Anybody Still Have the UMT?

[Paul M]

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.

But even some excel spreadsheets I had to do a quasi 4th edition game quickly became cumbersome.  The ones provided by Marvin were ok-ish but managing an empire more than a few star systems in size is a major task without a database program (largely what starfire assistant is) that gives you the data you want, in a form that is not overwhelming.  I actually played starfire by pen and paper in a play by snail mail game years ago.  Even then you quickly get meshed down in the details.  It is hard to track which ship is where, what their orders are, which planets you have colonies on etc.  But the flip side of starfire assistant is that games VERY quickly get huge.

As for the difficulty level of 3rd(R) or 4th the key point is that if you start off with a low tech level the game is still very simple.  You have a limited choice of weapons (gun, missile launcher, and laser basically) and ship design is simple since you have both small ships and few systems to put in them.  Starfire economics were also brain-dead...nothing was a bad investment the only thing that you had were varying rates of return.  Basically you could only not grow as fast as someone else.  I also don't recall that the rules were more than 60 pages, and Weber's writing (for 3rd) was at the least entertaining...it was not always clear but it was entertaining.  As far as the economics went the lack of "bad investments" mean that the rich get richer faster and faster and that the money available quickly spirals out of control...this is true in the 4th edition but the increased costs and reduced incomes just mean it will take longer to happen.  At some stage in either edition money becomes irrelevant for a big empire, which is never good for the game.  As much as people hated crew points they were in the game to keep the fleet sizes reasonable...their removal well caused fleet expansion bloat that then cycles back to requiring computer support to play the game.

It is certainly relatively easy to teach someone to play starfire starting with Tech 1 ships as there are basically no complex rules either for movement or firing.  I even think the 4th edition rules has something about that in a quick start section or something.  But playing the first few battles from the Stars at War would teach anyone the basics quickly.

There is really no comparison between Starfire and Starfleet Battles.  Starfire allows you to play major fleet engagments out, Starfleet Battles tops out at 4-6 ships a side.  I finally drew the line at running 250 corvettes.  I told Alex that was far too many to deal with.  But you can have a playable if slow battle with 50-100 ships a side in Starfire.  Fun for me is smaller battles (12-24 ships a side) but even major warp point assaults aren't that bad...just not battles with 250 corvettes.  Just remembering which counters were which ships and not shooting some ship that had its weapon destroyed last turn was a major annoyance.  I was regularly tapped to play the NPC...largely because my empire was relatively peaceful I think.  And since the NPC ships were generated by Steve's randomizer I got to play a large number of weird designs and quickly came to the realization that no design is unplayable but you can't play them all the same way.  The key was to figure out how to use the design...but for a new player it means they can't design something that is utterly useless.  I should also point out that 250 corvettes is something that I am sure Steve and Kurt dealt with in their campaigns...so it isn't that outrageous a number.  But the OOB of my empires last warp point assault had over 100 ships in it, and that was not my entire fleet...I can't recall what fraction but I figure it was far less than half in number of hulls but more in terms of hull spaces since it included virtually all my heavy ships.  But I had 4 or 5 warp point nexus in my empire so I had a lot of patrol forces.  It was a nightmare of epic proportions and at the same time since a few of the nexus connected a valuable strategic resource.

One thing that is worth mentioning is system scale maneuver is really something that doesn't get used enough in Starfire.  One time we had two situation maps, with the two sides one each map and the GMs moving between us to update the map with our moves.  That was really an eye opening experience.  I was the NPC again and was also in charge of one players fleet and no one told me he had ships with communications modules (speed of light comms) so I ended up waiting for drones to arrive and trust me that takes a lot longer than you might think.  When I finally could move the enemy had managed to assemble...but had I known of those ships...it would have been a defeat in detail of the other player.  He did fox me totally by sending in unarmed ships...lots of unarmed ships.  I didn't engage cause the odds were not really in my favor...then it turns out they were utterly unarmed...chutzpah.  It really gave me a better understanding of the terms "Operational Realities"  and "fog of war."  Anyway regardless of no battle the result was a peace treaty as I think both sides were intimidated by each other.

