3rd Edition Rules

[Paul M]

On the topic of the system scale and the STMP.

The system scale is rarely used in Starfire probably because just about everything comes down to the empire state formation.  This reduces the fight to a one dimensional clash.  You are either holding distance, decreasing it or increasing it.   Battles are fought by shooting till she pops, and the mathematics behind this sort of combat results in the destruction of the weaker force for little damage to the more powerful.  So all told there is no "operational level" to starfire.  And the operational level is the system scale maneuvers where you only know ships are there and you want to determine what they are and are worried about things like communications, scouting and counter scouting.  This is a lot of what Weber's books involve.  Try and find it in Steve's or Kurt's stories.  As I said that time with the SMs and the two maps was about the most fun I had playing Starfire, because that was like a real command situation.  But it is just outright missing in Starfire mostly.  Skip past it to shoot till she pops, empire state battles of attrition that you can see the outcome of in many cases right from the start.  If it wasn't that Starslayer doesn't play like this I would not play Starfire since those sorts of battle are personally boring.  The fact that Kurt and Steve's games were solo games though probably is the main reason for the lack of operational level manuevers since they automatically know what the other side has and that tends to influence decision making.

As for STMP, the fact it simplifies moving ships around is good, but it also tends to make you ignore WP location, distances between them etc.  I rarely if ever look at the map of the WPs, all I need to know is xblash-yblah-zblad is the chain and it is 2 STMPs from xblash to zblad.  But the RM won the battle they did because their path between WP was much shorter than the path from the Buer homeworld to the WP.  So they assaulted the WP a few days before the reinforcements arrived.  Something you only get by counting hexes.  For routine movments STMPs are good but when push comes to shove you will count hexes again.  Basically STMP is something that removes you the player from looking at your empire.  But it is hard to argue against it for routine ship movement.  I think it is a good and useful tool but one that has a subtle draw back.

I lump STMP into a lot of the changes in SM2 that while saving bookkeeping efforts have other unintended effects on gameplay.

[crucis]

On the topic of the system scale and the STMP.

The system scale is rarely used in Starfire probably because just about everything comes down to the empire state formation.  This reduces the fight to a one dimensional clash.  You are either holding distance, decreasing it or increasing it.   Battles are fought by shooting till she pops, and the mathematics behind this sort of combat results in the destruction of the weaker force for little damage to the more powerful.  So all told there is no "operational level" to starfire.  And the operational level is the system scale maneuvers where you only know ships are there and you want to determine what they are and are worried about things like communications, scouting and counter scouting.  This is a lot of what Weber's books involve.  Try and find it in Steve's or Kurt's stories.  As I said that time with the SMs and the two maps was about the most fun I had playing Starfire, because that was like a real command situation.  But it is just outright missing in Starfire mostly.  Skip past it to shoot till she pops, empire state battles of attrition that you can see the outcome of in many cases right from the start.  If it wasn't that Starslayer doesn't play like this I would not play Starfire since those sorts of battle are personally boring.  The fact that Kurt and Steve's games were solo games though probably is the main reason for the lack of operational level maneuvers since they automatically know what the other side has and that tends to influence decision making.

I'm not sure that I'd blame the lack of system scale maneuvering down to the ESF, although I suppose that one might think that the ESF may extend into the system and interception scales, where one or both sides are keeping their main fleet concentrated, with only scouts being detached.   But still, I'm not sure that that isn't realistic to some degree.  Admirals aren't going to want to risk splitting their forces unless there's one darned good reason for doing so, like trying to hit two inhabited at the same time as was done in The Shiva Option. In all honesty, I'm not sure how one can get players to try to use the system scale for anything more than seeking each other out for the sake of the tactical battle. 

Oh, and what you describe as “operational scale” is essentially the range when both sides know of each others’ presence due to being detected at “presence” range on their long range sensors, which in 3E would be 6 system hexes or less.

As for “shoot til she pops”, you’re overlooking something important.  A lot of players design their ships with a beam weapon as the final system on the control sheet.  Are you going to say that opposing players are doing something wrong by finishing off enemy ships that are continuing to shoot at them?  One way to reduce “shoot til she pop” is for players to stop putting weapons as the final system, because until they do, they have every legitimate and logical reason to continue shooting.  And if even after players stop putting beam weapons as the final system enemies continue to shoot til they kill ships, you should use that to your advantage, since it means that they’re wasting shots against disarmed opponents rather than targeting active combatants.

As for ESF, part of me says that it’s up to the opposing player to come up with tactics to turn the ESF against itself.  That said, I can see how the use of Ultra-like firing arcs could help out somewhat.  But it seems like the only serious way that one could hurt the ESF tactic would be to have ships that are destroyed “blow up” and cause damage to all other ships in the same tac hex.  Of course, the counter to this is that tac hexes are huge (75,000 km across).  But if one is looking for a way to counter it, one also may have to accept a somewhat questionable idea.  (I’d probably suggest an explosion strength based on the number of engine systems, so that smaller ships had smaller explosions and larger ones has larger explosions.) Honestly, though, I wouldn’t use such a rule because ESF just doesn’t bother me all that much, because I believe that it’s up to opposing players to find their own counter tactics, not for the game designers to do it for them.

As for STMP, the fact it simplifies moving ships around is good, but it also tends to make you ignore WP location, distances between them etc.  I rarely if ever look at the map of the WPs, all I need to know is xblash-yblah-zblad is the chain and it is 2 STMPs from xblash to zblad.  But the RM won the battle they did because their path between WP was much shorter than the path from the Buer homeworld to the WP.  So they assaulted the WP a few days before the reinforcements arrived.  Something you only get by counting hexes.  For routine movements STMPs are good but when push comes to shove you will count hexes again.  Basically STMP is something that removes you the player from looking at your empire.  But it is hard to argue against it for routine ship movement.  I think it is a good and useful tool but one that has a subtle draw back.

