Anybody Still Have the UMT?

[crucis]

By unplayable I mean for the GM.  Tracking 6 player empires and something like 20 NPRs over 600 starsystems explored is not something you can do without starfire assistant or the equivalent to that program.  Plus starfire assistant was purpose built over several years for just that task.  As far as game aides go I have never seen a better one.  If Kurt chimes in on this he will give you, I would bet money, the same view.  You can't play a galaxy with 1000+ systems with pen and paper.  I took several hours per turn at the end of the last game.  I have played with pen and paper and after 10 systems it starts to be a nightmare, the same is true of excel spreadsheets (at 20 or so it is just too much of a pain), you need a database program, a real one.

If NPR's are such a great bugaboo for the SM in a multi-player game, then the simplification is simple .... Stop using NPR's!!!  

The economy in starfire is such that any economic investment even the worst possible you can make will give you a net positive return.

Unless there's a non-economic benefit to the economic investment (such as building warships), I can't see any player willingly investing in an economic investment that has a negative return.  If you include such a bad investment in the game, no one will use it.  Period.  It will just be a waste of time, effort, and space in the rules.  About the closest you could possibly come is to have an investment with a random return, since some players may willingly invest in something that could have a big return, but also risks big losses.  Frankly, it seems like a pain in the butt to me.  And if such a random investment were included, and were ignored by players, once again, it would be a waste of time and effort and space.

 The only issue is if you could have gotten a better return by a different use of the money.  At the end of the day this means that whatever you do with your money that is allocated for economic expansion the next turn you will have more money available.  4th edition and any further ones increased the cost of things and decreased the money from income but they did not change that basic formula.  The net result is that your money increases steadily from turn to turn, the economy is a standard compound interest growth formula, the only thing that changes from empire to empire is what the rate of interest is.  The only drain on your economy is your war machine, and in our local games I think every possible way to do go about the economy got stress tested.  Even with increased costs, decreased rate of population growth etc money and hence fleet sizes explode.  In 4th edition the changes made only pushed the date at which your economy hits the über state till a higher turn number.  There needs to be a greater complexity to the basic economics that step away from a simple compound interest growth formula to solve the problem on a fundamental level.

Sorry.  Not interested in making the game more complex.  It's too complex already.

The compound interest economy is why PPs or some sort of other limit on fleet size is required.  Maintenance doesn't work with the simplified economics of starfire.  At least not for an old empire...a new NPR can be looped due to the high cost of ships...a single system NPR can't compete with a 100 system player empire no matter what sort of system you are talking about.  Also with a computer program tracking PP is no more of an issue than tracking anything else and it puts a hard limit on the player fleet.

I'm thoroughly uninterested is designing Cosmic to require beyond all doubt computer support.  I would rather simplify the game so that it was more playable as a P&P game.  I'm sorry, Paul, but any mention of "with computer support, you can do ..." is an automatic loser for me.  That is absolutely 180* out of phase with the direction that I intend to take Cosmic.

Exploration luck defines Starfire.  Marvin never grasped this.  

I'm not exactly sure that I agree with you here.  I think that Marvin's primary concern in this regard has been to try to mitigate exploration luck issues to try to balance those luck issues out in multi-player campaigns.

However, as I have stated previously, I tend to believe that reducing the numbers of T/ST's would help to decrease economic explosivity, since the central core of that explosivity is the colonization of numerous T/ST worlds.  But reducing T/ST's increases the exploration luck factor in finding them.  Having lots of T/ST's to find certainly reduces the luck factor in finding them, but it also makes the economic problems worse.

Of course, Marvin's usual suggestion has been to play in smaller game galaxies so that small galaxy size automatically limits #'s of T/ST's and forcing players to confront each other more quickly.  And that may be fine, if your players want to confront each other fairly quickly.  But some people like a much larger game galaxy.

It doesn't matter if you make the first 3 systems equivalent between players (as is done in 4th) eventually someone finds a useless system while someone else finds a friendly NPR or even an easily trounced unfriendly one (depending on the player...GFFP...) or a world which can be easily colonized.  At this point go back to the rich get richer faster and faster and the game balance vanishes.  Or not...there may be other factors but ultimately survey luck is hard to mitigate in general since luck sooner is worth more than luck later...even better luck later may not make up the difference.