I just need to get the locals interested in either squadron strike or attack vector: tactical.  But those are again small scale battle systems...they just use Newtonian physics.  Starfire is otherwise pretty much dead here in München since Alex moved up north since transferring a database by email just never caught on.  Which is too bad since it was a real blast and the game is the only one I know of to allow for real fleet combat with at least a bit of detail to the proceedings.

[miketr]

Hey Crucis,

The advantage to the ISF economic system is as you said it doesn't grow fast so the paper work load in terms of updates is much lighter.  The disadvantage of the ISF is that it doesn't grow fast.  In my group we want the growth so our economics expand, normally, the current game concept I am kicking around is a first for us.  You are correct colonizing and growth were a big part of the economic paper work load.

The REI multiplier in ISF created some out there economies.  Without it the Theban War Machine and to a lesser extent Danzig Detachment isn't possible.  Especially as they didn't max their home system, they only put colonies on one of their four asteroid fields.  

For the most part our group does games where we do explorer the universe, the NPC's are viewed as targets to be taken out to provide extra economic strength before they find other players.  Last game I did I pre-built everything where the players had three lines to head down.  One headed towards the center of the 'galaxy' while the other two headed out along the edge.  The galaxy was setup as a pin wheel configuration and people could get 10 systems before hitting the NPC's in a choke point systems that separated the players.  

Michael

[miketr]

Hey Paul M,

Size of fights was also an issue for us.  The solution was for us to cut in half or in one third all numbers of ships when fights were done.  As a result people had a habit of building ships in groups of nine.  When you have 6 players, all of them fighting wars with up to dozen NPR's things could really get out of hand.  I think the largest battle we ever did was two PC's vs. a much higher tech level race.  That had to be about 200 ships total, with the above reductions, so it was really a 600 ship battle.  With gunboats and fighters.  It took several hours for us to fight out and and it was a bloody draw.  

Michael

[crucis]

Hey Crucis,

The advantage to the ISF economic system is as you said it doesn't grow fast so the paper work load in terms of updates is much lighter.  The disadvantage of the ISF is that it doesn't grow fast.  In my group we want the growth so our economics expand, normally, the current game concept I am kicking around is a first for us.  You are correct colonizing and growth were a big part of the economic paper work load.

Mike, the problem with economies growing fast is that it will grow out of control ... fast.    And economies that grow so fast as to grow out of control will quickly produce fleets of hundreds of ships, a fairly common complaint among some players.



In ISF, populations aren't really meant to naturally grow within the game's time frame, as witness by the extremely long growth times.  Growth in pure ISF is more a case of economic growth (increases to a world's EVM) caused by increases to TL, which should occur every ~10-20 turns or so.  But of course, this sort of TL-based economic growth won't cause any increases to a world's population bracket. Now, it would be possible in an ISF-ish EVM style of economics that used "bulk growth" to greatly shorten the time needed to grow to the next population bracket.


The method of population growth is itself a point of complexity and paperwork in the game.  There are basically 3 methods that I can see.  

Method 1:  Fixed Period Growth: The ISF method where fixed periods that define the time needed to grow from one pop bracket to the next.  The ISF time periods are excessive long, but there's no reason that they couldn't be greatly shortened, for the sake of game play.

Method 2: Yearly Growth:  Yearly Growth causes a semi-regular (i.e. every 10 turns) and visible method of growth, without too, too much complexity or constant tracking of growth.  

Method 3: Monthly Growth:  Monthly Growth provides a much more regular and visible method of growth, but at the cost of truly constant recalculation and tracking of population growth for every single populated planet, moon, and asteroid belt in your empire.

Theoretically, it's entirely possible to produce a set of numbers that would produce a pace of natural growth that could cause a population to move from bracket to bracket as the same rate, regardless of whether one used method one, two, or three.  At that point, the question would then become, what is one's relative tolerance for the annoyances of constant or semi-constant recalculation of population sizes and the tracking thereof, vs. the desire or need to actually see visible signs of that growth.

Of course, if one is more inclined towards a p&p game, it's likely that you'd prefer minimizing excessive recalculations and paperwork and would find Fixed Growth more palatable.  OTOH, I can see where if one was using something like SA, or even just some well-written spreadsheets, which minimized or even eliminated the recalculation annoyances, you might prefer a more constant and regular growth method.

