STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

[Hotfoot]

I'm not a fan of needing courier ships for what should be routine communications to be honest.

I think that comm times should be FTL, the question is "should they be instant". I don't know what is really gained by not having them be instant as a base, other than flavor, but to be honest it's not a part of the game I've been focusing on a the moment.

The conundrum that I've been thinking about lately is as follows: How best to model the different ship point expenditures. What is the advantage of 20 +1 whatever ships vs. 2 +10 ships, etc. The first thing that comes to mind is sustainability versus power. A big ship with +10 is more of a target, and once it's gone, that's it. Also, it can't be everywhere at once. Also, should ships be able to confer bonuses to other vessels. This one seems like a no-brainer, as it's generally acceptable to have a horde of +3 Active Defense ships screening your heavier ships. The next question is how do we deal with densely packed ships with bonuses. Arguments have been made in the past that they should somehow stack, but I've not been fond of that solution. However, it is a point that bears discussion.

As far as comms, we should figure that out along with ship speed. Traditionally, a month or two to cross "known space" has been the metric used for ships. Communications should be less, but by how much? Again, I'm a fan of instant or at least near-instant comms, but barring that, I dunno, maybe a week for a comms transmission to go from one end of known space to another? Given how often comms happen compared to fleet travel, I'd rather not have a super-complex comms system.

[Academia Nut]

The stacking of certain specializations if an important point for me since for my OOB I've made it a thematic point that every ship has at least 1 point of active defence to represent just general noise kicked up by the way they run. This will probably let me do a "Shadow of the Warp" effect too, with large fleets completely drowning out a targetted system, cutting them off from pleas for help, forcing reinforcements to charge in blind. Unless of course we decide not to let it work like that, although I figure if I spend 175 points on active defence my enemies should be screaming, "What the fuck is even out there?"

[Covenant]

Do these effects actually stack though? If you have a fuckton of little shitty EW packages, aren't those basically all negated by a radar unit good enough to see through one of them? I didn't think that it was possible to just flood the area with noise, unless it was high power noise, which would be a more expensive point cost transmitter.

[Dark Hellion]

Stacking should have some penalty. Maybe stacking only works up to 50% and most of the time not that. If you have your EW ships in formation, coordinating EW, you can get half the points you have, but if they are just there, they might all count for only 10% combined. IE you have 120 points of EW on 40 different +3 ships. I have 120 points of Sensors on 6 different +20 ships. If your ships aren't working together, you have +12 points, and my ships have no trouble at all, but if you are actively working together to scramble my sensors, you have +60. However, if I work together, I can get that +60 too and its a wash. My big ships are much better if you aren't working in formation, because they have HUGE sensor ratings, but in coordination, you have a minor advantage of having much harder to reduce EW.

This is just a very basic outline, but I think its pretty good.

[Academia Nut]

True, but then again our entire system is based around the abstraction of "more points are better". Do 50 1pt corvettes really have the weaponry to take down a single 50pt dreadnought? And how many ships with 1pt ECM suites can a ship with a 10pt ECCM suite burn through? How much data can it handle if there are fifty of the little fuckers running about giving off noise? How well can this data be relayed to other elements in the fleet when comms are being jammed by the same measures? Eventually quantity will have a quantity all its own.

[Covenant]

Actually, 50 one-point Corvs would get massacred by a 50 point dread. Unless they do full damage both ways (which they don't under our current system) the Dread would murder about half of them, decreasing their offensive output during the exchange while the Dread's isn't. Big ships don't lose offensive firepower over the course of a battle, while a pile of little ones do.

Really though, for a lot of things for example, I don't think stacking will do that much more than a high-quality thing would. ECCM of 10 means a very advanced ECCM package capable of detecting incredibly nuanced signals, and a ECM of 1 means a really shitty scrammer of some sort, like adding extra flares and chaff and maybe a signal jammer.

It's kinda like... how many flares does it take to throw off a radar-guided missile. If the package is so advanced that it's capable of ignoring your countermeasures completely, it has no function. I think stacking DOES have a purpose, and a million little ships with sensor scramblers on them is more expensive and fragile than a big ship with one big one, so it's not like it's unbalanced. However, I just want to question the thought process, since there comes a time when no matter how many extra PD you add on each ship, it doesn't add up to a really good PD package on one ship.

It's like, if I fire a missile at a specific ship, the entire fleet's PD doesn't operate against it, for example. I'm extremely hesitant to request more numbers (like giving squared effects, so that a +3 counts for 9, whereas 3 +1's count for 3) because of the idiocy that causes, but we should be clear exactly what these advantages will mean.

