3rd Edition Rules

[crucis]

REI is just a factor that is multiplied by your EVM to determine your income, it always increases (eventually) and calling it "efficiency" is a bit odd.  Efficiency increase doesn't lead to increased economic performance last I checked.  Certainly it isn't going to jump from 2 to 12 just because you went up a tech level.  If you don't like my scaling that is what play testing is about but my point was economies don't always grow which is what the ISF REI change per tech level rules produce.  SM2 doesn't even try to simulate economics cycles it is just always expanding.

I won't disagree that the jumps in ISF's REI were rather ridiculous.  As for economics not always growing, true, but it's just a game with an intentionally simplistic economic model.  I'm not expecting a professional economist's economic model.  And frankly, I'd find having an imperial economy that had to deal with semi-realistic economic upturn and downturn rules quite annoying.  I'd probably ignore such rules in favor of having nice, clean, and simple economic rules with constant GPV's that I didn't have to micromanage every month.  

But clearly different people have different tastes and tolerances.

I'm not sure what exactly the CFN was capable of, probably you could not use it for "first in colonization" but after that it should have been possible.  I used the 2nd Edition rules so I'm sure there were changes, I only recall thinking that 10% was more than what the maintenance on my freighter fleets were, and there was no big deal to making up regular routes that moved MCr around.

I remember feeling the same way about using ISF's IFN.  Unlike some people, I had no problem with building Imperial FT's and using them.

Well in the Stars at War the KON had a hellish time developing the Rc/CM system which is why I would make these things more expensive time and MCr wise.  The knots in GSF were a good way of doing this, but for a ISF based system I would just increase the required RP total.  Why should it be easy to get a system that is going to completely change how battles are conducted?  The tech research rules in ISF are among the worst parts of the game.  I have never been able to fathom why they exist in the form they do.  

How about remembering that it's a simple-ish game with simple rules.  Heck, the R&D rules are all of 2 pages long!!!  Could they be better?  Sure.  But like I said before, perhaps something like the Critical Project rule could be applied to something like Rc/CM, where 2 successful die rolls are required for project completion, not just 1.  And the chances for a serious failure are greater with greater negative effeccts.

The problem with "perceived threat" is that unless the cost increase becomes largely not relevant as time goes on.  Steve used the tech purchase rules to develop fighters ahead of time without blinking an eye.  About the only rule I see a need for it one for developing captured technology.  I'd just drop the whole threat reaction stuff.

I'm not as bothered by you by the PT rules, though I think that perhaps they need a close re-examination to make sure that they're not being abused.

As for costs, IIRC, didn't SM#2 make some changes to R&D costs?  IIRC, EL Research was changed to a startup cost of 30% of GEV and a monthly cost of 10% of GEV, which is better than those flat rates (except perhaps in the early TL's).  I don't remember if it made similar changes to development costs.

Regardless, I full intend to change the R&D costs to get away from the flat rates.

[procyon]

Procyon, actually it's a little hard to say that incomes are lower in ISF.  There are some different things going on.  Individual planetary incomes are higher on a per world basis against comparable worlds (by TL and pop size).  But there is probably somewhat less colonization of the "rockballs" (i.e. non-habitable worlds, particularly moons and asteroids), due to the greater expense of rockball colonization.  And because natural growth is glacially slow, in ISF, you don't see any colonial populations growing into Medium, Large or Very Large.  The largest player race colonial population you'd likely see is a Small.  So for player race population incomes, overall they'd probably be lower, though the homeworld will almost certainly be an economic powerhouse.

 As I'm sure you've heard, trade income with NPR's is where player races get a lot of additional income in ISF, but that's tweakable.

I added the emphasis.
And you are right.  The chance to grow lots of pops on every little rock is pretty poor.
Expensive.  Takes a lot of time.  And isn't going to grow very far unless your game lasts a LOOONG time.

Trade was the big income.  Find friends - get rich.


But for us - finding friends just boosts you TL research....
So....
You wouldn't get runaway incomes.  Your homeworld will increase in income pretty well, but that will be the only major increase.

