LibriumArcana.Games

The real world is kinda lame so I spend a lot of time thinking about other things.

The problem is I'm kinda lame... I've been doing the same few scenarios over and over again for about a year now!

There's only so much milage (heh) I can get out of the "teleported far away from civilization" scenario.

the scenario wrote: Daydream-me, most my RL friends (including the babies), and daydream-wife are magically teleported to an unknown location by unknown power.

The real life folks are most disturbed by this, though I'm ok with it; daydream me is a starfleet officer on undercover assignment (or whatever, it varies in the non-canon stories. Sometimes he's a retired wizard too, but not here.) so extraordinary things are nothing out of the ordinary in his experience.

I and the folks from real life have no special equipment. The wife though is wearing her starfleet uniform with a laser pistol, a knife, and her sword for whatever reason.... but no communicator. Not much to go on.

This location is tree-y and warm. Step one is figure out what is going on. First thing I note is there's a moon in the sky as well as a second bright red point visible in daytime. I'm almost immediately sure of where we are, and it's not Earth.

Nevertheless, I don't say anything yet. My wife tends to the ground situation by climbing a tree (which terrifies me; heights, ugh). From up there, she can see a river, a clearing, lots of trees... and nothing else.

We're inland and there's no civilization in sight.


Now, if it were just she and I, we could handle ourselves easily, but with the other people there, a lot of options are closed. They aren't going to be able to walk very far, and need to eat well, etc.

We decide we'd better head for that river and set up for a long stay. Once there, we set up a bit of a camp from local materials and sing the theme from Gilligan's Island - both verses.

The wife in daydream land is a medical doctor with additional high level degrees in chemistry and geology. This is crucial knowledge, as she's able to determine what's safe to eat and drink, as well as MacGyver up some cool stuff, including a bit of a flare.


Night falls pretty soon. I head over to the clearing to make myself useful by examining the stars. Doesn't take long to get a fix on our location: confirmed, planet A'millia, longitude thereabouts zero degrees, latitude very close to zero, but slightly south.

What luck! The equatorial spaceport is only a couple hundred miles to the north. If we could walk that, people. We're saved.

Problem is the folks from real life aren't able to walk hundreds of miles. The wife or I could do it though... but her knowledge is too important to separate from the group. A medical doctor and chemist is far more useful to them than an astronomer and programmer.

So it's decided: I'm gonna start walking north, following the river and the stars to the spaceport. The others will camp out there until I can send someone back to them.

I take the sword from her (she keeps the gun and knife) and set out that night. The plan is to travel at night to keep cool and navigate, sleep during the day, and gather foods and whatnot from the land.

Meanwhile, they'll camp out there and basically wait.



Montage time. Long, pretty uneventful walk, and the camping is just the same day after day.


In about a week, I'm finding my health weakening but keep moving... and then finally see something in the distance: a radio tower!

I make my way to it through intense discomfort.. seem to have picked up some kind of an infection... and there's a small biology research outpost. Inside, the people start to tend to me and call a helicopter for pickup. Mission accomplished.


Back at the camp, they start to wonder if something went wrong. It's been nearly ten days, and they've heard nothing.... but then, the sound of a propeller in the sky. Waving and setting off the flare and signal fire, the airplane flies past.... then turns around, and things start parachuting out into the clearing. Gear, supplies, and people.


They meet up with them and the situation is explained: they went looking, but feared they were too far away for a helicopter and didn't have room to land an airplane, so a new plan was devised: air drop some people and boats.

They'll take the boats down the river, with everyone at once, and meet up with a ship once they hit the open ocean.


Fairly uneventful. They set up about five boats and five sailors to manage them, put lifejackets on everyone, and start down. It takes about a day to get down the river by boat.


They see the ocean ahead, and the beautiful grey of a ship waiting for them. On the ship, they can finally get hot showers, fresh clothes, fancy meals, and of course, a proper medical checkup. Everyone is in good health.

