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I looked over most everyone's OOBs as of now. A couple people should be reminded that their ships cannot be more than 50% Special Attributes.

Did we ever decide on that rule? If so I will change that because I know I've got a couple of ships like that.

It seems reasonable, preventing 1+49O ships and 1+49S ships. Plus it gives another possible imperial tech bonus: "Specialized Ships," which allows your ship to have 3x(or whatever arbitrary number) the amount of special attributes you can normally have.

Well, you can't build 1+49 anything unless you dump all your racial attributes into the improved tech, and then you would only be able to have ten of those kind of ship, and something like that is going to do dick all because if you flick it, it will explode.

To a certain extent specialization heavy ships are a trap, in that they are much, much more fragile than normal so investing heavily in the specialization must be role specific.

Academia Nut wrote:Well, you can't build 1+49 anything unless you dump all your racial attributes into the improved tech

Where did we say this? is there a cap on special attributes besides the 50% rule?

Total, I don't recall there to be any cap, but for any individual specialty the cap is +10, and it costs attribute points to raise that cap. It's mentioned in the wiki under tech caches.

And I really don't think that there is a cap on the total specializations because ships with 1+10S or 1+10H have been bandied about as examples a couple of times. They would be really fragile but incredibly sneaky or brutally fast, making them decent scout ships.

I mentioned a "no more than half?" but it was never made offical. Even if I slid it onto the wiki, it's not official, since that's unoffical anyway. A rule doesn't stand just because nobody contested it--we really should have to get at least a quorum of approval.

So, as far as I know, there's nothing stopping someone from going 5+10+10+10+10, which is why I made a ship that is very similar to that.

Where is the post saying that there is a cap of 10 on an individual specialty?

Anyways, if there is a cap on individual specialties, then I don't think we need a "no more than half" rule. If there is no cap on individual specialties, then there should be a cap on % of ship devoted to specialties. One or the other, but both work for me.

I'm not sure if the 10 cap was ever actually discussed as a rule or if it was simply assumed as such by the majority of people. I think Hotfoot may have included the 10 point cap on each specialization waaaaaaaaay back in the thread during the initial design phase. I'm not going to look for it though, because it may very well be at the end of the 2k7 discussion thread.

The +10 cap was a longstanding rule.

The 'no more than half' rule was to keep people from making 5+10 type ships. But nobody cared so it isn't a big issue.

I'm confused about this though:

These allow for the special abilities of units to exceed the normal 10 point limit. There are two parts to the point cost, the first being how much the tech can be improved, and the second being how many units can be equipped with the technology. The cost of improvement is 10 points for every point by which the normal cap can be exceeded. The cost of equipping is 1 point for every unit that can be equipped. So 150 points spent on a tech cache could be 100 points to increase the cap by 10 and 50 points to equip 50 ships, or visa-versa. Generally represent this attribute by (X+Y) where X is the amount spent on improvement, and Y is the number of units that can be equipped. Note that you can have a number of units with the improvements less than the maximum and can loan out excess to other empires.

Here's some questiosn to answer:

Does this mean '50 at any given moment' or '50 ships total, ever'?

-If I upgraded 50 ships, and 20 of them died, can I make 20 more?

-If some were damaged, could I transfer those upgrades to another ship?

Does it cost no extra production to upgrade a ship?

-If a 30+10H ship costs 40, does a 30+20H ship cost 50?

-If I had a ship that was 20+10H and wanted to make it a 20+15H, and had five +5H upgrades left over, does the upgrade cost 5 to do or is it free (since I already paid for the upgrades with racial points)?

Could a 40+10H become a 40+15H if it's one of the ships I upgraded? This breaks the 50 point cap.

Could a 20 be upgraded with a +10 upgrade package and turned into a 20+10 later? If I, for some inscrutable reason, decided to do this.

Does this mean '50 at any given moment' or '50 ships total, ever'?

At any given moment. Doesn't seem fair to spend attribute points on one shots. Mods could award one shots though.

If I upgraded 50 ships, and 20 of them died, can I make 20 more?

Yes.

If some were damaged, could I transfer those upgrades to another ship?

So long as the transfer was permanent.

Does it cost no extra production to upgrade a ship?

-If a 30+10H ship costs 40, does a 30+20H ship cost 50?