I lump STMP into a lot of the changes in SM2 that while saving bookkeeping efforts have other unintended effects on gameplay.

Yes, there is no substitute for knowing the exact distance that must be traveled when time is critical.  But most players aren't going to know those distances or be able to get them without placing WP's on system maps and counting sys hexes, which is very time consuming and annoying.  In my case, my personal sysgen program had this little feature in it that calculated the distances between all WP's in the system in sys hexes and LM using the Law of Cosines IIRC (I was doing this long before the article in SM#2 mentioned it). 

And now that I think of it, it might be possible to create some charts that list out the distances between 2 WP's on the system scale, if one uses the assumption (used in Ultra) that WP distances from their primary are measured in full sys hexes, rather than LM's, and of course, that WP's only lay on radians.  Of course, it would still mean that there'd be seven 30 x 30 tables (from 0 to 6 radians of difference, though the 0 and 6 radian diff tables may be unnecessarily due to the simplicity of the two situations).  And tables of that size would almost certainly each require a page per table, maybe more.

An alternative for spreadsheet savvy players could be a simple spreadsheet app which could take as inputs the locations of 2 WPs (distance from star and radian) and output the distance between the two WP’s in sys hexes and LM’s.  (FYI, knowing the distance in LM’s can be useful for more precise time measurements when sending time critical ICN messages.)

A gripe that I do have with STMP is that I think that there are some places where it is mis-used, such as planetary surveys, particularly habitable worlds surveys.  StMP is strictly speaking a distance, 6 light-hours, IIRC.  And yet hab worlds surveys use StMP as a TIME measurement … saying that you get X number of SP per STMP spend surveying the habitable planet.  That’s complete BS.  System body surveys should be conducted against a strict time measurement, days or weeks, and survey points earned on that basis.  I also don’t like the grouped body surveys for a similar reason.  Oh, I wouldn’t mind seeing moons orbiting a given planet being grouped together for survey purposes.  They’re close enough that it seems to work out well enough for time-measured surveying.

But when push comes to shove, I don’t think that you can force players to use the more complex model, particularly since there’s hardly any value-add except in time critical situations. 

[MWadwell]

I do understand that advantages that merging T and ST bring, since you no longer have to worry about balancing them.  But the flip side is that they are sort of traditional within the game.   It also begs some questions.

Do Mass 2 and Mass 3 remain the same but Type T planets encompass both?  Or is Mass 3 made different and no longer a habitable range for the larger set of habitable (and merged) T/ST races?  And if they are no longer considered habitable, are they then desolate or possibly even extreme?  Might they even be sort of like Type V planets (maybe not as hot as traditional Type V’s, but possibly having extremely dense and deadly atmospheres) and thus deadly environments for T races?  And how common should they be?  Or just perhaps merge the existing M2 and M3 ranges as is, and not worry about anything larger.

There are a lot of questions that come to mind when one starts thinking about merging the M2 T and the M3 ST types.

In the interest of simplicity, why not create them seperately (to the point of giving them HI’s) – and then ignoring what type (i.e. T/ST) of planet they are….

An example method. All T-type races/planets roll HI on a d10. All ST-type races/planets roll HI on a D10+5. When it comes time to determine habitability, the type of planet is ignored (i.e. T or ST), and only the HI matters.

You can justify it by stating that the for T races finding a benign ST, that the planetary formations (i.e. high altitude platea’s) make ideal habitable zones; and for vice versa, the T planet is incredibly dense, and has a higher gravity then normal.

But first decide what your desired outcome is (see below), before trying to determine how to determine the outcome.

One of the problems you encounter when you start breaking Habitability into realistic factors is that those factors become less amenable to being wrapped around, as is done with the generic HI as is done in Ultra.  In Ultra, an HI of 10 is 1 away from an HI of 1.  This is really good for game balance, but not at all realistic.  But back to what you're discussing.

Gravity is obvious and straight forward.

I'm not entirely sure that Temp would be quite so modified by star type (though obvious White stars are hotter than Red Stars).  The Biosphere itself represents a min and max temp range for planets to possess liquid water (hence the alternative term, Liquid Water Zone or LWZ).  So any planet at the inner boundary of the LWZ should arguably have essentially the same average temp.  The real key to ave temp is the relative position with its star's LWZ, where planets on the inner boundary would be hotter, in the middle would be average, and at the outer boundary would be cooler.  But this is made a bit tricky because all LWZ's aren't of equal width in terms of LM's of orbit, i.e. Red Stars have a narrow LWZ while White Stars have a wide LWZ.  The simplest way to handle this would just be some sort of look up table of the various values.

Hydrosphere is also straight forward.  Not sure why ave. temp would need to be added into the HS.  It seems to me that just having an Ave Temp factor means that it's already being factored in.

I'm not entirely sure that an atmosphere factor is needed.  It seems that it is going to be a derivation of gravity, temp, and hydrosphere, and assumed to be of an O-N composition.

A couple of factors that you left out are axial tilt, which would affect the severity of the seasonal changes, and chirality, which, IIRC, is a complex thing defining the relative biochemical makeup of life on the planet.

I view this as putting the horse before the cart.

First point, we have no trouble imagining all of the sci-fi stuff in the game – why do we want to try and make this section of the rules “realistic” (especially when you consider that we have no real idea what planets of other solar systems are like). I wouldn’t even start considering the factors you’ve listed above, as they can be left undefined.

