An SDNW Proposal

[Steve]

Frankly I don't think it matters much either way. The majority of all the planets we own most likely won't be anything but a footnote or brief mentions in-game... Whether they are completely terraformed or only halfway through the process will be more or less irrelevant.

Mechanically, true, but I think it would add to the setting flavor, and furthermore the point remains that it represents why Colony Sectors are more than just less-populated Core Sectors.

[Steve]

Edited the rule post on the last page. Added minimal unit building times and limits on spending NCPs for extra GDP.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

A few questions about sector economics:

1. Once you've seized a sector from a player or an NPC, it stands to reason that there will be at least some damage to factories, resource extraction facilities, and infrastructure that you'll need to fix in order to restore productivity. Will there be hard penalties to the GDP of occupied sectors? If so, how long and how much investment will it take to restore an occupied GDP's sector to full?

2. Settling empty sectors (those not controlled by any PC or NPC): How long and how much should it take to develop it to an actual Colony Sector, or should it just be RPed?

3. Developing a sector from one tier to the next (Colony to Midrange, Midrange to Core): Are there any costs to it?

If any of these have been addressed earlier, then I apologize for my inability to dig through the rest of the thread.

[Norade]

On terraformed planets and factories, people are going to be awfully disappointed going after what I have. I've got one terraformed world that used to serve as a base of operations when my first system was settled. It's nominally my capital, but the government orbits over it. The rest of my systems you'll have to try and take space habitations, asteroids and their robotic miners and factories, and space based shipyards. It seems unlikely that an invasion will take anything of value seeing how long it will take to capture everything.

[Dark Hellion]

Space habitations can actually be really easy and manpower efficient to capture. Take a stereotypical O'Neil cylinder stuck at a Lagrange point. While it may have 50 million people, it only takes a few dozen people to capture if they can get to the important controls and avoid or circumvent being locked out. Once the controls are captured they can hold the colony hostage through threats of either venting the oxygen or closing the mirrors and freezing everyone to death. Both take time because of the massive size but with mass communication and transportation shut down you have that time.

I think people are overlooking how integrated many aspects of society will be. To run a planet with 10 or so billion people on it in a sustainable manner will take a lot of coordination that will likely be better handled by 'dumb AI' than by biologicals. If these AIs are subverted in some manner entire portions of infrastructure necessary to repel invasions are shut down. While subjugation and assimilation will eventually be needed, a great deal of the initial pacification can be achieved by holding civilians hostage with rationing of their basic needs. Not exactly humanitarian but very practical and probably will be culturally expected and it will probably be as big of a hubbub to hold a few billion hostage as it is now when a predator drone kills a few dozen people. There may be a stink but that is more of an ideological talking point than a call to action.

This does segue into a question I have about how to best mechanically represent an aspect of my faction. I want my worlds to be inhospitable hellholes that are basically uninhabitable to normal biological life. My homeworld literally has rivers of molten slag and seas of chemical run-off that boil because the atmosphere is well over 100C. There are clouds of acid and sections that have been strip-mined down to the mantle. Other worlds are vacuum wastelands were the primary source of heating is the fact that the surface is irradiated til it nearly glows in the dark. As such there are serious practical concerns for trying to take a planet. Moreover, the nature of my faction presents some psychological challenges to invaders. Because they place absolutely no value on any individual or upon their environment, their ability to practice scorched earth is of an entirely different magnitude than most species are used to. My faction would think absolutely nothing of placing nuclear mines at probable landing zones or using troops for suicidal holding actions just to group the enemy up for a nuclear retaliation. This would have an obvious and huge effect upon enemy morale, fighting in an environment where they must always wear full NBC protection against an enemy that doesn't fear, doesn't tire and doesn't care about loses as long as it hurts the enemy more is pretty much the epitome of the common soldier's nightmare. Of course, I fully expect that people will have a lot less of an issue with someone using orbital bombardment on my worlds, especially because my faction will be more upset about the loss of general production and resources than the loss of life or territory. I just want to get opinions on how people think I should represent this in a mechanics fashion so it isn't just RPing.

