SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread III

[Simon_Jester]

Sorry about the pirate storyline; it kind of got out of control. I'm hoping to make it fun to read at least, but you're right that it doesn't do much good for player interaction.

The story itself isn't bad, the fact that it or things similar to it are dominating the Story thread right now is the problem. I like it even if the writer in me wants to see how much shorter he could have made it. There should be some p2p action and p2np interaction at all time. Capiche?

I do as much p2p as I and (more to the point) the people I'm interacting with have time for already.

On the side I write space battles, because most of my neighbors are either inactive or such a massive personality mismatch with me that we couldn't collaborate effectively.

That's the best playing-of-the-game I can manage. I encourage anyone to interact with anyone at any time, but feel that I'm doing my share as it is.

[Agent Sorchus]

Sorry about the pirate storyline; it kind of got out of control. I'm hoping to make it fun to read at least, but you're right that it doesn't do much good for player interaction.

The story itself isn't bad, the fact that it or things similar to it are dominating the Story thread right now is the problem. I like it even if the writer in me wants to see how much shorter he could have made it. There should be some p2p action and p2np interaction at all time. Capiche?

I do as much p2p as I and (more to the point) the people I'm interacting with have time for already.

On the side I write space battles, because most of my neighbors are either inactive or such a massive personality mismatch with me that we couldn't collaborate effectively.

That's the best playing-of-the-game I can manage. I encourage anyone to interact with anyone at any time, but feel that I'm doing my share as it is.

Not saying you don't just that as a whole all the players are a little unbalanced towards p2np. And yes I know what it is like having a bunch of no show neighbors, I have both Coyote and Stas gone not to mention large portions of the Eastern Map.

And yes the power rangers saga continues. Muhhahahah!

ps if anyone wants to write stuff using the rangers I don't have much of a problem with it. I want them to be lively and my muse is such a stuck up bitch that I can't really do them justice by writing often enough.

PPS: Story Index has been created so you may bask in the awesome that is the Power Rangers Saga.

[Shroom Man 777]

I've been working with Simon, Fin, Mayabirdies, Siege, and Shep and Darkevilme, to name just a few. So I'm not P2NPing.

[MKSheppard]

Heavily edited and put back up the MCNAMARAS segment.

This is a bit I wrote but left out -- COmments:

Ever since their arrival on Pendleton all those months ago; the initial happy relations between the ex-slaves and the Anglicians had quickly soured.

Shouts of "Go home to Anglica, you paid lackey of the slavers!" reverberated from the throats of the crowd which had quickly gathered around the burning McNamaras -- all the while unbeknowinst to them, they were breathing in hard fallout. Within months the majority of the crowd would be dead of radiation poisoning.

"Damn it, you fucking yobs; get the hell out of here!" shouted Squaddie James 'Soap' McShroomtavish, using his suit of power armor's speakers to amplify his voice.

"This is a hot zone! You're breathing in radiation! My suit's sensors are tripping the top of the scale!"

The crowd roared back, unswayed by logic or reason.

"You're just trying to get us away so you can cover up your crimes!"

McShroomtavish simply shrugged.

"Fine by me, you loony rotters. You'll all be bleedin' dead in a few months."

Shit, I fucking hate Pendleton. thought McShroomtavish. Initially, the occupation had been great fun, hunting down the former leadership of Pendleton wherever they hid, and accepting standing ovations from the former slaves.

Then things had taken a subtle turn for the worse several months ago. In the larger cities, Anglican rule was still universally liked; but in the fringes, like in Eel-Dodadgishu, there was increasing resentment against the Anglicans, particularly as violence amongst competiting power groups increased; and Anglician foreign aid to the victims of the Shepistani continental destruction strike was slow in coming.

[Steve]

I suppose the aid being "slow in coming" can be in the eye of the beholder. Slow by practical standards or by the standards of impatient people who thought everything would magically improve over the course of a few months?

[PeZook]

The latter, obviously. I mean, you're a super-duper all-powerful star-nation! Just get this moved in your spaceships!