Next point, before you start looking at how you are going to determine the outcomes, determine what you want those outcomes to be. An example, before you discuss how many dice you’ll be rolling, and what type of die you’ll be using, determine what percentage outcomes you want in each category, and then see what system matches the outcome.

An example, there’s no point deciding to roll a single d10, if you have 20 different outcomes. Similarly, if you only have two equal outcomes, rolling a percentil die is overkill….

Honestly though, while this sort of increased realism is interesting to think about, I think that it adds a new level of complexity to the mix that some people wouldn't really appreciate.  It may be cool for the people who like greater sysgen details and players who like to write stories who might also appreciate greater detail for habitable planets.  But I'm not sure that the average player would appreciate the greater detail.

I’m really not in favour of overcomplications – K.I.S.S. is my favourite acronym.

What you’re describing is pooling moons on a planet by planet basis.  It’s also possible to pool moons across the entire star system by environment type (i.e. Desolate vs. Extreme).  Each has its own advantages.
Clearly the advantage of a D and E pool is greatly reduced record keeping.  An advantage of pooling by planet is that one can gain the advantage of a population’s innate sensors.  Given how close moons are to their planets compared to the system scale, it really doesn’t matter all that much what moon has the population, if you’ve only colonized a single moon.  It only becomes a bit of an issue when you start dropping to lower ranges (interception or tactical scale).




I understand what you mean by over-simplifying things.  The problem is that people colonize tons of moons, particularly in star systems with a habitable planet to be the source of colonists.  And lots of colonized moons means lots of individual records to be tracked.

I think that pooling it by both planet and type is the easiest. (I.e. planet VII has a pool of 104 desolate PU, and 95 extreme PU.)

Rather then considering dozens of planets/moons, and hundreds of asteroid populations, you reduce it down to ~ a dozen pools…..

[MWadwell]

As far as IU goes I treat is as EVM.  It can't be sold (or put differently none of my races will do so).  Personally I think it is just a silly way to avoid players keeping a warchest and encouraging you to spend every last MCr you make every turn.  But whatever.

I would like to keep at least some ability of selling IU – to help out on the odd turn here and there when needing to run deficiet turns (i.e. when starting a lot of tech item R&D, or when responding to a dastedly alien attack).

However, I agree that the idea of being able to sell of huge chuncks of your economy silly. My preference would be to limit the amount sold to something like 20% of the amount of IU or something like a 10% increase in GDP from the sale of IU.

As for industrial technologies that is hard since the simplistic economics of starfire don't lend themselves to much other than changing population levels on planets.  IU limits changes become a must have technology and that is what I want to avoid.  But yes you have to pay for them, they don't come free.  The represent an alternative to colonization of habitables, and so are for cases like a pocketed empire which would be able to remain competitive by investing in these technologies to enhance the systems they have.  For some of them I would also have a use cost, so per planet you employ them on you also pay.

Possiblities would be:  robotic mines: decrease Q requirements while increasing H requirements for PTU going to desolate and extreme environments.
Teleopted mines:  requires orbital habitat, allows mining operations of V worlds.  this is a complex sort of technology with a number of others required first.
Improved refineries:  increase the mineral wealth modifier by +x% for a fee.
Orbital Habitat:  a SS module that holds 1 PU worth of population.  I'm not sure how big one of these would be.  But it would be the stepping stone to exploiting V and possibly G/I worlds.

I like the idea of industrial technologies. Make them slightly worse then colonisation (to “encourage” exploration) but it gives a trapped empire some hope of being able to build their economy enough to be able to break of of the cul de sac…..

The problem with any of this is balance.  It is opening pandora's box big time.

Agreed.

An easier suggestion would be to limit the amount of IU possible by EL so start at 25% and increase 5% every 2 EL (at EL 3: 30%, at EL 5: 35% etc).  If you did this then you could add in a way to buy that increase early.  So an EL 4 race could buy +5% or just wait.  For me I would rather see IU as EVM in ISF than a bond fund as they are in SM2.

This idea has merit – although I would reduce the increase to ~3% per 2 EL (so that you are still getting benefits at TL10+).

[MWadwell]

Battles are fought by shooting till she pops, and the mathematics behind this sort of combat results in the destruction of the weaker force for little damage to the more powerful.

The problem with the “shoot till they pop”, is that players have time to see the effect of their weapons before firing the next one.

This is incredibly unrealistic – for example, with missiles that are not light speed, when firing 20 missile boats, are you really going to have time to see how one alvo goes before firing the next???


A way to fix this would be to go with the Battletech method, and declare ALL weapon targetting before firing.

Another similar method is to combine the B’Tech method with the pulsed movement method. I.e. you break your fleet down into 10 parts. You then fire the fleet (alternating between the players as per normal) one part at a time, with all targetting declared before rolling.

As for STMP, the fact it simplifies moving ships around is good, but it also tends to make you ignore WP location, distances between them etc.  I rarely if ever look at the map of the WPs, all I need to know is xblash-yblah-zblad is the chain and it is 2 STMPs from xblash to zblad.  But the RM won the battle they did because their path between WP was much shorter than the path from the Buer homeworld to the WP.  So they assaulted the WP a few days before the reinforcements arrived.  Something you only get by counting hexes.  For routine movments STMPs are good but when push comes to shove you will count hexes again.  Basically STMP is something that removes you the player from looking at your empire.  But it is hard to argue against it for routine ship movement.  I think it is a good and useful tool but one that has a subtle draw back.

I lump STMP into a lot of the changes in SM2 that while saving bookkeeping efforts have other unintended effects on gameplay.