Edit:BTW I am cool with saying Q did it. I just want the motivation to be real as opposed to simple delusion.

[Teleros]

Because they place absolutely no value on any individual or upon their environment, their ability to practice scorched earth is of an entirely different magnitude than most species are used to.

On the other hand, the diplomatic costs may outweigh the benefits of such actions: if Terra & Nova Terra (and half a dozen player nations) object very strongly to scorched earth tactics, it may not be wise to antagonise them. I'll leave it to your people to do a detailed cost-benefit analysis of it .

[Steve]

A few questions about sector economics:

1. Once you've seized a sector from a player or an NPC, it stands to reason that there will be at least some damage to factories, resource extraction facilities, and infrastructure that you'll need to fix in order to restore productivity. Will there be hard penalties to the GDP of occupied sectors? If so, how long and how much investment will it take to restore an occupied GDP's sector to full?

Naturally. Players will be trusted to RP such rebuilding efforts, with mod oversight only as necessary.

2. Settling empty sectors (those not controlled by any PC or NPC): How long and how much should it take to develop it to an actual Colony Sector, or should it just be RPed?

RPed. If the game hits about 10-15 years of time we can consider newly-settled sectors being named Colony Sectors.

3. Developing a sector from one tier to the next (Colony to Midrange, Midrange to Core): Are there any costs to it?

Honestly I'm not sure such will happen within the timeframe of this game's likely lifespan. If the game does last that long it'll be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Norade: While anyone you're at war with may choose to RP things as they see fit and account for such difficulties, your particular settlement pattern will not net you any special advantages in terms of system defense. If an opponent brings enough land forces to overrun a system, it is overrun.

Hellion: If you want to choose to make your worlds inhospitable for RP reasons, it's fine, but I agree it would leave you vulnerable to being a power for which orbital bombardment is an acceptable solution. I would, however, consider that your main worlds have defenses that would require landing forces to remove, possibly even including deep surface bunkers that must be identified before even orbital bombardment can work.

[Darkevilme]

A quick question to the SDNET world folks. How many in-game years did the game go on for in its various peculiar incarnations?

[Steve]

SDNW3 lasted 2 in-game years and is still getting some story posts by devoted writers, not sure how long SDNW1 lasted as I wasn't in it, and SDNW2 lasted 10 years (start 2008, I believe we called it quits in 2018) not counting PeZook's final storyline. It would've been even longer but after 9 months of a brisk "one RL month = one in-game year" we switched to a much slower "one real-life week = 1 in-game month" progression to avoid storylines being quickly outpaced by time. The new timeframe proved a tad slow, though, and in SDNW2 we tried to a pace of "2 real-life weeks = 1 in-game quarter", or roughly 2 RL months per game year.

[Steve]

Currently I have a grid-square base map ready that has 16x20 squares, if we have a sector from each square and a three map game (to reflect the third dimension) that is 960 sectors.

If I cut the map to 16x16 it's 768 sectors. Which might be better if we get like 20 players and an average of 8-10 sectors per player.

[Darkevilme]

Can i just point out now that personally i'd find it a pain if i had to flick between three different maps to see all of my territories. I'd prefer a 2d map, it might not be realistic but it's easier to handle.

[Dave]

Can i just point out now that personally i'd find it a pain if i had to flick between three different maps to see all of my territories. I'd prefer a 2d map, it might not be realistic but it's easier to handle.

Seconded.

[PeZook]

Thirded. It won't add anything substantial to the game.

[PeZook]

Space habitations can actually be really easy and manpower efficient to capture. Take a stereotypical O'Neil cylinder stuck at a Lagrange point. While it may have 50 million people, it only takes a few dozen people to capture if they can get to the important controls and avoid or circumvent being locked out. Once the controls are captured they can hold the colony hostage through threats of either venting the oxygen or closing the mirrors and freezing everyone to death. Both take time because of the massive size but with mass communication and transportation shut down you have that time.

