Asteroid Wars - coming soon to a Kickstarter.com near you

Three words: “Deadwood” in space. You play a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of an Asteroid Mining company in this 4x (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game, set 20 minutes in the future. Read the preliminary rules here.  Asteroid Wars is a multi-player, real-time, on- line, browser based game. Each game of Asteroid Wars will take place over the course of weeks, with new games starting on a regular basis. INNOVATION NUMBER ONE: GAME TIME. Asteroid Wars is a real time game. BUT, your game is not run 24/7. During sign-up you have options for what time you want your game to run. For example, a game may only run Tuesday and Thursday nights for a few hours. INNOVATION NUMBER TWO: ISSUING ORDERS. In Asteroid Wars, the game contacts a player when new information has been discovered and/or a decision point has been reached. The game is designed so that an immediate response is not required. Preliminary recommended response time is 20 minutes, which should be time to slip out and spend the 2-3 minutes needed to respond. Some orders and activities are not time sensitive, such as ordering new ship modules or setting up Rules of Engagements for your fleets and can be done at any time, whether the game world is being run or not. INNOVATION NUMBER THREE: PERSONAL VICTORY CONDITIONS. A possible stretch goal is Personal Victory Conditions, letting a player choose what part of the game is the most fun/challenging for them. The idea comes from watching individuals play their own “Meta-Games” in World of Warcraft and the like. I want to formalize having a player pick a personal victory condition at the beginning of a game. GAME PLAY So let’s say you picked Tuesday and Thursday evening, 8:00 – 11:00 local time to play for your game server to be live. You receive notice that your game is about to go live on Friday, giving you over four days to look at the map and plan your initial orders. Even though the game world is not live, you are free to examine the map, the status of your assets, and issue orders. On Tuesday, the game world is turned on, just as you start your WoW Raid. When the game has new information, or one of your units has come to a decision point, the game notifies you through the usual ways; text message, email, twitter, etc. etc. So after you down that boss in WoW, you take a quick 2-3 minutes afk and review your Asteroid War message and issue a new order if necessary. Any time during the week you can review the current status of your company and issue or modify orders. COMMUNITY, LEADERBOARDS, TOURNAMENTS, ETC. Players will be able to choose between rated and unrated games. As we move forward we will add Tournaments for bragging rights and minor swag such as t-shirts and such. We will have the usual forums. However, the Terms of Service will clearly state in big bold type that one buys access to the game not access to the forums. Everyone will be able to read most forums. However, write access to the forums will be granted or dismissed on my whim. I will have a well mannered forum, even if it is just me talking to my alts. WHY KICKSTARTER For Asteroid Wars to work I need thousands of players involved at launch so that everyone can find a game at the game-time they want.