It's been a while

[madd0ct0r]

There is actually an idea I've been wanting to explore for while.

Humans terraforming are all about lush greens, rolling hills, with plenty of livestock. It's our preferred habitat.

If I was an intelligent/uplifted Curlew (prehensile tongue), my ideal terraformed planet would be an endless rolling mudflat and marsh


To humans eyes, they are dead, but they are rich in biofilms, small seaweeds, and millions of types of invertabrate pdf1, , paper2

naturally, they would have developed and exploited bioplastics from seaweed, shells and biofilm the way humans did ligin from trees. Heavy metals would have come later, with industrial outpost towns trading for food from more productive areas.
Little quarrying, but the building of storm mounds, light houses, boats would all be true. Steel's propensity to rust might make it less preffered amonst other metals for tools for some time.

Skip a few hundred years. The emphasis is on light, extremely resilient or self repairing tech. Plastics, bio plastics and gold circuitry. Hover craft are dominant type of transport. Wheels are a bit useless under normal conditions, but rail and cogs are used in the limited dry lander circumstances they apply.
City density is lower than for humans, but when you can fly, this is less of a problem. Building are large and flat with marshy roof pools for landing and welcoming guests in a comforting environment.

Ships. Named after types of storm cloud.

[Jub]

My next idea is for a species on the cusp of transitioning fully from organic to digital beings. As it stands 80% of their population already lives and works in a completely virtual environment, another 10% live in synthetic bodies performing tasks that AI-controlled robots can't or aren't trusted to do. The other 10% is made up of traditionalists, the rich renting an organic body as a status symbol, and bodies reserved for procreation as this species hasn't yet mastered procreating digitally and is unlikely to do so over the course of our game.

Economically they are almost post wealth and post-scarcity with most limitations coming to those living outside of the massive servers that can easily simulate a life that would be unimaginable within this species current grasps of physics and material science. In the real world, much of what they do is automated using robots running AI packages similar to what we currently use. AGI research was halted ~100 years ago after an experiment which was, on-paper, designed to simulate the brains of a colony of birds was deemed an emergent self-improving AI. In the legal and ethical debate, the followed it came out that the experiment was designed specifically to cause an emergence event. The resulting laws and restrictions have set AI research back significantly as have recently drafted laws to stop the import of any machine capable of self-improvement and self-replication.

Another current social issue is the debate surrounding speeding up the simulation which is currently running at a fixed real-time rate outside of certain strictly limited circumstances. The side in favor of full-server acceleration argues that it's unfair to handicap the majority of the population because of a small percentage living off the server. Those opposed fear being left behind socially if even a modest two-times acceleration is applied let alone the twenty-times acceleration that is theoretically possible.

[Beowulf]

maddoctor, jub - those concepts sound good to me.

---

The Tsaj is a collection of gestalt minds. Each individual Tsaj is made up of worms. Each worm is relatively mindless, but when they form into a mass, their intelligence massively increases, in a approximately logistic function. Memories can be transfered between Tsaj, by transferring individual worms, however, only those worms that were there when the memory was formed will have the memory.

Their gestalt nature makes a Tsaj difficult to kill, as killing individual worms only reduces the strength and intellgence of the mass. A sufficiently small Tsaj will join with any other Tsaj it can find. A sufficiently large Tsaj will often split in half, resulting in two Tsaj. The combination of these results in Tsaj generally remaining in a relatively tight range.

[Beowulf]

Ok, I tossed some stuff up:
https://kienhui.github.io/STGOD/SDNW8/Tsaj.html

I've still got to make it look prettier, I know. And there's more details to come.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Guys, remember the glory days?
Man does this take me back...
You know... I may have something that may help with this...

[Crossroads Inc.]

Ok I dug it up ... not sure if this is applicable,
But here are specifically designed generic rule set for a Civ based STGOD type of game

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tnY ... 9Mc_U/edit

[Rogue 9]

I've been getting the itch lately. It's been eleven years for me, but I just went back and read through the SDGOD2k8 and 2k9 threads. The rules from that era are still on the wiki.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Rogue, You should look at what I have... its really big and complicated... but I also think its just the type of thing those of us on this bored tend to thrive on.

[Rogue 9]

Rogue, You should look at what I have... its really big and complicated... but I also think its just the type of thing those of us on this bored tend to thrive on.

Yeah, I've been reading through it. FYI, you have it publicly editable. I've been correcting spelling and grammar errors as I go, but if you're going to link it on the open Internet that might be something you want to change. Also, it doesn't explain itself very well; what in the world is a CYOC?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Oh wow, ok, need to change the publicly editable part!!!

