Future warfare

#1 You could try a sort of structured warfare built up by the mercenaries that dictates how they fight. That way you can stop the use of the really long-range, high-power stuff (or make it economically unviable to use them if you don't want to limit the player forcefully).

Jungle fighting FPS style could be very intensive if done right, but I've yet to play a game that did it right (right in my opinion anyway...). Don't ask me to explain what right is, it's more a feel than a concept. (That make any sense?)

#2 I like that idea... maybe have sort of a code of honour that dictates how warfare should be carried out, like there could be a pact between the major factions never to use nuclear devices. Hmm, you've given me a good idea there, thanks. As for the jungle based thing, I think it could be really cool, but like you said it could not be. I was thinking maybe a marshy type place, low lighting from the canopy above, and LOTS of trees, so that you can never expect what to find next. Maybe there could be lots of animals giving false readings to your scanning devices...

#3 If this game is set then the only limit is your imagination. It's the future, no one knows how weapons will look 50, 100, or hell 1000 years from now. Take a look at military weapons 50 years ago to today, quite a difference. Of course current sci fi is good to start off with, but your imagination shouldn't stop at that. It should expand instead of lasers how about bio weapons, or radiation, or some odd alien type weapon. Your idea is pretty cool, just remember only your imagination is your limit.

#4 In this game I think it would be cool if the entire game was viewed through yout avatar's eyes. That would be fine for when you're out on a mission, participating in a battle, but in the game, you will be able to recruit more people and end up controlling whole squads with support or whatever. My idea to stay in 1st person would be to have maybe an retinal overlay or something where you can view remote cameras and send orders and stuff if you have comms gear for all your recruits. I'm not sure whether to do it like a fullscreen transparent overlay that you can call up or to make it just a portion of the screen, maybe the player should be allowed to decide.
I think this could result in some pretty cool situations, the enemy could jam your comms signals so you wouldn't be able to communicate with part of your team and then orders would have to be sent verbally to people in range, maybe if a squad gets detached, the most advanced unit could take over and the AI could act independantly an a (semi)intelligent fashion. This would also let the player sit back in their base and control the battle from afar using recon drones which might be more realistic when controlling many units, it just adds a lot of possibilities. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

#5 If you can design the UI to allow easy use of all this in hectic situations, you've got it. If not, then it's just going to really confuzzling...

Let the player choose the size of the HUD/Retinal wotsit (Is this like what MechWarrior does with the Radar map?)

Also, add in something like Battlezone's comm tower thingy. I loved that game, but found that in the later missions I spent more time in the map view, and only switched out to lead an assault team, or do some recon.

#6 The book "A Call To Arms" is about a Galaxy-spanning war that is fought primarily by ground troops. The reason fighting takes place on planets is that assuming interstellar travel is available, eventually it would be simple for ships to simply pop in and out of this 'Otherspace', too quickly for any real space wars to be fought. Besides which, there is nothing in space to fight FOR. What 'strategic points' are you occupying? Nothing in space itself is worth fighting for except as how it relates to the planets themselves, which is what the wars are being fought over.

As for bombardment -- anything you destroy, you can't use. If you decimate a planet, what have you gained? Inhabitable planets are too rare and useful of an asset.

So what do you end up with? A setup where troops can get into the outer atmosphere with no resistance, and with some support can EASILY get onto the ground. And if the battle is to take a planet without destroying or even harming it much -- especially if there is also an intelligent race on the planet, as an intelligent ally is even rarer than an inhabitable planet -- you're gonna need ground troops.

They'll have much, much better weapons and equipment -- for example, the REAL book 'Starship Troopers' has the troops encased in metal suits with jetpacks (Tribes, anyone?) that were absolutely massive, and carried 'mini-nuke' rockets that could selectively obliterate quarter-mile areas. In that event, you could realistically take a planet with less than ten thousand men.

Etc. etc. etc.; you can come up with many more ideas I'm sure :)

#7 It all depends on how "realistic" you want the units to be...Mechs as in Mechwarrior, the book Starship Troopers and many anime shows are fantasy...wheels are a much more efficent meens of transversing a landscape then legs are...and a tank does not require as much specialised support craft for it to function as a mech would (things like "drop ships", some sort of unit to perform repairs and pick it up if it were to fall over, some sort of rig designed for it to reload it's weapons, etc..all of these machines would cost money to design and produce as well as the mechs) Any "realistic" battle involveing Mechs...from "giant robots" on down to Starship Trooper style "power suits" would depend GREATLY on frontline supply lines...knock out the supply line and you have won..just send a small squad out to engage the mechs useing "hit and run" tactics, just enough to annoy or distract the mech pilots...while the bulk of your forces take out the drop ships and other supply line craft...

