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ATF (Alliance Trade Federation)

What is ATF your asking, well it’s not the American Alcohol, Tabacco and Firearms agency, ATF is an MMORPG, based in both Space and on the Ground, the game is set over 2000 years into the Earth’s future, after nearly 1000 years of war a fragile peace has been established, thanks to a group of breakaway worlds calling themselves The Alliance. The Alliance has decided that the best way to keep peace going is to rebuild the systems of all three factions (Earth Federation, Sirian Empire and Alliance), to this end they established the ATF, an organisation that licenses civilians as starship pilots, either in the role of trader, bounty hunters, mercenaries, peace keepers, or whatever the player wants to become.

Skills based advancement
ATF will feature a skills based system, both in space and on the ground, the two skill sets will be largely seperate, there are three types of skills in each system, Primary, Secondary and Supplimentary (supplimentary are shared between ground/space, and can be brought with XP from either space or ground pools). You have 1,000,000 XP points available to spend in skills, the Primary skills are arranged on a drum, 6 skills high in different areas, between each of the primary skills are the secondaries, these require that you have the primary skill on either side and are therefore shared between 2 trees, there are 5 secondaries per branch, starting at level 2. the supplimentaries are seperate and can be taken by anyone. There are also 2 other types of skills, called Epic and Elite, these are unlocked by completing your Epic and Elite quests (more on those later), these are 5 and 4 rows high each and require the corresponding Primary skill to unlock, these increase the power of the player by supplimenting the skills they are linked to.

Starships, Power and Shields
Starships are a major part of the game, they’re as much a part of your players character as your avatar on the ground, hence we need the ships to be complex. Players will be able to design and submit their own ships to the game, these will be vetted and if passed the player can choose to license their design out or keep it to themselves, this will cost ingame money depending on the license you choose. Another major feature of the game will be the power management grid, we’ve all seen in Star Trek where they redirect power from one system to another to help get out of a jam, well in ATF you will be able to do exactly this, every system in the ship appears on the power grid, you can connect them up with cables, place switches in, have backup power supplies, reverse the flow of power, and setup macros that will quickly reconfigure your power usage depending on the situation you find yourself in.

This brings us onto shields, in ATF shields work the opposite way to how most people have shields work, instead of the shields losing power, they gain it, every shield generator has a capacitor attached, this capacitor charges up as the shield takes damage (since the shields are absorbing energy), once the capacitor reaches a critical level the shields shut down and allow the capacitor to discharge before the shields can come back up. Careful power management can allow you to use the damage you’re taking from weapons fire to power your ship, however there is a limit to how much power you can divert, and even the best shields can collapse under heavy fire.

Ground Game
The ground game is based around either fighting over territory on contested planets, building cities and taming wildlife on devestated planets, or exploring newly discovered worlds. Players will be able to establish new cities on planets or rebuild existing structures. To start with only a few planets will be available, but more will be added as time passes, you can also wander around space stations and starships, interact with NPCs and players.

Missions
Missions in ATF will be different from anything you’ve ever played in an MMO, missions will branch and your decisions will change the way they play out, special encounters allow for complex story telling, and the mission builder will allow players to design missions using the same tools that the developers will use. Also the Pay-to-Loot system allows crafters to setup missions using their wares are rewards, the players pay the trader collateral (held in Escrow) if you choose to keep any of the crafters wares the cost is taken out of the sum, the system pays out the actual mission reward. There will be a monthly competition for player missions, the winners getting free play time and entry into the yearly contest. When a player takes another players mission they’ll be asked to score the mission in 4 catagories (Story,Innovation,Difficulty and Fun), difficulty is how well the mission fits the difficulty level it’s advertised at.

Dynamically Generated Galaxy
The core of the galaxy will be pre-generated and fixed at launch, however large areas of the galaxy are still unexplored, these areas will be generated using realistic models as and when they’re explored, this means that the galaxy is virtually infinite, new resources will be spawned in newly explored areas of space allowing miners to travel and place mining outposts on distant planets and asteroids, explorers get the rights to claim newly discovered mineral rights and control who exploits them (for a price of course).

Wormholes, Stargates and Etherspace
There are two ways of travelling faster than light, the first method you’ll use is the network of stargates, these are stable wormholes that link two locations, during the early years of space exploration before the way, the Federation linked planets together with a network of gates to allow small craft to easily travel between them, these are fast, but you’ll probably have to queue at the busier gates. The other method is using E-Drive. It was the discovery of Etherspace (or E-Space) that led to the colonisation of the stars, each level of Etherspace is half the size of the preceeding one, early ships had the capability to jump to E7 or E8 (128 or 256 times as small) which shortened journey times conciderably, nowadays ships can easily jump to E19 or 20 (524288 or 1048576 times as small) covering lightyears in a matter of hours. Ships have 2 or 3 types of engines, impulse thrusters which are used for manuvering, jump thrusters which accellerate the ship up to the speeds needed to make an E-Rip and E-Drives which actually rip the hole between E levels, E-Drives use a lot of power and as such are not suitable for small ships, which is why the stargate network still exists today.