STGOD 2020 Concept/Planning Thread

[Simon_Jester]

Look, we're all ten or more years older than that now, a good deal more mature and hopefully more sane about how to get along together.

And I suggest that we form a gentlebeings' agreement that if one of our players just cannot help but assert that they win because they refuse to compromise with another player's idea of how things go, even when not-so-subtly pushed to do so by a mod...

Well, at that point we just start ignoring them. Their empire is a figment of someone else's bad entertainment product, or whatever.

EDIT:

With that said...

Rogue, are you, like, really worried about this? I'll bow to a set of combat rules if you're really worried.

[Rogue 9]

I will go with what the majority of players decide. You're right about maturity (and a different player base; it's looking like I'm going to be the only player left from that era), of course. But if we do freeform, my long form ship class descriptions are going to outline in detail what I would have shorthanded with points, and I'm going to treat them accordingly.

[Dark Hellion]

I will go with what the majority of players decide. You're right about maturity (and a different player base; it's looking like I'm going to be the only player left from that era), of course. But if we do freeform, my long form ship class descriptions are going to outline in detail what I would have shorthanded with points, and I'm going to treat them accordingly.

I'm gonna be blunt. The part I italicized makes me beleive that you are going to be the Stormbringer/thirdfain/Chaotic Neutral of this game...
Honestly, I don't see why anyone is worried or cares about winning at a literal make believe storytelling game. Especially when if someone misbehaves we can simply delete their misbehavior.

You seem to be trying to create a system which treats the symptom but at best leaves the desease unaffected and at worst boosts the desease.

[Rogue 9]

I've played a bunch of STGODs, several of them with you. Have I ever been that? Hell, have I ever pushed an unearned offensive war on anyone?

Allow me to elaborate: I'm going to write that the Intrepid class is a fleet carrier with an advanced C3I (in the military acronym sense, not the 2k8 rules sense) suite, that the Kensington class is a heavy cruiser with highly effective active defense arrays meant to escort the aforementioned carriers, that the Shadow class is as stealthy as we decide we can make a frigate, etc, and I'm going to use them accordingly. It's what I have literally always done, and I have never blown up a game. I'm not going to start now.

[Rogue 9]

Anyway, speaking of which, moderators. I know I've done most of the talking and kind of drove this thing, but I'm not going to stand for moderator, especially not with such doubts aired. TimothyC volunteered to moderate and not play, and I'm fine with him doing that, but he's doing it because he doesn't have time to play a faction, which means at least one more mod is probably a good idea to spread the workload around. Any takers?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Welp, I guess it is time to step forward.. I know I said I would help Mod as, I too, don't have as much time as I used to to play, though I do hope to use my group to still tell a good Story.

Rogue if you can PM me a list of everyone who had been interested, I'll start helping to take over the role of cheerleader to keep things from....Hopefully... fizzling out.

[Rogue 9]

Just to clarify what I meant, an example. From my 2k8 order of battle:

Polaris class escort destroyer (15 points total), 30 in service
5+5D+5C3
The Polaris class is an escort ship. Designed to screen for heavier warships as well as escort commercial traffic, the Polaris and her sisters are the workhorses of the fleet.

Bandit class frigate (15 points total), 25 in service
5+5O+5C3
The Bandit class is designed as a shipping raider. They may operate either independently or as part of a fleet, providing a powerful punch in a small package.

In a freeform system, I would render each thus:

Polaris class escort destroyer

The Polaris class is an escort ship. Designed to screen for heavier warships as well as escort commercial traffic, the Polaris and her sisters are the workhorses of the fleet. The destroyers mount both a formidable active defense array and advanced sensor package.

Bandit class frigate

The Bandit class is designed as a shipping raider and interdiction vessel. They may operate either independently or as part of a fleet, providing a powerful punch in a small package. Though on a similar space frame to the Polaris class, and sharing its sensor package, the Bandit forgoes advanced active defense in favor of a large antiship missile battery, allowing it to punch slightly above its weight class, and heavier engines to enable it to fill a pursuit role.

In play, this means that where I will have a Bandit get summarily swatted by anything cruiser-weight, and not purport that it has the ability to effectively screen other ships, I would, unless faced with something in the battleship range, have a Polaris hold out slightly longer, and depict them screening enemy fire off of escorted freighters or other warships. In freeform, of course, increased offensive output is always up to the other player to judge, but it would alter my starting position in what I ask for when talking out a battle. I would not assert that either alone is a threat to a major capital ship.