There are some things that are almost never mentioned that could be used to mitigate exploration luck.  Change the basic way that galaxies are constructed.  Currently, it's all random.  You enter a new system (assuming that it's not one someone else already explored), you create it from scratch.  It could be anything.  Totally random, depending on the die rolls (or the pseudo-die rolls within a sysgen program).  In one sense, there's a certain beauty to this randomness... a joy of exploration and an air of mystery.  OTOH, the randomness can be a major contributor to exploration luck "unfairness", which in a solo game is not a real issue, but in a highly competitive game can completely unbalance things, particularly early in the game.

One potential way that one might mitigate this type of randomness could be to use "sector templates".  (Not my idea, though I find it interesting...)  These sector templates would essentially be small maps of about 20 or so star systems and their interconnecting warp lines, as well as the warp lines off-map and out of the sector. The star systems would be predefined to some degree (totally pre-generated, or perhaps only defining the basic system type and star types). In addition, this sector map process would work well with pre-generated star system templates which could be linked to the sector's star systems.  The point where the mitigation of randomness begins to matter with sector maps is that the overall content of those sectors could be constructed to be more "fair" and less random.  The star system templates themselves need not be fully generated...  some details could be left out to be generated when the system is surveyed ... items like # of moons, mineral wealth values, habitability indexes.   Perhap WP locations and types.   Of course, trying to make a useful number of such sector templates that were all reasonably well balanced would probably be a bit time consuming, since you really couldn't just do it randomly.  Also, even if the number of sector templates were fairly high, it might remove the air of mystery in the exploration process.

As far as system scale maneuver goes.  What I meant is that there is a lot more to that level of play than is apparent on first glance.  It takes a lot of time for drones carrying messages to move on that scale.  So two fleets first have to find each other...then communicate that finding then attempt to "charge."  It changes the game a lot when you actually do all that rather than just saying that both fleets are in the same system and hence combat starts.  It makes for a much richer game experience.

Yes, I understood that.  But still, if the players involved are only looking to butt heads ASAP and aren't interested in this level of play, interesting though it may be to other people, one can hardly force them do it.

[Paul M]

Starfire is complex compared to what?  I started playing Avalon Hill wargames at 11 or 12 years of age.  To me Starfire is only complex because David Weber writes entertaining rules but is not very good at writing rules that make it clear how things work.  Presser beams and the words "for all intents and purposes a reverse polarity tractor beam" spring instantly to mind.  The fact that the game resolves itself, without direct player actions to stop this, into two empire state formations shooting on one ship at a time means the tactical depth of the game can be said to be zero.  Fun factor of that sort of battle is zilch for me and for the people I played with so we never did this, but the game has nothing in it to prevent it.  In all fairness neither does starfleet battles or a lot of other games.  Attack Vector: Tactical does at least try to prevent this, but is an overall more complex game.

The economic system in Starfire is the biggest single stumbling block to improving the empire building part of the game.  It is brain dead simplistic.  It is compound interest and nothing more.  And tieing in fleet size to something that can't do anything but spiral out of control results in nothing more than both the economy and fleet size doing the same thing.

The fix is to make the economy more complex.  Add in resources such as Steve has done with Aurora.  Make putting down a colony being a costly procedure which gives you a strategic rather than instant direct monetary benefit, again like what is done in aurora.  In 3rd putting down a colony meant reducing the income of the planet you were drawing the population from.  The essentially free PU and IFN of 3rdR made it easy to manage colonization, but contribute in the end to an unmanageable empire.  Simplistic is all that starfire ended up being.  Simplistic is not simple.  Simplistic leads to min-max optimizations that contribute to gamey "strategies" that are fun destroying for those of us who aren't into that sort of thing.

You can't play a game of Imperial Starfire without computer support.  I played an NPR for a 4th edition beta game and I wrote a set of Excel spreadsheets to track costs, maintenance, income, systems, fleets, ship status etc  That was a lot of work, and when my empire got to around 10 systems I saw the limitations of that.  The spreadsheets were getting huge.  Yes I could do this with PnP but I would make mistakes and lots of them, recalculation alone would be a nightmare.  And it would be very hard for a SM to check this, heck it would be nearly impossible for me to find an error.  So an error could slide by for a long time.  The empire management grows over time to a massive bookkeeping nightmare.  Starfire assistant did not start out the way it became...it became what it is because Steve kept finding it necessary to add things, and well the rest of us chimed in with our requests and he very graciously added those in.  

