I think players should buy this game from Stephen and work together to make 3d universal map, permanent round.  In addition, there would be a real-time 1st-person component to the game.

It would work like this:  during each phase of a battle for a planet, players in the universe could join any of the battles going on in any of the galaxies during any given tick.  Depending on their character's skills and upgrades, they'd get portions of the GC that the attacking empire spends to launch the attack.

It's like this, Render, in addition to your empire, you also have a character.  This character can play during the tick.  So, after you do you build for the tick, you can click a link and bring up your client through which you play your in-game character.

You see a list of all the battles going on in the whole universe.  Let's say one of your allies or a family member is launching an attack that tick.  You join the battle for the planet with your character, who participates in the fighter phase in control of a fighter.  Many other players in universe also join this battle either on the side of the attacking empire or the defending empire.  There are also plenty of AI NPC characters, of course.   The mission on offense is always to protect bombers, and on defense always to destroy the bombers.  For joining the battle, get extra GC according to your character's rep.  You increase your rep by getting kills.  You can use your character's GC to buy training / upgrades to your character's abilities.

Anyway, during the fighter phase (maybe 25 minutes), you fly around in dogfights around the planet, trying to kill fighters which are trying to kill the fleet's bombers.  If enough of the bombers survive and successfully destroy all the lasers, ground phase begins. 

For the rest of the tick, your character lands on a battlefield.  Your mission as attacker is to destroy the portal.  If you were a defender, your mission would be naturally to repel the enemy forces.  From your perspective the ground phase would be much like Counter Strike, but with different weapons and abilities depending on how much your character had upgraded / trained.  One upgrade would be your rank, which would then determine how many soldiers or droids would 'follow' you around the battlefield.

Each time your character dies, you get re-spawned, and continue the battle.  You don't lose any abilities or upgrades.

Your character could also conduct special op missions, and, if you chose to forgo the combat element and chose be a wizard character, a whole different set of other cool stuff to do.

Seriously, those players who really love this game should come together to build it into something really amazing.  We could buy some code, tweak it, have a permanent 3d universal map with fog of war with the potential to have many galaxies added to it over time.  With a real-time, first-person component, people would pay to play this game. 

You could still play IC as an empire for free, just as it is now.  Empires in the permanent universe would have some additional functions, including a lot of automation, like auto-building, production ques, auto exploring, auto periodic aid shipments, so that someone could basically spend most of their time playing their character and their empire could grow on its own according to players' presets.

It would eventually end up that one fam would eventually push all other fams out of a given galaxy, and take full control of it and together try to make headway into taking over additional galaxies.  Alternatively, after galaxy is won, and some in-fighting in the fam might ensue, one epic player could end up controlling a whole galaxy.  Maybe that single player is so good, he can take-over many galaxies, or there is a fam with each player controlling multiple galaxies.

The game would have to be designed so that this eventuality would be extremely difficult to maintain for very long, for, due to empire size and family size build cost, there would come a point were it simply would be astronomically expensive to build anything, and thus any losses incurred to such an empire or family could only be replenished at a significant loss relative to the smaller attacking family or empire.

Realistically speaking, it would only be sustainable for a single player to be able to control only one galaxy at a time, and thus a family could potentially control as many galaxies as they have players.  Depending on how strategically they are spread, and the difficulty and time involved in sending intergalactic invasion fleets, it might be possible for them to control a cluster of galaxies if they wanted to risk leaving the inner-most ones relatively undefended.

For essentially, there would be ridiculously long distances between galaxies (Sorry.  No such thing as inter-galactic portals).  The only realistic way to invade a galaxy would be to send a fleet from one galaxy to another, and it would take literally months to get there.  But so too would it take months for a family to send fleets to defend one of their inner galaxies.  They'd have to send fleets from their adjacent galaxies because they wouldn't be able to afford to build much fleet in their galaxies due to their huge size.  They could disband fleet in one galaxy, and thereby lower their NW enough to feasibly rebuild their fleet in another, but the waste of resources would be ridiculous, and it would only really lower their NW partially, unless they also wanted to dismantle all their infra in one galaxy, too.  Potentially, they could abandon a galaxy so as to lower their NW enough to rebuild fleet in an inner galaxy, but then that would leave an empty galaxy for other fams to colonize.

Anyway, what I am saying, Render, is I have a vision for this game.  This game could be something really, really BIG.  BIGGER than wow, BIGGER than Starcraft.  We as players, should work together to make it happen.

The question is really, how much real-world coin might players be willing to put together to invest in this game; how many players would want to take ownership of this game and build it into the sort of game MILLIONS of people would and could play...

lol

> NaKuShItA wrote:

> You know that the game you want Xeno is totaly different than what IC is.
You dont have to buy this game from stephan because it wont do you any good since your got to start over from scratch anyway.

The IC community is what's really valuable here, not the game code...

heya barewolf, been a while