If I've bought a +10 ECCM package, for example, that's the best that money can buy, at all, regardless of ship size. I could be a mile-long warship and still only able to devote +10 to ECCM. If that means that a fourth of my mile+ long vessel's cost or bulk is consumed by ECCM equipment of the highest calibur and it's still no match for 15 corvettes the the size of a schoolbus with, like, HAM-Radio scramblers... then that's kinda silly.

The threat of a blackout is too huge for it to be that easy. If you have more ECM than I do, does that mean that you've got complete missile and guidance and communication and logistical advantage? If so, that's a serious coup just for giving a large fleet a buncha +1's. So, like I said, I'd like to define what some of these bonuses are gonna be. Because, while stacking may be important, if the bonuses are huge then it's only reasonable that we encourage people to put their advanced and overpowered equipment into large and expensive vessels that can be easily targetted. A ship of 5 with a +10 ECCM, afterall, is a 15 point fairly large ship, but with only 5 attack and defense. That's a lot less annoying to kill off than hundreds of 1+1's.

[Beowulf]

Covenant

Piles of little ones lose offensive power over time because they lose ships. However, they have the bonus damage which partly offsets that. A pile of 50 point corvettes should have a roughly equal chance of winning as a 50 point dreadnought. If that isn't the case, then there's little reason to have the little ships, and all we have in the end is a bunch of dreadnoughts.

Sure, your dread may not be able to overpower the bunch of little ships' jammers, but you should be able to fairly quickly destroy enough to be able to get a message out.

[Darkevilme]

50 points of little ships as noted can be in multiple places at a time where as a 50point dred can only be in one at a time which is the dred's disadvantage. If a 50 point dred cant win against 50 one point corvettes then there's no point in having dreds and we'll all have a bunch of midget ships. So smaller = more flexible strategic and to some extent tacticall, larger = better at killing smaller.

edit: elaborated, grammared, made to make sense.

[Hotfoot]

A few points of my own:

1. Having lots of little ships gives you tons of strategic flexibility, because you can have several fleets and task forces with little bonuses. A few heavier ships with those bonuses gives you greater tactical flexibility.

2. Having a bonus for lots of smaller ships doesn't make a lot of sense, but as we are more interested in game balance than raw sense at times, this can be forgiven if there is a valid and useful mechanic behind it. Right now the mechanic desired seems to be "give lots of smaller ships a boost against bigger ships". I think we've established that escorts really aren't all that fantastic in fleet combat, for obvious reasons, so I can't really imagine a rule that gives them a serious boost in line combat being needed.

That said, if there were a rule to this, I'd stick to a rule of tens, so that every ten ships of that type, it's a plus one, with the following increasing limiter each time:

10: +1
30 (+20): +2
60 (+30): +3
100 (+40): +4
150 (+50): +5

And so on until you hit the logical cap of +10 without Imperial tech.

[Academia Nut]

Well, this little thread seems to have stalled, so I now post the first draft of my OOB (minus fluff) so that you wolves can rip it apart and we can work out some rules. I think part of the problem was over-ambition. We don't need to figure out rules for everything, just the stuff we will be using.

Ships
Tenacious- 2 + 1 Active Defence (AD) + 1 FTL + 2 Siege (Si) = 6 * 50 ships = 300
Cacofonix- 4 + 1 Interdiction (I) + 8 AD = 13 * 10 ships = 130
Rammstein- 15 + 3 I + 2 AD + 10 Si = 30 * 10 ships = 300
Dragon- 20 + 1 AD + 3 Active Offence (AO) + 1 FTL + 3 Sensors (Se) = 28 * 10 ships = 280
Manowar- 29 + 1 AD + 5 AO = 35 * 5 ships = 175
Megadeth- 40 + 5 I + 3 AD + 2 Se = 50 * 3 ships = 150

Worlds
1 * Class 1 = 10
5 * Class 2 = 25
5 * Class 3 = 15
10 * Class 4 = 10

Static Defences (Class 1 world)- 40 * 1 =40
Static Defences (Class 2 worlds)- 12 * 5 =60
Static Defences (Class 3 worlds)- 11 * 5 =55
Static Defences (Class 4 worlds)- 1 * 10 =10

