Vapourware The Mandate - LOL DEAD

[MasterSmithFandango]

Not pre-ordering yet, because I want to see some actual footage of the gameplay, but it's on a short list of games I'm REALLY excited about.

 

[Sensuki]

New update with a short video



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1964463742/the-mandate/posts/1026413?ref=dash

 

[Jools]

Looks juicy. Would pay for. Would.

 

[Norfleet]

This game sounds more and more vaporware every time I hear about it. They say more and more things, and none of these things have actually happened. Classic vaporware feature-creep.

 

[Ulminati]

I kinda wanna see that (delayed) space comat update.
I agree with Norfleet that the vapor-o-meter is very high given the budget and the level of ambition.

But then again, it is better to choke on greatness than nibble on mediocrity!

 

[Chunkyman]

I'm fairly certain they have outside investors other than the $700,000 they got from Kickstarter, but yeah it does seem incredibly ambitious even given that.

Also, really loving those alternative firing team formations depending on their skill level.

 

[Lhynn]

It looks too good, there has to be a catch.

 

[Saduj]

I made myself dismiss this game because the proposal seemed too perfect to be achievable.

Say, "If mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Qur'an, they could not produce the like of it, even if they were to each other assistants."
- Quran 17:88

But even though there isn't a tangible game yet, the updates are so well thought out that I'm starting to believe it might actually happen.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Maybe they are geniuses like the dudes from no man's sky :p

 

[Kem0sabe]

Maybe they are geniuses like the dudes from no man's sky :p

 

[Norfleet]

even though there isn't a tangible game yet, the updates are so well thought out that I'm starting to believe it might actually happen.

Ah, but you see, well-thought-out "updates" are not a game. Given how much effort is being invested into thinking out these updates, how much can be left for the game?

Maybe they are geniuses like the dudes from no man's sky :p

Another piece of vaporware which is also not a game. Good analogy, though.

 

[Jaesun]

I greatly am looking forward to a "Man date".

 

[empyrean]

They just posted an update.

Update #44
Know Your Enemy

Hi backers,

Time for another update and today we are going to go delve more into detail about space combat. First of all we thought it would be cool to start with a trip down memory lane. Our space combat has gone through several iterations where we have experimented with different control schemes and evaluated the relationship between the ship and your crew. In each successive iteration we have shifted focus and put more emphasis on the crew as well as your officers.


Prototype 1 above was a from a very early iteration from before the Kickstarter campaign. The focus was to get all the features and functionality into one screen. It is rather chaotic and the user interface itself is also noisy. Observe for example that the power management controls in the bottom left include a triangle to allocate power to shields, weapons and engines. This triangle itself was resting on top of a reactor cylinder which would raise or lower as you modify the total power output from the reactor. Sort of like a control rod in a nuclear reactor.

Prototype 2 switched to a more sleek and elegant look as we shifted away from the player directly aiming his/her weapons and put more emphasis on representing the crew. Finally the third iteration is very close to the current state of affairs. Most of the functionality from the first prototype is still there, but we have laid out the controls in a more structured manner. A big change from prototype 2 to prototype 3 is the introduction of the maneuver wheel bottom left.


Returning to the present day one challenge for us has been that the experience we want to deliver in space combat is similar to some TV shows and series but have yet to be replicated well in other games. We have studied a lot of games and discussed pros and cons of different approaches. This has necessitated a lot of trial and error on our part. While you will undoubtedly recognize certain elements from other games, we find it difficult to describe the space combat in The Mandate as “Game X meets Game Y”.

Before moving on it would make sense to discuss a bit more in detail what type of experience we are trying to deliver. Slow and majestic are two keywords for us. We wanted to achieve a certain sense of scale and grandeur as these hulking behemoths travel through space and at the same time contrast these with the agile light craft that zip past or marines that conduct boarding operations and kick in doors. Capital ship to ship space combat -especially between equally matched adversaries- should allow you time to think and plan your next moves without having to pause the game. This means the rate of fire and the lethality of each weapon type must support this. For example a rapid-fire CIWS (close-in-weapon-system) would be effective against light craft but ineffective against the armour plating of a capital ship. A heavy torpedo on the other hand could do serious damage to a capital ship but the downside is low speed, limited ammo, long reload time, the need to manually guide the torpedo etc.

Secondly, we wanted space combat to be intuitive and fun from the start without requiring a lengthy tutorial. Yet we want to offer depth of gameplay as well as provide ample challenges during early, mid and late game. Your initial frigate will have a small complement of crew and only a handful of rooms and systems that you need to worry about. We also provide various templates that limit repetitive tasks and allow you to delegate certain ship functions to your officers so you can focus your attention where it is most needed (for example to manage your marines in a boarding operation). As you expand your fleet, train your crew and research new technologies, you will gradually unlock new options which may change your strategy.


