“So players hop into their jet, and fly over your world and wait to arrive where-ever they’re going. What are they doing for the minute, five minutes, eight minutes, etc, that it takes to fly there? That’s a long time to be sitting and not actually playing the game…”

I’m not a fan of long travel times. I think emphasizing the size of the world is fine, but there comes a point where it starts messing the the player’s fun. I think you also have to be very judicious with how you use instant travel (if at all), because that destroys most of the world’s continuity.

The numbers I used are just examples. Ideally, I would say (thinking of the game world as a globe) that the longest flight distance, say to get to an encounter in the antipodes of wherever you start, should be ten minutes tops. You have to consider giving your players a brief break to get ready for the encounter (bios, getting a drink, taking a phone call, etc…) without giving them too much of travel downtime. I think ten minutes maximum flight is a happy medium, and it’s well, well below other games’ maximum travel times.

Sure, it’s tempting to just go ahead and set things up for something silly like 1-minute max flights, to “maximize the time to fun” with the best of intentions, but you also have to consider that your players are not robots and need their breaks. You can make travel instant if you want, but if your players need to take care of something else, their group is still held up in the meantime, so whatever time you gained by eliminating the travel times, they turn around and spend it anyway by waiting for the afk guy. That’s what the travel time window attempts to compensate for.

“Also, if you’re going to the trouble of making all of the locations have a specific place on your global map, how much of them can players see while they’re flying overhead? If they spot something interesting, can they (after they finish the first mission) fly back to check it out?”

No, only cities have a specific place on the map (because they exist, they are on the map and everyone knows where they are). The rest of the locations do not, and would not be observable during flight. Player bases are supposed to be underground, in any case, so even if they had fixed locations they would not be observable during travel.

So players can’t really spot something interesting, other than a city they already knew was there should their flight path take them over it. The rest of the areas are cosmetic content.

Brad:

“The major dilemma in my opinion seems to be that in X-Com, the time taken on the battle maps is likely to be wildly inconsistent with time spent elsewhere. Won’t that result in players being in wildly different points in the game timeline and limit how much they can interact?”

Yes, but there are a few ways around this. It’s not possible (I imagine) to perfectly replicate X-COM’s “flow” of a game session over one world with different players at different stages. So we have to separate and translate that flow. In X-COM the game’s progress (from first small base, to Mars, basically) was tied to the player because that’s all the game had to satisfy.

What we need to do here is to tie the game’s “flow” to the world itself, and not the players, because we cannot tie it to all of them at the same time. It’s the world itself that will slowly go through the timeline of advancement, and the players will contribute to it and tag along for the ride.

There won’t be squads getting to Mars at the same time other squads are just downing their first alien scout under this view.

Other options are: Sectioning the content, as you mentioned. Freezing the timeline and move things into a framework of “constant conflict” instead of a definite beginning and end. Or perhaps a combination of sectioned and dynamic content.

This is an important area which I haven’t got to yet.

But I suppose if the original X-Com ended up being converted into something like LotR book 1, or levels 1-10, then segregating by those bands might be feasible.

So players hop into their jet, and fly over your world and wait to arrive where-ever they’re going. What are they doing for the minute, five minutes, eight minutes, etc, that it takes to fly there? That’s a long time to be sitting and not actually playing the game…

Also, if you’re going to the trouble of making all of the locations have a specific place on your global map, how much of them can players see while they’re flying overhead? If they spot something interesting, can they (after they finish the first mission) fly back to check it out?