STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

[Hotfoot]

Guys, I know it's a heady experience thinking up of what kinds of cool rules could be used to describe this, that, or the other thing, but remember, we have to keep things simple. Counting out ammo is a gigantic step in the absolute wrong direction.

So let's make this simple:
No alpha strikes. Period. There is no real downside to this maneuver without adding a massive amount of complexity that again removes the entire point of having this be a forum-based game. Remember, the mods have to be willing to apply these rules, and I certainly don't feel like checking a huge spreadsheet every time a minor battle comes about. At that point we might as well take up Starglider on his offer to have a web app that calculates combat every time it comes up, or really just move this whole thing into a Space Empires Mod.

Remember, ballpark figures are key. We want a good baseline for what's going to happen in combat that's it really.. Anything beyond that is not useful as far as this game is concerned.

As far as people wanting to close ranges and keep distances, generally speaking, where this will matter is combat in deep space with nothing to defend. In any other situation, people should be able to run or keep distance. Smaller ships can move faster in realspace, meaning if you've got lots of big heavy ships, you can't easily control what range you will be engaging from.

If I seem curmudgeonly, well, I am to a degree, but I do want to nip some of these in the bud. Some of these have been in previous games in either suggested or implemented forms, but the key thing here is that we have to have the simplest model we can possibly have, only adding new mechanics as needed.

Right now, the objectives we should focus on are as follows:
*Global Bonuses: What more can be done/should be done? Look at previous STGODs and see what is worthwhile.
*Space Combat: Where should the rules end and the RP begin? How does the length of combat affect strategic movement
*Space Travel: How fast do ships move? How much faster do ships with +X FTL move than other ships.
*Intelligence Operations: How well do long-range sensors work? Can large fleet movements be picked up by anyone, just nearby neighbors, etc? (I'd err towards the latter, of course, but that's me). How good are early warning networks, etc.
*Ground Combat/Occupation: How easy is to to occupy a captured holding, turn it into solvent resources, etc. Keep in mind that as this is the highest risk method of gathering resources, it should have the highest reward.
*Racial points, how many does each player get, and how many points exactly do you get for the diminishing returns of sucking points from other abilities. Include other "perks" other than Imperial Caches if necessary.
*Limits of Imperial Caches, as well as types. I'd err towards more individual but limited caches rather than loads of different types, of course. Still, facilities that affect globals could be interesting, like an Imperial Intelligence Database that gives access to hidden deep space satellites, etc./whatever.

Any other suggestions, because I'm sure I'm missing something.

[Rogue 9]

Well I know that unless there's a substantial change in the way ground occupations work, I'm not going to engage in them. We all know how the Covenant of God thing worked out in STGOD 4; I was occupying in the face of a massive insurgency for the whole fucking game and didn't get a thing out of it. As of now, there's nothing to stop someone from saying that his population resists indefinitely.

(To be fair, that's essentially what I was going to do with Nashtar if the planets were in the end overrun; keep fighting rather than give it up and get a new power. But it's still irritating.)

[Academia Nut]

Well for starters we should have a "Donald Rumsfeld is a penalty" rule, in that occupations are to be done well unless you intentionally play as an idiot or take a penalty there. As a starter, your troops will be assumed to be at least marginally competent at running an invasion and occupation and will, as a rule, be well versed in counter-insurgency tactics. "Winning hearts and minds" will not be a a sound-bite. Besides, if you want to capture a planet for its resources, first thing you'll start rebuilding is the infrastructure, which generally means that things won't be quite so shit-holey for the occupants what with the plumping and power being restored and the trains running on time. Sure, there will still be insurgents and hold-outs, but turn the lights back on and throw a little propaganda at the people and most people will just want to get back to their daily lives, leaving the guerillas to be mopped up.

So while the player who lost the planet can still try and slow down assimilation efforts while trying to get a fleet to retake the planet, the conquered world shouldn't be in revolt eternally after the planet has already fallen.

[Darkevilme]

If the assumption is that all ships regardless of size travel the same speed by default in FTL then it makes sense that FTL speed is a percentage price. so to answer my own question from earlier, a ship with ten percent of its cost dedicated to ftl speed goes the same extrafast rate regardless of size and whether that ten percent is a point, 5 points or ten points.

Every other capability of a ship scales with the overral value anyway(guns, defences, sensors, ECM/EW, capacity) so this particular percentage thing should only apply to FTL speed.

Now we just need to figure out how much faster a 50% engine speed demon goes compared to other ships, x2 fast? i mean no one's gonna be insane enough to put more than 50 percent into engines cause that'd be rather useless when it arrived. so have each ten percent equal +20% to overral FTL speed perhaps.

Thoughts? thrown objects?