Personally, I favor fixed growth, largely because I favor a p&p game, and believe that Starfire needs to be designed and written as a p&p game.  When someone points out that the game can't be played without "computer support", this can be caused or made more true by using game processes that only serve to make this happen... such as more paperwork intensive monthly or yearly growth processes.  IMHO, people can't have it both ways...  One can't state that the game isn't playable without "computer support" (assuming that it is one's desire that the game BE playable without such support) and but at the same time prefer game processes that cause this very "requirement" for computer support.  If one wants a game that can be played without "computer support" then one also has to accept that such a game would need to use of simpler game processes that do not require such support.  It's as simple as that.





BTW, a really simple way to mitigate growth issues for Desolate and Extreme populations is to do what ISF does ... and say that no natural growth occurs on such worlds.  That way, you'd limit natural growth to T/ST worlds, which should greatly reduce the annoyance and paperwork issues related to growth.

The REI multiplier in ISF created some out there economies.  Without it the Theban War Machine and to a lesser extent Danzig Detachment isn't possible.  Especially as they didn't max their home system, they only put colonies on one of their four asteroid fields.  

Oh, I'm sure that the Theban "war machine" probably isn't all that possible with the use of pure ISF economies... though remember that (like the Bug navy) it was built up over a number of decades of construction.

As for the REI, if I were to suggest a suggest a modification of pure ISF economics, I wouldn't suggest entirely dumping the REI.  The EVM values by themselves are too low to function be themselves.  I would probably suggest using a fixed and relatively low value for REI, perhaps somewhere around 3 to 5.  A fixed REI of 3 with a TL1 EVM of 1000 for a Very Lg pop produces a GPV of 3000, which is similar to the GPV of a TL/EL VLg in SM#2 or 4e.

For the most part our group does games where we do explorer the universe, the NPC's are viewed as targets to be taken out to provide extra economic strength before they find other players.  Last game I did I pre-built everything where the players had three lines to head down.  One headed towards the center of the 'galaxy' while the other two headed out along the edge.  The galaxy was setup as a pin wheel configuration and people could get 10 systems before hitting the NPC's in a choke point systems that separated the players.  

Michael

Oh, NPR's are certainly "economic targets".  The real problem they pose in a seriously competitive game is that some NPR's may ally with you without costing you anything, while other NPR's may turn hostile.  Of course, some people may find hostile NPR's quite enjoyable, but in highly competitive player vs. player games, some may see hostile NPR's as an extremely unlucky situation that greatly reduces their long term chances of victory against their fellow players.

But to each his own.  


Crucis

[miketr]

Crucis,

From having to do our games in the past if / when we do a exploration based game again we will have to do something else.  Its fairly clear that SM2 colonization and growth is just to fast and at the same time too much of a pain to deal with in terms of book keeping.  Issue with using a fixed length for growth is we then have to track when a colony was established as X number of turns need to pass before it grows.  Granted this is a minor paper work load compared to what we used before.  Your suggestion on hostile and extreme environments has merit.

As to NPR's what I did in that last game was make it so that the NPR's would never be better than neutral and most likely hostile towards player races.  Lost of first contact that resulted in smashed survey fleets.  It taught the players some caution.  

Michael

[crucis]

Crucis,

From having to do our games in the past if / when we do a exploration based game again we will have to do something else.  Its fairly clear that SM2 colonization and growth is just to fast and at the same time too much of a pain to deal with in terms of book keeping.  Issue with using a fixed length for growth is we then have to track when a colony was established as X number of turns need to pass before it grows.  Granted this is a minor paper work load compared to what we used before.  Your suggestion on hostile and extreme environments has merit.

Actually, the proper (SM#2 and 4e) term is Desolate, not "hostile".  [/quote]

Concerns of unreality aside, making NPR's mostly hostile should even out the luck factor involved in NPRs.

[miketr]

As to NPR's what I did in that last game was make it so that the NPR's would never be better than neutral and most likely hostile towards player races.  Lost of first contact that resulted in smashed survey fleets.  It taught the players some caution.  

Concerns of unreality aside, making NPR's mostly hostile should even out the luck factor involved in NPRs.

