Here is a storyline proposal

posted on January 14th, 2012, 2:51 am

[align=center]Introduction[/align]
The story begins off of the immediate aftermath of Nemesis. Romulus in in chaos as it tries to rebuild the senate. The Remans have begin cutting their supply of weapons to the Romulan Empire. Romulus is split between two loyalties, those who blame the Federation for Shinzon's blaze of anger. And those that believe the Federation are a potential ally. These loyalties pull on the strands that hold the government together.

The Klingons watch closely what is going on inside Romulan space. To cause even greater instability in their empire they begin numerous skirmishes and harassments against the Klingon-Romulan border. The Federation strain their resources trying to maintain their alliance with the Klingons. But with them helping Cardassians to rebuild, resources are being stretched.

Deep in Breen Space, Dominion shipyards have begin constructing an invasion force planning to avenge the Dominion from the first Dominion War. Meanwhile the Breen have been focusing their resources on constructing an artificial wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant to reconnect to the main stream Dominion forces in th Gamma Quadrant.

The Borg meanwhile have been trying to recover from the crippling blow from the USS Voyager. Through many Transwarp Conduits rebuilt from the many of the remaining Transwarp Hubs. In their attempts to reconnect their Transwarp Conduits some of their vessels were trapped on the otherside. And they plan on making minor colonies and bases to make a holding while they await the rest of the Borg Forces.

[align=center]Singleplayer Campaign[/align]
Basically you have three Federation Campaigns, two Klingon Campaigns, one Romulan Campaigns, one Dominion Campaign, and one Borg Campaign. They will be listed in order.

First you begin in the Klingon campaign. You recieve an intelligence report that the Romulans are planning on constructing a new type of Warbird (the Tavara). Your first mission is to find the Shipyard and destroy the Mining Facilities to delay the Warbird's construction. Meanwhile you have to avoid detection from patrols and not permit survivors of your resource raids. Mission two is when you switch your focus to another borderline problem as Romulans have been attacking mining colonies near a major shipyard. You being Martok dispatch a fleet to help rebuild defenses and then wipe out Romulan forces in the system. Your third, fourth, and fifth missions are additional skirmishes as you chase down and try to wipe out the Tavara project once and for all.

Next is the first Federation campaign, these will be split between diplomatic missions with the Klingons as well as trying to intervene in the skirmishes as peacefully as possible. This is followed by the Romulan campaign which would continue the story about the Tavara project and relocating it. Meanwhile commencing several reconnacance missions near Federation outposts as the Federation Outposts being built in Klingon space makes the Senate nervous that the Federation and Klingons may plan a cooperative invasion to expand their borders into Romulan territory.

After dealing with mere border incidents, you then begin investigating the causes of several missing fleets and three destroyed outposts near an uninhabited region of space. This then reveals the Borg plot. And you begin a hunt that stretches through several missions which you hunt down and destroy several Borg station keepings. This is immediately followed by the Borg campaign that chronologically backclocks a little earlier. The first mission is when you first get isolated from Borg space. You go and first build your outposts. And then you try to gain resources by attacking nearby patrolling fleets and outposts. Then the last mission is your initial greeting to the Federation.

Following the Borg campaign is the Dominion campaign, there you try building up fleets anticipating the construction of the Wormhole. And the last Federation campaign is you trying to push into Dominion/Breen space and destroy the Wormhole.

posted on January 16th, 2012, 3:07 pm

Storyline for what? All the fleet ops story has already been established, and is outlined on the guide.

posted on January 16th, 2012, 3:41 pm

As this topic is already opened, there are two things to say:

At first, the single-player campaign should:
a) Introduce the Fleet-Ops timeline to new player
b) Should be a large scaled campaign, where you should be able to take over units from scenario a to scenario b, because this will give you a more "RPG-like" progress, which is one key-element of most campaigns.

Also, it should be something introduced like special story objects, that are as for now only set as map-objects with no real or really minor background.

@1337 64M3R

Wel... the story sounds like a patchwork for a brute-force storyline. You begin "somewhere" in the time and let the story progress without a real motivation. What about a heavy conflict with... the Noxter, a civilian war, where the feds are trying to support a peace-resolution and then gaining control over a sector? What about two aspects of campaigns, like

A) Story-campaign
Galactic conflict with sectors like in Starfleet-Command?

There is so MUCH possible. Your post is in my eyes (no offense) too plain.

posted on January 16th, 2012, 9:18 pm

That said, I want a bonus mission where you start with 1 Tavara and must reach the other side of the map while a massive Federation base is assaulted by a massive Borg force and Klingon/Dominion outposts send reinforcements.  I will make this mission myself 

posted on January 16th, 2012, 9:55 pm

That said, I want a bonus mission where you start with 1 Tavara and must reach the other side of the map while a massive Federation base is assaulted by a massive Borg force and Klingon/Dominion outposts send reinforcements.  I will make this mission myself 

Sounds like nice stuff for a good cutscene (could even be an intro-sequence, showing all factions in a big central battle), but a mission? 
The Tavara's supreme-cloak will mean you cannot lose unless the mission-script disables the cloaking-device.^^

posted on January 16th, 2012, 10:49 pm

It probably will, or downgrade it to a regular cloak.  Actually if I do it properly I'll end up creating my own Tavara variant that starts with lower stats and has different abilities and rank progression.

