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.