Attributes and Technology

Barbarian (proposed flat cost, gives +30 counter-espionage, -30 espionage, and the rest of the points go towards moving you out into the boonies where you have fewer people at your back)- 50
Improved Ground Combat- 200
Improved Logistics- 75
Improved Espionage- 75
Improved Assimilation- 25
Improved Salvage- 75

Totals:
1500 on ships and defences
60 on planets
500 on attributes and technology

---

Problems I can see some people having with this:
1) My destroyers are a bit top heavy in that they have a lot of extras, exceeding their base point cost. Should this be allowed? Same problem with my EW ships, although to a somewhat lesser extent as its all in the same thing and people often expect things like that to be a bit fragile
2) My seige ships. Never got a straight answer on if this was an acceptable upgrade. I'm willing to change it, but my whole nation design is that they like to raid colonies so I would like some mechanic so that I can crack static defences more easily with raiders instead of needing a multi-nation fleet
3) My barbarian attribute. You're basically paying 40 points [50 base -30 (counter-esp) +20 (buyback from esp penalty)] to be on the edge of the map, plus an extra 30 points if you want to make up for your deficiencies in scoping others. The esp and counter-esp is in there to represent general cultural disconnects and other such problems.
4) My improved salvage attribute. Again, we never agreed on a mechanic here, and if we want to have some sort of economic/pirating mechanic I'll gladly change it over to that if salvage rules are not desired, but again, having my barbarians haul off hulked ships as loot is part of my concept for them, so perhaps we can work something out. This would be a good attribute for Nitram and his murder-bricks being capable of limping away when other ships would be hulled.
5) Most of the attributes are unquantified. Something we'll definitely need to work out.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Ok... I'm going to try my hand at designing a ship here...

Bentuselion - 50 +5 Active Stealth +5 Active Defence +5 Active Offence = 65
Exelion - 40 +5 Active Offence = 45
"Destroyer" 20 +5 Active Defence = 25
"Science Ship" - 15 +2 Interdiction +3 Sensors = 20

BusterMachines 5 +1 AO +1 AD +FTL = 8

I wonder how those might stand up?

[Covenant]

What's an active offense? Aren't most offenses... active?

[Hotfoot]

What's an active offense? Aren't most offenses... active?

It stems from the fact that I really just never gave "Improved Offense" a better name. It's not easy, I mean, it's not bigger guns, larger missiles, or simply better fighters, it's a finer application of each, usually through counter-counter measures

[Darkevilme]

Draft one of my point expenditure proposal

prices for ship models
speed 1.1 elements
60 points Chamaran Destroyer. 54pts base+6pts speed
40 points Chamaran monitor. 36 pts base+4 pts speed

speed 1.2 elements
30 points Chamaran operations cruiser. 10 points base+6 points speed+7 points coms jammer+7 points interdictors.
20 points Chamaran frigate, 16 points base+4 speed
5 points Chamaran corvette, 2 points base +1 speed,+2 points sensor arrays




point buy

Racial advantages:
200 points, chamaran ground combat superiority, psycher tech and other stuff.
100 points, extragalactic entity, no real espionage beyond tossing probes, at the same time i'm unknown and somewhere just on the edge of the empire.
50 points, planetary pacification tech bonus, psychic hypnotic wave emmitter masts.
150 points, compact technology, i'm not sure if i need to pay for this but basically Chamaran equipment is just a bit smaller for a given level of effectiveness.

system defences 120 points

ships
240 points, four destroyers
360 points, nine monitors
180 points, six operation cruisers 4
500 points, twenty five frigates 9
100 points, twenty chamaran corvettes

disposition

First incursion fleet 220 points
eight frigates
six corvettes
one cruiser

second incursion fleet 220 points
eight frigates
six corvettes
one cruiser

First conquest fleet 460 points
two destroyers
four monitors
two cruisers
five frigates
four corvettes

Second conquest fleet 480 points
two destroyers
five monitors
two cruisers
four frigates
four corvettes

[Adrian Laguna]

I'm finding it somewhat odd that a "decent sized asteroid", by which I suppose they mean something like Ceres, 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, and 10 Hygiea on our own solar system, have 1/10th of the production of a full sized planet. Earth is four orders of magnitude more massive than those bodies and has two orders of magnitude more surface area than the largest one (Ceres, which is largest by far and a dwarf planet, not an asteroid). I suppose I can make allowances for game mechanics. However I think it's better for the definition of a Class 4 colony be changed from "big asteroid or space station" to "dwarf planet". And yes, a dwarf planet is smaller than Luna, Titan, or Mercury. Pluto is a fifth the mass of the first and a twentieth the mass of the last.

