STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

[Rogue 9]

And if you send a cruiser to annihilate a planet with a proper defense fleet, that cruiser will die.

Why does it have to be that way?

I'm challenging the status quo I know, but when was the last awesome STGOD? I heard STGOD4, and how long ago was that?

Actually, STGOD4 wasn't all that awesome. It wasn't bad, until the end anyway, but it wasn't exactly great. The game-long occupation I was relating earlier? STGOD4. But to answer your question it was in 2004.

Anyway, if ships are so hard to destroy and production so easy to nuke, then for the last time everyone with half a brain will keep his fleet home so as to outnumber raiders by enough to destroy them before they do significant damage. Having planets be able to hold out for some time reduces pressure to keep the fleets at home.

[brianeyci]

Maybe if I outline the entire idea in my mind it will have more support, quantatively rather than qualtatively. It is pretty simple, and the numbers are subject to change based on how fast or how slow a game people want.

Honestly I find the idea of "turns" very cumbersome. Things should be based on posts, not turns. The only problem is I can't figure out what would be a good way to assign production besides turns.

• Every player is assigned a unique number from one to twenty (if there's twenty players). This is their "hyperspace" number or something, or location number.
• If player A is number 5 and player B is number 7, it takes two posts to get from A to B. Two of his posts, so he can write stories about other things in the meanwhile.
• When A arrives, the attacker can destroy a chunk of the defender's point production. This chunk can be say, 1 point for every 100 points in the attacker's armada, or 2 or 3 or whatever. This happens with one post, a dramatic exciting attack that's unanticipated. The attacker can also decide to stay, or retreat. In order to prevent "moronic attack" there could be a cap of maximum say, 2 points of damage, or 5 points of damage, or ten points, or whatever, regardless of number of ships.
• The defender responds with a post saying how many ships he will commit to the chase or defense.
• Over the course of 7 - 5 = 2 posts each for both sides, they RP the running fight and the great space battle happening. For each post, the attacker who is now retreating loses some ships. Perhaps for each post, 10% of the ships times some multiplier related to the numbers.

This way it would encourage splitting up of fleets, and an aggressor could conceivably handle several empires at once.

The only way you can damage a world is if no one is home. If worlds are easy targets, then guess what? Everyone will be at home and that's just a lame way to spend a Friday night.

Easy solution: cap to maximum damage. Also make defenses leaky.

Honestly the reason for strong planetary defenses does not encourage aggression at all. If it takes ten to one, then if someone hides their entire fleet at home all the time, it will take two or three players to defeat him. No wonder STGODS eventually sputter out, people just get bored and don't want to play the metagame or the metagame happens and there's two huge blocs of empires because that's the only logical way to defend yourself.

Having planets be able to hold out for some time reduces pressure to keep the fleets at home.

It does not speed up the game though, or even encourage aggression, because a person can keep his entire fleet at home, confident that it will take two or more empires to kill his fleet AND take over his planet. And then the logical result is two mega empires, since everybody will have to team up to be aggressors, and the renegade is never a danger. Why shouldn't the renegade be a danger? He can be, if point production is easy to destroy and ships are hard to annihilate.

[Crossroads Inc.]

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Every player is assigned a unique number from one to twenty (if there's twenty players). This is their "hyperspace" number or something, or location number.
If player A is number 5 and player B is number 7, it takes two posts to get from A to B. Two of his posts, so he can write stories about other things in the meanwhile.

I just want to say, I REALLY like this method of laying out a map. Not only does it randomize things, it sets out exact distances from one another.

[Covenant]

Brian, I really don't think you've got the right picture in your head about how this works.

Strong planetary defenses do not equate into weapon platforms capable of killing enemy ships that arrive in-system. Never has. These are defensive systems for the surface--not planetary space shields or planetary weapon satellites and shit. You can't 'wall up' behind your world, since your fleet gains zero benefit from being above a shielded world.

All that'd happen is every other world is gutted horribly, your last world (which produces no more 'money' for you than any of your other previous colonies) quivers in terror as the other worlds are sliced to death, and then the massive bloated warfleet that's been feeding off the spoils of the uncontested conquest arrives on your world, erases your last remaining fleet, and then smashes the planet to dust.

