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.
-- nineteenthly, Mar 17 2017

Voxiebox https://www.youtube...watch?v=_ddgprJRKMc
Your game could make good use of this thing [Cuit_au_Four, Mar 17 2017]

Time travel would be difficult in a turn based game like battleship.
-- bungston, Mar 17 2017


Could it still be played on a paper pad?
-- Size_Mick, Mar 17 2017


Bermuda Battleship.
...this personnel it's time.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 17 2017


Yes it could, [Size Mick]. It just needs to consist of a number of pages representing different levels of that 3-D space and needs a pencil and rubber/eraser. You could even do real wormholes by piercing the sheets. What's puzzling me right now though is whether a series of flat toroids like the Life board would suffice.

Something I meant to mention: this also addresses that problem with the three utility suppliers for three houses, and I think that would almost certainly be relevant in gameplay but I don't know how.
-- nineteenthly, Mar 18 2017



random, halfbakery