STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

[Nephtys]

Adrian Laguna
There is no range mechanic for a reason. The point of these rules is not to favor a specific tactical combat style in space, because it gets needlessly detailed and, frankly, too much of a headache. Want to play a super crunchy game? Play SE5.

You have it backward. My point is that since the mechanics fail to account for these important factors, we shouldn't use them to decide battles, not that we need even more complicated mechanics.

Range, Stealth, Surprise, Incompetent Generals and Cylon Sabotage can easilly be accounted for: By Moderators. If for some reason a battle leans for one player, all of their 'points' in a mechanics system get a new multiplier or similar thing.

Have I caught your fleet in anchor? I attack for 2x Damage, and you can't fire back for a turn! Are we fighting and my fleet is specifically designed for point blank action, and we de-warped on top of each other or somethingf? My attacks do 1.5x damage! etc. It's still moderation.

[Covenant]

Remember, these hard values are meant to allow for ballparks and easy moderation tools in the event of players who cannot reconcile combat on their own for various reasons, not as a hard guide of what MUST happen in every case.

Yeah, nobody wants to play the game as if it were, like, Heroes of Might and Magic. (weeps) However, like he said, an objective method for ballparking the damage done will stop people from going "each ship of mine can easily blow up one of yours" etc, and people arguing ad-nauseum. You can ROLEPLAY it however you want.

Let's say the numbers come up that you'll inflict massive losses on me, but I'd attack your main Flagship and sink it regardless. You may want to avoid that, and agree to allow my ships to leave with half casualties in exchange for me popping your escorts instead. We'd then do 5 or so RP poses about that one combat exchange. Plenty epic, but fair, and less retarded. I say it makes more sense to resolve 'losses' outside of the Roleplay aspect, so people don't need to roleplay their own losses without any guide whatsoever. That never struck me as a healthy system.

Things like good tactics, creative traps, and so forth are always more important, and frankly, we just need an idea of how long people should expect battles to last in the event of reinforcements and so forth, something that's been desperately needed for YEARS but nobody has been willing to do because we constantly get sidetracked into other stuff.

I'll do it. When people get into combat, mods will draw up the stats based on their Adjustments and our arbitrary combat number generator that we're working on. Hotfoot or Nitram would then post the calcs. That would be One Hour of cannon exchange. Then the two opponents barter for what they want to get out of it, like I said above, or just take the numbers flat-out, do their RP's, and when they're satisfied (or a day passes or whatever) the mods will post the next round's combat numbers.

One hour is reasonable. Rationale: It's cinematic. We're playing with, essentially, Trek-level or BSG-level firepower. Battles in those shows are rarely longer than an hour or so. The Battle of Jutland was basically two hours long--that'd be two exchanges. Probably not a bad model for our style of combat, really. Quick, glorious, and brutal.

That gives us enough time for a single heavy exchange, for a small-scale combat to be completely resolved, or for someoen to make a desperate action of some variety and be done before the episode is over. There could be many RP rounds, with lots of shouted orders and exploding panels and flaming ensigns falling out of their chairs, but we'd decide the result of that episode (hour of combat) at the beginning of the round.

As a result, every time we get to a major combat, EVERYONE bitches over how long the fight should last, what losses should be taken, how effective cruisers should be, how effective escorts should be, how effective battleships should be, how effective stupidly overcosted dreadnoughts are, etc.

I think we should address those brainbugs asap. Is there really any reason for us to encourage unfairly diminishing returns for our vessles? If repairs are not automatic then it won't be easy to put a damaged big ship back into combat, so even a minor scuffle where a few BB's get banged up could be just as bad as losing them entirely.

If it costs 3 Spacebucks to repair 2 damage to a ship, eventually it'll be more effective just to scrap it entirely. Small vessels would be more expendible than big ones. A ship that takes 50 damage would cost nearly as much an entirely new Battleship. So either you end up wit gimpy-as-fuck ships that can't do anything (but still cost full maintenance), or you spread your forces between small vessels and big ones, and balance it in gameplay terms rather than artificial combat negatives.