Why not look into something like Victory by Any Means or Squadron Strike for examples of how you can make a simple economic model that isn't simplistic (and I've only read rather than played them so they may have their own issues).  Marvin changed 4th edition to make it into something he enjoys, and I would say that he succeeded in that goal.  More power to him, but most of the changes made to simplify the game (starting in AD, and continuing on into SM2, 3rdR, and 4th) had a lot of consequences that, as far as I am concerned, contribute to making the game neither fun nor playable if you don't play the game the way Marvin does.  A small galaxy leads to a short game plus shoving back the turn when the death spiral starts by reducing incomes and increasing ship costs means that the game will be over before the issue becomes critical...but this isn't "solving the problem."

The only way to remove exploration luck is for the SM to generate the galaxy first in its entirety.  Then he or she can assign players to systems with an eye to balance, not to mention recreate systems if necessary.

To bad I can't post up one of the last databases saves from one of our games so you could see what I am talking about.  Even trying to draw a map of my empire by hand would be hard.  It has been years since I looked at any of this but I had at least 3 nodal fleets, 20-ish patrol forces, 3 exploration fleets, several major fleet bases, 2 fleets assigned to a limited war I was carrying out, 2 NPRs I was supporting via treaties, at least 2 major hostile NPRs (one that was the tyranids, and the other was at the über tech levels who was at war with one of those NPRs I was supporting...they were the last remnants of their race not conquered), warp point defenses here and there (though the warp point nexus made that harder to do), I was trying to streamline the number of ship classes I had but I still had over 15 different classes of ships if that isn't considerably less than I had taking into account my non-combat ships, bases, support vessels etc.  Trying to keep track of that by hand?  Not to mention the SMs (2 of them) who were tracking 5 player empires, 2 big bad SM NPRs (the tyranids...kind of bug like and a AI race), 1 small bad NPR (small but extremely high tech), and god only knows how many "standard" non-SM-specifically created NPRs (joy of joys for me I had 2 of 3 of those SM-created pains to deal with).  Since for a long time I had the good luck to avoid a war I played a lot of NPRs in the battles...NPR on NPR...PR on NPR...NPR+PR on PR...PR on NPR+PR...SMPR on NPR...  I played ships designed in ways that made me laugh or cry or just stare in shock at the ship display.  All of this was possible for one reason: starfire assistant.

4th Edition did not even get a try with our group for the simple reason there was no starfire assistant for it.

[Paul M]

Ralph,
What you say is something done in Moo3 and has been copied in a number of other 4X games.  The Heavy Foot of Government is the term used in Moo3.

I don't have a solution off the top of my head to fix the issue...beyond moving away from a game based entirely on money and from compound interest economic growth.  Those two synergize in a bad way and so far as I can tell there is nothing you can do to other issues (number of T planets, relative worth of T planets, size of galaxy, etc) that really solves the problem.  They form a feedback loop that you can't get out of.  You can get off the train (have a short game) but the grundsätzlich probleme (fundamental issue) is built into the game system.

So the obvious solution is to break the loop...how to do that will vary from person to person.  I know the "heavy foot of government" approach generates wailing and gnashing of teeth from the 4X computer gamer crowd.  They hate bureaucratic limitations on them conquering the galaxy.  PPs limited fleet size and made you prefer to build bigger ships...but apparently tracking them is such a pain that people are willing to put up with fleets of 300+ CTs or a few hundred BBs.

I like what Steve has done, colonies in Aurora are generally speaking money sinks, it takes a long time to get a colony worth anything but they are obviously strategically critical.   But aurora is like molasses in january compared to an Imperial Starfire game (it is slow to play).  Starfire has a 12:1 economic to military time warp.  In SM2/3rdR basically every "turn" is a year for economic purposes while for military purposes they are a month.  We tried lots of things in our local game...reduced NPR chance, reduced growth rate, lowered ship construction rates, increased costs...all of these; however, are treating the symptoms not the real issue.  Also since we were using Starfire assistant we were somewhat limited in what we could change "home rules wise" since Steve had to consent to add it to the program, but he did a great job adding in options.

