SDNW5 Rules Discussion Thread

[White Haven]

Ground invasions becomes boarding actions against vast arkships. Orbital bombardment against populated worlds becomes naval attacks against arkships containing millions and millions of civilians. The narrative changes; I don't see the ruleset needing to in this case.

[Rabid]

I see.

So, to attack my habitats, someone would have to use the "planetary bombardment/ground invasion" ruleset, yes ?

I'm okay with the idea.

[White Haven]

Little different than, say, an ocean planet with population centers on islands in archipelagos, IMO. The only exception would be the ability to, at significant expense and time investment, move the whole 'planet' to safe territory, but not on any sort of tactically-significant timescale, so that doesn't need to interact with combat rules.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, no, the differences might be significant. Warships could chase his fleeing habitat columns, but he could probably relocate them out of striking distance of an enemy fleet faster than it could react on the operational level- given a suitably heroic diversion by the National navy, the sort of thing good story posts are made of.

[Simon_Jester]

Military Stuff: Short Form

The military and war should not make up the entirety of your nation. Culture, politics, the escapades of individuals from your country, and so on are just as interesting if not more so as fawning over military hardware. Players who obsess over hardware at the expense of healthy participation in the game will draw unfriendly attention from the moderator(s).

However, because warfare involves competition between players in which different players will have totally different ideas about what ought to happen, the great majority of the rules in the game are there to resolve what happens in the event of war. If I honestly thought we could remove these rules and make the military side of the game better, I would be willing enough to go along with it- the carrier rules have already been simplified nearly out of existence in this way, and the troopship rules were simplified to match them.

However, for those of you who dislike rules governing your actions in-game, please try to be understanding. This ruleset is sincerely meant NOT to become a straitjacket, to enable flexibility while preventing the old “I shot you!” “I dodged!” “No you didn’t!” “My spherical mass of iron can beat up your phaser!” arguments that we all know and loathe. Simplifying the rules much further would, in my own opinion, make this kind of problem more likely rather than less, and would not benefit the player base on average even if it benefits a few exceptional individuals.

So, again, I can only ask that those individuals be understanding, and that they contact the mods if they have any questions or want to do something that stretches or ignores the rules for the sake of the fun.

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Fixed Defenses

Every planet is presumed to have a planetary defense of some form. These forces are not available for offensive war, and have no strategic mobility- they cannot be moved from one system to another. They mobilize and deploy when a planet (system) is faced with invasion. They act as a permanent point value attached to the planet or system, which will be fielded against an attacker but cannot be mobilized to attack someone else.

The quality and quantity of these forces varies by the type of sector. Home Sectors have the best defenses and Colony Sectors have the least. A nation's richest sectors will have the highest priority for quality defenses, and also be best able to pay for some of the cost of maintaining those defenses.

Space Defenses

Any given system has a value of space defenses related to sector GDP. Given the typical "five major systems per sector" figure, the point value of the space defenses in a single system is equal to one tenth the sector GDP. Thus, a core sector has a GDP of 10000$/year, and a core system has 1000$ of space defenses in it.

Putting all your assets into one or two systems per sector to concentrate defensive strength is strongly discouraged, but it is not unreasonable to vary the number of defended systems per sector slightly, and vary the strength of the defenses accordingly.

Ground Defenses

If there is a well defined ‘planet’ or massive inhabited structure where most of the people in a system live, the system also gets an extra allotment of fixed ground defenses, equal in point value to the strength of the space defenses. So in a core system with 1000$ of space defenses, the major planet (or other large inhabited object) will have 1000$ of ground defenses.

‘Conquering’ the planet in any permanent sense will require a commitment of ground troops. A swift, easy conquest will require a large commitment of ground troops- a good guideline from history is that winning a decisive victory takes an attacking force three times stronger than the defense.

Bombarding planets does not require a ground troop commitment, but does require bringing ships close enough to the planet to be threatened by surface-to-space weapons. Gratuitous genocidal bombardments may draw hostile international attention, or bad karma in the form of random events.

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Military Budget

As for the mobile military, your nation gets a starting military with a point value equal to its annual GDP. Thus, at game start, if you have a GDP of 60000$/year, you have 60000 points to allocate to your starting military. This point value is divided as you choose among spacecraft and ground forces.

If practical (it may be too much work, if you don’t care about nailing down an exact list of everything), you should try to work out an “order of battle,” a list of what you’ve got and how many points it’s worth, and make it publically available early in the game- ideally, before game start (or before you start, if you’re joining after we begin).

If for some reason you want to keep your order of battle a secret, please contact a moderator. It is advised that you have a good and compelling reason to convince the moderator that it will be better for the game for you to be able to keep that secret.

Space Forces

Obviously, it will be difficult to prosecute a successful war, or even control your own nation’s borders, without combat-capable spacecraft. There are an infinite variety of forms these craft can take. Please use your imagination to its fullest extent. Your armed spacecraft will probably play a big role in many of the stories you tell; be creative. Imagine what you think would work, or what would be glorious to imagine, and implement it as best you can.

What poses the greatest challenge is matching up one person’s dream to another in a fair-minded way. That’s what the naval guidelines are for. Below, we have a list of ship weight classes, ranging from miniscule small craft up through massive dreadnought-monsters. However, you can build ships of pretty much whatever point cost you choose. Your nation’s idea of a ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ ship may be different in point cost from mine, or someone else’s.

Note that I am not trying to assign permanent names to any of these weight classes. I might call my “medium” weight ships “cruisers,” but that doesn’t mean you have to, if your idea of a cruiser is bigger or smaller than that. Or if you don’t like the whole faux-naval thing, and want to name your medium-weight ships something entirely different. I use certain words for myself, but that's a choice I make for myself. It doesn’t mean you should have to, or that you should expect anyone else to do so.

Please be open-minded. With that said, here’s the list of weight classes, roughly like those of SDNW4:

Shuttlecraft: < about 0.05 pts

Shuttlecraft are unarmed or poorly armed small craft. They do not have a hyperdrive and thus lack interstellar mobility. Heim drives are optional- they might be used for interplanetary vessels, but would not be very helpful for craft designed to operate in planetary orbit.

