WARCRY - How do Fleets operate in battle?

 

Larry: One of the most important objects in IWars is the star fleet. Each of the 300 fleets in the game starts off as an empty engine capable of flinging an attached group of ships instantly through the Stargates to another world. Its technology is far ahead of the simple civilizations that first discover them. Until a fleet is populated with one of more ships, it is flightless and harmless. Once assembled, the fleet takes on the combined attributes of its component ships. If you were to think of it in board game terms, you can define this game piece and continue to re-define it as it moves throughout the worlds of the universe.

There are four major characteristics that every fleet shares: Fleet Strength - offensive power, Shield Strength - defensive protection, Speed - the number of worlds the fleet can travel in a single move, and Cargo Space - how many raw materials the fleet can haul. There are several other defining characteristics that apply depending upon what kind of Character owns the fleet and carrying a Jewel of Power can affect fleet abilities. Each character has a choice of three kinds of ships to purchase for these fleets, which cannot be moved or their ownership maintained until at least one ship is attached to them. BattleStars are the slowest, most expensive but most powerful ships, Scouts, which are the least powerful but most inexpensive, fastest and most flexible and last, the cruisers (or freighters for the Traders) the best cross between speed, power and cost. By combining the individual ship attributes, a fleet value for each of the major characteristics is reached.

Combat between each individual fleet is easily calculated. Each ship adds its Fleet Strength and Shield Strength to the entire fleet; by subtracting Fleet Strength of the attacking fleet from Shield Strength of the defending fleet, any fleet that has Shield Strength remains alive with ships being destroyed in a specific order. At first glance this seems very simple. The complexity is not in individual fleet battles but armada battles, as enveloping moves from unseen directions and the worlds have their effect on the outcome of the battles. In a more passive role, fleets can be set as sentinels to powerfully ambush non-allied fleet traffic passing through their orbits.

Fleets are not only for combat but also ferry raw materials and carry artifacts and Imperial Credits, the game’s currency. They are the one uniformly required resource in the game by all characters to make mobile the plans and schemes of the players. Scouts on fleets play important roles when converted as probes to unexplored worlds, fortresses to establish world ownership, forays to capture unpopulated fleets or missiles fired through a Stargate to a neighboring world. And for the Terminator, Scout ships are especially valuable when converted to robots for attacking and replacing world populations and under the right circumstances to charge their Gravitronic Disruptors for blowing up worlds and forcing their suns to Nova! BattleStars too can have special values as they move one world faster for the Warlord, are Mobile Factories for the Traders, and convert Minions for Philosophers and generally give all their owners a warm and fuzzy feeling of security. For general duties, like hauling and policing around your own empires, the cruisers and freighters are just the ticket.

WarCry: How many games do players get to play every month? Give us an average number.

Larry: In theory it would be fine with us for players to play in any number of universes simultaneously. However, we noted something in the open beta games. Because Imperial Wars games start with a couple of easy turns there is a tendency to think that there will be plenty of time to play in multiple games. That is not very likely. So, beta testers often signed up for several games and then had to drop out of some of them as the universes heated up and they were suddenly confronted with managing large empires in each of them. This is not good for the health of the games. It is natural for a certain attrition rate in a universe as players will wish to resign from games in the natural course of game play but it is damaging to the game balance for players to leave simply because they committed to too many games.

For most people it will be all they can do to be fully involved in one game, or at most two. On the other hand, players should have that option once they are aware of how IWars plays. And often, it is useful to start up one game as another is winding down. So, once a new player has played in 10 consecutive turns, they are free to begin a second simultaneous game. Once they have completed a game, they can play in up to 3 simultaneous games. Also, new players can substitute into games with openings from resignations for another 3 games. If that isn’t enough games we are happy to let players with a responsible player history play in any number of games they wish by contacting the Galactic Effectuator directly.

WarCry: You're planning on a monthly subscription aren't you?. How did you try to set your subscription price in relation to the other MMOGs?

Larry: Right now we're playing Imperial Wars for free. But the cost of a game service or anything else should be based first on its value, how much fun is it? For the kind of player that likes strategy role-playing in a sci-fi universe Imperial Wars is at least as much fun as any game anywhere that I have ever played. This is a very subjective opinion, of course, but it is nonetheless sincere. So our cost is comparable to many of the other persistent world games. I think Imperial Wars offers a great value for the number of hours one can play in an Imperial Wars universe since your moves and the Starlords you play with are always available to you. I have never heard a comment about price from players who have actually played and are familiar Imperial Wars. Veterans realize that paid players mean “players who are likely to respect their positions in a universe” and that makes them more fun.

While bandwidth expenses are significantly less for us than those of other persistent world games, our other costs, such as customer service, promotion and so on are no different. And we intend to spend more money on cutting edge communication techniques in the 'metagame' aspect of IWars then anyone else even contemplates. More importantly, cost is not what determines price. An inexpensive but brilliant Robert Altman film costs the same to see at the box office as a Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson blockbuster though costs are in no way comparable. StarWars Galaxies shouldn’t cost more to play then Dark Age of Camelot because it took 10 times as much money to make.

Maybe the most important point is that we are blazing a trail in our game niche and we can’t expect to have a large player base right away. We are prepared for the long and difficult prospect of searching out our audience and helping them find us. Our veteran players seem to understand that there is a partnership between the game producer and the player community in a game service. The revenue they provide funds our efforts to find and expand our player base, to maintain our service so that this game exists and promotes a healthy, involved veteran core. Our goal is to have the best, brightest and most involved game players possible. That may be incompatible with having the largest player base and that is just fine with all of us. As we are self-funded we still have to pay what we can for promotion, customer service and general overhead as well as our own investment to pay back. By any conventional accounting our team has spent well over a million dollars producing this game and though most of that debt is in contingency payments those people who have invested their time, materials and money have a right to a return on their investment.