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Steve wrote:

CmdrWilkens wrote: So basically I think it can work we would just need a few good rules of thumb and a willingness on everybody's part to remember its a game you don't play to win, its a game you play to enjoy.

A good point, but we do have some people around here for whom enjoyment is fucking things up for other players that displease them or irritate them in some way.

We had those and the flip side is with a rule of thumb, write the battle don't dice roll the battle you can very easily deal with this. The STGODs always used to attract douches (e.g. Transcend) so you just smack them down while the mod stands by and whistles a tune. The thing was then which we seem to have lost is that when you write a battle your own forces can and should lose some times (hell I wrote many a tale where I lost whole fleets).

It comes down to this: players have to be willing to accept losses, move on and write a clever counter-attack. Mod(s) should ONLY be called in when another post is blatantly powergaming or otherwise willfully mis-representing the situation for advantage. The average "but my ships are stronger than that" whining needs to stop, just counter-post an attack that will leave your opponent wanting to say the same thing.

Steve wrote:
I don't think the Alpha Centauri-style game is expansive enough. One of the advantages of this system will be plenty of room for new players or for others to remain active if someone stops playing for whatever reason.

The issue of planets is best dealt with by ensuring their rarity. Nobody wants to see an Earth-like planet, natural or via terraforming, nuked because there's only one natural Earth-like world per sector and terraforming takes centuries to complete. At the same time, permit defensive tech that makes taking a planet an appropriate effort, especially if it's a Core World as opposed to some fringe planet.

But people WILL be nuking sites from orbit, just to be sure. Hell, in my mind I'm already thinking that half the population of the Old Dominion(in spaaaaaaaaaaaace) will be "spaces" in Oort cloud objects, since we've reached that technological threshold.

A Grand Convention against hte use of atomics and the like against planets?

You can add that to the "list of shit I won't sign".

Who says you're the one who signed it?

Lonestar wrote:You can add that to the "list of shit I won't sign".

Eh... why bother complaining about nuking (which happens regardless which futuristic setting) when you don't want to sign the treaty? Which probably applies to Shep as well.

Wilkens' and Steve's points are well taken: the conquest of a moon or planet should be significant enough that it is (under certain circumstances) worth invading in the first place, but at the same time not so significant that the loss to the other player is completely crippling. This is why I like the idea of controlling several sectors: there would be plenty of room for the loss of an entire planet without such an event being debilitating to the point where one might as well give up in disgust.

Of course how many sectors each player should have and how many planets each sector should contain is something that remains up for debate, but I do believe that containing the setting to a single planet or even a single solar system would be a mistake.

Also, concepts like a pre-arranged 'Grand Convention' just strike me as a weak pre facto attempt to limit what people can do in-game. If the outright burning of a planet outrages you so, then you can always go to war over it, or you can call for a grand convention then and have planet-busting outlawed by galactic consensus (if such a consensus can be found, that is). Why impose a thing like that beforehand and limit the story-telling opportunities before the game even begins?

Siege wrote:Also, concepts like a pre-arranged 'Grand Convention' just strike me as a weak pre facto attempt to limit what people can do in-game. If the outright burning of a planet outrages you so, then you can always go to war over it, or you can call for a grand convention then and have planet-busting outlawed by galactic consensus (if such a consensus can be found, that is). Why impose a thing like that beforehand and limit the story-telling opportunities before the game even begins?

Meh, I won't mind going on a genocidal spree executing an exterminatus on a few planets, if it warrants it that is.

I love this idea, count me in.

Siege makes a good point on the Convention thing, there is no need to set limits for ourselves. If some asshole gets a little bit too nuke happy, we can always gang up on him and wipe him out of the game completely, or something like that. Problem solved.

As for what my nation would be...I have to think about that.

I wasn't thinking a "Grand Convention" so much as a kind of unofficial rule. Earth-like planets are rare, only one per sector, and while by our era every core sector of a nation will also have a couple fully terra-formed worlds that are just as good as Earth-like planets, that's because said work's been going on for, well, centuries.

