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[NRDL]

I want a Liberal Crime Squad-esque game about being a superpowered person. Me re-watching My Hero Academia has probably influenced this.

Honestly, just any sort of LCS game at this point. Something that's actually playable on a mac and not an absolute nightmare to set up.

[Reelya]

There's a Unity port of LCS in the LCS board. Unity will build to Mac. If you can't do that yourself (all the stuff you need is free) then you should ask the dev of that to do a Mac build.

[cider]

A sim game where you're a football player. Basically New Star Soccer but with the complexity of Football Manager.

[EnigmaticHat]

A strategy game (realtime with pause maybe) where the vast, vast majority of the map is empty space with pockets of useful materials spread throughout.  Setting could be space, or a post apocalyptic wasteland.

Players would have all kinds of options for attacking enemy bases: long range bombing/missiles, ground attack, sabotage.  The game would be very offense focused in the sense that to defend you have to prepare against all possible threats, but to attack you only need to beat your opponent in one type of battle.

However, there’s a catch: you don’t know where the enemy bases are.  So war would have 2 phases: in the first, highly mobile scouts compete to locate enemy bases while killing enemy recon units.  Then once the scouts succeed an actual battle can start.  The theme being that all the powerful weapons in the world do nothing if you don’t know where to aim them. And also that war is won by being active and aggressive.

You could also trade with other factions and set up embassies.  But this would be a double edged sword, as both factions would over time accumulate information about each other.  This could be a good thing, as knowing about each other’s capabilities might discourage war.  But it would also make you both more capable of carrying out a surprise attack.  So it would turn into a prisoner’s dilemma.  You both benefit economically by staying at peace... but whoever attacks first will have the advantage if war does break out...

[Robsoie]

A sim game where you're a football player. Basically New Star Soccer but with the complexity of Football Manager.

When i had my old atari st i had Player Manager on it and had tons of fun, that was basically Kick Off (Dino Dini's good old Kick Off) with yourself being only one of the players (the other member of the team were AI) and between matches you were managing the team like in any football management game.

I remember i was certain there was some save scumming protection in that game as when i was playing if i saved/reloaded too many times before a match (until my team and myself could manage to win it ) the directing board was growing less and less confident in you and even if you never ceased to win finally decided to fire you .
Without abusing the save/reload the board confidence in you was changing in a lot more believable way, they were delighted when you won matches, had the team promoted to a superior division etc... and didn't liked much when you were failing.

Anyways, i learned there were apparently more titles in the Player Manager serie, that i never heard about before :
https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/player-manager-series

[PTTG??]

A strategy game (realtime with pause maybe) where the vast, vast majority of the map is empty space with pockets of useful materials spread throughout.  Setting could be space, or a post apocalyptic wasteland.

Players would have all kinds of options for attacking enemy bases: long range bombing/missiles, ground attack, sabotage.  The game would be very offense focused in the sense that to defend you have to prepare against all possible threats, but to attack you only need to beat your opponent in one type of battle.

However, there’s a catch: you don’t know where the enemy bases are.  So war would have 2 phases: in the first, highly mobile scouts compete to locate enemy bases while killing enemy recon units.  Then once the scouts succeed an actual battle can start.  The theme being that all the powerful weapons in the world do nothing if you don’t know where to aim them. And also that war is won by being active and aggressive.

You could also trade with other factions and set up embassies.  But this would be a double edged sword, as both factions would over time accumulate information about each other.  This could be a good thing, as knowing about each other’s capabilities might discourage war.  But it would also make you both more capable of carrying out a surprise attack.  So it would turn into a prisoner’s dilemma.  You both benefit economically by staying at peace... but whoever attacks first will have the advantage if war does break out...

I'm thinking urban gang combat.

Players control a number of street-level factions in a cyberpunk distopia, so blowing down a building full of bystanders is bad, but only because you have to pay a private security firm $35.98 per collateral death. The scouts are not just extending bubbles of fog-of-war, but actively looking for any sign of enemy action, and the enemy faction might be mobile enough to move into previously scouted areas.

[Mathel]

An idea for an MMO game.

I had been thinking about MMO adventures (Runescape, WOW, ESO...), and while I did not play any of them, I did think of one strange thing. Quests can be done by multiple players sequentialy. (Player 1 does it, gets reward, player 2 does it gets reward.) This is strange when a quest is killing a specific creature or anything else that can only be done once.