Then there's the fact Pendleton's infrastructure is primitive and needs to be upgraded wholesale ; And obviously Shepistanis nuked a continent which occupation planners probably didn't anticipte, throwing a bit of a wrench in the works: whoops, turns out all the nice landing sites for orbital food transports are now radioactive craters!

[Simon_Jester]

Plus, a certain fraction of the Pendletonians in the area are probably blaming the Anglians for the nuking. Sure, you can say "it was the Sheppoes," but how do they know that?

"Yeah, I'm glad you made them stop treating me like a slave and all, but... did you have to burn down my house and cause my cousin Fred to die slowly of radiation poisoning?"

[Steve]

"Yeah, we thought we could control the Sheppoes, our bad. But at least we stopped them from trying to settle an OZ right?"

I was also thinking of the issue of the Bannerman Gap. A two day run through shoals complicates logistics a bit since you have to get a better quality of starship pilots and pay for that, as well as higher fees and costs for wear and tear on ship components subjected to greater fatigue from shoal runs.

[Simon_Jester]

"Yeah, we thought we could control the Sheppoes, our bad. But at least we stopped them from trying to settle an OZ right?"

Again, half the problem is that you can't prove it wasn't you who bombed the planet. You're the guys marching around troops on the ground, who they can actually see; if they live in the bombardment zone, who else are they going to blame if not you?

Some people will believe the Anglians when they say it was the Sheppoes, because you can present video of the bombing from orbit (fuck, it's probably on ShepTube by now), things like that. Some, on the other hand, will still blame you, or at least feel some kind of residual resentment even if they accept intellectually that you aren't the one who burned down their cities.

[PeZook]

Even if everything was actually going perfectly and according to schedule, some people would still complain and sometimes even riot on the streets over the most inane shit, like "My town out in the undeeloped wilderness still doesn't get cheap electricity!!!" or "I was mugged yesterday, I thought it was supposed to be safe!" or "I had to wait in line at the magistrate yesterday!"

The fact it's an occupation with all the problems will only make these elements more frustrated. The fact parts of the planet got their infrastructure blasted to pieces can't help

Overall, Pendleton might be an interesting place for the next few years...

[MKSheppard]

I suppose the aid being "slow in coming" can be in the eye of the beholder. Slow by practical standards or by the standards of impatient people who thought everything would magically improve over the course of a few months?

Let me elaborate further on my concept:

The Anglicans have near total control and universal love and adulation on the main continent where the majority of the population pre-war and the big government facilities were.

Basically, most of the occupation force's aerospace bases and whatnot are there, since the most infrastructure is there. Also, population densities there are high. So you can basically have like one power armored guy per 100 population there; which discourages pro-slavery irredentist elements like the brownsheets.

As you leave the main continent; the density of the Anglican power armor gitz decreases; to the point where the only Anglican presence is basically a convoy that passes through every week, or a aircraft flying overhead.

This also makes it possible for people like the brownsheets to actually exist and do things openly, like beat up or kill ex-slaves.

There's of course the fact that the Shepistani Continental Destruction Strike not only did kill a lot of people and wrecked infrastructure; but having to feed, clothe, and take care of the survivors there sucked up a lot of the initial first aid shipments that Anglica sent in...

I think at this point, Anglicia has pretty much abandoned the 'Shepped' Continent to it's own means by evacuating people from the place and resettling them in other regions -- so that they can spend money upgrading the infrastructure where it can do the most good; not rebuilding 'Shepped' cities.

This is all based around the rough idea that the whole Pendletonian expedition by Anglica is on the scale of a "freebie" -- you know, the US Marines landed from a LHD or LHA in Haiti to oversee distribution of first aid -- rather than that of a very serious occupation where every square inch of ground is covered in an Anglican trooper and we have tens of millions Anglicans in dozens of Army Groups consisting of the occupation authorities.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, occupations can't go all 100% swimmingly. Eggs and omelettes and all that.

[PeZook]

Besides, it wouldn't be interesting if the whole Pendleton thing went straight from "INVADE!!!" to "VICTORY THE PEOPLE LOVE US!"

