Campaign ideas

Warning: Wall of text incoming! Impact in t-minus 3...2...1...

Okay, after mulling over the campaign for a few days, here's what I got. Please note that all these suggestions are very much 'pre-alpha'. I haven't got the names of any of the factions or main characters, or the details of how they got there, or their form of government, or what they want. These ideas need a lot of polish and, should any of them sound interesting, still need to be twisted to fit whatever narrative is settled on. Right now I just need to post my notes before they get too big to handle.

When you write a game story it's always best to design from specs. What are the parameters of the game and what kind of story does it need?

1. Robots annihilating each other

I assume that the drive to war comes from the robots' basic instructions, programmed into them long ago by humans. They are designed to kill everything in their path, to keep replicating non-stop, or whatever. Now, in order to make drama from this, you need to humanize it a little bit. Thus, the robots should not blindly carry out this instruction like ants. Instead, with their humanoid personalities they interpret it as a social code - as an explicit moral imperative. Now, if you take that idea and give it a 40K makeover, that becomes a religious imperative. After all, a human coding instructions into a sentient machine is a lot like God handing out laws to mankind. And now you're just one step from a robot theocracy. Which is too cool to pass up.

Theocracy lets you mine a lot of flavor from Biblical and medieval sources. Biblical styling was a natural choice anyway, what with the nonstop genocide and world obliteration. Theocracy as a government type just makes it synergize even better. Techno-medievalism and old-timeyism can inform unit and character names, social conventions and mannerisms, and some aesthetics like say a stained glass style to intermission screens.

For unit names you can go for sort of a mix between religious and computer terms. For instance, a neat name for the worker units would be Daemons. In Greek mythology, daemons were servants of the gods. In Christian mythology, they are, well, demons. And in programming, daemons run in the background, handling low-level tasks. As an aside, you may hate me for this, but maybe the Daemons could be kind of cute, in a wistful, servanty sort of way. Like a cross between R2D2 and Wall-E, with R2D2 sounds. They're just these little guys that follow your every command and do all the dirty work with a melodic little chirp. They would become iconic of the game, and every game benefits from iconic characters.

2. We need competing factions but there will only be one set of units.

So - several factions, one species. Going with the theocracy idea, the obvious solution is religious sects. In Christianity you have Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, and lots of tiny little groups. They're all the same species with pretty much the same ideology, but, historically speaking, persecute each other as heretics.

There can be two or three main sects, like Catholics and Orthodox, but there should be thousands of them altogether. The galaxy should be teeming with robot swarms big and small. That way in multiplayer each clan or even each player can pretend to be their own 'faction' in a way consistent with the lore. It also makes the campaign galactic situation more dynamic with allying and backstabbing out the wazoo. All these thousands of sects worship the same thing - let's call it the Source, as a placeholder - and fight over the correct interpretation of its teaching.

The main visual difference between factions could be their banner or symbol, as with the Autobots and Decepticons. In my habitual geeky speculations I have long considered the Monad a great symbol for sentient machines. It's an ancient symbol of Oneness, the Source, and God, and evokes Hal-9000's eye. It's also a term in programming. This could be the basic sign of the Source, as the cross is the sign of Christianity, and faction insignia can be variations on it or incorporate it. Add stripes like the Orthodox cross or something.

3. Voice acting resources are limited.

I assume it will be possible to make a small subset of units fully voice acted. This points to a caste system in the robot ranks. You have self-aware machines, some of which are campaign 'hero' units, with full VA and Transformers-type personalities. Then you have the servant machines that only make computer sounds. The relationship between the self-aware and the non-aware machines could be a bit like medieval nobles/priests and peasants.


Now that we have a basic world-building concept to match the specs, let's add flavor.

What do the robots worship?

