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I've seen nothing to indicate a coop campaign is planned, though tbh coop here seems a letdown since you don't even get your own fleet, you just split control of a standard size fleet.
That's why I like to ask what the dev actually means with "coop"...
Cheers
Pip
Is there by chance any possible way that any of this is going to be part of an incoming DLC?
Off the road I'm very excited about this game's release as I always wished for a BSG strategy game to see the light of the 12 colonie's dawn, so I'm eager to get to battlestations. ;)
It's good for us to have references to understand your desires better
Thanks!
Basic concept:
- both players get the story together; for simplicity sake both players are adressed as the same player so you can just keep the story and dialogue, you don't have to create a new "2 player story" with 2 player personas in mind
- give each player half of the fleet to control while increasing fleet size so both players always have something to do
- increase enemy fleet size slightly to keep the balance (if impossible because you are already rendering max units, increase their strength)
More advanced concept:
- each player has his own fleet that he controls and manages
- increase enemy fleets / difficulty accordingly
Highly advanced concept:
- have 2 players / fleets acknowledged by the game's story
- include some asymmetrical aspects into the cooperation
-- this means that having 2 players doesn't simply increase the amount of player controlled ships, but that each player has to specialize his fleet in his own way. So you don't win by throwing more identical ships at the enemy, but by shaping 2 specialized fleets that complement each other. Make it so that 2 different specialized fleets are more successful than 2 balanced almost identical fleets. You could also lock one player out of certain techs / roles / perks / whathaveyou if the other player picks them. It would add a totally new layer of strategy to the game if you had to think and discuss who picks what "role" and how to complement each other.
Quality of Life aspects:
- must have: be able to save progress
- make it simple to host / join
- make cutscenes skippable if both players press skip
Examples:
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance with the FAF mod has coop campaign.
"Clandestine" is a great game for asymmetrical coop. Totally different genre though, but I still want to recommend it. One player plays the field agent and the other player the hacker. The hacker gets to view security cameras to look after the field agent, he hacks networks, opens doors, and uses drop offs to help the field agent. Your view of the game is literally a computer inferface. The field agent meanwhile is playing a stealthy shooter game in 3rd person.
One of the greatest scenes is when the field agent is trying to get past a security guard, telling him a cover story about wanting to meet with the HR department about a job offer. The field agent has to pick dialogue options like in a rpg. The security guard starts asking questions and now the hacker has to find the corresponding emails on the company server to quickly gather the needed info so the field agent can keep the conversation going. Eventually the security guard calls the office to ask if the HR department is expecting a new trainee. Now the hacker has to intercept the phone call and answer it himself.
It's as if the hacking and the running around in Deus Ex were split into two games, one for each player.
(If you wanna skip from "inspiration" straight to the "suggestions", please look for the "II. Suggestions" line far below)
In RPGs and sort of shooters there's not much space to missunderstand a coop campaign, because mostly it's playing alongside another player as a team against AI, mostly while following a storyline until it's finished.
Now in this special case/genre it's quite a bit more complicated to get a clear definition, because a lot of developers defined the word "Campaign" here a bit different, according to the type of strategy game they made. For example you've got the well-known total war series, which claims to have a coop campaign, because it has got about two different kinds of events, listed below, but no story to be typically told. It's more about reacting strategically and tactically to events than experience a story that takes you with its drive. That's because it's not a campaign they did in TW(Shogun 2, Rome 2 and squels), they're rather offering a coop 'conquest' with some campaign related events.
Back to the mentioned, two events:
An example: In TW:Rome2 as the faction of rome you can enter the time of civil war when the senat tries to tear your house from leadership because of its overwealming influence it has gotten lately. This happens once and in the end, if you won this war, you are able to decide if you wanna continue as a republic or forge an empire. Furthermore you can find such events within the Crusader Kings franchise, where you can find a lot of inspiration. Those devs focussed their efforts on a lot of scripting, for the sacrifice of any graphical eye candy and semi-live battles that sadly only appears as a diagram fight without being able to do fine adjustments after the battle had begun. (Crusader Kings 2) You leave the tactics alone to the leaders you promote to be general of your troops.
