I have my default one in my home system, and another 2 sectors away in my core sector on the oher side of the Shoals. I feel nifty!Siege wrote:Yes, but that's my point: it would make things easier to have two or more warp gates, it's why the Solarians have two, but how many other nations have actually done this kind of thing?
Speaking strictly for myself, I have no interest whatsoever in adding Solarian holdings outside the K-Zone. But then I'm not sure why this would need to be a matter of points either; Steve could just stick with the excellent mechanism Simon proposed earlier:Shroom Man 777 wrote:Maybe for the sake of fairness, he could allow other players to do so as well within reasonable constraints? So Shepistanimerica can have Guam and Puerto Rico. Just call them... Guano and Puta Chica.
Perhaps the amount of off-system colonies optionable can be determined by the amount of extra dice roll NPCs? Or something?
This proposal is brilliant in its simplicity. Steve (and anybody else) can have fleet bases (provided, again, they stick with the "obtains permission from neighbours first" clause): they're not providing any economic benefit (or for that matter disadvantage), they're just a place with a few warships and/or soldiers that folks can write fluff about. Doing it this way would eliminate the need to reshuffle, rewrite or redistribute anything, we wouldn't have to roll any more dice, we wouldn't have to add more annoying game mechanics, and it would just be altogether easier for everybody.Simon_Jester wrote:When talking of far-flung protectorate 'empires,' I think that like the historical British empire, it might be best to consider them a wash in net economic terms, at best: the profits you gain from the empire are roughly offset by the costs of maintaining it, to the point where it doesn't really gain you anything.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source)
- PeZook
Don't trouble yourself about it, it's fine.Tanasinn wrote:Simon:
Note that if you don't particularly want a terrorist trying to flee to your nation to escape pursuit, I can retcon it.
Who said they'd be at vital strategic points?MKSheppard wrote:Been taking a break from this but here's my two cents about Steve's proposed rewrite of his nation to have more Hong Kong and Singapore like colonies at vital strategic points:
NO. HELL NO. You should have thought of that during the planning phase, not when the game has been running for x months and already gone through several storylines.
See, that's kind of what I think. The sheer scale of the game map (twenty days' or more travel) means that you have to go a long way out of your way to find any reason in-game that justifies interacting with anyone but your immediate neighbors. That's not a good thing, in my opinion.Shroom Man 777 wrote:The existence of far-flung colonies would make the cosmopolitical landscape more interesting, to say the least.
Maybe a thread so there's one place for everyone to see it, but I don't see the point of dice rolls. I think the current plan of "ask nearby nations" and the long-standing "don't be a dick" cover it. Or, IOW, be reasonable. You won't have little specks of "colonies" all over the black squares on the map. Well, I guess you could if you went around planting flags on any random planetoids you found, but you'd never be able to really control them, they'd be paper territories and most people won't even know you "own" that chunk of space rock. And saying that someone setting up shop there would be an act of war would be rather dubiously received, I expect.Akhlut wrote:I do think it might be wise to start up a thread for creating retroactive colonies, though. Perhaps dice rolls for us to determine a random number of them, should someone actually want them? Just an idea.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) - PeZookRight. The really critical issue, though, is that even the weaker nations on the map (the 21 and 22 NCP states) are powerful enough relative to Anglia that a war in their backyard could go very badly for the Anglians- arguably more so than the historical Falklands War. They could win... but it would require a very large-scale commitment of their fleet to defend a remote imperial outpost.Shroom Man 777 wrote:Depends. He could contest it and it might come out his way. Or not. The UK won the Falklands, after all. But then again, if the Argentinians had better fuses for their bombs, a lot of those duds that hit the Brit boats might've exploderized. Or so Shepples' graephs say.
Exactly.It makes for interesting stories at least.
That's why I limited it to very short periods of time for all but the most powerful worldships. It's good for things like tactical precognition, but less so for important decisions.Siege wrote:I can't help but suspect this 'can send messages to the past' mechanic is going to be a pain in the ass to explain away as you write more on-the-fly interactions with other people. I was of half a mind to incorporate a similar thing in the functioning of Solarian CI's (because they can supposedly "think faster than the speed of light") but I haven't bothered with it so far exactly because at some point someone's going to do something that in-context you shoulda been able to see coming but didn't (because we can't actually phone home to the past when we're writing our posts), and then where does that leave you?
Mind you I'm not opposed to the idea, in fact I rather fancy it, I just suspect in the future it's going to become increasingly difficult to explain why in a given situation your guys didn't make use of this ability to the point where it might as well not exist.
Hmm, actually I second this.Kartr_Kana wrote:I don't have a problem with the far flung colonies idea, I think it's pretty cool actually because as everyone has been pointing out it gives more reason to interact with people. In fact you could have protectorate/colonies close to the protectorate/colonies of someone to far away to really feasibly interact with normally. Like Hiigara and the Centrality, there's no real reason for us to interact especially come into conflict unless we have little colonies that happen to be neighbors and cause problems.
