Post by: Kwan Yu on June 18, 2009, 05:34:54 PM
Post by: Steve Walmsley on June 22, 2009, 11:29:53 AM
Steve
Post by: Kwan Yu on June 22, 2009, 03:48:15 PM
Post by: Tregonsee on June 23, 2009, 11:29:39 AM
Post by: Kwan Yu on June 23, 2009, 03:02:05 PM
Post by: Steve Walmsley on June 26, 2009, 02:24:29 PM
Quote from: "Tregonsee"
But does Marvin have legal standing should one person who owns a legal copy sell it to another person?No idea but it is a fascinating question. I had a quick search but this was the only page I could find that even referred to such a situation.
http://www.digitalsecrets.net/secrets/Copyright.html
Steve
Post by: crucis on June 26, 2009, 04:56:07 PM
Post by: miketr on March 22, 2010, 12:59:36 PM
Michael
Post by: crucis on March 22, 2010, 02:52:18 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
I take it from this that Marvin is still having his fit over 3rd Ed. What is the status of the new 3rd project, Cosmic Starfire? After a couple of years off I am looking at starting a new 3rd Campaign and having copies of core rules for new players would be helpful. So I take it that we can't buy even Sky Marshal II and 3rd Revised?
Michael
Michael,
I am in a fairly unique position to answer some of these questions (or direct you to where you might get some answers), given that I just happen to be the Lead Designer of Cosmic Starfire and, now, a member of SDS.
First of all, I'd suggest that you visit the new SDS site and SDS forum:
SDS Site: http://www.starfiredesign.com/starfire/index.php
SDS Forum: http://www.starfiredesign.com/forum/
Secondly, from what I can see on the current SDS Ordering page ( http://www.starfiredesign.com/starfire/order/index.php ), it does appear that the 3rdR rules, nor SM#2 nor the UTM are available for sale. However, you might want to consider joining the SDS Forum and posting a question about this in the General Starfire forum, and see what sort of response you get.
Thirdly, Cosmic Starfire is progressing slowly, so don't be expecting it any time soon. I'm the only person writing the rules, though I do have a small handful of people with whom I brainstorm ideas, etc. (I also took a few months off from working on Cosmic because I was a bit worn out from focusing on it so intensely for so long. But I'm back in the saddle again...)
I suppose that I should say that I'm not as chatty as Marvin was a decade ago when he was working on what became GSF, in part because because I don't want to get dragged into spending more time chatting about Cosmic than working on it... though I have to say that even when I've tried to be a little chatty, it's been like pulling teeth to get anyone to talk about it... which in turn can put a little bit of a damper on my own enthusiasm. :wink:
Post by: miketr on March 22, 2010, 05:43:14 PM
Crucis my interest in Starfire stated in the 90's. I picked up a copy of Crusade at my local gaming store and found it interesting, I really liked the background and wanted to learn more. I found the novels and then the game itself. Quickly I picked up ISF and SM2 at the same time; later I got all the other supplements. When SDS released Starfire 4th Ed I was one of those who strongly disliked the new system. So the group I am part of has kept playing starfire 3rd ed but our last game was about 2 or perhaps 3 years ago. I have copies of all my stuff but I am not sure who else has what. Also we never used SFA for our games where I was the space master we used excel to keep track of things. Most times we do games with about 20 or so systems per player and they last about 60 to 80 turns before they fall apart for one reason or another.
As you pointed out people in our group play for different reasons, some want to do empire building and combat doesn't matter all that much. Some combat is key and some its in between. Even for the empire builders economics and paper work is an issue and we have used a number of different things to reduce the paper work load from SM2 rules set. For example in the new game most likely we are going to have only T/ST worlds with colonies on them and for the universe to start fully explored. The concept I am toying with is for the players to be sector governors of a single empire that spins off into civil war.
