STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

Spyder · Post by **Spyder** » 2007-12-02 03:18am

As always, my suggestions are as serious as they are received

. Just kicking around random ideas here, it's probably to late to work into this STGOD but one thing that might have been neat would have been to have a 30 day 'qualifying round'. Basically everyone gets 1,000 points and thirty days to cause as much mayhem as possible and carve out an empire for themselves. Points are then redistributed based on the political situation after 30 days.

Crossroads Inc. · Post by **Crossroads Inc.** » 2007-12-02 04:11am

Spyder wrote:As always, my suggestions are as serious as they are received . Just kicking around random ideas here, it's probably to late to work into this STGOD but one thing that might have been neat would have been to have a 30 day 'qualifying round'. Basically everyone gets 1,000 points and thirty days to cause as much mayhem as possible and carve out an empire for themselves. Points are then redistributed based on the political situation after 30 days.

I Approve this Idea!!!

Darkevilme · Post by **Darkevilme** » 2007-12-02 04:14am

Yes but who are we going to kick the shit out of exactly? who are the adversaries in this? if it's eachother this sounds like just starting the game and then arbitrarily calling half time and updating OOB's.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-12-02 04:57am

I had a few MORE questions so I just added my old stuff here:

Stealth:
Can anyone tell me how stealth works? What's 1 point get me? What's 10 get? Is a 1+10S ship stealthed just as well as a 40+10S? Does stealth count for an entire fleet (allowing us to mix a fleet of stealth and non-stealth so long as we have enough 1+10S stealth generator frigates) or solely for the vessel it's on? If so...

Sensors:
...then can one +10 ship see as many stealthed vessels as you have (meaning it can see ships that are equal or below it's scan capacity), or can it only counter 10 points of stealth? Like, one +10S or ten +1S? And did we ever agree to give it some sort of C3 benefit as well? I want to know if these sensor points I'm investing in are worthless, or if I may potentially need to defend them really well.

Interdiction:
Is it possible to set up interdictors away from your planet to force them out of hyper in dead space? There's SOME advantage to this, best of all for piracy, but I wanted to see if it forced people out as well as making them take longer to re-engage. Do interdiction levels stack? Like if I had three +10 ships, you'd take like an extra month to escape? Or are extra ships just 'backup', allowing you to keep the field running incase they detonate the first interdictor?

Planetbusters:
Also, are we still allowing 100 point one-shot planetbuster weapons? I assumed we were. Possibly only for non-Barbarians, or only with a specific aptitude?

Ship Size:
Are we allowed to build vessels larger than 50? DarkEvil's OOB contained a 60 point vessel--and Hotfoot's early post on the subject was a bit vague. I'm making my OOB--should I be considering 50 the ceiling, like last game? I am, currently. Weren't advanced shipyards a cache tech, or a racial one? Did we decide on costs for such upgrades?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2007-12-02 06:28am

If it's higher than 50 I am thinking of going all the way up to one hundred for my Empire's theme, which will be seriously revised and rewritten.

I wouldn't even mind a two hundred point orbital acropolis. I know, above 50 points don't necessarily have to scale 1 for 1, but I don't care: very large ships is my theme.

I need to rewrite my fleet for combined arms operation, not just some silly piece of shit I put together at 5 in the morning.

Darkevilme · Post by **Darkevilme** » 2007-12-02 11:00am

I thought 60 was the limit for some reason. But then if it isnt i'll pay racial points to buy an extra ten points of ship building size cap. I also was under the impression that Cache tech if you started with it was bought using racial points as well, with the decent sized shipyards capable of building 100 pointers taking most of your budget. Personally i think it's simple for shipyard cap to be a ten to one deal, spend ten points and boost your max ship size by one.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2007-12-02 01:25pm

I think a 10:1 ratio for increasing ship sizes beyond 50 seems like a good idea, because it means that it will cost all 500 points to get to 100. Additionally, you should have to declare where this shipyard is, so that it can be captured by enemy forces. If you get something as awesome as a 100 point murder-ship, then you deserve to get a big fucking target painted on you for it.

Darkevilme · Post by **Darkevilme** » 2007-12-02 01:38pm

I was under the impression that Brianeyci 'cording to his current OOB cant so much build battlemoons as started off with twelve, decommissioned eight or so and uses the remainder. So he's not got a shipyard so much as the ability to have up to twelve of these battlemonsters as that's how many hulls he's got. As for the Chamaran's, i dont suppose i could just spread it out and say any of the motherships can build a 60 point ship, they're all in the same system so they're unlikely to be captured individually for long periods.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2007-12-02 03:27pm

I suppose we could say that if you want to build bigger ships without buying the production facilities, you would have to buy the extra points from your racial attributes, along with the initial purchase. So if you get ten 100 point ships without buying the production facilities, then it costs 1000 points from your ship pool and 500 attribute points for the overflow, although at this point it would have been smarter to just buy the damn shipyard. Or I suppose you could theoretically buy a single 450 point behemoth, but expect everyone and their dog to attack you and try and take that mother.