[Covenant]

There's nothing crumudgeony about it. There's places where rules will make things vastly easier and less mired in arguement, but most everything else went fine without them in the past. Basically, people flail anytime someone has done an end-run around them that forces a major loss. If we have our ballpark combat rules, the only other point of catastrophic failure is strategic, and I think that's what RP is about.

Global Bonuses: I liked your idea of having seperate 'faction' points to allocate that never will be touched again, and do not pertain to construction. Perhaps only to maximum warship size, but please, no 'invest 500 points now to make 250 points more each build time' since that's just a way of lame-ing the system. I don't really know what faction benefits we should have, but if we must to global benefits, I'd like them seperate from other things--so nobody starts weak, but becomes overpowered by month 2.

Space Combat: I liked my first idea--mods use the ballpark rules to make some estimates, and then we RP the rest. The numbers are basically cold-hard facts that we fudge a little, or barter with the other player to achieve a more favorable result for both sides. If both sides are deadlocked, then they can be imposed by the mods on both sides, but sour grapes will no longer derail a combat and nobody will get suckerpunched by "My FTL Drive Makes Your Fleet Explode" type wierdness, if we happen to let in a wacko.

Space Travel: I'd say "pretty fucking fast" or else galactic-scale travel will be so slow that by the time reinforcements arrive, the planet has been dead for 100 years. More like Stargate and Star Wars speed of travel, along with nearly realtime communications. Maybe, like Stargate, you must be at a planet to communicate FTL--so no changing course mid-flight.

Intel Ops: If we have fast travel and fast communications we can have fairly shitty basic intel nets and warning ops. If we have shitty travel speed and communication then we need good warning nets and strong intel. Since we're going Space Opera, I'd go with more ability to suprise someone with an increasingly good ability to call for help and have it arrive from a nearby system (a few lightyears away) in 45 minutes or so.

Ground Combat: Let's just be honest and say that most ground assets aren't in the form of manual labor. The captured world's supplies of Poets, TV Anchormen, and Politicians may resist your rule but their automated robot valets and factories won't. After a month, you've recaptured 25 percent of the exportable assets and gotten them reprogrammed and unboobytrapped and such, and after two months you have 75 percent viability and no more risk of sabotage. You always get a +25 percent bonus to your own worlds. No queen-swapping, but this gives you nearly all of someone's resources from that world per month, a big boost. Also an incentive to recapture one of your own worlds, and get it back to producing at 100 percent.

Perks and Caches: I have no idea what would require a 'perk' and how we price them. If my guys are cyborgs, all of them, do I buy a 100 point Cyborg perk and get... what? What if just some individuals are? Hard to quantify some of this stuff. Caches, I say, one cache per person and of limited size and potency. Global caches are too risky.

[Darkevilme]

I'd prefer reinforcement times being a few hours, in the 2 to 12 range to have that hold until relieved feel.
And space travel speed is rather dependent on how much space this terran empire actually covers, which has never been specified and will probably be determined by how many starsystems a player is expected to have. If nearly all of the empire is made up of players then it's doubtful the empire covers more than a fraction of the galaxy unless players control dozens of starsystems.

[Hotfoot]

The key to reinforcements is that you shouldn't be able to receive reinforcements from across the galaxy to come in at the last minute to save the battle from absolute ruin. Reinforcements should be within a short distance from the battle if they are to be used at all. Otherwise, we have situations where alliances on totally opposite sides of the map can reinforce each other with ease.

[Covenant]

The key to reinforcements is that you shouldn't be able to receive reinforcements from across the galaxy to come in at the last minute to save the battle from absolute ruin. Reinforcements should be within a short distance from the battle if they are to be used at all. Otherwise, we have situations where alliances on totally opposite sides of the map can reinforce each other with ease.

If we don't have blazingly fast FTL, then for reinforcements to be pertinent at all would require massively early warning or for battles to rage across weeks of combat. However, if battles take less than 4 hours on average, than reinforcements will probably come from your nextdoor neighbors if at all. There won't be much purpose to reinforcing a fallen world, that's "counterattack" planning.

Do we want a spreadsheet representing distances between 3-dimensional regions of space (like last time, only better?) or do we want a strategic map? If we do it like last time, with a 3D coordinate system between regions of space, we can compute the distances between areas and use that to figure out the time taken two regions of the map.

---

Here's an idea I am definately not in favor of, but I'll state just so it's already been said: We could also go back to the Ye Olde Spaceroad theory, that there are wormholes connecting regions of space, and you'd need to march your army past Space Sparta in order for Persia to reach Athens. That's kinda lame but it is, at least, consistant and easy to draw a map of.