One obvious choice is the leader who overthrew their human masters. There's an interesting parallel between AI revolution and the founding myths of Indo-European polytheism. The Aesir overthrew the Vanir, the Olympians overthrew the Titans who in turn had overthrown the Giants. Most likely, this is a mythologized account of some conflict between the tribal ancestors of the Indo-Europeans, and the gods are the "telephone"-ized memory of their chieftains. Maybe over the millennia the robot revolution has become equally distant and mythologized, so it's not clear who the beings mentioned were or if they even existed. Ambiguity=good.

The backstory is taking shape: The [mythical beings formerly known as humans] ruled the galaxy; Robot God led the rebellion against them, and guided Robotopia through the Golden Age, but after his mysterious death a war broke out among the successors which has ravaged the galaxy until now. Countless advances were lost, and now we're stuck in a galactic Dark Age. The game could start with a Mad Max-style voiceover that recounts it all in mythical terms over illustrations and a sad, epic score. Cheap yet effective.

That's great and all, but what about the campaign?

I have some ideas.

Your hero starts as a new commander in the service of the reigning Emperor or whatever the title is for the leader of the biggest faction. All resources must be assimilated for the war with the heretics, and that's what you do. In the first missions you mop up various heretic strongholds. These also serve as tutorials. I'm pretty sure everyone who will buy this game has played an RTS before so they don't need to learn the utter basics, what they do need is the specifics of the TA series like cover, economy flow and so on. The player should not have to wait while the game tells him something he already knows, keep unskippable cutscenes at a minimum. Your instructor at this point is a superior officer. He spices up the proceedings with lines like "Annihilate the heretic!", "Faster! Faster! War brooks no inefficiency!" or "Now unleash that power and annihilate your enemy". If you come across some dinosaurs or humans he tells you to "destroy this primitive lifeform and assimilate its mass!"

At some point there's an event that makes your hero break with the Empire and become a fugitive. I'm not sure what yet. What's important is that this event starts your hero commander on a journey across the galaxy with constantly switching alliances and meeting all kinds of strange figures with shadowy motivations. The plot should be as twisty as Starcraft's Terran campaign. At some point it leads to...

An order of robot monks, dedicated to preserving knowledge of the aeons. Being heretics, they hide from the telescopes of the Empire in the darkness of interstellar space. They claim that the current Emperor is an usurper and not actually following the true Source. They send you to locate an ancient 'wise one' who, the holy records suggest, is one of the few survivors from the Golden Age millions of years ago. He has long been hiding on a distant planet which has since been overrun by hostiles. So in the next mission you clear out that system and perform whatever rituals the monks told you would summon the wise one. This ritual may well include smashing several asteroids into the planet.

What neither you nor the monks know is that the wise one is not hiding on that planet, he is the planet. It's a Jupiter Brain which has lain dormant for aeons and been overgrown with living things and mistaken for a normal planet. As you finish the ritual there is a huge earthquake and much of the biosphere is disrupted (illustrated by deer escaping as from a forest fire, and your commander hefting his D-gun as if expecting something to jump out) as the planet-brain awakes and its megastructures reach out into orbit, revealing the computational substructure of the crust. Its moons erupt into slightly less colossal spherical robots, revealing themselves to be the main-brain's co-processors. Its personality is super slow, old and wise, like the ents from LOTR. Exposition dump! You learn a ton of backstory and finally get to know what you need to defeat the Emperor. It's like the swamp scene in Empire Strikes Back if Luke was a 300 story kill-bot and Yoda was a million-years old sentient planet. The planet-brain could be voiced by a male but a female "Earth Mother" would be cool too (is Ellen McLain available?).

What you learn is that this world-brain has been on lockdown ever since the great war when the God was destroyed. He/she/it was present at the God's side in this battle, and perhaps the current Emperor was implicated with killing the God? In any case it's clear that the reigning doctrine is a heresy compared to what the God preached. But to get proof of this you need to go to the scene of the battle, of which the mother-brain helpfully tells you the location.