[Academia Nut]

That or a Class 4 colony could be defined as a series of asteroid mining colonies within a localized area, or we could say that actual industrial activity is not linearly related to the size of a colony, in that the lower-G environment makes it potentially easier to do certain processes, and the fact that you don't have to push your goods out of a gravity well makes up for it somewhat. But I agree, if the system doesn't really make sense, just change the fluff, it's not that big a deal.

[Covenant]

I'm making an OOB of a new race idea, and I'm thinking the stuff through--we never quite decided some of these functions. Is this still how it is? I've seen more than one scheme being used for ship design and that's a bad thing. I'm using my own naming scheme at the moment, but this is basically just hotfoots list from before with extra info and I thought that was cool with everyone. Tell me if this is wrong, if we have a new list, or if I have the right idea. I'm attempting to clarify an idea, not make a NEW one. I added some balance stuff... but only to clarify relationships. I'd rather stats remain stats, and RP remain RP. I think it's lame when people RP a technobabble of their foe's into a stat bonus, or minus, because the game is really not supposed to be that numerically complex.

Just to be clear, I'm just trying to clarify this list so we can all make our OOB's consistant in the ship-design catagory. I see people with +points to communication jamming and I think that's going to get messy to decide. A clear system would be better. You can then RP the way in which this is done anyway you please, and we always know what the counter and effect is.

Okay, I think this is a better balance, the way I set up a few things, because primarily these systems were a bit lopsided before, when you looked at what some of these things meant. Now it's much simpler and I think more reasonable. Everything is worth taking, and everything has a counter, and it's not a lousy counter either. And of course you can take nothing and do fine too, but it's just an interesting way of thinking of this stuff.

However, this is also depending on the idea that +bonus points to systems do not add to ship hitpoints or offensive firepower. I think that's something we all agreed on. Write your shipstats as Base(+Bonus) values so we know what their actual hitpoints are! You can hide what those bonuses are in your OOB, but make it clear when writing ships. A vessel with +8 to comms does not get extra guns and shielding automatically, that's just silly.

Also, I'd like to propose that Comm Speed be a racially purchased bonus. Comm Speed should be equal amongst all vessels--and we should use Comm Systems from the C3 stat as a determinor for how well you send and recieve messages in-combat. This makes it revelent even if you don't intend to relay play-by-plays back home, as now it also relates to how well you can communicate to far-flung squadrons or how well you can recieve new orders from newly-arriving reinforcements.

Anyway, tell me what you think. This might unify our stats better, get them all nicely linked, and make them easily RP-able to a degree they weren't before. Note, counters don't necessarily imply a one-for-one ratio, that's too mathy. I just meant that as a "This reduces This" for the purpose of deciding what you're able to do, or how to handle interactions, such as Hypers vs Interdicts and Defenses versus Offenses.

==========


(O) Improved Offenses: Otherwise known as active offenses, a wide catagory of superior weapons or weaponry systems such as improved Fire Control, Shieldbuster Weaponry or smarter Missiles.

• Countered By: Active Defenses
  Counters:
  Stat Bonus: Adds to ship-to-ship firepower for combat calculations.
  Balance Note: These can't counter defenses, as if they counter each other it gets messy. If someone has no Active Defenses, they'd just take heavier damage.

(D) Active Defenses: Operates as aggressive countermeasures to the above such as Point Defenses, Electronics Warfare and a variety of other defensive systems. Also messes with sensors for the same reason.

• Countered By: None, this is a Passive Effect (oddly)
  Counters: Improved Offenses, Sensors and Comms
  Stat Bonus: None, does not increase ship Hitpoints
  Balance Note: Active Defenses messing with comms is an idea that hotfoot's original list hinted towards, and I felt it was a good balance idea. It also gave defenses some relevence besides just countering Improved Offenses, if they existed just to counter each other, they become pretty useless.

(C3) Sensors and Comms: Governs how good your sensor nets and anti-Stealth equipment is, as well as providing benefits directly to the quality of your comms.

• Countered By: Active Defenses
  Counters: Stealth
  Stat Bonus: Higher Quality communication reception and transmission
  Balance Note: This is kinda an RP stat--I said elsewhere that Comm Speed should not be ship dependant, this should be used instead to coordinate fancy maneuvers, recall squadrons, or recieve new orders.

(I) Interdiction Gear: Interdiction gear messes with enemy hypersensors, drives mechanisms, or creates a variety of other conditions to keep vessels from escaping to Hyperspace for a longer duration.

