SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread V

[Tanasinn]

Curious, just how dumb are your drones? I could see the Pfhor slavers harvesting them under some rather sinister (if unofficial) arguments.

[doom3607]

A basic drone is a little dumber than the average dog. Thinkers are pretty smart, but they represent only about half a percent of the population and are physically quite useless anyway. The only reason the hive mind doesn't get godlike intelligence due to the sheer number of Thinkers is because each Thinker has to basically manage all the actions of hundreds of drones. That's why small ships are dumb, by the way: Each Thinker can manage a little bit more than the number of drones the breeding proportions create, so each Thinker adds that little bit of excess to the hive's brain. The more Thinkers, the more excess you get, the smarter the hive gets. Each small ship has one or maybe two Thinkers, and is thus pretty dumb. The big motherships have a lot of thinkers, more than is proportional, and are thus essentially as smart as a planetary hive.

Also, kidnapping them and surviving would be tough. Fine Manipulators have fricking cutting lasers built in in case they need to work on circuitry or anything that needs a precision cutter, Workers are goddamn living bulldozers, and Carriers are like semis with a temper. And only an idiot would try to kidnap a warrior drone.

EDIT: History added here.

[KlavoHunter]

Finally, a reason to get rid of the ugly, nonplaying stain on the map that are the Chirons! If you wanted to occupy some of their space, instead of being soooooooooo close to the Pfhor.

[doom3607]

Ah- provided the Chiron are for sure inactive, why not? Might as well avoid Pfhor slavers if I can.

[Kartr_Kana]

More Bolo's!? Man I'm seriously going to have to start building more monitors to ensure I always have something on hand to Ion Beam away those pesky things.

BTW welcome to the game doom3607, if you want I have a spreadsheet setup that you can just plug the numbers into once you figure out your GDP. Makes it easier to figure out how much of your initial budget you're using. Also make sure someone explains the carrier rules to you as they tend to cause people fits and it sounds like you may be using a lot of them.

[doom3607]

Only for the motherships, believe it or not. The rest of the fleet will be smaller starships with the brainpower of a fairly smart attack dog.

Your monitors shall not defeat my Bolos, Ion Beams or not!

And thanks for the offer, but I can keep track of my finances myself easily enough.

[Darkevilme]

The overcomplex carrier rules of SDNW4:

Carrier capacity is a given amount of points, for instance a hundred point carrier spends all 100 points on capacity. partial purchase for battleship carrier hybrids is of course possible.

Half of the carrier capacity value represents actual capacity for the strike craft. so our 100 point carrier has 50 points capacity. The other half represents purely protection systems of the carrier, for some reason. To be hopelessly mechanistic you're paying for fighters with 50 defence points between them and 50 defence points for the carrier.

In order to balance out the earlier arbitraryness all strike craft have twice their weight in attack power so that a 100 point carrier is equivalent in strength to a 100 point cruiser. This means that again in overly mechanized terms while the carrier itself has 0 offence points the fighters have 100 points of offence instead of 50. The result is that like the cruiser the carrier has overral 100 defence and 100 offence as it's a 100 point ship.

And i think these rules were born of revisionism instead of reconsidering basic assumptions hence the mess.

[Kartr_Kana]

Ok no worries just offering since I already have the spreadsheet laid out, just have to plug in the GDP, ship values and numbers, which then are automatically deducted from the GDP until you reach $0. Numbers are easier for me to work with than stories which is one reason why my frequency of posts is low.

If you're not planning on having any carriers ever you should be fine, but if you do build some or build some at a later date make sure you get someone to help you make sure you're not cheating yourself. Carrier rules seem to cause most of the problems when people are allocating points.

[Steve]

Eh, I don't see a major issue if he's between the Pfhor and Chamarrans, actually helps explain why those two haven't already had a throwdown, and with Pollux being out for so long, well.... the Pfhor aren't the threat they used to be.

And. yes, the rules on carriers and such were basically piled on from a simple element because people kept finding issues with them. I really should've just said "Carriers are worth their value like any other ship, LEAVE ME ALONE PEASANTS."

[Kartr_Kana]

The overcomplex carrier rules of SDNW4:

Carrier capacity is a given amount of points, for instance a hundred point carrier spends all 100 points on capacity. partial purchase for battleship carrier hybrids is of course possible.

Half of the carrier capacity value represents actual capacity for the strike craft. so our 100 point carrier has 50 points capacity. The other half represents purely protection systems of the carrier, for some reason. To be hopelessly mechanistic you're paying for fighters with 50 defence points between them and 50 defence points for the carrier.

In order to balance out the earlier arbitraryness all strike craft have twice their weight in attack power so that a 100 point carrier is equivalent in strength to a 100 point cruiser. This means that again in overly mechanized terms while the carrier itself has 0 offence points the fighters have 100 points of offence instead of 50. The result is that like the cruiser the carrier has overral 100 defence and 100 offence as it's a 100 point ship.

And i think these rules were born of revisionism instead of reconsidering basic assumptions hence the mess.

Actually I was under the impression that Carrier cost/2 = fighter capacity was because of the space needed to support parasite craft operations. The easiest way to do it IMO is figure out how many points of fighters you want to carry and multiply by 2. This works if you're making a hybrid ship as well as a carrier, since you can create a $100 cruiser and then if you want $25 worth of fighters you just multiply $25 by 2 and add that $50 onto your cruiser so it's total cost is $150. The cruiser will fight at $100 and the fighters will fight at $50 even though you only have $25 of fighters carried on the hybrid.

