Author Topic: pinnances and mine fields  (Read 10152 times)

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Offline MWadwell

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #30 on: October 05, 2013, 12:10:57 AM »
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.

The problem is, that there is also a "time management cost" (i.e. the time required to play out a turn) that has to be paid for by the player - and adding all of the above items more then doubles that cost.

That was one of the benefits of SM#2 - it cut the time required to run the empire dramatically, and allowed players to focus more on strategy/planning and on the battles, and less on micromanagement.


I'm not saying that these items can't be added back in - merely that to do so, you'd need to either add them in as an abstract percentage cost (i.e. such as corruption in Civ), or implement some kind of automated support (such as SA, or custom spreadsheets) to reduce the burden on the player.
Later,
Matt
 

Offline MWadwell

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #31 on: October 05, 2013, 12:12:21 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.

Agreed. As many games lack a SM, the information time delay is often not enforced.
Later,
Matt
 

Offline Paul M (OP)

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #32 on: October 11, 2013, 01:47:32 AM »
Agreed. As many games lack a SM, the information time delay is often not enforced.


Sorry for the delay Matt, my reply yesterday got foxed by the network connection.  The issues with turn taking more time in ISF compared to SM2 is clearly important.  I assume right from the start you have something like SFA to play the game.  If you don't then the game will collapse from paperwork overload relatively quickly.  I've written spreadsheets to handle stuff and even that rapidly gets out of hand.  Admittedly if you work to keep the money low and the fleets small then you can push the turn numbers upwards.  But in a standard SM2 game you quickly run into mega-economies and even in a 4th Edition game I ran into trouble rather quickly (30 turns in or so).

But regardless of the problems with micromanagement (and I am not fan of it) you need something to stop the "rich get richer, faster and faster" syndrome that Starfire's SM2 rule changes produces.  As that kills the game just as dead.  That computer game Sword of the Stars tried to deal with this...clearly they were thinking about the problem.  I think just about every modern 4X game looks at how to deal with exactly this issue.  Starfire has to do it as well.
 

Offline MWadwell

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Re: pinnances and mine fields
« Reply #33 on: October 12, 2013, 04:49:29 AM »
But regardless of the problems with micromanagement (and I am not fan of it) you need something to stop the "rich get richer, faster and faster" syndrome that Starfire's SM2 rule changes produces.  As that kills the game just as dead.  That computer game Sword of the Stars tried to deal with this...clearly they were thinking about the problem.  I think just about every modern 4X game looks at how to deal with exactly this issue.  Starfire has to do it as well.

G'Day Paul.

I couldn't agree more. With flat costs (i.e. R&D) and an exponential population growth rate, the amount of free cash an empire has increases exponentially.

And without some kind of custom PC support (i.e. SFA), then the game quickly becomes unmanageable. Even with PC support, the point of "unplayability" exists, it is just further away.

My preference to address this, would be to move away from PU/PTU's, and to introduce costs that are based on the empires income (rather then flat costs). This would have the effect of further slowing down reaching the point of unplayability.

Fixing the game so that this point never arrives, though, is beyond me.....

Later,
Matt