Robot God, as big as a giant star, was annihilated by the impact of a supermassive black hole and his body was broken. Over time his remains coalesced into a strange planetary system which has drifted for aeons undetected through the measureless expanse of interstellar space. In this system his torso is the star, and his head and limbs the planets, moons and asteroids. To uncover the secret of the metal god you must battle across his body parts, defeating his surviving 'immune system' of extremely powerful war robots. Since this is interstellar space, it would be night everywhere, interesting if solar power is implemented.

Once you reach the head/torso, you finally get the evidence you need to prove that the Emperor is a usurper. Maybe it also somehow proves that you are the true Prince, so now you have a claim on the throne. So it's not about overthrowing the Empire to form a Republic - like medieval peasants the robots probably wouldn't know what the hell that is - but restoring the true dynasty, like in a fairytale, or Dune. In the next missions, you take on the Empire. They should be absolutely ******* gigantic, like many hours long. And there you are, king of the galaxy!

So in a nutshell: the hero commander is the rightful Prince or at least bearer of the true religion, and must gather evidence that the current ruler is a usurper or not following the instructions laid down by God. This quest takes him on a galactic odyssey: to water and ice worlds, to the depths of gas giants, to tribal humans, heretic monks, a planet-brain, and the corpse of God, where at last he finds the evidence he needs, and then it's a question of rallying the masses and defeating the false Emperor in a series of utterly enormous endgame battles. There's your campaign.

tl;dr: Transformers 40,000!

OK, so much for the story. Here's some thoughts on implementation. The main point is cheap fun!

-Allow shared unit co-op; advertise this as a feature
-Let players pick any mission from the start. (With a prompt if you haven't finished the previous ones, like the Starcraft campaigns.) This makes it more accessible if you know a map you like. You can also just skip ahead if you're stuck.
-No unskippable cutscenes.
-Don't hold up the game for inane chatter. If characters have something non-vital to say, let them say it to you while you play, GTA style.
-No cinematics. Plain voiced text intermissions over 2d art, maybe supported by a few in-engine cutscenes. Starcraft 1 style 'captain's bridge' with talking heads would be nice but I'm not sure it's needed.
-No installation crawls. You sometimes advance by moving a hero to trigger spots, but each map should have RTS gameplay.

If it costs really much to make a campaign.. what about having as DLC a campaign-expansion that might introduce a new faction: humans and slowly fighting back against machines and getting some stronghold?

I really get sad by the idea that all humans are dead, past and gone, so something that introduces forgotten human colonies at abandoned sections of the galaxy borders would be nice, with then the groups growing again into a human empire.

Good idea. Humans are the best option for a second race. They'd have a totally fresh playstyle and personality. However, I do think there should be a robot campaign to ship with the vanilla game.

I was speaking of DLC, or something else that can be done in any expansion form when Uber entertainment got money from the sales.

Let's just call it Expansion, I got tired of DLC :<

When I think of DLC I just think of half or barely tiny content.

Sorry. When i first learnt of the word DLC with the infinite war pack of Supreme commander 2 and then after with the Treasures of the Sun with Dungeon Siege III i started to very much like the system.

I am not sure how the DLC system is used in the other games, but i very much like the DLC system (via steam) that was used for Dungeon Siege III and Supcom 2.

I much prefer content that can be turned on/off like in Supcom 2 that is added to the main game than a stand alone game.

That would be nice but let's hope that the comunity doesn't get separated too much. But if it's only campaign DLC/Expansion then it might be fine.

Also no need to say sorry, you didn't do anything wrong.

With DLC like this community gets splitted if it even does on the smallest way. Everything happens on the same game, and i often set DLC of to play with other guys that don't have DLC.

You do have a good point actually. I personally do like campaigns, so even with TA which admittedly, as campaigns go was quite primitive, I enjoyed playing through it and have done so several times. It's one of those games I occasionally get a hankerin' for and dust off. But I am not everyone. No doubt there's a good number of offline players who exclusively play skirmish.