That's literally all I'm saying. I do not see how that makes me likely to godmode or power game. I expect that everyone else will define what their ships are actually like as well.

[Esquire]

Yeah, I think everybody was going to write something like those descriptions anyway - that's a good chunk of the fun of these games, IMO at least.

[Rogue 9]

So I was getting into the STGOD documents folder on my computer and found a document of notes I'd jotted down about the 2k9 rules. Note that STGOD 2k9 was the shortest STGOD ever played on the forum, lasting less than two months and filling three forum pages in its main game thread. I am NOT proposing these rules as an alternative, but just for historical reference:

Partial compiling of the current rules for STGOD 2k9.

OOB purchasing: You get the following amount of points to spend on your OOB.
1000 points to be spent on spacecraft and starfleet.(cruisers, frigates, battleships.etc)
500 points to be spent on planetary forces (infantry, airforce, armour, etc)
250 points to be distributed amongst your holdings to represent their industrial output and intrinsic garrison (10 point planet X, 15 point planet Y. etc)

Intrinsic garrison. All holdings except mobile ones have a free garrison attached equal to their industrial points. This is like your normal troops except does not possess spacelift capability and cannot relocate. Normal troops have spacelift capability/dropships.

You can convert planetary force points into starfleet points at a 2/1 ratio if you wish.

Strategic movement: Travel is conducted via nodes, points in space that are mobile and follow a mostly predictable path around the edges of systems, this path makes keeping ships on station at them a draining undertaking due to course corrections. Each node offers instant translation to its partnered node in another system so most strategic movement is taken up by the trips to and from nodes at STL velocities. Travel times to cross from one node to another is 2 days for light elements and 3 days for capital ship elements.

Communications: The only way to transmit at a speed above that of light is to use a bucket brigade of node transit drones. Each one uses a communication laser to send the data to the next NTD on the chain or to the destination. This process can take anything from an hour to a day per node depending on the location and availability of the drones when the message is sent.

Sensors: We're going for a slightly space opera ish feeling, its possible to be in a system and not see every little thing in it that doesnt have stealth. Sensor ranges are a bit less than that.

Stealth: Stealth is a modification for ships that doubles their cost and makes them stealthy, simple no?

Theater shields: In order to make those point spent on ground forces relevant the theater shields over bases and cities have been increased in power massively compared to previous games. A theater shield can stand up to bombardments from orbiting spacecraft for days necessitating ground invasions as opposed to simply issueing an ultimatum of 'surrender immediately or get glassed'. Not that you cant be a dick anyway, you can still bombard undefended parts of the biosphere and stuff. Just can't take the planet that way unless you manage to fight the space version of Greenpeace.

Production: Each production turn(at an interval yet to be determined) you get a number of points equal to the total industrial production of your holdings with which to produce new ships and troops. There is no upkeep but production turns are at an interval greater than previous games.

Combat: Fleet strengths can be used for rolling dice of damage or as a baseline for rping it.
Current dice roll for damage per exchange is a roll of 10d(base value of fleet)/20*tactics/rping/funky gadget modifier.

War and Peace: While a state of active war exists between two parties, all currently occupied territories are worth half as much due to resources being committed to things other than putting down local rebellion and whatnot.

If a party loses substantial territory in a war (at least 50 points), and then signs a peace treaty or ceasefire, they still produce half as much as what they lost during the next phase, to account for the public outcry and plans for 'the next war'.

Dice rolls. What the hell were we thinking? No PVP wars ever broke out; I think the node map FTL system was a bit too restricting.

[Rogue 9]

I found this star map generator. https://github.com/dagorym/StarMapGen It might be an easier way to get a map going on the quick. I'll poke at it this evening.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Yo peeps, a suggestion.
With the amount of detail we go into for both story Fluff and numbers, often by the time we have a fully "OOB + Nation description" the posts end up being MASSIVE and sometimes hard to find specific bits of info.
What about splitting the threads? A dedicated thread for JUST backstory and break down of peoples empires, and the another thread for JUST listing military units and numbers...

Less complicated? More complicated? Thoughts?

[Simon_Jester]

Having order of battle threads is a common innovation and does no harm.

But it's a bad idea to segregate nation-building and drafting of things TO the order of battle thread.