Another example: These above called events leaked into the BSG universe, we'd have situations, we witnessed in the reimaginated BSG series, like ship accidents(mainly because of civil traffics or material fatigue), supply bottlenecks or sabotage acts (we don't have those sleeper agents during the first cylon war as we know, but there are some good concepts to be found in Blood and Chrome. In that reimagined version of the first cylon war we can observe that the cylons then were very versatile too, even without having human looking counterparts to operate behind enemy lines. Again you can find such event behaviour within the complex Crusader Kings series.
We saw, what kinda secrecy had to be maintained within the colonial fleet's hierarchy to deceive the cylons and lure them into a trap as a result of the entire pilot film. That (and some other pilots' comments about the war's acutal "success") shows us the distressed urgency the fleet command was forced to act with to get a last chance to win this war.
In order to draw a picture about how it could look specifically like with Battlestar Galactica Deadlock:[/b]
At a glance I'd spontaneously see two ways to get this kind of game into a coop campaign, a "Simple&Quick" one (still quite some work, not attempting to gloss over the impression), adapting to a lot of things already existing ingame. This, first version should probably contain the whole single player campaign to an ambitious one that leads towards new features, options and tasks for both players alongside each other. No matter what, it would lead to some kinda long term conquest/campaign on a strategy map.
First way, "Simple&Quick":
As far as I understood the single player campaign (without knowing yet too much about it's story progress atm) so far, the fastest way for a coop experience I see, would be:
The campaign host's options:- Able to build units through the mobile shipyard and add finished ships to his own or allied's reinforcement list.
- Able to order a variable number of ships.
The joining client's options:- Able to send ship requests to the host that can be confirmed by him and get - after building process - automatically assigned to his available reinforcement list.
- Able to order a variable number of ships.
Second way, "Ambitious":
After writing and overthinking it, there appears to be a third, hybrid way:
A way, which is settled between the "simple&quick" and the "ambitious" one.
And even a fourth, totally different suggestion without the actual singleplayer campaign content as is known. An alternate game mode, inspired by various aspects of the BSG board game - "Flagship Survival Cooperation":
-- Basestars X
-- Cylon Raiders X
-- Cylon Heavy Raider X
The cylons are therefore targetting primarly ship types, not what they're containing, so you can sacrifice an empty civ. vessle to buy some time by luring enemy ships into empty space, far away from a battle to gain tactical supremacy in battle or save the more important ships.
When the Bad End event triggers, the lossy situation makes the despaired commander to send away the remaining, civilian ships out on their own to perform a final, last strike against the cylons.
You can also sort the named ships out and call them otherwise to make this scenario work in first cylon war work as well. A background of a fallen outpost, cut loose from fleet high command, believing that they are probably the sole survivors of humanity. That's a solution without implementing ships from the new interpreted BSG series.
Sorry; it's nearly half a book. About ten years I made a gamedesigner diploma and since then I can't stop anymore with only a short suggestion. I'm open for communications and hope to be of help! Sorry if in some cases my english seems to be a bit wonky, it's not my native; doing my best!
Thanks for your time and best wishes,
Vale
P.S.: Thank you for caring about the same topic, Pille, nice to meet someone else with that desire!
Edit: @Pille
Oh well, we sould've talked to each other before, m8. =) Didn't see yours before finishing mine, cause it really took a long time, writing it. I really like your idea, not just because we're very close to the same conclusion in the end! Because of my already pretty big post, I didn't dare yet to touch the basic functions like save/load, client drop in/out and useful little mentions like that, which can of course have a genius impact on gameflow experience and avoiding network connection workarounds. I just totally agree with you, we had the same thought, thanks
Phase I - quick add-on: Support voice and/text chat. Host controls fleet movements in the war room. Client controls build and blueprint queues and recruits, trains and assigns officers.
Host can delegate control of any number of ship's in an engagement to client player in FTL insertion screen. If there is only one ship in the engagement the host can either control it or assign it to the other player. Players not controlling ships are observers.
If client drops all control reverts back to host. If host quits he can either turn the game over to client or disconnect and retain control. If host drops connection client errors out to lobby.
Phase II - campaign overhaul (probably a DLC): Rework campaign economy so that it tracks planetary status and operates on three levels: Planetary, System and Colonial.