I will be interested to see where you take 3rd Ed. ISF was interesting but the economics that could be generated were something else on fully built up systems. One of the issues that most annoyed me about the way things played out when Marvin and Steve had their bloodbath is the UTM was about done and now no one can buy it. "PLEASE NO ONE ELSE RESTART FIGHTS MANY YEARS DEAD." I had hoped that at least 3rdR and SM2 would be available for sale. Our group will figure something out if we can't buy stuff. If nothing else our groups customs rules I still have.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Michael
Post by: Father Tim on March 22, 2010, 06:02:38 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Quote from: "Tregonsee"But does Marvin have legal standing should one person who owns a legal copy sell it to another person?No idea but it is a fascinating question. I had a quick search but this was the only page I could find that even referred to such a situation.
http://www.digitalsecrets.net/secrets/Copyright.html
Steve
It depends on where you live, where the seller lives, where the buyer lives, and what the local laws are. It depends on whether the UTM was sold as a software package, or a software license. It depends on how the UTM is sold and paid for.
And above all, it depends on whether Marvin (or someone else) wants to sue. Being in the right doesn't mean you can't be sued, it just means you are likely to win . . . eventually . . . if you keep on top of the suit and file all the paperwork correctly and don't do anything stupid during the process.
Post by: crucis on March 22, 2010, 08:53:01 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
I have a request pending for an account to post on the SDS forum. We will see what happens.
Crucis my interest in Starfire stated in the 90's. I picked up a copy of Crusade at my local gaming store and found it interesting, I really liked the background and wanted to learn more. I found the novels and then the game itself. Quickly I picked up ISF and SM2 at the same time; later I got all the other supplements. When SDS released Starfire 4th Ed I was one of those who strongly disliked the new system. So the group I am part of has kept playing starfire 3rd ed but our last game was about 2 or perhaps 3 years ago. I have copies of all my stuff but I am not sure who else has what. Also we never used SFA for our games where I was the space master we used excel to keep track of things. Most times we do games with about 20 or so systems per player and they last about 60 to 80 turns before they fall apart for one reason or another.
As you pointed out people in our group play for different reasons, some want to do empire building and combat doesn't matter all that much. Some combat is key and some its in between. Even for the empire builders economics and paper work is an issue and we have used a number of different things to reduce the paper work load from SM2 rules set. For example in the new game most likely we are going to have only T/ST worlds with colonies on them and for the universe to start fully explored. The concept I am toying with is for the players to be sector governors of a single empire that spins off into civil war.
I was personally a bit in between on the empire building player vs. tactical player scale, and played a number of solo campaigns that were strictly paper based, and never had much problem with the paperwork. Then again, I never used the SM#2 PU/PTU system of economics, so once any OP or Colony (even on Type O1/O2 moons) was established, it could pretty much just ignore it and rake in the incomes without worrying about the details until that empire's TL increased and the EVM values needed changing. It seems to me that having to worry about tracking colonial population growth yearly, or worse, monthly, would be a paperwork nightmare. This could be mitigated by ruling that only populations on T/ST planets grow naturally (which was the case in ISF), which would prevent any natural growth on Desolate or Extreme worlds and hence mitigate the need to worry about that little annoyance...
BTW, remember that one reason for allowing colonization of Desolate and Extreme worlds (paperwork annoyance aside) is that they offer one alternative for players who find themselves unable to expand. (I suppose that you could allow Desolate/Extreme colonization only for those empires that find themselves in this unfortunate situation...)
Anyways, something else you might want to consider in the search for paperwork reduction could be to not use NPR's. I know that this seems like a radical step. NPR's add a considerable amount of paperwork to the game for the SM, if there's no player handling the NPR's. Also, NPR's are the most serious random factor when it comes to exploration luck (referred to by some as "survey luck"). That is, NPR's are almost entirely random in nature, since so much about them is die roll based, starting with their very existence. The existence of an NPR on a T/ST, rather than the T/ST being empty, is the first random factor. Then there's the question of what sort of political relationship your own race will be able to form with the NPR. If you're lucky (there's that random factor again), the NPR will form some sort of alliance. But if you're unlucky, they'll be hostile. (And of course, if one is playing solo, then all races are sort of NPR's, so what the heck...)