This...is complete bullshit. It's one of those plans where you assume the enemy will just sit there and let you waltz into his (naturally completely centralized) control centre. Why do you think the owners of the cylinder won't realize this vulernability?

A habitat with 50 million people could easily support a 400 thousand man defence force (with just organics, not countring automated defences they could spam by the millions), and they will all rush to defend the command centre, which will naturally be A) Designed to be as defensible as possible, and B) Have hundreds of not thousands of backups that could take over. There's no shortage of space ; A cylinder could easily have massive stocks of weapons with which to arm the citizenry in case they need more warm bodies to defend themselves from brutal death.

So, have fun trying to grind your way through 40 divisions of infantry in close quarters combat, only to arrive at the control centre to see all the equipment blown to hell with thermite, and control transferred elsewhere.

Trying to seize a cylinder in the way your described would require the attackers to seize control of all relevant systems locally, and hold them against counterattacks long enough for it to matter. The environmental systems could easily be decentralized, too, with countermeasures and civil defence systems designed to work around partial loss of capacity.

Communications isn't going to be centralized like that, either. There'll be lots of various different systems with redundant controls as well.

The only way to really capture an O'Neill cylinder with minimal manpower is to win local space superiority and threaten to blow massive holes in it. Which isn't guaranteed to work, either, since the damn thing can probably mount a fair number of heavy weapons, too, and its internal atmosphere would work as an excellent heat sink.

[Shroom Man 777]

You're playing, PeZook?

The Bragulans will just blow the fuck out of your fucking space stations and, I dunno, replace it with a giant statue of Byzon or something.

[Steve]

Well, there are three basic maps I have ready.

16x16 - 256 Sectors
16x20 - 320 Sectors
24x24 - 576 Sectors

I figured we need 300-400 minimum, though past 500 we might be getting too much space.

[Sea Skimmer]

Can i just point out now that personally i'd find it a pain if i had to flick between three different maps to see all of my territories. I'd prefer a 2d map, it might not be realistic but it's easier to handle.

We could have a 2D map, but put an additional number on any sectors that are supposed to be highly remote to indicate an elevation difference. Like -5 means five sector widths below the normal plain, +4 means four above. All other sectors would otherwise be assumed to lie on the same general level so travel distances are easily measured. This way we can have a 2D map that isn't huge, and yet still have basically unlimited volume in which to play the game if needed.

[Steve]

How would you reflect such on the map? Say Player A owns a Sector on the map at the plain level, but Player B owns the space 2 sectors up?

[Norade]

Norade: While anyone you're at war with may choose to RP things as they see fit and account for such difficulties, your particular settlement pattern will not net you any special advantages in terms of system defense. If an opponent brings enough land forces to overrun a system, it is overrun.

I can understand that from a rules standpoint, but from a realism standpoint it sucks ass. I'm pretty sure that if you're attacking a decently well thought out asteroid city, or space based colony that I can inflict more than 3:1 losses on an attacking force by playing games with choke points, automated defenses, sealed doors, and other fun stuff. Then if the colony does fall render it worthless by using an automated system to destroy the life support and power generation systems. Hopefully I can get the civilians evacuated, but if you've gotten far enough to take anything I likely no longer have enough control to do that anymore.

The same goes for planet based forces too, 3:1 even with orbital support seems far too low for foes with technological parity. I'm not sure what examples I'll be able to find given that conflicts in reality are rarely ever fought be equals.

[Sea Skimmer]

How would you reflect such on the map? Say Player A owns a Sector on the map at the plain level, but Player B owns the space 2 sectors up?

Well if we had any need to stack sectors, then yeah. Just tag it with 'Player A @ 0' and 'Player B @ +2'
But as for a 3:1 rule that just declares a system fails, that is quite unacceptable to me. We might as well not bother playing a game at that point since you just removing any realistic hindrance on conquering entire planets. Just showing up is half the battle sure, but the other half is billions of people being killed. Soviet doctrine BTW called for at least five to one in tanks and seven to one in artillery superiority besides three to one in men for an attack to succeed.

