As far as asteroid belt populations go, there is no reason for them to be particularly large assuming there is no need for anything beyond the orbital smelters needed to process the raw rock. They already give a +10% bonus to the system income. It is a question of playtesting really, so far as I can see. You have two boundaries and just need to iterate around to find a happy medium. If you don't like big numbers then set the limit to be 1 PU per hex (or LS or whatever) and see what that gives for economics versus tracking. But it is also possible to justify a large population since space for the habitats and such isn't an issue (there will be lots of hollowed out asteroids).
As I believe you said earlier, asteroid belt colonization, and quite frankly almost all non-habitable world colonization, is about establishing mining operations. And I’m very hard pressed to believe that mining operations (plus a fair amount of support personnel) in an asteroid belt would require tens of millions of people. Allowing that many PU’s (and people) seems more like a way to allow players to build up a huge population in a non-habitable environment. And I’m of the opinion at the moment that if there’s a place where there’s a chance of a significantly sizable population on a currently non-habitable world, it should be on Mass 2 or 3 Type B (i.e. O2) planets, since they will probably be the closest to habitable conditions of any non-habitable worlds in the existing array of options.
"Stay at Home" to me is just that. You mothball your fleet and plow your money into rocks and tech. I think it is non-viable from the get go. If you get pocketed then you have to go to war as a player race or else buy open space from an NPR or other player, because colonizing rock balls will never compensate for another player who can both colonize rock balls but also the significantly better rate of return habitable worlds and has the chance to find NPRs to trade with. This is an economic situation that the pocketed player can never get around except by conquest. The Canon Cartel in our game is in a pocket and since they are peaceful they have been content to remain so, but clearly their economics isn't advancing like the still growing races.
No argument from me here.
I would suggest though that I’d think that a good Spacemaster would never let a player race get “pocketed”, even if it required fudging the # of WP die rolls in some new star systems to make sure that player races never run out of outbound WP’s.
A trade treaty is a +10% increase in your income in general unless the economies are grossly different then it is only one side that gets +10%. That is a nice boost. You could play with the percentage to make it smaller but you would again have to play test it to see where it becomes less incentive to trade then to conquer.
Just to be picky, in ISF it is 10% of the
smaller trade partner’s economy. And given that player races are often, if not usually, the larger trading partner, the trade monies will usually be less than your total economy.
As I expect that you’re aware, in GSF/Ultra there’s more than one level of trade treaty. There’s Restricted Trade, Limited Trade, and Free Trade, with increasingly better trade bonuses at each level. And IIRC, ISF’s trade treaty numbers are similar to the numbers for “Limited Trade”.
The only thing that makes the current "send forth hordes of unarmed flies into the great dark unknown" foolish and hence stops it dead is when that results more often than not in a horde of alien ships following the bread crumbs back to your home system and crushing you like the bug you are. It is absolutely insane to send them out without even armed escorts but most people if they escort them at all send along some paltry amount. They do it because the chance you encounter a hostile NPR is virtually nil. The risk is non-existent and the reward is huge so people follow it. To stop it you have just have to change that. The trouble is then the first player to make peaceful contact wins the game I guess...unless you win the war with the NPR and gain a nice planet then the occupation income probably exceeds the value of trade treaty. Then you are back to Dan's GFFP or variants thereof for that.
I agree that making NPR’s be hostile more often is necessary to put some disincentives into blindly exploring without proper military backup.
As for the first player to make peaceful contact winning, etc. I’m not entirely sure that there’s much that can be done with that. If trade treaties are made less profitable, it probably only increases the incentives for players to be more conquest oriented.
In truth, I’ve long thought that if you’re playing in a serious multi-player head-to-head Starfire campaign, one of the best ways to reduce the random luck factors in exploration is to simply not play with NPR’s. It may seem extreme, but NPR’s are always a bit of a game-changer, whether positively or negatively. Without them in a multi-player campaign, the players can get down to exploring and colonizing and trying to seek each other out without the risk of NPR’s being like a treasure chest with either a bomb or a pot of gold hidden within it.
