Adventures in Mission Running

Terra Incognita

The lights of colony site twinkle in a mountain valley of this unnamed world. Stretching up into the night sky the safety lights of the space elevator mark off the kilometres up to the orbital terminus high above. Amongst the twinkling stars, other ephemeral flashes can be seen. One particular star grows brighter and draws closer until the bomb crashes into the colony and annihilates the valley in a flash of a million suns.

24 hours earlier

The two Gallente woman, a blonde and a redhead, sitting at one of the several coffee houses on the station veranda could be assumed to be business people by their attire. As they sip their coffee and enjoy the starlight streaming though the huge windows, they chat.

“…why they chose that system. A backwater dead-end system that noone ever visited. Even their carebears,” the blonde said.
“How did they find it then?”
“One of their pilots noticed a spike in traffic in that system on the map and went in, looking for neutral targets.”
“So some wildcats set up a mining colony in the middle of nowhere. They worried that one of their enemies will buy it and set up a staging area?” the redheaded woman asked.
The blonde shrugs. “I didn’t ask, and they didn’t say.”
“One of your usual land’n'grab ops with your dirtpounders then?” the other asks, sipping her coffee.
“Actually, they have something else in mind. Which is why I asked you to join me.”
“I’m intrigued. Go on…”

Twenty hours later

“Stiletto One, Hammer Actual. Do you read?” the comlink chirps into the redhead’s ear. She stops walking along the creek and looks up at the space elevator cable reaching into the heavens. Invisible in the blue day lit sky, a battlefleet is hammering at the orbital terminus, draining its shields and distracting the automated defense systems from the apparently quiet world below.
“Hammer Actual this is Stiletto One. Go ahead.”
“How is your nature walk going? Almost at the ground terminus yet?” the blonde, Hammer Actual, asks.
“Going as well as expected. I’m still a couple of klicks away. Fortunately, this rough terrain is hiding me from the automated sentries. Unfortunately, it’s slowing me down a lot.” Stiletto One resumes her trek up the creek valley towards the colony site.
“We landed you as close as we could. Even with our distraction up here, we didn’t want to risk tipping any eyes on the ground by landing you too close. What kind of ETA are we looking at?”
“According to your satellite scan, this valley runs almost all the way to the site. I should be inside and set up in about two hours or so. Assuming no major glitches with the nexus AI, I’ll have it hacked and subverted a couple hours later and your employers will be the brand new owners of this backwater colony.”
“Roger. Report back when you’re in position. Hammer Actual out.”
“Roger. Stiletto One out.”

Four hours later

“Stiletto One, Hammer Actual! Are you there!?” the comlink chirps. The redhead looks up from the terminal screen, frowning with annoyance.
“Hammer Actual, this is Stiletto One. I told you when you called me half an hour ago that this will take a couple of hours. That wildcat corporation left this colony to finish setting up automatically and some of the high level AI subroutines are-”
“Stiletto One. Abort. We’ve sent a drop ship down to get you. Grab your gear and be ready to leave in five minutes!”
“What’s going on? I’ll have this colony ready to hand over in an hour or two.”
“The alliance that hired us changed their minds. They decided that a hydrocarbon mining colony wasn’t worth the maintenance hassles and they’re sending one of their capsuleer pilots to this planet to nuke the ground terminus from orbit.”
“Godsdammit! Roger, Hammer Actual. Pulling the plug.” Stiletto breaks off comms and quickly disconnects herself from the computer systems of the colony. She can hear the roar of the dropship landing through the walls as she gathers the rest of her gear. Suddenly the the lights go red and the primary display flickers to life.

MAR SARA COLONY
SPACE ELEVATOR ONE

INCOMING NUCLEAR WARHEAD DETECTED
4 MINUTES TO GET TO SAFE DISTANCE

“Oh snap,” Stiletto mutters as she runs out to the drop ship waiting outside.

Twenty minutes later

Hammer and Stiletto are standing on the bridge of a Hyperion-class battleship. On the viewscreen, the mushroom cloud can still be seen hanging in the air above the former colony site. In space above, the disconnected, dead, orbital terminus drifts in orbit. It will come crashing down to the planet in a few months, the hundreds of kilometres of tether hanging from it dragging it down into the atmosphere.