If you wreck a good Earth-like Planet with mass nukings, it takes a massive amount of time to fix (an amount of time likely beyond the scope of this game) and in the meantime can have a deleterious effect upon the galactic food supply (Since such planets will produce the vast majority of food since its easier and cheaper to do it upon them), meaning that for all the other powers intentionally mass-nuking a planet because you can't easily take it is a major no-no and would result in pretty much every other power available jumping on you to wipe your polity out.


Wilkens, while I find your idea beneficial to the workload of the mods, there are a couple issues I have with it.

A) I believe it plays into the hands of those who like to write battles where their side completely wins. They will continue to do so and then respond with the same to any attempt by another player to counter-balance the losses. This leads to the "sandbox" effect where the players are trying to trump one another with bigger and badder fleets.

B) I'm not sure yet what kind of scope our ingame fleets will have. I know the old ASVS STGODs tended to have utterly massive armadas in them. I figured we'd probably have a case where everyone's starfleets were in the four digit range in terms off "warship" space combatants (not counting fleet auxiliaries). The idea that a player should just take a lump where someone else decrees his loss and throw another fleet in to counterattack implies that a player can easily accept the losses involved.

I was going to suggest that if players can determine their fights with each other that is great and I look forward to seeing them duke it out, but a player should have the right to appeal to the mods over a combat post by someone else. If Player A attacks Player B and claims victory and such and such losses for Player B, Player B's options should not be limited to "accept defeat and leave it alone" or "accept defeat and post a counter-attack, which Player A might just retaliate against in turn". The option of "appeal to the mod to have the result altered or reversed" should be there. Of course, for you potential Player Bs out there, this third option should not be invoked lightly. Upon review of the forces at play we mods might very well decide that Player A inflicted more loss on you than claimed. Particularly if Player B is behaving in the fashion of a petulant child and forgets that one does not trifle with mods, for we are unsubtle and very quick to anger.

Since we are approaching this as fun story writing more than a game, I would hope that people who go to war do so in common agreement with a story planned for it. It would minimize the fuss.

Easy solution; don't dictate combat results unless you're describing your own losses.

Steve wrote:Wilkens, while I find your idea beneficial to the workload of the mods, there are a couple issues I have with it.

A) I believe it plays into the hands of those who like to write battles where their side completely wins. They will continue to do so and then respond with the same to any attempt by another player to counter-balance the losses. This leads to the "sandbox" effect where the players are trying to trump one another with bigger and badder fleets.

B) I'm not sure yet what kind of scope our ingame fleets will have. I know the old ASVS STGODs tended to have utterly massive armadas in them. I figured we'd probably have a case where everyone's starfleets were in the four digit range in terms off "warship" space combatants (not counting fleet auxiliaries). The idea that a player should just take a lump where someone else decrees his loss and throw another fleet in to counterattack implies that a player can easily accept the losses involved.

For point A the solution might be to have combat storyposts sit in a sort of tentative stance for a day or so after they go up and/or be subject to mod approval. There is no need to get in to rolls and arguments over fine points (again the shit Ryan and I got in to was almost wholly counter-productive to the entire scheme of things) but there should be some opportunity to control "LOL I win" posts. If we provide for either mod approval (which means the ability to force a re-write) or make all such posts tentative upon delivery (giving the opposing player a chance to air grievances) it can cut back on that. Short of unofficial agreements to nuke such jackasses in to oblivion (e.g. Transcend in STGOD Mk I) its probably the best way to constrain such behavior.