[Dark Hellion]

Space habitations can actually be really easy and manpower efficient to capture. Take a stereotypical O'Neil cylinder stuck at a Lagrange point. While it may have 50 million people, it only takes a few dozen people to capture if they can get to the important controls and avoid or circumvent being locked out. Once the controls are captured they can hold the colony hostage through threats of either venting the oxygen or closing the mirrors and freezing everyone to death. Both take time because of the massive size but with mass communication and transportation shut down you have that time.

This...is complete bullshit. It's one of those plans where you assume the enemy will just sit there and let you waltz into his (naturally completely centralized) control centre. Why do you think the owners of the cylinder won't realize this vulernability?

A habitat with 50 million people could easily support a 400 thousand man defence force (with just organics, not countring automated defences they could spam by the millions), and they will all rush to defend the command centre, which will naturally be A) Designed to be as defensible as possible, and B) Have hundreds of not thousands of backups that could take over. There's no shortage of space ; A cylinder could easily have massive stocks of weapons with which to arm the citizenry in case they need more warm bodies to defend themselves from brutal death.

So, have fun trying to grind your way through 40 divisions of infantry in close quarters combat, only to arrive at the control centre to see all the equipment blown to hell with thermite, and control transferred elsewhere.

Trying to seize a cylinder in the way your described would require the attackers to seize control of all relevant systems locally, and hold them against counterattacks long enough for it to matter. The environmental systems could easily be decentralized, too, with countermeasures and civil defence systems designed to work around partial loss of capacity.

Communications isn't going to be centralized like that, either. There'll be lots of various different systems with redundant controls as well.

The only way to really capture an O'Neill cylinder with minimal manpower is to win local space superiority and threaten to blow massive holes in it. Which isn't guaranteed to work, either, since the damn thing can probably mount a fair number of heavy weapons, too, and its internal atmosphere would work as an excellent heat sink.

I am not suggesting that you are going to just waltz in with a hundred guys and capture it. It is going to take a relatively large and coordinated force of naval assets, marines, combat engineers, computer techs, and ground pounders to take the colony. However, once taken the design of the colony necessitates far few men to control than a terrestrial location does. There are aspects of the design that require an ability for relatively few men to control a great deal of the important colony functions. Once secondary sites have been cut off, either destroyed or command disabled, you have an amount of general control far above what a planetary site would give you. For example, by controlling the central "spoke" of an Island 3 you can direct nearly all movement on the colony. You can literally rain firepower on any location and can move far more quickly with the central lifts than those on the cylinder walls can. Its simply very difficult to amass any civil uprising when you can lob tear gas from 5km above or pop off a sub-kt tac nuke from 20km away if needed. It is just a function inherent to the way one would design a space colony. They are going to be highly symmetrical, organized and with very streamlined civilian C3 apparatus. There is a limit to how much you can decentralize without opening other problems and there are very real space and structural difficulties in building certain types defenses. A large amount of the chaos that makes urban combat and pacification difficult is not present.

Now these same advantages do apply to the defender during the initial invasion, but there is a much greater onus on the defender to avoid collateral damage and maintain general colonial functions than the attacker. There is a sort of odd inversion of terrestrial operations. Planetside you can take the control of the major objectives with a moderate sized force but then require a large number of men to hold the urban environment and complete pacification/subjugation procedures. In a colony you need a very large amount of initial manpower to overcome the natural choke point aspect of the structure but once you control the major objectives you need far fewer men to keep control because of the encapsulated nature. I am assuming that we are are just hand-waving that these both balance out.