[Hotfoot]

Range should be a primary factor in how long a fight lasts. As far as I'm concerned all weapons have the same range. There's no functional difference in direct fire, fighters, or missiles other than style. Hence "Active Defense" and "Improved Targeting/Firepower/whatever" being polar opposites. However, at long range, there's a greater chance of a given attack being affected by active defense. It's easier to shoot down fighters or missles, it's easier to fool targeting sensors to hitting the wrong patch of space, etc. As you close ranges, it's harder for active defense to work. Point defense has less time to shoot down fighters and missiles, it's harder to fool a gunner who can get a visual lock on the ship.

For a roughly equal fleet battle, the metric could be as follows:

Long Range (Skirmish): Battle takes 6-8 hours, ships effectively peck at each other.
Medium Range (Battle): Battle takes 4-6 hours, this is a standard engagement range.
Short Range (Pistol Range): Battle takes 2-4 hours, this is getting in close to really pound on the enemy, and of course exposes you to fire as well.
Point Blank (Knife Fight): Battle takes .5-2 hours. You are essentially inside of the enemy formation and could potentially dock with the enemy ship if it weren't for the fact that they'd blast you to pieces for trying. Ramming becomes an option here.

Take in mind that these numbers assume that this is how long it takes for each side to fight each other to the point of the other no longer being able to fight. More lopsided battles (like the kind we'll be more likely to see) will lower these numbers as a matter of course.

As far as repairs, I say let repairs be free, since I consider it a part of paying the upkeep. No need to overcomplicate the mechanic, just have it take time to repair the damaged ships. The mechanic of paying for repairs also doesn't slow down the redeployment of big ships, it just makes it more expensive and makes them even more worthwhile because while you'd have to spend full price to build a new fleet for destroyed ships, it's almost always going to be cheaper to repair a damaged ship (and if that IS the case, then there's no reason not to kill ships instead of damaging them, which is counterintuitive).

Maybe it won't be necessary to have diminishing returns at all. If we limit the maximum ship size to, say, 60 points, then we don't have to worry about it. After that, the only way to make big ships is to grab various Imperial Shipyards, which can build to higher limits. Make a few different kinds:

Imperial Light Shipyard: Maximum Construction 100 points per ship
Imperial Medium Shipyard: Maximum Construction 200 points per ship
Imperial Heavy Shipyard: Maximum Construction 500 points per ship
Imperial Superheavy Shipyard: Maximum Construction 1,000 points per ship

The last two, obviously, should be whispered rumors at best, or we could rework the numbers, but hey, there you go, possible ways around the "stupid big ship" limit.

[Covenant]

I'd respond that a long-range fight, that has a lot of plinking only takes more time because the damage inflicted is less. If we stick to an hour per combat turn, then we can correctly model that behavior without an arbitray limit. If I want to kill you and you want to kill me, and we both stay at long range, it may take us 8 combat turns to finally decide the combat to the point that one fleet is gone or limps off.

I'd rather not have an arbitrary battle time, since if I want to close to short range, does that mean we've effectively distorted the time, and that my reinforcements won't arrive as soon? And what does this mean about the damage?

I'd rather let combat progress at the same rate at all times, and let the combat go on as long as the combatants wish to face off. A close-range combat might take less time, but I don't think that's a good reason to morph the timescale, as it makes the whole "I want to warp out" thing pretty hard to avoid. If I engage someone at long range, they just escape. I doubt it would take 8 hours to escape into hyperwarp.

Or, did I misunderstand you, and you just wanted to offer some ballpark figures for how long a combat might go on for? Doesn't that also really depend on the amount and composition of the ships? If I bring in all my ships, it might take a very long time, even in Knife-fight range. The Battle of Coruscant was done at idioitically close ranges, but took quite some time.

Basically, what I'm saying is that it seems to be the easiest and least arguement-causing if every combat round takes the same 'amount of time', and that a single battle will go on for as many combat rounds as people desire. That way we can do turn-based poses (like 1 combat round per day, for example, with as much RP as you want to do) and then die certain advantages/disadvantages (such as escaping, calling reinforcements, etc) to the progression of combat turns rather than mire it further in arbitrary values.

Also, in real life, ships were scuttled all the time because they were essentially 'totaled' even if they could still swim. Time is pretty much as useful as money, but I still prefer money, as it would encourage people to scuttle ships rather than 'dance away' a mostly dead ship. Even if it takes a while to be repaired, eventually it'll get repaired for free, and be like a new 'bonus' ship.