Fighter: 0.1 to 0.5 pts

A ‘fighter’ is an armed small craft with no FTL drive. It may have zero, one, or multiple crew, it may be armed with light weapons for space superiority, heavier munitions for antiship strike, glorified propaganda speakers, or whatever else you choose. How you choose to equip a fighter affects its point value, or should- a fighter worth 0.25 points might be more better equipped and boast modifications not found on a 0.1 point fighter.

There is no obvious reason to have an STL fighter worth more than 0.5 points, but I won't stop you from doing so.

Gunboat: 0.5 to 3 pts

A ‘gunboat’ is a combat-capable small craft with FTL drive. Its hyperdrive capability is limited in range and endurance, so it cannot cover inter-sector distances on its own power unless it piggybacks on a mothership, carrier, or tender of some kind. Gunboats are typically larger and more powerful than fighters, but may be modeled as large, heavy fighters if you wish.

Tiny: 3 to 10 pts

This is an (optionally armed) hyper-capable starship. It has point value, which means it must be able to contribute meaningfully in a fight- that might mean weapons, or it might mean something else. Unlike even an expensive and powerful gunboat, its endurance is great enough for long voyages (refueling stops optional, depending on how you feel about stopping for gas). Note that this applies to all larger starships as well.

It is certainly possible to have a long-range hyper-capable ship worth less than 3 points in combat, but such vessels would be restricted to the role of pure transports, lacking enough muscle to be significant in combat except as targets and victims.

Small: 10 to 30 pts

These ships can start to carry more noticeable and effective weapons, while still being easy for a major nation to turn out in vast quantities.

Light: 30 to 60 pts

Like Small, only bigger.

Medium: 60 to 100 pts

Like Light, only bigger. A Medium ship is the largest thing that can easily and safely land on a planet.

Heavy: 100 to 200 pts

Like Medium, only bigger.

Superheavy: 200 to 400 pts

Heavier than Heavy. I predict that a lot of nations’ largest typical “line combatant” will fall into this range.

Ultraheavy: 400 to 700 pts

Even more heavierer than Heavy. I predict that some nations’ largest typical “line combatants” will fall into this range, and that other nations will often have at least a handful of large ‘flagships,’ ‘monitors,’ ‘superhypermetatransturbodreadnoughts,’ or whatever in this weight class.

Ludicrousheavy: >700 pts

...

...

OK, there.

As a caveat to that, a lot of people seem to like building really big ships, with point costs near to or greater than 1000 points. This is often somewhat impractical, and usually comes with a bit of disagreeable chest-beating about the ULTIMATE POWER of the extremely large ships. Since that’s an unbecoming habit, ships with strength around 1000 points or higher merit some extra scrutiny. You ought to have a good reason for building them, though I for one think there are lots of possible good reasons just waiting for you to discover them, so don’t worry about it too much as long as you have some reason other than strutting up and down and beating your chest about how big your gun is.

Non-Negotiable: Any order of battle containing spacegoing vessels of 1000 points or more should be checked with a moderator. There may be a very good and logical reason for it, and the mod(s) will be flexible about allowing such superships if there is such a reason. But a bit of thought is called for.

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Carriers
Spaceships that carry smaller spacegoing combat units such as ‘fighter’ craft are one of the classics of the genre. Many of you will probably want to have some, and this is certainly allowed. The SDNW4 rules had a rather cumbersome way of handling carriers, which is now streamlined in light of Rule Three:

Anything contributes usefully to battle has a point value proportionate to its contribution, so long as it is risked in battle so that it can be shot back at.

Track the point value of the small craft a carrier brings to battle. The carrier itself only has a point value and cost if, even after all its small craft have flown away, it still increases your odds of victory to bring the carrier along.

Basically, when thinking about carriers, keep track of the point value of the small craft (fighters or gunboats) carried on the larger mothership. Carriers are not, or are not necessarily, ships with a point value, because of Rule Three: the carriers themselves don’t actually do any real harm to the enemy, and aren’t necessarily brought close enough to the enemy for the enemy to shoot back.

So your fleet can contain zero-point carriers to haul your small craft into battle. They simply exist as an excuse for you to bring small craft to places they otherwise couldn’t go, and even if they participate directly in battle, they don’t improve your chances of victory by doing so.

They may be fragile and meant to keep out of battle. Or they can be rugged, but still worth zero points because they don’t directly contribute to a battle once their small craft are launched.

Or they can have actual point value independent from their small craft, which makes them “hybrid” ships- more on how that works later. This usually happens if the carrier is physically rugged, and participates in combat alongside other assets even if it’s only providing intangible support and drawing fire off other units. Or the carrier can have actual weapons of force with which to fight back at the enemy, other than their fighters- think ‘battlestars,’ and more on that concept later.

Troopships

Any armed spacecraft of significant strength can safely be assumed to carry a ground combat detachment- armed naval infantry or dedicated marines. But this detachment would usually have extremely limited point value, probably much less than one point even for a large battleship unless you have preposterously good marines.

Your military gets, for free, a reasonable number of troop transports that can move soldiers and their weapons from one world to another. These transports are also suitable for an opposed troop landing, using some built-in means to get the ground forces onto the planet in the face of enemy opposition.

However, the “free” troopships fall under the “have no points” category. They cannot fight offensively, and lack heavy bombardment weapons or effective weapons for fighting other spacecraft. Like certain carriers, bringing them along with you in battle does not influence the odds in your favor. So if you want to use them offensively against a defended world, you will probably want to send along a naval escort of normal warships to fight any space battles.

If you wish to design an armed troopship that is tougher and more durable, fit to operate in close proximity to a still-ongoing naval battle, it should be worth points. These ships will be “hybrids,” on which more later.

Multirole/Hybrid ships

Some of you may want to build ships that have a fighter detachment, but can still fight effectively in direct combat, improving the fleet’s chances of victory by bringing that ship along into battle. For this purpose, you may designate ‘multirole’ or ‘hybrid’ ships which have some small craft capacity, and some direct combat effectiveness. This gives the carrier a point value in its own right, separate from any cost the fighters may have, which you will have to pay for.

For example, I can have a tiny 5 point tender which hauls around 10 points of gunships. If the gunships are taken away, the tender is still worth 5 points. If it brings all its gunships with it to a battle and fights alongside them, then the total force of tender and gunships is worth 15 points.

