So I was thinking today about a game I’ve been playing recently called Football Manager Live. It’s an MMOG where virtual managers buy a team of footballers, coach them and then stick them in a formation that suits their abilities before pitting them against other teams, either in friendly matches or player-created leagues. Generally the higher you finish in a league, the more funds you get to buy better players.
Initially I was quite excited by FML. It has a skill-training system fully-based on EVE’s (lots of offline training), you can run the client in the background all day without having to pay too much attention to what’s going on in the gameworld (usually just transfer mails and chat rooms), and if you need a break from work, you can quickly and easily find another manager to PvP against in a friendly soccer match, or a scheduled league game.
It’s not a very visual game. All the players in your team are represented by stats, with each of their physical and mental attributes, as well their footballing skills, rated between one and twenty.
The reason I mention the game here is because it suddenly struck me today that there is an equivalent to FML in the EVE universe. Well, not really, but almost… Imagine if the great EVEmon was given a chatroom and a text-based battle system where you could field a fleet of your fitted ships and manage them in some kind of Alliance Tournament. You could create leagues, offer prize money, then when it got to the battle, you could order ships to attack, defend, orbit, etc, all in a real-time overhead view where you’re dragging lines across the battlefield like some frenzied general with a chalkboard.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of there being a Spaceship Manager Live game, and the more feasible it seems. I’m not sure the EVEmon guys would agree with me though.
It’s an interesting idea. They tried something like that, but it was something like web wars/ fleets fighting over websites. I don’t know who well it did. It was in beta last I heard.
WebWars is still in development hell. Not sure why.
I’d love to see something like this with EFT better than EVEMon but yeah, sounds like an awesome minigame.
Hmm, chat windows, fleet combat… You want me to add it to the feature list for future consideration? :)
I want to toss my name in the hat in support of this idea.
“dragging lines across the battlefield like some frenzied general with a chalkboard.”
Sold.