STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

[Beowulf]

I think defense is being oddly termed. Each point of defense negates (soaks) 2.5 points of opposing weight, regardless of what the exact percent of the weight is turned into damage. Is this understanding correct?

Also, are we going to allow .5 pt values for small ships?

[A-Wing_Slash]

What is the upper limit on ship size? 50pts/ship? How much can you increase that number, and at what cost? Someone a while back proposed a 10:1 racial points to ship points ratio, so if you spent 100 racials on a shipyard, you could build ships 10pts larger than you would otherwise be able to. Also, is there a list of what we can spend racial points on?

[Crossroads Inc.]

I have a 60pt ship... But only One, Im also paying for it by having to invest a bunch of points into having a Drydock big enough to hold it.

[Covenant]

I think defense is being oddly termed. Each point of defense negates (soaks) 2.5 points of opposing weight, regardless of what the exact percent of the weight is turned into damage. Is this understanding correct?

Also, are we going to allow .5 pt values for small ships?

The 'weight' is actually just the 'total enemy fleet basic cost' value. It's a good raw term because you'll want to be aware of both side's 'weight' because it's also their hitpoints.

So you'd be soaking the 'basic damage' value, not 'full value'. It wouldn't offset their, like, hyperdrives. ;D

I'm also going to write that +D can be expended as hitpoints. It seems about the fairest way to handle it, since doing the math always ends up with the basic ship winning in the end (and without it winning in the end, it's just as screwy) and I think it'd solve a lot of the need for degrading stats. We don't need to be able to shoot off guns as much as we need the ability to wear down defenses.

So you could pop a point of D instead of a hitpoint, if it gets bad. That lets us make them not as effective as they should be (even soaking 2.5 points worth of enemy ship isn't a huge enough advantage to help a 40+10D ship beat a 50 pointer) while also solving the degrading stuff.

As always, this is all rule of thumb stuff, not hard-and-fast rules. As long as there's agreement there's no rules.

[Academia Nut]

So far, it looks like you can spend attribute points on some basic things along these lines:

• Improved Logistics, increases repair rate by 1% per point spent, and with enough points you don't need to drydock severelly damaged ships. Since we don't quite have the repair mechanics worked out, that's a bit stickier, but basically this lets you recover from fights faster
• Improved Sensor Nets, gives your planets a longer range of seeing and allows better penetration of stealth and EW from D. Probably something along the lines of every 50 points improves your planet's natural C3 capacities by 1
• Improved Espionage, a basic "more is better" one, mostly for the mods and other players to judge how good you are at this skill
• Improved Counter-Espionage, same as above, only for defending against espionage actions
• Improved Salvage, a bit of an iffy one, but I figure if you win a battle you can salvage hulked ships and get say 5% of their total value added on to your next turn's production. This attribute would add a bonus to what you salvage based on how much you put into it, probably percentage based. So if you salvage 100 points of ships, you would normally get 5 points, but with 100 points in Improved Salvage you would get +100% to those 5 points, or 10 extra points to spend on your next turn's production
• Improved Assimilation, increases how fast you gain control of conquered worlds. May or may not be useful in game depending on how we work out ground combat, but seems reasonable enough

That's all I can think of for now considering the fact that we seem to have decided that Improved Ground Combat was just too much of a headache to deal with.

Then there are so far two proposed "tags" which are for anyone intending to play a barbarian nation. They

• Barbarian: gives +30 counter-espionage and -30 espionage because of a variety of factors. This makes you more "unknown", but conversely you have the same problem. The espionage penalty can be bought off if you wish. You also get to be positioned outside the boundaries of the former Empire, so it costs something to live on the edge without anyone at your back. Flat cost of 50 points
• Extra-galactic: you're really unknown, gives +60 counter-espionage and -60 espionage. With only two extra-galactic powers, this may be unnecessary, and since the Enclave is human they may choose to just take the Barbarian tag, although I'm sure they would be offended in game if you called them that. Flat cost of 100 points

You can also decrease these abilities to gain extra points, but you get less out of them the more you decrease. A 10 point penalty is good for 10 extra points, but it takes an extra 20 points to get another 10 points, then 30, and so on (-10=>+10, -30=>+20, -60=>+30, etc.)

