A game idea

[Destructionator XV]

I've been thinking about writing a sci-fi game about territory and diplomancy. It would be something like this:

The game is set in a playing field broken up into sectors. The sectors each have systems in them. Systems all yeild different kinds of resources. Maybe people, or energy, or dilithium or whatever. Some systems also are the homes of jump gates used to jump to another sector.

A new player can join the game at any time, with a small fleet in a random system. With his ships and diplomatic prowess, he must convince the natives to allow them to build a base.

Now the player sets military quotas and taxes. As resources come in, he can put his soldiers either as crews on his new ships, construction people building varous structures, or engineers researching new technology. Soon, he expands to another system and taxes the locals, or acquires technology from them. This repeats over and over.

But the interesting part is that the players will have to negotaite with each other for new technology or military alliances to conquer other players. For this you will be able to send messages and ships to other planets, and the enemy may or may not know know about it. The messages will be coded, but with rather weak encryption. This way, a player can set up an antenna and interecpt the message in game, and decode it using his own skills, or not decode it and never know the consequences.

Combat and in game things (having a decode skill on a chaacter for example) will be done somewhat like the D&D d20 system.

Time will advance in real time. The whole game updates every 6 hours or something - fast enough to stay interesting, but not so fast so people will be ok if they only check the game every day or two.

Does this basic idea sound interesting at all, or would I waste my time programming it? Questions, comments, suggestions, anything is welcome.

[B4UTRUST]

Sounds interesting, though there seem to be a few games out there similar to this already.