Bear with me here...



Background:

Me and a bunch of friends are trying to do some epic 4X'ing. We want to start off a handful of Civ 5 MultiPlayer games, each with 2-4 players. Then we want to trigger the launch of a cumulative Endless Space game at a certain point in the Civ 5 game(s) and with particular pre-conditions. We want the players for each respective Civ 5's games to start in the a respective system of the Endless Space world.



So for each Civ 5 game, the objective for each player is to stay alive until they achieve a designated "Civ 5 Tech Goal". This can either be a Space Victory or a particular technology (satellites?). We can tweak Civ 5 settings (by turning off "Space Victory"), so that the game doesn't actually end, and each player in the game can continue playing until they achieve the designated Civ 5 Tech Goal and are allowed to enter the Endless Space game.



The Endless Space game starts when the first player throughout the 3-4 concurrent Civ 5 games achieves the Civ 5 Tech Goal. That is, certain players should be joining the Endless Space game at different points in time. We'd map the Civ 5 turns to Endless Space turns, for example, 5:1, so if I achieve the Civ 5 Tech Goal 10 turns before you in Civ 5, I only get 2 Endless Space turns prior to you joining the Endless Space game. Also, the 2-4 players in the same Civ 5 game all start on the same system in the Endless Space game, but every Civ 5 game starts on a different system in Endless Space. Whether you continue the in-planet/system fighting amongst the Civ 5 game players you were playing against is up to you, alternatively you could band together to fight against the other systems (ie, players from the other Civ 5 games).



Essentially there's a Round One in Civ 5, where each game has 2-4 players, and how well you do in Round One affects your starting position in Round Two, the single Endless Space game with 4-12 people in it. Some people will be eliminated in Round One and won't make it to Round Two.



Design add-on requirements:

We'd need some way of delaying entry of the players into the Endless Space game. Maybe give each player a designated starting civ slot in Endless Space, but make them sit in a stasis until they officially are allowed to join the game at a particular time.



Some way of allocating the designated starting civ slots to particular systems in the galaxy and giving them each a planet in the system to start with, so that players of the same Civ 5 game start next to each other in Endless Space.



I feel like most of this could be accomplished by tweaking the starting settings for a Endless Space MP games, maybe creating a few new settings, creating a dummy AI that sits in a civ slot and does nothing but can be embodied by a human player later on. It would also be nice to read from multiple Civ 5 savegame files, and maybe trigger actions based on their content. For example, if a player civ in the Civ 5 game is destroyed completely before they achieve the Civ 5 Tech Goal, their dummy AI in the Endless Space game is destroyed.



Obviously, a lot of this stuff can be done with our own implemented rules. For the turn syncing, we could ensure all the concurrent Civ 5 games are on the same turn, and after every 5th turn load up Endless Space and everyone take a turn. Alternatively, if the Endless Space add-on is reading the Civ 5 savegame files, and we autosave each Civ 5 game after every turn, it could display a "you can't take your turn yet" in Endless Space until all the savegames are on the same turn and every 5th turn.



I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I haven't thought of. But to me this would be absolutely Epic.

There are a whole variety of problems with this, so much so that I'm finding it hard to pick just one, so bear with me.



Its totally unnecessary. Assuming that the objective of your idea is to create a situation whereby your progress in the Civ game gives you an advantage in the ES game then you can do that yourselves, without the addition of new starting options or an absurd inter-title connectivity, by simply starting and joining a game then having people wait however many turns they're supposed to wait until they start.



In general if you want to make ES more interesting then you're better off doing it yourself, as a group of players, than you are trying to insinuate your particular flavour of what determines "interesting" into the overall game. Opinions will differ, and that is before you consider how simply impossible some ideas are to implement.



Example. The ES game I'm currently playing has several "House Rules" as it were which we feel make the game more interesting, but I'm sure other people would find boring or even frustrating. For instance, purely based on ships and combat:



Ratios for different weapon modules are to be 5-2-0 where kinetic is always 5. Similarly ratios for different defence modules are to be 4-2-0 where deflect is always 4.

No fleet outside of your home territories (defined by system not by influence) can have more than one Dreadnought class ship, no fleet within your home territories can have more than two.

No fleet outside your home territories can have a CP greater than your current CP minus 6.





Those sound crazy, and they are to a point, but the people I play with enjoy them. That doesn't mean I think anyone else would.