Darkevilme · Post by **Darkevilme** » 2007-12-02 03:31pm

There's not a whole lot of difference honestly between stealable immobile battlemoon hulls and stealable immobile shipyards. If Brianeyci has to pay the full 100 point cost per moon to get them operational again then it just means he has a limit on how many superships he can have. A limit he'll probably never reach as its 1200 points for the full fleet of battlemoons of ultimate doom.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-12-02 03:37pm

Academia Nut wrote:I suppose we could say that if you want to build bigger ships without buying the production facilities, you would have to buy the extra points from your racial attributes, along with the initial purchase. So if you get ten 100 point ships without buying the production facilities, then it costs 1000 points from your ship pool and 500 attribute points for the overflow, although at this point it would have been smarter to just buy the damn shipyard. Or I suppose you could theoretically buy a single 450 point behemoth, but expect everyone and their dog to attack you and try and take that mother.

Extra points for Motherships seems dangerous. Our current rules are pretty good as-is, nobody really needs a massive supership the same power and durability as an entire heavy fleet group (which can be repaired as a single unit too).

The special shipyards are good enough for that stuff, and they're better for your money.

Any answers for the other questions? Isn't there some STGOD precedent for those?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2007-12-02 04:36pm

Or you could go the other way. Say that 100 points means you have less flexibility, and over 50 points moderators don't have to consider a fight point for point anymore because of the ridiculousness of the size. This was how it was done last STGOD if I remember correctly.

I thought about it last night and one hundred point one shot wonders seems lame-o for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it's probably because anybody and everybody will have the things and go for the gank but it makes it metagame almost a necessity to have one of these. You will get 600 points a turn, so you can always make more ships, but the one-shot wonders you need to start out with if I got it right, and anybody who has any sense will get one. I don't like an idea which forces everybody to act one way or another.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2007-12-02 04:49pm

No, we've removed the "after 50 points it goes non-linear" rule and instead said that without special production facilities you simply can't have ships bigger than 50. This makes ships that are greater than 50 extremely valuable because they can give and take a shit ton of fire. It also makes calculating the battles easier.

And its why I suggested that if you want to buy motherships without buying the valuable production facilities you also have to spend attribute points, otherwise everyone will simply buy a bunch of big ships and then turtle for a couple turns until they've built up a bunch of smaller ships that are more expendable.

Oh, and I say that if you want to build a 100 point planet killer, you have to buy the tech with attributes or find one as a reward from the mods for good playing.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2007-12-02 05:04pm

Well if then, I don't really care if my Battle Moons are 50 points or 100. It's just that I want the biggest dick for RP purposes and it is a little pretentious to call something a "Battle Moon" if it's not the biggest dick: almost sounds stupid.

So these builder facilities: they would cost starting points? I might turn my empire into the Barbarian epitome of spaceyards... my guys could be like ants, having a lot of experience building low-technology but very reliable ships that the Empire doesn't want to deal with. Like the T-70's and AK kings of the galaxy. Rather than computer gurus.

Darkevilme · Post by **Darkevilme** » 2007-12-02 05:15pm

100 points it is for you Brianeyci, as i wont call them the battle moons of ultimate doom if they're anything less.

So are these battle moons still going to be the hulls of decommissioned and gutted imperial battlespheres with lower tech subsystems substituting for the original imperial supertech? Or is it now that your guys built some huge scaffold and churn them out hulls and all?

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2007-12-02 05:23pm

Well... the shipyard required to build a 100 point battlemoon isn't available to barbarians. Because living on the edge of the territory without anyone at your back is an advantage, you have to buy a "Barbarian" tag with attributes, or at least, that is the way things are looking now.

Currently, the Barbarian tag seems to look like this:

+30% to counter-intelligence
-30% to intelligence
Being placed beyond the borders of the old empire

50 point total

The counter-intel and intel thing is to represent the various cultural quirks that would make it harder for a foreigner to blend in properly (for either side) and because a lot of espionage is through diplomatic or trade channels, and as barbarians you really don't have embassies or the like. If he wants to be a barbarian with a huge shipyard, the biggest he could get would be 95 point ships, as things stand right now.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2007-12-02 06:28pm

I was under the impression that everyone was Barbarians.

Except for the Enclave, and the actual Imperials. When I think of Barbarian I am not thinking of some game mechanic buried in these 19 pages, but of Covenant's OOB for the Terra Holy Sol Empire (or one of his posts) that says that everybody should be considered Barbarians.

Barbarians certainly don't have to be in an outer rim world. Rome had plenty of Barbarians close to home and it's clear that if you don't have Imperial citizenship, you're a Barbarian, at least to their eyes.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2007-12-02 06:35pm

No, there are Barbarian nations who basically were the guys who were kicked out of the empire but not annihilated for one reason or another, and then there are the Successor States, who were semi-autonomous groups within the Empire that were capable of a degree of self-sufficiency when everything went boom. The Barbarians are there to stir up shit, while the Successor States are intentionally Balkanized like the former Yugoslavia to keep everybody from playing nice.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2007-12-02 06:45pm

The post of Covenant's is about the state of the galaxy, before the fall of Terra. The vast majority of the players will likely be playing Successor States.

