Galactic War

No problem. I'd encourage more people to download copies of those - they are relics of an awesome time, and I'd feel pretty bad if they were lost forever because my hard drive imploded.

A battlefield the size of the universe might be a bit much, if extremely cool. But I was thinking of something like the galaxy map in Endless Space - except instead of the galaxy divided up into constellations and stars, it could be sectors and clusters. There's ~400 billion stars in the Milky Way, which I think would be plenty to handle the scope of metagame like this.

So you've got a galaxy broken into sectors, each of which contains a couple of dozen star clusters - which are the focal point of daily battles. Players jump into different clusters to help their faction win by winning games in procedurally generated star systems within the cluster. At that point, the game can follow either a model like the original Galactic War (that is, all players participate in a battle over a particular sector, with news updates, coalitions forming and breaking apart, and an evolving storyline basically created by the players). Or it could go something like the Shogun 2: Total War route, where the whole galaxy is up for grabs, and a dozen different factions compete for control over the available territory.

I lean in favor of the former, particularly since there isn't likely to be any kind of single players campaign, and a lot of players *are* actually drawn to stories. An evolving story that the players can directly influence? Kickass.

I want Galactic War for CLANS!

That should be quite possible.

I figure if they went with a Galactic War metagame along similar lines to the ones we were talking about, bearing in mind that there's basically only one army divided up by individual commanders, there's a few ways to shake this out.

One option is to break the galaxy up by dev-designed factions, and let players and clans join them, fighting over the galaxy. Another is to simply allow clans to register as such, and be allowed to carve out their own territories. It's a bit more difficult, but you could end up with a crazy system of clans and alliances akin to EVE Online.

Either way, I'd like to see a narrative arc of what's happening, like Newsbot of old. It would certainly be a much cheaper way of handling a "campaign" and storyline, without actually devoting the major expenses a proper single-player campaign would require. It wouldn't really satisfy the single-player fans, but it would let multiplayer games determine the narrative. All Uber would really need is one decent storyteller/writer to do weekly updates based on game recordings (if that feature is in the game) and strategic shifts. I have to imagine that it'd be far easier to implement than a full scale single-player game.