Bulwark Battlecruiser overpowered?

[Dark Primus]

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bulwark- ... le_cruiser

Looking at the number of guns this site claims the Bulwark has, seems in my opinion far from what it should have for its size.
Compare it to a Imperial class star destroyer then it should fall in to the same tonnage, roughly.

I mean if a ship in mearly 1000 meters in lenght could house so many anti-capital ship scale guns then shouldn't the entire surface of the ship be covered by them? And if a ship of that size could muster such advantage in firepower then why not Imperial star destroyers?

[Srelex]

Where are all those guns supposed to be? o_O Perhaps they're tiny, and as such it sacrifices firepower for volume?

[Agent Sorchus]

Easy, the Bulwark is not the Bulwark mk1. The mk1 is the 1000m ship while the non-mark is a far larger ship. It is all in the disambiguation tag at the top of the page.
For the lazy I present:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bulwark_Mark_I
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bulwark- ... le_cruiser
The battle-cruiser is far bigger in the game it appears in, but there is nothing concrete that tells us it's size. It is just a roughly weaker opponent for a super star destroyer.

[Agent Sorchus]

Where are all those guns supposed to be? o_O Perhaps they're tiny, and as such it sacrifices firepower for volume?

Where are all the guns on the Executor supposed to be? If the 1000m ship was the same as the battle-cruiser than yeah there is a problem, but it isn't so we don't.

[Broken]

IIRC, the Bulwark was first introduced in the EU by the Rebellion RTS video game. It was the rebel tech tree equivalent to the Executor/Super Star Destroyer and so had to fulfill the same basic role as the centerpiece of fleets/flagship with roughly equal protection, firepower, hangar space, etc. So the reason we have these absurdly powerful ships that somehow all manage to not make it to the Battle of Endor or mousetrap the Death Squadron at Hoth is game balance. Well, that and the authors/powers-that-be of later EU materials don't understand the concept of game balance as separate from "reality" and take the game stats verbatim. Not that they are alone in this problem, as several authors do the same thing with West End Gaming's d6 rpg materials, especially with regard to Force abilities and the 60 turbolasers/60 ion cannons is all the armament on an Imperial Star Destroyer brainbug.

[Vehrec]

IIRC, the Bulwark was first introduced in the EU by the Rebellion RTS video game. It was the rebel tech tree equivalent to the Executor/Super Star Destroyer and so had to fulfill the same basic role as the centerpiece of fleets/flagship with roughly equal protection, firepower, hangar space, etc. So the reason we have these absurdly powerful ships that somehow all manage to not make it to the Battle of Endor or mousetrap the Death Squadron at Hoth is game balance. Well, that and the authors/powers-that-be of later EU materials don't understand the concept of game balance as separate from "reality" and take the game stats verbatim. Not that they are alone in this problem, as several authors do the same thing with West End Gaming's d6 rpg materials, especially with regard to Force abilities and the 60 turbolasers/60 ion cannons is all the armament on an Imperial Star Destroyer brainbug.

The real reason that this ship never appeared at Endor was because the rebels never acutually built any-they might have in an alternate timeline, but in this canon one they never had the engineering or dockspace to actually build the damn things until the war was over!

There, a perfectly reasonable explanation.

[Stark]

The Bulwark is why I sneered and never bothered playing Rebellion. Game called 'rebellion', about two equal teams having a slugging war? Ho ho ho.

[Vympel]

The Bulwark is why I sneered and never bothered playing Rebellion. Game called 'rebellion', about two equal teams having a slugging war? Ho ho ho.

Rebellion was flawed to say the least, but playing as the GE you never got the impression the Rebels were your equal, thankfully.

[Stark]

Yeah, that's what I've heard over the years. It just wasn't what I was looking for in a 'galaxy wide SW strategy' game.

But then I missed out on all the bottling up unkillable characters on planets and trainign 50000 Jedi, so....

[Stofsk]

It's really surprising that Star Wars never had a TBS style game, you'd think it would be an obvious fit along with space sim. Rebellion was awful, and I never played Empire at War.

[Stark]

TBS doesn't lend itself well to licences; look at how horrible BotF is (although 80% of that is the awful interface). A traditional TBS (ie, a wargame) in SW would be cool, a Civ-em-up would be shit.

I'd like a business sim or politics sim (like Europa 1400 perhaps) in SW, actually, but nobody else would.

[PainRack]

It's really surprising that Star Wars never had a TBS style game, you'd think it would be an obvious fit along with space sim. Rebellion was awful, and I never played Empire at War.

How was Rebellion awful as a game? For its era and modding capabilty, it was pretty good.

[Stofsk]

No it was fucking terrible. BotF which was released around the same time was much better (it had its own problems though).

[Stark]

BotF was bad because of awful UI and balance, but it was otherwise pretty functional (the combat was arguably just too ambitious for the time). Rebellion is a bit older, I think (at least I played it first) and its much more primitive.

[Srelex]

What was so bad about it? I've had half a mind to check it out from time to time.

Edit: adressing Stofsk here.

[Stofsk]

The UI is unbearably bad. It makes everything you do in the game 10x more difficult. There were also things you could exploit in it, like Stark alluded to above, you could train people to be a Jedi (that's an exaggeration but it's strange how people would go 'lol now I'm force sensitive!') and I can't recall correctly, but I thought none of the characters could die. Actually I might be wrong about that.

