Space STGOD planning.(2k9)

[Darkevilme]

First off this is not an immediate call for another space STGOD, mainly cause of the fact I believe we don't have enough players with free time and the inclination to support one here right now. What it is is an attempt to discuss and consider ideas for the next one, a process that took about three months when we had STGOD 2k8 so it's best to do it well well before anyone is planning on actually resurrecting the concept. So here it is, a planning thread with no time constraints so we can work on the rules and play dynamics.

Now to start us off i want to know whether this idea has merits.

Node based FTL
Ships cannot go anywhere and/or lurk in deep space as FTL drives only work along set routes between set points. This will have a great deal of effects. Firstly the obvious regarding the purchaseable specializations, Interdictors are gone.
Secondly it's now possible to have borders, if someone wanted to seriously attack you they went right for the throat and attacked where they pleased, often your best worlds, your less valuable worlds simply got ignored in those situations. With a node based situation your less valuable worlds can be used as a buffer and defence is no longer either close in garrisons or deep space intercepts. Also it changes the dynamics of piracy and intercepts as are usually easier when hunting in system.
The bad side is of course that the map becomes more complicated and someone has to mark down all the node interconnections. This'll probably make for a smaller game overral.

There are other considerations like whether to do away with FTL speed as well as interdictors and make the intersystem transitions instant and the STL crossing of systems more important and much slower.

Hells there's probably a load of other ramifications to such an idea which is why i'm pitching it to see if it gets shot down.

[Master_Baerne]

I don't now enough to make suggestions, but if there were such an STGOD, I'd probably participate, in a limited manner.

[Starglider]

Unfortunately I am far too busy right now to participate in an STGOD. However, the node-based travel idea is very good.

I suggest drawing a map first, with a few hundred systems and their connections on it. The nodes would be numbered. Before the game starts there would be a series of rounds. In each round the players would choose one or more system to become part of their nation (probably 1 in the first two rounds, then 2, then 3, until the map is as full as you want it to be). That's kind of like a simulation of the colonisation/expansion process that presumably produced these empires. For extra amusement you could do this secretly and if two players go for the same number on the same round it becomes a multi-nation system. This mechanic works well in Catan and some similar strategy games.

[Nephtys]

Any system is going to require a pretty distinct, but simple set of rules. Fast enough to work out between two people for any particular battle or whatever.

Probably it'll need some third party judging.

[Ryan Thunder]

May I recommend copying a randomly-generated map from Space Empires V?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Any system is going to require a pretty distinct, but simple set of rules. Fast enough to work out between two people for any particular battle or whatever.

Probably it'll need some third party judging.

Well, there are a few ways to do this. A point value system, combined with a rock-paper-scizzors system for ship classes *escorts have an advantage against fighters, which do horrible things to capital ships, which can rape escorts, as a simple example)

As for the game, I would gladly participate.

[Darkevilme]

Any system is going to require a pretty distinct, but simple set of rules. Fast enough to work out between two people for any particular battle or whatever.

Probably it'll need some third party judging.

Well, there are a few ways to do this. A point value system, combined with a rock-paper-scizzors system for ship classes *escorts have an advantage against fighters, which do horrible things to capital ships, which can rape escorts, as a simple example)

As for the game, I would gladly participate.

Neph
We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. We're trying to fix the ruleset used last time and suggest modifications as it did somewhat work. For instance the balance between the defence and offense specializations is just a liittle broken and should probably be fixed if specializations are resurrected this time around.

The most basic ruleset of course was fleet does 1/5 of its point value in damage to the enemy fleet each turn. so 100 point fleet versus 150 point fleet.
round 1: 100(attack/5=20)150(attack/5=30)
round 2: 70(14)130(26)
and so on

The specialization rules were huge things and mired in complexity, i think there's a tgod handbook on the wiki that contains all of that stuff.

Alyrium
While such a space combat system is valid there are others and if you enforce one you get the fans of the others put off as they think yours is silly.

In the last game it was mostly raw points, which meant essentially that if you looked at it at the individual ship level it was the dreadnaught era, the battleship was king and the most expensive ships you could get were the best simply cause 50 one point fighters lose their attack power quicker than a fifty point battleship. Course one would wonder why people would build ships smaller than the max size except for the major point that combat rules are only supposed to A. supposed to provide a rough fleet strength for each side, often with their point values. B. supposed to be subordinate to simply writing and roleplaying it unless an arguement occurs. In fact in the last game the only time me and Thirdfain devolved outright to mechanics was in the battle of the great backstab, in which we only used the point totals of the three fleets involved and the one fifth rule for damage. What the fleet was made up of wasnt terribly important then. So while mechnically big ships are better if you make it that complex you might never need to use that level of complexity.