The future war units will most like develop from the "smart" targeting systems used in missles and the like...add in smaller and cheaper robotic technology and you could easily see "toy" planes flying about dropping bombs and such on key targets...such small craft would only register as a bird on radar and go unnoticed...sure one shot would most likely take it down, but being small and cheap, you could send out many..even hundreds of these things along different flight paths...and the total cost would be less then that of a F-16...basicly the future battlefield is shapeing up into a remote controlled one...

Also the "look" of future war machines will most likely be VASTLY different then what is currently depicted in games and films...Simply because through out history the "style" has always changed...from simple and straitforward designs (somewhat like it is currently) to the ellaborite decorative designs of years past (shogun warrior armor, uniforms worn during the American revolution, etc..)...times and style are constantly changeing :)

#8 One thing that I think will make those little remote-controlled planes useless is when laser defense systems are perfected, not to mention things like railguns/particle beam weapons. But we've already successfully tested laser antimissile defense (not for things like ICBMs but for uses in smaller conflicts). As soon as this technology is made more mobile (it took a Ryder moving-truck-size vehicle to transport it, because it needs its own generator) we'll see missiles become obsolete.

#9 Thanks for all the replies, this is giving me some great ideas :)

@Andrew: About the UI. I would want to incorperate quite a bit of AI into the UI hopefully making it intuitive and also effective, either for controlling many units, or just a few. When controlling just a few squad mates, you could maybe bring up small 'windows' on your retina, showing their view (from their helmet or something) and tell them what to do). When controlling multiple people, you could use remote camera's and give group orders, making it as scalable as possible.

@Luc: wow, you've given me something really good to think about for why ground troops would be predominant. I was really struggling on that one :) I really didn't want the game spent flying around bombing planets out of existance from afar. Trying to work out why, if they had the technology, they wouldn't just bomb locations was quite hard - feel a little dumb now....

@Darren: I do want to have realistic units, but being able to set the technological levels in the game gives me quite a hand defining realistic. I agree with you about the mechs and that, I have thought about that often before, but I do think that I could incorperate 'powered suits' into the game. When going on a mission requiring only a few units, having powered suits would really be an advantage. I'm not talking about huge things like mechs, but really just suits. They could provide lots of cool features like increased speed/strength, built in scanners, protection(obviously), recycled atmospheres, heat dissapation, ECCM's and so on, I think it would be really cool for stealth misssions and the like.

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I agree that missiles probabley won't be the most effective weapon, but I think it would be pretty unrealistic not to have ranged targeted weapons of some sort, well, at least the targeted part. Having folk run around with laser pistols, firing randomly is deffinately not going to factor into it, I think pretty advanced systems would be used for targeting weapons. Maybe you could have a kind of harness on your suit that your gun plugs into, hooked up to all your sensors etc, sort of a look and shoot, the gun would automatically aim at where you are looking (or something along those lines). I do think that image recognition would factor a great deal into it - weapons being able to destinguish and aim at valid targets. Anyhow, better go and write more of this down...

Oh yeah.. about the game in general. I was thinking that in this game, countries or factions or whatever would keep a military force of their own, ALL troops would be free-lance. Risking your life for a faction would be a highly paid job. You could be hired for a whole campaign though. The reason I was thinking of this was that all the factions in the game could be controlled by an AI(not in the game, but in the code) who decides which strategic battles to fight etc, or decides that people need to be hired to defend wherever. This could mean that players pick the fights that they want to participate in, but agreeing to sign up for a campaign would be riskier(and more profitable) then signing up for a single battle as they don't know exactly what would happen. I was thinking maybe have a scripted game, but also have the option to play a 'free game' where all the happenings in the game world are controlled by AI interactions. Just some random thoughts...

#10 All sound good ideas, however I have a different view of futuristic combat which would be reasoably realistic, and make for a fun game.

Current technology and politics already means that 'war' between any of the foremost nations would be so destructive as to be ridiculous. However, we are seeing intervention by the US, NATO etc. in conflicts between or within less developed nations. Reading any of Ian Banks books based around the 'culture' gives you a glimpse of this taken to the extreme.

A scenario I would imagine is that a special forces unit exists to deal with ground warfare on planets which are not as advanced as your culture. Ground troops are used for the same reasons they were in the original Starship Troopers, which is when the objective is unobtainable by any other means. In the book this was going into bug tunnels and capturing the bug leaders.
In the case I imagine this might be to assist one side of the fighting without giving away that the special force unit is invloved, or for counter terrorism. I'd love to play an FPS where I was first given a good briefing, with full maps etc., followed by dropping out of a small stealthed starship and breaking into a planetary atmosphere at the same time as a meteorite shower, to land near the objective and join the battle. There could even potentially be battles between special force units from opposing governments on one of these planets, with no real space / air support available due to the political scene (though please no Russian/US stereotypes!).