The problem is, that players (and SM’s) continue to follow the StMP method when they shouldn’t.

I mean, if a few hours is going to make a difference, then the SM should ask players to determine the real ETA for their ships rather then rounding to the nearest week…..

[MWadwell]

As for “shoot til she pops”, you’re overlooking something important.  A lot of players design their ships with a beam weapon as the final system on the control sheet.  Are you going to say that opposing players are doing something wrong by finishing off enemy ships that are continuing to shoot at them?  One way to reduce “shoot til she pop” is for players to stop putting weapons as the final system, because until they do, they have every legitimate and logical reason to continue shooting.  And if even after players stop putting beam weapons as the final system enemies continue to shoot til they kill ships, you should use that to your advantage, since it means that they’re wasting shots against disarmed opponents rather than targeting active combatants.

It’s more than that.

The first 50% of a ships HTK is passives/non-essential systems. It’s not until you get past this, that you get to the “goodies” that allow a ship to fight effectively.

With this style of ship design, it is in the best interest of the opposing player to “shoot til she pops”.

As for ESF, part of me says that it’s up to the opposing player to come up with tactics to turn the ESF against itself.  That said, I can see how the use of Ultra-like firing arcs could help out somewhat.  But it seems like the only serious way that one could hurt the ESF tactic would be to have ships that are destroyed “blow up” and cause damage to all other ships in the same tac hex.  Of course, the counter to this is that tac hexes are huge (75,000 km across).  But if one is looking for a way to counter it, one also may have to accept a somewhat questionable idea.  (I’d probably suggest an explosion strength based on the number of engine systems, so that smaller ships had smaller explosions and larger ones has larger explosions.) Honestly, though, I wouldn’t use such a rule because ESF just doesn’t bother me all that much, because I believe that it’s up to opposing players to find their own counter tactics, not for the game designers to do it for them.

ESF is (to be honest) a good practical idea for an admiral to use (aside from game mechanics) – the problem is that the game mechanics have the hex too big.

An example, is that modern day ship formations can be up to 100 miles across. But if we replcated this in a game, where a sea hex is 200 miles in diameter, then the modern day ship formation is going to look exactly like the ESF of Starfire.


Having said that, I personally don’t like seeing the ESF formation (despite believing that it is the best one under the current rules) – as it tends to devolve the battle into a 1-D system (that is based on range).

The problem is, that developing a counter to ESF is difficult, both from a game mechanic rule (for example, Crucis’s idea about engine explosions can be used offensively against ships trapped behind MF’s surrounding a WP), as well as tactically (as to split your forces raises the potential for defeat in detail).

[crucis]

It’s more than that.

The first 50% of a ships HTK is passives/non-essential systems. It’s not until you get past this, that you get to the “goodies” that allow a ship to fight effectively.

With this style of ship design, it is in the best interest of the opposing player to “shoot til she pops”.

I won't disagree with this in the least Matt.  I suppose that the one point to be said regarding those who put a single Force beam (a good option due to fairly long range) on the end of the control sheet is that even if the other player thinks that he's done enough to totally cripple the target ship, leaving barely a handful of systems left undamaged, so long as that single weapon sits on the end of the sheet, it's still a combatant.

But yes, if the first 50% of the HTK's are passives and non-essentials, you have to do a lot of damage to even start degrading a target ship's offensive capabilities, thus enhancing the need to "shoot til she pops".

ESF is (to be honest) a good practical idea for an admiral to use (aside from game mechanics) – the problem is that the game mechanics have the hex too big.

An example, is that modern day ship formations can be up to 100 miles across. But if we replicated this in a game, where a sea hex is 200 miles in diameter, then the modern day ship formation is going to look exactly like the ESF of Starfire.

I'm not sure how the size of the hex matters here.  If the current tac hex (75,000 km) was reduced to 10,000 km or 1,000 km or less, couldn't players still use ESF?  Of course, the smaller the hex, the less space there is in the hex.  And I suppose other things start happening, like it becomes hard to turn in an ESF without bumping into each other's drive fields, or finding it hard to shoot out of the hex without friendly fire issues.  For that matter, if ships are too close together, a single nuke or AM warhead might start damaging multiple ships other than the target with collateral damage.

Having said that, I personally don’t like seeing the ESF formation (despite believing that it is the best one under the current rules) – as it tends to devolve the battle into a 1-D system (that is based on range).

The problem is, that developing a counter to ESF is difficult, both from a game mechanic rule (for example, Crucis’s idea about engine explosions can be used offensively against ships trapped behind MF’s surrounding a WP), as well as tactically (as to split your forces raises the potential for defeat in detail).

That's a good point about an offensive use regarding ships trapped by a minefield.  It would make it highly desirable to not send ships thru a WP until a path thru the minefield has been cleared.  Of course, it would also make it more difficult to support the minesweeping ships while they do their work as well.

As for the splitting one's forces point, yes it does risk defeat in detail.  But then again, that's what PaulM wants.  He wants to see ESF ended to force battles of maneuvering.  But one might argue that ESF is the tactic that one might use when they do NOT want to engage in a battle of maneuvering, perhaps because they think that their opponent has an advantage in that sort of battle, whether due to more maneuverable ships or he's simply better at fighting battles of maneuver.

Regardless, I don't really have any solid suggestions for rules mechanisms for hurting ESF.  Exploding ships is a suggestion, but a weak one, since it assumes a rather humongous explosion in the 75,000 km tac hex.  Another could be accidental friendly fire, and vice-versa enemy fire accidentally hitting the wrong target in an ESF.  But I could see how this could be rather complex, annoying, and require a fair amount of rules to manage.