Construction time of a carrier is determined by combining the point values: an X point carrier which sustains Y points of fighters will have the same construction time as a normal (X+Y) point ship. More on construction times later.

You may also ‘hybridize’ between a normal direct combat ship and a troopship (a ship which is worth 40 points in a naval fight and carries 20 points of ground troops). Here too, construction times will be figured for the combined point cost of the ship and the troops it’s meant to haul.

You may even, if you are utterly mad, hybridize all three. For example, you might have a ship which is worth 40 points in a direct fight, carries 20 points of ground troops, and carries 20 points of small craft. Its construction time will be typical of an 80-point ship.

Speaking of ground troops...

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Ground Forces

To describe how powerful and dangerous these soldier-like things are, we can assign them point costs, just like starships. However, since the typical starship is going to be a large, shielded platform with nuclear missiles or the like, ground troops are individually worth a lot less than starships- orders of magnitude less, as a rule. We will typically speak of ground troops as being worth “X per $,” where X is some number, most likely up in the thousands.

If you simply want to say “I have a type of ground troops where I can buy X of them per $ I spend,” that is fine. For the sake of some guidelines, I’d like to outline some possible ways to think about troop cost in terms of equipment and training levels. Skip it if you want to just say “I want my troops to cost 1 $ per X thousand.”

Alternatively, use the SDNW4 ground troop descriptions as guidelines for what kind of point values ground troops might have.

[inane blather redacted]

Superheavy Ground Units:

It will probably please some of you to include in your ground forces units of extreme combat power, equal to entire regiments or armies of normal troops, and/or capable of winning gunnery duels with armed orbiting starships. Examples include, but are not limited to: walking killer robot gun platforms, rolling killer robot gun platforms, killer robot gun platforms on treads, flying killer robot gun platforms, Space Marine primarchs, tame Godzilla clones, extremely powerful psychics who wander around blowing up mountains by flexing their eyebrows, Superman, and probably some other stuff I haven’t thought of.

I choose, for my own nation, not to have any of these things. That doesn’t mean you can’t have them.

It’s okay for there to be individual units in your military that just have a cost, in points, which happens to be relatively large. 1$ is very expensive for a ground unit- recall that this is equivalent to a hundred thousand ordinary soldiers! 10$ is powerful enough that such a ground unit could array itself against a million men equipped with (for this setting) basic modern weapons, and win, or at least die very hard in the process of trying. It is honestly hard to imagine that kind of firepower concentrated into any one thing, at least for me.

Personally, I advise that you stick to point values more like 1, 2, or 5$ for even your most powerful superheavy ground units. But you don’t have to take that advice if you don’t want to. If you want to go much beyond that, though, please talk to a moderator.

[Simon_Jester]

Military Stuff: Long Form

The military and war should not make up the entirety of your nation. Culture, politics, the escapades of individuals from your country, and so on are just as interesting if not more so as fawning over military hardware. Players who obsess over hardware at the expense of healthy participation in the game will draw unfriendly attention from the moderator(s).

However, because warfare involves competition between players in which different players will have totally different ideas about what ought to happen, the great majority of the rules in the game are there to resolve what happens in the event of war. If I honestly thought we could remove these rules and make the military side of the game better, I would be willing enough to go along with it- the carrier rules have already been simplified nearly out of existence in this way, and the troopship rules were simplified to match them.

However, for those of you who dislike rules governing your actions in-game, please try to be understanding. This ruleset is sincerely meant NOT to become a straitjacket, to enable flexibility while preventing the old “I shot you!” “I dodged!” “No you didn’t!” “My spherical mass of iron can beat up your phaser!” arguments that we all know and loathe. Simplifying the rules much further would, in my own opinion, make this kind of problem more likely rather than less, and would not benefit the player base on average even if it benefits a few exceptional individuals.

So, again, I can only ask that those individuals be understanding, and that they contact the mods if they have any questions or want to do something that stretches or ignores the rules for the sake of the fun.

---

Fixed Defenses

Every planet is presumed to have a planetary defense of some form. There may be reservist formations or literal town militias in the colony sectors. On any world, there may also be paramilitary gendarme forces, caches of weapons to enable the citizens to fight a guerilla war against an oppressor, 'coast guard' aerospace forces whose normal responsibility is patrolling planetary orbital space, fortress troops manning strongpoints on the planetary surface, and the like.

In much the same way, a planet may also have emplaced defense batteries or fortifications that can control both ground and space around themselves, STL fighter squadrons on standby, theater shields to cover important parts of a planetary surface from orbital fire, space-based orbital weapon stations, minefields deployed to deny certain volumes to a spacefaring attacker, defense installations on conveniently placed asteroids or moons, or any combination of the above. There may also be other kinds of defenses not envisioned in the above paragraphs, depending on your imagination.

These forces are not available for offensive war, and have no strategic mobility- they cannot be moved from one system to another. They mobilize and deploy when a planet (system) is faced with invasion. They act as a permanent point value attached to the planet or system, which will be fielded against an attacker but cannot be mobilized to attack someone else.

The quality and quantity of these forces varies by the type of sector. Home Sectors have the best defenses and Colony Sectors have the least. A nation's richest sectors will have the highest priority for quality defenses, and also be best able to pay for some of the cost of maintaining those defenses.

Space Defenses

Any given system has a value of space defenses related to sector GDP. Given the typical "five major systems per sector" figure, the point value of the space defenses in a single system is equal to one tenth the sector GDP. Thus, a core sector has a GDP of 10000$/year, and a core system has 1000$ of space defenses in it.

Putting all your assets into one or two systems per sector to concentrate defensive strength is strongly discouraged, but it is not unreasonable to vary the number of defended systems per sector slightly, and vary the strength of the defenses accordingly.

Ground Defenses

If there is a well defined ‘planet’ or massive inhabited structure where most of the people in a system live, the system also gets an extra allotment of fixed ground defenses, equal in point value to the strength of the space defenses. So in a core system with 1000$ of space defenses, the major planet (or other large inhabited object) will have 1000$ of ground defenses.

‘Conquering’ the planet in any permanent sense will require a commitment of ground troops. A swift, easy conquest will require a large commitment of ground troops- a good guideline from history is that winning a decisive victory takes an attacking force three times stronger than the defense.

