I've been thinking about the logistics of how to build and maintain a dwarven empire. The core issues are fragmentation and player fall-off. Bay12 members are NOTORIOUS for refusing to work together and share, and insisting on doing their own thing. Observe, HnH, Terraria, Wurm, Minecraft... Every multiplayer attempt inevitably falls to people just drifting in their own direction because they want their OWN piece of land and empire, and because of that they fragment, fail to work together, and ultimately falter. The other issues is players who join in briefly, usually all at once, and within a month everyone's stopped playing.
My suggestion? We start as a single empire with an oligarchy, probably myself, greatorder, and Naxza, as these are people I see on the forums very regularly and can be contacted to handle the game even if they're not playing the game - a simple request like "can you step down from your government position and hand it to someone else". This is just for long term security, to ensure the empire leaders are actually available and the empire doesn't fall into a terrible limbo state where the leaders are inactive and no one can access higher orders, but there's still people keeping the lower functions running...
Then, we'll work off the home system - whatever system we happen to start in - and produce wormhole ships. Once we can handle that, we can fortify the home system with industry and taxes, and start mapping neighboring space. Certain neighboring systems will be designated as "corridor" systems, owned by the empire proper and under direct oligarchy control, serving little more purpose than refueling stops, tax harvesting, and transit routes. Branching systems will fall under specific individual control, by claiming it under the empire's flag and then assigning others as the governing authority over the system, effectively making them a "state" under the unified "country". For the most part, these will be self-governing, except those which show particularly high-value materials available, which will undergo very communism style taxation and redistribution (primarily central stockpiles that others can then draw from), because exceedingly high quality materials are of exceeding value.
Ships could be provided from a central yard, where the highest tech materials are collected to produce vessels for empire purposes. These, as well as guns, ammunition, and armor suits, would be available for empire campaigns by default, preferably encouraging players to use the same ship type during invasions, so we can swoop in with 30 dwarf-faced vessels battering down the enemy's shields and ransacking their colonies. Players wouldn't need to expend their personal fleet during empire campaigns.
Empire campaigns would also be an ideal time to bring in transient players - those who don't have enough interest to hold the empire building, but would like to participate in battles, able to act as additional ship pilots or ground forces
TL;DR - Core worlds will be empire controlled, while side systems will be under more individual control, very valuable resources being taxed and ships/equipment being available freely.
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Topic: Shores of Hazeron (new thread with the last updates) (Read 139750 times)