Mercenary Commander
The United Nations of Earth, in an effort to instil peace for mankind, has decreed every single military disbanded. And amazingly, they all did. Unfortunately however, this put millions of soldiers out of work, and thousands of pieces of military hardware into warehouses. Also unfortunately, the nations of Earth still wanted to gain the upper-hand over their neighbours, and without a national military, this became the job of enterprising mercenaries.
And what with all the ex-soldiers and old military gear now lying around, these mercenary groups were everywhere.
That's the premise. Now I've put a bit of thought into it and it's gonna be focusing on mid-small scale ground combat. If you play WH40K, think up to 1000pts of space marines. If you don't, then that'll be about 20-30 guys and a few of vehicles. Or less guys and more vehicles. Or no vehicles and loads of guys. But that sort of size.
It'll be set somewhere just after WWI, and part of the game will also include R&D to try and outdo the other players in the field. I'll be fairly liberal with how fast sciences progress, but don't expect to go from bolt action rifles to 500m tall robots with plasma guns in a hurry.
The various men and woman that get thrown into the line-of-fire will be one of two types. Officers and enlisted. Officers lead your men into battle, be it at the head of squads or when in command of vehicles. They have names, stats and can gain skills and other intersting things. They also find it harder to die. Unfortunately for the enlisted, this is not the case. They are nameless and generally their only defining feature is what they get assigned that mission, be it driving to carrying the squad's heavy weapon. They are cheap, some-what cheerful, and are expected to die regularly.
Finally, every soldier, along with their equipment, vehicles, and other war paraphinalia will have a points value. When a player fields an army, they provide it's points value and they'll be assigned a side such that the two teams are as even as possible. At the end of the battle, officers will gain experience and the player will gain precious moneys to be used to research new equipment or buy/build it, hire new soldiers to replace the inevitable casualties and otherwise improve their force.
The dilemma I currently have is how I want to do turns. I've found that I much prefer to play games where I'm not limited to hexes or squares, and would to run one such as that, but I also know running a game like that on a forum is a pain in the ass. There is however a way to get around this. I like to think I'm a half-decent programmer, so I could write an interface which'll allow each player to input their commands directly, without having to explain it in such a way that I can't accidentally misinterpret. This also means we could include much more exciting things, like initiative orders, complex maths, and fog of war.
So, thoughts, opinions, ideas?
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Topic: Mercenary Commander - Brainstorming (Read 919 times)