STGOD 2020 OOC Thread

[VX-145]

Looks good to me - I plugged those values into a spreadsheet and it all seems to add up nicely. It also had the benefit of auto-calculating your speeds and stealth value - though you may want to double-check those as I'm reasonably sure I've done something messy with the formula.

Link! Yours is on the second sheet - there's some tabs at the bottom.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Bah i forgot what post that was, figured I'd end up as last post from the previous page ;P

Well, as long as the numbers look good. I mean most of the numbers I wanted simply to reflect a basic "Small ships = physically faster and more maneuverable" but having the numbers equal / make sense for what their point value is.

[Rogue 9]

Updated map.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I am cooking up an NPC nation.. I have never really done this, and feel.... a giddy sense of excitement.
I am preparing to launch a horribly silly race, to be played in a deadly serious fashion.

[Rogue 9]

I am cooking up an NPC nation.. I have never really done this, and feel.... a giddy sense of excitement.
I am preparing to launch a horribly silly race, to be played in a deadly serious fashion.

So, Orks?

[Eternal_Freedom]

I am cooking up an NPC nation.. I have never really done this, and feel.... a giddy sense of excitement.
I am preparing to launch a horribly silly race, to be played in a deadly serious fashion.

Just how high a level of totally-serious sillyness are we talking here? Airplane? Naked Gun? Spaceballs?

[Crossroads Inc.]

I am cooking up an NPC nation.. I have never really done this, and feel.... a giddy sense of excitement.
I am preparing to launch a horribly silly race, to be played in a deadly serious fashion.

So, Orks?

well I sent YOU a "report: of the species in question, was curious of your thoughts...

For everyone else...
imagine if Agent-K was reading a report for a species highly silly yet lethal activities,

[VX-145]

Have a sneak preview of stuff I'm working on for my polity. You ever wondered how much space 144 fighters actually take up?



Turns out, it's a lot. Each one of those subdivisions holds 12 fighters at about the smallest size possible - the little yellow things handle refuelling and rearming automatically in the game I'm building this in. There's a fighter floating off to the side for scale, and another two really hard to see (because lighting is an absolute pain - it's either too bright or too dark) in the right-hand side subdivision just below the large wall. Getting them out again is also a pain, since this is supposed to be an enclosed hangar deck.

For comparison's sake, here's a picture of a person next to one of those fighters:



And these are actually pretty small designs for how much they're capable of - most others are either far less capable or far bigger.

[Esquire]

Now I kinda want to fire up Space Engineers again.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm.

I'm sorry if this is a redundant question, but as I try to do ORBAT stuff seriously, I find myself reflecting on the role of both sublight drone-carrier craft and short range FTL-capable "cutter" swarms in the Umerian military as envisioned in SDNW4.

How, if at all, do those categories of ships work with this game and the assumptions baked into its rules? What do people think?

[Crossroads Inc.]

welp, sadly it all comes down to points
"2000 drone ships" can, in theory be taken out with a single big ship of equal points"
of course the difference comes in who you are playing out an attack with and how they may haggle details of an attack.

I remember in one of the very first STGOD space ones Nephye..Nepy.. Um.. shoot I forgot their name..
but they basically played as "SPACE MONSTERS" from Gunbuster... and had "fleets" of tens of thousands of ships

[VX-145]

Purely mechanically, RAW - cutter swarms would just be swarms of low-point ships, one or two base value plus whatever else you want to stick on them, whilst sublight drone carriers are a bit harder to work out. A carrier's easy enough - it's just another point blob, or a smaller point blob you run other point blobs with - while making it sublight just means taking off its FTL drive, which might get you an extra point to work with. (This was raised in the concept/planning thread - IDK if there was an "official" verdict reached but it's one point at the end of the day).

Strategy-wise, lots of small-point ships can work - en masse, they're as powerful as a single equal-value ship, and can be in more places at once than that one ship.