That was my objective, too many times in games before we had one player find a "pet" NPR that was higher tech level that became friends with the player.  Soon the player would get scans, buy sample or whatever some of those tech systems and get a leg up.  Even if it was nothing more than seeing a larger ship and getting the threat R&D bonus it gave the players a bonus.  So my current solution is for NPR's to show only smaller ships and be "antisocial" / "xenophobic".  It worked much better last game.

Michael

[crucis]

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...

In no particular order...

Length of rules... The rules for 2e's strategic side were 32 pages long, while ISF was 94 pages long (I check both documents).  I'd argue that 2e (New Empires) were entirely too vague, and not particularly well organized.  ISF was much better organized, and less vague (well, than 2e:NE at least)...  However, I'm a bit uncomfortable with complaints about rules length, since a lot of the length of these documents ends up accounting for new rules that old pros continuously wanted add, as well as rules covering areas where the vagues in older rules sets left situations unclear to player and SM alike.  Frankly, if one wants a set of strategic rules that are only 30-ish pages long, you're going to end up with something that's horribly vague and highly abstract.  (I'm sure the the highly abstract may appeal to some people, but I have a very hard time seeing horribly vague rules being popular with anyone...)


Investments:  I guess that it depends on what you mean by "bad investments".  If everyone knows what the "bad investments" are, no one will bother taking them, and all you've done is waste time and effort in developing them.  OTOH, if you are referring to some sort of set of investment rules that can cause an "investment" to randomly go bad at some point in the future, frankly I'm uninterested in complicating economics any more than they already are, and would prefer simplifying them.


Personnel points:  There's not a chance in hell of going down that rat hole again.   With all the complaints about paperwork and tracking missiles, etc., etc., etc., I see no way in hell that PP's will ever again see the light of day.


Explosive Economics:  I understand what you're talking about here...  I happen to believe that it's sort of a consequence of the conscious that SDS decision made to enhance colonization as a game strategy back in SM#2 (and moving forward).  But combining aggressive colonization rules, with aggressive PU growth tends to combine to produce an overall situation where imperial economic growth is rather explosive.  Also add another factor to this ... the relative commonality of T/ST planets... which gets into another related issue ... exploration luck.  One could make T/ST planets more rare as a way to reduce overall growth.  However, if you makes T/ST's more rare, you also end up increasing the degree of luck involved in finding T/ST.  In a solo game, this wouldn't really be an issue.  But in a multi-player competitive game, it may be an issue, if T/ST's were less common.

Ultra tends to try to slow down growth with its low PU growth rate (1% per month), but at the same time keeps T/ST fairly common to prevent exploration luck issues.  This design strategy seems aimed at pushing out the time at which imperial economy sizes will be rather overwhelming.  However, I'm personally of the opinion that so long as you keep the T/ST's relatively common, eventually, they'll all have major populations dumping more and more money into the imperial economy.    Of course, even if you reduce the numbers of T/ST, in a large game galaxy, you will eventually have them grow to major sizes and dump those large amounts of money into the economy as well....  (key word: eventually).  

You're also faced with another factor... if you make T/ST's less common, (and obviously more spread out), even if all players were equally (un)lucky in finding them, would they like playing in this game galaxy, since you'd have less (much less?) colonization of T/ST worlds...  Also, you're faced with players possibly not being happy with the rate of growth of the imperial economies.  However, if all the "stars" (and rules) align to produce relative quick economic growth early in the game, it seems that this would continue to remain true throughout the game, with the result being that you end up with the campaign's economies growing out of control too quickly...

I suppose that one thing that could be done is to use the Ultra startup strategy of guaranteeing 1 Benign (or 1 Harsh + 1 Hostile) world within 1 transit of your homeworld, but then use a "less common T/ST" strategy to reduce the numbers of habitables across the game galaxy.  Allowing for a guaranteed nice world close to home would give you some room to expand, but then you'd have to go hunting for more rare T/ST's.

It is certainly relatively easy to teach someone to play starfire starting with Tech 1 ships as there are basically no complex rules either for movement or firing.  I even think the 4th edition rules has something about that in a quick start section or something.  But playing the first few battles from the Stars at War would teach anyone the basics quickly.

