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Ok I have given much more thought to my potential remake of my old php game...this thread is for those that played the last one and I just want to discuss my new ideas a bit.

In the game you will be a person, who can control a company and buy stock in other companies etc. You can control more than one. You have your own personal wealth and then the companies have their value.

In order to give the controller a much larger role in the game I am thinking about having two balances for the controller. One is the controllers actual balance and the other is the cash the controller
has set aside to pay for things in game. The controller can deposit money in this account but not take it back and therefore at the start of the game, a lot of money can be poured into this account (say 100,000 credits) compared to a players starting of 10,000. Suppose this account was called the planet budget.

The controller could then choose to spend this budget on things such as:

New plot development.
Investment in new companies (Say you put up 5k initial investment, then the controller may do the same, and any earnings from the stock would go to the planet budget)
Subsidaries to companies.

Im thinking of more things, please contact me if you have any ideas.


On to the next thing, which was vaguely mentioned above. In the old game you could buy plots, which were randomly assigned to you. In the re-write the plots will have to be produced by the controller from the planet budget. As they are produced, they will still have random resources on them, but players can choose from the available plots which one they want to buy. There are more possibilities with this scenario but I dont want to touch on all of my ideas for this aspect of the game at the moment.

Stock inventories

This is not to do with the stock market, I am referring to physical stocks of resources i.e. salt, uranium, water etc.
Now in the old game there was one global inventory for each player which could store unlimited amounts of material. In the new version it will be quite different. Your company will still be able to purchase overall storage space, but otherwise you will be limited to storing produce at the facilities they are produced at but there will be limited storage space and production will stop if this space runs out. Instead of buying freighter space as in the old version, you will buy freighters for a cheap price which can complete one journey per turn from A to B and carry X amount of cargo, as you command it to. This has a multitude of advantages as will become apparent later.

Marketplace.

In the original version there was a simulated dynamic market place with invisible simulated consumers. In this version, nothing will have an actual base value as in the old version and instead of a global marketplace, players will ship their produce that they want to sell to the marketplace, and choose what price they want to offer it for sale(per unit). This way an actual marketplace with supply and demand can be realised. How this will work I dont know, im going to consult some people with better knowledge before finalising my plans on this.

Stock market.

One of my plans is to implement a stock market, which allows players to invest in other companies. This will hopefully add a whole other unique strategy and method of actually playing the game, as well as making the other elements much more fun too(and competitive, which is the whole aim of the game).

Well, thats a bit of a read :-P. If you have any comments then feel free to post them .

heh

Just read it all. The concept appears sound, but as your last tests proved, it's damn hard to find balance issues until you actually test these things.

The main thing that occurs to me is that with this level of complexity, the steep learning curve and competetive online enviornment, a lot of potential players might be scared off.

Anyway, it sounds solid apart from those thoughts.

Obviously there will be a large amount of testing to be done on the systems. I will make it structured so much of it can be changed or tweaked easily.

As far as the learning curve goes, its an unfortunate sacrifice im having to make to put all of these gameplay elements in. If people are not going to be bothered to learn how to play it then they probably wouldnt be very good. In short, im making the game not for the benefit of most people, just for the benefit of those smart enough to try it.

Sounds like a nice idea.

Can I suggest that there be something like... The game is split into, say, continents, or Cities, and when you start, you choose a city... So, there could be cheaper plots in a newly developed city, and more expensive ( but more productive ) plots in more established cities?

Also, as an extension to this ( or as a feature on its own ), have a Needs & Sales list...
So, when searching the marketplace to sell something, you dive into the "Needs" list, and punch in "Salt", which returns a list of all the players currently wanting salt. Then you have to manually search this list for the best buy, where delivery to other cities costs more credits...

Then, when you want to buy something, you go into the "Sales" list, and punch in what you're after... Then you find the one with the best price.

Using that, there'd have to be a message system in place, something where the player receives a message saying "Player X wants to buy XXXX units of Salt from you", then they hit accept, or deny.

Alternatly, have a scale, where when you post something that you need, you put a +/- value in... If someone offers you the goods within that +/- value of the asking price, then it automatically accepts given that your budget hasn't fallen bellow XXXX credits.

Just a few idea's I can think of

Most of that was derived from HardWar the game... It's quite good and well-balanced ( in the latest patches ), but it's all automated

Jess.

I might steal your needs and sales lits.

As for cities and continents etc. this would not be applicable in the futuristic game scenario.

The game is set on a newly colonized planet, which you must help to create an economy on.

'tis all good

No need to steal the idea, though... It's free

Jess.

xD