Anyone around here in LA wanna try and give this a go?
I’m still waiting for a WWII bomber sim that works like this. I mean, BF1942 sort of let you do this with their vehicles, the ones that could be crewed by multiple people anyway.
- Alan
The few bomber sims around are kinda similar, but the closest I think, based on what I’ve seen, is Megafortress.
The ancient 1990 (89?) GEnie game Air Warrior allowed up to I believe 4 people man a bomber.
Some of the other massively multiplayer dogfighting games did as well.
And didn’t B17 Flying Fortress 2 have this feature as well? That game still holds up.
(It’s also EXTREMELY boring to sit in a gunner’s seat or the bombadier’s chair for a 2 hour flight)
You ain’t kidding.
APB allow 4 players in a car.
That’s the issue with this kind of game. How do you keep six roles engaged and active during the entire scenario?
Iirc Dangerous Waters has an online coop mode for multiple stations on a sub or frigate manned by a person each.
I could see it being interesting if it were frantic enough.
Captain gives the orders.
Helm steers the ship.
Weapons locks and fires weapons, keeps track of targets.
Science keep track of targets and alert of new targets and help with situational awareness.
Engineering keeps everything powered and running as best they could.
Comms keeps track of communication traffic and alerts the captain of any messages (likely most boring role).
Man, this looks like it would be a blast! Anyone live near New Orleans and want to give it a go?
I wish. I do have one other guy locally who wants to try this, so now I just need four more folks…all with PC’s…
Just wanted to comment on that video and how it played out. I was sitting at my computer desk frequently laughing at the mess they made of things while trying to figure the game out.
“Didn’t he say shields don’t regenerate?”
“No, he said hull doesn’t regenerate.”
“Oh … are you sure?”
“I think it would be great if we just killed one ship …”
<again>
<and again>
“So … maybe we don’t want to fight 11 enemies at once”
“Uh … shields up, captain?”
“Hey, I think there’s only one enemy over there - set a course!”
“That’s two.”
“Oh.”
I think everyone has fantasized about this sort of game before. The trick it giving the bridge crew enough information / tasks / choices that you actually need multiple crew members, without having it turn into a bunch of irrelevant mini-games. Otherwise, it’s the sort of thing that would be fun for a game, and quickly become boring.
I spent a lot of time in Air Warrior (and later Air Warrior 3) as a bomber gunner. As I recall, every position on a Fortress could be manned, but rarely was because it was usually more efficient to just fly more under-gunned bombers against your target than it was to fully crew a plane. Honestly, you only really needed one gunner to force the enemy to attack cautiously, although I liked flying with multiple gunners. (The big diminishing returns didn’t kick in until you took a Fortress beyond the 3rd gunner…)
Being a gunner was one of my favorite parts of the game: It could be boring, but I quickly learned to read the newspaper or something “light” while taking a quick glance at chat every 30-60 seconds. It would have been a terrible tactic in real life, but AW had such clear skies that someone would always see enemy planes long before they got in gun range.
Yeah, I think this is key to make it work. Otherwise, it’s just a party game/gimmick that would quickly fade. The groundwork is certainly there, but it seems more needs to be added to have some replay value.
I would be all over trying this in the Redmond/Seattle area. Anyone else here as geeky as I am?
Yeah. Maybe I’m just in an Air Warrior frame of mind, but this seems like it would be a much better concept (though probably much harder to program) if they moved away from “Star Trek” and into something more like Star Wars (or some sort of archaic / steampunk game of airship battles) where gunnery involved aiming, and where ship controls are more responsive.
Radar would also be more interesting if there were lots of little targets to call, or if calling position mattered for the gunners…
It’s a capital ship, not a fighter, it’s not SUPPOSED to be responsive, or so I think.
I agree on the rest. Science and comms I don’t think matter as much at the moment, wherein the COULD matter a great deal if science tied in with weapons for situational awareness and target acquisition.
Yeah, but the game was just crash prone enough, if your sonar operator crashed, and because of the way the game worked, no one else could man the stations assigned to that person, but they couldn’t reconnect. I loved the idea and had a lot of fun trying to get the ‘real’ target by communicating my heading needs to a captain at the helm. The not being able to reconnect on crash situation killed it, especially when a scenario could be three hours.
Thinking more about it, to be truly compelling this game’s end-state needs to involve large-scale multiplayer. Comms becomes a much more important position if you’re communicating with friendly ships in your sector, and potentially trying to negotiate with / bribe neutrals into doing things.
Plus, it’s way more fun sending a hail to a living room full of nerds in another state, and demanding their surrender. Hell, incorporate video chat, and you can put them “on screen.” :)
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. If this game was able to eventually accommodate multiple multi-crewed ships, both friend and foe, comms would become so much more useful than it seems to be now. I don’t know if the comms station can hail or make enemy ships surrender in the current version. I would love to see this kind of thing evolve into the game over time though.