If you wanted to have ships that carry-over from mission to mission, it would be good to have a level limit, like Warcraft III for example.  It would be nice if you could just code it into the mission, but if not I could create a series of odfs.

So for the first mission you get a ship that can reach 2 silver bars but cannot go higher.  Then the next mission uses a set of odfs that go from base to officer first rank, then the next mission goes from base to officer second rank and the final mission you have to complete some objective to unlock the veteran upgrade.  You would also want an experience bar so that people can see when their ship can no longer advance in this mission.

I expect by the time it's all said and done, such a campaign would use highly modified ships as its "named" units so that they can have a deeper progression and be more balanced for the specific challenges it will face.  Most campaigns would not use this format because it's so much work.

posted on January 16th, 2012, 10:54 pm

It probably will, or downgrade it to a regular cloak.

Doesn't the Tavara have a regular Cloak anyway? I'm sure the Advanced ones is an upgrade, which can be disabled in a mission-specific techtree.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 12:30 am

Oh yeah, I forgot that part.  So I'd probably make it a special event to obtain the offense/defense/system upgrades and remove the option to just buy them.

This idea is really coming together in my head, even if I can't implement it yet.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 1:14 am

Maybe it would be possible to save your stats by writing to a file and then on the next mission, retrieve those stats.  Perhaps at the end of the mission, have the player select the ships that he/she would like to keep for the next mission or have the ships selected at random or strategically.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 10:14 am

I know it from warzone 2100, where you could keep up to... erm... 9 units?

I think it would be cool to have a maximum set of ships you could take over, for example 20. Then we introduce the system like in battle-of-wesnoth, where you could recall these "saved" ships, but pay a price for it. This price could be supplies, because the ship is already build. The supply costs will depend on the ship itself + rank.

So every bar on rank could increase the supply cost by 10% when recalling, so you dont stand up with a massive fleet at the beginning cause of supply-limit.

Also the ranks should be vastly spread through the campaign. No two silver bars and two gold and then vet but... 3 bronze, 3 silver, 3 gold, then two kinds of veteran and one "flagship"-rank.

Sure, you have to implement a vast amount of odf's for that, but in the campaign, you could make that.
The final rankup of those ships should be as strong as the veteran-multiplayer version - so you just have to go a "longer way" for the same result.

And I WANT a galactic conflict - campaign! Like in Starfleet Command! That would be... great! With tactical and strategic layouts. For every sector a map you can control and if an enemy fraction wants to invade your frontiers, it must do a "scout mission" to bring up freighters and a constructor, that build a forward base and if they manage, a full sector-fight will be engaged... or you try to weaken the enemy by sending in a fleet, make a short stand and warp out. So... missions like that, where you try to conquer the galaxy with nice ressources like "planets", "technology level", "veteran slots", "mixed tech designs", "nebulas", "asteroid belts", "dilithium", "raw materials" and so on.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 1:50 pm

Storyline for what? All the fleet ops story has already been established, and is outlined on the guide.

Im pretty sure hes talking about a single player story mode of which fleet ops does not have.

I like it but there's just 1 problem, no one has said they are trying to use megadroids mission mod yet altho dom has said some people have said they will try i have heard nothing regarding this and there has been nothing to show for it. I think its a combination of the language that its coded it and the time it will take to put together just 1 mission yet alone an entire campaign which is very unfortunate considering the effort megadroid put into it so i really hope someone takes up the task at some point.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 4:49 pm

Yeah, I think too many people are just afraid of everything changing (like me) and their work becoming obsolete.  But then Megadroid joined the dev team as a programmer, so hopefully the mission mod will become a standard part of Fleet Ops come next patch.  Here's hoping for a mission-related dev blog next week 

I do like the Wesnoth method, but I'm not sure about coding that many ranks.  I was thinking more along the lines of tripling the exp for each rankup and call it good    It would also be fun to have the option of individually choosing from a list of ships which one to warpin, as near the end of the campaign you can call veteran ships to join the battle the moment you need them.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 4:52 pm

Im pretty sure hes talking about a single player story mode of which fleet ops does not have.

I like it but there's just 1 problem, no one has said they are trying to use megadroids mission mod yet altho dom has said some people have said they will try i have heard nothing regarding this and there has been nothing to show for it. I think its a combination of the language that its coded it and the time it will take to put together just 1 mission yet alone an entire campaign which is very unfortunate considering the effort megadroid put into it so i really hope someone takes up the task at some point.

But a singleplayer camapign is already planned out by the devs, with storyline and everything. It just hasn't been made yet.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 5:19 pm

Doesn't mean fan-created ones can't be included by default, it would only need an 'Optional Campaign' menu.

posted on January 17th, 2012, 5:52 pm

True but I thought the OP was proposing his own story line to explain the Fleet Ops universe, sorry if I was wrong.