Starship Corporation

The Jump gates are for getting from star to star.

If you are going with a Ly per day concept that would be fine, question is, how will that time effect the game.

Is this going to be RTS like or turn based in the larger picture (traveling between stars).

You can have different types of time for each level of the game, RTS in combat, and turn for the week/month.

Dave Chase

I was thinking about using a timelapse mode (like the world map in xcom: enemy unkown). It would be basically the same mechanic like speeding up / slowing down crew management, only on a larger scale. This way you can easily keep track of your ships moving around, and the game is halted as soon there is an "incident".

I don't know what exactly your plan is, but if you actually want people to do real-time missions with theit ships you will horribly screw up MP-timescale when doing this. (as in: The one who encounters something will be significantly later at the destination than the one who doesn't just because of he timescaling. If you just want to simulate one go as a "testrun" without any competition or whatsoever, that system could work.

Nevertheless, you need some sort of warpfield/hyperspace/jumpgates to make interstellar travel possible in a human timescale. Or else you would need at least 4.5 years (!) to reach the nearest star, increasing fast to 10 years if you want more than a few solar systems. For a list of nearest stars and theit distance (conveniently in lightyears) see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars

This would work in single player mode but not so well if at all in a Multiplayer game.

Dave Chase