We did toy with the idea of reinstituting this mechanic in our games when we went from GSF to Ultra.
But decided not to as it would have required rewriting a LARGE number of house rules.  And making the jump from GSF to Ultra looked like it was going to be enough work.
Adjusting Ultra to modified ISF was more than we wanted to bite off before we got to playing.

But the idea was appealing.  If you had no income from trade in an ISF economy - the runaway economic spiral would definitely slow down.

[crucis]

I added the emphasis.
And you are right.  The chance to grow lots of pops on every little rock is pretty poor.
Expensive.  Takes a lot of time.  And isn't going to grow very far unless your game lasts a LOOONG time.

Trade was the big income.  Find friends - get rich.


But for us - finding friends just boosts you TL research....
So....
You wouldn't get runaway incomes.  Your homeworld will increase in income pretty well, but that will be the only major increase.

There are a few other ways to control trade incomes.

1. Reduce the percentages used to determine that income.
2. Increase the chances of new contacts being hostile, thus increasing the risk to aggressive explorers.
3. Place limits on the amount of trade income, such as saying that an empire's trade income cannot exceed its (internal) imperial income.

Those are 3 right off the top of my head.  There may be others.

We did toy with the idea of reinstituting this mechanic in our games when we went from GSF to Ultra.
But decided not to as it would have required rewriting a LARGE number of house rules.  And making the jump from GSF to Ultra looked like it was going to be enough work.
Adjusting Ultra to modified ISF was more than we wanted to bite off before we got to playing.

But the idea was appealing.  If you had no income from trade in an ISF economy - the runaway economic spiral would definitely slow down.

If you had no income from trade in ISF, you were really hosed because colonization's ability to greatly enhance your income was limited.  With some luck, you might find some empty T/ST's and build up some Small pops.

Without trade, the only other major ways to greatly increase your income would have been to find some really friendly NPR's to amalgamate into your empire, or conquest.

[procyon]

There are a few other ways to control trade incomes.

1. Reduce the percentages used to determine that income.
2. Increase the chances of new contacts being hostile, thus increasing the risk to aggressive explorers.
3. Place limits on the amount of trade income, such as saying that an empire's trade income cannot exceed its (internal) imperial income.

Those are 3 right off the top of my head.  There may be others.

These could be options.
And we do use #2.  Kind of....
As SM - the players don't meet lots of friendly races....

We just wanted very limited incomes to keep the game manageable.
We don't want 100 ships on a side battles.  The best way to do that was to make it nearly impossible to afford them.

If you had no income from trade in ISF, you were really hosed because colonization's ability to greatly enhance your income was limited.  With some luck, you might find some empty T/ST's and build up some Small pops.

Without trade, the only other major ways to greatly increase your income would have been to find some really friendly NPR's to amalgamate into your empire, or conquest.

Yep.  That's pretty much it.
And so far, in all our turns, no one has managed to amalgamate a race.  My wife has come close...

So it boils down to conquest.
Which in our game, is a very risky proposition.

[Paul M]

SM2 introduced a minimum cost for EL research.  For the first four tech levels you will be above the limit to trigger it, and those first 4 tech levels are the most expensive in the game, 1000 MCr to a TL1/2 race is a substantial fraction of their income.  But I was speaking of the item research costs and for those after some point the cost increase becomes largely not relevant.  Steve must have paid 200,000 MCr or so to develop fighters early.  But his income was at that point nearly 1,000,000 MCr.

As for the "simplistic" economic model...frankly this is a matter of taste and preference but such models inevitably end up min-maxed, if for no other reason than it is easy to do so.  Once this happens then either every player employes such min-maxing or else you end up behind economically (and that means you have lost).  This removes options from the players.  That is why I would rather have a system that is more complex for the designer but offers the players options.  I don't think that it is more difficult for the player to deal with a "mixed economy" than a "MCr" economy but it is much harder to min-max a system with multiple variables, and in general the chance of an extreme deviation from a multi-variable optimization is reduced.  It is why D&D with its trivial characteristics leads rapidly to, as the TV Tropes site says: "One Stat To Rule Them All" and other such things you can find there.  To avoid that you need to bring in some design complexity.  A professional economist is a good idea and one if I was serious about a game design I would start with.  4X games (or any RTS) are ultimately management games (they aren't strategic, strategic thought takes a few seconds) and having the core of the game (its economic model) be abusable leads to the game quickly becoming stale.

