Empire Games

[thesims3mods]

I am the owner of Empire Games a new start up unregistered company located in Portland Maine. Our Development teams are located across the world and our work is done online through our forum, AIM, and other methods.

Our first MMO is currently on its way to beta as soon as we receive a more stable version of the engine being used. The name of it is My Avatar City and the game play is like that of Secondlife.

Our 2nd MMO in development is Rise of Heroes. Its been in development since October of last year. Its a mixture of Scifi and fantasy. Guilds will play an important role in the politics of the game.

Here is the back story for rise of heroes:

To Whom it May Concern,
Be mindful and watchful on your journey through the eternal darkness in your quest for knowledge and power. The Universe is a marvelous place. Filled with more wonder and mystery than you can even begin to comprehend, but take care - Space is also full of evil, death, and danger, but for those who are ready it can be a place of success, adventure, and even greater rewards . So always remain on guard and remember not all stories and folklore are fantasy. Some legends and mythology are true. Some are meant as a warning passed down from one generation to another. They have some key elements twisted but the general idea remains true. Take Alleen for example. What you have never heard of Atlantis? Then let me tell you all about the planet of Alleen

In a day not so different from this very day a planet existed that fostered community, education, Goals to better the world around us as well as each other, and further the knowledge that helped us meet our goals. Aliens lived in peace on this planet all working toward the same goals. The Planet of Alleen was alive and thriving in this peace. No explosions to blow apart her soil or blood to stain her many rivers and oceans. The Aliens of Alleen took care of her and in return she took care of them. That was until the Afrekening started.

A race of perfect killers part technology part biological with nothing but hatred for every other living thing that dared to breath. We called them Zerztorers. Once they saw you there was no hiding from them or pleading for your life. They could transport instantly from one location to another through a network Portals. They were known as The Doors to Oblivion. To this day we do not know how they managed to get that first portal on to Alleen. Once the invasion started it came strong and fast. Our main cities were destroyed before we even managed to launch a counter offensive against them. Once the mutual fighting started wave after wave of our troops fell to those monsterous things. The Rivers of Alleen turned red from the blood of our troops. Smoke rose above our cities as ash fell from the sky. The fires were so fierce that they created their own weather systems. Giant Funnels of extreme heat, wind, and flame rose from the center of our largest cities sucking in everything that dare get to close.

The fighting raged on for over two years. Finally when all hope was lost and the spirits of those few remaining survivors had all been broken, we managed to push them back to where they came from. Out of the ashes rose a leader some might have called a hero. He came from a race that held great power. He electrified us and made us believe that when so many before us had failed we could take them on. We would be the ones to bring about peace once more to Alleen.Little did we know The final Stand of Alleen was to yield the largest loss of innocent lives during the two year war. Only a Handful of us survived. When the blasts fell silent, the air cooled off, and the ash no longer fell we had been on the winning side. The corpses of those who fell littered the streets and walking through puddles of blood was unavoidable. These were our fathers, our mothers, our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, our friends, and our closest allies.

After this final stand, we destroyed all of the gateways on Alleen but one. We were unable to get to it before a powerful force field was erected over it and all of our technology and spells were unable to get through the force field. A Keeper of the gate was appointed to stand guard over the gate. He was given the gift of eternal life so he could fulfill his duty with out having to find a replacement. Life on Alleen carried on. Soon her soils started to heal and her blood stained rivers returned to their many shades of blue. Governments arose and our cities were rebuilt. Unsure of how the Zorztorers had found us, a meeting was held for all of The Alleen governments, there they decided that Alleen needed to go into hiding. Every piece of technology was banned, destroyed and thrown into large holes in the ground to be covered up. A dark age had falling upon Alleen, a time of little learning and mourning for all we had lost.

As the years passed our knowledge of the world outside our cities faded and our memories of the terrible Afrekening was lost in the back of our minds. The Gate Keeper was the only living being on Alleen that remembered those terrible days. As the time passed everyone kept to their own kind and the knowledge of each other's existence grew into nothing more than legends and mythology.

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Here are some screen shots of some test terrain I have done:

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Any feed back you guys can give us or if you would like to help out then please respond or PM me or email me at deadmanheat@yahoo.com Thanks!

 

[thesims3mods]

Here is some of our brainstorming we have done on the subject of guilds:

Key Guild Features:
- Build and defend villages
- Attack other guilds villages
- Control large areas of land with multiple villages
- Number of possible villages depends on number of members with in the guild
- Different buildings provides different ability boosts to members of the owning guild when with in a certain radius of building
- smaller mining or lumber colonies
- Village founder can decide on the government style with in the village

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======NPC guilds======
Approach 1:
NPC Guilds.
NPC guilds will be career guilds.
For instance there could be a Mage guild, a fighter guild, a merchant guild etc.
If there is a career path, there will be a matching career guild.

Approach 2:
NPC Factions.
NPC factions are groups of NPCs with a common goal. An NPC run city can be a faction, a marauding band of mercenaries can be a faction.

Approach 3:
A combination of approaches 1 and 2. There are NPC guilds. These are independent, global guilds. If you are a member of the mage guilod, you are a member of the mage guild in every city.
Besides that, you have the NPC factions. With a faction you need to build standing. The higher your standing with a faction, the friendlier they are towards you, and the bigger the bonuses. If your standing gets below a certain level, you could be banned from the city, or even attacked on site.

Personally, I prefer Approach 3. Having a standing system instead of a clear cut division into two sides.


