Quick response to Nut, and then the rest to Beowulf, so everyone else can skip, basically.
Partial control is still kinda unimportant because the values are arbitrary anyway. The planetary production values don't count the amount of poems or paintings or puppies you export per year, it's just concerned with the stuff you care about. So even if all you want to do is get the factories running, that's the only thing the numbers are talking about anyway. Even with a planet totally compliant you may have hippies protesting your factories and Wall Street Investment Bankers whining about taxes, but that's all irrelevent, since the numbers never accounted for them anyway.
The numbers only represent the lowest level for usable control of the interesting industries on the world. Basically, achieving compliance means you've succeeded in getting the barest possible control over the fewest possible useful factories. Partial control is not really necessary, and it's a good balance versus only invading big planets too. Good mechanics, good balance, and okay roleplay function.
Please do skip it if you're trying to catch up, unless you read all of Beowulf's thing too.
Beowulf wrote:Unless you disallow increasing the modifier, which would result in an emminently unfair advantage to those with the modifier, because they don't have to worry about buying extra troops for invasion. They make x times as many as the normal person.
Dividing up ground combat seems the most fair way to handle things, or reducing the amount of racial points to spend. If people only had 200 racial points to throw around, they'd be less eager to put them all into marines I agree it does need work though, and it's really such a small part of the system (I added it at the end after everything else as it basically only deals with the way in which you get invasion forces) that I think we could radically change how Ground Combat modifiers work without altering anything.
This is one of the reasons I felt ground combat bonuses were too far-reaching to balance properly, honestly. However, double the free troops is a lot but they're rathermuch so limited in scope that it's not a gigantic bonus. I bar them from being deployed defensively to a world, so you can still harass someone with their piles of troops, it just means that they're going to be able to throw more of them around. Someone with a huge advantage in ground SHOULD be attacking more often, and he can really only do it if he takes out your spacefleet first. Until he does, those extra points have been wasted.
Beowulf wrote:Free infantry is only given at the start. It's largely to prevent people from being insane enough to not have an army, unless they really want to (-60 pts from their army, for example).
Then we're back to making people spend money to buy ground forces? I thought we'd abandoned that? I also thought we were doing away with negative racial point values?
I made them free to encourage people to spend less than their total allotment per month, save some, but also not fear using them when they have to. It's a simple way of handling it and it keeps people from steamrolling with one giant army from planet to planet, and forcing them to keep a garrison (which also removes the need for us to track planet loyalty or allow people to claim "my world is totally empty, why can't it rebel?")
Beowulf wrote:Free troops are only at the start. You don't get any for conquering a place. You still have to spend to garrison the place. If you don't, they the liberators can just waltz in and take it right back with a single point of troops. You can spend either by raising troops in the next production turn, or by leaving troops there. Doesn't matter.
The 'free troops' you're referring to here (from making a planet Compliant) are Resistance Level in my system, not troops. You only get Invasion Forces (offensive troops) on production rounds in my system, and can't redeploy troops already spent invading. The Resistance Level replaces the need to tally up the troops and removes the need for an ability to shuffle them around from planet to planet. If we're allowed to, someone can literally make his planets nearly impossible to invade by cramming tons of troops onto them.
Beowulf wrote:As far as counter-attacks go, what I meant is what happens when the Nation D, whose planet is being conquered by Nation A, attempts to reconquer before Nation A has assimilated the planet? In my system, it's pretty simple. Control starts reverting to Nation D. In yours, you have Nation A's resistance level, Nation D's remaining resistance, invasion forces of both, and I'm not quite sure how it all works out. That, or I'm dumb.
You might want to re-read it, I've clarified it a while back. In my system there's no "partial control" of a planet so you don't need to track how converted it is during a liberation. An invading force pays exactly the amount of Invasion Forces equal to the Resistance Level of the planet.
There's never a 'friendly' or 'enemy' resistance level. Resistance level is never raised or lowered except by raising or lowering planet worth. So if the enemy bombed a planet from 50 to 40, the resistance level is 300. (100+(5x40)) = 300, using the 'friendlier to small planet' calcs I have listed now. So if you're liberating a 40 point world that's only partially taken over by the enemy, it costs you 300 invasion forces straight-up and then it reverts back to you, and you get to lock up nasty Gestapo forces and run collaborators out of town and parade down Mainstreet.