[crucis]

SM2 introduced a minimum cost for EL research.  For the first four tech levels you will be above the limit to trigger it, and those first 4 tech levels are the most expensive in the game, 1000 MCr to a TL1/2 race is a substantial fraction of their income.  But I was speaking of the item research costs and for those after some point the cost increase becomes largely not relevant.  Steve must have paid 200,000 MCr or so to develop fighters early.  But his income was at that point nearly 1,000,000 MCr.

Yeah, it was like about 30% for startup, and 10% for the monthly fee for EL research.  But there's no reason that the same concept couldn't be applied to tech item development as well (just as is done in Ultra).  Though I should say that paying 20% of your income to develop a tech system using PT development is a pretty darned hefty cost and seems quite "relevant" to me.

As for the "simplistic" economic model...frankly this is a matter of taste and preference but such models inevitably end up min-maxed, if for no other reason than it is easy to do so.  Once this happens then either every player employs such min-maxing or else you end up behind economically (and that means you have lost).  This removes options from the players.  That is why I would rather have a system that is more complex for the designer but offers the players options.  I don't think that it is more difficult for the player to deal with a "mixed economy" than a "MCr" economy but it is much harder to min-max a system with multiple variables, and in general the chance of an extreme deviation from a multi-variable optimization is reduced.  It is why D&D with its trivial characteristics leads rapidly to, as the TV Tropes site says: "One Stat To Rule Them All" and other such things you can find there.  To avoid that you need to bring in some design complexity.  A professional economist is a good idea and one if I was serious about a game design I would start with.  4X games (or any RTS) are ultimately management games (they aren't strategic, strategic thought takes a few seconds) and having the core of the game (its economic model) be abusable leads to the game quickly becoming stale.

Regarding complex vs simple, I prefer a simpler model because I don't want the focus of the game to be on micro-micro-managing of an empire's monetary system, and worrying about whether to move a tiny handful of PTU's here or there.  I prefer a higher level view, because I don't want to get dragged down into the weeds.  Also, too much micro-micro-managing in the economic system to me moves the focus of the game away from where I like it ... more on building ships, moving ships, exploring, meeting NPRs, and fighting whatever wars pop up.

But as we've both pointed out, it's a matter of taste.  And we simply (pardon the pun) seem to have different tastes as to complexity when it comes to the game's economic system. 

[Paul M]

If you do it without even thinking about it then it is not relevant.  20% for a game changing system like fighters isn't even anything you spend a second thought on.  It becomes relevant when you have to save money for 3 turns to afford it and think about if it is worth doing in the first place.

As I said, the player isn't likely to have any more difficulty managing an economy with more than MCr, it is the game designer who suffers the complexity.  I don't like games that end up being min-maxed and then you have to do stuff I don't think is sensible just to stay competive.  Whether that is heavy IU investment, exploring with EXs, or whatever...when I have to do "insert thing" else I am dooming myself then a game has "epic failed" for me.  There should not be one true path to sucess.

The starfire combat system is actually extremely good that way, no matter how wacky the combination is, you can make it work.  Unfortunately there are some combinations that don't work for some generic tasks (WP assault, WP defence) that are critical to the game. 

But to me, what is important is not "simplicity" or "complexity" but player choice.  An easily min-maxed, gamed, exploited or manipulated system, regardless of how complex or simple it is, is what I am against.

[crucis]

If you do it without even thinking about it then it is not relevant.  20% for a game changing system like fighters isn't even anything you spend a second thought on.  It becomes relevant when you have to save money for 3 turns to afford it and think about if it is worth doing in the first place.

As I said, the player isn't likely to have any more difficulty managing an economy with more than MCr, it is the game designer who suffers the complexity.  I don't like games that end up being min-maxed and then you have to do stuff I don't think is sensible just to stay competitive.  Whether that is heavy IU investment, exploring with EXs, or whatever...when I have to do "insert thing" else I am dooming myself then a game has "epic failed" for me.  There should not be one true path to success.

