STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

[Nephtys]

I honestly am not a fan of magic. Even if we say 'it'll be quantifiable!' it rapidly becomes not-so fast. Additionally, it also plays a really weird bit of havoc with how our empires fit in together. unless magic is a really minor thing for parlor tricks and minor stuff (like magic powered pistol-staves or something), it's going to be weird if some people are totally based on it, and some aren't.

Also, it's not always equal. An ambassador walking into the UN with a nuke in a box can be obviously scanned. But arguments WILL arise on if the nuke spell carrying mage will be detected or not. Same with a 100 point space dragon. It may be 'treated' as a ship sometimes, but much of how different they are from ships will cause issues.. like say, if my 100 point space grand mage is aboard a small commercial shuttle. So it's a shuttle now with a Star Destroyer's firepower? Uhhhh...

Summary: Magic? Limit plz.

[Dark Hellion]

That's why I am suggesting we limit magic to the same as we would limit personnel technologies. It is just personnel tech with a different name, but adds a minor amount of flavor.

But, it seems likely that someone is going to abuse it if we don't either decide to make a system, or ban it all together. Which I think should be a group decision, or at worst, a mod one.

[Nephtys]

That's why I am suggesting we limit magic to the same as we would limit personnel technologies. It is just personnel tech with a different name, but adds a minor amount of flavor.

But, it seems likely that someone is going to abuse it if we don't either decide to make a system, or ban it all together. Which I think should be a group decision, or at worst, a mod one.

It seems reasonable to limit magic at 'personal scale'. your fireball ring will be like my flame carbine. Your shield spell will be as tough as my shield belt. Etc. But your ships still are going to be made of metal, use nuclear fusion, and shoot lasers. Even if the laser guns are magical and talk to the gunners.

[Spyder]

That's why I am suggesting we limit magic to the same as we would limit personnel technologies. It is just personnel tech with a different name, but adds a minor amount of flavor.

But, it seems likely that someone is going to abuse it if we don't either decide to make a system, or ban it all together. Which I think should be a group decision, or at worst, a mod one.

It seems reasonable to limit magic at 'personal scale'. your fireball ring will be like my flame carbine. Your shield spell will be as tough as my shield belt. Etc. But your ships still are going to be made of metal, use nuclear fusion, and shoot lasers. Even if the laser guns are magical and talk to the gunners.

That sounds good to me. Magic maybe for a touch of flair, but that's about it.

Oh, and no more trade pacts please. We can't realistically expect to cobble together a functioning interstellar economy and have it behave in any way that makes sense in the gametime we have.

[Academia Nut]

The last attempt to cobble together some trade rules kind of fell flat, but the idea had some merit at least from the standpoint of it gave us a way of quantifying piracy and giving the escorts something to do other than serve as ablative armour in battle. Some form of trade might be needed if we want to have people occasionally share their caches of Imperial goodies. For the right price of course. We might want to also think about rules for blockading systems and what exactly that does. While obviously any well settle Earth, or even Mars, type world would be nearly self-sufficient (unless of course its a Hive-type eucemenopolis(?)), but the smaller colonies might be vulnerable to starvation tactics.

[Hotfoot]

Trade had a few details left to hammer out but was otherwise fine. Let's just have generic trade between empires with the total value of the trade being somewhere between 5-20 points (whatever % of total net worth that ends up being), and make it somewhat easy to pirate. That's the objective, we've got a framework, all we need is the hard numbers that give us the desired result.

It's unlikely anyone will gain more than 50 points with this method, which is good enough to be desirable without being so good as to be super awesome. In the event someone is trading for more than that, the good news is either their trade lanes will be super exposed or their territory will, either way they're a fish on a line for more aggressive powers. It balances nicely.

[Beowulf]

Nearly any installation of reasonable size will have to have a self contained biosystem. If water, air, et al aren't recycled, then you'd going to have to ship tons of mass to a station daily. Sure, the food would probably rapidly decline in quality, but that's life in a siege.

But, successfully blockading a system should have the effect of removing that system's production from the owning nation.

[Dahak]

Personally, I'm not so hot about magic. I just don't see it in this setting and what it would add.
If you absolutely have to, it should really be highly constrained...

[Rogue 9]

Fuck. I had a preliminary nation background in post form for the background thread, but the circuit my computer is on overloaded and reset for unknown reasons while I was at work.

Anyway, what in God's name do we need magic for? As far as I can see, it serves no point or purpose in a tech-based space game. If you want to play in a fantasy STGOD, perhaps people should pay more attention when FSTGODs are attempted.

[Academia Nut]

People want magic because it lets them do some funky things. Frankly I think magic should be used only in "we would rather not explain our technobabble reasonings, we just call it magic because it's a convienent word" sort of way. For example, my guys do a bunch of funky things, that they attribute to "Awesome" but whether this is psychic powers, Clarke's Law in action, or magic pixie dust they're not saying, and no one should really care because they should have the mechanisms to deal with it, just like they would have counters to more technological sounding devices.

[Dark Hellion]

Academia nut hits it on the head. If we don't allow some kind of extra-technological power, we are going to end up with a fuckton of treknobabble and really, me bringing in a mage to fireball a tank is the same as your guy overloading his phasers powerpack.

[SirNitram]

Or you could stop with the silly technobabble entirely. No on magic.

[Dark Hellion]

How are we supposed to get by without technobabble? Are we seriously going to just chuck rocks and nukes at each other, and everyone is just some random human nation that has a different social structure and maybe one or two unique imperial remnant technologies. When you can't really tell which persons nation is which, is it really going to be fun? I want to know that player A has his blah-blah pulse mines, which make it hard to chase him down after combat, and hard to assault his planets, but limit his offensive abilities. Not, well player a has imperial mines. So he gets x bonus. The end. I thought the game was going to be above us playing a game of SMAC without the Nietzsche quotes.