• Countered By: Hyperdrives
  Counters: Hyperdrives
  Stat Bonus: None
  Special Note: Does this affect at all your ability to intercept an enemy fleet enroute? Is it possible to engage them in deep space using good Interdiction gear?

(H) Hyperdrives: Hyperdrive improvements either equal more or better transluminal drive components, better navcomputers or anything else that allows you to punch through Interdiction faster and travel more quickly in space.

• Countered By: Interdiction Gear
  Counters: Interdiction Gear
  Stat Bonus: Additional Strategic Movement speed
  Special Note: Does someone with good Hyperdrive technology have a better chance at evading Interdiction traps? Could they fly right through them, or fly around? Do they get to enter closer to a planet?

(S) Stealth Systems: Stealth equipment allows you to remain hidden from enemy sensors in some situations, and is primarily used to covertly position fleets and hide assets.

• Countered By: Sensors and Comms
  Counters: None
  Stat Bonus: Invisible Strategic Movement
  Balance Note: Stealth is pretty basic--it just makes you quiet. I didn't think it needed to do much besides that, since this is purely pre-combat.

==========


I also had a different question, what Aptitudes for racial points are available? I thought that we were going for a "ground forces are equal unless you buy more of them" sort of thing, how does that interact with bonus points to ground forces? I was hoping we weren't going to have such an orgy of racially buffed ground forces his time, and force people to purchase them instead.

Otherwise I propose we put our Racial Bonus on a 100 point cap, so that we have a clear multiplier for some of these things. Putting all 100 would make your forces twice as uber, instead of just nebulously "+500" points as strong.

[Academia Nut]

Looks good, although I still don't think we've properly quantified just what the hell active defences do. I don't know about other people, but here is how I envisioned them working:

Standard fight: However much damage is done that turn is distributed amongst your ships, which are damaged or destroyed by such things
Fight with active defences: Before your ships take damage, you subtract some amount related to how much active defence they have, representing shots missing or getting shot down or just bouncing harmlessly off your shields/armour because the angle was bad

Thus a ship with active defences can take a hell of a lot more pounding because it is hit definitively far less often. Perhaps we could say that ships with active defence can screen other ships, but only so well, say something like:

Friendly ships in a fleet may screen one another with their active defences, but there is a conservation of defence, so that if you have one ship with +10D and one with +0D, then you can redistribute the two as you see fit, but both don't get +10D. There could also be a cap on how much one ship could benefit from multiple sources, along the lines of the max benefit being the largest active defence rating + (1/10 all others, max tech cap). So if you have 100 points of active defence on several EW ships with 10D being the max, you can't stick all that defence on one dreadnought, you can stick 19 on it [10 + (100-10)/10]. Or, if you're like me and have 50 ships with 1D each, the max effect would be [1+(49)/10]=5.9=6. So I could have 8 ships with 6D, 2 with 1D (or 1 with 2), and 40 to 41 with 0D.

It's a bit more complicated, but it lets each player declare each round what exactly they're doing with their active defence, so you can get the choice to protect your big brick for a few turns but get your EW ships blown to hell and then lose everything later in the battle, or go for a more even distribution and suffer taking hits that you might have been able to completely stop if you had focused your defences. Of course, the guy doing the damage has the problem of deciding whether to try and punch through the defences around the target now or take out the defenders first. If say the enemy is trying to push a superweapon towards your homeworld, that might be an important choice as there is a certain time constraint there.

As for the racial bonuses, we could just say that each point provides a +1% improvement to whatever stat and thus if you dump all 500 into a single stat you're 6x better than normal at that one thing.

[Adrian Laguna]

Improved Offense and Active Defenses should counter each other. I don't see what's so messy about, say, +10 - +10 = 0

This is kinda an RP stat--I said elsewhere that Comm Speed should not be ship dependant, this should be used instead to coordinate fancy maneuvers, recall squadrons, or recieve new orders.

Unless your fleet is spread over several light-seconds, improved comms should not be needed to co-ordinate manoeuvres. Having ships shine lasers at each other is quick, unjammable, and uniterceptable. Unless we're going to be getting magic visible light jammers, that would have fun consequences.

[Darkevilme]

Curious, if a 50 point ships takes 10 points of active defence, Lucifer shield style, does that mean any opposing ship that costs less than ten points cant hurt it?