The Starfire combat system is actually extremely good that way, no matter how wacky the combination is, you can make it work.  Unfortunately there are some combinations that don't work for some generic tasks (WP assault, WP defence) that are critical to the game. 

But to me, what is important is not "simplicity" or "complexity" but player choice.  An easily min-maxed, gamed, exploited or manipulated system, regardless of how complex or simple it is, is what I am against.

Paul, I guess that we have very different outlooks.

I think that paying 20% of one's income to develop a single tech system is extremely "relevant".  20% is 20%.  In the example you cite, if there's a problem, it's not that Steve paid 20% (i.e. 200K MC) to develop fighters.  Rather, perhaps it's that he had an income of a million MC.


And for me it is about the game having simplicity (to a degree).  I could make Cosmic be full of "player choice".  It could have "player choice" coming out its ears.  And it might end up being a rulebook that was over 500 pages long that a lot of people wouldn't bother opening due to its size.  At some point, one has to say "enough's enough" and take a stand on the game not becoming too bloated with "player choice" features.  Ultra is over 370 pages long.  Solar is over 420 pages long.  I don't think that I aspire to creating a rule book that reaches those lengths, though it's possible it would happen in spite of my best efforts.  Boring weapons aside, you sound like someone who'd like Ultra or Solar because they have bucket loads of "player choice" with long optional rules sections, etc.

As I said, i think that we have very different outlooks.  I view Starfire much the same way as Dave Weber did ... as a wargame.  I'm not interested in a Starfire where the point of the strategic game is my empire's balance sheet and the order of battle is little more than an expense on that balance sheet.  That sounds really boring to me.


Also, Paul, please don't take anything I've said above as hostility.  As I said, we clearly have different points of view on Starfire.  But there are areas where we do agree, and I always appreciate your comments.  If I've taken a long time to reply to your last post, it was because I didn't want to sound hostile.

Moving on...




BTW, I agree about that TRPTD.  PT is one thing.  It's simple enough.  (See a weapon of a higher TL.  Develop it yourself.)  But that TRPT thing is bogus to me because some of the counters (in SM#2) are really not obvious ones (at least to me).  And even in Ultra, I can't fully agree with the counters.  GB's as a "counter" to fighters?  Really?  Fighters should be the counter to fighters, or in 3e, Di or AFM's.  GB's should only be viewed as a counter if your race can't use fighters for some reason that's sort of outside the purview of the game's rules.

TRPTD requires a judgement about what the appropriate counter tech is, and quite often, I think that the supposed counter simply isn't particularly obvious.  I mean, why should Overload Dampeners be an obvious counter to E-beams?  Are there any other beam weapons that have a similar energy siphoning defensive tech that would lead one to think that "O" is such an obvious counter?  If anything, it seems to me that the more obvious counter to E-beams is better shields.  The only reason that "O" is an "obvious" counter is because we know that it's on the list of tech systems.

Regarding PTD, I think that it should actually be more difficult and take more time than it is in ISF.  The difference in TL's should be reflected in how long it takes to develop.  And if anything, it should probably take more time to do PTD, depending on the TL diff, than regular development, because of the TL difference issue.

[Paul M]

When your income is in around one million you can spend 200,000 of it to develop a game changing technology without blinking.  Consider that to do TL2 research your race is investing 1000 MCr, and that is around 33% of your income (2000 PU*1.25*1.1*1.1), and likely leaves you with peanuts to spend on other things (less than 1000 MCr).  Whereas that 200,000 for fighters leaves you 800,000 MCr still left to spend, even with a maintenance of 500,000 that is still 300,000 to spend.  At this point the starfire economics no longer has a brake.  You would have to do something like Kurt did with his fortifiy every system with a major population to see an effect.  This is pretty much what Weber's TFN did.  They have a massive investment in defences judging by the bases you see near planets in scenarios.