Really, strong defenses mean you can afford to occasionally pull your forces away for an attack. Without it, we got no game.

[Academia Nut]

STGODs are not based on posts, because a single battle with multiple nations present can easily take 20 posts, if not a hundred. Turns are merely a block of time to represent when new production rolls out, everything else is assumed to take as much time as it needs to take.

And you're just not getting it. You never, ever, ever get to declare your own damage. Do you think that when early warning sensors pick up your incoming raiders the defenders are going to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs until after your fire your city busting salvo? No, they're going to rush out and punch you in the face before your ships are even in range of his world.

I say it again, you can only damage a world when nobody is home. Their are two ways of doing this: catch them while they visiting someone else, or kill everyone who was home in the first place. If you try and make a kamikaze run to damage infrastructure, expect Charge of the Light Brigade poems to be written about you afterwards. Congratulations, you just went through a shooting gallery to fire a couple of nukes that got shot down. Very brave. Very noble. Very stupid.

[brianeyci]

Brian, I really don't think you've got the right picture in your head about how this works.

Strong planetary defenses do not equate into weapon platforms. Never has. These are defensive shields on the surface--not planetary space shields or planetary weapon satellites and shit. You can't 'wall up' behind your world, since your fleet gains zero benefit from being above a shielded world.

But it takes two guys or more to reliably destroy another player's production before the game is over, especially at a 10 to 1 ratio. Or even touch it. I know STGODS are supposed to be simplified compared to wargames, but come on. Defenses can be leaky, ambushes should happen, first strikes should be rewarded. If defenses are NOT leaky, first strikers get no bonus other than the 150 point bonus to start, which is not enough to encourage aggression.

All that'd happen is every other world is gutted horribly, your last world (which produces no more 'money' for you than any of your other previous colonies) quivers in terror as the other worlds are sliced to death, and then the massive bloated warfleet that's been feeding off the spoils of the uncontested conquest arrives on your world, erases your last remaining fleet, and then smashes the planet to dust.

Really, strong defenses mean you can afford to occasionally pull your forces away for an attack. Without it, we got no game.

I disagree. It's called leaky defenses, and staged retreats. If defenses are weak, it will intrinsically encourage attacks. This is basic logic: the stronger defenses are, the less attacks are encouraged. Even if defenses cannot destroy the attacker, it will still take two or more players to destroy a 10 to 1 advantage and make a planet productive. "Strong" does not just mean ability for defense to hit back: it means how long the defenses last. If they last a long time, it discourages aggression and I don't see how you can't think otherwise.

I say it again, you can only damage a world when nobody is home.

I say it again: why not justify this except by saying it over and over? If someone is proposing leaky defenses, maybe you could rebuttal with a reason why leaky defenses suck, rather than keep repeating that defenses are solid.

[Rogue 9]

Leaky defenses suck because if a reasonably sized defense fleet is leaky, people will just keep more ships at home to make it less leaky. Fucking duh. Just keep more and more of the fleet in orbit until there's no attack vectors that aren't in broadside range of somebody or other. Which actively prevents aggression, since if planets are so weak, then pulling your fleet to go on the offensive is suicidal.

[Covenant]

It rapidly gets to the point where you can't afford to send a fleet anywhere, because as soon as you do, your planets will have been obliterated before you can get back to defend your worlds. It's the Bangbus again.

And seriously, don't be intentionally dense. 10 to 1 odds are extremely easy numbers achieve, are you joking? After I obliterate your last fleet, I just spend a little cash on investing in some ground invaders, drop them down, and bam. If I'm a cheap bastard I can always reduce a 10 point planet to a 5 point one to make it easier to invade. That's what happens when you bomb the shit out of a planet, afterall. You're reducing it's point value to lower it's automatic defensive value as well.

Basically, once you have no more fleets, it's only a matter of time before I conquer your worlds. And since you can't land your ships behind the planetary shields, you can't hide them. Abandoning your worlds will quickly ruin even a hidey hidey fleet due to upkeep requirements.

[brianeyci]

Not if ships are tough and they're allowed to hit and run with pinpoint strikes. If the ships are tough enough, they can attack and leave and lose some before getting home, and it could be a good trade off. If ships are so fucking tough that even a small fleet can last a relatively long time against a long fleet, well then great power to the attacker.