Hell, sometimes even a populace that's enthusiastic towards the new occupiers can go grow tired and weary and start demanding independence after a while.

[Steve]

We'd need troops in place to protect assets working to clean out radioactive materials from the area though, as well as other efforts to fix the damage from the atomic strikes.

If we get 10 million occupation troops onto the planet we'd have a ratio of 1 soldier per 20 locals, so I was thinking that as of now it's more along the lines of 5 million, give or take a million in either direction, with detachments of Royal Marines assigned to the partially repaired HMS Sentinel (which suffered major drive damage from the Collector Monolith and is not considered capable of transiting the Gap) acting as a rapid reaction force for major insurgency operations across the globe (planet-based Marines provide more immediate reaction forces tied to regions).

There are other ways to implement monitoring and security to curtail insurgency activity. Micro-scale sensor drones permeating an area with dedicated AIs and CIs filtering through the data in real time to identify likely insurgent cells, for instance.

On the relief side of things, getting people out of the nuke zone is the most logical use of resources, since so many would've left anyway. Set up entirely new cities in the countryside by shipping in Prefab housing and arcologies while carefully screening individuals to find any diehards.

For what it's worth I don't want everyone to love the occupiers. Naturally those who benefited from the old order hate them while the abolitionists and such can't help but think of what happened the other times. That the occupation is international isn't entirely going to be seen as a positive step, since one nation leaving might cause the other ones to do so as well as the expectations of rising costs and sacrifices cause a cascade in decision-making (or at least that'd be the fear).

Actually, that makes me ponder if the insurgents might try to focus on the other states first. Focus their outright attacks on ESR, Hiigaran, and Ascendancy troops (maybe Altacaran as well) to make those nations decide to just leave, putting more pressure on the Anglians to do it by themselves and thus repeat history.


On another note.... yes, Granny Goodness is going to cameo in the Shroom Fighter storyline. I am, indeed, insane.

[Simon_Jester]

We'd need troops in place to protect assets working to clean out radioactive materials from the area though, as well as other efforts to fix the damage from the atomic strikes.

If we get 10 million occupation troops onto the planet we'd have a ratio of 1 soldier per 20 locals, so I was thinking that as of now it's more along the lines of 5 million, give or take a million in either direction...

I'm a little surprised you've got the planetary population as being so low. Granted it's a shithole, but it's been settled for centuries, and it's fully habitable. There's no reason obvious to me why it shouldn't have a population in the low billions after this long, not when there's effectively no population pressure to keep things below carrying capacity.

[Steve]

I wrote the population as 200 million quite a long while ago. In part it's because I didn't intend Pendleton to have as much landmass as Earth and to have a lot more ocean and it was also to reflect that the original population was fairly small and that there has been a constant "leak" of population (unsurprisingly coinciding with every Anglian occupation over the centuries) representing the emigration of freed slaves and abolitionists driven out after prior reconstruction efforts failed as well as any basic emigration (people approaching the upper class who decided they want to live on a First Galaxy planet, so they liquidate their assets into a galactic-standard currency and move off-world). Not to mention occasional slave revolts.

[Master_Baerne]

You know, in light of half the players being inactive for various reasons, maybe we could reorganize the map a bit? Put the active nations in one corner to facilitate player interactions? Just a thought.

[Simon_Jester]

Re: Baerne:

I'm a little unsure about that, not least because it will do strange things to the "less-active" players who are engaged in the game but aren't posting at the same rate that, say, me, Steve, and Shroom do. If we start rearranging countries, where do we stop? Do we redraw the whole map? What happens when people suddenly wake up and realize they've got Shep for a neighbor* or something?

A lot of people might wind up having to retcon a fair chunk of their strategic situation in light of the new neighbors, or the removal of old ones.

*Not a prospect for the faint of heart!

EDIT: In a lot of places, the active or semi-active players are already (more or less) clustered; the Koprulu Zone comes to mind, as does Tanasinn/Sorchus/Force Lord over to the upper left. The really dead parts of the map is the extreme left edge, the left side of the lower edge (with the Pfhor and Chirons), and an area around the middle of the extreme right edge (where the RIS, Altacarans, French, ESR, League of Free Stars, and apparently now the Hiigarans are all largely inactive).