But “CYOC” was supposed to be for Choose Your Own Civilization

Was just a working title

[Rogue 9]

Space STGODs have always been my favorite flavor of game, for what it's worth. I've played a couple of fantasy STGODs (even hosted one myself on my own board back when I took a stab at running one), but the format has always felt to me to lend itself better to sci-fi for whatever reason. I know it annoyed Nitram that I kept iterating on a similar concept every game, but I do enjoy developing Nashtar. (And it does get developed; after the debacle of STGOD2 I always, always, ALWAYS invest in stealth ships and espionage. )

[KraytKing]

I am theoretically interested in this, but I REALLY don't understand the specifics of it. From what I've observed, it seems like the "game" takes the form of a series of written stories by players. Which leaves me a little confused about points and GDP calculations and such. As well as how to figure out with other players how stuff plays out. If I want to declare war on another player, do we shoot a bunch of DMs to figure out fleet battles and such and then both write up the results? I suppose I'm confused about how much is crunch and how much is fluff, and how the two interact.

Basically a game of Stellaris but with more options?

I do have some ideas I'd like to mess around with, if there's general interest.

[Rogue 9]

If you look further you'll note that each game has several threads apart from the main one, primarily the OOC thread, which is used for that sort of thing. Different TGODs have had different amounts of hard rules; the rules are traditionally hashed out by the players before starting. (There will also be a rules thread for that purpose.)

[madd0ct0r]

I am theoretically interested in this, but I REALLY don't understand the specifics of it. From what I've observed, it seems like the "game" takes the form of a series of written stories by players. Which leaves me a little confused about points and GDP calculations and such. As well as how to figure out with other players how stuff plays out. If I want to declare war on another player, do we shoot a bunch of DMs to figure out fleet battles and such and then both write up the results? I suppose I'm confused about how much is crunch and how much is fluff, and how the two interact.

Basically a game of Stellaris but with more options?

I do have some ideas I'd like to mess around with, if there's general interest.

My war with EF we did exactly that. We had things we wanted to show off about our people's, and we found ways to fit the war to that. A set piece cavalry charge, explaining how the hyenorks epic poetry appears as growly pidgin to others

Its collaboration story telling, not a competitive board game. I'd really recommend making the writing as easy on your self as possible, I found it hard to keep up because I got too weighed down by plots rather than stringing a few details together and letting story emerge.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I am theoretically interested in this, but I REALLY don't understand the specifics of it. From what I've observed, it seems like the "game" takes the form of a series of written stories by players. Which leaves me a little confused about points and GDP calculations and such. As well as how to figure out with other players how stuff plays out. If I want to declare war on another player, do we shoot a bunch of DMs to figure out fleet battles and such and then both write up the results? I suppose I'm confused about how much is crunch and how much is fluff, and how the two interact.

Basically a game of Stellaris but with more options?

I do have some ideas I'd like to mess around with, if there's general interest.

My war with EF we did exactly that. We had things we wanted to show off about our people's, and we found ways to fit the war to that. A set piece cavalry charge, explaining how the hyenorks epic poetry appears as growly pidgin to others

Its collaboration story telling, not a competitive board game. I'd really recommend making the writing as easy on your self as possible, I found it hard to keep up because I got too weighed down by plots rather than stringing a few details together and letting story emerge.

Man I remember that one, good times. That was the second one I did, and while I preferred the setting of the previous one, I had a lot more fleshed-out civilisation for the 1750's fantasy one - even if most of that was "how can I use magic to simulate modern tech" (shipboard nav systems, radios, medics, really heavy guns). Man those heavy cannon really made a mess of your Hyenorks

[Rogue 9]

Anyway, now that I'm at my desktop, I can elaborate a bit more.

The reason for all the points, production limits, etc, is to prevent what happened in the early STGODs. STGOD rules tend to iterate on what came before; what came before rules around production was STGOD4 (I typoed up above; STGOD4 in 2004 was my first one, not STGOD2) when some of the players just arbitrarily tripled their fleet size and proceeded to steamroll everyone. (My teenage self... didn't handle it very well; even when I was right I find it hard to read my own posts from that era.) All that being said, the rules document that I linked above that governed the 2008-2009 era games (the first ones in this subforum; all the prior ones are buried in the general GE&C forum) are what we at that time found to be the minimum necessary to govern the semi-cooperative storytelling nature of the game and were used as a general guideline.