Yes, I agree.  I'm aware of this and will be doing something about this at some point.

There is really no comparison between Starfire and Starfleet Battles.  Starfire allows you to play major fleet engagments out, Starfleet Battles tops out at 4-6 ships a side.  I finally drew the line at running 250 corvettes.  I told Alex that was far too many to deal with.  But you can have a playable if slow battle with 50-100 ships a side in Starfire.  Fun for me is smaller battles (12-24 ships a side) but even major warp point assaults aren't that bad...just not battles with 250 corvettes.  Just remembering which counters were which ships and not shooting some ship that had its weapon destroyed last turn was a major annoyance.  I was regularly tapped to play the NPC...largely because my empire was relatively peaceful I think.  And since the NPC ships were generated by Steve's randomizer I got to play a large number of weird designs and quickly came to the realization that no design is unplayable but you can't play them all the same way.  The key was to figure out how to use the design...but for a new player it means they can't design something that is utterly useless.  I should also point out that 250 corvettes is something that I am sure Steve and Kurt dealt with in their campaigns...so it isn't that outrageous a number.  But the OOB of my empires last warp point assault had over 100 ships in it, and that was not my entire fleet...I can't recall what fraction but I figure it was far less than half in number of hulls but more in terms of hull spaces since it included virtually all my heavy ships.  But I had 4 or 5 warp point nexus in my empire so I had a lot of patrol forces.  It was a nightmare of epic proportions and at the same time since a few of the nexus connected a valuable strategic resource.

Well, one of the things you're describing here, though indirectly, is the prevalence of swarm ships.  This is something that I intend to address in Cosmic... for starters, by making the per-HS hull cost of all warships constant.  Also, by getting rid of the 4 HS SY bonus thing.  It's not my intention to do go out of my way to make large ships have major advantages over swarm ships.  But I do intend on removing some of the small things that exist in the rules that favor the small ships.

One of the better ways to reduce the raw numbers of ships is to make it more economically viable to build fleets of smaller numbers of larger, more expensive ships, than huge numbers of smaller swarm ships.

One thing that is worth mentioning is system scale maneuver is really something that doesn't get used enough in Starfire.  One time we had two situation maps, with the two sides one each map and the GMs moving between us to update the map with our moves.  That was really an eye opening experience.  I was the NPC again and was also in charge of one players fleet and no one told me he had ships with communications modules (speed of light comms) so I ended up waiting for drones to arrive and trust me that takes a lot longer than you might think.  When I finally could move the enemy had managed to assemble...but had I known of those ships...it would have been a defeat in detail of the other player.  He did fox me totally by sending in unarmed ships...lots of unarmed ships.  I didn't engage cause the odds were not really in my favor...then it turns out they were utterly unarmed...chutzpah.  It really gave me a better understanding of the terms "Operational Realities"  and "fog of war."  Anyway regardless of no battle the result was a peace treaty as I think both sides were intimidated by each other.

While I don't disagree with you regarding system scale maneuver, if two sides just want to charge right at each other and get on with it, that's what will happen.  I don't think that it's really up to the designers to try to force the players to engage in more "system scale maneuvering", if that's not really how they want to fight their battles.

[Hawkeye]

I´m not sure I should step join in here, as I have zero experience with Starfire and know only about it from the stories I have read. But if an explosive expanding economy is a problem, how about introducing an element of diminishing return, like, doubling population only yields (sqr)2 rise in income? This could represent the growing bureaucracy needed to manage a growing empire up to the point, where any further expansion will need more money to keep things going than the expansion itself generates.
Or is something like this allready in?

[Paul M]

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.

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

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.  In play I had from the start one of the largest fleets but I also had some of the smallest economic growth...only reasonable since I had less money left after maintenance to invest.  The game allows you to surge fleets out of major space yard complexes in such a short time that it makes it a viable strategy to simply keep a minimal armed fleet, a large cheap exploration fleet and rely on mothballed fleets and new builds for your fleet.  It only requires an investment in SY complexes to give yourself the surge capacity you need.  It seems to me that a lot of the changes made to simplify the play have had the un-intended effect of making play more difficult at a latter date.  Easy colonization, the IFN, simple economics, no PP, etc all contribute to an exploding fleet size and the rich get richer syndrome.  Compare the total TFN fleet to say Kurt or Steve's fleets.