Though by all means if someone wants that rock paper scissors arrangement of their ship specialization why not it's probably just rpness.

And now to bulk out an already big post. Regarding the node system and travel times we can A.

Make the transition between systems insignificant, the travel time now becomes crossing systems to the entrance of each intersystem link. This makes ships with better STL speed better at FTL speed as well, this'd probably require we throw out the idea that smaller ships are faster than larger ships in STL though. This would needless to say remove the Hyperspace specialization.

or B.

Keep the hyperspace specialization, make the in system travel trivially quick and the intersystem jumps take a long time shortened by the H specialization.

Personally i'm thinking A though i'd appreciate other opinions on the matter.

[RogueIce]

I was thinking, on the FTL thing, that existing nodes would be the "safe" way to travel, but non-node FTL jumps were possible as well. But riskier. Sort of inspired by the movie Lost in Space.

Basically, there's a chance that your fleet will either make it to their destination, be a bit off course but still salvagable, or be, well...lost in space. Bigger ships with better crews would have a higher chance of making it, but there's still the possibility of losing your awesome battleship to a bad FTL jump.

You could even approach it two ways for a fleet action: all ships slave to one command ship on the jump. That means if it goes good, everyone shows up. Though if it goes bad, well, you just lost a fleet. The second is individual jumps by ships, which means some of your ships will get there, though which ones could be random (ie: you get there with most of the fleet, but a bad jump lost your best battleship...and your best admiral. Whoops).

I suppose using some RPG-esque dice roll system or something of the nature would be the most fair, impartial way of managing it. But this is just a rough idea so of course it's open to suggestion, refinement, or outright dismissal.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Well, question is, who will roll the dice? You would need a impartial game master.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Well, question is, who will roll the dice? You would need a impartial game master.

I forget who implimented in on Librium Arcana, but there is a dice rolling system that one could probably port over to PHP3 relatively easily, if it has not already been.

I mean, if you want to get kinda fun with it and make OOBs more complex, you could use a point buy system for ship designs (say, if a ship is worth three ship building points at the fleet scale, that translates to a set number of ship building points you can use to spec out a ship class, with rules for that in terms of weapon yield, fire rate, etc) and then we could use a dice roll system to adjudicate how successfully fighter-strafing runs on capital ships are and the like. Roll the dice in OOC with the bonuses. Then RP out the results.

[Ohma]

I'd be up for another STGOD, I'd try not to contribute to its death like I did with the last one (having an actual job and not having to travel back and forth between towns to get the rest of my crap moved out should help).

I like the FTL node travel idea, the only problem I could see with it is that if we go with FTL only at nodes then it would be trivially easy for everyone to concentrate all their defenses in a given system around that area. Granted, that still doesn't mean that defenders would have any greater advantage than they did in the 2K8 one, but it should be thought about.

[Darkevilme]

I'd be up for another STGOD, I'd try not to contribute to its death like I did with the last one (having an actual job and not having to travel back and forth between towns to get the rest of my crap moved out should help).

I like the FTL node travel idea, the only problem I could see with it is that if we go with FTL only at nodes then it would be trivially easy for everyone to concentrate all their defenses in a given system around that area. Granted, that still doesn't mean that defenders would have any greater advantage than they did in the 2K8 one, but it should be thought about.

Only if you know someone is coming ahead of time. The nodes dont orbit the star, starships have to. It's kinda draining to have to constantly keep station out there.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'd be up for another STGOD, I'd try not to contribute to its death like I did with the last one (having an actual job and not having to travel back and forth between towns to get the rest of my crap moved out should help).

I like the FTL node travel idea, the only problem I could see with it is that if we go with FTL only at nodes then it would be trivially easy for everyone to concentrate all their defenses in a given system around that area. Granted, that still doesn't mean that defenders would have any greater advantage than they did in the 2K8 one, but it should be thought about.

Only if you know someone is coming ahead of time. The nodes dont orbit the star, starships have to. It's kinda draining to have to constantly keep station out there.

There are also some pretty terrible things one could do from the other side of the node, as well as multi-pronged attacks on different nodes within your territory.

[Ohma]

Oh, for some reason I thought these were like jump gates or some other actual structure. If they're more like Alderson Points or something similar that has more wiggle room then I concede the point.