Beowulf wrote:Something I hadn't noticed before was: say you invade. It's taking 6 turns to bring the planet to compliance. 3 turns after the invasion, you double the number of troops. Suddenly the planet is compliant. Doesn't make much sense. Even worse, you do so at turn 4. Now suddenly the planet's been compliant for a turn? Do you retroactively gain a turns production? What about if it were a tripling of forces?
Compliancy is determined retroactively, but production is not. Adding extra troops to a partially suppressed world is essentially a Troop Surge, declaring martial law, bolstering your secret police departments, which we all know of from real life. Can be a bit messy but it really does work at getting a place up and running, even if they do whine about it and listen to allied Radio still. It's like sending the National Guard to the Katrina Wastelands to restore some order.
It's the most simple solution, and it doesn't penalize people for the time at which they deploy their forces. Once they're deployed they're deployed for good anyway, so this lets you decide which places to reinforce and which places to leave just a few small outposts.
Now for the list!
New type of turn. Ground combat takes a while anyway, so you might as well just determine it on the regular game scale
Combat turns are required anyway, as battles can't last for several months, and people want to do more than one exchange of fire. My system does multiply the amount of time it takes to make a planet usable by a duration measured in months, so I agree with you there.
However, we can't play the game without a seperate timescale, as space combat and space movement won't work without them, so there's no reason not to put bombardments and invasions in a similar timeframe. It also keeps consistancy across the board for reinforcements. If it'll take my fleet 4 turns to reinforce a world under attack, and it takes you 3 turns to obliterate my space navy, that means my reinforcements will pop in-system and be ready to fight in 2 turns. (one to arrive, one to prep and start battle) That's really convenient and cool. Adds strategy.
New types of modifiers. It's more stuff that has to be kept track of, and will interact in a complex manner. Note that I've done away with improved ground combat even. 5 pts of troops costs 5 pts, regardless of how elite they are.
I agree here, but my modifiers are few and easy to keep track of. I'm not a fan of Ground Combat, but I'm absolutely 100 percent sure that if you put this to a vote, nearly everyone besides you and I are going to vote for some variety of a Ground Combat modifier. This is a
vox populi addition on my part, but I'd be squeeful to remove it too.
New types of unit. Ground troops of the same worth should be fungible. Whether they're high-tech and small, or large hordes of guys with an AK and a clip of ammo, the same cost of unit should behave the same. You'd need a division worth of troops to equal the cost of a frigate anyway, so why have 2+ point ground troop units?
I agree to this wholeheartedly. In my system they're just an amorphous blob of numbers which you allocate like coins into an arcade machine, plunking in enough to achieve the desired result. I don't like the idea of discrete military ground units with attributes and such. If ground combat exists, it should merely increase the size of your pile of 1's, not make them into 2+ units.
Separate replenishment of troops. Industrial points represent your total warmaking capacity. Why have a separate method for adding more?
I agree with this, but I think having a 'free per month' allotment of troops keeps people willing to use them and makes it less expensive to actually field an army. People with a max-size fleet are not going to have any money to spend anywhere due to upkeep, so that means purchasing ground forces is really a bigass pain if you're at a large fleet level. Someone who just got his ass kicked will be able to buy troops, sure, but won't he rather buy ships? Seems to make ground combat less easy and fun than it should be.
Lots of states. Although you could argue my method has a lot of states, it's just one variable, which always means the same thing. Other schemes have different states, with different things that can be accomplished in each state.
I assume you don't mean 'nations' but mean 'status'? Like the status/state of being compliant? I really only have two--compliant and noncompliant. And one is just the state of not being the other. That's hardly a lot. But I do agree with the sentiment, I don't like the idea of partial control, of seperate loyalties to different nations, etc. Planet should be rioting and useless, or grumbling but productive. There's no reason for 'status inflation' unless we were doing a lot more with planets and we had nations that weren't so eager to skin their new citizens or eat them for lunch.
Controlling numbers far removed from the start value. Sure, each intermediate value means something, but they don't really mean anything.
I apologize, but I don't know exactly what this means. Numbers of what?
Something my system doesn't address is how rebuilding works. However, others have appeared to come to a consensus that a 1:1 ratio of investment and return sounds good. The only thing I'd add is that rebuilding doesn't change the control level.
What's the control level?