My issue with 250 corvettes was not the swarm itself, but the work involved in tracking 250 ships. Even trying to play some of the ISW4 scenarios was just a nightmare.  Starfire can handle large fleet sizes compared to any other system I can think of but at some point it just becomes not fun.  For me that was 250 CTs.  The change to the costs of them doesn't matter in the end since the cost of the hull is by a medium tech level hardly worth considering to the overall cost of the ship and the 4 HS rebate not an issue to 20 SY complexes.  

Exploration luck defines Starfire.  Marvin never grasped this.  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.

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.

[Paul M]

I´m not sure I should step join in here, as I have zero experience with Starfire and know only about it from the stories I have read. But if an explosive expanding economy is a problem, how about introducing an element of diminishing return, like, doubling population only yields (sqr)2 rise in income? This could represent the growing bureaucracy needed to manage a growing empire up to the point, where any further expansion will need more money to keep things going than the expansion itself generates.
Or is something like this allready in?

Nothing is in.  The only drag to your economy is the money you take out of economic investment for tech system development (as basic tech research increases your wealth) and to build and maintain your navy and army.  The rich get richer, faster and faster is the way it works.  You might actually see diminished net construction income from turn to turn depending on how much you are investing in warship production.  With growth turns (every 10 turns) you see a major jump in income, and any time your basic tech level increases your income jumps.

It is straight compound interest mathematics and essentially money early is better than more money later which makes the first random probes extremely critical.  Finding a starless nexus early in your exploration can have a serious effect down the road if someone else found a habitable world or a friendly NPR or for the GFFP crowd an NPR.  GFFP is genocide for fun and profit....*shakes fist at Dan*

[miketr]

What I quickly learned to do in games was pre-generate the first two or three systems out to assure that they were roughly the same for players.  No players finding a system with two T worlds tied locked around one another with 4 asteroid fields in a binary system.  I had that happen once in a early game.  In time the clear solution for me as the space master was to pre-generate the entire galaxy and do the things with NPR's I talked about up thread.  Problem with reducing the likely hood of finding T worlds is they then become that much more valuable and luck becomes an even bigger factor.  

If anything I would increase the chance of finding T worlds.  

Currently there is a big drop off in quality of worlds.  A T world within Habitability Index that is Very Rich is huge while a T world but out of HI and very poor is really bad.  Also worlds drop very quickly in terms of population.  T in HI -> T out HI -> ST -> O2.  A world like Mars is rated as O2 and so is the Moon but Mars should be a vastly better world to colonize.  So I would smooth out the spread of how habitable a planet is and reduce the effect of mineral wealth.  

It all comes down to reducing the effect of exploration luck.

Michael

[Hawkeye]

Ok, just a wild shot into the dark.

As I see it, houserules are nothing extraordinary in Starfire, so how about another one.

Say, any colony has a cost assigned, which accounts for the bureacracy it needs to keep running.
This cost is not a fixed amount, as this will become negligible rather fast, from what I gather, but a percentage of the total income.

If your goal is to limit empires to a maximum of, say, 50 colonies, the cost could be 1.5% of total (empire wide) income per colony.

Empires with those 50 colonies could probably live on with the remaining 25% of initial total income, but could hardly afford to expand further.
It would also prevent the "colonize anything that is there" I have read about, because colonizing bad planets now actually costs you money.

Adjust the numbers so you reach your goal of max colonies.

This doesn´t deal with a steadily increasing income (which I take includes higher productivity) due to tech advances, but at least you can set the colony cost so high, unmanagable empires become impossible.

[crucis]

What I quickly learned to do in games was pre-generate the first two or three systems out to assure that they were roughly the same for players.  No players finding a system with two T worlds tied locked around one another with 4 asteroid fields in a binary system.  I had that happen once in a early game.  In time the clear solution for me as the space master was to pre-generate the entire galaxy and do the things with NPR's I talked about up thread.  Problem with reducing the likely hood of finding T worlds is they then become that much more valuable and luck becomes an even bigger factor.  