At this point, I should say that one may want to consider the motivations of the players... Are they playing strictly to play against each other, to beat each other, or are they playing more for the fun of the game? (Not saying that either motivation is wrong...) If the players are more interested in beating each other, then NPR's can definitely be seen more as an annoying random factor that can "unfairly" help or hurt, whereas the playing for fun players might see hostile NPR's as an amusing challenge.
Note that this is very much of a personal taste thing... But it is worth considering that if one's group of players is more intent on playing against each other in a highly competitive manner, then NPR's may be an annoying distraction, and perhaps one can save time, paperwork, and some general annoyance, by simply not using NPR's in a highly competitive game.
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I will be interested to see where you take 3rd Ed. ISF was interesting but the economics that could be generated were something else on fully built up systems.
Well, I'm not so sure that I'd blame colonization of the non-T/ST planets for the size of ISF economies... That should probably be more accurately blamed on the REI multiplier. I will agree that the tracking of all those non-T/ST populations could be a paperwork pain though... Also, it's worth noting that the general consensus was that non-T/ST colonization was for the most part an economically bad decision in pure ISF, since the economic returns were far lower than could be achieved from NPR alliances or conquests... which was a reason for some of the changes to colonization and NPR's starting with SM#2.
Quote
One of the issues that most annoyed me about the way things played out when Marvin and Steve had their bloodbath is the UTM was about done and now no one can buy it. "PLEASE NO ONE ELSE RESTART FIGHTS MANY YEARS DEAD." I had hoped that at least 3rdR and SM2 would be available for sale. Our group will figure something out if we can't buy stuff. If nothing else our groups customs rules I still have.
You may want to check out Ebay for a copy of 3rdR. I've seen hardcopy SF products on Ebay from time to time... In fact, that's where I bought my own copy of 3rdR a couple years back.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on March 23, 2010, 12:15:42 AM
Quote from: "miketr"
I will be interested to see where you take 3rd Ed. ISF was interesting but the economics that could be generated were something else on fully built up systems. One of the issues that most annoyed me about the way things played out when Marvin and Steve had their bloodbath is the UTM was about done and now no one can buy it. "PLEASE NO ONE ELSE RESTART FIGHTS MANY YEARS DEAD." I had hoped that at least 3rdR and SM2 would be available for sale. Our group will figure something out if we can't buy stuff. If nothing else our groups customs rules I still have.The Unified Tech Manual was released, along with a v1.1 update. It was the Unified Rules that were 95% complete when the sky fell in. I still have them somewhere, as does every other member of the 3DG I assume, but obviously I can't start handing them out, even if 3rdR is out of print, without agreement from Marvin. That seems unlikely to happen :). It seems to appeal to 3rd edition players.
Steve
Post by: procyon on March 23, 2010, 03:57:11 AM
For my part I have been playing Starfire since the baggy editions oh so many years ago, as have most of us that you probably are going to talk to. We've been here quite a while, aren't really going anywhere, and can occasionally be a picky and hard lot to please (my wife tells me I am all the time). I will probably end up picking up a copy of Cosmic when it comes out even if it was written on the side of milk jugs. Among us old gamers, we have probably already decided whether we want to pick up another copy of Starfire or not (I realize I don't speak for everyone, but most of us have our preferences on what we like to play, and base our decisions on that).
From where I stand Starfire doesn't seem to be going anywhere fast. I'm not well informed, but other than my kids, none of their friends/schoolmates/ball team buddies have a clue what Starfire is. If Starfire is going to go anywhere (from my point of view), it isn't about keeping all us old timers happy with whether it is about ISF or SM#2/3rd vs 4/5th, its about making it something someone new would want to play.
I've got six kids, a wife, and several friends. Not one of them started in a full blown game. They started with baggies, or small bites and simplified systems. As did I a long time ago. If someone had tried to interest me in playing a game the first time as complex as what 3rd/4th/5th looks like now, I'd never had gotten into it. Sorry.