Good luck! Doug from EnkiSoftware Limited

#11 Starship Troopers (the book) has already been mentioned, but I can't stress 1) how great a book it is, and 2) how great a futuristic warfare book it is. Especially considering it was written in the late 50's. If you're interested in making a "realistic" futuristic ground combat game then you might want to check it out (and no, watching the movie doesn't count even though it's got Denise Richards and really cool bugs). Someone mentioned tanks, but that's 20th century technology. The US Army is cutting almost all of it's tank divisions in favor of wheeled light armored vehicles (LAV's). As far as transportation, the Starship Troopers suits had little jets that would allow the soldier to "bounce" a couple miles in one hop. I just don't see tanks and artillery in a futuristic setting, just more powerful personal weapons (like the mini-nukes in Troopers) and close-air support of course.

On a side note: am I the only one that is bored by energy weapons in games? They just doesn't feel like they pack the same punch. I just finished playing Elite Force last week and I was completely unimpressed with the weapons. Especially compared to games like SOF, or even NOLF. Just curious if it's just me...

#12 While I would agree that Starship troopers would be a great model for futuristic warfare, I would personally like to see something based on Herbert's Dune. Not only is it a great universe when it comes to futuristic cultures and social/enviromental occurances, it also puts together some rather interesting warfare strictures in relation to the Butlerian Jihad. You have the laser/Holtz-Shield relationship that I've been dying to see implemented in a large scale FPS as well as a plethora of Postapoc-esque weaponry and warfare theory. Especially coupled with the capabilties of the V12 engine, it could help break new ground in the FPS territory.

#13 I want all of the above, mixed up and nicely balanced... Failing that, anyway this game turns out has got to be interesting enough to keep me interested :)

Luc - Is "A Call to Arms" that Alan Dean Foster book with the two sequels? If so, I think the ships did fight "battles" in space, but until I read the books again I'll bow to you and leave it at "Are you sure?"

I like Doug's idea of peacekeeping between lower-tech by an elite force (I hope I read your idea right). The mention of other high-tech groups calls to mind Syndicate, just on a larger scale... (I think in terms of games I've seen, makes it easier for me to visualize)

#14 That idea sounds pretty good Doug, might be able to add it into the game by making the 'elite' forces a faction that you can join. I like the idea of sneaking in under the cover of a meteor shower :) that would make for some pretty good gaming. If they were in the game as a faction, then you could be recruited my them, but the game would still create AI driven missions, and you could choose them within the constraintys of that organisation. It would be pretty cool doing stealth missions, aiding other factions secretly to further your side's agenda... could make for some cool AI.

#15 Thought I'd fill in some bits on the 'elite forces' action on lower tech worlds bit (Andrew - you got the idea I apologise for any obscurity in the post). William's suggestion of factions would make for a more fun game by allowing you to choose your destiny, however it might be at the cost of the players belief in the reality (or rather consistancy) of the game world if not handled correctly.

Though I am no expert on the situation, I imagine that currently (and in the future) soldiers of fortune are generally hired by the lesser developed nations. I cannot imagine the UK hiring soldiers to do a job which the SAS and SBS (A for air B for boat - we have a flair for TLA's us brits) have been expensively trained for. This brings us to the possibility of a scenario where you first play a regular soldier, doing peacekeeping work (which is military assistance in policing a truce between cooperating factions I guess). This goes wrong, you are involved in a rescue/whatever and after success get asked if you want to join the elite forces.

After training (hey - the game quits if you say no!) you do a few elite missions, still on the monorail story line, until you get involved in a mission you don't agree with. If you refuse to perform your duty, you get courtmartialed and chucked out, only to be approached by people interested in hiring you.

I'm trailing off into the vague here, but although I don't really like mentioning other games as sources of ideas (it can get you too stuck into making unoriginal content) the scenario I trying to describe is possibly Deus Ex like but based around more around warfare.

All of this is, of course, not original. I believe the trick would be to constrain the player within the technical limits of your world whilst maintaining the consistancy of the world. Also, a clear vision of the important encounters would be required.

None of this is possible for my team at the moment. It's just too much. But with V12, a well developed storyboard, and a good team someone could do it.

Good luck!

Doug EnkiSoftware Limited

#16 I guess I'll throw in my 2 cents. As for making it mercenary/infantry based you can take several ways to it.

1) As was mentioned before, planetary bombardment would leave the planet a scorched warzone..who wants to lay claim to that? Go w/ infantry to destroy enemies and keep the planet.

2) You could incorporate it into a storyline of sorts, although it would have to be good to make it believeable.

3) Make up an excuse as to why you dont use gigantic bombs :D

4) The hardest but one of the better payoffs, make a storyline that sticks to the idea that large scale bombardments and ballistic missles were rare, and that infantry is the norm, slowly incorporating it into gameplay until the player sees a mission of like 3 divisions on both sides and thinks of it nothing more than a larger mission.

Of course, lets not forget that FPS players generally like the whole "Look at me, I'm a badass mercenary, gonna frag me up some saps and get a big fat paycheck" Who doesnt like that role =P

Ah shit I forgot the rest of my post..oh well go with that...I was gonna say some more shit but I just kinda zinged it...

Alpha