If anything I would increase the chance of finding T worlds.  

Currently there is a big drop off in quality of worlds.  A T world within Habitability Index that is Very Rich is huge while a T world but out of HI and very poor is really bad.  Also worlds drop very quickly in terms of population.  T in HI -> T out HI -> ST -> O2.  A world like Mars is rated as O2 and so is the Moon but Mars should be a vastly better world to colonize.  So I would smooth out the spread of how habitable a planet is and reduce the effect of mineral wealth.  

It all comes down to reducing the effect of exploration luck.

Michael

Actually, I do not necessarily agree with these statements...

The problem with increasing the numbers of T/ST worlds is that habitable worlds are the true economic "gasoline" that lies on the floor of the galaxy waiting to be ignited, i.e. explosive economic growth.  Adding more T/ST's only pours more gasoline on the fire, making it worse.  

Will making T/ST's more rare also increase exploration luck?  In the normal sysgen process, yes it will.  It's just the way things are... The more rare you make something, the greater the effect that luck has on that thing... as long as the discovery of that "thing" remains random.  

OTOH, if T/ST were more common, while it reduces exploration luck, it also increases the problems of economic explosivity.




As for the comments regarding Habitability Index and Mineral Value, I tend to agree with you.  Let me look at Hab Index and Mineral value separately.

Mineral Value: IMO, mineral value certainly increases the effects of exploration luck.  However, from what I've heard and read, the concept of mineral value is fairly popular.  That said, it is possible to tweak it in ways to make it a bit less extreme.  For example, you could have MV's range from 80% for Very Poor up to 120% for Very Rich in 10% increments (i.e. 80%, 90%, 100%, 110%, and 120%).  This would somewhat mitigate mineral wealth differences.  

As for the Habitability Index, it depends on which rules set you look at.  In SM#2, the differences between Benign, Harsh, and Hostile worlds caused by HI differences are rather extreme...  Benigns have a max pop of VLg, Harsh is capped at Medium, and Hostile at Settlement, IIRC.  OTOH, in Ultra, the caps for Harsh and Hostile are upgraded to Lg and Medium, so the HI differences are considerably mitigated.  However, this also means that Harsh's and Hostile's will have larger populations and hence larger economies, which then only serves to increase the long term problem is explosively growing economies.  

As for describing the Habitability differences between the Moon and Mars, while there may be some truth to what you say, there's only so much complexity the "system" can absorb.  Trying to quantify the minor differences between a nearly airless body such as Mars and a totally airless body like the Moon would only add an additional degree of complexity to a game that many people find to be already too complex.

[crucis]

(snippage)  With growth turns (every 10 turns) you see a major jump in income, and any time your basic tech level increases your income jumps.

Well, if one is enough of a paperwork masochist, one could do growth on a monthly basis.  That certain makes the income jumps caused by growth much smaller.  It also means that you have to recalculate every world's population in your empire every single frickin' turn. Argh.  (One could simplify this to a degree by ruling that growth only occurs on T/ST ... which was the rule in ISF.)

The thing with growth in PU/PTU economics, whether monthly or yearly, and whether using SM#2's growth percentages or 4e's, some degree of accelerated growth seems necessary to promote a Colonization strategy within the game (as an alternative to a strictly NPR-centric strategy as in ISF).  However, in doing this, it also promotes economic growth at the same time, and lays the groundwork for later, more explosive economic growth.

It is straight compound interest mathematics and essentially money early is better than more money later which makes the first random probes extremely critical.  Finding a starless nexus early in your exploration can have a serious effect down the road if someone else found a habitable world or a friendly NPR or for the GFFP crowd an NPR.  GFFP is genocide for fun and profit....*shakes fist at Dan*

Well, if you're playing in a competitive game, you can remove the effects of finding friendly NPR's by making them all hostile, or remove the effects of NPR's altogether by simply removing NPR's from the campaign and just have the campaign be player vs. player.  (Plus, it would reduce the paperwork issues for the SM.)  

Of course, if a player is using GFFP, then finding an NPR is little different from finding an empty T/ST.  However, if you want to stop the GFFP strategy in its tracks, just rule that nuking T/ST planets makes them uninhabitable.