It doesn't take long for the ship to make it to the spaceport (though if this took longer they might be ok with it... it's almost like a nice cruise now!), then they switch to a large airplane to fly up north to the main country.

There, they are reunited with me, almost fully recovered in a hospital from all kinds of problems - an infection, dehydration, poor nutrition, and blistered feet.


But, it's all ok. I show the real life folks my actual house here on this alien planet, and then it's back to the spaceport. A starship will take them home, and through the magic of time warp, they'll arrive the instant they disappeared.

However, the wife and I go with a science team back down south. What brought us there? Why there? It's incredibly lucky that it was so close to civilization; well over 99% of that planet is uninhabited by people. Why did it bring the real life folks? How did it get them from Earth over here anyway?

Lots of unanswered questions, and we were going to get to the bottom of it.


but that's where the story ends. They figure out it was just an act of plot setup and that's that. Strange world they live in.

The "be captured and bond with captor over disney songs" is ok but has run out of steam.

Daydream-me's world has been wiped out, but I, along with two other of my countrymen, were here on Earth so we survived it.

I build a time machine out of spare parts and turn back the clock. Sending my crew to retrieve past-me's starship and some ordinance, I meet up with past-me and try to convince him to join us.

To my surprise, he refuses.

Present-me wants to stop the apocalypse with a few suitcase nukes. We'll use future knowledge to slip in to the facility where the weapon is being manufactured, plant the bombs, and blow the whole thing to kingdom come. Meanwhile, one of us will tip off our government that something is up so they can take further action.

But, past-me isn't ok with this. He says it's a bad plan: it's driven by revenge and will have too much collateral damage. Besides, it sounds like suicide.

Present-me rips into past-me, calling him a selfish coward who doesn't appreciate what's at stake, but the reaction is so mean because present-me knows past-me has a point.


Meanwhile though, we weren't alone going back in time. Another team from the future came too, from the other folks wanting to stop us. We've had some entanglements with them in the past, and it looks like there's no easy way out this time.

I order my crew to take the ship and proceed without me in carrying out the plan. The persuing starship sends down a ground team to capture me and then goes to warp chasing my ship.


On the ground, I ask again if past me is with me or not. He still says no - what I'm doing is not right. The clonking footsteps of the persuing ground team draw near. They call for me to surrender.

I draw my pistol, but it'd be of no use against an armored attack team. My choices? Jump out the window and chance it. There's nowhere to run though, the ship is long gone. Fight them, but the odds of that ending well are next to zero.


I surrender, with past-me looking on quietly, not drawing any attention to himself. His moral resolve though convinces me to take another approach: words.


There's a human commanding the android attack team. It is she who breaks the ice. After chasing me for all this time, here, we finally meet face to face.

There's some small talk, a little banter. Then, we start to get into our personal lives. I talk about how I miss my wife and all the crazy things we used to do.

At this point, we don't see each other as the inhuman butchers we did in the chase... actually, we're not all that different. We're both reasonable people. We even share a song when talking about our homelands. (a slight variation on a part of "whole new world" from aladdin)


She says "maybe in another life, we could be friends"

and without missing a beat, I put on my William Shatner impression and say "this is another life. We've turned back the clock. Let's use this second chance."

She then puts a talking to the end and brings me, restrained, to her shuttle.


We somehow get back to the starship - meaning my ship managed to elude them - and set a course for their homeland. (All this time, past-me is still back there....)


I manage to negotiate my way into a meeting with my capturer's superior, and while there's a lot of hardliners in the government... there's hope in the dialog. Indeed, most their people are against any genocide and agree to put a stop to it, if we can all sit down and work this out. As an act of good faith, they release a number of our prisoners, including my beloved wife.

I call off my crew and hand things over to the diplomats.

And we all lived happily ever after. Except there's now two of me and one of the wife. Shit son. The plot reaper should have cleaned up that loose end, but that's cowardly writing.