For an example of that, see my engagement with Tanasinn's Humanist Union with a stealth frigate attempting to remain unseen and gather intelligence. Under the rules of the game for Stealth, he technically couldn't detect me at all, because I built the Shadow class (5+10S+5C3) with a Stealth rating of 11, higher than the combined C3 score of all his in-system ships and the planetary bonus. However, that's no fun. So instead of just getting what I wanted to know and leaving without interaction, since he had enough sensor suites in system be almost good enough, I offered that he could detect sensor ghosts that would indicate something was in the area, without getting an exact fix on the ship's coordinates.

This paid off in precedent for me later, when Darkevilme decided to send a stealth pod to my capital system to spy on fleet exercises. In my ship builds, I did not screw around with C3I; the Chamaran stealth pods similarly had an 11 stealth rating, but I had two carriers with 10C3 each in system before throwing in the cruisers and escorts, far in excess of what the Humanist Union garrison had scanning New Khan. But again, just seeing the pod is no fun, so we worked out that I'd get more solid sensor indicators than Tanasinn did but still have to work at figuring out what was there, which played out like so.

So despite the fact that it has rules, like maddoct0r and Eternal_Freedom said, an STGOD isn't a competitive board game. The rules are to facilitate storytelling and keep everyone honest, not to try to make it a perfectly balanced competitive experience.

[Jub]

I don't know if we have the board population to pull this off, but if we do get this thing off the ground I'll be down to at least world build out a nation/empire/whatever but my track record at staying active in these games is pretty poor.

[Crossroads Inc.]

The art of "The Story" was a real big part of the early days of the STGOD when we ran wild with ideas and narrations.
Of course as Rogue hints at, it had its downside. The Open story was great when everyone was nice and peaceful, and you had stories of diplomatic intrigue, and cloak and dagger espionage... But once "Open War" came about, you started to have the enviable routes of:
"I have THIS many Battleships!"
"Well I have THIS Manny Battleships!"
"Nuh Uh!"
"Uh Huh!!"

And so on....

I do agree that the space settings seemed to be where we had some of the more successful narratives, but I think an aspect of that is the heavy slant toward Sci Fi stuff in general on the bored.

Which goes back to the Rule set I had worked out...
About Four years ago I started having fond nostalgic thoughts of the "glory days" the STGOD stories, and tried to get a group of friends at work who all played DnD together interested in starting a game. Unfortunately the "open Story" system we used to use didn't exactly cut the mustard, as they were the types that revealed in Rules and charts and crunching numbers.

That spurred me towards my "Great CYOC" project of making, what I considered, to be probably the most structurected and comprehensive ruleset of an STGOD, and one that [In theory] could be applied to ANY setting.. From old time fantasy, to sci-fi space settings.
Of course at the end of the "The Story" is what the game is all about. I remember during some of the more structured settings we had, when it came to an attack or a battle, certain considerations where taken into effect by how well one side told their story vs the other

My Anime theme "Kushawni Alliance" I remember made good use of this, as I regularly invoked certain anime and Giant robot tropes in the face of often Superior numbers of enemy warships.

I don't know if we have the board population to pull this off, but if we do get this thing off the ground I'll be down to at least world build out a nation/empire/whatever but my track record at staying active in these games is pretty poor.

Something I have thought about over the years, when it comes to "how many people do we need?"
The "Golden Age" of the game would often have dozens of people playing. it didn't matter if some dropped out, or went dormant for a few weeks, and then came back... There were plenty of others that kept things active.

These days, yes there are far fewer people around and active... But... Depending on just how we structure a game.. .How we frame it. Maybe that's not a bad thing? If we get a Core set of players that are active, quality over quantity as it were... We might actually end up with a better over all game and certainly more cohesive if we got, say.. Maybe Six to Eight people playing vs 20.

[Crossroads Inc.]

[Double Post]

[Rogue 9]

I don't know if we have the board population to pull this off, but if we do get this thing off the ground I'll be down to at least world build out a nation/empire/whatever but my track record at staying active in these games is pretty poor.

Total board population doesn't really matter as long as you get a dozen or so people actually playing the game. Alternatively, we could try transplanting it to a more active gaming board; I experimented with getting a game going on the Giant in the Playground board (which keeps high traffic thanks to also being the home of a popular webcomic), and generated a lot of interest, but neglected that the Recruitment forum in their play by post forum cluster auto-prunes threads after three months regardless of traffic so lost it all because I didn't move to a new thread in the OOC forum to hash out the rules. x_x (That no one wanted to co-moderate was also awkward; being the only mod makes it hard to be impartial if you're also playing because you can't keep secrets from yourself.)

[Crossroads Inc.]