Regardless, I do think that there are some things that can be done to mitigate some of these things. Nuclear or anti-matter bombardment of a populated world should seriously damage that world’s economic output, and after enough damage, make the planet completely uninhabitable. That would put a crimp in GFFP. And as I said above, increase the chances of NPR’s being hostile to mitigate uncontrolled, blind, unsupported exploration.
I would just say that EX can't mount X and be done with it.
Or just get rid of EX’s altogether.
But that doesn’t really solve the problem.
Xi is 2 HS and that in an EX is a tight squeeze, it makes more sense for Xi to use a bigger ship, especially as you want Xr on board as well. And I don't think a EX can do it...Xi, Xr is 4 spaces, Qs, H is 2, Ix2 is 2 and that is 8 and you have only 7 spaces...you could with Xi, Qs, H, Ix2 = 6 HS but that leaves you blind...and you carry either a S or a (BbS) or Hs and (BbT) for a cutter I guess...doesn't make much difference. Xi is more suited to putting on a CT or FG.
Let me point out here that it’s long been my intention to get rid of Q and maintenance Hold requirements. The problem is that frigates and smaller hull types always have to use Q and H’s that are not scaled properly to their needs. So after careful consideration, I decided that the best way to deal with the problem is to simply get rid of the requirement for explicit crew Q’s and maintenance H’s. They will become innate features of the hull. Each hull will be assumed to have enough life support capacity for the ship and its crew, and enough maintenance capacity for 1 month of maintenance for the ship.
Why do you want a Pseudo-Science explanation for a game which is based on making rules and then trying to shoehorn some garbage babble on top of it? But anyway here is your pseudo science explanation: Xc can be used together as each Xc expands length of the gravimetric baseline array to a greater distance to give you more sensitivity to changes in the gravaton flux and enables you to sweep a larger area around the ship.
Perhaps the use of the term “pseudo-science” was ill-advised. I was looking for a logical reason why a ship could mount more than a single X installation. If one assumes that the first X is going to be only able to “sweep” a path of a given width of space, how can the second X do anything but sweep the exact same path? That is, if X is only capable of detecting WP gravitic data 1/2 LM around the ship (i.e. a 1 LM sweep), how can the second X do anything other than the same thing? And if that’s the case, a second X is redundant. For a second X to have any value, it has to be able to detect data that the first one can’t in some way.
Bah. Perhaps the solution should come in a different form. But it has to be remembered that the “1 X per ship” is a powerful economic incentive. Alternate solutions need to be able to compete economically with the dirt cheap solution.
It depends on how you define what an X is and how it works. Doubling the number of sensors and increasing the computers and scientists on the ship is going to make things go faster regardless of how they work exactly.
Actually, Paul, I disagree with this assumption that more X per ship will speed up things. There’s a minimum amount of “time” (StMP) in which a WP survey can be completed. And allowing more X per ship would really just serve to reduce the number of ships required to achieve a completed survey as quickly (and cheaply) as possible within that timeframe.
The rules are written in the way they are I believe to prevent people exploiting them via "clever rules lawyer munch-kin" strategies rather than because they were consistently thought out starting from what the system was and how it would work and deriving what the rules are from that.
Yes, I believe that that’s often true. And it’s probably more true of follow-up versions of the rules since the writer would have a feel for how the initial version was being “rules-lawyered” and would be making adjustments to correct it.
There are issues with the 50 EX with X anyway. For a good part of time the ships will be basically sitting on top of each other and the 50 Ships won't survey any faster than 6, 12 or 18 ships initially. They have to starburst quite some distance from the WP before there is sizable separation between each ship. And depending on where the entrance WP is in the system the utility of a lot of ships would be lost till quite late in the process. This means the survey is already abstracted considerably so allowing multiple Xc per ship is hardly a big issue compared to allowing 50 ships to generate 50 pts per STMP. There should be a considerably smaller limit on the survey points that increases per STMP surveying (this would effectively slow down surveys but also make the 50 ship swarm not so cost effective).
If I’m not mistaken, the minimum “time” for a WP survey limit of 3 StMP contains the assumption that for a while, survey ships will have to “starburst” away from each other to get into an efficient survey pattern.