Thirdly, we want the experience to be tactile and for many operations you will click on and interact directly with your ship. Feedback on the status of your ship will be conveyed visually in what we hope is a less “gamey” approach. We are steering away from hitpoint bars as much as possible and going more in the direction of location-based damage modelling. This applies to both shields, armour and the internals of your ship. This has the added benefit of allowing us to “connect” the crew that reside inside your ship with the ship itself and have consequences for both ship and crew as a result of battle damage.


We have spent a lot of time to streamline both the GUI and the player feedback loop both for boarding combat and space combat to ensure that if you understand either game mode then the other game mode should follow naturally. As you can see above both the space combat and boarding combat have metaphors and key design elements that are reused across both game modes.


So what is the process for initiating space combat? Well, when not in combat you will travel between star systems in the Adventure Mode. Here you can zoom in or out, dock with friendly space stations, contact factions, obtain quests etc. The objects in the Adventure Mode are not just pretty window dressing but have some game function. There will be merchant convoys, derelict ships to explore, escape pods to scan, planetary bodies to visit etc. Basically if you played Sid Meier’s Pirates! or Mount&Blade then you should have a basic idea of what the Adventure Mode is all about.

Once a hostile fleet is in close proximity to your fleet it may decide to attack you or you may decide to attack it. The environment that you are in will impact the upcoming space battle. For example - if you were attacked by pirates in the vicinity of an asteroid field then this asteroid field will be present in the space battle and may be used to gain an advantage.

The space combat may start at either visual or beyond visual range depending on how close you were to the hostile fleet in Adventure Mode. In both cases you will start in the Battle Orchestrator with your own forces and you may or may not know the strength and disposition of the enemy forces. Your scanner tech level and the experience of your astrogation officers may also influence this. In case you are not familiar with the Battle Orchestrator you can view the video below which was made available earlier this year.



After you have laid your plans in the Battle Orchestrator and unpaused the game, you will be able to use the environment around you to mask your EMS (electromagnetic signature). This will make it more difficult for enemy ships to detect, identify and scan your ship. Alternatively the environment (asteroid field in our example) could make your scanning process take longer and be less precise. You may also tweak the power allocation and turn off certain power-hungry systems to minimize your EMS output.


At beyond visual range you will have to rely on long range scanners and perhaps you will launch light craft to perform a recon mission. If your ships have long range weapons you can use these to deliver a powerful blow before entering visual range.


Information warfare is crucial in space combat and whichever side gains the upper hand here will have an advantage which could tip the scales and change the outcome of the space combat. On the one hand you want to minimize the intelligence that the enemy has about your exact armament and capabilities. You may wish to wait with deploying or delay firing your weapons to limit the enemy’s chance to respond with a suitable counter (until it is too late). We are taking a bit of inspiration here from the Age of Sail where the gunports on the tall ships were closed until they readied for action. What exactly is behind the gunports or in our case the turret slots of an enemy ship?


For answers we can turn to the Astrogation service branch. They have specialists and consoles that can help us identify contacts (to decide if they are friend or foe) as well as scan hostile contacts in more detail. This may reveal additional information about the room types and weapons carried by the hostile contact. In addition we may also discover additional places where our marines could later breach the hull if we decide to launch a boarding operation. While we are scanning the hostile contact they may respond in kind by either scanning us or trying to jam and interfere with our scanning.


With this new information we can tell our crew in the Weapons service branch to perform sub-system targeting against specific targets. Provided you have precision weapons installed and skilled Weapons specialists then you may damage or destroy key rooms and weapons on the enemy ship to cripple it. In our example we could either target each individual weapon and gradually destroy them or we could target Gunnery Bay 4. By destroying Gunnery Bay 4 we would effectively disable all weapons controlled from that room, allowing us to later board the ship and capture these weapons intact.


It is important to note that Sub-system targeting is an advanced concept and not something we expect players to do early in the game. Rather it comes into play a bit later and adds interesting opportunities during the mid and late game stages. Speaking of opportunities we do want to offer a lot of customization options, not just vertical progression (getting bigger ships) but also horizontal progression (change focus). We have iterated on the ship section types which we presented during the Kickstarter. A major change is that each section now allows either a crew upgrade or a system upgrade from the standard hull. This should allow you to experiment and create some interesting ship designs. The ship section types are as follows:


The Crew Bow upgrade allows more crew on board your ship. The Hangar upgrade converts crew berths to pilot berths and installs hangar bays as well as other rooms necessary for your pilots to perform at their best. The Marine upgrade converts crew berths to marine berths and installs additional armouries onboard your ship to allow you to equip additional marines in full battle gear. The Guided Weapons upgrade will let you install specific long range weapons like torpedoes, missiles etc. The Heavy Weapons upgrade adds extra turret slots so you can fire a more powerful broadside. Finally, the Systems/Aux allows you to upgrade your power output, scanning range etc.