Bombarding planets does not require a ground troop commitment, but does require bringing ships close enough to the planet to be threatened by surface-to-space weapons. Gratuitous genocidal bombardments may draw hostile international attention, or bad karma in the form of random events.

---

Military Budget

As for the mobile military, your nation gets a starting military with a point value equal to its annual GDP. Thus, at game start, if you have a GDP of 60000$/year, you have 60000 points to allocate to your starting military. This point value is divided as you choose among spacecraft and ground forces.

If practical (it may be too much work, if you don’t care about nailing down an exact list of everything), you should try to work out an “order of battle,” a list of what you’ve got and how many points it’s worth, and make it publically available early in the game- ideally, before game start (or before you start, if you’re joining after we begin).

If for some reason you want to keep your order of battle a secret, please contact a moderator. It is advised that you have a good and compelling reason to convince the moderator that it will be better for the game for you to be able to keep that secret.

Space Forces

Obviously, it will be difficult to prosecute a successful war, or even control your own nation’s borders, without combat-capable spacecraft. There are an infinite variety of forms these craft can take. Examples may include but are not limited to: tiny one-man fighters, humanoid robots with energy swords, giant extremely non-humanoid robots with enough weapons of mass destruction to obliterate entire fleets, dragonflies with laser eyeballs, suspiciously nautical-looking turreted dreadnoughts, big spheres with beam emitters that flit around on inertialess drive, clones of Imperial star destroyers, giant starfaring squids that eat spaceships for breakfast, clones of the battlestar Galactica, big empty boxes full of missile racks, mutant-looking skinny things with around ten million cubic meters of armor plate ‘round the bow, clones of Romulan warbirds, passenger liners full of combat psychics and psi-amplifiers, dangerously radioactive masses of steel and concrete with engines and missile launchers precariously bolted on, and starfaring FTL oared galleys. All but two of these made prominent appearances in SDNW4, and so even have the strength of precedent behind them.

As you may have inferred, this is an invitation to use your imagination to its very fullest extent.

Your armed spacecraft will probably play a big role in many of the stories you tell; be creative. Imagine what you think would work, or what would be glorious to imagine, and implement it as best you can.

What poses the greatest challenge is matching up one person’s dream to another in a fair-minded way. That’s what the naval guidelines are for. Below, we have a list of ship weight classes, ranging from miniscule small craft up through massive dreadnought-monsters. However, you can build ships of pretty much whatever point cost you choose. Your nation’s idea of a ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ ship may be different in point cost from mine, or someone else’s.

Note that I am not trying to assign permanent names to any of these weight classes. I might call my “medium” weight ships “cruisers,” but that doesn’t mean you have to, if your idea of a cruiser is bigger or smaller than that. Or if you don’t like the whole faux-naval thing, and want to name your medium-weight ships something entirely different, such as "aggressor," "defender," "hippopotamus," "polychromatizer," or "gazorninplat."

I use certain words for myself, but that's a choice I make for myself. It doesn’t mean you should have to, or that you should expect anyone else to do so.

Please be open-minded. With that said, here’s the list of weight classes:

Shuttlecraft: < about 0.05 pts

Shuttlecraft are unarmed or poorly armed small craft. They do not have a hyperdrive and thus lack interstellar mobility. Heim drives are optional- they might be used for interplanetary vessels, but would not be very helpful for craft designed to operate in planetary orbit.

It is probably unwise to build carriers loaded down with shuttlecraft, but one might imagine using shuttles as aerospace bombers or ‘dropships’ for troop landings. The point value of shuttlecraft really isn’t very important; an armed starship can be safely assumed to have a few shuttles as ‘landing boats’ or escape pods without any need to make a note about how this affects its point value.

Fighter: 0.1 to 0.5 pts

A ‘fighter’ is an armed small craft with no FTL drive. It may have zero, one, or multiple crew, it may be armed with light weapons for space superiority, heavier munitions for antiship strike, glorified propaganda speakers, or whatever else you choose. How you choose to equip a fighter affects its point value, or should- a fighter worth 0.25 points might be more better equipped and boast modifications not found on a 0.1 point fighter.

Obviously, fighters will not be a match for armed starships except in large numbers.

There is no obvious reason to have an STL fighter worth more than 0.5 points, but I won't stop you from doing so.

Gunboat: 0.5 to 3 pts

A ‘gunboat’ is a combat-capable small craft with FTL drive. Its hyperdrive capability is limited in range and endurance, so it cannot cover inter-sector distances on its own power unless it piggybacks on a mothership, carrier, or tender of some kind. Gunboats are typically larger and more powerful than fighters, but may be modeled as large, heavy fighters if you wish.

The obvious advantage of gunboats over fighters is that they let carrier operations extend over interstellar distances- the mothership never needs to get within light years of the target.

Tiny: 3 to 10 pts

This is an (optionally armed) hyper-capable starship. It has point value, which means it must be able to contribute meaningfully in a fight- that might mean weapons, or it might mean something else. Unlike even an expensive and powerful gunboat, its endurance is great enough for long voyages (refueling stops optional, depending on how you feel about stopping for gas). Note that this applies to all larger starships as well.

The Tiny ship will be protected well enough to resist attacks by small craft, up to a point; whether it has antiship weapons of enough force to be a threat to larger starships is an open question. Courier-type vessels are often in this size class, since they don’t need to be heavily armed or especially tough, and do need to have light, pared-down hulls optimized for speed and endurance.

It is certainly possible to have a long-range hyper-capable ship worth less than 3 points in combat, but such vessels would be restricted to the role of pure transports, lacking enough muscle to be significant in combat except as targets and victims.

Small: 10 to 30 pts

These ships can start to carry more noticeable and effective weapons, while still being easy for a major nation to turn out in vast quantities.

Light: 30 to 60 pts

Like Small, only bigger.

Medium: 60 to 100 pts

Like Light, only bigger.

By this point, you’re getting up into a size range that can fight safely against fairly strong opponents, even if it won’t be able to beat them alone- ships that can probably cross swords* with a battleship without being obliterated instantly, or which can assault minor enemy bases without being in too much danger. You may still need to group Medium ships in squadrons for them to win against planetary defenses or battleships, mind you- points are points are points.

A Medium ship is the largest thing that can easily and safely land on a planet.

