Author Topic: pinnances and mine fields  (Read 10146 times)

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Offline Starslayer_D

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #15 on: May 11, 2013, 09:32:57 AM »
*chuckle* I am dead certain Paul wouldn't use CD that way, but he sure pointed out that the rules allow for them to be used that way. There was a reason why the 3rd Redesign group had many people innvolved.
 

Offline Paul M (OP)

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #16 on: June 05, 2013, 08:20:45 AM »
I like the box launcher idea and the ambam pod dodad...frankly the AMBAM itself is useless.  If you fire it the ships can't fire on anything and expect to hit, since you are firing on two targets: the minefield and the enemy base/ship.  That gives you a -8 to hit.  So if you put it on your first ships through they only fire AMBAMs the first round (so long as no lasers are in use else the just blow up).  This overall makes it difficult for me to understand how you can use it during an assault.  After one is done with they would be useful for clearing the mines from the warp point.

The box launcher concept would simplify the SBMHAWK situation a lot from what I can see since that is what they are by the time you get to the SBMHAWK4 and SBMHAWK5 (and any further varients).

As for CDs.  You have to consider I came up with this while discussing a theoretical assault on a closed warp point defended by an absurdly huge amount of mines.  20,000 patterns or some such moronic number.  In this case I had to start thinking out of the box and noticed the rules for CDs and Pn in terms of mines.  That it is NOT what the rules intended was clear, and the fix was simple: change the number of mines required to kill a CD from 10 to (2 or 1).  But as the 3rdR rules are written you can very effectively sweep mines with CDs.  It is cheesier then sin and as Starslayer points out I would not do it.  But then so to is 20,000 effen patterns of mines (or equally absurd numbers) on a closed warp point.  However, possibly Starslayers bricks would an effective solution as well (CLs that are basically 90% armour).  It isn't by the way a cheap solution to use CDs...they cost somewhat more than the patterns of mines but it is pretty much even as it takes 5 CDs to take out a pattern so 15 MCr of CDs vrs 12 MCr of mines.

AW in 3rdR is that they pay no maintenance for reasons that I've never sorted out.  It isn't that hard to track how many patterns you have even in a PnP game and simply pay 10% of their value.  It would stop cold things like 20,000 paterns of mines and make them far less of a no brainer solution to every problem.  But as it stands you are loosing ships that have a value of Build Cost*(1+TurnsActive*0.15).  This means the economic value of an active ship increases continously.  And loosing a ship that you paid 100 turns of maintenance on to something that pays no maintenance is a big win for the other side.  That is why I am so negative on things that pay no maintance killing ships.
 

Offline crucis

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #17 on: June 05, 2013, 08:52:20 AM »
I like the box launcher idea and the ambam pod dodad...frankly the AMBAM itself is useless.  If you fire it the ships can't fire on anything and expect to hit, since you are firing on two targets: the minefield and the enemy base/ship.  That gives you a -8 to hit.  So if you put it on your first ships through they only fire AMBAMs the first round (so long as no lasers are in use else the just blow up).  This overall makes it difficult for me to understand how you can use it during an assault.  After one is done with they would be useful for clearing the mines from the warp point.

The box launcher concept would simplify the SBMHAWK situation a lot from what I can see since that is what they are by the time you get to the SBMHAWK4 and SBMHAWK5 (and any further varients).

The "flying box launcher" concept would simplify things for missile pods.  A gen 1 pod might have a capacity of, say, 3 csp.  Gen 2 might have a 4 csp capacity, and so on.  Something simple like that.  And just use those csp how ever you want.  Also note that I haven't ignored the issue of the # of pods that could link.  I actually haven't written up anything "official" yet on this, but this is the direction I'm headed.


And an "AMBAM" anti-mine drone makes total sense too.  If you can build drones and missile pods (and pinnaces) that transit WP's, why not create a drone pack with antimatter to sweep mines?  It's so obvious, at least to me.  The one thing that slightly concerns me about the idea is that it might be "too easy" to use.  That is, just make transit and fly into the adjacent mined hex and blow up.  It almost turns minefields into a situation where the defender pays X MC's for his minefield, and the attacker pays Y for his anti-mine weapon, and whoever spent more (depending on the efficiency of the anti-mine attacks) has something left over.