[SirNitram]

Hellion, could you try stating your nonsense in a form other than a black/white fallacy? Thanks.

[Dark Hellion]

So, how do you envision it working Nitram? What is the basis of technology, because without techno-jargon we are going to all follow a similar imperial tech-base, except for those who don't play remnant powers. I was pretty sure this thread was for discussion of exactly those issues, and a blanket I don't like it doesn't help that at all.

[SirNitram]

So, how do you envision it working Nitram? What is the basis of technology, because without techno-jargon we are going to all follow a similar imperial tech-base, except for those who don't play remnant powers. I was pretty sure this thread was for discussion of exactly those issues, and a blanket I don't like it doesn't help that at all.

The only possible reason you'd need technobabble or magic is to try and asspull solutions out of thin air when you're straight up defeated. And yes, there will be general technological similarity, because you're all members of the now-collapsed Empire.

[Dark Hellion]

Or just flavour of course. I thought there were mods to keep ass pulling to a minimum. Or are we really that afraid that our players can't play within the rules, especially when we are establishing a much tighter ruleset this time around?

[SirNitram]

Or just flavour of course. I thought there were mods to keep ass pulling to a minimum. Or are we really that afraid that our players can't play within the rules, especially when we are establishing a much tighter ruleset this time around?

I don't trust players at all. It's called pattern recignition.

[Covenant]

It's still quite possible to have a wide variety of unique technologies.

Imperial Tech depends on a large resource base and a massive infrastructure to support it, something the players don't have access to. While they may have a few Imperial ships on-hand in garrisons to scrap down, they're going to be restricted to the roughly more "civilian contractor" level of firepower that they can build and maintain themselves.

So if your nation has no Vespene Gas and you can't build Imperial Tachyon Cannons, you might need to make slugthrowers. Those may have never been fielded by the Empire, but you may have no other choice. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of ad-hoc weaponry and technology in use. If the US Military disappeared and we all went around strapping guns to H3's and welding metal plates to their sides, we wouldn't all do it the same way, even if we're all wishing we had a Abrams Battletank.

So I think we have lots of variety involved. Technobabble like "I have Baryonic Torpedoes that flicker in and out of quantum state and damage you by teleporting pieces of your ship to the end of the universe" is silly and unnecessary, and Magic is really the most extreme example of technobabble. Psionics, if I recall correctly, are still more popularly regarded as feasible--but with technological assistance.

Plus, since most of this action will be happening at planetary invasion and fleet battle scales, a guy with a fireball will only be RP fluff--and will never, ever effect anything. I don't see a real reason to introduce a paradigm change into the game as huge as the realization of actual supernatural planes of existance if all it'll be used for is the occasional "Joachim throws a fireball at a tank, and gives a shout to his fellow Magister-Marines to charge the fort" sort of ground fluff text.

[Nephtys]

I suggest we start it at least 50-100 years after. The intervening time is when our groups gobbled up their neighbors or nearby stuff, established themselves and differentiated themselves, and the most chaotic of times has settled. But now it's heating up again as the clear survivors need to vie for what's left of the spoils.

[Noble Ire]

I honestly don't care when we start; either immediately after, a decade, or a century works for me. Still, I think we should reach a final decision sooner rather than later. Either the prospective moderators should get together and make a collective judgment, or we should put it to a vote.

[Battlehymn Republic]

I thought the game was going to be above us playing a game of SMAC without the Nietzsche quotes.

What's wrong with that?

[Covenant]

How about we meet halfway--the civilizations have only just recently, very recently, begun to realize nobody is coming back for them. They've been hearing about a war for the last 10 years or so and have been living on starvation mode as Imperial assistance grows more and more scarce, and now it's been like a year since any shipments.

So Terra just got dusted recently, but people have had around 10-20 years or so to begin taking some of the reigns of control themselves, but are still 99% percent stuck in the "Wait, what? On our own?" mode and aren't self-sufficent--but that they've probably had a little time to see the writing on the wall, and have been wary of their neighbors for some time, wondering who the first opportunist would be, and if they should themselves strike first.

[Crossroads Inc.]

How about we meet halfway--the civilizations have only just recently, very recently, begun to realize nobody is coming back for them. They've been hearing about a war for the last 10 years or so and have been living on starvation mode as Imperial assistance grows more and more scarce, and now it's been like a year since any shipments.

So Terra just got dusted recently, but people have had around 10-20 years or so to begin taking some of the reigns of control themselves, but are still 99% percent stuck in the "Wait, what? On our own?" mode and aren't self-sufficent--but that they've probably had a little time to see the writing on the wall, and have been wary of their neighbors for some time, wondering who the first opportunist would be, and if they should themselves strike first.

This is probablly the best thing Ive heard yet for a good background and explanation, it would explain a lot, theres no sudden collapsde and people have even KNOWN about the collpase.. just, perhaps for a decade or so, they kept figuring things would rebuild, but this time things arn't.

[Dark Hellion]

@Battlehymn: The point I was making is that in a game like SMAC, you are trying to break the system. You are attempting to figure out where you can put the thermal borehole to get mad cash for your secret project. In cops & Robbers, you are trying to beat the other player, outsmarting him, and arguing why you shot him first. I believe that we are trying for the middle ground, where you might win one round by beating the player and win another by beating the system, but at all times having to be conscious of both.

@Nitram: If we don't trust the players, then lets stamp out what standard tech feels like. It will be good to know what the proper power level and level of exoticness is. And this is the thread for it.

Also, I am slowly going into the no magic camp. I would like it for my fluff, but I am more than prepared to live without it, especially since it is looking to be a much more major point of contention than I envisioned it.