*Literal crossing of swords is permitted, but not required. Most starships in the game will not have swords. If your starship sword fights last more than four hours, please contact a physician.

Heavy: 100 to 200 pts

Like Medium, only bigger. Heavy ships cannot, as a rule, land on planets, except possibly in custom-built docking facilities designed to accomodate their size and weight. Heavy-weight ships are getting up into the scale that I anticipate will be typical of ‘line combatants:’ ships large, strong, and tough enough to be used as your fleet’s big bruisers and sent into combat against any opponent without too much fear of them getting swatted out of hand.

(This is only an anticipation on my part, and the game is not guaranteed to bear out this assumption)

Superheavy: 200 to 400 pts

Heavier than Heavy. I predict that a lot of nations’ largest typical “line combatant” will fall into this range.

Ultraheavy: 400 to 700 pts

Even more heavierer than Heavy. I predict that some nations’ largest typical “line combatants” will fall into this range, and that other nations will often have at least a handful of large ‘flagships,’ ‘monitors,’ ‘superhypermetatransturbodreadnoughts,’ or whatever in this weight class.

Ludicrousheavy: >700 pts

...

...

OK, there.

In general, given the size of the available naval budgets, I tentatively suggest that you should plan for a fleet of hundreds of ships, with sizes ranging from a few dozen points for escorts, up to several hundred points for capital ships. If you want lots of small ships, or a relatively small number of very powerful ships, that is fine; my tentative suggestion is tentative and a suggestion. If everyone starts going towards one or the other end of the scale, away from my suggestion, that’s fine too. Individual choice is important here.

As a caveat to that, a lot of people seem to like building really big ships, with point costs near to or greater than 1000 points. This is often somewhat impractical, and usually comes with a bit of disagreeable chest-beating about the ULTIMATE POWER of the extremely large ships. Since that’s an unbecoming habit, ships with strength around 1000 points or higher merit some extra scrutiny. You ought to have a good reason for building them, though I for one think there are lots of possible good reasons just waiting for you to discover them, so don’t worry about it too much as long as you have some reason other than strutting up and down and beating your chest about how big your gun is.

Non-Negotiable: Any order of battle containing spacegoing vessels of 1000 points or more should be checked with a moderator. There may be a very good and logical reason for it, and the mod(s) will be flexible about allowing such superships if there is such a reason. But a bit of thought is called for.

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Special Types of Combat Space Units

Now, people might ask, well what if I want to play a ship that carries smaller things into battle, but does not itself fight? Or that fights and carries smaller fighting units into battle?

Carriers
Spaceships that carry smaller spacegoing combat units such as ‘fighter’ craft are one of the classics of the genre. Many of you will probably want to have some, and this is certainly allowed. The SDNW4 rules had a rather cumbersome way of handling carriers, which is now streamlined in light of Rule Three:

Anything contributes usefully to battle has a point value proportionate to its contribution, so long as it is risked in battle so that it can be shot back at.

Track the point value of the small craft a carrier brings to battle. The carrier itself only has a point value and cost if, even after all its small craft have flown away, it still increases your odds of victory to bring the carrier along.

Basically, when thinking about carriers, keep track of the point value of the small craft (fighters or gunboats) carried on the larger mothership. Carriers are not, or are not necessarily, ships with a point value, because of Rule Two: the carriers themselves don’t actually do any real harm to the enemy, and aren’t necessarily brought close enough to the enemy for the enemy to shoot back.

So your fleet can contain zero-point carriers to haul your small craft into battle. They simply exist as an excuse for you to bring small craft to places they otherwise couldn’t go, and even if they participate directly in battle, they don’t improve your chances of victory by doing so.

They may be fragile and meant to keep out of battle. Or they can be rugged, but still worth zero points because they don’t directly contribute to a battle once their small craft are launched.

Or they can have actual point value independent from their small craft, which makes them “hybrid” ships- more on how that works later. This usually happens if the carrier is physically rugged, and participates in combat alongside other assets even if it’s only providing intangible support and drawing fire off other units. Or the carrier can have actual weapons of force with which to fight back at the enemy, other than their fighters- think ‘battlestars,’ and more on that concept later.

Troopships

Any armed spacecraft of significant strength can safely be assumed to carry a ground combat detachment- armed naval infantry or dedicated marines. But this detachment would usually have extremely limited point value, probably much less than one point even for a large battleship unless you have preposterously good marines.

Your military gets, for free, a reasonable number of troop transports that can move soldiers and their weapons from one world to another. These transports are also suitable for an opposed troop landing, using some built-in means to get the ground forces onto the planet in the face of enemy opposition.

However, the “free” troopships fall under the “have no points” category. They cannot fight offensively, and lack heavy bombardment weapons or effective weapons for fighting other spacecraft. Like certain carriers, bringing them along with you in battle does not influence the odds in your favor. So if you want to use them offensively against a defended world, you will probably want to send along a naval escort of normal warships to fight any space battles. Indeed, you’d want to send in warships first, to clear out the space defenses so that landings can begin.

If you wish to design an armed troopship that is tougher and more durable, fit to operate in close proximity to a still-ongoing naval battle, it should be worth points. These ships will be “hybrids,” on which more later.

I advise you to consider the physical size of your troop transport, before you decide that you have it. A transport for a hundred thousand soldiers would be extremely large, and yet theoretically a hundred thousand soldiers might not be worth that many points, requiring only a low-point ship to carry them. If that's all right by you, OK. However, I for one intend to have my armed troopships carrying only small numbers of elite troops, while the bulk of the army rides in troopships of negligible combat power, worth 0 points each.

Multirole/Hybrid ships

Some of you may want to build ships that have a fighter detachment, but can still fight effectively in direct combat, improving the fleet’s chances of victory by bringing that ship along into battle. For this purpose, you may designate ‘multirole’ or ‘hybrid’ ships which have some small craft capacity, and some direct combat effectiveness. This gives the carrier a point value in its own right, separate from any cost the fighters may have, which you will have to pay for.

Construction time of a carrier is determined by combining the point values: an X point carrier which sustains Y points of fighters will have the same construction time as a normal (X+Y) point ship. More on construction times later.

You may also ‘hybridize’ between a normal direct combat ship and a troopship (a ship which is worth 40 points in a naval fight and carries 20 points of ground troops). Here too, construction times will be figured for the combined point cost of the ship and the troops it’s meant to haul.