Guilds and factions would ideally function almost identical, with the main difference being that the guilds are the place you go to train your skills and the factions are where you go for everything else. Also, faction will be part of the standing system, while guilds will not.

Faction standing:
Each faction has 2 types of standing: faction standing and individual standing. Faction standing is the standing from one faction to another. Individual standing is the standing a faction has towards an individual.
Actions performed by the player influence his standing towards the NPC factions. If the player completes an assignment for an member of an NPC faction his faction standing will increase. If he kills members of an NPC faction his standing will decrease etc.

Guilds are not part of the standing system. However, they are indirectly part of it. Guildhalls are where players need to go to receive training. Guildhalls are located inside NPC towns. So, if the player's standing with the faction owning the town is low enough, he can no longer access the guild hall in that city.

======Player Guilds======
Player guilds would actually be more in line with the NPC factions. Handling the standing will be the hard part here. How do you automatically handle standings between player run factions.
One way would be to determine a list of player actions and put standing modifiers on that. For instance attacking another player should influence your standing in a negative way, bot from that player and from that players faction. However, if that player has any factions with a negative standing towards him, your standing with those factions should increase if you kill the player.
Assisting a player in combat should as a result increase your standing with that player and his faction.

It gets bit harder to put standing modifiers on other things, but this goes for both npc and pc factions.

Besides taking part in the standing system, player run factions should ultimately also be able to build their own towns etc. Eventually, their should be no noticeable difference between player run factions or NPC factions.

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This is a guild setup I have encountered in one game before, and it works very well. It gives the players maximum freedom to do what they want, while still enforcing different sides in the struggle.
The biggest advantage is that the different sides are chosen dynamically (at least on the p[layer end). The NPC faction standings are something we can set ourselves, so through this we have a reasonable matter of influence. We can also influence the amount by which player actions change their standing.

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Interesting stuff. Guilds are an important unit, and one that I feel have been underdeveloped in most MMOGs. I really like the concept of them being able to create buildings and gain benefits based on that, as well as create colonies for obtaining resources, which obviously could go on to fuel that guild's war machine.

I'm concerned about the concept of player guilds and NPC guilds. Does there need to be a distinction? It all depends on how guilds fit into the wider political landscape. In most games, guilds are apolitical, because the politics of the game world aren't influenced by players. However, if territory control, city development and resources come into play, then it's a different story altogether. If guilds can control territory, wage wars over borders with other guilds, then what distinguishes them from states in themselves? Thus, it becomes important to consider where guilds fall into the wider political spectrum.

Ideally, there should be no distinction. Players should join guilds with player leadership, or NPC leadership, and NPCs should be compelled to join guilds with player leadership and so on. Anyone should be able to join a guild which caters to them in the best possible way. As for managing relations between player guilds, I don't think it's a problem. Take a step backwards and think about it. If you saw someone in another guild, who were bitter rivals with you, always heaping **** on you in chat channels, would you just let them walk by because a number on your UI said that they had good relations with you, because they'd never really acted physically against you, but were a constant thorn in your side? Probably not. Players can handle relations between themselves just fine. I think we should consider players as having enough intelligence to decide who they want to kill, and deal with the consequences. Trying to create a numeric system to control that seems kind of redundant and overly restrictive.

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Ok, first let me clarify a few of the concepts in my proposal.
There will be Guilds and factions.
Guilds are entirely NPC and will be career centered. Each career will have it's own guild. You will have a fighter guild, a mage guild and so on.

Seperate from the guilds will be the Factions. These are the more interesting groups, since these are what make up the political structure. Factions work almost the same for players and NPC. The only difference being the way standings work. With player Factions, standing can be set either manually, or as a reward for a player initiated quest. NPC factions will always have automatic standing modification. (Like hell, I'm going to manage al the NPC factions manually...)

Standing:
Standing is the way the political landscape is given form. There are several levels on which you can define standing:
Player-to-Player: this is standing between players.
Player-to-NPC: this is the standing between a player and a certain (named) NPC. Only certain NPCs support this concept. It makes no sence to have this kind of fine grain control on every farmer you meet.
Player-to-Player Faction: this is the standing between a player and a player faction, this does not have to be the players own faction.
Player-to-NPC Faction: this is the standing between a player and a NPC faction. This does not have to be the players own faction.
Player Faction-to-Player Faction: This is the standing between two Player factions.
Player Faction-to-NPC Faction: this is the standing between a Player faction and a NPC faction.
NPC Faction-to-NPC Faction: this is the standing between two NPC factions.

The Faction to Faction standings are what makes up the political landscape. Faction standing will (this is my idea at least) be based on the standings of the members of that faction. If the majority of the members of a faction have a high standing with another faction, then the faction as a whole will have a high standing towards that other faction.

This standing system can be used for several things. With regards to the NPC factions, it can be used as a way to automate certain tasks, like deciding the mood of the NPC-trader.
In general it can be used as a way to display a political map of the game, and thus decide where it is safe to travel and where not.

With regards to player-to-player faction standing it can be argued that having this standing depend on the players instead of being able to manually set the standing directly is not a wanted scenario. On the other hands, it gives us a means to draw the political landscape, among other things. We can also link several other things to the standing, like war and alliances.
To be able to attack another faction's village, you need to declare war on that alliance. to be able to declare war, you need a low enough faction standing. This is done by getting enough of your members to lower their standing towards that faction so your faction standing drops below a certain level. Same goes (the other way around) for alliances. This could be a way to hold a member vote on whether or not to declare war on that other faction.

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