Longterm gameplan idea...

[ruairiau 0]

I'm gonna try make this short and to the point. The idea is to create a meta game that gives players a reason to login regularly and work together for a long term goal.

Firstly, make farms, villages and cities capturable. The bigger the area, the more people needed to pull it off. Capturing an area requires resources from all around (several branching quests that require one or more people). Captured areas are on a server by server basis.

Captured areas are free of zombies and NPC survivors patrol the area as well as checkpoints on main entrances. When you die, you will respawn at your settlement. You may belong to one or more settlements, but ultimately each settlement will require you to do tasks and it will be unfeasible to try to maintain too many.

To capture an area, you must go to the area and click on a flag post. Small farms will require 2-3 people; large cities will require 20-30. The first person to do so will mark their name as being the initial settler, other people that subsequently click the flag can choose to join that settlement or contest themselves; thus multiple groups can contest the same area. The first person/group to finish the capture tasks wins the settlement.

Once you click on the flag and trigger the capture, you will be given a set of objectives which will cover general gameplay e.g. collecting wood, infiltration, resource gathering, clearing out zeds in the local area etc. When these tasks are done, NPC survivors will appear at the area and zeds will no longer spawn there. Anyone who helped liberate the area will be seen as friendly (and are now seen as settlers). And zeds or other people will be shot on sight (if they are armed).

If an outsider wishes to join your settlement, they must approach unarmed (or weapon lowered – double CTRL in Arma 2). The must get to the flag pole, click it and then they have to do a set of tasks (similar to the capture tasks). Settlers are free to shoot armed/unarmed newcomers. Once a person does their initial tasks, they them become a settler like everyone else. Killing another settler expels you from the community and the NPCs will see you as hostile.

In order to remain as a settler, you will be given random tasks periodically that have an ingame time limit. For example, you may have 30 mins to get wood, or 1 hour to get food supplies, or kill x amount of zeds near the perimeter. As a settlement, you will be required to complete a certain amount of tasks regularly in order to maintain the settlement; failure will result in the settlement being disbanded. Basically, you do tasks to create NPC settlers (up to a max limit based on the size of the settlement). If NPCs get killed, they will respawn as long as your group keep doing the tasks regularly. Respawn is not immediate as to give attacking forces a chance at invading.

Attacking a settlement will be rewarded by getting access to loot (a supply cache). This supply cache will yield significantly more if you do it whilst there are players in the area. An attacking force can also choose to contest the area, they do this by clicking on the flag pole. They will then have to do a set of general tasks to win the settlement (exactly like the initial capture).

Discuss...