One thing you might consider is to set up the game (I haven't played yet, so ignore my comments if they're nonsensical) so that prices vary according to what people buy most.

In general, shops will sell things at higher prices when there's high demand, and lower prices when there's less. There are a few real-world constraints, however, as the shopkeeper will consistently look for ways to make a profit, so they'll tend not to discount items below their wholesale price or quite close to it. Perhaps you could also make inventory limited, replenished by new shipments over time, which gives storekeepers an even greater incentive to increase price in response to demand. As a result, the big-ticket items that may see slight discounts or none, that are rarely purchased, might be bought a little more often. But if everyone's buying, say, glue traps, the shopkeeper might sensibly raise their price to avoid wiping out the inventory.

Another potentially interesting move would be to incorporate shop inventory shipments into the game structure. Why not assign spies to guard a truck full of trap parts or explosives? There could be big bonuses for spies who intercept those shipments, the main bonuses being that they'd gain access to a lot of weaponry while depriving another team of theirs. This of course would raise a whole mess of play balance issues, but those could be solved by making shipments generally hard to steal and by making them small and often (as opposed to the more realistic model of huge shipments of an item coming every month or so).

Lummox JR

Skysaw wrote:

This is a pretty interesting idea. After the main logistics are all in place, I will be looking for things that feel more "questish" like this. Thanks for the idea. I'm not sure how doable it will be within the existing structure, but it's not out of the question.

As I understand your game, the delivery of documents is an important element. Why not make some of those documents point to things like shipping routes and times? Of course documents could also contain other useful information, such as the layout of a base, or maybe trap locations--things that might help other teams get around such obstacles. This is getting away from the point a bit, but basically I think the "information leak" system will be your best asset toward creating a more questish game structure.

Other ideas toward richer, more detailed missions might include missions of a sort where team members are forced to work together to accomplish something. The necessities of planning out such a mission and diverting resources of time, etc. might tip off an opponent that something is going on, and the opposing teams can then try to figure out what the mission is and derail it. This also opens doors to things like misinformation, where a team may deliberately lose a document containing false information about a mission, faking out another team into diverting their attention elsewhere (or, more fun, luring two opposing teams to attack each other).

To the extent of my knowledge (limited basically to hearsay and Bond movies), spy organizations also depend heavily on informant networks and contacts in a general population, some of whom may not be quite so loyal. Maybe an important part of spy missions would be to collect documents from these sources, or occasionally deliver things to them. The game engine might decide from time to time that Informant X is a double agent, who will then become a contact for another team. It may be a while before Informant X's betrayal is discovered by his original handlers, during which time sensitive information could leak; after that, maybe a mission would pop up to eliminate him, and then X's new handlers would have to decide whether it's worth the risk to launch a mission to protect him (which would tend to be a complex mission of the sort I think you're looking for) or risk losing the loyalty of other informants. The same sort of situation occurs if one team merely discovers the identity of another's informant: They might try to eliminate him, which brings up all the same issues, or they might try to recruit him.

Finally there's also something to be said for a spoken secret approach, where many pieces of information don't come in documents. A simple way to discourage combat while increasing game complexity would be to make it possible to capture another spy and interrogate them--using truth serums and whatnot. It would of course take time to extract any information, more so for better-trained operatives, so it would then be an imperative for that spy's team to rescue them before any information leaked. Rescue operations would also require lots of planning and coordination.

To what extent any of this will work in your game, I don't know. But heck, brainstorming is fun.

Lummox JR

I just got a quick idea from that post that probably means nothing, but shouldn't delivering enemy documents to your base provide some kind of overall bonus for your team? Perhaps black documents decrease the skill or price required for some weapons, and delivering green docs reveals the location of enemy traps in certain areas or such things as that.

Maybe they could just be temporary changes like using a stim or something would be, but it would still be a nice change...

Foomer wrote:

Mission: Pick up supplies from vender in mall and return to base (therwise the team's supply of traps will cease to increase for a duration...)

Intercepting these supplies would increase the amount of say traps for your own team's vendors.

Actually, I think it would be cool if rather than having abstract supplies, you actually went shopping on your team's behalf. Of course, this would require some changes to the general way missions are handled (but then, you'd probably have to do that anyways since there's only one sort of "mission"). What if, say, rather than picking up documents, you were assigned a mission? For instance, the most common mission would obviously be to deliver a sheaf of documents--you're handed a pile of docs all at once, and you have to deliver them. Rather than picking up missons incrementally like you do documents, you could (and in fact defintely should, for the following proposed implementation) make it so that you're required to complete a mission fully before getting another one--if document delivery was done in bundles rather than individual documents, and you got training points and money mostly for delivering everything in the bundle safely rather than each document, this would also make it a bit harder to sit there shredding undesireable documents to get more good ones.

Then, for example, a second (much rarer) type of mission would be the procurement mission--say, your HQ hands you $10,000 and tells you "Go obtain $10,000 worth of light firearms and bring them back here." The usual procedure would be to go out and buy $10,000 worth of guns, take them back to the HQ clerk, and drop them off, which would convert them to items of your team color and stock them in the appropriate vendor. You could spend the loot for yourself, but you wouldn't be able to get any missions at all until you pony up $10,000 in firearms, one way or another. As an added incentive to be honest, you could assign a time limit to missions--if you take too long, you'd be docked training points and the $10,000 you were given. Upper-rank players might be given more difficult variations on this, such as "Go obtain so many dollars' worth of enemy equipment", or might not be provided by HQ with enough money to actually fill the requirements.

Of course, a system like this is still a very-far-down-the-road sort of thing, but I imagine any sort of implementation of other missions would be something loosely along these lines.

Lord of Water wrote:

Now, add in this:

An NPC team to thwart you on certian missions, with some AI. The Blue agents assigned to stop you would be of similar rank.

Another map, with somwhat similar layout, connected to the first one via airport. Tickets would cost money, and the HQ could covor that price or neglect to.

That's seems like a very good idea if the game becomes more popular. Multiple cities across a game world, and you travel to each by bus, truck, car, plane, etc.