I wasn't thinking a "Grand Convention" so much as a kind of unofficial rule. Earth-like planets are
rare, only one per sector, and while by our era every core sector of a nation will also have a couple fully terra-formed worlds that are just as good as Earth-like planets, that's because said work's been going on for, well, centuries.
If you wreck a good Earth-like Planet with mass nukings, it takes a massive amount of time to fix (an amount of time likely beyond the scope of this game) and in the meantime can have a deleterious effect upon the galactic food supply (Since such planets will produce the vast majority of food since its easier and cheaper to do it upon them), meaning that for all the other powers intentionally mass-nuking a planet because you can't easily take it is a
major no-no and would result in pretty much every other power available jumping on you to wipe your polity out.
Wilkens, while I find your idea beneficial to the workload of the mods, there are a couple issues I have with it.
A) I believe it plays into the hands of those who like to write battles where their side completely wins. They will continue to do so and then respond with the same to any attempt by another player to counter-balance the losses. This leads to the "sandbox" effect where the players are trying to trump one another with bigger and badder fleets.
B) I'm not sure yet what kind of scope our ingame fleets will have. I know the old ASVS STGODs tended to have utterly massive armadas in them. I figured we'd probably have a case where everyone's starfleets were in the four digit range in terms off "warship" space combatants (not counting fleet auxiliaries). The idea that a player should just take a lump where someone else decrees his loss and throw another fleet in to counterattack implies that a player can easily accept the losses involved.
I was going to suggest that if players can determine their fights with each other that is great and I look forward to seeing them duke it out, but a player should have the right to appeal to the mods over a combat post by someone else. If Player A attacks Player B and claims victory and such and such losses for Player B, Player B's options should not be limited to "accept defeat and leave it alone" or "accept defeat and post a counter-attack, which Player A might just retaliate against in turn". The option of "appeal to the mod to have the result altered or reversed" should be there. Of course, for you potential Player Bs out there, this third option should not be invoked lightly. Upon review of the forces at play we mods might very well decide that Player A inflicted
more loss on you than claimed. Particularly if Player B is behaving in the fashion of a petulant child and forgets that one does not trifle with mods, for we are unsubtle and very quick to anger.
Since we are approaching this as fun story writing more than a game, I would hope that people who go to war do so in common agreement with a story planned for it. It would minimize the fuss.
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