You may even, if you are utterly mad, hybridize all three. For example, you might have a ship which is worth 40 points in a direct fight, carries 20 points of ground troops, and carries 20 points of small craft. Its construction time will be typical of an 80-point ship.

Speaking of ground troops...

---

Ground Forces

Your nation will probably also need some kind of... soldier-like things. Beings or devices, which are designed to fight on planetary surfaces, or in mazes of tunnels, or space habitats, or just up close and personal in general. If you want to subjugate planetary populations, this is a must-have unless you get really lucky with threats of genocidal bombardment.

To describe how powerful and dangerous these soldier-like things are, we can assign them point costs, just like starships. However, since the typical starship is going to be a large, shielded platform with nuclear missiles or the like, ground troops are individually worth a lot less than starships- orders of magnitude less, as a rule. We will typically speak of ground troops as being worth “X per $,” where X is some number, most likely up in the thousands.

If you simply want to say “I have a type of ground troops where I can buy X of them per $ I spend,” that is fine. For the sake of some guidelines, I’d like to outline some possible ways to think about troop cost in terms of equipment and training levels. Skip it if you want to just say “I want my troops to cost 1 $ per X thousand.”

BLAH BLAH BLAH

Training provides a base cost for a given (large) number of troops per point spent on them. Equipment provides a multiplier to the cost, but also to the quality.

Training

>200000 troops/$: “Screaming Horde”
These troops are in some way... inadequate. Perhaps their training came from watching action movies. Perhaps a significant fraction of them do not, in point of fact, have weapons. Perhaps their officers are donkeys. Perhaps they fight among themselves at the drop of a hat. Perhaps they are not, strictly speaking, sentient lifeforms.

Screaming is strictly optional, coming in hordes is less so.

<200000 troops/$: “Conscript”
These troops are basically adequate, and are at least capable of most types of warfare. However, esprit d’corps is poor, manpower quality is mediocre, officers are uninspired, training is limited, or some combination of the above. Relying on them to carry out complex plans can be iffy. Important support arms may be handled poorly, limiting the troops’ strategic endurance or mobility. Or important equipment may be spread too thinly (heavy weapons at the platoon level where a normal army might have them at the squad level, to take a human-infantry-centric example).

<100000 troops/$: “Regular”
These troops represent some highly generic ‘average,’ roughly corresponding to a roughly baseline human soldier with adequate training, leadership, doctrine, motivation, and equipment.

<50000 troops/$: “Guards”
These troops have some extraordinary qualities- years-long training, excellent officers, very good support arms, indoctrination in special academies, a do-or-die mentality sustaining individual or collective heroism, or some similar strengths.

<20000 troops/$: “Elites”
These troops are almost absurdly competent. It is difficult to achieve this level of quality in the basic military stock of your forces without making the troops in some way superhuman.

Equipment Modifiers

This reflects the level of effort that goes into equipping the troops. Good equipment is usually given to good troops in real life, but in an SF society with high productive capacity this might not always be true. Note that ‘normal’ is defined relative to the technological milieu of the setting- the mere fact that your troops have ray guns doesn’t give them a super-high equipment quality if everyone else has them too.

x0.5 or less: “Excruciatingly Poor”
These troops are armed with weapons so inferior that it makes them almost totally ineffective in intense combat. Against even mediocre enemy armies, they are likely to fare as badly as native armies with swords and spears would against a Victorian expeditionary force armed with rifles and machine guns. To have weapons this bad, an army must usually be totally lacking in combined arms. Or they must be almost totally lacking in some vital counter-weapon needed to deal with a particular class of common enemy equipment- having no AA weapons or antitank weapons could put your troops at this kind of disadvantage.

x0.5 or more: “Bad”
These troops are inadequately armed. Their weapons are significantly sub-par, compared to the median standard of what you can get in the galaxy by making it yourself or buying it from your neighbors. This is either because the industrial base supporting them is unusually primitive, or because their masters couldn’t be bothered. However, they at least have weapons, theoretically capable of doing most of the things an army would want to do, and can pose a credible threat to normally-equipped armies as long as their inferior equipment is available in enough quantity.

x1 or more: “Average”
These troops are armed reasonably well. Their weapons represent the average of what ‘modern’ galactic civilizations can provide on a large scale for their armies. They have the full range of combined arms equipment available, at least in theory.

x2 or more: “Pretty Darn Good.”
These troops are armed with weapons at or near the upper limit of what an average ‘modern’ galactic civilization can mass produce for its armies, and this production is quite expensive. Troops will be extensively equipped with gear that is more powerful, ‘smarter,’ tougher, or otherwise better than average, and this will present a significant advantage when compared to conventional forces.

x5 or more: “Who Are These Guys, And Where Did They Get All These Bazookas?”
These troops are armed with weapons that are probably difficult to mass produce, and are most likely available only in limited quantity. On the other hand, each individual fighting unit has firepower comparable to a squad of normal soldiers: in general, this requires heavy weapons and excellent protection for every soldier.

x10 or more: “Walking Tank”
These troops are armed with extraordinarily powerful personal weapons, each of them probably being comparable to an armored vehicle of a normal army. In general, no one will equip an army like this without a good, specific reason to give superheavy weapons to a handful of individuals. There may of course be exceptions.

x20 or more: “Increasingly Ridiculous”
You get the idea...

So, for example, I might construct a ground army that looks like:
5000 points spent on 200000/$ “conscript” training, x1 modifier “Popularitarian Glourious Socialist People’s Justice Militia”
5000*200000/1 =
one billion soldiers.

2000 points spent on 100000/$ “regular” training, x1 modifier “Line”
2000*100000/1 =
three hundred million significantly better soldiers.

2000 points spent on 50000/$ “guards” training, x2 modifier “Imperial Marines”
2000*50000/2 =
fifty million soldiers, considerably better than the last group.

1000 points spent on 30000/$ “guards” training, x15 modifier “Kaboom Commandos”
1000*30000/15 =
two million soldiers, comically superior to all the previous groups man for man, but incapable of defeating any of the previous groups in an ‘all of X versus all of Y’ match, because of inferior total point cost.

Total cost: 10000 points for 1.352 billion troops, of wildly varying quality.