The point of PPs was to generate a non-MCr based limit on either absolute fleet sizes (which it must do at some stage) or fleet expansion. It also probably made it more sensible to concentrate you crew into bigger ships. The real issue is that with the compound interest growth economy, you get a compound interest growth fleet size and that again to me implodes the fun. In the second münchen campaign my last battle was well over 100 ships on my side alone and that is pretty much unplayable. I kept having trouble tracking which counter was which ship, and marking damage off the right ship in my listing and so forth. Crew grade is far less of an issue (though it compounds the problem) than sheer unadulterated weight of paper.
Crew grade is a major issue to me because I positively hate the idea of having to track each individual ship individually. Having to keep an individual record for each ship is a waste of time. If I have 30 Tiger class BC’s, I want to keep only a single record for those 30 BC’s so long as they are all identical and undamaged. The only time I want to need to track ships individually is when some are damaged and are temporarily different from their sister ships. But once repaired, they can go back to being generic ships with the pool of 30 BC’s.
As for PP’s we’re in agreement. But as for whether PP’s limit absolute fleet size, in ISF it doesn’t. There’s no rule that in any way uses PP’s to place a hard limit on fleet size, only the rate of growth of fleet size.
As for changes I would redo how ships are designed. I would break weapons into small, medium and heavy. Up to the DD you can mount only small, CL and CA can mount medium and BC and larger can mount heavy. Small weapons do less damage and have a shorter range then, medium. Medium weapons do less damage and have a shorter range than heavy. Each hull would have a limited number of turret hard points, and otherwise would have to use either bay or spinal mountings. Spinal mounts have longer range/higher damage than bay mounts but a more restricted arc. Bays are limited to side arcs, turrets give you 360 (less blind spot). But nothing smaller than a CL can mount a turret and it has only a single such mount. This introduces a lot more tactics into the game, currently the ESF and as you say 1 pt is 1 pt regardless if it’s from an ES or a ML.
To a certain degree, these ideas exist in Ultra. You have small, medium, and large weapons. They’re just termed “regular (unstated), Capital, and Heavy. Ultra also has firing arcs (Forward, Rear, Sides, and Turreted [all minus blind spot where applicable]) that are based on the size of the weapon relative to the size of the mounting ship. Kinetic weapons are more limited in the firing arcs due to the nature of the weapon, while missiles don’t worry about blind spots since they can re-orient themselves after launch.
In the Ultra firing arc model, if you take a capital Force Beam and try to mount it on different ships, you’d find that for a very small ship, it’d probably have to have either a forward or rear firing arcs, while for a larger ship, it could be turreted.
What you’re describing sort of fits into the Ultra model, where “spinal” weapons are Ultra’s Forward (or Rear) FA and “bay” (could also be called broadside) weapons are side FA. Of course, Ultra’s firing arc limitations aren’t too terribly restrictive unless the weapon is kinetic, or rather large while the hull is rather small. To fit more closely into the paradigm you describe, the Ultra FA limitations would need to be more restrictive.
A problem with the paradigm you describe is that it doesn’t mesh with the tech systems as they currently exist in 3E. That is, there are only standard and Capital sized weapon mounts. And the Capital weapon mounts represent technological upgrades over the standard weapons, rather than merely upsized versions of the standard technology. To fit into your paradigm, something like the Capital Force Beam would need to be available at the same time as the initial Force Beam technology, rather than being an upgraded technology. This would really throw a monkey wrench into the entire weapons mix. I won’t say that it’s impossible, but it would really require a significant re-think of a number of things relating to beam and kinetic weapons.
For example, is the “standard” 4 HS L and F the “small” sized weapon you describe? Or is it the mid-size weapon? Also, right now, cap beam weapons (obviously) have an advantage in range over standard sized weapons of the same general type, but are not necessarily as good on a HS for HS basis at short ranges. For your paradigm to work, it would seem that the larger sized weapon would need to have the advantage at all ranges over the smaller weapon.
I would also change a bit how the ships are designed lumping a lot of the electronics into the Bridge (a new system) and removing electronics from the sheet, they would just add to the basic cost of the ship.
I don’t think that all electronics systems should be in a Bridge system for the simple reason that they’re not. Oh, there may be control panels for those electronic systems on the bridge, but I think that the really important parts of those electronics systems (i.e. their emitters, computers, and so forth) are elsewhere and can take up considerably more space than the ship’s bridge.