The Hangar ship section in particular is interesting since without it your ship will not be able to launch or retrieve fighters or bombers. These can be either 1-seaters or 2-seaters. Fighters are good for dealing with other fighters and also for taking out enemy bombers. Bombers are good for dealing with enemy capital ship since they can carry anti-ship weapons. The light craft are organized in a similar fashion to the marines.


Flights and squadrons can only contain either fighters or bombers. A wing can contain up to three squadrons and each wing can either be a pure fighter / bomber wing or perhaps a composite wing where each squadron can be either a fighter or bomber squadron. This is useful when you want to launch attacks with bombers and you need to screen them from enemy fighters. Similarly a group can contain up to three wings, and each wing can contain a mix of fighter or bomber squadrons.

From the previous Kickstarter update you may remember that we also outlined how pilots could specialize to become a Recon Operator or a Weapons Operator. To really take advantage of their skills, you need to put these pilots in the co-pilot seat in a 2-seater. That means they have a regular pilot (or Ace Pilot) to fly the light craft while they can focus on either scanning or executing an anti-ship strike. Now, we could talk at length about air drills and how they are both similar and different from the battle drills in boarding combat, but this update is already very long so we will save that for another time.

We are going to round off this update with a video from Garret (art director), Greg (env artist) and Vegard (tech art director). They will tell us a bit more about ship art direction, the ship construction process and also demonstrate the sub-system targeting in practice.

Cheers,

Your friends at Perihelion Interactive

 

[Norfleet]

Pretty, and yet by the continuing absence of an actual game, also obviously and unconvincingly faked.

 

[SuicideBunny]

Pretty, and yet by the continuing absence of an actual game, also obviously and unconvincingly faked.

define "faked", cos that is just a refined updated version of the shipbuilder they made available after funding, where you could choose basic modules and then hurl roids or shoot lazors at the ship.

 

[Norfleet]

Faked, as in, not actually a game, conspicuously characterized by the nonexistence of the actual thing, like a movie trailer for a movie that doesn't actually exist. The difference being that fake movie trailers can still be hilarious, fake game trailers, on the other hand, have all the utility and entertainment value of tits on a bull.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

Is the an RPG or a space combat game?

EDIT.. I kinda like the old ship design (from the last vid) a bit better. It had 'character', the new one just looks 'typical'. It's not much to base an opinion on admittedly.

 

[DeepOcean]

Is the an RPG or a space combat game?

It's king's Bounty/Pirates! in the space with some FTL on it, it isn't a dedicated space combat game and isn't a RPG.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

Is the an RPG or a space combat game?

It's king's Bounty/Pirates! in the space with some FTL on it, it isn't a dedicated space combat game and isn't a RPG.

OK, not sure how that'll play, I guess it's just another waiting game.

 

[Abelian]

The ship design from this latest update kind of reminds me of Homeworld's Taiidan carriers.

 

[SuicideBunny]

Is the an RPG or a space combat game?

It's king's Bounty/Pirates! in the space with some FTL on it, it isn't a dedicated space combat game and isn't a RPG.

'cept it actually is an rpg. or at least has stronger rpg elements, like you playing the captain, who has skills, and the game featuring some c&c,

Faked, as in, not actually a game, conspicuously characterized by the nonexistence of the actual thing, like a movie trailer for a movie that doesn't actually exist. The difference being that fake movie trailers can still be hilarious, fake game trailers, on the other hand, have all the utility and entertainment value of tits on a bull.

it's prototype screenies/footage, not ingame screenies/footage.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

FAQ

This thread will be updated as we get more questions (and the answers to those questions) so you don’t have to hunt through the forums for the more basic issues. This post will be locked so as not to get too messy, but if you believe something should be added to it or (Mandate forgive us) you spot an error please PM one of the moderators (identifiable by the little sheriffs badge under their profile) and we will update as appropriate.

More detail on most of these points can be found in the Mandate Compendium.



What is The Mandate

The Mandate is a space opera strategic RPG where you start as the captain of a single ship, and can build up to commanding a potent flotilla and even starbase. Your crew are a living part of the game universe and as your character grows, so to can you direct the growth and development of those who serve under you. The real time combat allows you to target enemy systems and even send in your marines to board their ships, with opportunities to both plan your tactics in advance and plunge into the heart of the battle. Travel wherever you want in a large galactic sandbox where your actions can impact the very political fabric of the galaxy.

More details can be found at the Kickstarter Page.