But I see why this is done. If most quests could only be done by one person, the devs would have to either keep adding quests, or later players would not have any quests to do.

So the idea is, replacing all NPCs with PCs. A player could either play the game as an adventure game, or as a idle/clicker game. A character could only master a certain amount of total skill, so a master smith would be unlikely to also be a master swordfighter. And if he was, he would have no other skill, so he would have no idea how to shoot a bow or to tan leather.
Most items would have to be made by PCs. The sword that an adventurer buys in town, he buys from a smith, who had to buy iron ore from a merchant. This merchant bought the ore from a mine in the mountains, mined by miners.
There would be creatures, randomly spawning in wilderness, some of which would attack PCs, so traveling merchants would need protection.
Some of these creatures could even attack cities.
If PC loses all HP to hostile creature, the character is dead and the player needs to make a new character. (But all items stay on the corpse)
If PC loses all HP to provoked creature or accident, they are merely knocked unconscious and will recover after a while. (But can be robbed with impunity while out.)
If PC loses all HP to another PC, the victor has a choice to merely knock them out or kill them.

The idea is, that random creatures and players themselves, rather than predefined quests, would provide content. I would expect some players to be playing as criminals, robbing merchants and the like (but preferably not killing them, as that would just reduce the profitability of crime in the area.), which would give merchants additional incentive to hire guards.
And some trolls would decide to troll people with terrible deeds, becoming villains. But then someone would probably hire heroes (or at least antiheroes) to stop them.

There would be a magic system, which would certainly have to allow necromancy, possibly also ressurection. (If you can get a corpse to master healer within certain amount of time, he can ressurect the PC. But such healer would probably be just a burden on an adventure.)

This whole thing should probably be combined with a physics system allowing anything to be damaged. Natural terrain would regenerate over time, new trees would grow, but artificial structures would have to be repaired or rebuilt. Heated fights in cities could rack up some serious property damage.

[PTTG??]

A co-op survival FPS following a robot uprising. The enemy AI is based on neural networks. The story of the game is that the apocalyptic AI was produced from a videogame project gone terribly wrong, and the specific game is the game itself. A narrative oroboros, if you will.

[Reelya]

The sword that an adventurer buys in town, he buys from a smith, who had to buy iron ore from a merchant. This merchant bought the ore from a mine in the mountains, mined by miners.

Sounds exactly like how Ultima Online worked. Mathel, I think they already tried a lot of those ideas with earlier MMOs.  The early MUDs/MMOs were very much keen on the "players are the content" model. However, the ones that added quests were the ones that made all the real money.

The problem is that players make poor "content" for other players. Imagine you've entered the Big Bad's fortress with a strike force, and the Big Bad sees that you can beat him, so immediately rage-quits and deletes all his stuff, rather than let you win. Basically it would be like the entire Third Reich deleted itself right after the Battle of Kursk rather than let the Russians have any fun. That's not to forget all the ways trolls screw with people. A guy could send an army up to kill all the ore miners, and thus corner the market in swords.

The problem is that these economic models sound good on paper, but in reality they're not very good models for games. One reason is that they don't take "opportunity costs" into account. The opportunity cost of playing a different game, basically. For example, in your example if not enough people want to be miners then there's an ore shortage, smiths are out of work due to having no ore and the price of ore rises, pushing up the price of swords down the line. You might think this has balanced itself, however, players can merely switch to another game that doesn't have the sword shortage instead of addressing the shortage by taking up ore mining.

[Mathel]

The rage-quit, that would be preventable. While rage-quitting would take the character out of the game, it would not take away anything they do not currently carry. Deleting an account would spawn the player's character dead where they last logged out (or on the last place in the overworld they were, if they logged out in a location not accesible by normal means), so loot would be kept.

There could also be a duel challenge mechanic. If you manage to reach a spot where someone logged out within 5 minutes, and the sum of their combat skills is at least 80% of yours, you could challenge them to fight you.
Doing so would force the two of you to teleport into an arena moment both of you are connected. If a challenge is not answered within a month, whoever was connected less often during that month automaticaly loses. Disconnecting during a duel would not end the challenge and disconnecting three times during a single duel would lose you the duel. Of course, if either character manages to die from a different cause during that time, the duel is dropped.
Any player could be on the recieving end of only one duel at a time, though they would be able to challenge as many other players as they want to. But if they happen to all be connected when the challenger connects, he has to fight them all at once.