And the various JAG in SPAAACE things are cool but I'm feeling something different.




so yeah i'm open to ideas

or you can write up some random stuff too!

daydream me is a starfleet officer on undercover assignment

i thought i was the only one

Anyone familiar with "If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life" by Jimmy Soul? A 60's song based on an early song that have great lines like this:

if you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife, so from my personal point of view, get an ugly girl to marry you

a pretty girl makes her husband look small, and very often causes his downfall.

[...]


well anyway i was listening to this song because i'm a filthy sexist.


but i just completely lost it on this line:


"though her face is ugly, her eyes don't match, take it from me, she's a better catch"



my brain often does these songs with fake me (who can sing, lol) and imaginary wife doing them together.

And her eyes don't match.



This sent me into a rofl fit for a solid two minutes.

So I was daydreaming a little this afternoon about a concept for a game. A Star Trek 4X space strategy game. Adam you'd like this I think. This was brought on by a recent playing of Star Trek Birth of the Federation, a game microprose released in 1999 who also did Master of Orion 1 and 2.

Anyway this game: Basically, you'd be Chief of Starfleet Operations, what Kirk was in TMP. You'd have the resources of SF under your command, the authority to deploy starships to many different sectors, and to refit them for appropriate missions. But it would be a point of departure from typical games like the aforementioned BotF. You wouldn't for example go 'ok I go to this colony world and tell it to build this or that'. Nor would you go 'I want to build a colony ship and send it to this remote system to expand my empire.' You're in charge of Starfleet, not the Federation as a whole. Starfleet has exploration, defense and survey missions as well as first contact and diplomatic duties.

So instead of building a colony ship and sending it to an uninhabitable system, you'd instead deploy a starship to explore several star systems over several turns, and then you'd have the option to recommend either more surveys (say deploy a dedicated science vessel to a particular system) or recommend to the Federation council that this new M-class planet in such-and-such sector is fit for colonisation. And if they decide that it is then after a number of turns pass, you get a new colony in that system.

The game should be dynamic. Random events happen but more than that, the galaxy changes bit by bit based on the player input. So take that above example. Let's say you had a Constitution class ship explore that sector over a number of turns. Oh a turn might equal a month in the game, or maybe a week, or somewhere in between. If you had a ship explore a sector over a number of turns, they will report in 'hey this is what we found' and the Captain will have written in his recommendations. I'll come back to Captains and so on but for the moment, let's say the recommendation is 'M-class planet found in system M-23 is comfortable by human standards. Landing party made preliminary findings all noted here. Possible avenue for colonisation.' Maybe the report goes into a bit more detail. In any case, I'm Chief of Starfleet Operations. I could go 'well, an M-class planet might be a good place to recommend colonisation, but what's the big picture.' You know it's an M-class planet, but the findings have been preliminary surveys by the landing party, nothing in-depth. So you could decide to deploy a dedicated survey vessel, like one of those small Oberth-class starships we saw in TSFS. Or you could decide to recommend to the Federation Council that this planet is fit to be colonised.

Lets say you do the latter instead of the former. A colony is established several turns later. But you didn't do that survey, so maybe they encounter something that affects them to their detriment. Like an alien disease. Or natives that weren't detected. Or some kind of hostile predator species. Whatever. Because you didn't do that survey, the colony suffers. On the other hand, you might have sent the survey vessel instead. It encounters that disease and half the ship's crew complement is wiped out before it goes under control. Or it's lost entirely (you lose contact with it, which requires you to send another ship into the same area to find out what happened). Lots of random, dynamic things can happen is the goal of all this.

