positions for every round. Once the game is over those logs will be posted on the board, so that everyone can have a look on what happened during that game.

I would like to start a game after the current TWG is over, or if people are willing to participate in 2 games at once it could even start earlier.
Minimum players: 2+host
Maximum players: 12+host
I currently have only 1 map created and I honestly dont know how many players would work, so i am going with the NS classic on this one. Although 3 people are enough to play this game, it should be more interesting with more players, simply because it can add alot of conflict to the game. (Teamleader wants skulk to ambush in a room, but the skulks wants to move into the next room)

RoE:
-Teamleaders are required to exactly CC their teams moves and actions to the host, even if you think that is a stupid decision.
-Teamleaders can however deny their team certain informations. So you can for example deny a player the fact, that an RT has been found in room 15.
-Only Teamleaders are allowed to PM the host with movements and actions. And they have to PM the movement of their whole team in a single PM. Only the last PMs contents count.
So if you PM that your whole team moves to room 5. And after that you PM that Derrkick doesnt move to room 5, but to room 6. Then ONLY derrick will move.

Map sample:
vents are red, vent exists are green, hallways are blue, rooms are grey


Cookies to Im_Lost for hosting these:
http://twg.isa-geek.com/faskalia/

Tatata

I will participate in this, I would even be up for doing it at the same time as TWG. I'll read through and revise the rules tonight. Also, would you like me to host these files, so that you could just link to them instead of having to deal with the painful attachment limits?

Yes, that would be nice. I have some FTP space myself, but I use it for my private programming projects and dont want to create a "public" area there. Thanks.

Firefox does not like you attachment, it wanted to open it as a pdf, and there was no save as option.

Anyway, I am interested, in playing this.

You can do this and TWG, at least for the players, might be hard on the leaders and hosts.

...

Aberration: HMG
Full name: Heavy machine shotgun

Last time I looked HMG was short for Heavy Machine Gun...

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Is this going to be a one life thing?
I think we should give people like 3 lives to use, or something like that.
You die, you lose everything you had and have to restart at the hive/main marine room.

Team leaders some a little too powerful on the information controlling side of thing...

I think I'll join in on the game too

Question:
How exactly is the combat system going to work? There are little hints here and there, but no real in-depth one I can find.

Comments:
Looking at some of the stats, I'm wondering if the aliens may be overpowered or not. A basic skulk can remove a marine from the game in 1 hit, which seems unfair, especially with ambushing. An Onos is the same way; 1 hit from an Onos kills anything marine, including HA and JP. I think it would be better that HA get at least 2 hits from Onos before death, and JP has some type of invulnerability to Onos (%60 chance of dodging a hit or maybe a first hit miss guarantee for JP?).

Also, there may be a problem where you got a large portion of the alien team camping an RT until they get the required amount of RP's to go fade/onos.

Side Note:
Oh, and Eternaly_Lost, just right click on the link and select "save link as" and save it. It should save it as a .php file, so just open that file using WinRAR. It worked for me .

Exactly why I think we should have some from of limited lives.

I think the RT problem is solved by giving only giving it to one person in that room.

I uploaded the files at http://twg.isa-geek.com/faskalia to view. It's currently all in .txt files, because I figured it would be an easy format to use for a single file that will probably be viewed and edited frequently for now.

What are the team ratios going to be? I figured the instant kill ability of some aliens was fine if they had a smaller team. Also, since a single plain marine will kill a single skulk in an encounter that neither of them expect, I don't see how that's totally skewed toward a skulk. Even if the skulk ambushes the marine, the skulk still dies.

And if all of the aliens camp an RT, they are kind of screwed if a group of marines walk in. I would think that SOF becomes pretty important for the aliens to get, but that's just me.

And to Faskalia, is there going to be a nice method of communication set up between people on a single team? One possible method is to set up an IRC channel for each team. I know you put in the rules that the team captain controls everything, but that seems kind of silly. It doesn't even fit with the aliens in NS.

Ok, I though it would be obvious how combat worked:

During the movement phase the host moves the players one after another in a randomly chosen order. This order is randomly chosen every movement phase.

All players are moved 1 room.
Then the host checks if alien and marine paths did cross or if aliens and marines end up in the same room.
If they did cross he calculates combat.
Repeat these 3 steps until players have no more MP left, or there are no more movement orders.

Combat calculations.
Every player has one attack per round, unless specified otherwise.
A player deals damage against a randomly target on the other team.
The damage infliced is directly substracted from the targets health.

Combat starts:
-Host checks for ambush
-If an ambush is setup and succesfull the marine he first entered the room suffers X DMG, where X is equal to the number of ambushing skulks.
-After that marines attack because of their longe range. Every marine attacks a randomly chosen target, unless specified otherwise by the teamleader in the PM sent to the HOST.
-After marines have used up their attacks aliens attack the marines. Again the target is randomly chosen unless specified otherwise.
-Evey attack takes upgrades into account, except for the ambush which deals a fixed amount of DMG and is no attack per se.
-A players that is brought down to 0 HP will flee with he remaining MP left. If he has 0 MP left he will nontheless be given 1 MP that he can use to flee.
-A player that is brought down to -1 HP is dead.

--To some it up:
Ambush first.
Then Marines with first strike!
Then alien go melee.
If your damage is higher than the enemies HP you will kill him unless items/upgrades make you miss.
If your damage is equal to the enemies HP you will make him flee. A fleeing player that encounters another combat is as good as dead.

I would like to stress the importance of the teamleader:
Think about what you write in a PM. You can lay down rather complex tactics by using lots of contitionals.
Decisions that are not specifid in the PM but have to be made (which way to flee back to the hive). Will be made by the host and random.org.
So a marine PM would like this:

The conditions are worked from top to bottom. With the top conditions taking priority over the bottom ones.
This is just a small example but it could be made even more precise. For example: If x5 meets a marine with 1HP or less he uses a medpack on him.




I was planning on using only 1 live, because you flee when hitting 0 HP allowing you to get back to battle, unless you meet enemys on your way back to the hive/MS. But depending on how it plays more lives might be a good idea.



Well the teamleader is the team leader. He can deny his players informations, but he has to forward his players movements exactly as he has been told. So although he controls the flow of information he cannot control his players directly.
It also introduced the team-leaders, because it removes some stress from the host. He should already be pretty busy with setting up the map-log for every round and calculation the combat-movement results. No need for him to have to deal with 20 different PM formats.



When all aliens camp an RT, they cannot setup ambushes which should be vital to the early alien game. And then there also the option of putting a "res per round per RT" limit into the game And skulks cannot directly remove a marine with 1 hit, because at 0 HP marines will flee.
Vanilla skulk vs vanilla rine looks like this: