An SDNW Proposal

[loomer]

Yeah, the same can be true for alien species from non-earthlike worlds. The Airaii breathe an air mixture that consists mostly of methane, so they have no reason to care about the 'value' of worlds they can't breathe on except that the other commissions, especially the human member, hold them in check by reminding them that just like an attack on any commission provokes a response from all the other 'barons', razing a world the dominant local species can use will do the same on a far larger scale.

[Norade]

Hence the asteroid thing I mentioned, they can come but when we heat dump our rocks back to ambient using lasers they're have trouble picking us out from lifeless rocks. Even better if we setup 'decoy' operations on our planet using cheap droids. They zoom through, assume that we're on the planet, shoot a mining ship or two on the way in and then look at dealing with our planet. It'll only work so often, but even so being spread out makes us harder to wipe out than they are.

[Dark Hellion]

I don't think Steve's system has any problems with non-planetary based life. All a "sector" needs to be is your societal equivalent of X humans capable of generating the equivalent of $Y.

I also think, given that we probably have a reasonable in game suspicion that all factions are of general tech parity (regardless of method and source) that any society can assume and work out for themselves the difficulty of planetary bombardment as an actual war strategy. Whether the target is defended by ABM systems and anti-laser nanotech in the atmosphere, "bugs live really deep underground", or the gestalt psychic effect of a million kittens cuteness preventing the gunners from targeting, utilizing orbital strikes to destroy population or industrial centers is a grueling siege. You give up strategic maneuverability and invest copious amounts of energy and munitions to do so. Even discounting cultural taboo, you need to weigh whether it is wise to do so.

[Norade]

True but living in rocks that you move around and mine means that I'm more likely to chuck a ton of them at somebody to win a war than waste effort on sending things of value. It doesn't matter how good your defenses are when a swarm of rocks that were given a slight nudge are sent at an enemies home system for less cost than it takes to build the defenses to counter them. I mean the engine wash from our ships is enough to wipe out life on a planet so those that cling to them can have alliances all they want, when all it takes is for one ship to slip through balance goes out the window compared to those that aren't target able by that tactic.

EDIT: This might fall under the douche clause, but this is SD.net, we've all talked about or seen tactics such as these mentioned before as potential ways to slag worlds.

[Dark Hellion]

Norade, you realize space is big right? Not just normal big, but fucking huge. Unless you send those rocks from within the system of the planet you are targeting it will literally take years for them to reach.

Also engine wash that can wipe out the population of a planet? I don't think you realize how ginormously huge that amount of energy is. A really rough 2 second back of envelope calc gets that you could accelerate the Asteroid Ceres at 100g with that kind of energy. That's not moving a rocks around, that is chucking a fucking dwarf planet. I call shenanigans!

[Teleros]

Steve - have you seen my questions re troop transports, carriers etc?

Again, you are operating from a humanocentric viewpoint.

Who cares? Really? I answered how you could get your little squadrons of networked ships to work under the rules.

You can of course represent this by simply buying it as a bigger vessel but it looks a bit disingenuous.

Or, as this is supposed to be RP-dominated, pay a lower cost up-front but have a monthly upkeep cost to represent the loss of crewmen (crewbugs?) etc. It'd be your decision though, and the mods would presumably have oversight if it got a bit too problematic.

But we can keep going and it gets worse...
...
And it will continue...

Two options for this:
1. Don't. You're not being forced to play.
2. Do, and accept the consequences in the game.

We'll use bugmen again because space bugs are so common as to be a cliche. Specialization is for insects and man do these guys specialize. They have jungle bugmarines. In a jungle or wooded area these guys are Rambo, Arnold, and the predator rolled into one but in taiga or tundra they are redshirt popsicles. We have urban warfare bugmarines, underwater bugmarines, boarding action bugmarines, etc. Are these elite units because they are elite in their element? Does buying the elite unit get us a couple of every type? Or do we have to buy a few of each? Do we have to track them as they are transported around? And what if all of the bugs infantry works this way? Do we buy all their infantry as elite (seems to make them not as elite if everyone is) or do we buy them as normal and then have the possibility to ass pull the situational correct unit if we are feeling like pouting?

How about you decide when you buy them? "I'm getting £3 worth of Elite-geared Elites for Generic Planet III. The 50,000 is split equally into 10,000-strong divisions for tundra, underwater, temperate, jungle, and desert warfare. If you invade, you can expect to fight them in their element; each 10,000-strong division is thus worth £0.6 of ground forces."
Another thing: is anyone going to actually make this complicated race?

Here you again show humanocentricism

We're human, we're intending to play an RP with a little rules to set things up. What you're proposing is that Steve basically write up a new Warhammer 40,000 rulebook, or a Civ 4 mod or something. Unless of course you want to .

There should be no need to differentiate hull sizes or carriers from non-carriers and no need to make attack and defense their own statistics. Doing so imposes a clear framework of naval hierarchy and usage that is unnecessary and implausible when dealing with the vast variety that alien civilizations could present. Same with military. Just make a $ = a $ and let fluff do the rest.

The hull sizes are more like guidelines I believe. Eg Steve's examples earlier have several Medium-hulled ships that cost different amounts. There are no attack / defence stats in play except for fighters, and carriers / fighters are the most complicated parts of the naval rules. And if you can't handle "£100 carrier with £45 of fighters, which are equal to £90 for the purposes of attacking"... well.

One thing I'm going to ask about is what if somebody wants their civilization to live in asteroid belts and orbitals and could care less about habitable worlds?

The only real issue I can see is that if they live on their own Culture Orbitals it implies one hell of an industrial base & some impressive material technologies. I was thinking about having a Culture Orbital as one world too, but it being found & colonised rather than actually built by the Altacar Empire.

Hence the asteroid thing I mentioned, they can come but when we heat dump our rocks back to ambient using lasers they're have trouble picking us out from lifeless rocks.

How likely do you think it is that a species which is interacting & trading with others will manage to keep the fact that it lives on asteroids not planets secret like that?

I also think, given that we probably have a reasonable in game suspicion that all factions are of general tech parity (regardless of method and source) that any society can assume and work out for themselves the difficulty of planetary bombardment as an actual war strategy. Whether the target is defended by ABM systems and anti-laser nanotech in the atmosphere, "bugs live really deep underground", or the gestalt psychic effect of a million kittens cuteness preventing the gunners from targeting, utilizing orbital strikes to destroy population or industrial centers is a grueling siege. You give up strategic maneuverability and invest copious amounts of energy and munitions to do so. Even discounting cultural taboo, you need to weigh whether it is wise to do so.

Going back to the earliest thoughts about this, Steve was talking about there being very few inhabitable worlds - so dropping rocks on them will, if nothing else, deny that world's living space to you.

True but living in rocks that you move around and mine means that I'm more likely to chuck a ton of them at somebody to win a war than waste effort on sending things of value. It doesn't matter how good your defenses are when a swarm of rocks that were given a slight nudge are sent at an enemies home system for less cost than it takes to build the defenses to counter them. I mean the engine wash from our ships is enough to wipe out life on a planet so those that cling to them can have alliances all they want, when all it takes is for one ship to slip through balance goes out the window compared to those that aren't target able by that tactic.

Then just allow FTL sensors (in the case of relativistic missiles) and you'll need a hell of a lot of straight-line-trajectory rocks to get past any defenders (I'm also assuming the rocks are launched from either the same system or have hyperdrives slapped on them and launched from yours). The earlier the rocks are intercepted the easier it is to just nudge them out of the way for example.
Now... yes, if I want to slag your planets then I certainly will drop rocks on them, but only once I've achieved space superiority in the system in question... which means sending warships in to clear the way.

As DH says, I very much doubt our engines can do that kind of damage. We're playing with the UFP or B5 Earth Alliance, not the Culture.


One final thing for Steve... so far the rules talk about "sectors" being the key geographical... entity, I suppose. However, most (all?) players are going to be based on planets and other things that orbit stars... so how does that work out with the sector idea? Is a sector a single star system, or can it contain multiple star systems, and if so, how does travel between those star systems work (particularly important when we're talking about invasions)?

[Norade]

Norade, you realize space is big right? Not just normal big, but fucking huge. Unless you send those rocks from within the system of the planet you are targeting it will literally take years for them to reach.

Also engine wash that can wipe out the population of a planet? I don't think you realize how ginormously huge that amount of energy is. A really rough 2 second back of envelope calc gets that you could accelerate the Asteroid Ceres at 100g with that kind of energy. That's not moving a rocks around, that is chucking a fucking dwarf planet. I call shenanigans!

No shit space is big, but we have hyperspace and engines powerful enough to move massive ships about at rather high speeds. Depending on how we decide hyperspace works bombardment could be as easy as pushing a rock through a wormhole or as hard as sending in a massive bulk freighter and having it dump a load of ore at decent speed from high orbit.

As for engines the noted tech level is trek and a quick google shows them pushing 33% of C at sublight. Though this uses mass lightening nothing says that we have to use that so if we're sticking within those guidelines you could have some powerful as hell engines that could, at the least really fuck over an earth like planet with near trivial ease. I also find your claim for energy required to cause an extinction event rather flawed, I doubt it took 70973.190746236 yottatons to kill the dinosaurs.

EDIT: According the the main site it would take between 1 and 1,000 yottatone to do that, and at minimum that is an order of magnitude to high at maximum several. Though you did say it was a rough calc.

[Norade]

One thing I'm going to ask about is what if somebody wants their civilization to live in asteroid belts and orbitals and could care less about habitable worlds?

The only real issue I can see is that if they live on their own Culture Orbitals it implies one hell of an industrial base & some impressive material technologies. I was thinking about having a Culture Orbital as one world too, but it being found & colonised rather than actually built by the Altacar Empire.

That would be interesting, sounds like an idea you should go for.

Hence the asteroid thing I mentioned, they can come but when we heat dump our rocks back to ambient using lasers they're have trouble picking us out from lifeless rocks.

How likely do you think it is that a species which is interacting & trading with others will manage to keep the fact that it lives on asteroids not planets secret like that?

Depending on how secretive they are and how much trade they do it could range from difficult to Q only knows how they could do it. But even so, it's harder to nail multiple asteroids than to nail one planet.

True but living in rocks that you move around and mine means that I'm more likely to chuck a ton of them at somebody to win a war than waste effort on sending things of value. It doesn't matter how good your defenses are when a swarm of rocks that were given a slight nudge are sent at an enemies home system for less cost than it takes to build the defenses to counter them. I mean the engine wash from our ships is enough to wipe out life on a planet so those that cling to them can have alliances all they want, when all it takes is for one ship to slip through balance goes out the window compared to those that aren't target able by that tactic.

Then just allow FTL sensors (in the case of relativistic missiles) and you'll need a hell of a lot of straight-line-trajectory rocks to get past any defenders (I'm also assuming the rocks are launched from either the same system or have hyperdrives slapped on them and launched from yours). The earlier the rocks are intercepted the easier it is to just nudge them out of the way for example.
Now... yes, if I want to slag your planets then I certainly will drop rocks on them, but only once I've achieved space superiority in the system in question... which means sending warships in to clear the way.

I brought up a few ideas in my last post for how it could be done.

As DH says, I very much doubt our engines can do that kind of damage. We're playing with the UFP or B5 Earth Alliance, not the Culture.

I'm not talking BDZ here, just enough to cause major climate change and fuck over all crops and animals not under domes. It's not complete, but it is mean.

EDIT: Looking at the main site I see that this is out of our range, though I still wouldn't want to be a city under and exhaust plume from a large cargo ship.

[Ryan Thunder]

I say we use Steve's system, but instead of specifying the composition of the armies/space forces we just determine their cost and RP all the details. Neatly removes the humanocentric issues inherent with the army and lets us do whatever we want with the space forces.

[Teleros]

Depending on how secretive they are and how much trade they do it could range from difficult to Q only knows how they could do it. But even so, it's harder to nail multiple asteroids than to nail one planet.

True, but I think interacting with the other nations is meant to be a big part of this, so...

Plus, cutting down on all that waste heat is still going to be easier said than done, especially with things like lightspeed lag (ie, sit a passive sensor ship squadron waaaaaay out there to detect radiation from before you turned off the heating). Or just stick a few ships with big guns in the inner solar system looking outwards, and have the rest of the fleet head home. When you turn the lights back on (and you'll have to eventually) the ships will pick it up and can start poking holes in the asteroids.

I brought up a few ideas in my last post for how it could be done.

Oh I know it can be done, I just have my doubts as to the cost-effectiveness of warfare through chucking rocks without first achieving space superiority in the target system, given that this isn't a hard sci-fi setting.

I'm not talking BDZ here, just enough to cause major climate change and fuck over all crops and animals not under domes. It's not complete, but it is mean.

Uhm... that kind of ecological damage may still be beyond our means without a significant investment in time and / or ships. I don't think weapon yields or typical ship sizes have been specified yet, but if we have B5 / ST level firepower then I doubt we'll be able to accelerate at more than a few tens of G's (implies pretty damn good power generation otherwise, which feeds into having better weapons, etc), and planets are damn big things. Slagging cities this way I can understand, but if you want to just bugger up the whole planet and have achieved space superiority, dropping rocks is the way to go, surely?

[Dark Hellion]

Yah, I goofed. Went to the bathroom during the calc and came back and wrote it down as acceleration instead of velocity. Congrats, you only managed to get a fucking moon to outrun a fighter jet. Lets ignore that you would have to annihilate 5 million tons total of matter/antimatter to generate the 100 petatons I used for the rough calc. I think you are missing just how fucking massive of an object Ceres is and also not looking at the fact that fucking moons don't need to travel that fast.

And I still think you do not get how big space is. If you come out of hyperspace at the edge of a system (because who is going to let an unregistered ship use a gate) even traveling at fractional c it takes days to reach an inner planet. You have to come out of hyperspace literally only a few light minutes away to do such a stunt.

This is of course ignoring the much more likely political possibilities. Everyone in the galaxy genocides your race. Happy days. Seriously, don't be a dick and don't try to push some "Well I don't have to use mass lightening and can choose an arbitrarily large mass and push it up to .33c" bullshit. There are a load of absolutely, hideously broken shit you can do with ostensibly Trek level tech that make planetoid bowling balls look like a mild case of gas. No one is going to do them because they are stupid, cheesy and obviously break rule #1.

[loomer]

Look, why are we even detailing armies and navies? Everyone knows tomorrow's wars will be fought by robots on top of a very tall mountain, and our role will be to write and design these robots.

[Simon_Jester]

One thing I'm going to ask about is what if somebody wants their civilization to live in asteroid belts and orbitals and could care less about habitable worlds? They might think nothing of nuking a world assuming that the majority of their enemies forces are off world, or assume, that the enemy is primitive for not having migrated and nuke them just so they can gather resources easier from that systems smaller bodies. I only ask because I was going to build such a civilization, it would likely be a human off-shoot smaller and weaker from living in near zero-g for generations, they rely mainly on AI for combat and only employ a small command team of humans per ship for traditions sake and so there is no such thing as a war without losses.

The game engine has no trouble modeling any of this. Nuking planets into billiard balls is probably a colossally bad idea strategically and diplomatically; setting up an orbital blockade might make more sense.

One thing we might want to consider is allowing players to spend some of their naval money on defensive fortification for critical planets- along with the kickass space fleets you have kickass Orbital Fortresses or something. Dunno, it probably won't be all that different from a game point of view than parking a fleet in orbit, unless we make planetary defenses cheaper than the fleet it takes to crack them (which we could justify by the fact that the planetary defenses don't need to be mobile and can be built deep into a mountain range or whatever)

I say we use Steve's system, but instead of specifying the composition of the armies/space forces we just determine their cost and RP all the details. Neatly removes the humanocentric issues inherent with the army and lets us do whatever we want with the space forces.

That is Steve's system, more or less, with only one exception: he distinguishes between screaming hordes and elite commandos. That's not exactly a detailed, humanocentric concept: Bug Swarms are screaming hordes, alien warrior-caste guys who are hell on wheels in all sorts of exotic terrain are elites, and so on.

Mechanically, it hardly seems to matter what the composition of the space forces is in terms of heavy ships/light ships/whatever, with the sole exception that "carrier" ships exist. And even that's been called into question.

[Teleros]

One thing we might want to consider is allowing players to spend some of their naval money on defensive fortification for critical planets- along with the kickass space fleets you have kickass Orbital Fortresses or something. Dunno, it probably won't be all that different from a game point of view than parking a fleet in orbit, unless we make planetary defenses cheaper than the fleet it takes to crack them (which we could justify by the fact that the planetary defenses don't need to be mobile and can be built deep into a mountain range or whatever)

I swear my posts are just vanishing or something. Scroll back a page or two, I put down an idea for planetary shields / weapons, but with a greater cost than starship versions.

[Simon_Jester]

I swear my posts are just vanishing or something. Scroll back a page or two, I put down an idea for planetary shields / weapons, but with a greater cost than starship versions.

Apologies; no offense meant. Though looking back I'm not seeing it in the past few pages. Maybe farther back than that?

Anyway, the sheer volume of this thread is getting to the point where it's impossible to keep track of all the suggestions that have been made. Look on the bright side; anything that actually gets incorporated into the ruleset will probably have to be suggested by multiple people anyway.

[Teleros]

Apologies; no offense meant.

Yeah I know, it's just weird.

Though looking back I'm not seeing it in the past few pages. Maybe farther back than that?

Top of P18.

[Darkevilme]

Why the devil would 1 point worth of defences, being equivalent to 1 point worth of starships, cost more than 1 point of starships when its less useful than said 1 point of starships on account it can't go anywhere.

Although apparently we get defences free with our star systems based on the industrialization of the system, though there's no ball park figures for how strong the defences are in points for colony, mid, core, home either on ground or in space as of yet.

[Steve]

I say we use Steve's system, but instead of specifying the composition of the armies/space forces we just determine their cost and RP all the details. Neatly removes the humanocentric issues inherent with the army and lets us do whatever we want with the space forces.

I remove the entire "troop quality/kit quality" setup last night, even before Hellion made his next post on it. As some of you might have noticed.

[Steve]

And now for Teleros.

Hmm, got some questions about carrier / transport rules.

1. Are starship troop carriers (and fighter carriers) assumed to come with enough parasite dropships automatically? Ie if I buy a £100 carrier and have it carry £50 worth of troops / fighters, do I need to then pay separately for the troops' dropships / the actual fighters? Obviously replacement costs are another matter.

Yes.

2. How does the starting troop transport fleet impact on our regular fleet-building exercises prior to the game? Furthermore, what's to stop me saying that my troop transports are £200 ships which each carry £10 worth of my £10,000 worth of troops... making them in other words at least as good in a stand-up fight as a £150 warship? That's an extra 250 big warships to start the game with. Mod oversight at the very least seems sensible.

The automatic troop transports are all dedicated troop transports that carry full hull value worth of troops. But the entire thing has to be reconsidered IMHO. Getting the transport fleet to carry a logical number of troops was utterly skewing everything. At this point it's probably better if people just RP their own troop transports, with the caveat that the transports are just big hyperspace-capable bread boxes loaded with troops.

3. Are there any advantages to say limiting your starting transport fleet to only 20% of your starting soldiers? It seems odd otherwise that peaceful nations or those with no intention of setting foot on enemy occupied worlds start with such a massive fleet of transports... but what have they invested in otherwise?

You still need transports to move troops around, to potentially send them to aid allies or friends, or to send reinforcements to invaded sectors. I'm not of mind to let someone say "I have fewer troop transports so I'm better in X stuff".

4. Let's say my £100 carrier can launch £50 worth of fighters / gunboats etc. It now has an offensive value equal to £100 plus whatever weapons the carrier itself has. Even if this is just an extra £20 or something (ie, 1/5 carrier's cost), scale it up to lots of carriers and it could be an issue. The parasite craft also provide an obvious range advantage, and free up the carrier to do other stuff (like drop rocks on planets whilst the defending fleet is busy, or whatever).

Any carrier's "weapons" will be limited to point-defense, anti-spacecraft armament, and maybe a couple of weapons capable of hurting an Ultralight, with no range to them. 10% of the ship's value being their equivalent anti-starship capability is likely the cap..... and this is all guidelines anyway because if someone tries to min-max with carriers they will suffer.

5. Fighter v fighter sounds like a case of MAD to me, unless the odds are greater than 2:1. Is this intended?

Logically fighters would do good in taking one another out and a balanced opposition would easily counter one. And the thing about fighters is that they're still much easier to kill and cannot take what they can dish out.

A final thought about planetary defences. If I want to build a network of shield generators and anti-starship lasers on one of my planets, can I and should there be a cost penalty involved (eg £2 of planetary defences = £1 worth of starship / fighters)? Construction times could use regular starship build times to keep things simple, but it would allow for more passive defensive buildups that won't worry your neighbours.

Everyone automatically gets effective planetary defenses, I've not yet decided the "value", though on the spot I figure it'll be the equivalent value of a sector's GDP level, or something like three quarters of it.


The main issue I have left is balancing Colony Sectors. The growth mechanic, conceived to balance Colonies, is making people thing there'll be in-game calculations when I didn't want to have those as mandatory, nor do I want the mods to track the growth of 100 midrange and colony sectors across the game. Of course, without the growth negative, a Core Sector's cost also becomes unbalanced.

Updating the rules I just posted after I click submit. Reposting the whole thing for a couple changes does seem silly.

[Teleros]

Why the devil would 1 point worth of defences, being equivalent to 1 point worth of starships, cost more than 1 point of starships when its less useful than said 1 point of starships on account it can't go anywhere.

I assumed that first we wouldn't want to have overpowered defences on planets, and second that you'd have to cover the whole globe with defences, some of which would be presumably useless because they'd be pointing away from the invading fleet.

Steve:

That's a "yes" to the automatic parasite craft when first bought I assume.

The main issue I have left is balancing Colony Sectors. The growth mechanic, conceived to balance Colonies, is making people thing there'll be in-game calculations when I didn't want to have those as mandatory, nor do I want the mods to track the growth of 100 midrange and colony sectors across the game. Of course, without the growth negative, a Core Sector's cost also becomes unbalanced.

Honestly I think if you want population & economic growth to be modelled here then people will just have to accept the need for some calculations every in-game year. The question is just how you want to have population growth etc work:

1. By sector, meaning more work for players.
2. By nation, with players then saying where the increases happen.

Either way, there'll have to be a yearly pop / econ update as well.

[Steve]

Steve:

That's a "yes" to the automatic parasite craft when first bought I assume.

It is.

The main issue I have left is balancing Colony Sectors. The growth mechanic, conceived to balance Colonies, is making people thing there'll be in-game calculations when I didn't want to have those as mandatory, nor do I want the mods to track the growth of 100 midrange and colony sectors across the game. Of course, without the growth negative, a Core Sector's cost also becomes unbalanced.

Honestly I think if you want population & economic growth to be modelled here then people will just have to accept the need for some calculations every in-game year. The question is just how you want to have population growth etc work:

1. By sector, meaning more work for players.
2. By nation, with players then saying where the increases happen.

Either way, there'll have to be a yearly pop / econ update as well.

Which is why I was considering dropping it.

[Dark Hellion]

Steve, now that I have found your wavelength I am grooving to this rule set pretty well. But I still have one major problem. $ What is this shit!? It is far too complicated. I have to hold down the shift key and then reach all the way up to the number keys. Unacceptable!

[Teleros]

Which is why I was considering dropping it.

In which case... yeah, up the Core Sector cost by a lot, but perhaps give it / home sectors more benefits? Economies of scale can start to kick in if you have a small, highly-developed nation, which may help offset the benefits of having a large, less-well-developed one.

Anyway, I'm happy keeping track of stuff using Excel if we are going to keep the pop / GDP stuff, but I can understand if people don't want to deal with it.

[Steve]

Which is why I was considering dropping it.

In which case... yeah, up the Core Sector cost by a lot, but perhaps give it / home sectors more benefits? Economies of scale can start to kick in if you have a small, highly-developed nation, which may help offset the benefits of having a large, less-well-developed one.

Anyway, I'm happy keeping track of stuff using Excel if we are going to keep the pop / GDP stuff, but I can understand if people don't want to deal with it.

Why would you need Excel?

And raising Core Sectors to 5 points curve them perfectly with Midrange sectors and Colony Sectors, which I'm giving an extra $1,000 in GDP.

Considering dropping the restriction on Cores and Homes getting GDP/population boosts - that was again linked to the growth concept.

In-game, though, I would expect people to reflect Colonies as the place people go to in order to build a new life, try to make their name or some wealth, etc.

[Kuroji]

I say we use Steve's system, but instead of specifying the composition of the armies/space forces we just determine their cost and RP all the details. Neatly removes the humanocentric issues inherent with the army and lets us do whatever we want with the space forces.

I remove the entire "troop quality/kit quality" setup last night, even before Hellion made his next post on it. As some of you might have noticed.

I honestly don't see what is humanocentric for much of this, honestly, but if you come down to it and say you spend X on troops but your troops are lower in number but higher quality... it'd be like spending extra on ships so they could dish out more, and take more punishment. In the end it's all RP in that respect, after all. I suppose it's just more flexibility for the players this way, then.

Honestly this looks pretty solid overall, but the refinement is just making things smoother, not to mention easier to deal with by mods. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to participate in this as much as humanly possible; how long would you expect this to run overall? Or is it just indefinitely?