The strategy part of the game is based on the starships you have, what you do to prepare them for deployment i.e. what equipment you assign them, which is dependent on what is available from stuff you had the foresight to get ahead of time; how many science or engineering or security or other personnel you assign them - you can have a balanced crew or you can emphasise one over the other for certain missions, like for a survey ship you'd probably put in almost all science to maximise your chance at 'discovering' something. But also in dealing with that discovery, because on the other hand if you don't have any security for example then say that survey team encounters hostile lifeforms, they might not deal with it in the best way possible because there were no redshirts on hand to take a bullet for the team. If you have only the minimum engineers required then your ship will mostly operate fine, but what if it takes damage from an accident? What if it gets into a battle? Or what if it encounters an alien vessel that needs repairs? Having an extra engineering team might be the difference between saving them or not.

The starships would probably be TOS vessels. You'd have the Constitution-class ships, Miranda-class ships introduced later as a kind of new class of cruiser that might be more modular than the Constitution class, or have different slots for equipment or have some kind of performance difference (in TWOK the Enterprise and Reliant seemed fairly evenly matched, and there isn't much different in volume between them, with the possible exception that maybe the Enterprise has more space for cargo/supplies and may have a bigger warp core; which suggests the Connie is better suited for long range missions, the Miranda is better suited for flying around in the Federation's backyard). You'd have ships like the Excelsior and the Constellation be late-game new designs that replace the aging Constitution ships, while maybe the Mirandas never become obsolete. And you'd have other classes like survey vessels, logistics ships, and escort ships.

One important part of the strategy aspect is choosing who the CO is of your ships. This might mean keeping the number of ships down for gameplay reasons but I would treat the Captains like how Rome: Total War or Medieval 2: Total War treated Generals. You'd have a number of officers in a pool and you select from among them someone to promote to the big chair. They'd each have abilities and attributes that have relevance to their role as a Captain. Some of these attributes might be good or bad or only work in certain scenarios. If you had a vulcan officer, he'd lack emotional empathy so that might be a crew morale penalty. On the other hand he'd have a disciplined mind so that could have a bonus is other areas. It could be that he makes first contact with a race that respects feats of strength or some warrior bullshit code, which being a vulcan might not serve him well. Yet he might be inclined towards diplomacy anyway so it could be another variable. Which department the officer belongs to is another factor as well. If the officer comes from a science background, that implies he'd be best suited for survey missions. Obviously any captain has to transfer over to command division anyway, but their background also determines their attributes and their personality which affects a number of variables. Someone who was dedicated to command might be the best fit for any given mission, but someone from a science background would do better in a survey role than it would in any other role, while someone from an engineering background might have like a '+1 to ship maintenance/damage control' attribute or something.

So you only have a certain amount of starships. You can't build them like you can in normal 4X games by simply going to a colony and say 'BUILD ME A SPACESHIP OK THX'. You'd have to operate within a budget that the Federation gives you. This means you have to determine what the priorities are and divide them between stuff you need done Right Now, to stuff you need done Next Year to stuff that needs to be done five years from now. You can't just go 'oh i have a billion dollars, i can has me 3 more constitution class ships'. Because if you do that, what happens when one of your ships gets into a battle with aliens, or pirates or needs repairs? What if you lose a ship entirely and all you had was money allocated towards building starbases here and there?

I don't want to call it 'money' per se because lol they don't use money in Star Trek lol, but basically the resources you have are given to you via the Federation Council, and that is itself determined by the prosperity of the Federation as a whole. More colonies might mean more people, which might mean more taxes collected (for lack of a better term). That colony might have a source of dilithium. That might increase the number of ships you can support. Although I would want to deemphasise individual colonies being money makers like you get in regular 4X games. Sometimes you can make an economic and manufacturing powerhouse out of a colony. I'd like it if you could go 'The Federation has hundreds of worlds as members' and not have to micromanage each and every one of them. Indeed, it would be tedious in the extreme to have a scale like that I would think.

