Emperor of the fadeing suns team game?

[dacole]

Had a curious idea yesterday that I thought I would present here. First if you have never heard of Emporer of the Fadeing suns I'll give a breif description of it here if you have then you should probably skip down to the second part of the message. Emperor of the fadeing suns is a turn based strategy sci-fi game. Imagine a game that mixes the land based combat and management with the space based combat of MOO and you will have the general idea. The story is that the emperor of the known universe has died without an heir and five houses must now vie for the throne. At the start of the game you start out with one unconquered planet and a few spaceships. The first thing you must do is take over your home planet, expand on it building cites ect as well as a space fleet to take over other planets. The beauty of the game is in the fact that besides the other four houses there are two other "factions" that are always computer controled the Church and the merchant guild. Like all these games EOFS has a tech tree but here the most interesting techs are illegal to research by order of the church, so if you decide to research them you better be prepared for an all out war with mother church which though winable can be quite costly. The merchant guild sells and buys equipment and is thus a good way to make money by selling excess equipment and a good place to buy equipment that you can't produce. However there agenda is to get rid of the monarchy and set up a republic. To this end they have a war chest that they place money they make (and being the merchants guild they are quite good at makeing money) when this chest gets to a certain point they declare for a republic start a revolution and the game ends. Also the point of the game is not direct millitary conquest but rather to be elected the Emperor of the Fadeing Suns. Every few years an election is held on the capitol planet an election in which each house has five votes. If a house wins the election twice in a row they are decleared emperor. Now each houses votes are represented by staves and if you happen to have another houses staves when an election roles around...or suppose the designated voteing unit for a house gets assinated (this of course requires research doppelgangers and assisns which are proscribed by the church) well then the election results change accordingly. Thus direct military conquest though a way to win the game is not the only or often the best way to win. Now the problems with the game are in that the AI is terrible light years Worse than the AI in alpha centauri and since you end up with usually ten to 15 planets late in the game, and a huge space fleet well turns can take quite a long time to plan and play. I was serious when I said it had the base managment of alpha centauri spread out over several planets along with the fleet management of MOO.

My experience with the Alpha Centauri Team Game made me think that this might be an interesting game to give this treatment. The terrible AI would be taken care off since you are playing real people, and the incredible level of complication would be taken care of since the work could be spread out (perhaps one person takes care of the planet management while another takes care of the fleet ect). As such I thought I would check if there was anyone who might be interested in joining in such an endevor? I would certainly be willing to help set up (as well as hopefully play) in such a game. For those who don't own the game I could also give primers on how things work in it (as a first step I could pretty easily make the instruction manuel available as a file somewhere).

Just an idea let me know what you think!