Ultimately people are afraid to attack because they will lose ships. Make ships very hard to die, no duh, so they aren't as easily lost so people use them more. This is rather obvious, I can't believe it hasn't occured to anybody before?

Leaky defenses do not suck: if people keep more ships at home, the guy could come in, do damage, then retreat and lose a bit of ships, rather than one decisive engagement. Make it impossible to defend all vectors by fiat: this can happen due to technology. Tons of examples in science fiction makes this possible: like in Battlestar Galactica latest season, where the Galactica and Pegasus do a pinpoint jump into the atmosphere and save tens of thousands of colonists. Defend every attack vector doesn't have to happen if the technology for jump drives is good enough.

[brianeyci]

It rapidly gets to the point where you can't afford to send a fleet anywhere, because as soon as you do, your planets will have been obliterated before you can get back to defend your worlds. It's the Bangbus again.

And seriously, don't be intentionally dense. 10 to 1 odds are extremely easy numbers achieve, are you joking? After I obliterate your last fleet, I just spend a little cash on investing in some ground invaders, drop them down, and bam. If I'm a cheap bastard I can always reduce a 10 point planet to a 5 point one to make it easier to invade. That's what happens when you bomb the shit out of a planet, afterall. You're reducing it's point value to lower it's automatic defensive value as well.

Basically, once you have no more fleets, it's only a matter of time before I conquer your worlds. And since you can't land your ships behind the planetary shields, you can't hide them. Abandoning your worlds will quickly ruin even a hidey hidey fleet due to upkeep requirements.

Are planets tough or are they not tough?

Are they good enough to last without a fleet in orbit or are they not good enough?

You guys seem to want to have it both ways, which baffles me. If you want planets conquerable by fleets, then you don't get the advantage you guys propose allowing flexibility in fleet attack. If you want planets unconquerable by fleets, then what I say does happen, difficult to conquer a planet. This mixture is my confusion, because you're pointing to advantages of both strong and weak planets.

It rapidly gets to the point where you can't afford to send a fleet anywhere, because as soon as you do, your planets will have been obliterated before you can get back to defend your worlds. It's the Bangbus again.

Not if defenses are leaky, and there is a cap of maximum damage per turn/per post.

You guys seem to be ignoring my rebuttals to your suggestions with tradition: fine, I do not particularly care since I am a newcomer. I will play it your way, of course.

[Covenant]

You're still doing it wrong. This is your "How I Shot Web?" moment. People aren't afraid of losing ships--you already have an unoffical ship cap, and you just get more next month. It behooves you to spend ships liberally because it frees up points th at would have gone into upkeep going into new ship production, but regardless, no, we're not afraid of losing ships.

We're afraid of losing worlds. It's never occured to anyone else because it's a ridiculous proposition. Make all ships hard to destroy so that people aren't afraid to commit them to combat? What? How does that make sense? It just means that combat will take LONGER before anything is accomplished, and that you're more likely to end up with everyone staying home on two or three favorite fortress worlds to keep their factories running. This plan ends in COMPLETE RUIN because it can end in no other way.

A gankerfleet could get in there, do damage, whack a world, and get back to what? For what? Wouldn't the gankee just return the favor? So now nobody has money, but does have all their fleets. Dumb.

Fleets conquer planets but it takes a while. Fleets do not fly in and bitchslap a heavily defended world. That is bad mechanics and it makes no sense internally either. Planets are heavily defensible but if they have no fleet, they have no guns. Even a giant wad of defense can get whittled down.

[Rogue 9]

Brian, you're being stupid. Planets are conquerable by fleets; the process just isn't instantaneous. What part of that is hard to understand?

[Academia Nut]

This is why I suggested that when your fleet can equal half the defences of a world, you can start landing troops. The absolute best defences a world can have is 1000, which makes them pretty much proof against any single nation for bombardment, but a 500 point fleet that gains orbital control can start dropping troops, which if we keep them cheap will make them a much more effective method of taking a world.