@Norade and Skimmer: In my experience with about a half dozen different STGODs, you do need to just put an arbitrary number down for how much it takes to invade. Now, if you are just troubled by the number go ahead and lay out your suggestions. I am not satisfied with 3:1 takes all either but I'm willing to stomach it. The thing is that RPing it just doesn't work... people are just too reluctant to lose planets and don't like to make any consideration for the general morale of troops attempting to capture some dirtball a hundred light years from their home inhabited by a bunch of methane breathers. In the end, people want to write about explosions and heroic last stands and don't want to worry about how scared and on edge Johnny and his men are after walking five days through a swamp filled with razor sharp silica crystals while under constant bombardment by sub-kt nuclear artillery and incendiary cluster missiles.

As for 2-D vs. 3-D. In school I learned this really cool way you can represent something in 3 space. (x,y,z) Set an origin, use Cartesian coordinates. Told you they'd come back.

[Sea Skimmer]

Its simply very difficult to amass any civil uprising when you can lob tear gas from 5km above or pop off a sub-kt tac nuke from 20km away if needed.

The US could have done either of those things in Iraq, but it didn't. Because what the fuck is the point of capturing anything if you are just going to destroy it and make everyone hate you as bitterly as they can while you do so? The reality is that invading a planet or a large space colony makes almost no sense in the first place, between the cost of invading and the scale of destruction that would be inflicted and the endless resistance an attacker simply could not gain anything. On earth people are willing to still invade each other on the ground because we have finite land and finite world resources, but that ceases to be an issue if you can travel between solar systems. So it especially makes no sense to just hand people an arbitrary way of capturing worlds. They SHOULD have to fight a long grinding time consuming war to do so, and if a player doesn't want to do that then maybe they should shouldn't try. Any pretext of strategy would also just go out the window if systems are automatically overrun by an army arriving.

[Norade]

This...is complete bullshit. It's one of those plans where you assume the enemy will just sit there and let you waltz into his (naturally completely centralized) control centre. Why do you think the owners of the cylinder won't realize this vulernability?

A habitat with 50 million people could easily support a 400 thousand man defence force (with just organics, not countring automated defences they could spam by the millions), and they will all rush to defend the command centre, which will naturally be A) Designed to be as defensible as possible, and B) Have hundreds of not thousands of backups that could take over. There's no shortage of space ; A cylinder could easily have massive stocks of weapons with which to arm the citizenry in case they need more warm bodies to defend themselves from brutal death.

So, have fun trying to grind your way through 40 divisions of infantry in close quarters combat, only to arrive at the control centre to see all the equipment blown to hell with thermite, and control transferred elsewhere.

Trying to seize a cylinder in the way your described would require the attackers to seize control of all relevant systems locally, and hold them against counterattacks long enough for it to matter. The environmental systems could easily be decentralized, too, with countermeasures and civil defence systems designed to work around partial loss of capacity.

Communications isn't going to be centralized like that, either. There'll be lots of various different systems with redundant controls as well.

The only way to really capture an O'Neill cylinder with minimal manpower is to win local space superiority and threaten to blow massive holes in it. Which isn't guaranteed to work, either, since the damn thing can probably mount a fair number of heavy weapons, too, and its internal atmosphere would work as an excellent heat sink.

I am not suggesting that you are going to just waltz in with a hundred guys and capture it. It is going to take a relatively large and coordinated force of naval assets, marines, combat engineers, computer techs, and ground pounders to take the colony. However, once taken the design of the colony necessitates far few men to control than a terrestrial location does. There are aspects of the design that require an ability for relatively few men to control a great deal of the important colony functions. Once secondary sites have been cut off, either destroyed or command disabled, you have an amount of general control far above what a planetary site would give you. For example, by controlling the central "spoke" of an Island 3 you can direct nearly all movement on the colony. You can literally rain firepower on any location and can move far more quickly with the central lifts than those on the cylinder walls can. Its simply very difficult to amass any civil uprising when you can lob tear gas from 5km above or pop off a sub-kt tac nuke from 20km away if needed. It is just a function inherent to the way one would design a space colony. They are going to be highly symmetrical, organized and with very streamlined civilian C3 apparatus. There is a limit to how much you can decentralize without opening other problems and there are very real space and structural difficulties in building certain types defenses. A large amount of the chaos that makes urban combat and pacification difficult is not present.