My impression is that there are relatively few places where an active player is surrounded by inactive players; even there, a fair amount of player-on-player interaction can occur at a distance.

I wrote the population as 200 million quite a long while ago. In part it's because I didn't intend Pendleton to have as much landmass as Earth and to have a lot more ocean and it was also to reflect that the original population was fairly small and that there has been a constant "leak" of population (unsurprisingly coinciding with every Anglian occupation over the centuries) representing the emigration of freed slaves and abolitionists driven out after prior reconstruction efforts failed as well as any basic emigration (people approaching the upper class who decided they want to live on a First Galaxy planet, so they liquidate their assets into a galactic-standard currency and move off-world). Not to mention occasional slave revolts.

OK. That combination of factors could do it, I suppose, though even then I'd feel a little odd about a population under 500 million or so. Otherwise, you wind up either with so little land area that everyone's living on a handful of mountain peaks while what would be continental plains on Earth are underwater, or with the conclusion that most of the land that's left is inhospitable... or that the "leaks" of population are on the order of half the population leaving every few generations, which seems a bit extreme.

[Ryan Thunder]

RogueIce, we should trade shit.

I can offer you dickweed and various domesticated native Miratian species (shitbird, cock goblin, troll, ceiling cat, etc.)

Or other things. Asteroid mining rights, perhaps. Or we could do tech sharing.

[Steve]

I'd consider letting people move in certain circumstances, but only if we can avoid having prior plot elements and background fluff completely discombobulated by the move.

Does anyone here actually want to shift their position on the map?

[PeZook]

We're comfortable where we are, making other people uncomfortable

[Siege]

Yeah, I don't think anyone wants to be near us anyway .

But speaking of rearrangements... Maybe it's a good idea to, in the light of the increasingly slow passage of time in this game, speed up construction times? After all we've drawn up these boring build queues already; might as well get some use out of them. As it is, it takes four or five years to get some ships built and into the field, and by my estimate it won't be 3104 until 2012, if you catch my drift. Why not speed up construction by a couple of factors and get some use out of those spent points?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Yeah, I don't think anyone wants to be near us anyway .

But speaking of rearrangements... Maybe it's a good idea to, in the light of the increasingly slow passage of time in this game, speed up construction times? After all we've drawn up these boring build queues already; might as well get some use out of them. As it is, it takes four or five years to get some ships built and into the field, and by my estimate it won't be 3104 until 2012, if you catch my drift. Why not speed up construction by a couple of factors and get some use out of those spent points?

*returns to the drawing board for the new Apocalypse class*

[Simon_Jester]

This is a good point. Our average rate of advance in time has been about six to seven months game time in four to five months real time. I, for one, enjoy that because I write long storylines, but I can easily see the problem with that and ship construction times.

And we can easily retcon more new construction being out than otherwise indicated, though I for one have a multiyear building plan that will have to be adjusted because some of the long-lead items of the Fleet 3410 initiative will be ready sooner.

We could probably start off by just doubling production speed:

<200 points:
One month production time per 20 point value, plus an extra 50% time for commissioning
(thus, 120 pt ship takes 6 months to build and 3 months to commission)

200-350 points:
12 months to build, 6 months to commission

350-500 points:
18 months to build, 9 months to commission

500-700 points:
24 months to build, 12 months to commission

700-1000 points:
30 months to build, 15 months to commission

1000+ points:
36 months to build, 18 months to commission

(possible exceptions for REALLY BIG UNPRECEDENTEDLY HUGE ships bigger than anything that navy has ever built before, like Fin's proposed 2500-point superhyperuberbattleships or LoC9's 600-point carriers that are twice the size of his existing battleships)

Under this model, battleships would still take a long time to come out, but we could at least reasonably expect to see them within the scope of the game.

[Shroom Man 777]

I wonder what the interstellar community's reaction to the live broadcasted executions would be. :3