[miketr]

OH...  One thing different that our group does with the rules is the use of Graded Leaders.  We use this in place of crew grade.  They represent admirals and governors.  I posted the details on the old starfire list some time ago and it was called, "unbalanced" because of the Banker Skill.  Where a banker could give a 5% economic bonus per skill level to a planet.  People in my group like it as it adds a lot of flavor to the game and leaders mean something especially when they get killed.

Michael

[crucis]

The economic system in Starfire is the biggest single stumbling block to improving the empire building part of the game.  It is brain dead simplistic.  It is compound interest and nothing more.  And tieing in fleet size to something that can't do anything but spiral out of control results in nothing more than both the economy and fleet size doing the same thing.

The fix is to make the economy more complex. (snippage)

Not IMO.  Making the economics more complex is a direction that I will NOT take.

In 3rd (ISF) putting down a colony meant reducing the income of the planet you were drawing the population from. The essentially free PU and IFN of 3rdR (SM#2) made it easy to manage colonization, but contribute in the end to an unmanageable empire.

Paul, the thing here is that SM#2 colonization rules were designed to enhance colonization as a gameplay strategy, because it was the opinion of the powers-that-be in SDS at the time that colonization was, for the most part, economically useless in ISF.  SM#2 (and forward into 4e) colonization was intended to provide stay-at-homes (whether intentional or because they were boxed in by a lack of WP's) with a way to enhance their economies while waiting for a time when they may choose (or be able) to break out of their stay-at-home status.  

SM#2-style colonization was also intended to be an alternative strategy to the NPR-centric strategy that was the core of ISF expansion.  Without aggressive colonization rules, ISF expansion tends to deal with finding friendly NPRs and getting treaties with those NPR's, or conquering the hostile NPR's.  However, NPR's by their very nature, tend to be one of the most random factors in exploration, since almost everything relating to NPR's is determined by die rolls as opposed to colonization, which is a process managed by player decisions without any randomness beyond the finding of the T/ST's.

So, the problem is that if you try to make colonization less aggressive, you also reduce its ability to act as an alternate strategy to NPR-centric economic expansion, and you reduce the ability of stay-at-homes (particularly those who are stay-at-homes against their will) to expand their economies.

OTOH ... I do agree that aggressive colonization rules to also contribute to the long term problem...  It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing.

You can't play a game of Imperial Starfire without computer support.  I played an NPR for a 4th edition beta game and I wrote a set of Excel spreadsheets to track costs, maintenance, income, systems, fleets, ship status etc  That was a lot of work, and when my empire got to around 10 systems I saw the limitations of that.  The spreadsheets were getting huge.  Yes I could do this with PnP but I would make mistakes and lots of them, recalculation alone would be a nightmare.  And it would be very hard for a SM to check this, heck it would be nearly impossible for me to find an error.  So an error could slide by for a long time.  The empire management grows over time to a massive bookkeeping nightmare.  Starfire assistant did not start out the way it became...it became what it is because Steve kept finding it necessary to add things, and well the rest of us chimed in with our requests and he very graciously added those in.  

I most certainly CAN and HAVE played ISF without heavy computer support (beyond a sysgen utility and word processor for printing out ship control sheets prior to battles).  Furthermore, I will NOT write a set of rules with the foreknowledge that it is little more than a design spec for a computer game.

Marvin changed 4th edition to make it into something he enjoys, and I would say that he succeeded in that goal.  

Actually, I'd agree.  But furthermore, I'd say that any game designer (and particularly ones who are essentially volunteers) are going to design games to be something that they enjoy.  This isn't exactly a revelation.  

More power to him, but most of the changes made to simplify the game (starting in AD, and continuing on into SM2, 3rdR, and 4th) had a lot of consequences that, as far as I am concerned, contribute to making the game neither fun nor playable if you don't play the game the way Marvin does.  A small galaxy leads to a short game plus shoving back the turn when the death spiral starts by reducing incomes and increasing ship costs means that the game will be over before the issue becomes critical...but this isn't "solving the problem."

I agree with this as well ... to a degree.  It's always possible that changes to any rule(r) can cause unforeseen consequences, some of which may not come out in playtesting.  And I agree that if one doesn't play the game in the same way as the designer (in this case, Marvin) apparently does, and changes to the game seem directed towards that style of play, the game may indeed seem less fun.

OTOH, I have no problem conceptually with attempting to push out the time at which the game becomes (supposedly) unplayable.  The further you push it out, the less likely it is that anyone will ever get to that point.