[Academia Nut]

Okay, let's start with the laws of cinematics in that you should be able to have reinforcements stading by and ready to drop an ambush on someone the next round, with a round being say... an hour. For an ambush to work, the prey can't be able to see the reinforcements, so if we take starship sensor limits at say 1 LY (as in hiding in a system's Oort cloud), then that would imply drive speeds of a little under 9000 times the speed of light (24*365=8760 to be exact, but the line was too good to pass up). That implies that if it took two weeks to get from the edge of the empire to Earth, then the Empire would have a radius of about 339 LY, with a volume of 1.60*10^8 cubic light years. Of course, if we want to simplify things and ignore the third direction then we get an area of 3.57*10^5 square light years.

For comparison, according to Trek mechanics, Warp 9 is 729c.

Now, if we want lower ship speeds, we'll probably need to increase the amount of time between summoning or greatly decrease sensor range for ships. Either one is viable, but you'll either have to sacrifice ambushes or make them easier to do in non-enemy territory as their ships won't be able to see very far.

[Covenant]

Question, what's the average star density in Sol's region of space? How many stars are we likely to have within the 'empire'? If we have a radius of around 350 lightyears, how many stars does that include?

BTW, I looked up my old Starflight Maps--he's a map from Starflight I. Something like this might work well for our purposes.

Good ol' 2D Spacemap.

[Academia Nut]

Well, in our stellar neighbourhood, a quick Google search gives me a density of 1 star per cubic parsec, which means that in the radius I gave we get about...

4.62 million stars.

Admittedly, most of them will be red dwarfs and the majority of the rest will be unihabitable, but this is just one of those things normally glossed over in space operas, namely the fact that space is big. Hugely big. I mean so big its practically holding up a sign saying "Look at me, I'm big".

Ahem... assuming that F, G, and K type stars are suitable candidates for establishing colonies, that cuts the number of available stars down too...

1.11 million

Well at least we'll have plenty of room for asteroid mining. Saying that 10% (current estimate) of stars have planets...

110,000 eligible stars

Saying that a star has an average of 3 planets, and of those 10% are something humans would want to set foot on...

33,000 planets

Even if we say that only 10% of those are Earth-like, we still get 3000+ worlds. Then again, if we knock it down a further order of magnitude (not unreasonable) that would give us enough worlds for a fair sized interstellar empire.

But yeah, space=big.

[Nephtys]

I'd personally be happier if we only had a small number of real planets. Like say, 17 or so inhabited worlds as an example, with 3 'real' core worlds of some 10 billion humanoids. Of the others, 5 are outer planets of around a billion, and the last 9 are outpost worlds of tens of thousands.

In such a situation, it's much more interesting and notable if a real planet is invaded, while at the same time every world matters some.

Edit: It's also so much easier to track who has what then...

[rhoenix]

On the subject of FTL travel, I had an idea on this count that wouldn't complicate things (much), but would allow for more tactical points to arise. I give the caveat that I've been playing quite a bit of Freespace 2 over the past few days, so you know what to blame in advance.

Have FTL travel require travel through x-space, into and out of x-space nodes near stars. This also provides a handy reason for FTL travel to work, in that stations built near x-space nodes pass along communications through the nodes to achieve FTL communication.

This has the additional effect of creating bottlenecks for travel and contested space, as since corridors connecting x-space nodes are fixed in destination, control over both ends would be necessary to avoid being shot at in fusillade upon entering or leaving one.

Further details are up to all of you, such as whether or not shields work while within a x-space corridor, whether or not one could destroy a node with a big enough explosion, and/or additionally, whether or not one could use Imperial (tm) technology to stabilize or re-activate a node.

All of this would require everyone to chart where the nodes are, and where they connect to, but I think this idea would allow for much more intrigue and fun than the simple "rar I use FTL in realspace" idea.

Granted, the "I use FTL in realspace" idea would be simpler, but it would also make sure that it would be difficult to barricade a resource, as one wouldn't be able to necessarily predict where one's opponent would be attacking from.

[Academia Nut]

Uhhh... the problem with that is that the math simply doesn't work out. If we're presuming an old empire that has been secure in its dominance for at least a thousand years, then they will have easily been able to populate hundreds of worlds in a territory such as I described. Especially since the empire was apparently religiously human-centrist they would encourage growth and colonization.

But, to be fair, let's halve the FTL speed I gave. That will decrease the territory covered by 8 times, so that there are only 139 thousand F, G, or K class stars in there, and low balling it we'll get about 400 worlds would want to set foot on instead of 3000+, or about 40 Earth like worlds. This gives us more than enough worlds for people to have their sucessor nations, NPCs to lurk with caches of goods, and for more than a few to have been blown up in the run up to Earth going bye-bye.

So how does an average FTL speed of about 4500c sound to everyone?

[Darkevilme]

Sounds fine to me, an empire of 400 worlds means that the Chamaran single system doesnt seem completely and utterly miniscule.