I have a thought.  How much volume does a ship with its drive field up require?  Yes, it could vary with the size of the ship (or base or SS).  Then beyond, thinking of your wet navy formations, etc., how much spacing between ships is required for them to safely turn and have good fire lanes, etc.?  If we could produce a number for the latter question, it might be possible to determine the maximum number of ships that could be allowed in a 75,000KM diameter volume of space.  Of course,  that number might be rather large and make the effort moot.  But it is an interesting thought.

[crucis]

In the interest of simplicity, why not create them separately (to the point of giving them HI’s) – and then ignoring what type (i.e. T/ST) of planet they are….

An example method. All T-type races/planets roll HI on a d10. All ST-type races/planets roll HI on a D10+5. When it comes time to determine habitability, the type of planet is ignored (i.e. T or ST), and only the HI matters.

You can justify it by stating that the for T races finding a benign ST, that the planetary formations (i.e. high altitude plateau's) make ideal habitable zones; and for vice versa, the T planet is incredibly dense, and has a higher gravity then normal.

Matt, I gotta give you credit, this overlapping T/ST HI's is one idea I didn't think of.  I don't think that it can get me to my goal, but it is interesting. 

One question that immediately comes to mind with it is ... are the HI's wrapping around or not?  I'm tempted to think not only because with wraparound, your HI-1 and HI-15 would be one apart, and yet with overlapping, it seems that the clear intent is that the zone of HI's where there should be some habitability commonality is between HI's 6-10, rather than at the extremes.

Also, another problem is that to make this idea work, you'd probably need T and ST planets to be equally common.  Otherwise, you can't ignore planet type when doing the HD.  This is why I am strongly leaning towards merging T and ST ... the math of balancing the number of BHH worlds for both T and ST races is essentially impossible unless you do what Ultra did in making Type T planets exactly twice as common as ST planets.  This, combined with wraparound HD's and the way that Ultra determines BHH environments, creates the perfect 33%-33%-33% balance.... except that Ultra's process, while simple and elegant, is also very unrealistic.  Plus, your only choice is for a 33-33-33% BHH ratio.

The only other option I can see, which I mention in a previous post, is to do what SM#2 did and limit player races to Type T planets, and let ST race NPR's get the short end of the straw.  And I'm not particularly fond of that option.

But first decide what your desired outcome is (see below), before trying to determine how to determine the outcome.

I view this as putting the horse before the cart.

My reason for considering merging T and ST has nothing to do with merely dumping the ST type for the sake of raw simplicity and losing a few lines out of the sysgen rules.  No, I have a desired outcome in mind for the BHH ratio (BHH = Benign, Harsh, Hostile), and it's proven all but impossible to reach that outcome so long as T and ST remain separate types yet part of the "habitable planets" whole.  My goal is to try to reach a BHH ratio of 10%-20%-70%, or 10%-30%-60%.  I'm trying to reduce the number of Benigns relative to the total of all habitables.

I’m really not in favour of overcomplications – K.I.S.S. is my favourite acronym.

Really?  I'd have never guessed. 

I think that pooling it by both planet and type is the easiest. (I.e. planet VII has a pool of 104 desolate PU, and 95 extreme PU.)

Rather then considering dozens of planets/moons, and hundreds of asteroid populations, you reduce it down to ~ a dozen pools…..

I've pretty much (99%) settled on my moon and Asteroid Belt pooling rules.  I've actually written them...


L1.0x Moon Populations
The population capacity of all the moons of a given planet are pooled together, but not pooled with the planet’s own population. (In the case of a twin planet, the twin is considered a planet and not a part of the moon pool.)

L1.0x.1 All pooled moon populations have a PU/PTU conversion factor of 1.
L1.0x.2 A given planet’s pooled moons have a common REI rather than individual values for each moon.
L1.0x.3 The population of a moon pool fills up the innermost moon first before moving outward to the next closest moon and so on.


L1.0x Asteroid Belt Populations
Asteroid belt populations are placed on the belt’s planetoids. Planetoids are treated as moons of the same type for population purposes.  And like moons, planetoid populations are pooled together by asteroid belt.  That is, if there are two asteroid belts in a star system, there will be two asteroid belt planetoid pools.

L1.0x.1 All pooled planetoid populations have a PU/PTU conversion factor of 1.
L1.0x.2 A given asteroid belt’s pooled planetoids have a common REI rather than individual values for each planetoid.
L1.0x.3 The population of an asteroid belt pool is spread evenly amongst the planetoids in the pool.


A planetoid is a small moon-like body, also known as "dwarf planets" in current astronomical parlance.  Ceres would be a planetoid for the purposes of these rules. I'm intending that there will be either 1d10/2 FRU (1-5) or 1d10/3 FRU (1-4) planetoids per asteroid belt (leaning towards 1-4).  And as stated in the AB populations rule, planetoids are treated like moons for the purposes of the rule.  In reality (at least within our own asteroid belt), the largest planetoid, Ceres, is smaller than the smallest moon that Starfire considers a moon.  However, for game purposes, it's easiest to still treat planetoids as "moons" for population and pop caps purposes.

Lastly, I'm doing away with the asteroid belt bonus.  All possible income derived from an asteroid belt will come from its population.  The advantage here is that it will place asteroid belts in highly populated systems and those in uninhabited systems on a nearly even footing.  The only advantage that the populated system would have is the ease of colonizing the asteroid belt in the first place.


I don't want to get into a long involved discussion on IU's in this reply (that will come later)... However...