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As for CDs.  You have to consider I came up with this while discussing a theoretical assault on a closed warp point defended by an absurdly huge amount of mines.  20,000 patterns or some such moronic number.  In this case I had to start thinking out of the box and noticed the rules for CDs and Pn in terms of mines.  That it is NOT what the rules intended was clear, and the fix was simple: change the number of mines required to kill a CD from 10 to (2 or 1).  But as the 3rdR rules are written you can very effectively sweep mines with CDs.  It is cheesier then sin and as Starslayer points out I would not do it.  But then so to is 20,000 effen patterns of mines (or equally absurd numbers) on a closed warp point.  However, possibly Starslayers bricks would an effective solution as well (CLs that are basically 90% armour).  It isn't by the way a cheap solution to use CDs...they cost somewhat more than the patterns of mines but it is pretty much even as it takes 5 CDs to take out a pattern so 15 MCr of CDs vrs 12 MCr of mines.

No prob.  ;)



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AW in 3rdR is that they pay no maintenance for reasons that I've never sorted out.  It isn't that hard to track how many patterns you have even in a PnP game and simply pay 10% of their value.  It would stop cold things like 20,000 paterns of mines and make them far less of a no brainer solution to every problem.  But as it stands you are loosing ships that have a value of Build Cost*(1+TurnsActive*0.15).  This means the economic value of an active ship increases continuously.  And loosing a ship that you paid 100 turns of maintenance on to something that pays no maintenance is a big win for the other side.  That is why I am so negative on things that pay no maintance killing ships.

Preaching to the converted here, Paul.  I suspect that the reason for not having maintenance on them in the first place was simplicity.  But in this case, not requiring maintenance, or some other mechanism, only allows to minefields to run wild.  Not to mention that in 3rdR/SM#2, laying mines was made too easy IMHO when you could just use the CFN.  At least in pure ISF, when you had to use actual FT minelayers, you had to pay to build them (expending money and yard space), maintain them or mothball them in peace time, and when needed, you had to actually ship your mines to the WP that needed them.  All of that taken together would slow MF growth considerably.

With maintenance required, I think that it would create an incentive to only use mines in war time, or at a very few ultra critical WPs that were worth the cost of maintaining MF's.


Mines really are a pain in the butt though...  I tried rewriting the 3rdR MF rules to simplify them and cut their length.  And I think that I probably only succeeded in half of that.  I think that I cleaned up the rules, but they're still just as annoyingly long.  Makes me wonder if they're worth the effort.   :-\

 

Offline Paul M (OP)

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #18 on: June 05, 2013, 09:49:02 AM »
Starslayer and I are using the rules that Steve was testing in SFA 7.1.  It adds two systems:  mine rack and mine deployer (or something like that).  This requires pretty much that you use military hulls for these ships, and we added in a rule requiring a tender for each system with deloyed mines/bouys.   My FT4 design is used a lot for that as it basically can deploy 12 mines (or in this case replace the odd mine failure).

It is infrastructure costs like this that tend to drive up the "cost of empire."  And it is a failure to have such a thing that makes 3rdR/SM2 economics basically explode since the cost to run a big empire is approximately the same as a small empire.  This is the same problem they ran into in the original Civillization games, and is the reason for things like corruption and the various government types and so on.  Procyon has some ideas of his own for keeping the cost of running an empire high so that the empires remain "balanced" over time.  It really doesn't matter how you do it but if you don't do something.  Sword of the Stars has that intial cost to terraform the planet which can eat into your income but I noticed that as you get bigger that becomes less and less a constraint...though at least it does mean that you don't willy nilly colonize every rock you find.  I find most of these 4X games have to face this problem somehow or else the bigger empires just richer and richer, faster and faster.  And at some point money (or MCr) just ceases to be either an issue or a break.  And for me when you no longer need to thnk about decisions then a big part of the game goes away.  At least to me the challenge comes from presenting the player with multiple paths to victory where each decision you make is important.  I really despise max-min solution games...or min-max character design or min-max anything actually.  There never should be only 1 path...but many with trade offs.
 