For Point B its why I drew the comparisons to the Mk II game after the universe wide Armageddon. Ship counts went down to <1,000 total (including little in-system puddle jumpers) and ship speeds dropped to a few dozen to hundred times the speed of light. For instance the workhorse ship for my group was:

/Sardonius/ -class Heavy Cruiser
Length: 682m
Width: 138m
Height: 78m
Total crew compliment: 1,022
Power source: D-T Fusion (5)
Engines - Sublight: Fusial Thrust Ion.
Engines - FTL: Augumented N-Wave
Acceleration: 18G flank, 11G Full
Armament:
2 x3 12" Naval Railguns. Impact energy approx 9.25 Mt. Fire Control is
accurate to approx 110,000 Km. Maximum effective range approx 43,000
Km. ROF
1/5 sec.
4 x3 8" Naval Railguns. Imapct energy approx 7.5 Mt. Fire Control is
accurate to approx 110,000 Km. Maximum effective range approx 43,000
Km. ROF
1/5 sec.
12 40GW Proximity Defense Lasers
12 67mm Flak Cannons
6x 208mm Torpedo Tubes
2x 154mm Missile Rails
Armor: 5 layers .5m E-armor
Shielding: None
Carried Craft: 4 Shutlecraft for ground attck spotting and transport.
Arti-Grav: Gravitons generate approximately .70G in gradient (forward
gunnery about .58, engine room about .8)

Number in Service: 138

By the time of the reset this was actually one of the probably top-10 ships in terms of overall capability, shielding was out, inertial dampening was at best done with whatever gravity substitute you used, full on weightlessness was common in smaller combatants during full power battle maneuvers, etc. So anyway the tech level is probably a bit higher than we were going for but the post apocalypse STGOD world was definitely interesting.

I was figuring we'd have something in the area of Trek-B5 in terms of tech "feel", though in scope our countries would be more the size of a B5 race's holdings than a Trek power's. (13 sectors, thus no more than 13 natural Earth-like planets and maybe another 10 or so fully terraformed worlds, being the base size for a power, though one can spend Nation Creation Points from the starting pool to alter sector makeup or number of sectors). My main concern with tech isn't "what it is" so much as "what it does". Whether someone powers their hyperspace engines with anti-matter/matter reactions, hypermatter fusion, burning peanut butter oil, a chorus of Pakleds chanting "We need things. Things that make us go!", or the energies of aphrodisiac-abusing lesbian nymphomaniacs in an engine room orgy, the end results will generally be the same in "how fast the thing can go".

The alternative is to debate how our tech works pre-game... and I don't think that'll work too well.

Your proposal for combat rules makes sense. I like.

If fleets are less then a thousand, then we have a situation where individual warships are capable of making a meaningful contribution. With gigantic million ship fleets, most warships will just be lost in the crowd, unless they're wank personified. I have no problems with thousand ship Navies being the upper limit.

It will depend largely on the industrial capacity etc. etc. etc. that we want as well.

If my proposal becomes accepted.... welcome to SDN Worlds, gentlemen (and ladies).

*Gets out AstroSynthesis*

Anyway, your proposal... I like it, and may for once even have a go at taking part. Also, the thought of playing with interstellar maps and stuff sounds like good fun. I do have a copy of AstroSynthesis (trial copy I think, which has some limits), but I can at least use it. However, I think a good old-fashioned 2D map may be easier to use, especially if we're dealing with a small corner of the galaxy (say, a few hundred star systems shared between the players).

I also agree with the idea for fleet sizes - if thousand-warship fleets are unusually large then it generally makes for better storytelling potential IMHO. The loss of the 14th Cruiser Squadron means something that way.

Also Steve, I'm writing / have written (depending on when you read this) a PM to you regarding a possible setting / background for it. Let me know what you think and if it can be of any use or not (I don't mind, but I do get this compulsive urge to get into backgrounds and things in a big way when I like the look of them ).

Setzer wrote:If fleets are less then a thousand, then we have a situation where individual warships are capable of making a meaningful contribution. With gigantic million ship fleets, most warships will just be lost in the crowd, unless they're wank personified. I have no problems with thousand ship Navies being the upper limit.

I was thinking of 1,000 ships as a potential lower limit myself, more the size of a "holy shit that's an epic force" national armada than one's entire fleet, but I'm not adverse to it being an upper limit (it would slant us yet further to the B5-side of the "Trek-B5" scale I was hoping to hang the game in).