Technical Specifications (not formally confirmed)

Minimum Specs (Subject to change)

- CPU: dual core 2.4 GHz or higher

- GPU: Intel HD3000/4000, AMD/ATI 3850, nVidia 8600 GT

- System RAM: 3 GB

- Shader model: 3.0 or higher (DX9.0c+ on Windows)

Basically if you have a decent gaming PC that is 5-6 years old or a laptop with integrated graphics (from Intel) that is 2-3 years old, or a laptop with discrete graphics (from nVidia / AMD) that is 3-4 years old, then you should be ok.

Launch platforms will be: Windows, Mac & Linux (Steam OS, is possible but not confirmed)

Localization has been confirmed for: French, German, Russian, Italian & Spanish.



DRM

The Fairness Directive states that in The Mandate, DRM is outlawed! You’ll require a game-key, and there will be the standard Steam services DRM. In addition we have contacted GoG.com and expect to distribute The Mandate via them at release. Since GoG.com only supports Windows and Mac, for Linux users that want a non-DRM option we plan to offer The Mandate via the Humble Store.



Release Schedule (Subject to change)

December 2014 – Alpha

January 2015 – Beta

April 2015 – Main Release

A visual image of the full shedule is here



Multi-player (Optional)

Support will be via Internet & LAN.

Multiplayer will support up to 6 players at any one time and will be fully cooperative, PvP is specifically not supported.



How much did the kickstarter raise? A.K.A: Are we getting our Mod support at $800k?

The Kickstarter itself raised $701,010, extra purchases and upgrades through Backerkit and paypal had raised this to over $750,000 by April 2014. Given the trend and the requirement to build Mod support in early on, Perihelion decided to assume that the $800k target would be hit and moved ahead with full Mod support.

This is the faq from their site.

A couple of things I do like the sound of... LAN, yep, good ole LAN, good to see and they want to release on Linux and even better they make a distinction between actual Linux and Steam OS, which is also good.

I'm not usually a fan of Space combat, (although it's possible I just haven't come across one that appeals) however I don't dislike the sounds of this, that at least is a plus.

EDIT.. I cut out the pledge info, it's not that relevant.

 

[DeepOcean]

Is the an RPG or a space combat game?

It's king's Bounty/Pirates! in the space with some FTL on it, it isn't a dedicated space combat game and isn't a RPG.

OK, not sure how that'll play, I guess it's just another waiting game.

You move your fleet around on the strategic map like on King's Bounty or Pirates, you can visit places to hire crew or do some questing like on FTL and sometimes this questing lead to fights. When you meet another fleet, the game changes from strategic mode to tactical mode and you can control multiple ships but you control them more like a RTS than a dedicated combat game, you can send marines to invade other ships or they can do the same to you, when there is boarding action, you control the soldiers with some basic commands on a RTS fashion. It is only complicated on paper but on practice it's just any strategic/tactical view games but with a space opera story. It's Mass Effect for people that don't like Gears of War clones and actually like some space exploration and prefer ruskies to kwans.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

Is the an RPG or a space combat game?

It's king's Bounty/Pirates! in the space with some FTL on it, it isn't a dedicated space combat game and isn't a RPG.

OK, not sure how that'll play, I guess it's just another waiting game.

You move your fleet around on the strategic map like on King's Bounty or Pirates, you can visit places to hire crew or do some questing like on FTL and sometimes this questing lead to fights. When you meet another fleet, the game changes from strategic mode to tactical mode and you can control multiple ships but you control them more like a RTS than a dedicated combat game, you can send marines to invade other ships or they can do the same to you, when there is boarding action, you control the soldiers with some basic commands on a RTS fashion. It is only complicated on paper but on practice it's just any strategic/tactical view games but with a space opera story. It's Mass Effect for people that don't like Gears of War clones and actually like some space exploration and prefer ruskies to kwans.

I have to admit, I'm not particularly strategically minded, I pretty much fail at games with that requirement, although it's certainly never stopped me having a go at them. April 15 doesn't seem too far away, although... delays, so it'll probably still be on my radar then.

Heh, your ME reference doesn't inspire me though, not a 'plus' in my book. (but I get your intention.)

 

[DeepOcean]

I have to admit, I'm not particularly strategically minded, I pretty much fail at games with that requirement, although it's certainly never stopped me having a go at them. April 15 doesn't seem too far away, although... delays, so it'll probably still be on my radar then.

Heh, your ME reference doesn't inspire me though, not a 'plus' in my book. (but I get your intention.)

By "strategic", its more you moving your flee around with maybe some resources to collect and trading dealing but not a completely dedicated 4x game, far from that and by Mass Effect, I mean if Mass Effect wasn't written by retards. Well... assuming those guys aren't obsessed with anal sex or retards like Bioware.