What does kind of bother me is the re-structuring of the OOBs. In my opinion that sets a bad precedent for "I have a cool new idea, but I need to change my OOB.". Retroactively change the 3400 purchases perhaps( I don't even like that idea), but in my opinion the OOBs were locked many moons ago and should stay that way. Yeah that could make it hard on a player who want's colonies, but a capable player can figure out how to work around it and come up with reasons why their OOB doesn't accurately reflect the need to protect colonies. Perhaps even use that as the launch point for a story that revolves around the colonies being upset at the lack of protection afforded them.
My $.02
Well, I can't complain about sending messages into the past by technological means, since I already invoke the notion of doing so by psychic means. That said, the limit on this sort of thing is pretty profound. You need any message you send into the past to create a closed timelike curve- you can only change events in your own future if it doesn't matter whether the messages you receive from the future are accurate or not.fgalkin wrote:EDIT:
For those wondering why Resolution didn't simply warn itself of the catnapping attempt on its boat, the reason is that to send messages to the past requires a lot of temporal disruption that requires a lot of power, so it could not have sent a message far enough to have made a difference.
Lo, it is written, talking is a free action.EDIT2:
Yes, Unreal Time is real! It actually exists!
Again, there's a difference between cognitive speed and the ability to deduce facts based on data that you don't have yet. This setting ignores the interaction between FTL and causality, and I am totally glad to keep doing that... but that means we do have to accept that there's a difference between being able to send signals between different parts of a computer at FTL speeds and being able to make the computer read its own future processor-state.Siege wrote:I can't help but suspect this 'can send messages to the past' mechanic is going to be a pain in the ass to explain away as you write more on-the-fly interactions with other people. I was of half a mind to incorporate a similar thing in the functioning of Solarian CI's (because they can supposedly "think faster than the speed of light") but I haven't bothered with it so far exactly because at some point someone's going to do something that in-context you shoulda been able to see coming but didn't (because we can't actually phone home to the past when we're writing our posts), and then where does that leave you?
Heh. There, the limiting factor is that the time horizon for metacognition is measured in tenths of a second, on the same scale as normal human thoughts. You can't use it to grab answers to a question you haven't asked yet, or deduce something from information that won't be revealed until a minute from now.Mind you I'm not opposed to the idea, in fact I rather fancy it, I just suspect in the future it's going to become increasingly difficult to explain why in a given situation your guys didn't make use of this ability to the point where it might as well not exist. Like Simon's technarch who can send herself the right answer to a question from the future to pro-retroactively avoid multiple tries, it will work wonderfully when you're writing tightly plotted self-contained storylines... But probably not so well outside of them.
Actually, that was a perfectly reasonable thought, and a good question. Umeria has no direct observations of Monoliths from their own high-end sensor suites (or didn't until the Great Stealth Clusterfuck over in C-6, anyhow). Susie, specifically, doesn't know enough about naval engineering to be able to deduce anything really significant about what the Collectors might be capable of.Mayabird wrote:Also the metacognition isn't necessarily correct, either. Remember Doctor Susie asking if the Collectors could possibly have ships larger than the monoliths. Granted, the good doctor isn't as well trained in it as Dora so her ability to skip the wrong/bad/dumb thoughts isn't as great. Instead of having to do A, B, C, and D, Susie can skip straight to C, but that still leaves D. Don't know how far Dora would go in comparison.
Now, the Umerians' calculation on this issue may be correct (or not), but the point is that they have no hard evidence one way or the other as far as Umeria is concerned. The mere fact that Monoliths are huge does not mean, in and of itself, that the Collectors can't have other, huger ships.At her end of the table, Dr. Gerber, Third for Research, looked across the table at what she’d been drawing... a series of giant black boxes next to what looked like one of their own dreadnoughts, with question marks over the biggest one.
“I was wondering, what if they have ships bigger than this? I mean, maybe these Monoliths are just their idea of a cruiser or something, and their real battleships are even heavier than that. We wouldn’t really know, would we?”
Dr. Lanning's eyes flashed; that was certainly possible, and it was something no one in MiniSec really enjoyed thinking about. “Good question, Susie. I wish I had a better answer- as a preface to what I’m about to say, we really can’t rule that out.”
“Even so, we’re... cautiously optimistic that the Collectors have no ships larger than these Monoliths. Design Directorate believes that the sheer tonnage of those things approaches a number of theoretical limits in hyperdrive design, even allowing for the unusual techniques we speculate they use for shoal-space propulsion. To do much better than that they’d need to reach a whole new level of performance in high energy density engineering... in which case their firepower per ton ought to be even higher than it already is. Though that is, of course, speculation on our part, we do not expect to see anything larger than these Monoliths in known space- though it’s conceivable that they have heavier system defense platforms in their own space, much as the NenAltKik home system’s defense monitor outmasses any of their other capital ships by a great margin.”
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) - PeZook
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) - PeZook Uh oh, I know that attitude...Shroom Man 777 wrote:This is gonna be fun.