The only way to remove exploration luck is for the SM to generate the galaxy first in its entirety.  Then he or she can assign players to systems with an eye to balance, not to mention recreate systems if necessary.

I agree that it's pretty much impossible to remove exploration luck entirely.  Even with a theoretically perfectly balanced pre-genned game galaxy, another part of exploration luck is simply the order in which a player chooses to explore which WP's.

That said, I don't think that Marvin ever actually thought that he was trying to remove exploration luck "entirely".  I'd say that he was only trying to mitigate its effects.  However, I tend to believe that reducing exploration luck (particularly as it pertains to finding T/ST's) can actually make the game's economic problems worse.  More, easier to find T/ST's mean that long term you will have more, highly populated, high economic output worlds in a shorter time frame.

[crucis]

I don't have a solution off the top of my head to fix the issue...beyond moving away from a game based entirely on money and from compound interest economic growth.  Those two synergize in a bad way and so far as I can tell there is nothing you can do to other issues (number of T planets, relative worth of T planets, size of galaxy, etc) that really solves the problem.  

I disagree that you cannot do anything about the number of T/ST planets.  One absolutely could do something about the numbers of T/ST planets in the game in a number of different ways.  Here are two of the most obvious.

A.  Star Types: One could change the balance of star types to match the proportion of star types that appears to be the case in reality, wherein Class M stars (Red Dwarf and most Red type stars) represent about 75% of all main-sequence stars (IIRC).  If one looks at White, Yellow, and Orange (Class F, G, and K) Stars as the primary "habitable" star types, those only represent about 23% of "habitable" star types, but in ISF and 4e, those types represent 61% of the core "habitable" star types... nearly 3 times greater than is the case in reality.

B. Planetary Masses: One could change the balance on the planetary mass table.  In ISF and 4e, 75% of planets in the Biosphere have a mass of 2 or 3 and are Type T or ST.  Clearly, if one wanted fewer T/ST's, one could reduce this percentage.


Of course, changing the numbers of T/ST's would have a number of consequences for good or ill that may or may not be foreseen, even with playtesting.

  PPs limited fleet size and made you prefer to build bigger ships...but apparently tracking them is such a pain that people are willing to put up with fleets of 300+ CTs or a few hundred BBs.

Exactly correct.

I like what Steve has done, colonies in Aurora are generally speaking money sinks, it takes a long time to get a colony worth anything but they are obviously strategically critical.   But aurora is like molasses in january compared to an Imperial Starfire game (it is slow to play).  Starfire has a 12:1 economic to military time warp.  In SM2/3rdR basically every "turn" is a year for economic purposes while for military purposes they are a month.  

And frankly, I think that this time compression is a good thing, otherwise the game would be far, far too slow to be interesting.

We tried lots of things in our local game...reduced NPR chance, reduced growth rate, lowered ship construction rates, increased costs...all of these; however, are treating the symptoms not the real issue.  Also since we were using Starfire assistant we were somewhat limited in what we could change "home rules wise" since Steve had to consent to add it to the program, but he did a great job adding in options.

And this is a problem any time you depend on a program (well, someone else's program) to do this...   The program basically sets the rules in stone and limits your ability to use house rules.  Of course, one can balance this against all of the other perceived benefits that one gets from such a program, and believe that you come out ahead.

[crucis]

Just to let you know, PaulM (and everyone else), I am currently looking at Personnel Points as a means of limiting fleet sizes.  

The concern that I have is this... Many people complain about out of control fleet sizes.  But are they willing to accept the extra work that tracking PP's would require to try to rein in fleet sizes?

I could write a set of personnel point rules right now (and actually have a framework already).  But if people aren't willing to use such a mechanism to counter their complaints about fleet sizes, the effort would be wasted.

[Erik L]

One thing I did in Astra Imperia was to limit the amount of tonnage a population can support. I'd have to look up the rule to see what the excess incurs, but I believe it was along the lines of 2-3 months of stationing a ship at a population that cannot support it would cost near the purchase price of the ship.

[Steve Walmsley]

Both the 3rd(R) and 4th Editions campaign games are essentially unplayable without computer support (you can only do battles from a scenario book).  Marvin (and others) may disagree but certainly the experience here in München was clear, without starfire assistant you can't run a campaign.  I could never interest anyone in a 4th edition game for the simple reason that no such beast existed.  Marvin liked the small galaxy "death match" games so it is not a surprise that he consciously or not optimized 4th edition for that sort of game.