Starfleet Battles (that may be a dangerous subject round here, I'm a little new) grew into a monster. Nobody would have started it. But some of my kids friends know about it through their new Cadet set up. Perhaps laying out the first layer of the new game should be something that will get new players interested. 300 pages won't. I didn't even know about the new Cadet PDF until my middle son brought it home from his buddy. Now he plays Starfleet, and loves running Federation CA's. Even ASKED for the new Capt.'s Basic Set for his birthday. So he could play with his buddies. He's 14.
Anybody out there know of 12-15 year olds tracking down 3+ Ed Starfire so they could play with their friends. On paper and pencil sheets with a paper map. I don't.
I've only been on this site for a few months, but I've played games for a long time, and been a dad for almost as long. The folks here already know what they want. But it looked like my Nemesis Campaign was the first new post in the Starfire Section for over a year (with the exception of your announcements on Cosmic). I really would rather not see Starfire die off, but unless something is aimed at NEW players, the future doesn't look so good from where I stand.
Perhaps something like the baggies (without the baggies). Something perhaps about groups way before the ISW's and their trials and strife as they formed some large union (I'm sure you have already thought of that or you wouldn't be the one doing it)? Something with the battles that catch the new/young players, a story to interest them (and give us old timers something to read. Especially if we can relate it to something else we have read somewhere if that is possible [hint] - I have always loved reading the interludes), and directions to how they can start creating their own stories. When I started as a trainer in the Army, the first thing they told us was the best way to teach someone nothing, was to teach them everything at once. It would also give you a smaller bite to work on. Revising the whole thing at once would be an ominous task.
"Not all change is progress, as all movement is not forward."
Just a thought. And best of luck. I have ALWAYS loved Starfire.
Post by: Summercat on March 23, 2010, 06:37:57 AM
Anyone know what the recourse is to redownload previously-purchased stuff? I'm afraid that my last encounter with Marvin (...and my first, thinking about it) were ... well, they could have been friendlier (the last one on both sides).
...now to find a copy of the 3rd Edition rulebook. A neighbor was sold me a copy of Starfire and Starfire II: Strikefighters, so now I want to get back into playing 3rd edition again. Guess what went missing! =D
Post by: Paul M on March 23, 2010, 07:28:46 AM
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.
Post by: miketr on March 23, 2010, 07:40:01 AM
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
Post by: miketr on March 23, 2010, 08:31:49 AM
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
Post by: crucis on March 23, 2010, 01:26:16 PM
Quote from: "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.
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.
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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.
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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
Post by: miketr on March 23, 2010, 02:10:40 PM
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
Post by: crucis on March 23, 2010, 02:44:24 PM
Quote from: "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.
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.
Post by: miketr on March 23, 2010, 03:07:38 PM
Quote from: "crucis"
QuoteAs 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
Post by: crucis on March 24, 2010, 12:09:41 AM
Quote from: "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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Post by: Hawkeye on March 24, 2010, 05:47:10 AM
Or is something like this allready in?
Post by: Paul M on March 24, 2010, 05:52:46 AM
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.
Post by: Paul M on March 24, 2010, 06:12:07 AM
Quote from: "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?
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*
Post by: miketr on March 24, 2010, 08:50:18 AM
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
Post by: Hawkeye on March 24, 2010, 10:27:15 AM
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.
Post by: crucis on March 24, 2010, 12:49:05 PM
Quote from: "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
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.
Post by: crucis on March 24, 2010, 01:05:39 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
(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.
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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.
Post by: crucis on March 24, 2010, 01:51:10 PM
Quote from: "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.
If NPR's are such a great bugaboo for the SM in a multi-player game, then the simplification is simple .... Stop using NPR's!!!
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The economy in starfire is such that any economic investment even the worst possible you can make will give you a net positive return.