Stiletto looks over at Hammer. “We’re still going to get paid, right?”

Terra Firma

[Author's note: It's a good thing CCP announced that Dust 514 game. I was having a pickle of a time figuring out how to integrate some of the ground-based combat elements with EVE.]

Colonizing a world in several easy steps.

1. Head out to 0.0 space. All the colonizable worlds in lowsec and highsec have been claimed already. Sovereignty in its current form has no bearing on whether a world can be claimed.
2. Find an unclaimed world. It won’t have any space elevators installed around it.
3. Scan the potential colony world. This requires the Planetary Survey skill. (2x skill. Requires Survey 4. Speeds up scan speed of planets by 5% per skill level) When a planet is scanned, its quality is determined. The quality of a planet can range from 0 to 5. 0 being the lowest quality and 5 being the best. With better quality comes more resources that can be harvested, etc.
4. Once the world is scanned and deemed desirable, the colonization process is started by placing the first space elevator onto the planet. The orbital terminus is placed within a certain distance of the planet (likely within 5km in the game) and anchored much like an anchorable object is now.
5. Once the orbital terminus has been anchored up in orbit, the actual colonization process is started. The orbital terminus goes into a reinforced mode as the tether extends down to the surface.
6. Once colony is established 24 hours later, active defenses come online both in orbit to prevent landings and/or orbital bombardment and on the ground to repel ground-based assaults. Shield HP reduced to reflect vulnerability of the colony at the bottom of a gravity well.
7. Congratulations! You’ve colonized a world.

Now that you have a world, what can you do with it?

• Install additional space elevators. The maximum number of elevators a colony can support is determined by the quality of the planet. A Q0 or Q1 world can support one elevator. Q2 can support two, Q3 three, up to Q5 with five elevators. Additional elevators increase the defensive and productive capabilities of the colony.
• Terraform the colony. This improves the quality of the world, which is generally viewed as a good thing. However this is not a process that can be entered lightly. A colony has to have at least one elevator installed. Additional elevators will speed up the process. A Q5 planet cannot be improved. A terraforming module needs to be installed in the elevator by a pilot with the Planetary Engineering skill. (5x skill. Needs Science 5, Planetary Survey 4. Decreases terraforming time by 5% per skill level) A terraform module requires a fuel like strontium and the default cycle time is 14 days. During the terraforming, the productive processes of the colony shut down. The defense systems remain online during the process.

Conquest and Combat

EVE wouldn’t be EVE without combat. Colonies will have two battlefronts; the ground and orbital termini.

The orbital terminus can be taken by besieging it with ships. Once the shields are down, dropships can ferry troops over for some exciting boarding action with that Dust game (See why I’m glad they announced it? ). Or blown out of the sky. The terminus has shields and defensive turrets than can be operated with a pilot with starbase defense management to repel attackers.

The ground terminus has automated turrets and can be supplemented with live personnel if desired for defense. A colony can be destroyed usually by orbital bombardment. It can be taken over by ground assault or by covert action.

And those are my ideas regarding implementing planetary control. Hopefully any similarities bewteen other folks’ ideas are a result of a similar science fiction experience.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m attending Fragapalooza 2009 this weekend. One of the biggest LAN parties in Canada, according to their website. Over 400 men, women, and children playing a variety of computer games from Team Fortress 2 to Starcraft, Left 4 Dead to World of Warcraft. And yours truly, playing EVE Online.

During the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, we were given the opportunity to see the movie Second Skin, a documentary that focused for the most part on a few people who play World of Warcraft or Everquest 2 and how their ingame lives collided with their out-of-game ones . Let me start by saying that I enjoyed watching this movie.  It flowed well and was entertaining. However I’m pretty sure that the enjoyment that the audience here derived probably wasn’t the kind that the film makers had in mind.

Take a room full of several hundred people who enjoy playing video games. Of those several hundred people , I’m willing to say that about a quarter (at least), have logged into WoW, EQ, EQ2, DAoC, etc. etc. Show them a movie that has as its premise that all MMO players are fat, socially maladjusted people that are either hopelessly addicted to their games, or so emotionally dependant that they’re willing to move thousands of kilometres to meet up with their “soul mate” that they met in their online adventures.