I had been considering doing what Ultra did with IU's and only allow them to be built on planets with populations of Small or larger.  HOWEVER...  I've also been considering some ways to increase AB (or all non-hab's) income without increasing population.  (I don't like the idea of having populations of hundreds of millions of people in asteroid belts.  It really rubs me the wrong way.)  It has occurred to me that if I allowed AB's (or all non-hab's) to build IU's, that would be a solid way to let them boost their income without increasing their populations.  I've also been considering requiring IU's built in non-hab environments cost a little more.  Maybe something like 35 MC for a Desolate IU and 40 MC for an Extreme IU.  Enough to knock their ROR's back a little bit.


NOTE:  There will be more related content on pop caps and IU's on the following replies... 

[crucis]

I would like to keep at least some ability of selling IU – to help out on the odd turn here and there when needing to run deficiet turns (i.e. when starting a lot of tech item R&D, or when responding to a dastedly alien attack).

However, I agree that the idea of being able to sell of huge chunks of your economy silly. My preference would be to limit the amount sold to something like 20% of the amount of IU or something like a 10% increase in GDP from the sale of IU.

Matt, I have a strong philosophical disagreement on the topic of selling IU's.  Cralis have had some (very civil) knockdown drag outs on the topic.  I am strongly against the selling of IU's.  I feel that IU's are like the "industrial EVM's" from ISF ... permanent.  I see them as permanent heavy industrialization that can never be sold.  Oh, ownership might change, but the factories still remain ... as IU's contributing to the economy.


To me, what you're describing is more like some sort of financial instrument, like a bond.  In theory, I have no problem creating "bonds".  But it would have be understood that it's adding a bit more income into the game, as well as a few more lines of rules.  The simplest way to do bonds might be to let them function like SM#2 IU's (call them BU's for Bond Units for the moment).  Buy a BU for something like 30 MC or so.  Get 1 MC of income for every BU.  Only allow them to be sold at face value on growth months (i.e. every 10th turn).  But also allow them to be sold in non-growth months at a 50% penalty, or only 15 MC per BU sold.  The last two sentences would simulate the requirement for a bond reaching maturity before redeeming it for full value, or taking a penalty for early redemption.  

As for how many bonds could be purchased, I'm thinking that the number should be relatively low (to prevent creating too much new income in parallel with IU's).  Perhaps no more than 20% of a planet's local GPV (not counting bond income).  And only planets with sizable populations, probably Medium or above, would have financial markets which would allow the sale of bonds to local governments.  It could probably be even the sum of all Imperial GPV's, not including BU-derived incomes, which complicates the calculation unfortunately.  (But the gov't own bond derived income shouldn't be turned around and used to increase its own bond buying capacity.)

I like the idea of industrial technologies. Make them slightly worse then colonisation (to “encourage” exploration) but it gives a trapped empire some hope of being able to build their economy enough to be able to break of of the cul de sac…..

My general idea for "Economic Technologies" is that they actually don't give you any extra money, per se.  Rather they increase your capacity to increase income.  Let me explain.  (I prefer Economic Tech rather than Industrial Tech, because I have one portion of Eco Tech relating to IU's, i.e. "Industrial Tech".)

If an EconTech increases a world's mineral value, you've basically gotten extra money for almost nothing, except for the possible cost of developing that tech.  But if you increase the IU cap on a world, you don't get any income from that until you actually build the additional IU's!  Or if an EconTech allows extreme moons to increase their population cap from Outpost to Colony, you'd still have to pay the cost to move in the additional colonists.  This is what PaulM calls a "use fee" in a previous post, and I like it.  No getting something for nothing.

Note in reply #175 from October 30, 2012, 10:11:48 PM, I've listed out some potential Economic Tech ideas.  I like the idea that you have to pay to develop them, like other tech.  And I like the idea of "use fees" rather than getting the benefit without paying for it when you want to "use" it.  (And it's possible that some of my ideas in reply #175 haven't kept up with my preference for use fees.)

This idea has merit – although I would reduce the increase to ~3% per 2 EL (so that you are still getting benefits at TL10+).

With this idea of IU's limits as an Economic Tech (in the case of IU's, it's "Industrial Tech"), I wouldn't assume that the existing 50% cap on IU's would hold true.  I could see the starting cap on IU's being relatively low, perhaps 10-20%.  But then with regular increases every 1-2 TL's, allowing it to exceed 50%, perhaps even to as much as 100% of PU at its peak.




You want to hear an off the wall idea, here's one...  Rather than have a TLF as SM#2 uses (or the EL Growth that Ultra uses), just increase the IU cap by 10% for every TL.  (I.e. The IU cap for a TL 1 race would be 10% PU, for a TL5 race it'd be 50% of PU, and so on.)  The idea here is that economically when your EL/TL increased, you wouldn't see an increase in income ... what you'd have is the OPPORTUNITY to increase your income by investing in more IU's.  Yes, to get the economic benefit of an increased EL?TL you'd have to pay money, but don't companies have to pay money to buy more advanced equipment and factories when technology improves?

Wow... it would take a while to absorb the new allowed IU's into the economy.  If you had a population of 1000 PU, it'd be allowed 10% more IU's when the EL/TL increased.  That'd be 100 IU, at a cost of 3,000 MC, or 3 full turns of GPU (not counting any mineral wealth, or the income from existing IU's).  Or at a more reasonable pace, you could do buy 10 IU's per month for 10 months at a cost of 300 MC per month or 30% of the planet's income, not counting other factors.

