I put up the idea of replacing the moon colonies with an income bonus a long time back when I was still on the starfire board. Consider a 100 hex asteroid belt under SM2...that is 500*16 or the same as a 3200 population planet...and at max population that produces 2000 PTU of growth population every 10th turn once each asteroid is filled. I've got systems with 3-4 asteroid belts plus a lot of moons in the current games...they would be economic powerhouses in basic SM2 economics.
I am glad to see you are now understanding what I am saying about rock ball colonization. It is death in a GSF campaign, as tracking all that PU (or EU if you wish) growth, not to mention just tracking them was making it impossible to do it easily with Excel spreadsheets. They have a much stronger limitation on the number of lines on a single sheet, but just scrolling through them all was enough for me. I stopped my GSF solo game from book keeping issues. The lack of computer support prevented any use of the GSF rules in München as neither of the SMs wanted to track by hand (or spreadsheet).
The one legit alternative for asteroid belts is to handle them like in GSF/Ultra, as a single unified population, one population record per belt rather than dozens or hundreds. But having said that, I also have a problem with the level of population that the game is assuming that AB's can handle in the first place. Since I see these AB populations more as "mining camps" than full blown outposts, I have a very hard time seeing anything more than a single PTU (i.e. 50,000 people) per "outpost". I tend to think that those enormously populated ABs are horrifying, particularly when one also allows them to grow and grow at SM#2's highly inflated rate.
(And, BTW, I take no credit for thinking of (potentially) using a bonus to replace moon and asteroid belt colonization.)
Also, I realize that removing Desolate and Extreme Moon and Asteroid belt colonization might put a crimp in the "Stay at Home" strategy. But having the vast numbers of records associated with moon and Asteroid populations puts an even larger crimp in the entire game for everyone, though most particularly for p&p players.
My feeling is that a rock planet should be able to support a settlement sized population if desolate and a colony if extreme.
Actually, this is similar to the standard set forth in ISF rule 15.06.02. Of course, the ISF rule makes no differentiation between planets and moons, only speaking about "system bodies". It was SM#2 that reduced the max size of Desolate and Extreme populations to Colony and Outpost.
Anyways, I'd already intended to let Type O2 (i.e. Type B) planets have a max pop of Settlement and Type O1 (i.e. Type H) planets have a max pop of Colony.
The use of EX as explorers is something I have never done, to my detriment in every game. To me sending unarmed flys out to explore makes no sense whatsoever. Those ships would surrender instantly if confronted by a single armed CT and they all have detailed information on the way back home. But this is role playing and not min-maxing...and for min-maxers they are ideal. I would limit the size of a ship that can mount an X to a CT (and I am not fond of CTs), and I like the stuff Steve did with the Xi and Xc as they make larger ships more useful for exploring.
You won't get argument from me about the EX hull type. I despise them. And like you pointed out, they're a min-maxer's dream. But I tend to approach the game more from a role-playing perspective. Of course, given the current nature of 3E surveying tech systems and rules, it's entirely understandable to want to do surveying with as many of the smallest survey ships as possible. The rules force that attitude onto players. They basically give you no choice if you want to at least try for even a modicum of efficiency in surveying.
And I think that the root cause of the problem as it currently stands is the 1 Science Instruments system per ship rule. So long as that remains the norm, the rules will drive the player to building the least expensive ship possible to wrap around the single "X".
After one battle with 250 CTs I basically told Starslayer "never again." I believe I fell asleep while we were fighting that one out...but that was just too many ships for fun. I would also change the combat system to make bigger ships far more effective combat wise (longer ranged and more powerful weapons)...making it more like wet navy combat where larger ships mount heavier guns that the lighter ships can't match.
Yeah, you're describing the "problem" of swarm ships. The problem is that again, the way the rules are currently structured, there are few biases that favor larger ships (more space for things like defensive systems and electronics) and some that favor smaller ships (higher speed, quick to build). But at the most basic level, 1 point of damage is still 1 point of damage regardless of size.
One minor way to tweak things in favor of the larger ships is to change the per hull space costs of warship hulls to a flat rate. That is, X Mc per HS, regardless of warship type. (Carriers would probably pay a higher rate, but that rate would remain the same across all carrier hull types.) Another minor thing would be to enhance the value of useful electronic tech systems, but also increase their size so that they become more difficult for smaller ships to use. Command datalink and Improved Multiplex would be examples of this, as they are too large to be mounted by swarm ships. Of course, they also exist at TL's where swarm ships are less of a concern because the ultimate anti-swarm technology already exists ... fighters.
On PP those were intended to control fleet sizes...and the effect of removing them was a massive expansion in fleet sizes. It was a case of removing a bookkeeping issue (PPs) and producing a much worse bookkeeping issue (expanding fleet sizes). Or again the road to hell was paved in more good intentions.
I never found tracking PP's to be a big deal. I think that tracking crew grade is immensely more onerous, because it forces you to track each ship individually, something I'd never do. Sort of like the difference between ISF/SM#2 tracking each asteroid belt OP individually vs Ultra tracking the entire asteroid belt as a single pooled population. This is also a reason why larger fleet sizes was never as big an issue for me, because I never tracked crew grade and never tracked ships individually. I hate the crew grade rule with a passion because I think that it only serves to create a paperwork nightmare and slows up combat when you have to modify die rolls for all those annoyingly non-average ships. I won't remove the rule because I know that some people like it. But that won't stop me from loathing it with a burning passion.
Back to PP's. I should note that to the best of my recollection, about the only time when PP's were a serious issue was when there was a need to build an invasion army. PCF armies were (unsurprisingly) rather personnel intensive, and having to build such an invasion army could prevent one from manning newly built warships for a short time. But, of course, that was the point of the PP rule, to put some constraint into the game.