The reaction? Laughter for the most part. The bar graph that determined that we only have an hour in a day to do everything but play and sleep? A few chuckles and nods of bemused agreement. The time-lapse sections where those guys are playing almost non-stop to get their WoW toons to 70, sleeping on the couch? This is Fragapalooza! That is how we roll this weekend. However, that is not how we roll every day (for the most part).

We were basically laughing at a movie that was working on reinforcing all the negative imagery that gets invoked when Gamers come to mind. As fellow blogger CrazyKinux eloquently described in his post about the movie:

What the folks behind Second Skin did though is focused on the “weird” behaviors of some MMO players. I’m not saying that everyone in the film is a weirdo, but what I am saying is that that’s where the filmmakers decided to focus on. As I was watching the film, I couldn’t help but tell myself that these were not the kind of folks I played with. These were not the types of people I had come to know over the last 5 years of playing EVE Online. And I don’t think it’s a “Well-this-is-how-WoW-players-are” kind of thing. I’m totally aware that a lot of MMO players have addictive-like behaviors when it comes to playing these games.

That’s my 0.02ISK about this movie.

Welcome to the tenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter leans a little, OK a lot, on the academic side. It comes to us from xiphos83 of A Misguided Adventurer, who asks the following: ” Victor Davis Hanson argues that western culture, comprising of ideals such as freedom, debate, capitalism, and consensual government, are what make western society so successful at waging war. These ideologies create a warrior who’s direct participation in government, ability to think freely, and desire to remain free, fights harder and is willing to suffer more than his conscripted foe. Though a military must remain a structured oligarchy to fight a war effectively, why in a world where military conflict is as familiar as breathing are there so few alliances that embrace these ideologies when governing their members?”

I gave this topic a fair bit of thought ever since CrazyKinux emailed the topic information to me last week. Why would alliances in a game where military conflict is common place not embrace these ideologies?
I gave this topic a bit more thought as to why alliances in a game choose not to embrace these ideologies.
Then it dawned on me…
It’s a game.
No one’s getting bombed out of their homes during an alliance war. No one’s killing anyone over ideological differences of opinion. Bits of data are being manipulated, that’s it. After a few hours of pew pew, we all log off, back into our nice, hopefully not war torn, homes.
And that’s why I think these ideologies haven’t percolated into the psyche of Alliances. Real war has a way of bringing out certain properties of a person that pixels on a screen shouldn’t. That’s my off the cuff feeling, anyways.

Here’s a link that CrazyKinux set up to let you see what others have written about this subject. CLICK ME!!!

One of the things I’ve always loved about EVE Online is how beautiful it is. Especially after Trinity and subsequent updates, I have spent hours just sitting in my ship, marvelling at just how gorgeous this game can be.

Especially the ships. The way the starlight gleams off metal and the fire and fury of weapons. Yeah. Damned beautiful game.

Which leads me to today’s subject.

I present to you, High Beams!, an Amarr Navy Slicer.

High Beams! in space

High Beams! docked

Yes, it looks like an Executioner-class frigate that got bent the wrong way, but it has headlights!

And this is why you don’t surf the contracts before going to bed, kids

Real Life and other shiny distractions have been keeping me out of New Eden lately. I’ll be back soon.

Just a quick post about Out of Game tools I use with EVE. This isn’t the first article you’ll read about many of these, but I’m also sure it won’t be the last. So in no particular order…

EVEMon link Windows. One of the first OOG tools I used. Lets you plan out different training plans. You can search ships, modules, and with the latest version, certificates and EVEMon will show what skills are needed. It will also recommend neural remapping options to speed training up.

Capsuleer link iPhone/iPod Touch. One of the newer tools I added to my toolbox. Shows your current skill and queue if you have one going on. Can access the Blog Pack for reading on the go. Very easy to use.

EFT Link. EVE Fitting Tool. Windows. Let’s you set up different ship/module configurations “on paper” to see how effective they are. You can import your character info by API to check your skills against your setup.

ineve.net Web. Handy for showing off your millions of skillpoints. Or showing a friend what skills you already have and what skills you should learn…

All of these tools can use your public API key. (Just in case, you can get yours here.) All but Capsuleer can be copy and pasted. Capsuleer’s email system works great as well.

That’s all for this post. Not breaking new ground, but it did let me try out this Wordpress app on my iPhone.