Fin's right about the capacity playing a part, though to prevent the kind of number crunching that made some people recoil in horror from SDNW3, I was thinking we'd just track building times and how much of one's construction is compared to starting forces. As people go past the 10% mark of building units versus starting forces (such forces could be valued by GDP units at game start to help track this figure) the mods start making noises about economic issues with heightened military spending, and if a player goes too far over a certain limit - say 15-20% - in peacetime the mods give them a nice recession or stock market slide or something to compensate.

Teleros wrote:

If my proposal becomes accepted.... welcome to SDN Worlds, gentlemen (and ladies).

*Gets out AstroSynthesis*

Anyway, your proposal... I like it, and may for once even have a go at taking part. Also, the thought of playing with interstellar maps and stuff sounds like good fun. I do have a copy of AstroSynthesis (trial copy I think, which has some limits), but I can at least use it. However, I think a good old-fashioned 2D map may be easier to use, especially if we're dealing with a small corner of the galaxy (say, a few hundred star systems shared between the players).

I also agree with the idea for fleet sizes - if thousand-warship fleets are unusually large then it generally makes for better storytelling potential IMHO. The loss of the 14th Cruiser Squadron means something that way.

Also Steve, I'm writing / have written (depending on when you read this) a PM to you regarding a possible setting / background for it. Let me know what you think and if it can be of any use or not (I don't mind, but I do get this compulsive urge to get into backgrounds and things in a big way when I like the look of them ).

I figure if people generally have overall fleets of, oh, 2-3,000 ships, then it'd fit the "1,000 ships is a lot", especially if you end up with something like only a tenth or so of that figure actually being capital ships. Then the "loss of the 1st Battle Squadron in the action at Gamma Epsilon 22" means something since space dreadnoughts don't grow on space trees.

As for a map, I was thinking of using a number of 2D maps. Basically, we'd have, oh, 3-4 square-based ones, and each represents a "layer" of the Z-axis with each square actually being a cube, representing a sector. In this fashion, if you want to see who owns Sector 4A-1 you look at Map 1, while if its Sector 4A-3 you look at Map 3.

Would require some imagination on our parts in using 2D maps, but them's the breaks.

For FTL, are we thinking 'instant' (or fast enough to be just about instant) point-to-point, instant through 'nodes', or 'slow' (say a week or two from one system to the next)? Reaction or reactionless drives, both of which would dictate military strategy?

Teleros wrote:Also Steve, I'm writing / have written (depending on when you read this) a PM to you regarding a possible setting / background for it. Let me know what you think and if it can be of any use or not (I don't mind, but I do get this compulsive urge to get into backgrounds and things in a big way when I like the look of them ).

The only setting I think that most of the players want is based on the upper limits of technology. I mean that while a backstory can help it can also hinder having fun. This is especially true in that we are working more on the collaborative fiction side of the scale rather than a full blown roleplaying game.

And since we tend to be falling on the fiction side of gaming I still think having more of a goal than interaction is a good idea. Should there be a narrative goal for all the players?

As for FTL, if we have instant then geography becomes more irrelevant, more like world 2. But if we have slow travel times interfere with the narrative, like in World 3. As such I would like to see high speed low traffic "gates" so the narrative can be rapid and slower high traffic travel drives that dictates combat so that relative positions are maintained. Maybe one stargate per sector no matter what.

Maybe two "FTL" systems.

One is a kind of "network" of hyperspace lanes across the map, with one major node in each sector, where travel is of a decent speed (though not near-instantaneous) between sectors - this is the primary travel route system for vessels. If you go off-network, your speed is impacted and you go much slower (From maybe a day between sectors to a week or two), but it lets you circumvent hyperspace junction defenses.

The second are a series of wormholes/stargates, what have you, that do allow instantaneous travel, but they are highly rare (a player has to spend an NPC at game start for a gate).

This means there are two valuable kinds of systems - hyperspace junction systems and systems with a Gate. I would imagine that every available Gate is over an Earth-like world (simply say they're artifacts of some long-gone race that could be a potential plot development) but a hyperspace node isn't necessarily in a system with an Earth-like planet (Though for core and mid-range sectors it could be in the system of one of the sector's one or two terraformed or nearly-terraformed planets).