Crossroads Inc. · Post by **Crossroads Inc.** » 2007-12-02 08:47pm

By the By as we are talking about just how big ships are and how we are going to work with them, Should I treat Teknotron as a PLanet, or a Starship?

It CAN move, and it DOES have weapons, but it hasn't used either of them in almost 100 years. Also, given thats its 100km in size, would it be counted as one of those "takes all your resources to make operation" things?

Also, I was planning on using it as one of my main production center. Sure it has no raw materials, but most of its insides are supposed to be converted into production and manufacturing. Can I have a "10point" 100km Planet?

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2007-12-02 08:53pm

I think we all agreed that moving production facilities are out, but yeah, if you roleplay it as super heavy industry within, you could probably get away with saying that you produce 100 industrial points a turn. So long as you spend the points, it "counts as" something, although obviously anything abusive or ludicrious is right out.

As for its engines, just say that it would take you way longer to actually get them functional than we would ever play in game.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2007-12-02 09:42pm

I'd think that very slow sublight engines might be workable. It's not as if it can truly actually get anywhere. Hyper is definitely out though.

Crossroads Inc. · Post by **Crossroads Inc.** » 2007-12-02 10:31pm

Sounds fine by me. I didn't have any plans on using it.. But I wanted a reasonable explanation why my guys wouldn't be useing it... YTaking too many resources sounds best right now.

Also, it means I doubt I will be a Target for anyone want to capture it.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2007-12-03 01:17am

Covenant wrote:I had a few MORE questions so I just added my old stuff here:

Stealth:
Can anyone tell me how stealth works? What's 1 point get me? What's 10 get? Is a 1+10S ship stealthed just as well as a 40+10S? Does stealth count for an entire fleet (allowing us to mix a fleet of stealth and non-stealth so long as we have enough 1+10S stealth generator frigates) or solely for the vessel it's on? If so...

No, it's better. 10% of a ship's other costs = 1 stealth point. So the 1 point ship would have effective stealth of 10 (well, maybe higher, but you get the idea), the 40 point ship would have effective stealth of 2.5.

Sensors:
...then can one +10 ship see as many stealthed vessels as you have (meaning it can see ships that are equal or below it's scan capacity), or can it only counter 10 points of stealth? Like, one +10S or ten +1S? And did we ever agree to give it some sort of C3 benefit as well? I want to know if these sensor points I'm investing in are worthless, or if I may potentially need to defend them really well.

It's not benefits per se, it's just resistance to ECM's secondary effect is all.

Interdiction:
Is it possible to set up interdictors away from your planet to force them out of hyper in dead space? There's SOME advantage to this, best of all for piracy, but I wanted to see if it forced people out as well as making them take longer to re-engage. Do interdiction levels stack? Like if I had three +10 ships, you'd take like an extra month to escape? Or are extra ships just 'backup', allowing you to keep the field running incase they detonate the first interdictor?

Dead Space yanks, yes. As far as stacking, nobody has yet come up with a fair method for doing so.

Planetbusters:
Also, are we still allowing 100 point one-shot planetbuster weapons? I assumed we were. Possibly only for non-Barbarians, or only with a specific aptitude?

Meh. I'd rather not.

Ship Size:
Are we allowed to build vessels larger than 50? DarkEvil's OOB contained a 60 point vessel--and Hotfoot's early post on the subject was a bit vague. I'm making my OOB--should I be considering 50 the ceiling, like last game? I am, currently. Weren't advanced shipyards a cache tech, or a racial one? Did we decide on costs for such upgrades?

My post was open for discussion, but there is an upper limit, the only ambiguous thing was the specific number of the limit.

I feel like I should be making a single post with everything I've posted thus far about this.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-12-03 01:31am

A single post might be helpful for others, but thanks for clearing all that stuff up, I've got a thankfully clear picture about it now. I'm definately excited to hear about the stealthing, that makes it a lot more useful for small ships and still makes it quite sensible for large ones: you're able to stealth, just not ubersuperwell, and that's fun to hear. I'm happy to have everything else cleared up too.

If we're basically decided on these interactions and rules then, we could put this into the 'finalized rules' thread (isn't there one?) and include a FAQ about notes like this.

Did we decide if you need more than one Sensor Ship, or if a single ship is able to detect an enemy fleet so long as it is good enough to detect one? Still seems like you could have a single +10 Sensors vessel scan the sky and detect all the nearby stealth vessels, thus making it somewhat pointless to have more than one. Or will the 'countering effects of Active Defense ECM' be taken literally to mean that you reduce an enemy fleet's AD's by the level of your fleet's C3?