[Hotfoot]

We want good ballpark figures so that:

A. People can get an idea of how many losses they would take from running away early on at long/medium/short/point blank ranges
B. People get an idea of how long a given combat would be if it were to the death.

Combat of larger groups, if kept equal in size, should progress at roughly the same rate as smaller battles, because the damage scales pretty much exactly, unless there's some additional mechanic added that increases active defense for larger groups and thus reduces damage the same way +AD and longer ranges do.

Repairs create a period of vulnerability in addition to having lost ships. Frankly, if we use your model, we might as well scrap any ship that has more than one point of damage on it after a while, because it'll be worthless to repair it instead of making a new ship. I already have a very limited damage scale (damaged, crippled, hulked), and the first is extremely minor damage after shields have been dropped, the second requires some time in spacedock, the third is destroyed. Moreover, this reduces bookkeeping because you don't have to track how many point were lost, how much you have to pay, or other stuff like that, but still has a penalty for having lots of damaged ships. If your opponent is silly enough to let you repair them without using that window to press his advance, that's his problem.

However, more to the point, it prevents bouncing back. Remember, we need to have this game keep going, and being able to easily bounce back from losses is key to that. Making it harder to rebuild a fleet works counter to that notion. Again, I have to say, we should forget about realism when it gets in the way of where we are trying to take this game. While it might be realistic for that mechanic to exist, it bogs down the game with no real added benefit. Similarly, while Q-ships might not have worked well in reality, here they can. Why? For the same reason railguns and lasers and fighters and missiles can all compete with rough parity in combat, we can have FTL, and even have more than a rough handful of ships in combat.

If STGODs were perfectly realistic, we'd all be in one solar system, maybe have a dozen small ships apiece, use only nukes propelled by thrusters with laser point defense, use fusion and fission reactors, ships would take years and years to build, and the game would end either in fire or without a shot fired as everyone decides to play nice or suck up to the one political mastermind.

[Darkevilme]

I personally dont think we need to do away with diminishing returns, so while someone can build their hundred huge compensator class battleship it runs into diminishing returns. Where as an imperial shipyard is not affected by diminishing returns but has a finite limit as to how much economy can be put through it into making 'imperium sumdemolishers' or whatever per turn. Also, what if someone wanted to play smaller numbers of ships with a slightly higher techbase than the average player? quality over quantity, so they purchase a higher diminishing returns cap to reflect more refined technology.

[Raxmei]

No, actually; I was talking about much later in the game, when Stormbringer had battlecruiser squadrons stalking the lanes in the Nashtari star cluster. Granted, there was an all-out war going on, but it was a little ridiculous to need an entire carrier battle group to even begin to try and neutralize his anti-shipping measures. And I was in absolutely no position to attack, given that I was trying to fight off massive enemy forces in my own territory.

I remember that being someone else. I also remember wondering what the guy thought he was doing. You were about to get taken down by storm and everyone knew it. By then it was too late for the threatened resources to affect your strategic situation, nor was there any chance of drawing off the forces that were already hard pressed trying to survive. Near as I could tell he was afraid of taking losses and knew his side was going to win anyway, so he took up commerce raiding to sham his way through the war.

[Academia Nut]

I think Hotfoot's times could be adapted so that we have variable turn lengths. Thus at long range, it takes 8 hours to inflict the same amount of damage as half an hour at knife fighting range. Same results, you just RP it differently. It's the difference between coldly watching missile and beam tracks come in, wiping out friend and foe alike over hours of impersonal combat, and frenetic close engagements where you don't even need a target lock because there's no way to miss at this range.

But yeah, having the mods declare damage for battles would be a really good idea. The players involved can then hash out how exactly that damage was dealt and can make adjustments for how the use their tactics. For example, let's say a fight starts at long range. One player wants to end the fight faster and get to shorter range, the other is quite content to plink away and stall the other guy. Since it is presumed that they both have similar acceleration technologies, the guy who wants to close has to divert energy, so has to either reduce the damage dealt or increase the damage taken, possibly even both, to represent this charge.

We could also implement a fatigue level for combat to represent the crews getting worn and magazines being depleted out from fighting too long. Would be a great way for a smaller force to harry a larger one, reducing their combat effectiveness even while doing minimal damage. Fatigue would of course be presumed eliminated after a reasonable rest and resupply, anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on how long the fight or fights took. I can't quite think of a way to represent this mechanically, but it would make for great cinematics.