[Covenant]

Looks good, although I still don't think we've properly quantified just what the hell active defences do. I don't know about other people, but here is how I envisioned them working:

I dunno, that's all pretty complex. The idea of them being able to screen other people isn't so bad, but it's an awful lot of maths added into the mix. Weren't we going to keep these as simple as possible? Can we devise a much simpler, one-line explination of how to tally D's into a single aggregate Screening&EW score?

Pretty much their purpose is to give a big ship some extra screening against dedicated anti-bigship weapons (the Improved Offensives) that would normally allow them to be gutted way more easily than before, especially when confronted with hordes of frigates with +2O or something.

And then when not doing THAT job, they shouldn't reduce normal ship's offenses, that's really ultra lame. So having them provide a passive counter to improved sensors works well.

Improved Offense and Active Defenses should counter each other. I don't see what's so messy about, say, +10 - +10 = 0

It's unnecessary, and you didn't even do that in your math example anyway. (O) - (D) = Firepower works very simply, without the need to subtract it from both sides, you can just subtract D's from O's. O's don't need to reduce D's because of the way the math is done--it's a brainbug. ;p The O isn't reducing the D, afterall. It's just that we're only concerned about the O, so we subtract defenses from offenses, and we don't go into negatives either. It also keeps D's from being way too powerful, without the added confusion of people claiming their Supermissiles are somehow reducing the effect of an opponents Electronics Warfare package... which makes no sense and is the inevitable conclusion we draw.

As for the racial bonuses, we could just say that each point provides a +1% improvement to whatever stat and thus if you dump all 500 into a single stat you're 6x better than normal at that one thing.

That's kinda gross though--with such an amazingly huge possible advantage (six times as strong) aren't we going to end up with vastly disproportionate forces? That would REALLY throw off the 'buying ground forces' thing way, way off, since you're basically getting five extra men with each purchase. That's a ridiculously overpowered advantage, and unless some other racials are as useful, we're going to see everyone dropping half of their points into Ground Combat again.

Unless your fleet is spread over several light-seconds, improved comms should not be needed to co-ordinate manoeuvres. Having ships shine lasers at each other is quick, unjammable, and uniterceptable. Unless we're going to be getting magic visible light jammers, that would have fun consequences.

Obviously we have some sort of shielding capable of blocking lasers, so it's not impossible to imagine. However, improved comms being used for faster message speed is far less useful tactically and way less sensible strategically. I could simply have a +10 comms Courier Vessel in my fleet used for sending blazingly-fast messages back to base and get the entire benefit, whereas it would provide absolutely no benefit for each ship to have a 5 or so, since my one +10 message is going way freaking faster.

The command and control idea I provided does at least give the tech an in-battle usefulness and justify more than one retarded skiff per fleet having it. It's not like I need to send messages back home a lot in combat--with battles only lasting a few hours, it's not like there'd be enough time to request reinforcements anyway. The only way I can see of making the fleet-based communications upgrade viable--and not just cramming it onto a single ship for the bonus--is to have it play into people RPing complex, complicated maneuvers, changing targets mid-battle, and so on. Coordination stuff.

May not be extremely realistic but it's the most likely gameplay option that gives it a decent cost to benefit ratio.

Curious, if a 50 point ships takes 10 points of active defence, Lucifer shield style, does that mean any opposing ship that costs less than ten points cant hurt it?

This is why I don't like (+10O- +10D = 0) as a gameplay convention. If Defenses lower someone's non-improved Offenses, then you basically negate all small ships with a piddling +5D, and that sucks almighty balls, doesn't it?

This is why I say that Defenses only counter Improved Offenses (ie, only reduce those) and not normal Offenses, so that someone with +10 doesn't become immune to other people's guns.

People may cry and say "Then what's the point?" Thankfully hotfoot combined Defenses and Electronics Warfare, so the point is--even against a ship without extra Improved Offenses, your Defenses provide an anti-sensor boost, which is useful for all sorts of things, including justifying a little less damage taken (due to sensor scramming).

But if we make D's block non-improved ship offenses, it's essentially just a damage tax to ruin the effects of small ships, which are already taking severe damage due to the lossy nature of swarm combat.

So that's why I made the O's and D's interact the way they are. It avoids problems, and keeps everything relevent.

[Adrian Laguna]

Curious, if a 50 point ships takes 10 points of active defence, Lucifer shield style, does that mean any opposing ship that costs less than ten points cant hurt it?