Besides, hitting the strongest point is not how you conduct a campaign. First you pick off the smaller, less well defended worlds, growing your own industrial capacity while shrinking your opponent's, until finally, when he's sitting behind his fortifications, his fleets having been knocked from the sky, you crush him utterly.

Oh, and brian, a hit and run fleet would be fucked if they don't defend their world. If you can't pay for upkeep, your ships are gone. You are forced to scrap them at the end of the turn if you can't pay for them. If you lose too many worlds, even if you preserved your full starting fleet, then it is gone just as effectively as if it were lost in battle. Moreso, because the enemy probably took your worlds at little cost.

[brianeyci]

Sure it is: star destroyer warps into orbit, orders planet to surrender or else cities get glassed. It seems very straightforward to me.

Gank makes the renegade very, very dangerous, and MAD a real possibility even with large alliances. Nobody is safe. Fleets can live to fight on, even though their homeworlds have been captured or devastated. The renegade Admiral can commit his remaning forces to someone else's planets, and go with them to liberate or destroy for revenge.

I will obviously play it your way, since it is your guys game, but we'll see.

If you can't pay for upkeep, your ships are gone. You are forced to scrap them at the end of the turn if you can't pay for them.

Honestly upkeep to me is a very bad idea and makes the game too complicated. But we'll see. Ships should be self-sufficient islands, able to continue fighting no matter what, even when their support base is destroyed, for many months/years. Real navy warships can do this. But we'll go with your guys way: I am interested in seeing how it plays out.

[Covenant]

Sure it is: star destroyer warps into orbit, orders planet to surrender or else cities get glassed. It seems very straightforward to me.

Gank makes the renegade very, very dangerous, and MAD a real possibility even with large alliances. Nobody is safe. Fleets can live to fight on, even though their homeworlds have been captured or devastated. The renegade Admiral can commit his remaning forces to someone else's planets, and go with them to liberate or destroy for revenge.

I will obviously play it your way, since it is your guys game, but we'll see.

Honestly, did you just do that? You used a Star Wars reference for support against needing a massive fleet and a huge invasion force, and FOR single-ship bombardment? This from the movie that brought us the idea that a single planet could carry enough shielding that you needed a gun platform the size of a planetoid just to smite those frustrating enough to actually use such shields, that or land troops?

Come on now. No, that's retarded. You wanna glass their bigass superworld? Bring a full-size warfleet. You wanna do things the less dramatic way? Land some troops. You'll have plenty of small planetoids to whack with smaller fleets. Gnaw on those before crying that you can't kamikaze a cruiser and take out Coruscant.

[Academia Nut]

For the love of fucking God!

You can't just drop your warships right into orbit and demand a surrender! The only way you can put warships in orbit without any opposite is if you catch your opponent off balance! The best way to do that is to wait for the guy go launch his own fleets at someone else. Thus aggressors and first strikers get ganked. I've only played once, but it happens every fucking time!

By making planets stronger, we encourage people to risk their primary defensive capacities, namely their fleets, on attacks. That way some jackass with a couple destroyers doesn't show up in orbit and demand a surrender. There is time to mount a response instead of "You all die".

Also, if you don't like how strong planets are, guess what? Waaaaay back I suggested a seige addition to ships that has been largely ignored. The point of that is to make ships better at attacking planets but suck against ships, to make planet cracking easier.

[brianeyci]

Outer rim worlds can still get destroyed. I used a Star Wars reference because it was the first thing in my mind with the picture of a Star Destroyer plastered in front of me, not that I want this to be like Star Wars. Maybe I should have mentioned Star Trek, would you be happy then?

Another example is in Babylon 5 when White Stars opened pinpoint wormholes around Mars to take out turrets, and plenty of other examples where firepower utterly outclasses defense or pinpoint strikes and retreats are possible. A single Star Trek ship is more than enough to destroy a world's entire industrial capacity.

We will see how it actually works out: this has made me decide to be evil and the aggressor, and see how it actually works. We will see how the aggression works, if it works as you bill I will have sex with you.

[Covenant]

No, because even in Star Trek, massive orbital bombardment phails, and you need Ultra Super Hardcore TWO FUCKING NATION uberfleets to bombard a planet to death before they get utterly assraped, and even then it was a trap anyway. Got that? TWO NATIONS. That's more than a single ISD. The only times a single star-trek ship is enough to wipe out a world is when they're dealing with idiotic primitives who don't even have a starfleet of their own.