Finally, if we use this system, I think simply limiting ships to 60 points without Imperial shipyards would work best, with a tiered shipyard system too, perhaps allowing the lowest level tier to be bought as an Imperial tech too. That way we don't have to worry about the nonlinearity rule and how it works out under this system.

[Beowulf]

Well, if we don't use variable turn lengths, Hotfoot's times could be easily enough done by changing the damage multiplier. The higher it is, the faster it will go. Similarly, you can use a changing damage modifier to reflect ship design philosophy. A nation which wanted to do a MMM attack could have a much greater damage multiplier in the first round, but lower multipliers in the later rounds because the missile supply has been depleted.

[Academia Nut]

I suppose we could allow some form of differentiation between missiles and guns in this game, in that individualy a missile rack is the equivalent of a laser/fusion cannon/etc. but you can do an alpha strike with the missiles so that you expend a hell of a lot of fire power initially, but if you get into a slugging match then you're fucked because you basically just have point defence left.

Okay, how about this: each ship has an inherent "endurance" characteristic based on its size. Something like 10% base point cost + 3, so even your smallest ships can last for three rounds without worry. For every round after their endurance, they start losing say 25% of their effectiveness. So your 1 pt frigate is going to be good for 7 rounds (3 rounds normal, 4 rounds to drop down to nothing (assuming fractional points)), which, depending on turn length, is about 3 1/2 hours to 7 hours, not bad for a dinky little frigate that is unlikely to last that long anyway.

But say we introduce an "Overload Shot" module to represent super missile pods for the patented Macross Missile Massacre or channelling your reactor energy directly into your guns. Say for every point you devote to this you can expend an extra point of endurance for a 50% boost to your apparent strength for that turn.

So for say a 1 point frigate + 1 point overload you can get 1.5 damage out of it for 2 turns, and then it pretty much drops off to nothing. Should have just bought a damn 2 point frigate.

50 point dreadnought + 10 point overload. You can get 1 turn where it has a throw weight of 300 (!) points, and 1 turn where it has a throw weight of 50, but after that it is just dead weight until it can be resupplied. Of course, with damage currently being determined by the square of the points you've got, this might not be worth it seeing as 300 points only does 17 damage and 60 points does 8.

Overload ship: 1st round- 17 damage, 17 damage total
Standard ship: 1st round- 8 damage, 8 damage total
Overload ship: 2nd round- 7 damage, 24 damage total
Standard ship: 2nd round- 8 damage, 16 damage total
Overload ship: 3rd round- 0 damage, 26 damage total
Standard ship: 3rd round- 8 damage, 24 damage total

So between 50+10 overload and 60 straight, after 3 rounds they will have done the same amount of damage, but if the battle continues on after that it would have been smarter to either have conserved your weapons a bit more or have just gone with a standard ship. Still, a fleet based around overloading would have a different dynamic than just straight ships as they could cause massive attrition in the first turn. Tactics really become a big consideration here too. Do you fire everything you've got the first round, or do you conserve your supplies for later? If your enemy is know for the 3M solution, do you lure him into a trap, let him blow his load, and then drop the hammer on the bastard with a sudden surge of reinforcements?

[Covenant]

I think the overload option is interesting enough to survive on it's own merits without the endurance stat, since endurance is a pain but someone might want to make a giant one-shot "will use all our power!" cannon ship. But endurance is a bit iffy. If I use Lasers or something, I'll be able to fire basically all day and all week, especially if I have enough fuel to fly around and shoot for the service life of my hull. At that point you break the system.

Also, the module shouldn't gimp the rest of my ship. If I'm fighting before without missiles, just guns, then unleash the Itano Circus, my ship doesn't cease having guns afterwards. That makes sense for the 'reactor dump' Macross Beam or the Wave Motion Cannon, but not for missiles.

I happen to really love missiles and drones, and having frontloaded damage is a fine tradeoff, but missiles are a unique sort of weapon-system. They should, really, do maximum damage at any range whatsoever--but they're the one type of gun that can be tricked enroute. I'd happily arm my Drones with good ECM to beat all you fuckers' attempts to confuse them, but a belly full of drones or missiles is a very different beast than a laser or cannon ship.