Unless there's a non-economic benefit to the economic investment (such as building warships), I can't see any player willingly investing in an economic investment that has a negative return. If you include such a bad investment in the game, no one will use it. Period. It will just be a waste of time, effort, and space in the rules. About the closest you could possibly come is to have an investment with a random return, since some players may willingly invest in something that could have a big return, but also risks big losses. Frankly, it seems like a pain in the butt to me. And if such a random investment were included, and were ignored by players, once again, it would be a waste of time and effort and space.
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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.
Sorry. Not interested in making the game more complex. It's too complex already.
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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.
I'm thoroughly uninterested is designing Cosmic to require beyond all doubt computer support. I would rather simplify the game so that it was more playable as a P&P game. I'm sorry, Paul, but any mention of "with computer support, you can do ..." is an automatic loser for me. That is absolutely 180* out of phase with the direction that I intend to take Cosmic.
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Exploration luck defines Starfire. Marvin never grasped this.
I'm not exactly sure that I agree with you here. I think that Marvin's primary concern in this regard has been to try to mitigate exploration luck issues to try to balance those luck issues out in multi-player campaigns.
However, as I have stated previously, I tend to believe that reducing the numbers of T/ST's would help to decrease economic explosivity, since the central core of that explosivity is the colonization of numerous T/ST worlds. But reducing T/ST's increases the exploration luck factor in finding them. Having lots of T/ST's to find certainly reduces the luck factor in finding them, but it also makes the economic problems worse.
Of course, Marvin's usual suggestion has been to play in smaller game galaxies so that small galaxy size automatically limits #'s of T/ST's and forcing players to confront each other more quickly. And that may be fine, if your players want to confront each other fairly quickly. But some people like a much larger game galaxy.
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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.
There are some things that are almost never mentioned that could be used to mitigate exploration luck. Change the basic way that galaxies are constructed. Currently, it's all random. You enter a new system (assuming that it's not one someone else already explored), you create it from scratch. It could be anything. Totally random, depending on the die rolls (or the pseudo-die rolls within a sysgen program). In one sense, there's a certain beauty to this randomness... a joy of exploration and an air of mystery. OTOH, the randomness can be a major contributor to exploration luck "unfairness", which in a solo game is not a real issue, but in a highly competitive game can completely unbalance things, particularly early in the game.
One potential way that one might mitigate this type of randomness could be to use "sector templates". (Not my idea, though I find it interesting...) These sector templates would essentially be small maps of about 20 or so star systems and their interconnecting warp lines, as well as the warp lines off-map and out of the sector. The star systems would be predefined to some degree (totally pre-generated, or perhaps only defining the basic system type and star types). In addition, this sector map process would work well with pre-generated star system templates which could be linked to the sector's star systems. The point where the mitigation of randomness begins to matter with sector maps is that the overall content of those sectors could be constructed to be more "fair" and less random. The star system templates themselves need not be fully generated... some details could be left out to be generated when the system is surveyed ... items like # of moons, mineral wealth values, habitability indexes. Perhap WP locations and types. Of course, trying to make a useful number of such sector templates that were all reasonably well balanced would probably be a bit time consuming, since you really couldn't just do it randomly. Also, even if the number of sector templates were fairly high, it might remove the air of mystery in the exploration process.
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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.
Yes, I understood that. But still, if the players involved are only looking to butt heads ASAP and aren't interested in this level of play, interesting though it may be to other people, one can hardly force them do it.
Post by: Paul M on March 25, 2010, 05:10:42 AM
The economic system in Starfire is the biggest single stumbling block to improving the empire building part of the game. It is brain dead simplistic. It is compound interest and nothing more. And tieing in fleet size to something that can't do anything but spiral out of control results in nothing more than both the economy and fleet size doing the same thing.