That could be an interesting idea, the bored is certainly full of people well versed in text based RPG's and Story telling.
It may be worth taking another look into.

Incidentally, did you get through my Rule set? I am curious how well you think it may actually work fo a STGOD game

[Jub]

Something I have thought about over the years, when it comes to "how many people do we need?"
The "Golden Age" of the game would often have dozens of people playing. it didn't matter if some dropped out, or went dormant for a few weeks, and then came back... There were plenty of others that kept things active.

These days, yes there are far fewer people around and active... But... Depending on just how we structure a game.. .How we frame it. Maybe that's not a bad thing? If we get a Core set of players that are active, quality over quantity as it were... We might actually end up with a better over all game and certainly more cohesive if we got, say.. Maybe Six to Eight people playing vs 20.

Vey true. Plus, we may be able to rope in some currently inactive members if word gets to them that an STGOD is on and there's something to do other than watch the N&P forum roll ever onward.

[Rogue 9]

I think it might try to be too comprehensive, to be honest. The types of Resources seem kind of arbitrary. Especially in a sci-fi game, a multi-system stellar empire should be expected to be able to meet most of its own needs, presuming control of at least one M class planet. Historically, cargo ships haven't cost points either (barring military tenders); I believe it's generally been assumed that cargo shipping is mostly private the way it is today rather than paid for by the government, and if it isn't in a given empire for whatever fluff reason it was deemed unreasonable to penalize the player for that.

The warship stats system seems similar to the STGOD2k8 one with different numbers, fewer categories, and a more long-winded explanation. Notably, though, fleet combat worked differently from your truncated (ends mid-sentence?) "more adventurous" option, in that defender chose what in the fleet got hit - unless the attacker had points in Offense, in which case attacker chose targets for the damage from the O stat. The ability to lose active defenses (D) in place of hit points also made an interesting tactical decision, insofar as preserving your fleet weight now in exchange for losing your ability to soak damage in later turns. It's interesting that you went so far in defining resources and got real nitty-gritty about nation construction but pared down the combat system that much.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I think it might try to be too comprehensive, to be honest. The types of Resources seem kind of arbitrary. Especially in a sci-fi game, a multi-system stellar empire should be expected to be able to meet most of its own needs, presuming control of at least one M class planet. Historically, cargo ships haven't cost points either (barring military tenders); I believe it's generally been assumed that cargo shipping is mostly private the way it is today rather than paid for by the government, and if it isn't in a given empire for whatever fluff reason it was deemed unreasonable to penalize the player for that.

When I was first putting the structure of my idea together, my thoughts were geared heavily toward a starting phase of "working together" and having players/nations initially forced to relay upon each other to build friendships and such before the game might have got "messy" later on.
In practice, as you point out, this doesn't really work for my 'modern' settings, and especially space settings where you have players having several plants and, by extension, all the resources one would imagine to find there-in.
The reason I added point requirements to shipping was, in truth, similar to why it was added to almost ALL parts of myself system which was I was making a system geared toward "satisfying" hard core Dnd players, where numbers exist for EVERYTHING.

The warship stats system seems similar to the STGOD2k8 one with different numbers, fewer categories, and a more long-winded explanation. Notably, though, fleet combat worked differently from your truncated (ends mid-sentence?) "more adventurous" option, in that defender chose what in the fleet got hit - unless the attacker had points in Offense, in which case attacker chose targets for the damage from the O stat. The ability to lose active defenses (D) in place of hit points also made an interesting tactical decision, insofar as preserving your fleet weight now in exchange for losing your ability to soak damage in later turns.

That was where I drew much of my inspiration from, and then of course worked things so the system could, in theory be applied to different settings and still 'function'. I found it worked best for Victoria steam punk settings with late 1800's style warships and battles.
And yes, I do tend to carry on in my writings It has been a long time flaw of mine that will fill out raw detail with fluffy and complicated sounding words.
That said, yeah, at the end of the day I wanted to have my system be as flexible as possible. So it could go from on the one end going:
"All my points fight all of your points and we subject the numbers"
to
"This individual ship fights that individual ship, and we repay till we have run through our fleet engagement.

It's interesting that you went so far in defining resources and got real nitty-gritty about nation construction but pared down the combat system that much.

Well at the end of the day. my mind thinks more of building than war, and I was never good at "crunching numbers" I always felt the War part didn't need to [hopefully] be too complicated on the hope that Ful scale slug fest would be rare. But hey, we are human afterall.

[Rogue 9]

I have found that, although I build a peaceful, trade-with-everybody republic every time, I somehow always end up in a war, unless the game fizzles out first.