Trade Stations and Alliances games

posted on September 27th, 2010, 8:29 pm

So I was thinking the other day, what if during alliances games, latinum was added as a resource, and somehow it was used to force co-operation between players, based on scarcity? For example, in the real world, let's say there's a war going on. One faction has engines and wings for bomber planes, and the other has the fuselage (body). However, each faction can produce the other part of the plane, but at a much greater cost. Most likely, these two factions would decide to work together in order to make bomber planes more efficiently, and thus annihilate their enemies from above!

Now I'm not sure how latinum would emulate this. One idea I had was that each player would start out with an arbitrary amount of latinum (let's say, multiples of 100 between 200 and 2.5k). Let's suppose that 1.5k latinum is necessary to build a trading station, and this trading station brings all members of a faction extra resources (dil, tri, supply, uplinks, whatever.) But, due to its nature of beign a TRADING station, it has absolutely no benefit unless you are part of a team when you click "Build". Another idea I had was that latinum could be required to build some sort of giant latinum bomb that would annihilate the enemy factions on detonation: however, this bomb would only be buildable through some sort of cooperation. The bomb would be a "secondary" way of winning the game, and would most likely be very expensive or take a very long time to build, so that it could only be used late-game.

Anyways, I'm not completely sure how these idea would work, but I have a feeling that giving the economy a more important role could make things very interesting in Alliances games. I just wanted to share this idea before it left me.

Questions, comments, are welcome.

posted on September 27th, 2010, 9:11 pm

In Star Trek, each race makes their own ships.  There isn't too much cooperation on that, because they don't like each other enough and their technology isn't completely compatible with each other.

I'm also not a fan of game-ending (or even smaller) superweapons, no matter how they are implemented.

Alliance games generally don't seem to be that popular, anyway.

posted on September 28th, 2010, 1:26 pm

I like yer ideas,

I mentioned trading stations as well;

Star Trek Armada II: Fleet Operations - Trade Stations - continued

posted on September 28th, 2010, 2:02 pm

I like this idea.  Latinum has just been renamed "Tritanium" so it shouldn't be too dificult to put latinum back.  Since it's clear that Species-8472 won't be put back into the game, Biomatter can remain as Supply.  The "Metal" resource could be renamed "Tritanium" and that would mean that "Collective Connections" would be the added resource by means of a DLL.

Alliance games are my favorite.  However, they need extra rules to prevent people from exploiting them.  I like to remain neutral during alliance games.  Adding trading stations would mean that I could give out resources to whoever needs them.  And everyone can trade with me without worrying too much about whether or not I'm going to be attacked at every encounter.

I like the idea very much and I can't wait for it to be implemented.