The battles were also awful. Awful interface, awful graphics (basically every ship looked like a pixelated blob, except for star destroyers, which looked like pixelated triangular blobs) fighters were tiny specks, and if you zoomed in they were just x-wing or tie-fighter shaped symbols moving about. Now a lot of that might be due to it being old and primitive, but at the same time Moo2 showed their battles and ships a lot more clearly (and was just as primitive as Rebellion was).

That's not to say the game didn't do everything wrong; there was some neat things you could do like you could build installations on one planet and have them sent to another via hyperspace. I don't think I've ever seen that in a strategy game before. It implies buildings are prefab units which can be mass produced on your factory planets and then loaded up in transports (that you don't control - maybe you hired private contractors or something ) and then deposited to where they need to go, which is usually a planet that doesn't have infrastructure. But 99% of the problems in the game boil down to its awful interface (it took me forever to figure out how to train my characters and special forces to get better because of the UI, and sending people on missions as well as forming fleets and all that is a monstrous headache) and the awful battles - not just the graphics but other stuff like it was all but impossible to get a good slugging match without having interdictors, because the AI would usually chicken out and run even if you're attacking a major strategic planet.

BUT - you could play it multi, so the problems with the AI evaporate if you play with someone. That doesn't alleviate the UI issue however.

[Stark]

There's something with plot critical characters (Luke, Vader, Palps) that meant they couldn't die and you could bottle them up. This guy I knew was all about just rampaging up and down the galaxy after sploiting the game.

[Bakustra]

There's something with plot critical characters (Luke, Vader, Palps) that meant they couldn't die and you could bottle them up. This guy I knew was all about just rampaging up and down the galaxy after sploiting the game.

Basically, all the plot-critical characters can't die, because that would mess up the hardcoded events and victory conditions. But any other character can die. These hardcoded characters are the only ones whose Force powers are set, too. They are Palpatine, Vader, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and Mon Mothma.

[Stark]

Don't they teleport somewhere if they'd die or have a power to go there (to Coruscant or whatever)? I can't rememebr how it works now.

[Stofsk]

Wasn't there also some absurd thing where the Empire could assassinate your special characters, but the Rebellion couldn't? The most the Rebels could do was abduct the Imperial characters, or maybe kill them if they were on a fleet which was totally destroyed (even then I don't remember if they could still escape or were captured instead).

[Bakustra]

Wasn't there also some absurd thing where the Empire could assassinate your special characters, but the Rebellion couldn't? The most the Rebels could do was abduct the Imperial characters, or maybe kill them if they were on a fleet which was totally destroyed (even then I don't remember if they could still escape or were captured instead).

Yes. The Empire even had a special Noghri unit for assassinations. Characters on a destroyed fleet or captured planet had a chance to escape, but I haven't dug into the math or anything like that. I assume that it would depend on things like the relative size of the fleets and stuff, but assumptions tend to be chancy with 90's TBS games.

Don't they teleport somewhere if they'd die or have a power to go there (to Coruscant or whatever)? I can't rememebr how it works now.

They literally couldn't die. The most you could do was wound them and take them out of commission, or else capture them.

[Thanas]

I like Rebellion. Still the best SW grand strategy game there is (EAW is way better but I hate the ground combat).

[Kythnos]

Wasn't there also some absurd thing where the Empire could assassinate your special characters, but the Rebellion couldn't? The most the Rebels could do was abduct the Imperial characters, or maybe kill them if they were on a fleet which was totally destroyed (even then I don't remember if they could still escape or were captured instead).

Yes to both. They could still escape, the trick was to keep them on a ship jumping at all times or smothered under legions of troops and your own special characters. (and both of those options only slowed them down not stop it from happening)

[Bakustra]

I like Rebellion. Still the best SW grand strategy game there is (EAW is way better but I hate the ground combat).

Well, it has only one competitor, so it's pretty much a coin toss as to which you prefer. I did like the Imperial droid assistants though.

[RogueIce]

There's something with plot critical characters (Luke, Vader, Palps) that meant they couldn't die and you could bottle them up. This guy I knew was all about just rampaging up and down the galaxy after sploiting the game.

Basically, all the plot-critical characters can't die, because that would mess up the hardcoded events and victory conditions. But any other character can die. These hardcoded characters are the only ones whose Force powers are set, too. They are Palpatine, Vader, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and Mon Mothma.

That's mostly correct, except Chewie can die. SWR totally beat Vector Prime in that regard.

(I don't recall if Chewie ever went to Jabba's Palace to rescue Han because the slippery bastard was never caught by the bounty hunters; I have had Chewie die when the capship he was on got exploded by a pair of SSDs though)

I like Rebellion. Still the best SW grand strategy game there is (EAW is way better but I hate the ground combat).

It's a tossup for me, TBH. EAW moves a little too fast for me with the fleets jumping around everywhere. And sometimes I prefer SWR's ability to jump to any system whenever, and other times I like the "front lines" aspect of EAW. Space combat is way more fun in EAW, though I have to agree with ground combat sucking. It was just too boring for me.

Ideally, I would create a game to mix and match the best elements I liked from SWR and EAW into one game, but since I don't have lots of money, a staff of developers and, y'know, being LucasArts, it's sadly only a pipe dream.