The fix is to make the economy more complex. Add in resources such as Steve has done with Aurora. Make putting down a colony being a costly procedure which gives you a strategic rather than instant direct monetary benefit, again like what is done in aurora. In 3rd putting down a colony meant reducing the income of the planet you were drawing the population from. The essentially free PU and IFN of 3rdR made it easy to manage colonization, but contribute in the end to an unmanageable empire. Simplistic is all that starfire ended up being. Simplistic is not simple. Simplistic leads to min-max optimizations that contribute to gamey "strategies" that are fun destroying for those of us who aren't into that sort of thing.
You can't play a game of Imperial Starfire without computer support. I played an NPR for a 4th edition beta game and I wrote a set of Excel spreadsheets to track costs, maintenance, income, systems, fleets, ship status etc That was a lot of work, and when my empire got to around 10 systems I saw the limitations of that. The spreadsheets were getting huge. Yes I could do this with PnP but I would make mistakes and lots of them, recalculation alone would be a nightmare. And it would be very hard for a SM to check this, heck it would be nearly impossible for me to find an error. So an error could slide by for a long time. The empire management grows over time to a massive bookkeeping nightmare. Starfire assistant did not start out the way it became...it became what it is because Steve kept finding it necessary to add things, and well the rest of us chimed in with our requests and he very graciously added those in.
Why not look into something like Victory by Any Means or Squadron Strike for examples of how you can make a simple economic model that isn't simplistic (and I've only read rather than played them so they may have their own issues). Marvin changed 4th edition to make it into something he enjoys, and I would say that he succeeded in that goal. More power to him, but most of the changes made to simplify the game (starting in AD, and continuing on into SM2, 3rdR, and 4th) had a lot of consequences that, as far as I am concerned, contribute to making the game neither fun nor playable if you don't play the game the way Marvin does. A small galaxy leads to a short game plus shoving back the turn when the death spiral starts by reducing incomes and increasing ship costs means that the game will be over before the issue becomes critical...but this isn't "solving the problem."
The only way to remove exploration luck is for the SM to generate the galaxy first in its entirety. Then he or she can assign players to systems with an eye to balance, not to mention recreate systems if necessary.
To bad I can't post up one of the last databases saves from one of our games so you could see what I am talking about. Even trying to draw a map of my empire by hand would be hard. It has been years since I looked at any of this but I had at least 3 nodal fleets, 20-ish patrol forces, 3 exploration fleets, several major fleet bases, 2 fleets assigned to a limited war I was carrying out, 2 NPRs I was supporting via treaties, at least 2 major hostile NPRs (one that was the tyranids, and the other was at the über tech levels who was at war with one of those NPRs I was supporting...they were the last remnants of their race not conquered), warp point defenses here and there (though the warp point nexus made that harder to do), I was trying to streamline the number of ship classes I had but I still had over 15 different classes of ships if that isn't considerably less than I had taking into account my non-combat ships, bases, support vessels etc. Trying to keep track of that by hand? Not to mention the SMs (2 of them) who were tracking 5 player empires, 2 big bad SM NPRs (the tyranids...kind of bug like and a AI race), 1 small bad NPR (small but extremely high tech), and god only knows how many "standard" non-SM-specifically created NPRs (joy of joys for me I had 2 of 3 of those SM-created pains to deal with). Since for a long time I had the good luck to avoid a war I played a lot of NPRs in the battles...NPR on NPR...PR on NPR...NPR+PR on PR...PR on NPR+PR...SMPR on NPR... I played ships designed in ways that made me laugh or cry or just stare in shock at the ship display. All of this was possible for one reason: starfire assistant.
4th Edition did not even get a try with our group for the simple reason there was no starfire assistant for it.
Post by: Paul M on March 25, 2010, 05:52:14 AM
What you say is something done in Moo3 and has been copied in a number of other 4X games. The Heavy Foot of Government is the term used in Moo3.
I don't have a solution off the top of my head to fix the issue...beyond moving away from a game based entirely on money and from compound interest economic growth. Those two synergize in a bad way and so far as I can tell there is nothing you can do to other issues (number of T planets, relative worth of T planets, size of galaxy, etc) that really solves the problem. They form a feedback loop that you can't get out of. You can get off the train (have a short game) but the grundsätzlich probleme (fundamental issue) is built into the game system.