END OF BLAH BLAH BLAH

Okay, quit skimming.

Superheavy Ground Units:

It will probably please some of you to include in your ground forces units of extreme combat power, equal to entire regiments or armies of normal troops, and/or capable of winning gunnery duels with armed orbiting starships. Examples include, but are not limited to: walking killer robot gun platforms, rolling killer robot gun platforms, killer robot gun platforms on treads, flying killer robot gun platforms, Space Marine primarchs, tame Godzilla clones, extremely powerful psychics who wander around blowing up mountains by flexing their eyebrows, Superman, and probably some other stuff I haven’t thought of.

I choose, for my own nation, not to have any of these things. That doesn’t mean you can’t have them.

It’s okay for there to be individual units in your military that just have a cost, in points, which happens to be relatively large. 1$ is very expensive for a ground unit- recall that this is equivalent to a hundred thousand ordinary soldiers! 10$ is powerful enough that such a ground unit could array itself against a million men equipped with (for this setting) basic modern weapons, and win, or at least die very hard in the process of trying. It is honestly hard to imagine that kind of firepower concentrated into any one thing, at least for me.

Personally, I advise that you stick to point values more like 1, 2, or 5$ for even your most powerful superheavy ground units. But you don’t have to take that advice if you don’t want to. If you want to go much beyond that, though, please talk to a moderator.

[White Haven]

Hmm. A 5 point ship with 10 points of gunship capacity is a 15-point ship for the purposes of construction time, but a 5-point ship for the purposes of ship cost. Is that correct? If so, I need to do some editing of the Charge of the Lightning brigade. Not a problem, the naval tetris is full of nice, blocky shapes, none of those funky little wiggle-things.

[Simon_Jester]

That is what I had in mind, yes, White Haven.

[White Haven]

Alright, that frees up a couple thousand points to throw at some more hulls and the crazy braincannons to shove in them.

EDIT: OOB edited to fix point cost issues by adding four additional And Hell Followed With Him and four additional Charge of the Lightning Brigade-type groupings.

[Panzersharkcat]

Just putting this out there. I plan on having only one in the ludicrousheavy class. The rest are heavy and below. It's a planet-killer that cannot move on its own power. It requires other ships to clamp onto it to drag it around hyperspace and to to protect it because it's basically a ginormous eight-kilometer-long one shot railrun that has to escape immediately after firing lest it get torn to shreds. It spends most of its time stashed on a remote moon. The Bastian Senate gets complaints all the damn time about how a ridiculously inefficient use of resources the thing is. Is that fine? If not, I'll just stick with ships only in the heavy class and below.

[KhorneFlakes]

Just so you know, Panzer, it probably shouldn't be 5000 points. My supership, meant to represent the Glorious Harbinger of the Color Grue, was 5000 points, and Simon said I should soul search with it before I thought of it.

Like your own ludicrousheavy, the GHCG was the only supership I was ever going to have. But as I said, Simon said I should soul-search. I'm personally not quite sure. I want to it to be powerful, but in a fashion that it's not coming off as being mega-super wankery, but as representing the fact that fluffwise, it is indeed a megaship, and that you'd need a bit more than two battleships to destroy it. Maybe I should make it 2600 points. That will probably make it more reasonable, but sufficiently powerful.

[Imperial528]

Panzer, it seems to me that absolute size won't matter so much as point value, especially when you can have a 300 point star destroyer face up against a 300 point gundam and they are evenly matched. (FYI; my standard "superheavy" warship is about 11km long. Of course it is also not a giant spinal rail gun, but I think you get the point.) Essentially, for purposes outside of roleplay, mentioning size is superfluous.
Also, in my experience with making super-units, it's better if they have a distinct purpose and reason for their creation that is logical for their nation, rather than being able to do one super-epic thing and suck everywhere else. That usually tends to lead to things like: "my super gun kills ALL of your fleet" and "na, it didn't, since my speedy fighters blew it up before it got into range!" and so on. Not to mention that such units feel like they were made for the purpose of being able to say "I've got the BIGGEST gun EVER!"
Just my two cents.

[White Haven]

The real problem I see with a super planet-killer special purpose thingus is that there are two possible situations regarding it. One, you are not killing a planet, and it has no purpose at all, ever. Or two, if you want to make use of the huge investment it represents, you have to commit genocide. If you really want to go all-in for genocidal megadeaths, be my guest, but that really risks arraying a Stompy Foot against you if it's not super-justified. It's not that super-pointed ships are necessarily bad, although they can be dubious, but that specific concept limits you to basically just cutting those points out of your naval budget and pretending they don't exist, or slaughtering billions of civilians. Those are both pretty shitty options in most circumstances. Your call, of course, but that's my take on it.

[Panzersharkcat]

The backstory of the thing is that it's the end result of political engineering for a weapon meant to bring about larger version of the KT extinction event. Some guy in the arms industry proposed it and lobbied the Hell out of the Senate for its construction. The construction of the thing ended up "requiring" subcontractors in nearly every planet represented by a Senator. The weapons ends up being utterly useless outside of very specific situations (such as a last "fuck you" gesture) and actually makes defense of the Empire harder because the resources could have been more efficiently used for regular battlestars.

EDIT: There is story potential in this. I plan for the newly crowned Emperor, who ascended to the throne only two years before the game begins, to be a major reformer. The existence of that thing is one thing on his agenda. (Another would be the abortion ban for Bastians but that's not relevant to this megaweapon.) I mentioned the possibility of a three-way Cold War between the Greys and the Kryptonians, with their user approval of course, and that weapon could be a remnant of that era, with the new Emperor trying to ease relations. There's also the possibility of a certain crazy guy trying to hijack it to blow up Krypton.

[Simon_Jester]

[modhat on]

It is correct that the physical size of a warship is not fixed by its point value. Although if your idea of a 90-point ship is a multikilometer behemoth, then your 90-point ships probably can't land on planets, even if a 90-point ship would normally be able to do that.


Now, planet-busting artillery.

I am opposed to this, for a wide range of reasons. Bombardment/antiship weapons of immense power I can get behind, but actual "planetbusting" not so much. For a lot of reasons- the degree to which it becomes a mechanism with a binary outcome, either you're blowing up other people's planets without their consent or you aren't is one. Another is that it creates implications about the firepower level of the setting- remember what website this is! A benchmark for weapon energy as high as "can physically destroy a planet" is difficult to ignore and has implications for the rest of the national arsenal.