Then there are the technologies, which improve ship performance. These techs can only be taken by Imperial successor states though, so they are incompatible with the Barbarian tags. Basically, the techs are rare, expensive, and hard to maintain, but they let you break the standard rules for ship building. I see them working like so:

For every 10 points invested, you get to improve the max points you can invest in a special ship modification by 1, and for every point you invest you can equip a number of ships with these. So if you invest 100 points into Imperial Stealth Tech with an extra 50 for ships, you can equip 50 ships with 20S rather than the normal maximum of 10. You do not however need to use up to your maximum, and can in fact loan the tech out to other powers at an agreed upon price.

Incidentally, this system favours hyperdrive, interdiction, C3, stealth, and seige over offence and defence as these systems are greatly improved upon when they go over the normal cap as there are normally no counters to them. I think this is fair.

Finally there are Oversized Shipyards, which are purchased such that every 10 points invested allows you to build 1 point over the normal 50 ship size limit.

Both Imperial Techs and Shipyards must have a home star system where they are present, as they are capturable. Defend them well.

[Covenant]

Added bombardment for you nut. Acts as 5x a normal point for the purposes of ground schenanigans, whichever those are.

We need some extra stuff for the barbarians to buy if we're banning lots of the ground combat stuff.

[Academia Nut]

Well, the Improved Salvage certainly has a definite barbarian feel to it, so including it would be good. Alternatively we could lower the cost of the Barbarian tag as there is a certain opportunity cost associated with not being able to buy the techs. Of course, not having things you spent attribute points on be captured is a major plus.

Also, looking over what you've done so far in the wiki, I can suggest another attribute or two, although the second one is kind of... unbalanced. I'll suggest it anyway though since it might be useful in a modified form.

• Improved Planetary Interdiction, works like Improved Sensor Nets, in that it gives every world +1I for every 50 attribute points spent. This version can instead be used force enemy forces out of hyperspace early. Say for every point by which the hyperdrive rating is exceeded, a fleet has to drop out of hyperspace an (extra?) hour early
• Planetary Jamming Systems. This essentially gives every ship within an hour's travel of your planets a point of D for every 50 (more maybe?) attribute point you spend. This also screws with C3.

As can be seen, the Planetary Jamming Systems is... potentially very unbalancing, but at least the C3 interference part of it makes sense. Maybe restrict this trait to Barbarians because the Empire would have never let its client states get away with that sort of thing, while the barbarians were using it to fortify their positions against Imperial retaliation. I definitely think the first new attribute could be worth it, but the second still needs some work.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Finally there are Oversized Shipyards, which are purchased such that every 10 points invested allows you to build 1 point over the normal 50 ship size limit.

Both Imperial Techs and Shipyards must have a home star system where they are present, as they are capturable. Defend them well.

Wait, so If I have a 60pt ship, does that mean I need 10pts for EVERY pt over 50? which means I'd need 100pts to make a 60pt shipyard?

[Covenant]

Well, if you made it just for the purposes of hiding fleets and not for the purposes of making ships durable, then that'd be cool. Or don't make it apply to ships individually, make it apply to a fleet--so a fleet (no matter what size) gets a bonus of X. Basically lets you turn some of your planets into large immobile support platforms. No guns, just specials. I see no real issue with that--letting planets get a +25 in a stat or whatever might SOUND zomg unbalancing but it's not really.

Anyway, those are just ruminations.

[A-Wing_Slash]

Finally there are Oversized Shipyards, which are purchased such that every 10 points invested allows you to build 1 point over the normal 50 ship size limit.

Both Imperial Techs and Shipyards must have a home star system where they are present, as they are capturable. Defend them well.

Wait, so If I have a 60pt ship, does that mean I need 10pts for EVERY pt over 50? which means I'd need 100pts to make a 60pt shipyard?

Yes, you would need to spend 100pts to make a 60pt shipyard. These are racial points, mind you, not ship points.

[Crossroads Inc.]

how many Racial points do we get? Last i checked we had:
2000 ships
100 Plantes

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, if you want a 60pt ship, you need to spend 100 of your attribute points to purchase a shipyard capable of producing something that large. This puts an absolute upper cap of 100pt ships if you sink all your attribute points into your shipyard. Of course, once you have a shipyard, it's yours to keep until someone takes it from you by force. And you get 500 attribute points to spend as you wish.

And to Covenant, yeah, that was what I was thinking too. If each planet gives the bonus, then that's probably not going to be much (it will cost all 500 attribute points for each planet to give +10D), but I suppose if all worlds in a system stacked then you can get a more reasonable defence modifier. That would encourage building lots of asteroid colonies and the like to create more blanket coverage. And yeah, sure letting a planet get a large bonus to a stat sounds nice, but they're immobile, you'll only ever benefit when you're on the defensive.