I guess that I'll have to disagree about the supposed unplayability of the game without computer support, although I'd suggest that the very term "computer support" is quite vague, and could mean anything from using a sysgen utility, to using a word processor to print up ship control sheets prior to a battle, to the use of spreadsheets (whether in a simple form or highly programmed ones, like those official ones for GSF and Ultra), to something like SteveW's SA.

Personally, ever since 2e came out, I've always written up my own sysgen utility, cuz I didn't want to spend time rolling up star systems.  And I've used word processors to print up control sheets.  But I've never bothered using computer support for anything else.  Then again, perhaps my tolerance for paperwork is much greater than other people...

I think the difference of opinion may be a difference of scale. I have played Imperial Starfire using pen and paper, including rolling up systems manually, although it was only 30-40 systems and 3-4 races.

The Rigellian campaign has almost two thousand systems with over fourteen thousand planets, seventeen active races and nearly ten thousand ships in five hundred and seventy different fleets. There is no way that is playable with pen and paper. ISF is playable with PnP up to a point, but once you get beyond a certain size of campaign (and that size may differ between different gaming groups), you do need computer support. If you want a game that does not rely on computer support, the question becomes how large a game you can play with pen and paper before it becomes unmanageable. Next question is how quickly do you get to that point in a normal game and is that length of time how long you think a reasonable game of ISF or Cosmic should last?

Steve

[crucis]

One thing I did in Astra Imperia was to limit the amount of tonnage a population can support. I'd have to look up the rule to see what the excess incurs, but I believe it was along the lines of 2-3 months of stationing a ship at a population that cannot support it would cost near the purchase price of the ship.

Erik, I actually have thrown together a loose framework for some new PP rules.  I've started with 1 PP per 1 PU population (not worrying about PU/PTU conversion factors, for reasons I'd rather not explain).  And 1 HS of ship requires 1 PP (no exceptions for certain types of tech systems, for simplicity's sake).  (Also, no tracking of PP's for PCF's, since they'd eat up TONS of PP's and too many PCF's aren't the problem being addressed.)  

Note that this 1 PP per 1 PU is different from the ISF model which actually has no limit on fleet size (in PPs).  It only has a limit on the rate of growth, since the ISF rule allowed for a number of PP's equal to the number of EVM per month.

As for what happens when there's "an excess"... well, that's a slightly more complex issue.  

Still, the real key is the willingness to accept the tracking of PP's as the method of keeping fleet sizes under control.  If such willingness exists, it is possible to create a reasonably simple and workable set of personnel point rules.

[crucis]

I think the difference of opinion may be a difference of scale. I have played Imperial Starfire using pen and paper, including rolling up systems manually, although it was only 30-40 systems and 3-4 races.

The Rigellian campaign has almost two thousand systems with over fourteen thousand planets, seventeen active races and nearly ten thousand ships in five hundred and seventy different fleets. There is no way that is playable with pen and paper. ISF is playable with PnP up to a point, but once you get beyond a certain size of campaign (and that size may differ between different gaming groups), you do need computer support. If you want a game that does not rely on computer support, the question becomes how large a game you can play with pen and paper before it becomes unmanageable. Next question is how quickly do you get to that point in a normal game and is that length of time how long you think a reasonable game of ISF or Cosmic should last?

Steve

Yes, I agree, Steve, that it's very much a matter of scale.  But I should also point out that it's also a matter of scale in how one defines "computer support".  As I've stated, I've used self-written sysgen utilities since the 2e days, since I've always found system generation to be terribly tedious, particularly when the intended result is the production of a single star system.  But that's about the limit of my "computer support".

I also agree that after some point, it probably won't matter how simple the rules are, the sheer volume of data will exceed even the most patient person's willingness to deal with in a P&P mode.  (Heck there will be a point after which even with something like SA that the volume of data will be too great...)



Regardless, my underlying point remains that the game should be designed as a P&P game at a level of complexity/simplicity that is acceptable for a P&P game, not at a level of complexity that pretty much requires full computer support from the start and ends up treating the rules like they were nothing more than a design spec for a computer game.

[sloanjh]

One thing I did in Astra Imperia was to limit the amount of tonnage a population can support. I'd have to look up the rule to see what the excess incurs, but I believe it was along the lines of 2-3 months of stationing a ship at a population that cannot support it would cost near the purchase price of the ship.