This is not done in starfire campaigns because it is pointless (bases can't defend the planet) and expensive.  It is not optimal.  To remain competetive in starfire you can't deviate signficantly from the optimal.  This is what I mean by player choice.  This isn't a rules question, you can't add rules that give player choice.  You are talking about options such as racial characteristics or bonuses.  I am talking about if it is possible to suceed at the game without using EX's for your survey fleets, or massively investing in IU, or building solid defences etc.  Starfire is a wargame, Imperial Starfire is a management game.  ALL RTS (real time strategy) games are management games.  They all have to do with optimizing spreadsheets (even if you can't see the spread sheet).  Strategic thought takes a few seconds, managment takes hours.

Starfire the tactical game gives you the player choice.  You can design your ships as you like, and for the most part if you adapt your tactics to your design you will be sucessful.  The exception is when you hit a tactical situation you can't adapt to.  Engaging Rc armed BCs with F armed BCs in a deepspace battle isn't going to work no matter what tactical wizardy you employ.  I've played battles with utterly random ships and made them work even if my first reaction to the ship was "oh my god."  But even so there are just limits depending on the type of battle...assaulting a warp point with only Rc armed ships isn't so easy...

Where player choice vanishes is with the Empire State Formation and the Shoot On One Target Till She Pops tactics.  This removes manuever from the game, basically reducing it to a 1D combat system.  The Empire State Formation and the fact an F is an F independant of it is on a CT or a BB also reduce the effect of player choice.  If you have a BB and the other person has 6-8 CTs it is a hard call who will win.   Even if the BB wins it will be a cripple.  This is the same thing that happens in most games which have ablative defenses and a limited weapon selection.  Starfire magnifies this with the construction rules that make those CTs cheaper to build, faster to build and less expensive to maintain.

The single currency economy in the economic side of starfire limits player choice in the extreme since a system like this is easy to optimize, and there is virtually no chance that you get multiple optimizatoin paths.  This completely restricts players, you no longer can choose to not follow the optimized route or else you will fall behind.  Just look at the difference between Starslayer's economy and mine in our game.  I've seen this in not only starfire but also games such as HOIx where I nearly banged my head on the wall in frustration over the damned "optimizers" who would come on about how the one true path was doing x.  As far as I am concerned when this happens a "strategy" game has failed, and failed epically to use modern internet parlance.  The only way to avoid this is to have an economy that has at least a modicum of complexity to it since optimization of a 3 variable function is more likely to result in different solutions then a single variable function.  But this complexity does not hit the player, nor does it require 100 extra pages of rules it hits the game designer who has to deal with the balancing and so on that goes into the game system.

Look at the economics in Victoria or Pride of Nations.  Both use similar ideas, Victoria is an utterly incomprehensible mess and the other is much more straightforward to deal with.  But a strategy game needs strategic input, to keep the player engaged you need to be challenging them with "strategic" choices regularily.  Starfire does not because well there isn't any reason to "not" do things if you can afford them.   Most decisions in starfire (Imperial starfire or the 4X part) doen't take thought.  See a habitable, colonize it.  See an open warp point explore it.  Meet an NPR, talk to them.  Can communicate, offer trade.  Have trade, work up to amalgamation.   Keep fleet costs as low as possible to maximize you colonization money, as money early is better than money later. 

In the München game we even had people trying to break the economics by devious means.  One person basically had no fleet until they developed SDs...but by that time they had a massive economy to invest in them.  I've seen pretty much every thing you can do to the economy.  Starslayer is the better person to talk about what the one true path to economic dominance is, as doing that offends my sensibilities too much.

The main input into strategy in stafire is the random exploration.  How the warp points connect.  But at least with ISF's tech system there is no strategic thought involved.  GSF at least requires you to think about how you use your breakthru's and such.

At the end of the day player choice isn't about optional rules, it isn't about more rules, it isn't about complex rules it is about giving the player viable options to choose from within the existing rules.  Whenever you can say "you only need to build x" then the game has failed to provide this.  That ultimatly leads to the player becoming bored and not playing the game.  Chess has survived for as long as it has, because within a very simple rule set is a lot of player choice.  For every opening there exists a good number of things you as the opponent can do to counter it, and the number of openings is large.  Starfire has one, and only one economically viable start, if you deviate from that you will fall behind economically outside of having much better exploration luck.