As for a Bridge system itself, I know that some people would love it while others don’t care one way or the other. It seems to me that for the people who’d love it, the primary driver seems to be that they want to have a system on the control sheet for the Bridge so that they can say “The Bridge has been destroyed”, when it gets hit.
A problem that I have with a Bridge system from a practical game design point of view is that it’s another system that should need to be scaled to the size of the ship, like quarters and maintenance holds. And as such, it’d be another system that would be a pain for the smallest ships (FG and below) since they’d probably need something that was one half HS or smaller to be appropriately scaled, while a capital ship might arguably need more than 1 HS of Bridge to properly support the ship. There is a flipside argument here however. Since ships are giving up the requirement to mount crew Q and maintenance H, they’d have the freed up HS to require a Bridge, even for the smallest ships. And loss of the Bridge system could have severely detrimental effects to the ship (i.e. loss of life support, loss of innate sensors, death of graded admiral on flagships without CIC, etc.). However, I fear that that would only serve to give players a reason to go “bridge hunting” with precision weapons, like Needle beams, and close range battles might turn into mutual bridge massacres. So honestly, I’m not really hot on Bridge systems, though I could make it work if I felt the need.
A hull space would cost a hull space (or possibly only slowly increase to reflect more powerful reactors on the ship). And look into how the engines are assigned by generation to make higher tech level ships perform better than lower tech level ones, basically a lot of what is done in GSF to balance stuff tech wise I would not do. Higher tech should be better, if you are flying Fokker tri-planes and I have P51 mustangs I don't see why I should not fly circles around you.
It sounds like you don’t like generational increases to be quite so mild, and would prefer that they be more significant. That’s entirely do-able and a very 3e perspective. And this is a perspective that should seem to hold true of other places where generational upgrades occur. That is, upgrades should be significant rather than merely incremental, because minor incremental improvements can be, well, boring.
Fighter weapons would be limited to missiles when it comes to ship killing damage.
I know that you have a gripe with fighters and energy weapons. And I won’t say that you’re wrong, per se. But if what I’m doing is going to remain true to the 3E official history as presented in the scenario books and novels, doing away with fighter mounted energy weapons isn’t really possible, at least not without a retcon which might not be viewed favorably by other 3E fans. Still, I’m not 1000% unalterably opposed to the idea.
Point defense really needs a good look at. You have to decide what you want right from the start. The same is true of missile weapons. The key point is to make for interesting battles and choices by the player. How big should a launcher be? How much space for a magazine? How many missiles per magazine? But to my way of thinking point defense and missiles are the two sides of that coin, and they will develop in stages as each side tries to beat the other. Missiles will become increasing effective, and point defense increasingly able to stop them.
Argh, you did it again. What about PD do you think needs looking at? What problem do you believe exists with PD? Is it too good? Or is it the die rolls? Something else?
I have to admit that I’m a fan of 3e missile combat, and don’t like what GSF/Ultra did with so few missiles per launcher. If you’re going to have very few missiles per launcher, then those missiles should have considerably more damaging basic warheads. But that’s not really the Starfire way.
The trick is balancing this to keep the system itself functional up to 30-50 ships a side. So that means not adding too much complexity. But adding in weapon arcs and such brings back some tactics which, so far as I can see, left Starfire a while back. The ESF and shoot til it pops is what most battles seem to be, and that for me is boring as all sin. GSF doesn't do anything to change that, in fact it makes things worse with the homogenized weapons, short ranges and lousy chances to hit...much dice are rolled and little happens. I'd like to see maneuver come back and options that give the players some interesting things to try. What I want to avoid is going as complex as SFB or AVT. But I would like some more complexity as that brings with it increased tactical options...the trick is in the balance.
Paul, different people have different tolerances for larger fleet battles. Some prefer smaller sized fleets, while others don’t mind larger fleets. I personally wasn’t bothered by larger fleet battles. But then again, I never used crew grade rules. I would often use averaged results rather than roll out every weapon, just to speed things along. I certainly never used that “no automatic hit” rule.
Still, I do see what you’re saying. And you’re right; trying to include more interesting elements into the mix, while avoiding increased complexity is a difficult balancing act.