I wasn't going to respond to this thread, but Erik's post kicked me over the edge.

I think that the fundamental problem with PnP SF is that it's trying to be at least 3 different games for three different player archetypes:

1)  Naval combat PvP - For this archetype, the Imperial SF part of the game is primarily there to set up "realistic" OOB and start configurations for battles.  For this group, the details of planetary population growth, Imperial economics, etc. aren't important - they're just there to provide a backdrop.  I view this as the group that's looking for something like Carriers at War.
2)  Space 4X PvP - For this group, the opposite is true - colonization, growth of colonies, resource allocation, etc. are the interesting part of the game; the combat rules are there to "keep score" when empires go to war.  I view this as the camp that is looking for something like Civilization or Galactic Empires (or MOO or ...).
3)  Space 4X role playing - This is the group that likes to write after-action reports.  This group wants lots of random variation in NPR, since that adds interesting flavor to the story of the game.  The best I can come up with for this group is D&D.

Note that a lot of this has already been said in this thread and on the board, and that most real-world players will typically be a mix of the archetypes.  In addition, there are in-between states such as those who want to game out an entire fleet campaign or war (e.g. 3rd Reich players).  My contribution is that #1 and #2 are in direct conflict in terms of level-of-detail and timescales - the tactical game takes place on a scale of days, while the 4X game is on a scale of decades.  The problem is that there are a LOT of days in a decade, and a lot of ships in an empire :-) ) - the "detail freak".  These are the gamers who like to track and control individual squads in an entire theater (what's the WWII Pacific game of this sort - War in the Pacific?).  This is exactly counter to the separation of scales methodology, and winds up with games where the wall-clock-time to play a turn increases exponentially with the size of the empires.  In other words, these games grow until the empires reach a certain size, and then they stop.  For an example of this, take a look at the size and frequency of turn writeups in Steve's Rigellian Diaries (and this was with computer support).  Note that Civilization suffers from this disease too (at least if you micro-manage city production like I do).

In my opinion, Imperial SF didn't go far enough in abstracting away the individual movements of ships and units - it still has the detail-freak disease.  The player still gave individual movement orders to individual ships (or TG); as the size of the empire grows, this becomes excessively cumbersome.  I think that, in order for the game to meet both sets of needs (4X and tactical) the Imperial game has to be ruthless in cutting out detail - I think this is where Imperial SF falls down.

In order to build a game that doesn't suffer from this, I think one would have to go to a "macro-economic" version of fleet management for the strategic game.  Rather than tracking individual ship movements, one would assign ships to fleets which had patrol responsibilities - a fleet would have a certain number of certain classes of ships.  Rather than tracking which ships are in maintenance, one would go with the USN's "1/3 deployed, 1/3 training up, 1/3 refitting" ratio to determine how many ships in a particular fleet are available at a particular time.  For the single-battle tactical players, one could then use the patrol responsibilities (e.g. 1 CVBG is always in Westpac) to generate random encounters between Navies.  For the campaign tactical players, one could randomly assign locations upon a patrol to the various patrol responsibilities.  For the 4x players, one could generate "tracer" battles for the various patrol responsibilities that were then multiplied by some factor to determine the entire campaign (or just use straight attrition formulae).  For the detail-freak players, they could intersperse full campaigns with 4x segments.

The reason that Erik's mail prompted me to write this is that his statement of "stationing a ship at a population" struck a chord with the thoughts I've been having along these lines.  Basically, the 4X game would involve building ships for fleets, stationing them at fleet bases, and assessing the costs of the fleet deployments (in addition to colonization activities, of course).  It should be expensive to station a large fleet a long way away from core worlds, unless port facilities were explicitly built up.  The player could turn knobs to e.g. "surge" readiness if he thought war was imminent, or set levels of war-like encounters with neighboring empires (e.g. "friendly" vs. "covert harrassment" vs. "open warfare"), but these levels would have costs in the 4X game.

Of course, this brings up the question of how much Crucis wants to change Cosmic away from 3rd Ed.  On the plus side, I don't think many people are arguing that the core tactical game is broken (other than maybe the smaller=faster hard-wiring that, in my opinion, is a major contributor to swarm tactics) - it's the Imperial side that has the problems.  The question is, how much can this be changed?  Also note that none of this is a solution for the exponential growth "rich get richer" issue that's common in 4X games - that would require some sort of change in the economics rules that sets a scale size of empires, so that growth of big empires is (proportionally) slower than growth of small empires.

