the idea is basicly that you build up your team similar to rb2, but you have no access to the other team for three to four weeks time. i'll have everyone build up their empire for three weeks, upon which we'll check in with each team and see if they vote to extend it by one week or not. in the event there's a mixed vote, i'll favor extending the time out for 4 days.
the ultimate objective on this island is to destroy the other team's supply house. your secondary objectives are to produce enough weapons and vehicles to do this with, while in turn producing defense objects (forcefields, defense turrets, walls) for your own team to resist attack. first team to destroy the opposing team's supply house wins, though as usual there'll be my top ten list of the five leaders of each team, which will get a preview of rb4 as it gets developed (i'm hoping to get reina roja out in place of rb5, but we'll haveta wait and see).
a few things of note so far:
* all vehicles have the same capacity.
* all vehicles now use quite a bit more fuel
* boats are all a bit faster
* hunger and thirst is reduced significantly
* food sells for more in the supply house (though the same buy price).
this seemed to address the problems with hunger/thirst working mostly at midnight, whereas fuel is a nice constant drain resource, which makes it more appealing to use as the primary early obstacle.
boats are faster mainly because you can't visit the other team with them until the end anyway, and clearly as the map shows, you'll be doing a lot of boating early on until you build a concrete house to get around the offshore wood shed problem.
as usual, you're allowed to build anywhere on the island that you can travel to.
planes will be disabled from working until the end of the empire-building timeframe. you can make as many planes as you want, but they won't work until the three or four weeks is up. after that period, the barriar wall will be lowered, and you can boat or fly over to the enemy team to begin your destruction.
* note: all players will have driver, sailor and pilot skills by default, with an adjusted skills limit. this will allow you to forget one of the skills, should you need to concentrate on building for your team. in the end you could either go back and relearn the skill for a price, or just decide to live off boating / flying / walking alone, giving up the other abilities.
i envision this will create several player roles per team, since you could have someone that has given up the majority of their skills and elects to be a team builder, who just levels up on all sorts of skills and then constructs whatever the team needs. after the three weeks they could decide to stick with defensive positions, or the team could compensate them so that they can relearn the skill.
i suppose the opposite would hold true as well, where you might have a warriar class that is mostly concerned with building hidden or fortified houses and stores to dump weapons caches into.
another thing that'll have to be decided within your team is how to handle the defense building situation. i've upped max buildings to 8, but now the max different types is a mere two. the later strategies of both teams in rb2 might work here, where you destroy lower end buildings and consolidate your holdings so that you have enough slots for a good defense. or you might concentrate more on offense, keeping weapon production up even as you go for the offensive. which is praps a bit riskier and less sparkly :]
anyway these are just preliminary suggestions - i'll be interested to see how each team strategizes as the game progresses.
lastly, the one thing that bothers me a bit is that team selection via birth town (which is the best way i know of to keep people permanently assigned to a birth town), is a bit weird since it assigns players to a town/team at random, rather than evenly distributing players in a 1,2,1,2 fashion. this saw a huge glut of team two people early on in rb2, and then a mild influx of team ones. i may talk with newly arrived players about switching teams to soften the numbers a bit. we'll see how it goes.
oh btw, obviously there'll be a lot less commentary on this island until the end, due to the nature of the island. other than spec, players have no idea what the other team is doing. no crows, no getting onto their land, no map display.
also spectator mode is practically disabled, the zoom being set to 1 (default is usually around 20. setting it to 1 places the camera nearly inside the player on the gamefloor.)
) additions to the rb regulars: lepidus, jeff and wild