Especially here on SDN, where you can't edit things half the time, which just makes it fucking awkward.

[Rogue 9]

STGOD 2k8 had a quick reference thread. Might be what Crossroads means. http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 5&t=123902

[Rogue 9]

Anyway, my plan is to put my nation description in the OOB thread and then link to and maintain the actual ORBAT on a subpage of my user page on the Imperial Wiki. No editing problems that way.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Ahoy, yeah, that was kinda what I had in mind, just sort of a 'cliff notes' version of each of our nations.

[Rogue 9]

Hell, I just remembered that Campaign Cartographer 3 (which I got off of Humble Bundle earlier this year) has a Cosmographer add-on for starmaps and sci-fi themed mapmaking. If we're interested I'm willing to just drop the $40 on the add-on and bust out maps. It would be easier than screwing around with this Python-based random generator I found, at any rate.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Omg that sounds amazing. I'll pitch in 10$ for it just to make things easier for us

[VX-145]

After all the work I put in getting StarMapGen to work

Seriously though - if it's a significant improvement and you're not putting yourself out too much, it's probably a better idea.

[Rogue 9]

Nah, no need to pitch in. Glad to do it, and I'm sure I'll use the software for more than just this one game. Download's going now; I'll play with it and see what we can get this evening.

[Rogue 9]

Do we like this map style?

Fucking huge .jpg

Of course, this is just a software test; I'll happily customize as needed.

[Rogue 9]

Okay, map. If everyone's okay with it, Academia Nut had a fairly simple random placement method in 2k8, detailed here In that game it depended upon proximity to the ruins of Terra, but since we don't have that background we can just use the center of the grid. The workings, in short:

1d4 to determine the quadrant, using the Cartesian method for naming them as the guide (ie 1 = I, 2 = II, 3=III, 4=IV, simple enough)

Successor States:
1d6 along x
1d6 along y

Outsiders:
6+1d6 along x (this can be reduced to 6+1d4 if more compact play is desired)
6+1d4 along y

If we want to acknowledge that space is three dimensional it's easy enough; just roll a d8 for the octant and then do a third roll of the same magnitude for the Z axis as for X and Y.

In the quoted example "successor states" effectively means "anyone who didn't purchase outsider status."

Example map: The large yellow star is the grid center. For the position of the smaller orange star I rolled 1d4, which came up 1 for quadrant 1; 6 on the X axis; and 4 on the Y axis. This determines the location of your capital world, and you can request to control more adjacent territory as long as you have at least one world in each contiguous hex. Each hex takes a day or so to cross with unaugmented FTL.

[Simon_Jester]

I'll take whatever works; I'm playing a human colony state produced by a long range colony expedition in the relatively distant past, since that seems to be the basis of our planning.

EDIT:

To be clear, I'm talking about nation location and accepting being rolled up as a, ah... 'successor' is the word?

[madd0ct0r]

I might need to withdraw. Got a new dog, uni restarting and overtime at work does not look likely to decrease.
I'm dead on my feet.

[Rogue 9]

I'll take whatever works; I'm playing a human colony state produced by a long range colony expedition in the relatively distant past, since that seems to be the basis of our planning.

EDIT:

To be clear, I'm talking about nation location and accepting being rolled up as a, ah... 'successor' is the word?

Yeah, the reason Academia used that terminology is that in the game we developed this random placement for, the background was a recently fallen transhuman empire. Everyone was either a successor state or "barbarians," and which was which determined how far from the ruins of Terra you were. Of course, we don't have that dynamic in this game; the determining factor is whether or not someone buys the "Barbarian" or "Outsider" nation characteristics.

I might need to withdraw. Got a new dog, uni restarting and overtime at work does not look likely to decrease.
I'm dead on my feet.

Sorry to hear that. If it works out that you can jump back in, space is big; we can fit late arrivals.

[Beowulf]

Stupid possibly munchkinry idea: would it be allowed under the rules as written to have a negative hyperdrive specialization? Which is to say, the ship ends up slower than normal in hyperspace, to a limit of 0%. Gamewise, this would be the equivalent of having TIE fighters. Natural downside is: ships without hyperdrive can't retreat. Benefit: by the math, looks like you can save 10% on your craft.

---

In other news, the Tsaj are definitely Outsiders, since they have a physiology and psychology unlike anyone else. I'll be putting up a nation description shortly though.