John

[Steve Walmsley]

The worrying thing is that I have played all the games you mentioned

Steve

[sloanjh]

The worrying thing is that I have played all the games you mentioned :-)

BTW, they put out a new version of CAW a few years back - doesn't have as many scenarios as the original, though.  I keep hoping that they (the SSI guys) will redo MacArthur's War (mine stopped working a few OS upgrades back).

John

[crucis]

John, first let me thank you for your input.  I'm glad that Erik's post "kicked" you over the edge into responding.  Unlike the old days on the Starfire List where people would seem to reply to everything at the drop of a pin, these days, at times it seems all but impossible to get people to step up and give any opinions... which is unfortunate since it is those opinions which I find valuable in what I'm doing.  So, thanks for replying!  

John, I can't talk about the nitty-gritty of how similar or dissimilar Cosmic will be to 3E.  I prefer to play things a fairly close to the vest, as the saying goes...

As I've said before and elsewhere, the tech systems will be entirely familiar to 3e people and have a 3e feel to them.  Also, while as I've said that I'm entirely willing to take things from any edition of Starfire, my general preference is to try to maintain a general level of simplicity on the strategic side that's lower than exists in Ultra, and perhaps in SM#2 as well (well, at least for those areas in SM#2 where things became more complex than in ISF...).

On the plus side, I don't think many people are arguing that the core tactical game is broken (other than maybe the smaller=faster hard-wiring that, in my opinion, is a major contributor to swarm tactics) - it's the Imperial side that has the problems.  The question is, how much can this be changed?  Also note that none of this is a solution for the exponential growth "rich get richer" issue that's common in 4X games - that would require some sort of change in the economics rules that sets a scale size of empires, so that growth of big empires is (proportionally) slower than growth of small empires.

There are a number of little points here...

I agree that the adjustment of speeds for ES-DD hull types in 3rdR was a significant contributor to swarm tactics.  But I'd also suggest that the hull cost curve (small hulls having lower per HS costs than larger ships) is also a contributor, as well as the 4 HS SYD rebate.  

And another contributor is, IMO, the need to pay for ships entirely upfront. This tends to make larger ships more expensive (sort of) to build than smaller ships, well, in that you are forced to pay the entire cost upfront.  For example, let's say that you could build 4 30-hs DD's for the same cost as 1 120 HS DN (not sure if that'd actually be true or not).   But if the DD takes the same SY capacity as the DN in any given month, you could build one DD per month for 4 months (i.e. 120 HS's of DD's) and basically be paying 25% of the cost of those 120 HS of DD per month, whereas the single 120 HS DN has to pay the full price tag all at once.  If a ship that was going to need 4 months to build was able to pay in 4 equal installments, it could put larger, multi-month-to construct ships on a more equal footing with small one-month-build ships.



As for "how much be changed?" ... well, that's a tough one to answer.  For example, how much change would people accept? (That may seem like an overly leading question, but it's not intended that way.)    I can also say that if people are expecting me to simply take all of the 3e source documents and re-edit them, they're going to be disappointed.  That is NOT what I'm doing.  This isn't to say that I'm ignoring what's come before (aka 3e, 3rdR, SM#2, UTM) or what is (Ultra).  What I'm trying to do is to create something new, not something that's re-hashed, but with strong 3e sensibilities...  OTOH, just because I say "something new", don't take that to mean that I'm trying to do anything radically different (although "radically different" may be a very relative term from person to person).



As for the economics scale issue, I have no answers yet...  I'm working on trying to simplify economics.    There are some things that could add up to help in this regard.  Do not all natural growth on Desolate and Extreme worlds, for starters (this was the rule in ISF, BTW).  Use a concept similar to what's in SM#2 wherein worlds that are Medium and larger have half the growth rate of worlds that are Small and smaller.    

However, an idea that has only occurred to me upon reading what you wrote, I suppose that an additional factor could be included that took the total size of an empire (i.e. its total PU) into account, and above a certain point, the empire's growth rates were further reduced...  But I have no idea what would be proper total PU breakpoints for this sort of concept to work properly.


Crucis