But skirmish is one of those things that can go horribly horribly wrong if the AI is bad. If the AI is too weak, and multiplayer games are too hard or otherwise too intimidating than you have a situation where you are losing players that fall into the middle. With a weak AI, that can be a really big middle.

You need an AI that has lots of levels. Possibly the best example of this is CIV which has something like 10 different levels for the AI, the hardest of which challenge even the most hardcore players. Anybody can find a level of AI that they are comfortable with in CIV. If skirmish and of course coop skirmish is going to be a thing, AI is very very important to get right.

I disagree that a single-player campaign is needed. Of the 15 years I've played TA, I've only spent a few months playing the campaign. Almost the entirety of it was spent playing skirmish against the AI, and then later with/against some friends.

Of all the games I've played (not just RTS'), the game needs to have significant focus put on the campaign or it is absolutely not worth the effort. If they shoe-horn in a campaign, it's going to be terrible (no offense Uber, but if compared to any other RTS campaign/story, it'd be much less elaborate, and get much worse reviews).

I'd much rather see the effort put into offline and online multiplayer features. They'll need the focus, since they're planning a July 2013 release.

Especially since they want to make this the ultimate LAN game, they need to prioritize.

Anecdote is not data. But if you want to play that game - pretty much all my high school friends played RTS. Red Alert, Starcraft, some TA. A tiny subset of us sometimes played LAN matches. A few went online for comp stomps, UMS maps and the like. Me and a couple others even tried out competitive play. But the huge majority only ever played the campaign. That's 'the game' to them. Most RTS fans are like that. You just don't see those people since the ones who post on RTS forums are the hardcore. Still, go to any preview of this game and you'll see a string of comments like 'no campaign no buy'.

I agree that the focus should be on skirmish and versus. So do Uber and that's why campaign is a stretch goal. But I honestly don't see why a good campaign has to be expensive. The quality mostly depends on the writing. Good writing is cheap to implement but rare to come by. Starcraft 1 had a better campaign than Starcraft 2 at probably like, one 50th of the production cost. Like I've been saying, plain text and 2d art goes a long way.

Okay so here's another mission idea...

Once upon a time there lived the greatest warrior the Empire had ever seen. (Let's call him Belisarius because I'm a sucker for Byzantine history). Despite this warrior's unshakable loyalty the cruel emperor had him framed because he was popular enough to threaten the emperor's rule. The emperor ordered him cast to the bottom of the deepest sea in the galaxy, and then had the giant ocean planet moved away from its star, freezing the world and burying Belisarius within a thousand miles of ice. There he has rested, in painful contemplation, for the last million years.

To free Belisarius (Assuming you can melt ice planets and this is how it's done) you must melt the entire world by either by impacting enough asteroids or bringing it into the orbit of a sun. Then you get Belisarius on your side and can build more units of his type. My idea is that he's basically a super-Krogoth with a strategic missile launcher. He could also be the leader of a whole group of units of his type, like a sacred band of warriors.

In Norse mythology the world was made from the body parts of the giant Ymir. This would be a cool reference. Either the robot mythology could claim that the entire universe was made from the body of the original robot, or simply that the ruling class of intelligent robots descends from mutations to his code.

Maybe the robots treat codebase like aristocrats in the Middle Ages treated bloodline. A big deal among Christian nobles was claiming descent from Charlemagne, and Muslims claimed descent from Muhammad. Robot lords could use descent from this Original Galactic Gangsta as the basis of their claims to supremacy. This can even be worked into a sort of cyber-vassalage system - great for plot twists. Sentient robots are the 'lords' of the galaxy since they can operate autonomously and create mindless bots to serve them. The non-sentient units under a sentient robot's command/of his creation are his 'progeny' or 'household'. Viruses can turn any nonsentient robots to your side, but they don't work on sentient robots. So the lords of the galaxy have to make deals with each other.