Offline crucis

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #19 on: June 06, 2013, 02:12:25 AM »
It is infrastructure costs like this that tend to drive up the "cost of empire."  And it is a failure to have such a thing that makes 3rdR/SM2 economics basically explode since the cost to run a big empire is approximately the same as a small empire.  This is the same problem they ran into in the original Civilization games, and is the reason for things like corruption and the various government types and so on.  Procyon has some ideas of his own for keeping the cost of running an empire high so that the empires remain "balanced" over time.  It really doesn't matter how you do it but if you don't do something.  Sword of the Stars has that initial cost to terraform the planet which can eat into your income but I noticed that as you get bigger that becomes less and less a constraint...though at least it does mean that you don't willy nilly colonize every rock you find.  I find most of these 4X games have to face this problem somehow or else the bigger empires just richer and richer, faster and faster.  And at some point money (or MCr) just ceases to be either an issue or a break.  And for me when you no longer need to think about decisions then a big part of the game goes away.  At least to me the challenge comes from presenting the player with multiple paths to victory where each decision you make is important.  I really despise max-min solution games...or min-max character design or min-max anything actually.  There never should be only 1 path...but many with trade offs.

It'll only drive up the "cost of empire" if you're laying and maintaining a lot of mines.



I understand what you're saying, Paul, but I have serious philosophical problems with rules that punish success.  I'm not against trying to keep incomes under control, but I simply will not punish players for being successful and having grown larger empires.  I'd rather find a way to manage things in a different way that doesn't punish success.

Also, I'm not particularly enthralled by promoting the colonization of every rock you come across.  I know that some will counter by talking about "stay at homes" (more appropriately "forced to stay at homes"), but the problem I see is that anything that a "stay at home" can use, a races that's still expanding can use as well.  Note that this isn't to say that I intend to get rid of non-habitable colonization, etc.  I just don't intend to assume that it should take the form that it currently takes.


One area where I've come up with an idea for controlling income in a different way is the paradigm that one automatically assumes that an increased EL/TL increases one's income.  Now, in theory, this *is* probably true.  But there's an economic vector that's been left out of the game. probably for the sake of simplicity, but is still missing ... and that's inflation.  The cost of everything increases over time as well as do incomes. 

So the idea that I've for a simple solution is to make the broad assumption that the degree to which incomes increase over time (due to EL advancement) is fully offset by the degree to which costs increase over time (due to natural inflationary forces).  While a simplistic solution, it avoids having to try to insert inflation into the game with increased costs on everything.  It's a lot easier to just say that EL-based income increases are fully offset by time based inflationary cost increases, and thus rule that there are no EL based income increases, as would be reflected in an increased TLF using an SM#2-like model or no EL Growth using an Ultra-like model.  While some might be disappointed to not get a bump in income at a new EL, this could be a very simple solution for keeping incomes in check (to a degree) as well as guaranteeing that any investment made at EL1 has the same return as one made at EL10, since there'd be no TLF involved.



 

Offline Paul M (OP)

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #20 on: June 06, 2013, 10:01:30 AM »
Well I don't see it as "punishment" I see it as "reality"...it is more expensive to have a bigger anything essentially.  The infrastructure costs of large empires are historically what tended to cause their collapse.

In starfire the cost of say the CFN, which is the only thing that seems to exist in terms of infrastructure is just a purchase cost unless you use bases with CC.  So that means that effectively the "infrastructure" to running a big empire costs the player 0 MCr per turn.  Look at ISF: where every planet needed either a PDC with a space port or a space station with cargo handling facilities, where you needed imperial freighters, where you had delays in income use (it wasn't one big slush fund), where shipyards cost extra maintenance rather than being maintenance free, where the shipyards and workshops had to be upgraded, etc.  All of these were things that cost you more and more money the more of them you had.  So biggere empires tended to have a bigger cost associated with them.

Income is proportional to size.  Available income is that less maintenance.  So it is clear that the bigger you are the better off you are under the SM2 system.

As for no income increase with EL...didn't they do this in 4thE with increases to planet population limits?  It is something that I'd have to playtest to see how it works...though Proycon might have some comments from his game.   I can't make sensible comments based on the idea without seeing hard numbers I'm afraid...or better put I'd rather not comment on what I don't really have any hard data on.
 

Offline crucis

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #21 on: June 08, 2013, 12:44:15 AM »
Well I don't see it as "punishment" I see it as "reality"...it is more expensive to have a bigger anything essentially.  The infrastructure costs of large empires are historically what tended to cause their collapse.

In starfire the cost of say the CFN, which is the only thing that seems to exist in terms of infrastructure is just a purchase cost unless you use bases with CC.  So that means that effectively the "infrastructure" to running a big empire costs the player 0 MCr per turn.  Look at ISF: where every planet needed either a PDC with a space port or a space station with cargo handling facilities, where you needed imperial freighters, where you had delays in income use (it wasn't one big slush fund), where shipyards cost extra maintenance rather than being maintenance free, where the shipyards and workshops had to be upgraded, etc.  All of these were things that cost you more and more money the more of them you had.  So bigger empires tended to have a bigger cost associated with them.