If you want to do that, you might want to make it so 1 point of 'missiles' buys 2 or 3 shots. So you can either keep up with the output of a cannon ship for a few turns or fire a lot at once. In exchange they should be more 'accurate' when taking into consideration mod adjustments, and be able to do their full damage at long range.

[Academia Nut]

Well, I added the "endurance" to represent ships running out of fuel, laser cannons finally having their barrels melt without replacements, as well as running out of missiles. Thus is you use missiles, you don't have to take the overload option, its just presumed that your systems/doctrines means that you will always fire your weapons at a rate that is sustainable. I'm working on an excel table to show just how much of a boost you can get. Should be done in an hour or two

Also, we could say that points spent on other systems are not degraded by the endurance, so even if you're out of standard offensive power, you still have sensors, interdiction capacities, point defence, etc. That or put a minimum that your ships can fall to of 5% maybe? To show that you've totally exhausted your main weaponry, and secondary, but you've still got PD up or something like that.

[Covenant]

Eh, I think it's way too complicated in a way that isn't extremely useful. If we're only using these numbers as ballpark figures, they shouldn't be dealing in such small fractions--those will easily get ballparked out of existance.

It makes more sense to quanitfy how we want to treat missiles vs. guns in this game in a Roleplay sense more than on a spreadsheet. That or we make them exactly like cannons.

Really, we want to decrease the arguements, not try to sell the game to a publisher. I just want to avoid fights, that's the only motivation for putting rules in. While there's stuff that might be cool to put in objective format, if nobody really fights over it, I'm not sure why it should be our First priority.

That should be deciding on a theme, backstory, and ground rules.

[Academia Nut]

Eh, basically I wanted to have a way of showing that you can't fight forever no matter what your weapons load-out, otherwise you'll get silliness like a 3000 point fleet going through 20*300 point fleets in a row (although admittedly they might be able to win because they are defeating the enemy in detail rather, but losses would still probably be lower than they should) because they can nuke each one away with minimal casualties, when should really be happening each time is a chunk of the doom fleet is being used instead of all of them to preserve resources. Since we seem to be wanting to put quantifications on what exactly is happening to avoid dick waving silliness, I figured including some sort of stat that shows how long you can last in a fight before expending your missile racks, running your reactors dry, exhausting your psychics, etc. would be a sensible idea.

[Covenant]

I think we should cross that bridge when we come to it. A death march across known space is problematic, but I don't think it justifies a spreadsheet.

Plus, if that fleet had a sufficent number of fleet tenders, it would be able to keep getting resupplied and fighting.

[Academia Nut]

Well yeah, I figured something like an hour of rest with the tenders restores a point of endurance.

Hmmm... okay, how's about this:

Missile Launcher: Carries 3 missiles, worth 2 points each. Can be fired in salvos of 1,2, or 3. Min ship size: 0 Cost: 1 point. Special: Non-standard point limit (so you're not limited to 10 points if you want a missile dreadnought)
Missile Rack: Carries an extra 6 missiles, requires a missile launcher. Cost: 1 point Special: Non-standard point limit

I stuck the min ship size 0 in there so that people can have cheap ass missile frigates designed to fire everything in the first round and then act as ablative meat shields to catch return fire. For factions with good automation or a population problem. Might be unbalancing.

Then, because beam spam people need love too:

Overload Capacitors: Dumps extra energy into a shot from the main engines. Each point counts for double, but the next turn every overload point is subtracted from the ship's firepower

IE 20 pt + 10 point overload capacitors: Round A Does 40 points damage, Round B does 10 points damage. Average damage: 25 points/round, which is less than the 30 points spent on it. Seems fair.

[Covenant]

A 0 point ship should be dead. Make it a minimum of at least 1, so the thing has a 'speed' and 'durability' component. If it's 0-point ship then it has a durability, PD, evasion, etc of 0 as well. How many shots does it take to kill a zero point ship?

Make it at least 1. 1 is basically a big fatass fightercraft. We shouldn't allow vessels smaller than a fighter to carry racks of capitol-grade weaponry. A nuclear-armed fighter would cost 3 points, according to this. I think that's fair. Making it cost 2 is wacked.

[Darkevilme]

academia nut, at this rate the game will end up as complex as DnD, these details i think are really rp level anyway. Hell the Chamaran beamcannon works as an overload capacitor by default and design as it works by temporarily diverts all the engine's reacting fuel towards the ships beam emitter(s). Chamaran craft drift for the short times they're firing beams.

