In normal circumstances, Battleships is a two-dimensional
game, with competitors trying to guess the locations of
each other's ships. My idea is to extend this in a number of
ways.
I'm aware that there is a Star Trek game of some kind
which is slightly similar to this but I can't remember
the
details. Anyone know? I am not personally familiar with
it.
Firstly, the grid is hypertoroidal. It's fairly normal for
playing "fields" to be toroidal in some way, for instance
Conway's Life has a toroidal board with the top wrapping
round to the bottom and the left onto the right, so simply
making a three-dimensional grid behave as if it's on a
hypertoroidal hypersurface is entirely straightforward.
However, in this case the hypertorus concept is exploited
further. Wormholes exist already in the hypertorus which
can only open on the antipodes of the cross-sectional
sphere of the ring, and they can also be created by ships.
Secondly, the ships are elaborately designed shapes and
have various facilities such as impulse drive, wormhole
generator, cannons, force shields and time displacement,
all of which can be damaged or completely disabled.
There are also reactors within the ships which are liable to
explode when hit, damaging or destroying the ships
themselves and those around them.
Thirdly, the ships are moving, able to accelerate and
decelerate and go through wormholes. They can collide
with each other and travel forward or backward in time,
and to the players, the spacetime through which they move
is subject to Newtonian laws of motion and Einsteinian
relativistic effects such as time dilation and length
contraction.
Fourthly, rather than a player simply choosing coordinates,
specific ships fire specific weapons, although the
coordinate idea remains.
Fifthly, and this is the core of my idea, a record is kept of
the events such that when a ship or weapon travels back in
time, the appropriate alterations to the timeline occur.
For instance, if ship A has been destroyed by ship B and
then ship C travels back in time before ship B destroyed
ship A and blows ship B up, ship A is reinstated and exists
for that time unless something else has happened in the
meantime which has damaged it.
I'm no gamer, so this is probably baked.