Now these same advantages do apply to the defender during the initial invasion, but there is a much greater onus on the defender to avoid collateral damage and maintain general colonial functions than the attacker. There is a sort of odd inversion of terrestrial operations. Planetside you can take the control of the major objectives with a moderate sized force but then require a large number of men to hold the urban environment and complete pacification/subjugation procedures. In a colony you need a very large amount of initial manpower to overcome the natural choke point aspect of the structure but once you control the major objectives you need far fewer men to keep control because of the encapsulated nature. I am assuming that we are are just hand-waving that these both balance out.

@Norade and Skimmer: In my experience with about a half dozen different STGODs, you do need to just put an arbitrary number down for how much it takes to invade. Now, if you are just troubled by the number go ahead and lay out your suggestions. I am not satisfied with 3:1 takes all either but I'm willing to stomach it. The thing is that RPing it just doesn't work... people are just too reluctant to lose planets and don't like to make any consideration for the general morale of troops attempting to capture some dirtball a hundred light years from their home inhabited by a bunch of methane breathers. In the end, people want to write about explosions and heroic last stands and don't want to worry about how scared and on edge Johnny and his men are after walking five days through a swamp filled with razor sharp silica crystals while under constant bombardment by sub-kt nuclear artillery and incendiary cluster missiles.

As for 2-D vs. 3-D. In school I learned this really cool way you can represent something in 3 space. (x,y,z) Set an origin, use Cartesian coordinates. Told you they'd come back.

The main issue with your plan is assuming that you'll know the layout of the enemy station to find those secondary command sites. They could look like any other house on top and have an armored control center ready to go underneath. That gets staffed and the main control room is locked down and filled with troops so when you get there you only get another battle with nothing to show for it. Then you get to defenses, for starters you have to fight past the standard armored door, then the bunker like hallway with multiple fallback points where the enemy can kill you while remaining relatively safe. If you want to get creative you turn the gravity off, suck the air out, and line the hallway with space suit defeating razor wire to deal with anybody that wears a soft suit. Going with a Trek style tech base you can turn gravity up by a factor of ten or more and the enemy won't know until they walk into it. Better yet if you do it while they're stacked up and ready to breech a door.

In reality you'd rarely ever take anything, you'd only land forces there to cause damage and then leave if you don't just shoot it down with your ships. Even with treaties why would you even try to take a world when it would cost you so many soldiers? Even an Earth like terraformed planet will never be worth more than the empty systems filled with resource rich rocks you can take without going up and down a gravity well.

Also because he ninja'd me, I agree with Sea Skimmer. He made the same points as I did in less words.

[Dark Hellion]

The galaxy is fucking huge, there is no point to fight over damn near anything at all but petty ideology. Realistically a vast majority of conflict should either be naval skirmishes or xenocide. This doesn't actually make for a good game, just a bunch of people sitting around in diplomatic conferences circle jerking. And people get pissy when you glass their civ from orbit.

If we were going for the pretext of anything approaching realism someone would release an exponentially expanding Aggressive Homogenizing Swarm and sit back as it consumes the galaxy over a few billion years.

We have to make silly, arbitrary assumptions for the point of actual storytelling.

[Siege]

A three to one advantage should easily be enough to conquer a colony world. So it's a matter of which world you are attacking... Which leads into my next point: the 3-v-1 Steve proposed is a good guideline. As a fast-and-loose way to judge how likely an attack is to succeed it works fairly well. Meanwhile if you attack someone's core system it stands to reason you ought to bring more troops... But then that also depends on the sort of army your enemy fields, the kind of planet you're fighting on, what sort of troops you've brought along, how far away from home and resupply you are--so basically all aspects of "how am I going to write this war".

Yes, I know. Shock, horror: you might actually be forced to independently consider the narrative of your attack, or even (GASP) parlay with the person you're attacking, instead of just crunching mindless numbers and declaring victory. Oh no, whatever shall we do!