I second covenants call for the rules brigade to step back and only make vital rules, which they've mostly done with economy, point buy attributes, estimates for fleet losses in engagement, specializations and production rulesets.

So can the rules already present be fixed before more are added, then we can look and decide whether we need anymore complexity here.

[Covenant]

Technically, I'm one of the rules brigade, I just think we should throw this useful creative energy into the primary problems, and then work on any possible added 'special case rules' while we make our OOB's. We have actual, real issues with things like time, or reinforcements, escape, etc. If we can tackle those, modelling 'endurance' is much less important.

[Dark Hellion]

While all this rule talk is very good, does anyone want to start writing up civs and history? Since last game really suffered from no one knowing how much they knew about everyone else, and a lot of questions about what knowledge is metagame, why don't we work that out so that by the time we get to writing OoB we are just putting down a reference, instead of suprising everyone with whatever insanity we came up with. We can still be crazy, but it'll be healthy crazy, and we will know the thousand year history of why space dwarves hate space orcs.

[Covenant]

While all this rule talk is very good, does anyone want to start writing up civs and history? Since last game really suffered from no one knowing how much they knew about everyone else, and a lot of questions about what knowledge is metagame, why don't we work that out so that by the time we get to writing OoB we are just putting down a reference, instead of suprising everyone with whatever insanity we came up with. We can still be crazy, but it'll be healthy crazy, and we will know the thousand year history of why space dwarves hate space orcs.

Yeah, I agree. I'd like to work on that stuff, and we could do that in the other thread. If we have a massive collapsing Empire, we should mostly all be from it--as few extragalactic powers as feasible. And we should have a long and illustrious history, though from the sounds of it, mired in corruption at the end.

[Darkevilme]

Well escape is basically to get outside the enemy interdictor area, which will be present or there wont be a battle. So then we get fiddly things like, is it a fleet or planet interdictor. How long does it take to cross X distance, and the turn lengths are different for each range so we cant just say it takes one turn. It might be something down to agreement and mod call as well, if you're fighting in close range and pull away the timescale is short enough you're gonna get battered where as if you pull away at long range what's to stop you? With fleets you have to outrun the interdictor where as with planets you dont. Retreating is a thing full of a fair few variables, reinforcements will follow from turn times and escape but escape isnt a simple thing to model. Specially when some people's engines will be able to overcome the interdictors much earlier than others.

[Academia Nut]

There is a certain give and take to this sort of design process. Right now I think I'm primarily acting as an idea source, generating a lot of impractical thoughts while others look through them and look for ways of paring them down. Which I think is a good thing! I will help with refining ideas, but a bad idea is often more useful than a good one if it shows us what not to do. It's the impetus for going further half the time.

But yeah, if you think I'm going too far on a tangency, tell me that you want to talk about something else. Just suggest a mechanic for it or ask for input, because right now we're trying to design the mechanics so that we don't have to design them in game.

Oh, and Covenant, I did post something in the other thread yesterday about creating the history, but it seems to have been ignored. Perhaps another thread for the fluff since we're clearly working on the crunch in this one (hopes for a STGOD subforum so that there will be no bitching about the STGOD players spamming up G&C).

[Dark Hellion]

Perhaps, if we make enough threads we will force a subforum. Forward STGOD, a glorious new world awaits, if only we try!

[Rogue 9]

No, actually; I was talking about much later in the game, when Stormbringer had battlecruiser squadrons stalking the lanes in the Nashtari star cluster. Granted, there was an all-out war going on, but it was a little ridiculous to need an entire carrier battle group to even begin to try and neutralize his anti-shipping measures. And I was in absolutely no position to attack, given that I was trying to fight off massive enemy forces in my own territory.

I remember that being someone else. I also remember wondering what the guy thought he was doing. You were about to get taken down by storm and everyone knew it. By then it was too late for the threatened resources to affect your strategic situation, nor was there any chance of drawing off the forces that were already hard pressed trying to survive. Near as I could tell he was afraid of taking losses and knew his side was going to win anyway, so he took up commerce raiding to sham his way through the war.

Nah, it was Stormy. The Asgard captain was being a right royal prick about it too.