Each planet in a system has a one slot build queue. The main planet in each system (e.g. Caprica, Scorpia) has a two build slot queue. Daidalos build queue remains unchanged. Hostile planets suspend their build queue and cannot assign new ships to their build queue while Cylon fleets are present. If the planet remains hostile for 2 turns ships in the build queue are destroyed and the resource points already spent to build them are lost.
Steadfast and stable planets contribute their resources to a common resource pool usable by any planet or Daidalos. Concerned planets contribute resources to a regional resource pool usable by any planet in the same system. Unstable planets keep their resources in its own planetary resource pool. When a unstable planet improves to concerned their resource points are transferred to the regional pool. If sll planets in a system are stable or above the regional pool transfers to the Colonial pool. When a planet's status degrades it cannot pull past resource transfers back, but all new resource income goes to the pool matching its current status.
When you expend resources they are drawn first from the selected planet, then from the regional pool and then from the entire Colonial pool. Planets can draw from their own planetary resource pool, their system resource pool and the Colnial resource pool but not from other planetary resource pools or other system resource pools. Each planet will therefore have a different amount of resorces available.
The game will keep track of where Ships and officers originated. Ships and officers from Daidalos and Steadfast and stable planets can be freely reassigned to any fleet and move anywhere on the map. These fleets will be identified as Colonial fleets.
Concerned planets will attempt to recall their ships and officers back to their home system. Recalled ships will be identified as Alpha, Beta, Delta or Gamma fleets and can only operate within their home systems. If a recalled ship is in a Colonial fleet without an officer the recall is automatic and the ship will detach and start jumping back toward its home system. If a recalled ship is in a fleet with a officer from a different planet the ship will have a chance of mutiny based on officer's rank with more experienced officers having a better chance of retaining control. Ships that mutiny detach and start jumping back toward their home system. If an officer from a concerned planet is commanding a ship from a different planet he will attempt to order the ship to detach and head to his home system with more experienced officers having a better chance of taking the ship back to his home system. Ships recalled to their region will be identified as Alpha, Beta, Delta or Gamma fleets and can only operate within their home systems while their home planet remains concerned.
Unstable planets will attempt to recall their ships and officers back to their home planets in the same manner that concerned planets attempt to recall their ships and officers. Ships recalled to their home planet will identify as PDF (Planetary Defense) fleets and cannot leave their home planet while it remains unstable.
Planets that leave the Colonies will sue for peace with the Cylons and disband their recalled ships and dismiss their recalled officers.
In a coop campaign you could have up to five players each controlling one or more systems and one player controlling Daidalos/Colonial fleets. Each system leader would then control their own resources and build queues and can choose to give some of their resources from stable and steadfast planets to other players each turn. They can also assign ships and officers from their steadfast and stable colonies to fleets controlled by other players.
In a five player coop campaign the Daidalos player would be dependent upon resource contributions from the other players.
In a coop campaign battle each player controls the ships in their own fleets and can choose to assign control of any of those ships to another player for the duration of the battle in the FTL insertion screen.
This will probably require new income values for each planet. While you are at it, I would make each planet's bonus available whenever the planet is garrisoned by a fleet with an officer and rebalance those abilities as necessary.
The overall goal of this campaign would be to retain control of the Colonies and defeat the Cylons before they force a majority of the planets to withdraw from the Colonies.
These proposed changes would make for a very deep open ended strategy layer for the campaign independent of the story mode.
I'm glad to see there are more people passionate about "proper" coop! I also like your ideas and hope we might get an update or DLC :)
If either Scorpion shipyards or the Daidalos is lost then both players lose.
You could also have it so that you could combine fleets from both players, so if both players have a fleet in contact with the same mission/cylons or the Cylons attack a fleet where another is present from the other player then both fleets take part in the battle with the difficulty adjusted to fit. (Cylon reinforcements)
infact main missions could require that both players have a fleet present (too many Cylons for a single task force)
If both players are in combat with different fleets then you could have both battles play out independantly.
If one player is in a battle while the other isn't then the player not in combat has the option to watch how the conflict plays out or take command of a reinforcment group made up of the ships from the closest fleet that the observing player owns that jump in 'x' number of turns after the combat starts based upon how far away the closest fleet they own is (the watching player has a big red button they can press to summon reinforcments).
The Cylons can detect this signal and can call for reinforcments of their own (not guaranteed they will) if the players use it so caution is advised incase the Cylons reinforcments turn up quicker than the Colonials.