In SDNW4 it was explicit that no one had the capability to blow up planets- bombard and ruinize, yes, but not blow up. I think I would like to preserve that.

Let's let the conversation ripen a bit more before any modhat decisions are made regarding it, but I want to register my own discontent with the idea of planet-destroying weapons.

[modhat off]

[White Haven]

My thinking is edit it down to a bombardment vessel designed for punching through planetary defenses to rapidly depopulate a planetary surface no matter what's in the way. Given its ludicrous point value versus any conceivable planetary fixed defenses, that would already happen anyway, so it doesn't need any special rules to manage it, and it still stands as a heinous genocidal doom-weapon for the purposes of plot-writing regarding it. At the same time, since it's not an instant planet-cracker, a planet that's heavily fortified by actual pointed ground and space forces can stave it off without having to go 'uh...but the planet broke' which is narrative awkward to reconcile with points vs points.

[Panzersharkcat]

Well, it was more KT-extinction event than Death Star but I'll ditch it, nonetheless. I'll make up some other ultra-profligate form of military spending as a symbol of idiotic political bungling.

[White Haven]

Not necessarily, you've got some interesting plotline potential wrapped around it, just trying to make sure it doesn't break things. Hmm...does it have to be one ship? A genocide-grade dedicated bombardment fleet is just as ridiculously threatening and nuclear-war-y, but it's also a lot more flexible so you don't end up trapped to it. Then again, if you want to be trapped for narrative purposes...

[RogueIce]

Let me toss a couple cents into this one, if you all don't mind.

Panzer, the last game's biggest ship was, I believe a 2000 point (possibly 2500) more-or-less immobile Super Monitor. And there wasn't much in its weight class running around. Even the 1000+ ships were pretty rare, CN excluded (and I think it best we exclude that particular individual as much as possible; anyway, I digress).

So really, your 5000 point USS Penis Envy is twice as (or more than twice as) powerful as the most powerful ship(s) we had running around last time*. So I think you could still make it work by, say, reducing it to 3000 or even 2000 points and still let it have more or less the same effect. Even with potentially larger GDPs (more NCPs this go around) 2000 points is still going to be a fairly respectable fleet for most navies, so having that concentrated into one Super Ship would still represent quite the white elephant of wasteful military spending.

Just an opinion to consider...

*This ignores the Collector Monoliths which IIRC were around 10k points or so, but that was a very special case and they were intended to be very rarely seen in the first place.

[Panzersharkcat]

I don't mind at all. I welcome the feedback, especially before we actually start.

Anyway, I actually only envisioned it in the 1000-2000 range, which goes to show I have very little sense of scale. How's 1500? It's still a white elephant and it'd be a bit ironic, if that's the proper word, if it sucks at doing its job properly because it doesn't have the necessary stuff allocated to it. As an example, it will expend so much into trying to break shields that by the time it hits the planet itself, it's more Tunguska than K-T extinction. It sucks for whoever does get hit by it but it's hardly a planetary catastrophe.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm okay with this being a supergun that's worth X points where X is a large number, although I think "X=5000" is taking it a little far. At that point, someone must have spent about 10% of your national GDP building it- imagine the equivalent of a 1.5 trillion dollar ship for the US Navy. It would never happen in a remotely normalish society. Even Objective Global Warship doesn't come close to being that expensive...

Something more like 500-600 billion is at least remotely conceivable, amortized over a long construction period, if there were any real-life reason to do it.

X=2000 is actually fine, since you present it as a unique boondoggle. And in the "Simonverse," a 2000-point ship is probably capable of singlehandedly laying waste to almost any fortified world in known space given time, fuel, and ammunition.

(The "Simonverse" is a very much non-binding set of interpretations I use, where point costs correspond, as a rule, to weapon yield of [REDACTED] and so on- I do it as an aid to my own visualization, but will never ever hold anyone to any "Simonverse" interpretation or try to do calcs of other people's stuff based on it)

Note that the 2000-point ship might excel at planetary assault, but it must also be capable of contributing hugely to normal fleet actions- presumably its main battery is as effective against enemy warships as it is against enemy mountain ranges.

[Panzersharkcat]

I suppose if it can hit an enemy warship, it'd be pretty devastating. The "ultrasteel" projectile is supposed to be around 100-200 meters in diameter.

Assuming Akhlut and TimothyC approve of making a three-way Kryptonian-Bastian-Gray Cold War, the in-universe sell for it would be a bigger stick to beat them over the head with.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Hmm...I like the rules. They are easy enough to understand. Which is a good thing for sure. I should have my OOB worked up by around 12 or so (my time zone).

[Feralgnoll]

I have a question. I want to make a type of assault ship. I vision these as being able to land planetside very quickly, or slam into other ships and spill out assault troops. but I'm having problems getting the math into reasonable numbers. As of now, I'm spending 3,000 points on 300 5 point ships, carrying 7.5 million elite troops with x4 equipment. It puts me at 25,000 troopers per ship. Can I break the ships down further to be 1 point ships carrying 5,000 troopers?

[Simon_Jester]

The troops... I'm just going to assume their net value is 5000$/point, from the way you described them.*

So, yes, if you want the ships to be combat-capable you do have an issue. It's certainly legal to make ships with one point direct combat value and one point troop carriage- they'd be pretty vulnerable to antiship weapons of their own, and still physically large enough to carry a small brigade or reinforced regiment of troops, but the concept works and there's nothing in the rules that says you can't do it.

I recognize this as a problem with the ground troop rules- the sheer number of the things you can buy for a single point makes for big disparities between space and ground forces. But I can't figure out a way around it, other than just increasing everyone's GDP and the size of their fleets by a factor of ten (which, come to think of it, is possible)... or making it practically impossible to afford armies large enough to be commensurate with the size of national populations (i.e. a few billion men under arms).

Anyone have a suggestion for this? It was something I wanted to alter from the SDNW4 ruleset, but couldn't really think of anything that wouldn't be either unhelpful or making it worse.
_________

*And remember that you can take intermediate values between the small number of positions I listed in the training section (60000/$ training, x1.5 kit, for instance).