So the obvious solution is to break the loop...how to do that will vary from person to person. I know the "heavy foot of government" approach generates wailing and gnashing of teeth from the 4X computer gamer crowd. They hate bureaucratic limitations on them conquering the galaxy. PPs limited fleet size and made you prefer to build bigger ships...but apparently tracking them is such a pain that people are willing to put up with fleets of 300+ CTs or a few hundred BBs.
I like what Steve has done, colonies in Aurora are generally speaking money sinks, it takes a long time to get a colony worth anything but they are obviously strategically critical. But aurora is like molasses in january compared to an Imperial Starfire game (it is slow to play). Starfire has a 12:1 economic to military time warp. In SM2/3rdR basically every "turn" is a year for economic purposes while for military purposes they are a month. We tried lots of things in our local game...reduced NPR chance, reduced growth rate, lowered ship construction rates, increased costs...all of these; however, are treating the symptoms not the real issue. Also since we were using Starfire assistant we were somewhat limited in what we could change "home rules wise" since Steve had to consent to add it to the program, but he did a great job adding in options.
Post by: miketr on March 25, 2010, 08:38:42 AM
Michael
Post by: crucis on March 25, 2010, 01:32:45 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
The economic system in Starfire is the biggest single stumbling block to improving the empire building part of the game. It is brain dead simplistic. It is compound interest and nothing more. And tieing in fleet size to something that can't do anything but spiral out of control results in nothing more than both the economy and fleet size doing the same thing.
The fix is to make the economy more complex. (snippage)
Not IMO. Making the economics more complex is a direction that I will NOT take.
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In 3rd (ISF) putting down a colony meant reducing the income of the planet you were drawing the population from. The essentially free PU and IFN of 3rdR (SM#2) made it easy to manage colonization, but contribute in the end to an unmanageable empire.
Paul, the thing here is that SM#2 colonization rules were designed to enhance colonization as a gameplay strategy, because it was the opinion of the powers-that-be in SDS at the time that colonization was, for the most part, economically useless in ISF. SM#2 (and forward into 4e) colonization was intended to provide stay-at-homes (whether intentional or because they were boxed in by a lack of WP's) with a way to enhance their economies while waiting for a time when they may choose (or be able) to break out of their stay-at-home status.
SM#2-style colonization was also intended to be an alternative strategy to the NPR-centric strategy that was the core of ISF expansion. Without aggressive colonization rules, ISF expansion tends to deal with finding friendly NPRs and getting treaties with those NPR's, or conquering the hostile NPR's. However, NPR's by their very nature, tend to be one of the most random factors in exploration, since almost everything relating to NPR's is determined by die rolls as opposed to colonization, which is a process managed by player decisions without any randomness beyond the finding of the T/ST's.
So, the problem is that if you try to make colonization less aggressive, you also reduce its ability to act as an alternate strategy to NPR-centric economic expansion, and you reduce the ability of stay-at-homes (particularly those who are stay-at-homes against their will) to expand their economies.
OTOH ... I do agree that aggressive colonization rules to also contribute to the long term problem... It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing.
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You can't play a game of Imperial Starfire without computer support. I played an NPR for a 4th edition beta game and I wrote a set of Excel spreadsheets to track costs, maintenance, income, systems, fleets, ship status etc That was a lot of work, and when my empire got to around 10 systems I saw the limitations of that. The spreadsheets were getting huge. Yes I could do this with PnP but I would make mistakes and lots of them, recalculation alone would be a nightmare. And it would be very hard for a SM to check this, heck it would be nearly impossible for me to find an error. So an error could slide by for a long time. The empire management grows over time to a massive bookkeeping nightmare. Starfire assistant did not start out the way it became...it became what it is because Steve kept finding it necessary to add things, and well the rest of us chimed in with our requests and he very graciously added those in.