Paul, I see these as two vastly different things.  I see the "bureaucracy" idea as grossly punishing because it's sort of an anti-success tax.  I will not countenance such a rule in Cosmic.

But what you describe above in your comparison between the CFN and ISF's requirements is what I suppose you could call infrastructure... just the cost of doing business for integrating a new planet into the empire's commerce system.  Honestly, I never had a problem with the way ISF handled things in this regards, but no doubt some people did.  Otherwise, I doubt that things would have changed as they did in SM#2.

But I'm not sure that we can reasonably expect to be able to drop back to a situation where there's no CFN, and you had to use Imp FT's to move all MC around the empire, for all colonization, and so on.  In a number of ways, it'd be a pain, at least for some people.  

Also, I'm not sure that it really should be necessary to use FT's to ship "money" around the empire as if it was bulk cargo.  Look at the modern banking system.  Money is just data.  Why would it be any different in the future?  Now, if one suggested that it should only be possible within an empire and not between 2 different empires, due to the lack of a common currency, and all sorts of other details, that would be a strong argument, I think.  OTOH, I suppose if two empires had a trade treaty (or M&T) or were partnered, they must have the ability to do currency exchanges, so transferring money wouldn't be difficult ... possibly.  OTOOH, if you've invaded some planet and want to pillage a bunch of MC, well, you're probably pillaging actual goods and stuff that you'd need to ship as cargo.  But I think you get my drift here...

As for things like cargo handling and space ports, I don't think that those things should be really necessary as explicit tech systems.  Generally speaking, I tend to think that it's best to keep this sort of thing as abstract as possible.  What could be a reasonable alternative would be a fee to incorporate the planet, moon, or asteroid belt into the empire's CFN, possibly one based on the economic potential of the body in question.    OTOH, one could just increase colonization costs a little under the assumption that you're having to build these facilities as part of the colonization effort.  I suspect that there are many different ways to do this that don't involve creating annoyance to the player.


But regarding your examples in general, they all seem like relatively minor costs that didn't occur all that often, except for shipyard and machine ship maintenance, which would, of course, be ongoing.  Minor costs like that may be more of an annoyance to track than for the actual cost involved or the actual "value" of the cost to the game.



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Income is proportional to size.  Available income is that less maintenance.  So it is clear that the bigger you are the better off you are under the SM2 system.

This is probably true regardless of whether you're talking pure ISF, SM#2, or 4E, though perhaps with some slightly different caveats.



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As for no income increase with EL...didn't they do this in 4thE with increases to planet population limits?  

No.  In GSF+ (GSF, Ultra, and Solar), you get an EL Growth bonus when your reach a new EL, which produces an increase in income, though not as severe and with some annoying limitations.  The idea here would be that there would be no increase in income linked to an increase in one's EL/TL under the broad and simplistic assumption that any increase tied to an increase in productivity (due to increased EL) would be offset by increases in inflation (hence, costs).


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It is something that I'd have to playtest to see how it works...though Proycon might have some comments from his game.   I can't make sensible comments based on the idea without seeing hard numbers I'm afraid...or better put I'd rather not comment on what I don't really have any hard data on.

No prob.  It's only really an idea at this point.
« Last Edit: June 08, 2013, 05:47:31 AM by crucis »
 

Offline Paul M (OP)

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #22 on: June 14, 2013, 08:03:25 AM »
In reading the above I realize I wrote CFN and what I meant was ICN (Interstellar Communications Network).  The construction of such a thing is the only thing that remains as a infrastructure cost and it is largely (after HT4) is a single purchase.  So in principle an empire of 100 starsystems has pretty much the same infrastructure cost as one with 10 (essentially 0).  This means that at no time will a player go "Should I explore further?"  or "Is the cost of expansion worth it?"  The answer in both cases is: "The bigger the better..."

Single purchase items are not "limiting" in Starfire (or in most other 4X type games).  There is also the point that to some people (including myself) "Building an Empire" should involve something being built, not just automatically assumed to exist.  So by "abstracting" this sort of thing out of the game, you also abstract out the "fun" for a portion of your potential customer base.  Plus the economy should not be so simple that you should never have to think about things, and in starfire the economy is just that simple.  I think the player should have to make decisions continously and not just follow a brain dead reciepe to sucess.