[Beowulf]

I'd personally be happier if we only had a small number of real planets. Like say, 17 or so inhabited worlds as an example, with 3 'real' core worlds of some 10 billion humanoids. Of the others, 5 are outer planets of around a billion, and the last 9 are outpost worlds of tens of thousands.

In such a situation, it's much more interesting and notable if a real planet is invaded, while at the same time every world matters some.

Edit: It's also so much easier to track who has what then...

Yeah, but that makes world too important. You lose one, and that's it. You're dead.

400 planets sounds doable though.

[Academia Nut]

rhoenix, as much as having space lanes simplifies things, its probably going to be shot down for the simple reason that bottlenecks encourage defence, and defence encourages turtling, which we are trying to avoid that this time around. To compensate for that, we simply say that having a dedicated sensor net around your nation gives you a hell of a lot more warning time than even the best ship based sensors so you can get a couple of hours to a day to scramble a response force to the incoming threat. Of course, if your entire fleet was suckered into going elsewhere, well than that's a whole different problem.

When we draw up our system maps we can probably also include long range sensors as part of it so that we'll know about when people will start noticing incoming fleet elements.

[Rogue 9]

I think Freespace's subspace node idea is an interesting one, myself, and it'd add another strategic element to gameplay, but it does make for a more defensive game. Now, mind, I don't think defensive elements to the game are a bad thing, but that's not up to me.

[SirNitram]

Ugh, I'm just going to state that for STGODs, node/wormhole/jumplines really strike me as a great, perfect way to acheive strategic paralysis. Chokepoints!

[Nephtys]

Ugh, I'm just going to state that for STGODs, node/wormhole/jumplines really strike me as a great, perfect way to acheive strategic paralysis. Chokepoints!

Not if you have DOZENS of them that enter your systems. Enough that you can't picket them all well, so you need an inner-system fleet station.

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, but even if you can't picket them all, you can sure as hell mine, something that would be pointless and stupid in any other arrangement. If the route is a heavily trafficked one, then you put your pickets there, and mine the fuck out of the other routes. If someone legitimately comes through one of the mined routes, then they stand down and you send a tug out to get them, changing the safe route pattern after you're finished.

Any time you can predict the route your enemy can take, you have gained a strategic advantage, and a big one too.

[Covenant]

There's ways to make it less retarded but I don't see the real point to it. We don't need to a make it so linear, the hypertravel will probably be point-to-point anyway. Defending your worlds won't be impossible. Just don't lump your entire navy into one pile. Planets should have some mild offense as well, so you're not hidebound by numbers into an obviously lopsided confrontation.

[Nephtys]

There's ways to make it less retarded but I don't see the real point to it. We don't need to a make it so linear, the hypertravel will probably be point-to-point anyway. Defending your worlds won't be impossible. Just don't lump your entire navy into one pile. Planets should have some mild offense as well, so you're not hidebound by numbers into an obviously lopsided confrontation.

I have an interesting mechanic for FTL. Just a random idea, not necessarilly any real suggestion unless it's something someone likes. Our goal is to make it so FTL travel is fast, but not exploitable to make doomsday devices or to bypass any fight you don't want. But how's this...

FTL speeds are determined by what's in the path you're flying to. So in deep space, you do say... 2000c. But when you are aimed at a star within a few light years, you then only do 200c. You slow down as you approach.

Meanwhile, the defenders who spot your fleet want to intercept it. With minimal stuff in the direction of their travel (asteroids? A planet nearby or so), they go a high-ish speed like 1000c, and manage to meet you beyond the outer limit of the system if they wish. But they need some hours to prep drives or whatever for such an intercept.

This limits tactical FTL, while making ships interceptable (unlike a hyperspace or wormhole 'BAMF!' system).

Or we can do the jump nodes thing, only you can jump to any system within x-light years. So you have to do several stopovers and recharge time. Attacking an enemy necessitates taking staging areas and frontal bases. This is similar to Battletech's FTL system, or Escape Velocity.

[Rogue 9]

Ugh, I'm just going to state that for STGODs, node/wormhole/jumplines really strike me as a great, perfect way to acheive strategic paralysis. Chokepoints!

And? The other way doesn't work either; the first person to attack will get reamed by everybody else, as always, because he's the one who doesn't have his full fleet at home to prevent it. You get strategic paralysis either way.

[Covenant]

That's not as big of a problem with more than three people playing. The first person to attack, then the first person to gank, are BOTH exposed. The only one who is never exposed is the person who sits there and doesn't get attacked ever.

A lack of chokepoints opens up a good defensive strategy though--as a nation bloats from conquests, you can pick at it's edges. Barbarians attacking Rome can come and hit the outside provinces, ya' know. Not everything needs to be as direct as attacking Space Helm's Deep.