I think what I'd like to do is actually include a secondary battle layer to the AI where you can actually see kind of a holographic view of the AI's systems and then mess with them. I'm actually even MORE tempted to make it a command-line interface because that makes it feel waaaay more hacker-y. But also possibly a lot less accessible.I think I like this a lot. It shouldn't be purely command line though; it's the future and we can hack like it. And even if we do stick with the command line, providing a UI to let players script-kiddy wouldn't be hard. We can expand the available commands as you collect relevant logs, find derelicts and advance minor faction plots.
... The command line interface is what excites me the most as a way to do this, but I'm not sure how others feel about it. It's the most flexible by far.
Heck, we actually could probably build in some simply query language type stuff where the programmer-oriented type folks could run some automated checks against various data they have scouted, and plan strategies based on that sort of thing.
Instead of an actual digital battleground (dam I hate Shadowrun's hacking (the video game)), I would rather like to keep it as a metaphor, just like in our real world. There is no "virtual space" with holographic ships fighting holographic turrets with holographic handguns. I truly hate this vision of hacking.Hacking is a gajillion times worse in the Shadowrun tabletop game. I know players who will go home if the hacking looks to last more than three sentences.
@Pumpkin: that was very much along the lines of what I was envisioning before the CLI idea came up. There was a very old game called Castles 2 on AOL that had some mechanics that were centered around territory control that I really liked.If anything, doll up the chat window with a row of buttons that automatically insert specific commands, like..
I was starting to think more along the lines of the sphere grid from FFX (but with more cross-connections by far), but that gets kinda nasty pretty fast.
Chris. Think of this as a cheat code system built into the game as an actual gameplay mechanic.:D :D :D
I am concerned with how to properly visually depict this 'virtual layer' given that a number of these virtual locations seem to have physical counterparts scattered about the galaxy. If it is difficult to cross reference one location to another, interacting with the network could get irritating.It appears I gave a wrong picture of what I intended with the physical/virtual links. Not all virtual servers would have a physical counterpart. In fact, I didn't talk about that at all in the second "refined" post. I think there might be physical assets having an effect in the virtual space (like satellites to captures in order to gain Computing Power) but there wouldn't be such things like virtual firewall to physically destroy or server to physically connect to in order to bypass virtual protections. That was an interesting idea, but, as you noted, it would be highly confusing, and I intend to silently ditch this idea.
Examples:
There is a crypto-master in the way of something I want in virtual space and I know that there must exist a physical location holding it. How do I *quickly* locate its corresponding hardware in the galaxy?
I have (through whatever means) come into possession of hardware that has a virtual cluster running on it. How do I check where this cluster is in the virtual landscape?