Now it does occur to me that higher tech worlds would have the ability to "re-industrialize" (i.e. buy the new allowed IU's) faster than lower tech worlds, simply because they'd have more income from all the IU's from earlier EL/TL's.  OTOH, there'd be no difference between rich and poor races of the same TL, since the basic cost of adding 10% more IU's is going to be the same.  That is, a race with only 1,000 PU's is going to add 100 new IU's at a cost of 3,000 MC, while a race with 10,000 PU's is going to add 1,000 IU's at a cost of 30,000 MC.  Same percentage of income, same time requirements.  That is, 30% of your income would buy you all the new IU's in 10 turns, if that's how you chose to do it.

And it occurs to me that given the considerable cost of "re-industrialization", it'd be best if the cost of the EL/TL research went way down, perhaps to something like a nominal 1% of imperial income.  This idea could be rather challenging for an empire at war.  The nominal research fee is not a big deal, but once the EL/TL increased, you;d have to choose between paying for more ships, etc. and re-industrialization to increase your income, which at the current cost of 30 MC per IU, doesn't really pay off for 30 turns (meaning that you might be better off not re-industrializing until the war was over).

Hmmm.... interesting idea, not sure it's worth the trouble.  I suspect that the bulk of rules required to support this idea would actually be not that great.  But actually using this idea in practice may seem like a lot of work compared to getting your new TL enhanced income the instant your TL increased.  OTOH, it may seem somewhat realistic insofar as you;d probably see a more gradual increase of income due to technological advance.  And as a player, you'd have a choice where you wanted to increase the industrialization of your empire, if you really didn't want to invest in certain locations.

Anyways, just a raw and wild idea...



EDIT:  BTW, it's occurred to me that this idea has a couple of underlying advantages.

1. In the TLF model, if you multiply IU income by TLF, it causes IU incomes to increase as TL increases. (It doesn't do this in Ultra, of course.) In this wild idea, IU incomes remain steady at 1 MC per IU regardless of TL.

2. Also in the TLF model, the per-PU return on colonization increases as TL increases. In this wild idea, it remains constant at 1 MC per PU, regardless of TL.


Just more food for thought...

[MWadwell]

Matt, I have a strong philosophical disagreement on the topic of selling IU's.  Cralis have had some (very civil) knockdown drag outs on the topic.  I am strongly against the selling of IU's.  I feel that IU's are like the "industrial EVM's" from ISF ... permanent.  I see them as permanent heavy industrialization that can never be sold.  Oh, ownership might change, but the factories still remain ... as IU's contributing to the economy.

Interesting. I have a different idea as to what IU represents…..

The base income an imperium receives is taxation. To me, IU represent direct ownership of a company (or collection of companies), and the income from the IU represents company profit/dividends.

You see, that is how some government investment here in Australia work. Whilst a majority of the governments income is from taxation, the government also receives dividends/profits from companies that it owns (such as telecom, water, electricity generation and supply, railways, tollways, waste treament plants, etc.)


And so, to compare the Australian model to Starfire, whilst it is possible to sell these government owned companies (i.e. IU), there is a limit on how much can be sold per turn (as there is a limited number of buyers that can afford to make such large purchases).

To me, what you're describing is more like some sort of financial instrument, like a bond.  In theory, I have no problem creating "bonds".  But it would have be understood that it's adding a bit more income into the game, as well as a few more lines of rules.  The simplest way to do bonds might be to let them function like SM#2 IU's (call them BU's for Bond Units for the moment).  Buy a BU for something like 30 MC or so.  Get 1 MC of income for every BU.  Only allow them to be sold at face value on growth months (i.e. every 10th turn).  But also allow them to be sold in non-growth months at a 50% penalty, or only 15 MC per BU sold.  The last two sentences would simulate the requirement for a bond reaching maturity before redeeming it for full value, or taking a penalty for early redemption. 

As for how many bonds could be purchased, I'm thinking that the number should be relatively low (to prevent creating too much new income in parallel with IU's).  Perhaps no more than 20% of a planet's local GPV (not counting bond income).  And only planets with sizable populations, probably Medium or above, would have financial markets which would allow the sale of bonds to local governments.  It could probably be even the sum of all Imperial GPV's, not including BU-derived incomes, which complicates the calculation unfortunately.  (But the gov't own bond derived income shouldn't be turned around and used to increase its own bond buying capacity.)

I’m not in favour of “bonds” – as bear in mind that the cost of a single IU is small compared to a imperiums economy, for a planet it is relatively large.

And so the idea that companies/people are going to be rich enough to sell multiple bonds to the government a bit hard to believe…..

My general idea for "Economic Technologies" is that they actually don't give you any extra money, per se.  Rather they increase your capacity to increase income.  Let me explain.  (I prefer Economic Tech rather than Industrial Tech, because I have one portion of Eco Tech relating to IU's, i.e. "Industrial Tech".)

I like this idea. In fact, the only problem with it is that I would like to see the bonus per TL reduced, so that it can be extended over more TL’s (i.e. the bonus continues up to TL 10+ - instead of finishing at TL5).

You want to hear an off the wall idea, here's one...  Rather than have a TLF as SM#2 uses (or the EL Growth that Ultra uses), just increase the IU cap by 10% for every TL.  (I.e. The IU cap for a TL 1 race would be 10% PU, for a TL5 race it'd be 50% of PU, and so on.)  The idea here is that economically when your EL/TL increased, you wouldn't see an increase in income ... what you'd have is the OPPORTUNITY to increase your income by investing in more IU's.  Yes, to get the economic benefit of an increased EL?TL you'd have to pay money, but don't companies have to pay money to buy more advanced equipment and factories when technology improves?

True. Another option.

Anyways, just a raw and wild idea...

Which has merit!