No, it means that ten points of opposing ships can't hurt it. Fleets act as wholes, not as multiple individual combats where pairs of ships are compared without any regard for context. If the enemy is countering with 5 10 pointers it's an even fight. Depending on other factors it could go either way, with the balance of power being against the 50 pointer overall. If the enemy brought along 6 cruisers, the battleship is SOL and dead. If it's just a cruiser against a battleship, then the bigger one was going to win anyway. In fact, that battle will last longer where it's 40+10D vs. 10 than when it's 50 vs. 10, because the whole 50 will have five times the firepower over the cruiser rather than the 40+10D's four time advantage.


By extension, your 50 point ship with 10 points of active defence would be murdered by a fleet of 100 piddly 1pt corvettes.

Obviously we have some sort of shielding capable of blocking lasers, so it's not impossible to imagine.

Lasers are visible light, the fact that we can see out when the shields are up indicates some sort of discrimination regarding intensity. If the comms laser isn't strong enough to damage the ship, it will get through.

The only way I can see of making the fleet-based communications upgrade viable--and not just cramming it onto a single ship for the bonus--is to have it play into people RPing complex, complicated maneuvers, changing targets mid-battle, and so on. Coordination stuff.

I suppose, but having it really shouldn't provide much of an advantage. Like I said, you can just have ships shine comms lasers at each other. Even if the other element of the fleet is one or two dozen ls away, the delay is very much irrelevant when you have battles lasting for hours.

May not be extremely realistic but it's the most likely gameplay option that gives it a decent cost to benefit ratio.

Or maybe we could drop it. On the other hand, having dedicated C3 ships doesn't sound so bad.

Curious, if a 50 point ships takes 10 points of active defence, Lucifer shield style, does that mean any opposing ship that costs less than ten points cant hurt it?

This is why I don't like (+10O- +10D = 0) as a gameplay convention. If Defenses lower someone's non-improved Offenses, then you basically negate all small ships with a piddling +5D, and that sucks almighty balls, doesn't it?

It negates all small ships if the enemy is stupid enough to send them one at a time.

So that's why I made the O's and D's interact the way they are. It avoids problems, and keeps everything relevent.

I think you made things too complicated and missed the obvious solution.

[Covenant]

No, it means that ten points of opposing ships can't hurt it. Fleets act as wholes, not as multiple individual combats where pairs of ships are compared without any regard for context.

Well, in that situation, you're basically just going to end up adding up all the defenses and ignoring that amount of attack power. Honestly, why is that worth the point cost? It's not. Instead of reducing my offense by 10 points, you could absorb 10 points of damage while also dealing 10 points back if you had just purchased an actual 10 point ship.

Otherwise it's really pretty worthless. If it only works on the ship it's equipped on, and does nothing besides lower attack stats, then it's less useful than hitpoints. Why should a 40+10 ship ever be a 40+10 ship? So it can negate 10 points of enemy offense, turning a 40 point attacker into a 30 point attacker?

Big deal. If you had made that 50 point cost vessel a 50 point ship instead of a 40+10 pointer you could have survived anyway (with the same hitpoint total left over) and done 10 more damage as well, killing an enemy cruiser. It's not useful to do it the way you're proposing.

Lasers are visible light, the fact that we can see out when the shields are up indicates some sort of discrimination regarding intensity. If the comms laser isn't strong enough to damage the ship, it will get through.

Who says all our ships have shields that permit light? It's possible they don't. Regardless, this isn't a technobabble debate, but a game balance one. Honestly, either we should dump the idea of communication jamming entirely or we should make it have a function. And there's no concievable advantage to placing a long-distance call back home if battles are so sort and hyperdrives slow enough to make sure no help will be coming that wasn't coming in the first place anyway.

Or maybe we could drop it. On the other hand, having dedicated C3 ships doesn't sound so bad.

Dedicated C3 ships add nothing to the game. It will make it so the only useful C3 ship is one with 10 points of C3, so it's hardly even worth making into an upgrade catagory, and would fall under the 'assumed level of competancy' that all ships have. If we're going to make it an upgradeable characteristic, it should have a function. And if people are so horny at the idea of having comm-jammers and ECM packages, maybe we should make sensors and comms worth jamming.

And the simplest way to do that is to give them a function, such as maneuver, targetting, and other 'mission order' roleplay functions.

[Academia Nut]

The primary advantage of active defences would be that they stop damage dead, which means that while they are somewhat less useful tactically, but strategically and logistically they're probably worth it. Why? Because your ships will be less damaged at the end of battle, or even will have failed to have been destroyed. So instead of having to pull your ships back for repairs or wait for the end of the turn for replacements to be built, you can keep them active and fighting. Also, tactically, active defences are probably more useful in long fights in that your ships will lose effectiveness due to damage more slowly so they have more staying power.