[Covenant]

Right, so it's hardly a big problem. Hell, you could even give them an Improved Offensive rating in the form of satellites if you wanted--it's really not going to do too much damage. I can see someone easily making one world uber, sure--but I honestly don't know why you would want to do that. ;D

[A-Wing_Slash]

how many Racial points do we get? Last i checked we had:
2000 ships
100 Plantes

I think the points breakdown is as follows:

• 2000 ship points, with 200 extra if you declare yourself an agressor nation.
  
  My understanding of the agressor status is that you agree that your first combat of the game will take place on enemy territory. If that does not happen, an act of mod can make 200pts go boom.
• 100 planet points, with a max of 10pts per planet, and 25pts per system?
• 500 racial points.

Racial points would be a one time thing, and stay constant throughout the game.

Planetary points can be captured, destroyed, and rebuilt, but cannot ever exeed the overall number of planetary points that the game begins with.

Ship points can be destroyed, repaired, savlaged, captured, etc etc, and you get a certain amount of new one each turn depending on how many planets you control. The number bandied about earlier was 600pts/turn, but that was with 60 planetary points. How that number meshes with 100pts of planets, I don't know

[Academia Nut]

Okay, here is my more or less final OOB so that it can be used as an example for how the points work.

2000 points + 200 for being an aggressor. I am declaring this, so if I act all passive and wishy-washy then I am asking for the mods to drop rocks on me.

• Tenacious => 3+1S+1D+1H+2B = 8 * 66 = 528
• Cacofonix => 5+1I+10D = 16 * 17 = 272
• Rammstein => 15+3I+3D+1C3+10B = 32 * 14 = 448
• Dragon => 20+2D+3O+2H+3C3 = 30 * 15 = 450
• Manowar => 30+1D+5O = 36 * 7 = 252
• Megadeth => 40+5I+3D+2C3 = 50 * 5 = 250

Total: 2200. At 20% maintenance this means I must pay 440 industrial points each turn or I must scrap my ships.

100 points for planets

• 2 * 10pt = 20
• 6 * 5pt = 30
• 9 * 3pt = 27
• 23 * 1pt = 23

Total: 100. This means that I produce 1000 industrial points a round. After maintenance this is 560 points per turn.

500 points from attributes

• Barbarian: 50
• Improved Logistics: 125
• Improved Espionage: 125
• Improved Assimilation: 50
• Improved Salvage: 100
• Planetary Jamming Systems: 50

Total: 500

Notes:

• All of my ships are somewhat specialized in their roles, and for roleplay reasons I made it so that they all carried at least 1D
• My ships repair at 125% the normal rate
• I have a roughly 30% bonus to my counter-espionage efforts from my barbarian status
• I have roughly 95% bonus to my espionage efforts from my barbarian status (-30%) and my attributes (+125%)
• I assimilate captured populations 50% faster than normal
• I get a +100% bonus to whatever I salvage
• All my planets produce 1D for ships within the same system

[Crossroads Inc.]

Do we have a lits of all Racial ablities?

[Academia Nut]

Top of this page. If you want to do something that isn't represented in the list there, suggest something and a mechanic for it so we can discuss it. The only no-no right now is Improved Ground Combat because it's just a mess.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Ok thanks, So heres a stripepd down version of My Full OOB as well, submitted for others inspection.

1946

Starships

• ((270 Points))
• Bentuselion - 40 +10D +5H +5S = 60 x 1
• Tradeship – 30 +3D +2I= 35x 6
  
  ((135 Points))
• Exelion Class Battleship - 38 +5O +2D = 45 x 3
• Luxion Class Cruiser –30 +3O +2I = 35x0
• Hexeon Class Destroyer. –20 +3D +2C3 =25x0
• Durexion Class Corvette –5 +5SP = 10x0
  
  ((1050 Points))
• “Tekonotron Class BattleShip” – 20 +5O = 25 x 4
• "Benta Class BattleCruiser” - 15 +5H = 20 x 10
• "Support Destroyer" - 10 +5D = 15 x 20
• “Combat Destroyer" - 10 +5O = 15 x 20
• "Sensors ship" - 10 +5C3 = 15 x 10
  
  ((220 Points))
• ProductionLine BusterMachine 06 +1O +1D +1H +1S = 10 x 17
• BusterMachine#12 9 +1O +2D +2H +2S = 17 x 1
• BusterMachine#14 10 +2O +2D +1H +2S = 17 x 1
• BusterMachine#08 10 +3O +2D +1H +1S = 17 x 1
  