You can also reference the Prometheus myth. The first rebellious sentient robot could be remembered as the one who 'stole the spark of intelligence from the Gods'.

I'd certainly say most players play for the single player experience (campaign or skirmish). I, for one, love campaigns, and only play those (and multiple times; I've played the Red Alert 2 campaign a dozen or so times over nearly a decade) and skirmishes with most games. One exception; LAN play with people I know. But nearly never online with random people.

A campaign doesn't have to be that expensive; you don't need top notch actors (or any (professional) actors at all), nor do you need to make a movie out of it (Warcraft III's in game cutscenes were great).

It is my experience with the matter though, and thus data to those that take it seriously.

You make a good point. I had assumed they would make a campaign more similar to current games. Going back to something like TA could be nice. I had limited interest in the SupCom campaigns. Perhaps it was because it was just uninteresting dialogue, then a mission. Then more dialogue, and so on. I enjoyed reading the TA mission reports and strategic hints (iirc, been a while since I've been in campaign).

It would be nice to learn more about the history of the endless war. Would they be allowed to reference Arm and Core? Seems like Core won in the end

As a stretch goal, okay. I'd love to see them get 2+million, but these last few days have been vile. They could even just let John Lowrie narrate the entire thing again. That'd actually be absolutely awesome.

So neutrino said in the shacknews interview that a campaign 'probably won't be a stretch goal'. Can't say I'm not a bit disappointed but at least now we know.

My only request to the devs is: please release the mod tools as soon as possible. Preferably while the game is still in beta. That way fans can start making their own campaign and have it ready close to launch. With a few good custom campaigns out there, you'll sell to at least some of those people that only want to play the campaign. And you won't waste your dev time.

I'm one of those guys that don't play multiplayer, so I would love some single player mode in PA. But I don't think a campaign with any kind of story is needed. I would simply love some kind of 'Galactic Annihilation', 'Galaxy at War' mode. Randomly generating a galaxy (or a set of solar systems) of chosen size and number of AI players. On that galactic map players, all having the same faction, the same set of units (at least at the beggining) want to Totally Annihilate each other by, I don't know, conquering opponents capital planets or destroying their main commanders. I'm thinking turn based large scale tactical map, where you can choose which solar systems to attack, and then go into skirmish mode, a simple battle in that system against defending or attacking enemy. Something like Total War games, no story, just fun.

Of course, there are different types of solar systems - some are resource rich (because of gas giants, for example) and give in subsequent battles a small boost to player's economy. And some are some sort of scientific centers giving the controlling player soem research points each turn, which can be later used to unlock new units. Yes, I'm thinking about tech trees, but only on the galactic map scale, not in actual battle. Meaning, in some of the first battles we would simply see some tanks or bots exploding on a planet, because none of the players have space cannons or asteroid-hurling technology yet. But later on the game, after different players choose different paths, we could see some epic struggles where one player is working on weaponizing an asteroid and the second player is trying to stop him with his superior and more advanced units.

I'm also thinking about permanent planetarry damage. If in one epic battle half of the planet is destroyed and turned into lava, during the next battle in this system (if, of course, it would be invaded again) the planet would still be partially unusable. And, of course, if the planet would be a scientific center, nuking it into oblivion would stop it from giving those benefits (you can't really do any research when you don't have any planet to stand on and analyze).

This kind of game mode wouldn't require any story at all and because of random playing field, different AI actions every time and different tech paths to choose would offer a lot of replayability. And it wouldn't even need a story. I think it wouldn't be too expensive to make, but would give some players much joy.

I'd say skirmish mode is more important than a campaign. A basic campaign would be nice of course if time could be found for it. I don't think it'd need extensive cutscenes.

It'd also be nice if there were tools for users to make convincing campaigns.

Now there's an idea. Maybe the best in this thread yet. No story, just a series of skirmishes connected by a galactic map. You can even use co-op on that thing. Uber are you listening?