The only way to keep a simple one variable economy under control is to do all the things Proycon mentions.  You have to keep the available money to be spent each turn small to encourage the player to balance each possible expense against the other.  Either you reduce income growth, or you increase costs but the key point is that the amount of money to be spent has to be controlled.  My opinion is that a more varied economy can work at giving the player both more choices in how to develop but also functions to make the balancing act more interesting to the player.  It also adds "strategic value" to systems if they are the sole source of agent yellow that you need to build your deathrays of doom or whatever.  I don't see that such a thing necessitates 100 extra pages of rules.

And no I'm not a fan of too many optional rules.  Most of the time they are just another way to min-max your way forward.  If you are going to put in optional rules and whatever then they need to add to the game experience.  I started playing Avalon Hill's Squad Leader so I have a different view on the value of rules perhaps but still I am dubious I would be interested in Solar or Ultra or Extragalactic or whatever just because it has lots of optional rules. 

[Starslayer_D]

Actually, the production difference is not that great if you substract me amalgenating a 34k income NPR about 2 dozen turns back. That 3 SMTP colonisation distance wall is a very hard brick...

Well, I have ´Battletech: Objective Raids in my bookshelf. Interresting book for the emrcenary and industrial minded, as it lists the company and wich world it is based on for the manufacture of every single component used in building your mech. Well, any component ever mentioned in prior sourcebooks. So Raid a world and put the producer of said mechtype in dire troubles by say... keeing his reactor shipment from ariving.
But it's  abit complex for a game of starfire without computer support. But if you ahve to build factores for your weapons etc, and then have to ship them to your shipyards, then you really can make use of commerce raiding and resource denial. especially if some components needs mineral resources wich are scarce on most planets. and then you have planets all over your empire who are suddenly economic viable, and wich need to be protected and guarded and developped even though they are not in a vital warp junction etc. 

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*

[sloanjh]

Two things:

1)  I thought Paul's analysis was exquisite.
2)  One thing he didn't touch on:  What is the purpose of the strategic game (4X) relative to the tactical game?  Is the purpose of the strategic game to give a framework for generating "realistic" OOBs and victory conditions for tactical battle setups?  Or is it intended as the primary game, i.e. are people primarily competing in a 4X game with the tactical battles a more sophisticated/detailed version of putting human tactical choices into battles (such as the "Assault/Probe/Defend/Delay" choices in Halls of Montezuma)?  The answer to this question tells a designer where he wants to focus on giving players a richness of decision making (the primary game) and where he wants to focus on minimizing the time required to move forward (the secondary game).  And if the designer wants the answer to be "both", then he still needs to worry about satisfying players who might be interested in one aspect or the other and don't want to be bored with micro-managing the aspect of the game in which they are uninterested.  I actually think that this is the place where optional rules belong - to put in place an alternate mechanism that simplifies the game mechanics, so that people who are uninterested in that aspect of the game can simply cut it out and replace it with a plausible abstraction.

The best example I can remember of "strategic in support of tactical" is Red Storm Rising on the computer (which is available on one of the abandoned software sites).  You would move your submarine on the strategic map to set up the starting conditions for a tactical battle with Russion TG.

An example of "tactical in support of strategic" is Sword of the Stars.  One of my frustrations with this game was that, once your empire got big, it used to take a huge amount of time to wade through all the tactical battles to advance to the next turn.  I think it would have been very nice in this game to be able to auto-resolve battles, so that the 4X part of the game didn't drag to a halt.

Another interesting example of this is Stars!, which has the AI play both sides of the tactical battles while allowing the player to watch (and fast-forward if uninterested).  Another game that handled this well was Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, which allowed you to give general tactical orders for each tactical turn, after which the AI would resolve the detailed orders and combat for each ship.

John

[MWadwell]

I would just say that EX can't mount X and be done with it.

Sorry, I was away on holidays for a fortnight.

Another way to limit the use of EX(X), is to make them more vunerable to the using empire.

If (for example), they were more likely to surrender and fail the data dump roll (due to the higher numbers of civilian scientists on board), and had a higher chance of containing system data of the area, you'd quite quickly see people avoid using EX(X)'s as widely as they do....