I see no way to solve the second problem. You are right, ore shortage, thus weaponry shortage could lead not only to increase of mining profitability, but also in players just not wanting to play a game where equipment is overpriced.

[Reelya]

The rage-quit, that would be preventable. While rage-quitting would take the character out of the game, it would not take away anything they do not currently carry. Deleting an account would spawn the player's character dead where they last logged out (or on the last place in the overworld they were, if they logged out in a location not accesible by normal means), so loot would be kept.

That's not really the point. People stop engaging once things turn against them, they don't fight out to a "final battle" like you'd get with a scripted villain. That's why other players make poor "content". Beating up on someone who logged out and stealing their inert stuff isn't a solution to this problem.

As for economics, google previous MMOs and the economy problems, usually some variant of hyper-inflation and things becoming worthless. Or attempts to avoid hyper-inflation backfiring and ruining large parts of the game.

UO suffered from one. To avoid saturation of materials, there was a limit on how much total material could exist, for example Iron. The amount of Iron-based Ore, Swords, Armor that could exist at one time was limited, and they wore out. The idea was that as items were used and wore out, then new ore would become available, and new swords etc smithed, and the world wouldn't reach a point in which there were just too many swords. However what happened in practice was that a cartel formed, and they stockpiled all the iron items, drained the iron out of circulation, and charged exorbitant prices for any iron stuff. This meant they had all the iron locked up, and had artificially inflated its price, so their on-paper wealth was ridiculously large.

The point of this anecdote is to point out that no matter how good an economy concept sounds on paper, people will break it and ruin it in any way they can think up. When thinking up economy ideas for MMOs you should ask what the worst that could happen is, then design a system that prevents that problem. For example, UO could have dealt with the stockpiling situation by saying that iron items rust at a constant rate, and must be repaired. This would be no problem for iron items that are in use, since adventuring characters would have actions to maintain the items between fights and you'd say that maintained weapons didn't get to the point of rusting.

[Cyroth]

-snip-

You should probably look at Chronicles of Elyria.
Much of what you wanted is close to what they're planning to do, though at this point in time a playable release is likely still 2 or so years away, at best. They're not exactly the fastest devs out there, or the best with shedules.

Not the replace NPCs with PCs part, but most of everything else.
Some of the planned features:

Quests are one-time only things, generated by the NPCs according to their needs.
If a farmer wants you to collect 20 bear asses it is actually because bears have become a problem for the village and need a culling, and not because the devs thought the area needed more quests. And once the bears are gone, so is the quest. (animal density in an area is tracked and fluctuates according to how much, and what, is hunted there)

No items are spawned in, everything is crafted by somebody (NPCs and PCs alike) and aside from a few unique artifacts everything decays and gets damaged over time.
Crafting is also a lot more in-depth then most games. You craft parts and then assemble those according to a blueprint, and the parts are modifiable. (A sword needs a blade, crossguard and hilt, but what materials you use is your choice entirely)

Characters grow old and die, so you can't max out every skill and stat, but you get a boost on re-learning stuff from your previous generation.

Characters are permanently around, so they can be killed/robbed while you're offline, but since you can own property in cities and villages (that have guards, soldiers and lots of NPCs) you're problaby safe even when off for extended times (assuming you bother to log out inside your house of course).

Every possible position, title and job can theoretically be aquired or lost, from farmer, miner or bandit to officer in one of the nations armies to nobility and royalty.

Magic and supernatural abilities exist but are very rare and randomly distributed and only occur late in a characters life (so you can't just re-roll until you get one with magic)

[LordBaal]

I want that but on a strategy game. You want to raise a militia you need the men, the weapons and the gold, unless is a self armed militia then only men and gold would suffice. You want a sword regiment, you need the swords and men, armor is optional. You can either have it built by you or buy it from merchants or weapon smiths. As these participate in battles the weapons and armor suffer wear and need to be replaced...

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I want that but on a strategy game. You want to raise a militia you need the men, the weapons and the gold, unless is a self armed militia then only men and gold would suffice. You want a sword regiment, you need the swords and men, armor is optional. You can either have it built by you or buy it from merchants or weapon smiths. As these participate in battles the weapons and armor suffer wear and need to be replaced...

Sounds like a mix between Battle Brothers and Ymir (or something more combat oriented)

[LordBaal]

Oh that. I was thinking Ymir with a warhammer fantasy mod.