I won't be around for around a week to a week and a half so there is no need to reply in a hurry.
 

Offline Starslayer_D

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #23 on: June 15, 2013, 05:58:31 AM »
A slow down on Expansion might be to double CFN costs.. makes the Long distance forcing of colony sites more expensive. Especially when coupled with slower growth rates. 12 STMP is about the limit in our current game. Also note than naturally growing colonies about reached 400 - 450 PU after 200 turns.. So no new sources of people further away from homeworld.

Still 12 STMP from homeworld can cover a huge amount of Systems.

Still, any NPC which stuck at home.. by choice or galactography is falling behind fast. Only those with multiple planets are in the run still. (Ok, we also don't use asteroids for colonisation, else all income gets a huge boost by that.).
« Last Edit: June 15, 2013, 06:00:14 AM by Starslayer_D »
 

Offline crucis

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #24 on: June 15, 2013, 09:05:00 AM »
A slow down on Expansion might be to double CFN costs.. makes the Long distance forcing of colony sites more expensive. Especially when coupled with slower growth rates. 12 STMP is about the limit in our current game. Also note than naturally growing colonies about reached 400 - 450 PU after 200 turns.. So no new sources of people further away from homeworld.

Still 12 STMP from homeworld can cover a huge amount of Systems.

Still, any NPC which stuck at home.. by choice or galactography is falling behind fast. Only those with multiple planets are in the run still. (Ok, we also don't use asteroids for colonisation, else all income gets a huge boost by that.).

Starslayer, thanks for adding your 2 cents worth.

One thing that I don't like in the current rules (including Ultra/Solar) is the fact that you have to pay for CFN usage in full month increments.  This has the effect that colonization gets broken into 4 StMP groupings, i.e. 0, 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16, and so on.  Why should a location that's 5 StMP have to pay as much as one that's 8 StMP away?  Of course, I should also state to be fair that I've never been a fan of the CFN, and probably never will be. 

As for races stuck at home, that doesn't bother me.  I see that as evolution at work.  Grow or die.  It seems to me that getting too creative in allowing for solutions that allow races that stay in cul-de-sacs to be competitive with vibrant, growing races is producing a very contrived and fake situation.


One thing that's worth noting is that if population growth rates are kept low, and you can't generate major population centers other than the homeworld, this will slow down outward expansion, as it will become increasingly costly to colonize as those new enclaves are further and further from the HW.  The question becomes ... will people keep on expanding, or will they stop at some distance (12 StMP?  16 StMP?)?  I find such a decision to stop expansion sad, as the decision is likely an utterly cold economic assessment, which indicates to me that the situation has become too focused on economic analysis and returns and not on expansion and military conquest, which is the game I want to be playing.


 

Offline Starslayer_D

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #25 on: June 15, 2013, 05:10:45 PM »
Well, it's more having to weight your Investments in a low income.low growth game. Colonisation will not return your Investment so fast, but you have to invest anyway to grow. On the otehr Hand, covering a large empire (borders 12 STMP away) needs a military investment, especially ships and bases and ship yards.. and that rapidely eats up the avaiable money, too.

Overall a much more interresting game than the 'piles of money' games we had before. Unfortunately, the tighter the money in a game, the more powerfull no maintenance defenses like mines and dsb-l's become :( I really wish there was an Option in SA to add a 1 MCr cost per mine or buoyo per turn.


(we use the Option in SA to pay for CFN by STMP, so the costs differ between 5 and 8.. but hiering for an aditional month still is more expensive amd blocks the CFN, and due to slow growth new Centers Close to the frontier don't open up as fast.)
 

Offline crucis

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #26 on: August 23, 2013, 01:16:30 AM »
In reading the above I realize I wrote CFN and what I meant was ICN (Interstellar Communications Network).  The construction of such a thing is the only thing that remains as a infrastructure cost and it is largely (after HT4) is a single purchase.  So in principle an empire of 100 starsystems has pretty much the same infrastructure cost as one with 10 (essentially 0).  This means that at no time will a player go "Should I explore further?"  or "Is the cost of expansion worth it?"  The answer in both cases is: "The bigger the better..."

Single purchase items are not "limiting" in Starfire (or in most other 4X type games).  There is also the point that to some people (including myself) "Building an Empire" should involve something being built, not just automatically assumed to exist.  So by "abstracting" this sort of thing out of the game, you also abstract out the "fun" for a portion of your potential customer base.  Plus the economy should not be so simple that you should never have to think about things, and in Starfire the economy is just that simple.  I think the player should have to make decisions continuously and not just follow a brain dead recipe to success.