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. 

Just to raise a point - when was PP ever a limit? Someone mentioned hitting the limit once, when needing to raise a planetary invasion force. My point, is that having rules for a limiting system (PP), when the limit is rarely ever reached is a waste of space and time - space in the rulebook, and time for the player to check every turn whether they have hit it or not.

[MWadwell]

I added the emphasis.
And you are right.  The chance to grow lots of pops on every little rock is pretty poor.
Expensive.  Takes a lot of time.  And isn't going to grow very far unless your game lasts a LOOONG time.

Trade was the big income.  Find friends - get rich.

It wasn't just the finding friend part.

Using the pre-SM#2 ISF, with the slow population growth, often the only source for colonists was the homeworld, and once you have colonised those close by planets, the multi-turn colonisation convoys makes colonisation unrealistic. But, using the pre-SM#2 ISF, pretty soon you will find an alien race that will fall over itself to ally (and eventually amalgamate) with you - providing another source for colonisation (and income).

This changed in SM#2, both by the introduction of PTU/PU to "stage" the colonies growth (i.e. not needing to get the required H/Q onto the desired planet within a tight time frame using the IFN - instead being able to do it a couple of PTU per turn as you can afford to), by the increase in colony growth rate (allowing older colonies to start being sources for newer colonies), and by increasing the hostility of NPRs (making them less likely to become amalgamated with you).

Where SM#2 fell down, was that they didn't make the NPR's big enough. By the middle of the game, you are large enough that if you run into a NPR, and the First Contact roll goes against you - as they are a single system empire, you can quickly conquor them.

What I would do, is to allow them to be multi-system, with a comparible economy. This would result in players less likely to go to war with them.

Of course, this also has the problem that it makes the game more susceptible to chance.....

[MWadwell]

On asteroid populations, while I don't see why you would stick millions of people in asteriods in a belt (or for that matter what they would do) I only said it was possible to have a substantial belter population.  At the end of the day a population on mars (an O2 world) would be easier overall to sustain and be more sensible but technologically there isn't an real reason you could not put a lot of people into the belt.  For the game it is the difference between "can" and "should" essentially.  It can be justified but it should be avoided to have large populations in the belt.

(Sighs) There is a problem in reducing the population sizes in the belt. This is somewhat painful for me to point out (as I would prefer to remove them entirely) - but a cul de sac empire will need something to spend it's money on - and if O2/O1/AST colonisation is eliminated/reduced, an empire unable to expand (i.e. no WP's) is going to have nothing to spend it's money on.....

To me where the starfire (and SFB and any number of other such systems) combat system fails is where basically there is a weapon "F" and the difference between ship type 1 and ship type 2 is just how many F's it carries.  Things like FASA's Star Trek Bridge Simulator did a much better job than SFB ever did because they had different phasers/disrupters/torpedoes on different types of ships.  The best example I can give for why I thnk this is bad way to design a system is the case in Steve's campaign where a single Rigillian DD with HET destroyed was it 100 Bug BBs?  Doesn't really matter if it was 3 DDs or 1 DD or 50 or 100 BBs but that was just absurd to me.  But this is just pie in the sky dreaming on my part.

I believe it was three (HET) armed destroyers, and they destroyed ~40 F armed BB's.

[MWadwell]

Actually, the production difference is not that great if you substract me amalgenating a 34k income NPR about 2 dozen turns back. That 3 SMTP colonisation distance wall is a very hard brick...

Well, I have ´Battletech: Objective Raids in my bookshelf. Interresting book for the emrcenary and industrial minded, as it lists the company and wich world it is based on for the manufacture of every single component used in building your mech. Well, any component ever mentioned in prior sourcebooks. So Raid a world and put the producer of said mechtype in dire troubles by say... keeing his reactor shipment from ariving.

  Well, not every single component.

I put together a sheet (I didn't own a PC at the time), which listed every single mech type, and where each of the components were manufactured. There were a few missing items (as in some mechs did not have a associated reactor manufacturer, or fire control system, etc.)

I will admit it - I am anal....