And, of course - all of this comes after roleplay, so they're as valid as the roleplay allows until a disagreement occurs.

[Beowulf]

Hm.

I'm sorry if this is a redundant question, but as I try to do ORBAT stuff seriously, I find myself reflecting on the role of both sublight drone-carrier craft and short range FTL-capable "cutter" swarms in the Umerian military as envisioned in SDNW4.

How, if at all, do those categories of ships work with this game and the assumptions baked into its rules? What do people think?

Mechanically, I think this is part of my thought on having negative points for the H or S stats. The rating can't go negative (doesn't make sense), but having a rating of 0 (which means no FTL or no stealth for that ship) can mechanically make sense. It does give a small advantage, but it's not actually that much. I think it's 10% less cost for dropping one of them to 0, or about 18% for both. But of course, penalty would be you can't retreat without a hyperdrive, and you can't hide with no stealth rating. Do we have any objections to having the H or S stats going negative? We could add a rule that the actual cost can't go below the base cost, so you can delete your hyperdrive, but you have to spend the point on something else.

Swarms of cutter is just swarms of low point value ships. The low range on them is a RP limitation.

[Rogue 9]

The way I play it, if the parasite craft aren't jump capable, they're part of the carrier. If I spend points on fighters separately, they're FTL capable (and more like the Longsword of Halo than a modern cramped cockpit fighter, to make it actually capable of supporting a crew for a potentially days-long jump). That's me, though, and it's why my carriers are 45 points base; no one else is obligated to play it that way. I just find it simpler to use the mechanics like that and RP it as fighters (though without O the main mechanical way I did that previously is gone, since it was what allowed hitting power - precise hitting power like you'd expect from a swarm of bombers - without adding HP to the ship).

[Beowulf]

The way I play it, if the parasite craft aren't jump capable, they're part of the carrier. If I spend points on fighters separately, they're FTL capable (and more like the Longsword of Halo than a modern cramped cockpit fighter, to make it actually capable of supporting a crew for a potentially days-long jump). That's me, though, and it's why my carriers are 45 points base; no one else is obligated to play it that way. I just find it simpler to use the mechanics like that and RP it as fighters (though without O the main mechanical way I did that previously is gone, since it was what allowed hitting power - precise hitting power like you'd expect from a swarm of bombers - without adding HP to the ship).

I guess it depends on whether the fighters are cheap enough to be considered ammunition or not. If your combat strength would be materially altered by not being able to pickup the fighters as you leave, put the points in the carrier, and don't worry about it too much. If they would be altered by not being able to bring them back, then put them as separately accounted units, and if you can't recover them, sucks to be you.

Also with having them being part of your larger ship as "ammo", you can repair the carrier relatively cheaply, while you need to replace the destroyed units. So mechanically, they can have slightly cheaper for their power fighters, but with the major disadvantage of: anything lost has to be replaced through production, instead of repair, and it's a whole bunch easier to lose them. I suppose another advantage is that you can distribute them more if they're individual units, instead of a massive carrier. 45 points of carrier can only be in one place, 45 points of .5 pt fighters can be in 90 places. This could be mitigated a bit by having smaller carriers though.

[Elheru Aran]

So in the Discord chat, just to keep everybody on the same page, we discussed two subjects that will become relevant in game.

One is a worldship. It's basically a Death Star. Understandably, this would be an issue in working out combats, as something that huge would be a massive nut for any fleet to crack. There is also the possibility of other super-sized craft in other factions. So in the case of the worldship, it gets planet points as it basically functions as a mobile planet. However, it does not get fleet points, as we decided it shouldn't actually participate in combat outside RP events.

The other is that my faction's primary space-combat tactic is boarding, due to their history and technological development. We debated how to construct rules for that, but ultimately decided that boarding would count as generic damage as we're not granulating damages-- lasers, missiles, railguns, it's all the same. Boarding therefore falls under that category even though it's not quite "damage" per se. It would also complicate the rules if we added a mechanic for boarding craft, e.g. I dispatch ten boarding craft and the ship I'm trying to take blows eight out of the void but is still boarded by two craft, etc...