I won't be around for around a week to a week and a half so there is no need to reply in a hurry.

Little did you know that real life events would conspire to have me not reply to you for over 2 months...  Oh well.


Paul, I think that a problem here is that you and I have considerably different points of view about what the game is really about.  I won't say that either of us is wrong.  It's just the way it is.  I've always seen the game as a war game, first and foremost, and that empire building was about expansion and conquest and so forth, not for the sake of "oh, isn't it cool ... I'm building an empire", not for the sake of saying my empire generates more more MC than anyone else's, etc.

As for the "do I expand further?"  my answer would always be yes, yes, yes, absolutely yes!  Expansion and conquest!  I'm not interested in a game that asks "can I afford to continue expanding?".  That game sounds like a real yawner to me.


You speak to the idea of abstracting out the fun for a portion of the potential customer base.  But I could answer in reply that what one person sees as "fun" another may see as unnecessarily complex rules that lead to boredom.  Those conflicts are all over the place.  Personnel point rules.  CFN vs. using Imperial FT's to carry various cargoes.  Dealing with missile tracking.  And so on.  And from what I've seen, there often isn't even any consistency in which complexities or abstractions various people like.  And I'm often a weird place where I see things that people think are complex that I think are nor complex at all, and look at the abstractions that others think simplify the game and think that they actually complicate it instead.

But this leads up to an important philosophical question.  When the designer is designing the game, does he create the game that he'd want to play or the game that he thinks that the existing (or even new) customer base wants to play?  I have to tell you that everyone that has given me an answer to this question has said that the designer should create the game that he would want to play, because that is what inspires him.  Otherwise, you may just be going through the motions.


Anyways, that's all for now. 
 

Offline Starslayer_D

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #27 on: August 28, 2013, 03:00:30 PM »
The Trouble is, if expanding is a simple equation of who invests the most at the start, leads forevermore, the game becomes very simple and linear. Starfire in theory has the Balance of hostile NPRs, but these like exploration luck are a luck of the dice bit. Civilisation eg. had this way better, by having civic unrest as a factor limiting armies, and later empire sizes, making for a more complex and interresting game. A simple exponential growth curve soon leads to the death of campaigns around turn 150 when income and fleet sizes explode and make for huge, unmanageable battles (judging by the campaign reports written by Kurt and Steve respectively, and my own experiences with a multiple Player campaign with an accelerated economic start).
 

Offline Paul M (OP)

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #28 on: August 29, 2013, 05:41:15 AM »
Starfire so long as you are playing a scenario from one of the campaign books is a tactical wargame.  The moment you add in ISF and do a new empires campaign it becomes a management game exactly like all 4X or RTS games are.  The problem with SM2 and later editions is that they have trivial economic models.   Trivial in the mathematical sense as they are nothing more than compound interest growth.  This means eventually money stops mattering.  Worse the only brake on this growth is fleet maintenance.  This is double catastrophe since it means that first your money grows continously, and second that the fleet you can support without impacting your economic expansion grows continously.  Eventually as Starslayer points out around turn 100-150 in a SM2 game your game implodes as your money is such that tossing 100,000's of MCr at things becomes an automatic act and your fleet size has gotten to the point your battles start resembling ISW4 and those sorts of battles are pretty much unplayable.

My point was that in ISF Webber went though a lot of trouble to add in "cost of empire"...you had to pay to refit SY, you needed (SP), you had to build and transport missiles, colonization was expensive, you needed imperial freighters for lots of tasks, you had PPs, etc.  All of this added up to an ever increasing cost of having a big empire.  That has all been removed...my point was to put it back in because bigger empires should have more "costs" then smaller empires.  Just like the cost of operating a town of 2000 is less than the cost of operating the city of New York.  As Starslayer also points out the people behind the Civ series of games worked this out years ago.  That is why they introduced among other things "corruption" to make it so that your massive empire has a few drawbacks.  In real life it is the cost of operation of large empires that has caused most of them to in the first case stop expanding and in general to collapse eventually.
 

Offline Starslayer_D

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #29 on: October 04, 2013, 10:55:56 AM »
Also one Point wich fairly rarely gets taken into account though ISF provided it is the travel speed of information. your frontline System may be invaded, but even your sector capital may not know for a month or two, handing some Advantage to the invader.