Just an idea to throw up there. Naturally we want a chance for a lot of interaction - goal orientated or not - but we also want interstellar war to avoid being affairs of racing across someone's space at will.

Agent Sorchus wrote:

Teleros wrote:Also Steve, I'm writing / have written (depending on when you read this) a PM to you regarding a possible setting / background for it. Let me know what you think and if it can be of any use or not (I don't mind, but I do get this compulsive urge to get into backgrounds and things in a big way when I like the look of them ).

The only setting I think that most of the players want is based on the upper limits of technology. I mean that while a backstory can help it can also hinder having fun. This is especially true in that we are working more on the collaborative fiction side of the scale rather than a full blown roleplaying game.

That's pretty much what I've sent to Steve - it's more like "ships won't be more powerful than this" or "this is how FTL works" than "these are the playable factions". If I was going to do that it'd be as a separate RPG thing or a PC game mod, not an SDN World scenario. Or to put it another way, it's like saying it'll be set somewhere in the Outer Rim of the SW galaxy - a nice big sandbox in a setting with well-established internal rules and such. I know exactly what you mean about not wanting to be constrained too much though .

Anyway, I'll let Steve comment first on my ideas before I throw them up here (or not, as the case may be).

Steve wrote:Maybe two "FTL" systems.

Sounds rather like the Honor Harrington system, so should work well for drama purposes. If we're using this I bags a Manticore Junction-equivalent though .

Agent Sorchus wrote: As for FTL, if we have instant then geography becomes more irrelevant, more like world 2. But if we have slow travel times interfere with the narrative, like in World 3. As such I would like to see high speed low traffic "gates" so the narrative can be rapid and slower high traffic travel drives that dictates combat so that relative positions are maintained. Maybe one stargate per sector no matter what.

I've just started getting into David Weber's Honorverse, and he handles this (IMHO) quite well.

Paraphrased from [url=http://www.library.beau.org/lib/ebooks/baen/01/More%20Than%20Honor/0671878573___4.htm]Honorverse background[/url] wrote: A wormhole junction has one primary terminus and many secondary termini. Transfer is instantaneous. You can go from any secondary to primary terminus, or primary to any secondary terminus, but not secondary-to-secondary. This makes the primary terminus a chokepoint, and thus of military value.

There is a hard upper mass tonnage limit for a wormhole junction, and using any one wormhole "route" temporarily destabilizes for a period of time proportional to the mass of the ships that made the jump. So you can send a massive fleet through, but that means no reinforcements anytime soon.

Anyway, I'm interested in this. Hell, the last time I played SDN World, it was partially responsible for my election to the executive board of my fraternity.

Teleros' setting is interesting but not what I had in mind. He's free to propose it here though.

I still feel the major issue is going to be tech. Given this is the SDN community we tend to be nitpickers and tech-quantifiers anyway, and I don't want to see OOC flamefests because so-and-so's Quantum Discombobulator should only be 2 gigajoules based on description instead of the apparent 2 terajoules or what have you.

As such I'd rather have Player A's Quantum Discombobulator have the same capability as Player B's Solar Sodomizer at equivalent "size" rating. As in a Destroyer-scale gun is a DD gun no matter if it's the Quantum Discombobulator or the Solar Sodomizer variety. With FTL drives, we all use the same hyperspace system, but how we power our hyperdrives doesn't determine how good we do compared to others. Whether you use anti-matter or fusion or Shroom's insanity to power your ship's drives, they still function the same way as everyone else's. Defenses are obviously the same.

So the query is how to accomplish the latter without imposing a uniform tech system that will be, in of itself, a potential flame war and hardcore debate to determine. We basically have to agree that we do the tech for flavor, not for advantage, and any unique tech that might fundamentally undermine this precept has to be vetted by the mods for approval and for functional behavior.

Yay, more pressure on the mods. I reserve the right to fill story posts with Author Appeal to shameless levels as stress relief this time.

I'm totally in.