[Agent Sorchus]

I would think for ships the total point value of the fleet could be split up between escorts battleships and fighters where battleships do a third their point value a round to escorts and only a fourth unto another battleship and a fifth unto a fighter. same for fighters and escorts unto each other.
This would be a simple intermediate between the fleet weight in points only and the rock paper scissors method. Any thoughts?


And yes a space empires map from any of the series games would be some what appropriate.
Command ships could be a simple addition where the command ship would allow a fleet to stage a multi-system jump. i.e: a basic command ship allows you to jump over a system but not two, but it takes longer than usual. System defenses could use command facilities to counter fleet jump overs, maybe.

?

[Ohma]

Oh, and just a suggestion for the setting (I know we aren't at that yet but I don't think I'll have much to contribute to the rules discussion): could it be slightly less serious than the last?

I'm not saying that it has to be a complete farce. But I'd like it if there were a bit more room for empires of hyper religious space crocodiles, or heavily anachronistic civs. At least more room for them than the last one had.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Oh, and just a suggestion for the setting (I know we aren't at that yet but I don't think I'll have much to contribute to the rules discussion): could it be slightly less serious than the last?

I'm not saying that it has to be a complete farce. But I'd like it if there were a bit more room for empires of hyper religious space crocodiles, or heavily anachronistic civs. At least more room for them than the last one had.

Oh, if I join it is with psionic space turtles...

I would think for ships the total point value of the fleet could be split up between escorts battleships and fighters where battleships do a third their point value a round to escorts and only a fourth unto another battleship and a fifth unto a fighter. same for fighters and escorts unto each other.
This would be a simple intermediate between the fleet weight in points only and the rock paper scissors method. Any thoughts?

I dont know, I am a bit of a mechanist... and do kinda like the point buy system and would be willing to create it...

[Darkevilme]

It's also possible that the inbound node is a larger area than the outbound node for FTL travel. Just as a thought i had this morning.

Oh, and just a suggestion for the setting (I know we aren't at that yet but I don't think I'll have much to contribute to the rules discussion): could it be slightly less serious than the last?

I'm not saying that it has to be a complete farce. But I'd like it if there were a bit more room for empires of hyper religious space crocodiles, or heavily anachronistic civs. At least more room for them than the last one had.

I'm all for a weirder setting, do away with the insistence on a vast human empire and let all the nonhumans be seriously weird and nonhuman instead. Though naturally there will be human nations, it's up to those playing them to discuss amongst themselves how they came about. Though no one gets earth, it was a major problem in stgod 2k7 with dozens of powers all having their capitals on it, either its gone or not used by people.

Trivia, in the last game fighters werent bought because they were tied to their baseship for FTL. Fighters were the weapons used by carriers, not things bought individually. Could do it differently of course.

Though back on my original note. If we go with FTL being instant and the actual travel time mostly being STL node to node then a few things happen.
Firstly you can see an attack coming as mostly it'll be at least several hours, possibly over a day depending on how slow we want strategic speed, till they get from the node to where you are in the system.(we had a similar early warning with the use of hyperspace detectors in the last game).
Secondly it raises questions of how to handle STL speed. in previous games a smaller ship was an unspecified amount faster than a larger ship. This system now means that smaller ship fleets would be faster than larger ones on the strategic scale. and i'm not sure that's a good thing. it also means you have to figure out how fast a fleet is going based on the size of its largest ship, which sounds a bit awkward. We had FTL specialized vessels in previous games its true but mostly it was just a multiplier of the base speed (warp 2 or warp 3)

So if we go this way we either
A. make all ships the same speed in STL
B. keep the scale and determine the algorithym it uses.

And decide whether to add engine specialties to ships to make them faster in either implementation.
for those wondering the specialization system was simply where part of a ships point cost went to something else.
Like a 30 point cruiser with 5 points of engines or sensors, it's a 25 point vessel with 5 points of specialty tacked on.

[Alyrium Denryle]

So if we go this way we either
A. make all ships the same speed in STL
B. keep the scale and determine the algorithym it uses.

And decide whether to add engine specialties to ships to make them faster in either implementation.
for those wondering the specialization system was simply where part of a ships point cost went to something else.
Like a 30 point cruiser with 5 points of engines or sensors, it's a 25 point vessel with 5 points of specialty tacked on.

One way to do it completely objectively would be, again, a point buy ship building system. Give sublight engine acceleration a rating, say... 1-7 with 1 being the fasted, two being the slowest. The ratings are the same across ship classes, the cost is not. Say that for an escort, the engines cost 2x Engine rating as a percent of the ship's base cost, rounding up. While for a cruiser, the engines cost 4x engine rating etc.