So if I roll for damage against my opponent, they determine however the damage is spread out among their fleet. If it is sufficient to destroy ship(s), it may be RP'd as 'boarded and captured' or 'self destruct activated during boarding' or whatever. Since there is no mechanic for capturing ships, they will be effectively hors de combat either way whether destroyed or captured.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. OK, yeah. At the low end, the old Umerian navy had a whooooole lot of mass-produced FTL-capable "cutters" with short-ranged drives, with endurance measured in, like... days, tops... that were designed to operate off small, highly vulnerable tenders. They had small crews and were a great place to put relatable viewpoint characters, while also giving you something that could get into the whole Plucky Space Fighters aesthetic because they were hilariously outscaled by anyone's deep space capable warships.

At the high end (escorting battle squadrons), I had fleet carriers that ran huge swarms of drone fighters- like, several hundred, or that was the fluff at the time. Had this whole Cylon basestar aesthetic for them going, to counter Shep's BSG-referencing Shepnukistanis.

Because of the greatly reduced point scale in this iteration of the game, the cutters would individually be, like... 0.025-point warships. The drones would realistically just be treated as reasonably expendable smart munitions fired by the carriers and hopefully recovered if reasonably practical, which is to be fair pretty much how Umerian fleet doctrine thinks of them anyway.

[Crossroads Inc.]

VX-145

I am digging your writing style...
One can see It is verrrrrrrrry heavily influenced by Douglas Adams, but that is something most of us obviously deeply enjoy. I like the set up, the chaos and the fun of the colonists in the fleet, the battles with the factory ships. Look forward to see more.

[VX-145]

The thing is - I've not actually read much Douglas Adams - I think just the Hitch-hiker's Guide - but that sort of detached, matter-of-fact comedic style is perfect for that particular character (who has yet to remember to give herself a name) and Endeavour in general, especially given that piece had to cover a lot of ground. Pratchett's also an inspiration. Glad people enjoy it

I'm liking the foreshadowing going on, the slight ancient arrogance of the Skotians, and Rogue showing off some ships.

Simon: if it helps any, one of my ship classes is a similar sort of drone carrier - I just folded all that into its base hull and the rest is RP.

[Crossroads Inc.]

YO YO!
Question, for purposes of my own backstory and RP Fluff..
What "Ancients" were around the galaxy 2000 years ago? Any space faring groups of significant power that my "Ancients" would have bothered with or encountered?

[Eternal_Freedom]

My Lazari precursors were still active then, but were very much a fallen/vestigial empire confined to one system. The Lazari's enemies however may well have still been around at that time.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Hmmm interesting.
What is your Lore concerning what happened to their enemies then?

The Skothians upon arriving at the edge of the galaxy, spent about 100 years exploring, mostly to identify sapient races with the potential for their purposes. It would be a safe bet one of their scouts would have come across and reported on the Enemies of the Lazari if said forces were active 2000+ years ago. Depending on how active they are, if the Skothian saw them as a threat to potential younger races, they may have attempted to intercede,

[Eternal_Freedom]

The Orions have no idea who the Lazari's enemies were, the Lazari hated them enough that even in their own historical records they were only ever referred to as "The Great Enemy" or "The Foe."

[VX-145]

I've mentioned it obliquely before, mostly because I didn't - and still don't - have details, but at some point in the past nearly every rocky planet in Endeavour space got blown up. Endeavour itself (the star system, not the polity, colony ship or any of the destroyers) was probably on the outskirts of this denuded region because there are still a couple of rocky planets there.

I'm intentionally leaving the details vague so people can work that into whatever plots they might like.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Crossroads and I are possibly plotting some sort of epic backstory battle. I like the idea of it leaving a huge, mysterious debris field like the Karos Graveyard in Homeworld (though maybe without the Dyson Sphere fragments).