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[AzyWng]

Maybe make it so that you’re kinda screwed either way.

Exaggerate things and waste assets, and other people die - not to mention the risk of you being removed if your deception is found out.

If you remain true and HQ/your suppliers are just apathetic as big corporations always are, you’re not gonna get the supplies you need to survive.

Incidentially, in the combat portions of the game, you have to exercise restraint if you want physical evidence - explosives destroy terrain and evidence.

Include the possibility of making data open-source, adding a public relations element to the game. Anything usable as evidence (combat reports, analysis of physical evidence, etc.) can be used or even fabricated entirely, with risks similar to that of fabricating evidence.

The public has 2 relations bars you have to keep track of - how they view you, and how they view the enemy. You need to keep your view good while keeping the enemy’s bad. If the former gets too low, you’ll lose reputation until you get ousted. If the latter gets too high, the public may become interested in making peace - which is an unfavorable outcome for you for various reasons.

Add the possibility of an interrogation minigame for extracting info from prisoners, to further drive home the fact you and the organization you work for aren’t good people (and perhaps that your enemies may be better than they are). It’ll be horrific and closely resembling real life, from methods used (where you can choose anything from playing noises that prevent them from sleeping to medieval-era torture techniques), the possibility of the subject giving false info, and, unless the enemy is made to seem extremely morally reprehensible in the eyes of the public, a massive loss of public approval if the use of torture is discovered (represented in-game by a huge reputation hit that may be enough to get you ousted even if you haven’t done anything else wrong).

[JoshuaFH]

It'd be cool if there could also be a politics element in there as well. Where the supplies you're afforded are based on the necessity you've proven to them, but also by how much the company just likes you and/or can't afford to not help you. You can schmooze, bribe, do favors, extort, blackmail, threaten, just all kinds of corrupt no-goodery so that the people in charge have artificial, personal reasons for granting your requests rather than natural reasons of necessity.

[LordBaal]

Maybe make it so that you’re kinda screwed either way.

Exaggerate things and waste assets, and other people die - not to mention the risk of you being removed if your deception is found out.

If you remain true and HQ/your suppliers are just apathetic as big corporations always are, you’re not gonna get the supplies you need to survive.

Incidentially, in the combat portions of the game, you have to exercise restraint if you want physical evidence - explosives destroy terrain and evidence.

Include the possibility of making data open-source, adding a public relations element to the game. Anything usable as evidence (combat reports, analysis of physical evidence, etc.) can be used or even fabricated entirely, with risks similar to that of fabricating evidence.

The public has 2 relations bars you have to keep track of - how they view you, and how they view the enemy. You need to keep your view good while keeping the enemy’s bad. If the former gets too low, you’ll lose reputation until you get ousted. If the latter gets too high, the public may become interested in making peace - which is an unfavorable outcome for you for various reasons.

Add the possibility of an interrogation minigame for extracting info from prisoners, to further drive home the fact you and the organization you work for aren’t good people (and perhaps that your enemies may be better than they are). It’ll be horrific and closely resembling real life, from methods used (where you can choose anything from playing noises that prevent them from sleeping to medieval-era torture techniques), the possibility of the subject giving false info, and, unless the enemy is made to seem extremely morally reprehensible in the eyes of the public, a massive loss of public approval if the use of torture is discovered (represented in-game by a huge reputation hit that may be enough to get you ousted even if you haven’t done anything else wrong).

So Adeptus Administratum middle management, the game?

[bloop_bleep]

Maybe expand it even further to the point where you’re in command of a full army and have to convince the public that the huge war you’re currently fighting is completely justified.

[Egan_BW]

Just depends what ratio of tactics to politics you want. Being the general who's in charge of the whole army but has to justify this to the public/civilian government would be an almost exclusively political game, like CK2. Whereas if you're in charge of a platoon or something, you'd have a nice mix where you're managing individual units in battle, and also have to deal with higher ups and other organizations. And the two modes can be well intertwined, where perfomance in battle affects your reputation politically, and political maneuvering affects your options in battle. Good performance has let you convince your superiors to give your troops more powerful experimental rifles, but you promised a local NGO that you'd stop blowing up shrines...

[JimboM12]

i wish there was a zombie survival sim that lets you go off the rails and be awesome. dead rising is close but what im talking about is something with artificial restrictions like movement and controls that make it feel like you've manipulated them perfectly to perform some awesome move.

what im thinking is like, resident evil 4 but with 7 days to die needs with a evil dead theme over it.

an example is like, if you go out to scavenge a supermarket but a giant zombie pops out with a bunch of smallies, you kite the group around and hack up/shoot the small ones and throw your chainsaw through the big one to kill it. and like, the background music wasn't some crappy horror sting, its like fucking stone cold crazy by queen.

[Kagus]

The restricted mechanics -- radical execution reminded me of the old days playing the Zombie Master mod for Half-Life 2. The ZM would often spawn large hordes of very cheap, very expendable shamblers to block areas off and force players to waste ammo on clearing them out. That was, of course, unless you managed to get up onto a high place and then bounce your way across the hitboxes of the shamblers, careening over the heads of the horde as the game desperately tried to find a place for you to land that wasn't already occupied by something, and with a bit of suggestion from the controls you could manipulate it to safely plant you on the other side of the horde, bypassing the zombie blockade altogether.