[Darkevilme]

So if we go this way we either
A. make all ships the same speed in STL
B. keep the scale and determine the algorithym it uses.

And decide whether to add engine specialties to ships to make them faster in either implementation.
for those wondering the specialization system was simply where part of a ships point cost went to something else.
Like a 30 point cruiser with 5 points of engines or sensors, it's a 25 point vessel with 5 points of specialty tacked on.

One way to do it completely objectively would be, again, a point buy ship building system. Give sublight engine acceleration a rating, say... 1-7 with 1 being the fasted, two being the slowest. The ratings are the same across ship classes, the cost is not. Say that for an escort, the engines cost 2x Engine rating as a percent of the ship's base cost, rounding up. While for a cruiser, the engines cost 4x engine rating etc.

In general the rules should be secondary to rp, though having extra speed above base as a percentage of its pointage is a workable system. We used it for FTL in 2k8 quite well and it could probably be used for STL in the next one. I dont think we need to divide it into ship classes for different costs for X speed least of all cause in the last game my midweight cruisers were as powerful as some peoples heaviest ships and the lines would get a lil screwy. The question now is, if smaller and larger ships effectively have the same speed what is the merit of having anything other than battleships. We could draw a line and say that ships below a certain weight belong to certain speed categories i suppose.

Proposal one: fair and balanced.
Ships start with a default speed of 1
every ten percent of the ships value spent on engines boosts this value by one.

Proposal two: Gradients.
Ships start with (60-their value/10) speed (minimum 1)
every five percent of the ships value spent on engines boosts this value by one.

edit: The above proposal is probably too powerful therefore.

Proposal three: Slow gradients.
Ships start with a default speed of 1+(60-their value/200)
every five percent of the ships value spent on engines boosts this by 0.5

Though i think i'm not that good at defining fair values for this. Maybe we should just go with a less powerful version of fair and balanced like so.

Proposal four: Weak and balanced.
All ships start with a default speed of one
Every 10 percent spent on engines increases this by 0.5

[Dahak]

Less rules.

The games that lasted the longest were those with a very simple and reduced ruleset. I played those because it was fun to write posts and interact with other players (and solve any dispute by discussion and not rule lawyering); just writing some calulation sheet for a space game with a bit more prose is not the core of the game...
Spending hours of calculating who much points, bonuses, hitpoints,... may be entertaining for some, for others it is extremely off-putting.
If you put too tight a corset around it, the game suffers.
If we went back to "the old ways" (which worked), then I would probably like to participate. If it's going to be another Rule Fest, I don't think it would be something I'd enjoy.

[Darkevilme]

I suspected you'd say that Dahak and i suspect there are others who feel the same way.
So i have a new proposal.
The only specializations that should be used are those that have an rp as well as rules affect.
Which limits us to a list of:
Stealth
Sensors
Engines
and that's it, everything else is base killing power.
Sensors can just be a linear rating like in the last one. (use the rules in the TGOD handbook)
Stealth can be a percentage balance, so you only have to figure it out once. (use the rules in the TGOD handbook)
Engines can use the weak and balanced proposal in my last post in this thread. You only have to figure it out once per ship.

For solving disputes in rping battles and as a benchmark a fleet inflicts its baseweight(killing power)/5 in damage each round.(as outlined in one of my earlier posts and stolen from STGOD 2k8)

We'll use the node network system just to keep the interdictors and FTL specializations irrelevent.

The question is is it simple enough for people?
What does everyone think?

Edit: I suppose it could also be argued that the defence specialization should be kept due to the 'screaming jammers versus sensors' effect which was rpness. But that's for others to decide.

[Dahak]

I'm not so hot about this round-approach. It's not exactly Civ we're playing here.
What is wrong about the "old" approach? "My fleet with XXX points attack yours, you have XXY points, let's decide how much you/me lose and write it down"? Those battles worked and were usually nice to read.

[Darkevilme]

Dahak, and hell everyone who still pays attention to what i say as well.
That system I envision as a fallback. Now some people will want to use it regularly and it's simple enough that they can, that's fine.
Some people like Dahak will want to ignore it and purely rp their battles, that's fine.
But we have to have it just in case there's a dispute in the rped battles in which case then and only then will Dahak and others who think the same have to even touch that ruleset. And that's only cause they cant resolve it through agreement in rp.

[Ohma]

I like the three basic specializations (much better than however many we had in the last game that you had to sift through that STGOD handbook to find and figure out).

I also think that the slow gradients approach to speed is the most simple and elegant solution presented.