[crucis]

I like this idea. In fact, the only problem with it is that I would like to see the bonus per TL reduced, so that it can be extended over more TL’s (i.e. the bonus continues up to TL 10+ - instead of finishing at TL5).

Yes, but don't assume that just because we might start with a lowish percentage for a IU cap that that cap must necessarily end at only 50%.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Ok, enough toying with ideas... but it sure would make a gamechanger when that raid through the closed wp would not only hit 150 PU of hostile setlement (yawn), but also your only source of forcebeamium crystals... *panic*

Strategic Resources are a great idea that I don't think will work at all outside a computer context. Civ5 and Distant Worlds are both good examples of the mechanics and maneuvers they can bring to a game.   If you cant access the resources you need to compete, you might very well pull an Empire of Japan and go to war to get them.  But keeping track of and generating said resources would be annoying, and more critically these resources can't start a war unless more than one person knows where they are.  Soooo....

[Paul M]

With a PnP game you don't track number of minerals as is done in Aurora you have to do something based on either "have them" or "have them not" or else you base it on numbers.  Or do something else such as bonuses.

Using "forcebeamium" as a example:

The binary approach:
To build and use force beams you need access to a planet with "forcebeamium" when you don't have that you can neither build nor use them.

The graduated approach:
Resource: Forcebeamium Locations:  X-X-X-X (reads chart) can build and use forcebeams, check before battle per ship roll d10 on a 1 or 2 that many force beams are not operational due to insufficient amounts of the necessary critical resource.

Or whatever you like to do.  It certainly makes some systems important.  You can also do things like give bonuses.  For example with 4 locations with Forcebeamium means on rolls of 1 add an extra point of damage to the hit.

Or mix and match to taste, or do something completely different and wild and crazy.  It gives possibilities for trade, for war, for negotiations.  Tracking how many tons of "Forcebeamium" ...uhm no not really a good idea. 

[Paul M]

The ESF comes about in any game that treats a cruiser as a frigate with more of the same weapons.  I first encountered it in Starfleet Battles.  It is a way to min-max the system and it works.  There is no argument against it since it is the optimal solution.  It maximizes your firepower for no cost to you the player.

You can get rid of it not when you change hex sizes but when you change the weapons so that a force beam on a frigate isn't the same as a force beam on a battleship.  Nothing else will remove it outside of some sort of damage from exploding ships (probably the rest of the ships should take penalties to fire since their sensors are probably a bit overloaded by the ships exploding around them).

"shoot til she pops" just means that you focus fire on a single ship and keep swapping targets as they blow up.  This is contrary to actual naval practice where you engage every target possible and only double up when you outnumber the enemy.  This is because un-engaged ships are significantly more effective then ones under fire.  "shoot til she pops" also means ships either live or die and generally at most only one ship will be damaged.  This renders moot most of the damage control/damage repair and other rules that are in starfire since they never get needed.  It also means you don't need a fleet train or a lot of logistic support since you have at most 1 damaged ship.  One thing I tended to do in the München campaign when playing an NPR that determined they were to loose was switch to firing on multiple targets to inflict any sort of damage since damaged ships are harder to deal with then destroyed ones.  Another time the 25 Rc equiped shipss engaged the enemy muliple ships at a time since those damaged ships were less combat effective and I wasted less firepower in overkills even if the targeted vessels took two rounds to kill...so 25 kills ever 2 rounds rather than 12 kills a round.  I frankly think that designating fire should be done before shootig starts since it is supposedly semi-simultaneous...and missiles are certainly in flight for a good part of the 30s turn.

A lot of this is personal taste to be sure.  But if I want to fight two space control ships I would rather have a single space control ship not 50 frigates that just equals the fire power of one.  I much prefer a system more like Leviathan where the smaller ships mounted lesser weapons then the larger not just fewer of the same weapon.  A friend of mine did a bit of a rework to Leviathan to make even more interesting adding in penetration so making the choice of a lot of smaller weapons or a smaller number of more powerful weapons interesting in itself leading to different design options.

Starfire simply suffers from this as does SFB and Battletech to name other systems I am familier with but as a design choice it is the most common one.  Starfire's main strength is that you can play out fleet engagement of easily up to 30-50 ships a side but when they come down to two counters on the map (or 4 if you split into missile and beam armed components) then you end up with a 1D game where you are doing either: holding range, increasing range, or decreasing range.  No need for a map.  When you basically can lump all ships into a supper ship and when you know that a ship is either going to live or die then you get rather than the ships "Stilleto", "Bowie", "Bayonet" ... "stilleto 001", "stilleto 002", "stilleto 003" it is hard to generate much enthusasum for naming something which is just going to get obliterated in a meat grinder.

To me starfire has a lot of rules that indicate the people creating it thought there shold be more than this to the games combat system.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Yeah, a good point of modifiers. That is pretty much how it works in Distant Worlds and sort of how it works in Civ5.   An income-percentage based research system might make a strategic resource which reduces those costs or times extremely valuable. You could have a durable hull material that reduces maintenance costs. etc.  But it's still a problem that these things only engender conflict if multiple people know their locations.

The ESF comes about in any game that treats a cruiser as a frigate with more of the same weapons.

Nooo, I don't think that's right.  Bigger guns wouldn't do a thing to change ESF.  Formations are all about concentration of power, and ESF is the ultimate concentration of power, esp. when you have an advantage.  The only things that break up ESF in any game are unit footprints, terrain, and weapons of differing ranges (once the fight is joined).  The last can be minmaxed and usually is.   Terrain is impractical in space p much. And the only way for unit footprints-in-space to mean anything that I can see are artificial penalties for grouping up.