In any case, the resource you get from the council can increase or decrease depending on certain events. This is the part of the game where dynamic events can occur that shape the galaxy. Remember in TOS when you had big space amoebas attack the galaxy, or in TNG when you have giant space crystals. Or sentient and murderous gas clouds. Stuff like that would be in the game. That's where your deployment of ships in various sectors can have beneficial or detrimental consequences depending on what the ship class is, what equipment it has, what its mission is, and finally who is in charge. Say a colony world is being threatened by a comet impact in x number of turns. They only just found out about it. You need a Constitution-class ship to deal with it. If you have one in the area that's great, if you don't then you have a certain number of turns to get one there in time. If you pull off a Constitution class ship from one area it might leave that area open to something else. Maybe a klingon ship decides to get up to no good then. Or maybe an unknown alien race makes an insertion instead who knows. The point is the game would be set up to constantly shift and dance depending on the players input and what decisions he makes.

Dealing with other empires would also fall under this category. Say you want to explore an uncharted sector. So you deploy two or three starships, maybe all of them Constitution class ships doing a year long exploration mission. Maybe the klingons or the romulans or whoever sees this deployment and goes 'what are you doing over there i don't like it imma send over my ships to annoy you guys'. So now that sector becomes a little 'contested'. Maybe every couple of turns one of your starships keeps running into a romulan bird of prey, or klingon cruiser. This could be an area where who the Captain is becomes vital. Say there are attributes for like 'will rather run away than fight' or the reverse. Say the guy who runs away actually ends up being pursued by the klingons. That might ensue into a battle if the ship can't shake them off. On the other hand, say the guy who's headstrong and aggressive instead stands his ground with the klingons and ends up intimidating them into pissing off. But both would depend on who the klingon Captain is and what the AI determined his mission was.

In any case, both empires or more exploring one sector can almost be guaranteed to find something to fight over. Maybe it'll be a planet with dilithium deposits. Maybe some kind of ancient technology or whatever. Maybe a planet that has a peaceful prewarp civilisation who is being influenced by a rival empire ('A Private Little War' from TOS for example) or maybe it's a society that's about to get warp drive so it's 'ready' for first contact. Thus diplomacy is just as important as going to war, but maybe war can happen, and that might be even tragic that it otherwise is in games like this as the ships you carefully look after throughout the game with the Captains you know start dropping like flies because of battles. I don't know how I'd want battles to be done. I have this image of a hex map with directional based damage and turn based movement that's based on how much energy points the ship has and what you decide to do with it per turn. But that can be in a follow up daydream.

Yep this is me daydreaming. Also it would be interesting to play the above game but as the klingons, romulans, gorn, orions, tholians etc.

That took me a while to read, but I'm glad I did - that sounds awesome! Gets a nice feel for Star Trek while being big. I wouldn't mind making that some time.... but I'm so far behind on my game making schedule that I'm not sure I'll ever catch up.


BTW have you ever played the ST:TNG game on the Sega Genesis? I liked that one too for catching a varied feel for Star Trek - you can wander all around, check out random stuff, read the library computer.

Sometimes hit a random alien ship out there, and you can talk, fight, or run away. The dialog trees are sometimes obvious, but sometimes pretty tricky - the Romulan captains sometimes don't react well to being overly nice and prefer you to stand up to them, and sometimes you can just convince them to leave.

It's like "what would Picard do" to talk out of it.... but you can also fire on them too, and when they get hurt, they hail you and you get round two of talking. Or you can keep shooting.

Then the away team missions are about solving puzzles for the most part - there's some action stuff (though the control is awkward as hell) but it's mostly figuring stuff out and figuring what guys you want to bring on the away team.



It isn't a huge game plot wise, and leaves some things to be desired, but I really like it since it does capture the feel of playing Captain Picard, making a lot of varied calls.

no I didn't play that game

My friend had 'A Final Unity' which was always good for a laugh - we'd warp over to the Romulan Empire and pick fights with Warbirds. Then when we got too damaged and run out of photon torpedoes we'd warp back to a starbase and get repaired and rearmed. Then warp back to the war with Romulas!

apparently there was a story in the game but eh