"Surfing", it was called.

[JoshuaFH]

How about a game that takes place in a fictional country locked in perpetual war with another country. Your role is to act as the dean of a military academy and train young and aspiring cadets before they go on to the war. You'd be tasked with keeping up with the war through news reports and hearsay from connections, managing the students lives, determining their training and learning priorities, learning about them and socializing with them, and best preparing them for the conflict that is destined for them.

You don't actually get to witness the fights they participate in, once they graduate, new students come in to replace them. After so long though, you'd get reports of their success, failures, or heroic/cowardly deaths on the battlefield. I imagine there'd be some RNG, but for the most part your efficacy in training them has a large influence on these battle reports, and they effect these reports have is informing you where you've gone right or wrong, whether students actually want to enroll your in academy, and most importantly the funding you get from the government for doing well or poorly.

After a long period of time, the reports you see can show that your contribution is turning the tide of the war. And veteran students that get honorably discharged can become new instructors that have real experience of war fighting and can confer that to their own students.

I'd imagine there'd be so randomization in the students, in names and appearances, and maybe in native talents and personalities, and this would enrich the narrative by making your students more recognizable and endearing, and helping you to steer students to what it is that they can do best.

I suppose the game could be story driven like Papers, Please, or it could be like a Tycoon game where you're on a time limit to complete such-and-such objectives with such-and-such funding and available manpower and resources available to you.

[Mesa]

How about a game that takes place in a fictional country locked in perpetual war with another country. Your role is to act as the dean of a military academy and train young and aspiring cadets before they go on to the war. You'd be tasked with keeping up with the war through news reports and hearsay from connections, managing the students lives, determining their training and learning priorities, learning about them and socializing with them, and best preparing them for the conflict that is destined for them.

You don't actually get to witness the fights they participate in, once they graduate, new students come in to replace them. After so long though, you'd get reports of their success, failures, or heroic/cowardly deaths on the battlefield. I imagine there'd be some RNG, but for the most part your efficacy in training them has a large influence on these battle reports, and they effect these reports have is informing you where you've gone right or wrong, whether students actually want to enroll your in academy, and most importantly the funding you get from the government for doing well or poorly.

After a long period of time, the reports you see can show that your contribution is turning the tide of the war. And veteran students that get honorably discharged can become new instructors that have real experience of war fighting and can confer that to their own students.

I'd imagine there'd be so randomization in the students, in names and appearances, and maybe in native talents and personalities, and this would enrich the narrative by making your students more recognizable and endearing, and helping you to steer students to what it is that they can do best.

I suppose the game could be story driven like Papers, Please, or it could be like a Tycoon game where you're on a time limit to complete such-and-such objectives with such-and-such funding and available manpower and resources available to you.

A story mode that follows a more pre-planned narrative and some kind of 'sandbox' mode aren't mutually exclusive, so that could work.

[Dunamisdeos]

That..... sounds really awesome.

[LordBaal]

War Academy.

You could even stablish a franchise set on different ocations and historic periods, even fantasy ones.

[Parsely]

It sounds like it could easily be just another formulaic Tycoon game, you'd really need to nail the narrative elements for it to be interesting to me.

[LordBaal]

I think we have something good coming on here. Quick, someone fill a patent! This might be my ticket outta here!

[JimboM12]

It sounds like it could easily be just another formulaic Tycoon game, you'd really need to nail the narrative elements for it to be interesting to me.

this is where weekly anecdotes about what your students are up to comes into play. traits and stats may change how these events go; almost similar to crusader kings but where you have no control over what they choose. oh and teachers are similar to students.

Teacher Ryan has the trait "Grim": dislikes people with trait "Earnest". Student Jess has trait "Earnest". time comes for weekly practice with people divided into 2 teams with leaders for each side. all students with trait "Born Leader" get chosen in the first round of picks. Student Jess also is a "Born Leader". in this event, she will never be chosen for leader even if she's the one with the highest stat. morale drops by 5 points. you could write this with better text but that's the base of it.

[Kagus]

So, we all know that there are about as many WW2 games as there were Russian casualties during WW2... But there are markedly fewer WW1 games. Particularly WW1 strategy games, compared to WW2 strategy games.

This is most likely because a semi-realistic representation of WW1 trench warfare would be... Dreadfully dull from an RTS warmaster perspective, if done in the framework of a traditional RTS. It's a whole lot of waiting, and every now and then a bit of shooting that may or may not hit anything.


So, how would one go about making a game that's actually worth playing, and yet maintains a somewhat faithful representation of trench warfare?

One way of doing it that might have potential, in my opinion, is to focus on the supply and logistics portion. Do it a bit like a city builder, where you need to provide the troop transport, equipment and ammunition distribution to the trenches so that they can continue their function with regular losses and consumption. Actual charges, artillery strikes and sabotage missions would be treated more as disaster events that you'd need to respond to and recover from (provided you were already managing to keep the line strong enough to survive and hang on to the territory).

It needs work, but I'd very much like to see more games with extensive trench systems that manage to find a way of addressing the actual "pace" of those scenarios in a playable fashion.