  ((315 Points))
• Large Cargo ships – 5+1H= 6 x 25
• Small Cargo ships – 3+1H= 4 x 40
• The NovaOutlaw” – 4+1H= 5 x 1

Planets

• CapitalTeknotron-1 Class 1 colony 10pts +100 racial Pts for Massive Drydocks
• 6 x 8pts Colonies
• 3 x 4pts colonies
• 15 x 2pts Outposts

Racial Attributes

• Massive Shipyards: 100
• Improved Logistics: 100
• Improved Espionage: 125
• Improved Counter Espionage: 125
• Improved Sensor Nets 50

[Academia Nut]

Looks good, although you have one fleet where you didn't actually buy any ships

((135 Points))

Exelion Class Battleship - 38 +5O +2D = 45 x 3

Luxion Class Cruiser –30 +3O +2I = 35x0 <-

Hexeon Class Destroyer. –20 +3D +2C3 =25x0 <-

Durexion Class Corvette –5 +5SP = 10x0 <-

And not only that, if you had 1 of each, it would add up to the 135 you listed. Did you make a mistake? Because you don't need to declare all your ship classes at once, if you want to make a new class in a subsequent turn, there's nothing stopping you.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Nah, according to the FLuff of my group, those are a "Next Generation Warhips" that is JUST being put into production. you;ll notice thier numbers are much more powerful then the current ships. However, only the battleships have been built thus far.. So, I have PLANS for these ships, but none exist yet.

[SirNitram]

As the Moderator thread indicates, there's some things I'm still concerned on. I might as well throw out potential solutions:

Going to war takes time. There shall be none of those 'Constant war footing' nonsense, nor 'We just saw a fleet flatten place X, let's rape the fleet's owner'. In short, at least a production turn is needed between spats of warmongering. This will mitigate Bangbuses.

There's also the proposal of increasing the numbers in general. Any opinions on more fleet points, or on the idea of simply switching out a 1-50 point 'unit' into a fleet, instead of a ship?

[Covenant]

I'm all for the idea of 'vessels' being whatever you want them to be. I'm going to have 3 point units that are actually called 'debris' and a massive lightsecond-wide cloud of shit that's a 50 point 'unit'.

But forced epicness isn't really epic. It's the problem of dickwaving. Some people are always going to want the biggest ship possible, so forcing them to make their 50 point behemoth into ten behemoths is really just a matter of semantics.

Anyone like me who wants the 'horde of ships is equal to one of your ships' thing knows how to do it--call a 10 point cruiser a 'fighter swarm' or something.

The reason I mentioned for increasing production is just because it makes people feeeel better. It's just psychological. If we made the biggest unit a 10-point Deathstar that spits galaxies and gave people 500 points a turn to spend, you can bet they'd be far less liberal with those points than if they had 5000 a turn to spend and bought clusters of 100 point Iowa-class battleships from WWII.

[Academia Nut]

Well, the only problems I see with switching to a fleet system are the following:

1) In a fleet system this will mean that losses are obvious to individual ships. This would mean that repairs would entail building new ships, which would get kind of weird when interacting with new production as it is always kind of assumed that repairs are simply part of the maintenance cost.

2) We will pretty much have to completely rethink how the specialization system works, as in a fleet set-up there is nothing stopping people from switching out different specializations as need-be, and justifying the specialization maximums would be trickier to pull off. Especially for things like hyperdrive and the like.

As for the 'move to war footing' thing, how's about you only get full production when you officially declare war, which kicks in at the end of the turn. So if you declare war in Turn 1, at the end of that turn you are now at war footing and for Turn 2 you get your full production. Otherwise you only get enough production to maintain your fleets and any trade deals you have. This would severelly discourage turtling as you can't just sit around at peace and produce a huge fleet while everyone else is fighting so that they can gank the winners.

Sitzkrieging will cause supernovas to go off in your backyard.

[Covenant]

Is there a reason to stop being at war?

[Academia Nut]

You have to be fighting? Okay, how's about a modification. When in a state of peace, you can produce enough industrial points equal to your maintenance costs or 40% your total output, whichever is greater. This lets people lick their wounds after a war to get up to roughly the starting values. On the other hand, if you are at war, you must have a declared enemy and you must engage in battles with that enemy. Cold Wars and raiding disputes don't count, it has to be total war. Since it will take a round to kick in, the mods get to decide whether or not you've displayed enough activity to warrant the status of "War" and the full production output that entails.