[doom3607]

Heh. You know, I already knew this.

Anyway, just working on the wiki page now. I'll add in exactly where I am once I know, well, exactly where I am.

[Master_Baerne]

Welcome to the party, doom!

In other news, hooray for plots!

[PeZook]

A basic drone is a little dumber than the average dog. Thinkers are pretty smart, but they represent only about half a percent of the population and are physically quite useless anyway. The only reason the hive mind doesn't get godlike intelligence due to the sheer number of Thinkers is because each Thinker has to basically manage all the actions of hundreds of drones. That's why small ships are dumb, by the way: Each Thinker can manage a little bit more than the number of drones the breeding proportions create, so each Thinker adds that little bit of excess to the hive's brain. The more Thinkers, the more excess you get, the smarter the hive gets. Each small ship has one or maybe two Thinkers, and is thus pretty dumb. The big motherships have a lot of thinkers, more than is proportional, and are thus essentially as smart as a planetary hive.

Huh...why not automate everything and run off a huge network of AIs?

Also, kidnapping them and surviving would be tough. Fine Manipulators have fricking cutting lasers built in in case they need to work on circuitry or anything that needs a precision cutter, Workers are goddamn living bulldozers, and Carriers are like semis with a temper. And only an idiot would try to kidnap a warrior drone.

Bah, there are people in the K-Zone who kidnap Karlack bioforms for a living

[Simon_Jester]

Huh...why not automate everything and run off a huge network of AIs?

Because, like me, they retain an inordinate fondness for carbon?

[me goes looking for that giant buckyball again]

[hugs it]

[doom3607]

More because they never invented it. Turns out even a fleetmind can do math very quickly, and very well. So who needs the AI?

EDIT: Wiki page is done. Will fill in sector locations once I know them. Then I'll post the Locrians waking up into the latest story bit and send out the big "Hello out there"-type signal.

[Simon_Jester]

Perhaps they just bred "mathforms" which are like Thinkers, but do math very quickly in parallel, rather than slowly and inefficiently like the human brain? That would solve most of the demand for computers, if you used them cleverly enough and had a way to program them by way of the 'brain' organisms.

[doom3607]

Or Thinkers could just naturally work like that. Or maybe we do have AI, but it has issues connecting to the hive minds for some reason. Anyone have a good reason why they couldn't connect?

[Simon_Jester]

Hopelessly different cognitive styles, difference between linear and massive-parallel thinking? Having to rely on the organic's mental interface to move the AI's thoughts around the hive mind, and having it not work?

[doom3607]

Good enough psuedo-science for this game, in my opinion. It be official! We have AIs, but differences inthe mechanics of thought prevent them from joining the hive minds!

Now to determine if story wise it would make sense to have us eventually make it work. Only issue I see with that is it would send us so far over the top in terms of brainpower it would be just silly.

[PeZook]

Why? Solarians are run by gigantic networks of AIs, and my nation literally has nobody but AIs.

Processing power is not something the galaxy lacks

[Tanasinn]

The one advantage about AIs is that you can always paint them as "aloof" to avoid logical concerns about them making a given nation too strong. Sure, an AI might be able to do great things, but does it want to? Your AI, which are isolated from your culture and method of thinking totally, might only cooperate as much as they feel is necessary, doing whatever else a totally foreign self-improving thought process does the rest of the time.

Incidentally, the "well, you can't really trust them" bit is why the Humanist Union doesn't make heavy use of true AI like the Solarians. That's also born out of political ideology ("a non-human intelligence can be expected to pursue non-human goals").

[PeZook]

Frankly, it doesn't matter how much "brainpower" you have. Oh, so you can do math really fast and optimize your processes really well and write software at the speed of light?

If you don't have the industry to support your grand projects and plans, your AIs can think however fast they want ; Without experimental data, raw resources and rare components, they won't be able to do anything meaningful.

Same for military planning: so what if you have great stratagems? If you're Pendleton being gangbanged by half a dozen star powers, you can make 100% optimal use of your assets and you'll still lose horribly.

That's probably how "classically" governed star nations keep up: they just use a lot of specialized expert systems rather than a few general AIs,thus able to use all the advantages of electronic intelligence with none of the drawbacks coming with sentience - the difference being that you need to order and install systems for everything you want to do, rather than contracting a massive and powerful CI to run half the government for you by its lonesome, but they should be able to do anything a CI can do given enough of them. You can install an AI to collate the info and schedule tasks for each expert system, but that's it.

[Siege]

In case of Sovereignty CIs, they're just like their homo superior counterparts in the government: they're smart and fast alright, to the point where the USS needs only one CI to run the entire government bureaucracy, but the smartness also exacerbates other personality traits... Pride, wrath, envy, greed; Olympic and his ilk in many ways are poster boys for the seven deadly sins. Using them means the Sovvies don't have to employ a bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of people, but it also means that its decisions do not necessarily reflect actual human values. Like anything else, depending on the circumstances this can be a good or a bad thing, and it's up to the player to write the appropriate (and hopefully interesting) result.

[doom3607]

Hmm... I'll think about AI's position in the Collective.

[Agent Sorchus]

Don't worry, not everyone has vast AI's. If you don't want them you can just ignore it. Not everyone has to be similar.