I suggested the somewhat more complex rules for screening other ships because the simplest method already annoyed people. The simplest method is that you take all the points in your active defence, add them up, and that is the amount of damage you subtract (down to 0 obviously) from that turn. Thus active defence and improved offence cancel out by default as the extra damage simply cuts through the defence. The problem with this is that if you have 50 ships with 1 point base and 1 point active defence, they will be able to completely assrape a 50 point dreadnought because they won't take a lick of damage. Admittedly, it's a 100 point fleet vs a 50 point ship, but someone is going to complain about that, so some sort of limitation is needed.

As for the whole dumping 500 points into ground combat thing, true, it is a problem now that we are not drawing racial points and ship points from a common pool. I suppose we could reign that in a bit with mandatory purchases of certain things (the barbarian tag I suggested being one of them), and maybe a cap of say 300 points on anything other than a technology or Imperial-sized shipyard.

[Covenant]

Yeah, but for the reasons you already stated, a "stops damage dead" policy is a bad one, as it leads to illogical "lockout" scenarios where ships can block big freakin' heaps of enemy damage in ways that seem illogical and possibly in defiance of the rules.

For example if the 50 point dread wanted to fire on 20 targets instead of 50, would each target take slightly more than 2 damage, and thus be destroyed? Or would the screening fire allow the entire 50 unit force to absorb the entire volley of fire, despite the fact that only 20 of them are the actual targets? Would I be able to purchase lots of 5+10D point vessels and use their total +D value to screen my entire fleet from that degree of damage?

And then, for example, what's the purpose of Improved Offenses? If it's just bonus damage to be negated by Active Defenses, then doesn't that make +O less useful per point than actual shipweight?

I think it gets messy. My way may not be the most concise method (lowers Improved Offenses, fucks up C3 sensors) but it seems to be the most internally consistant and it has the least problematic conclusions drawn.

My system would look similar, mind you. You'd take the attacker and tally his +O and subtract it by the +D of the ships he is engaging to come out with the Adjusted Firepower Rating, which would be taken into consideration when RPing losses. The +D of the defending vessels would also automatically lower your sensor ratings too, but unless this action involved some fancy maneuvering I can't imagine it having that huge of an effect. I suppose if he had freaking huge defenses it might really ruin your sensors and you'd be unable to correctly target ships, leading to a lower-than-average kill rate.

I don't think you can safely apply Defenses to counter-damage AND ALSO apply them to fleetwide bonuses without causing ugly values. If we're doing it the way we discussed before (with ships doing a fractional value of their total cost, rather than their total cost, worth of damage) then that would lead to ridiculous turtle displays of lots of 1+9D vessels creating huge walls of impassable defense due to the -5000 damage penalties they would assign the enemy fleet. The only counter to such a force would be an equally hideous fleet of 1+10O just to get enough actual damage in there to start killing the enemy.

As for the whole dumping 500 points into ground combat thing, true, it is a problem now that we are not drawing racial points and ship points from a common pool. I suppose we could reign that in a bit with mandatory purchases of certain things (the barbarian tag I suggested being one of them), and maybe a cap of say 300 points on anything other than a technology or Imperial-sized shipyard.

Really, it's just an issue that you spend 300 points now on it, which is a bunch, but for the rest of the game your troops fight as hard as four times their number--which, when you end up fighting battles across several worlds, forces your enemy to spend a lot of time and money doing the rather unusual thing of actually purchasing and ferrying around troops in huge numbers just to seize a world while yours are busily pacifying his forces with nearly Spartan effectiveness.

I have no issue whatsoever with allowing people to sink ALL their points into ground combat, just with the runaway effectiveness of it. Basically, anytime someone is besieging your world, you're 90 percent fucked already--but if someone with 500 points into ground forces sieges you, the complete and utter ruination of everything terrestrial is assured the way we do it now.

And given that most racials are, so far, pretty worthless... the ability to spend less and get more out of 'free' militaries is pretty potent. If someone needs to buy an army eight times larger than their 'free' military forces just to seize a world from you, it might be a lot more clear an advantage than, say, slightly better comms or a minorly better repair speed for those ships lucky enough to limp away.

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Regardless, it's good we're hammering out these values now rather than later when we're all emotionally invested in our fleets.