I don't want your sex or a snide attitude, just look at the math. If you MUST leave forces home to defend from even a tiny, tiny fleet then there's no way for an aggressor to ever win a conflict. He'd be taken out by a neighbor during the first campaign, and then that guy would get taken out by someone else, and so on...

...and knowing this, people form alliances to keep that from happening. And soon you get half the people on one alliance so that there's no way they can lose, and suddenly everyone else becomes irrelevent and then you have last game and that's bad.

And about the outer rim example, Tatooine is not a 10 point planet. It's more like a 3. You wanna blow up a planet without breaking a sweat? That's fine--you just can't expect to do it to the largest and most industrialized ones. Like I said, go target his 1's, 2's, and 3's before you go waste his main capitol. Is that so hard to imagine?

[Academia Nut]

Which is what we've been telling you all along! Don't hit the fortress world first, hit the ones on the periphery of a nation. A world's defences are limited by its size.

Class 1 - 100 points max invested - 1000 points max defence
Class 2- 50 points max invested - 500 points max defence
Class 3 - 30 points max invested - 300 points max defence
Class 4 - 10 points max invested - 100 points max defence

As you can clearly see, even the best defended Class 2 is easily within a single nation's strike capacity, and with a fleet worth 250, less than the 375 points you can safely risk a turn, you can start landing troops to take the world and add its production to your own.

Defence encourages aggression in the real world too! When you have a feeling of superiority, that you can hit someone and not worry about being hit back, it encourages you to hit people more often.

[brianeyci]

Massive orbital bombardment in Star Trek doesn't happen, because people are afraid to shit about guys unleashing the same crap on them so they are loathe to use force. Plus they're pussies. You never heard of General Order 24? You don't need a massive uber fleet in Star Trek: it just doesn't happen a lot, even though they have the capability. That wouldn't happen here.

My attitude was not "snide" and not intended to be. There is no math: there is only the way people prefer to play. I already answered the "must leave ships behind" over and over three times now: an aggressor would split his fleet into ten parts and go and inflict massive damage, and perhaps so would everybody. Ganker can work, and it will result in an utterly devastated galaxy with perhaps only a couple civilizations left alive at the end. But if you guys don't like that idea, then fine.

I didn't expect such a reationary attitude to such obvious suggestions. That's all they were, suggestions.

[Covenant]

GO24? I mentioned that in my post. Yes, I could glass a world with the Enterprise when I'm dealing with a bunch of people in mud huts without anti-space weapons. They never said how long it'd take, but that's a subject for a different forum. Within our game, however, that'd be a class 4 world, or a 1 point world, whichever way you count it.

The reason we don't like it is that it favors the guy who wants to be a lame jerkass sonofabitch who sits home and turtles while the galaxy burns, and then when the fun-loving idiots are all burned out, he'll come out to clean up the mess.

[Spyder]

Maybe we need a system of aggression points with bonuses for alliance backstabbing.

[Academia Nut]

I'm not sure whether or not you were being sarcastic about the recent proclivity in this game for the propogation of different kinds of points, Spyder, but yeah, I think aggression points are probably going a bit too far.

That said, I am all for mods rewarding aggressive nations with caches of Imperial technology. If you are consistently moving about and conquering (or at least trying to conquer) things, then you are more likely to find things forgotten in the collapse. Space is pretty big, who knows where an abandoned Imperial warship or science station might be?

[Covenant]

Maybe we need a system of aggression points with bonuses for alliance backstabbing.

I wouldn't like that at all. It'd cut down on alliances, sure, but backstabbing is already profitable--removing a potential foe while they're out fighting your war. I'd hate to make it even MORE profitable.

Oh, if it was a joke, then I gotta admit you got me. -__-

I dislike always calling for new points rules, etc, but we've never seen an honor system working out well for a lot of this. If it was collaborative it might, but people are actively fighting against each other. Without numbers to be impartial for us, rarely would folks ever agree on how many ships their fleet loses.

[Covenant]

edited out for a more complete new pose