If I had a ship that was 20+10H and wanted to make it a 20+15H, and had five +5H upgrades left over, does the upgrade cost 5 to do or is it free (since I already paid for the upgrades with racial points)?

No, the attribute points are to raise the max and maintain the equipment, not buy it in the first place.

Could a 40+10H become a 40+15H if it's one of the ships I upgraded? This breaks the 50 point cap.

Only if you could go over the ship cap normally, you can't go over the cap with specials already, so this wouldn't change that. Alternatively, if you captured a ship over the cap, you could conceivably gut it and install your extra equipment. So if you got your hands on a 60 point ship and you could build 20 point hyperdrives, you could build a 40+20H.

Could a 20 be upgraded with a +10 upgrade package and turned into a 20+10 later? If I, for some inscrutable reason, decided to do this.

Theoretically you could do this anyway without the tech as the +10 is under the cap and you're always free to upgrade your ships if you want.

The disclaimer is of course that this is merely how I proposed it. If we want to do it so that the techs are "free" modules for ships, then we could run it that way too. My proposal was simply a way to raise the caps on a limited number of ships. We could also throw out the limited number part and just make it a total cap increase.

Alrightie.

People should ALSO know quite specifically:

YOU HAVE 2000 POINTS TO SPEND, NOT 1500!!

Most OOB's are listed out of 1500 points.

Let's just get rid of the limited number part. It's not like it's limited anyways, you just need to spend 1 more point.

How hard-and-fast is the "no more than half" rule for special abilities? I ask because I intended to make a recon prowler that was 1+2S, but I don't want to rock the boat if everyone's in agreement over this rule.

The no more than half thing isn't a rule, so don't worry about it at all.

And removing the limited number thing on the tech caps is fine by me.

How good are baseline sensors? If I have a ship with no additional sensors capability, what would I be able to see in a hostile system? Presumably the number of hostile ships, as well as a rough guess of their size, but what about things like planet class and systemwide bonuses?

On long or short range sensors?

If you're in system with baseline sensors against an enemy with baseline electronic warfare, then yeah, you can see all non-cloaked ships and their capacities. If the enemy has significant D active, then you will see very little with just baseline sensors. Baseline sensors on ships will not let you see beyond the system you are in though, so in enemy territory without sensors you will have very little idea on their strategic movements.

In your own systems, you get a minimum of +1C3, so you have some basic long range capacity.

So basic sensors on ships: good for short range, nothing at long range.

Hey, do we have a "scale" for this? like, if I wanted to do recon of everything within two hexes of me, how many LY would that be?

Well, within your own territory it is assumed that you know about the movements of everything not designed to screw with sensor equipment. The way it was proposed earlier, every point of C3 should give you about an hour's travel with FTL of visibility. Each map hex is about a day across, so each one would have a number of one hour hexes equal to however many are in a 12 hex radius. It would probably take something along the lines of a good week to do a full, indepth survey of a single map hex with a ship with 1C3, but I don't know the exact math right now.

That said, you should be able to know the general locations of anything of interest, like industrialized worlds, once you have a ship with long range sensors into the same map hex. Worlds with jamming would be more obvious, but harder to pin down their exact location.

As far as a hex to lightyear conversion, I'm not quite sure on that, but they're probably a couple hundred light years across each. I had a calc at one point, but we changed the sizes slightly, so I'm not sure how that's affected travel speed and thus the size of the hexes.

Finally done with my OOB! Phew! Took long enough. I decided just to get some improved salvage and logistics rather than mess with the improved tech, so no worried there.

Nice, although your interdiction matrix design is off by 5 points, so either you forgot to include an expenditure or you have a bunch of extra points as the description only adds up to 45 per, not 50.

Just drop me somewhere in it, I go with any location.

What does everyone think about capturable Imperial Facilities usable only by successor nations, like Imperial Sensor Net, Imperial Military Academy, etc? Right now it seems that Barbarians and Outsiders have an advantage over successor nations from their physical location on the map. This would even it out a bit.

I know we talked about this earlier, but nothing came out of it.

you mean on top of the successor nations being where the damned things are and us outsiders being nowhere near them?

Outsiders = not near you ugly manapes
Successor state = near all the shiney man ape imperial tech