I most certainly CAN and HAVE played ISF without heavy computer support (beyond a sysgen utility and word processor for printing out ship control sheets prior to battles). Furthermore, I will NOT write a set of rules with the foreknowledge that it is little more than a design spec for a computer game.
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Marvin changed 4th edition to make it into something he enjoys, and I would say that he succeeded in that goal.
Actually, I'd agree. But furthermore, I'd say that any game designer (and particularly ones who are essentially volunteers) are going to design games to be something that they enjoy. This isn't exactly a revelation.
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More power to him, but most of the changes made to simplify the game (starting in AD, and continuing on into SM2, 3rdR, and 4th) had a lot of consequences that, as far as I am concerned, contribute to making the game neither fun nor playable if you don't play the game the way Marvin does. A small galaxy leads to a short game plus shoving back the turn when the death spiral starts by reducing incomes and increasing ship costs means that the game will be over before the issue becomes critical...but this isn't "solving the problem."
I agree with this as well ... to a degree. It's always possible that changes to any rule(r) can cause unforeseen consequences, some of which may not come out in playtesting. And I agree that if one doesn't play the game in the same way as the designer (in this case, Marvin) apparently does, and changes to the game seem directed towards that style of play, the game may indeed seem less fun.
OTOH, I have no problem conceptually with attempting to push out the time at which the game becomes (supposedly) unplayable. The further you push it out, the less likely it is that anyone will ever get to that point.
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The only way to remove exploration luck is for the SM to generate the galaxy first in its entirety. Then he or she can assign players to systems with an eye to balance, not to mention recreate systems if necessary.
I agree that it's pretty much impossible to remove exploration luck entirely. Even with a theoretically perfectly balanced pre-genned game galaxy, another part of exploration luck is simply the order in which a player chooses to explore which WP's.
That said, I don't think that Marvin ever actually thought that he was trying to remove exploration luck "entirely". I'd say that he was only trying to mitigate its effects. However, I tend to believe that reducing exploration luck (particularly as it pertains to finding T/ST's) can actually make the game's economic problems worse. More, easier to find T/ST's mean that long term you will have more, highly populated, high economic output worlds in a shorter time frame.
Post by: crucis on March 25, 2010, 03:33:29 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
I don't have a solution off the top of my head to fix the issue...beyond moving away from a game based entirely on money and from compound interest economic growth. Those two synergize in a bad way and so far as I can tell there is nothing you can do to other issues (number of T planets, relative worth of T planets, size of galaxy, etc) that really solves the problem.
I disagree that you cannot do anything about the number of T/ST planets. One absolutely could do something about the numbers of T/ST planets in the game in a number of different ways. Here are two of the most obvious.
A. Star Types: One could change the balance of star types to match the proportion of star types that appears to be the case in reality, wherein Class M stars (Red Dwarf and most Red type stars) represent about 75% of all main-sequence stars (IIRC). If one looks at White, Yellow, and Orange (Class F, G, and K) Stars as the primary "habitable" star types, those only represent about 23% of "habitable" star types, but in ISF and 4e, those types represent 61% of the core "habitable" star types... nearly 3 times greater than is the case in reality.
B. Planetary Masses: One could change the balance on the planetary mass table. In ISF and 4e, 75% of planets in the Biosphere have a mass of 2 or 3 and are Type T or ST. Clearly, if one wanted fewer T/ST's, one could reduce this percentage.
Of course, changing the numbers of T/ST's would have a number of consequences for good or ill that may or may not be foreseen, even with playtesting.
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PPs limited fleet size and made you prefer to build bigger ships...but apparently tracking them is such a pain that people are willing to put up with fleets of 300+ CTs or a few hundred BBs.
Exactly correct.
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I like what Steve has done, colonies in Aurora are generally speaking money sinks, it takes a long time to get a colony worth anything but they are obviously strategically critical. But aurora is like molasses in january compared to an Imperial Starfire game (it is slow to play). Starfire has a 12:1 economic to military time warp. In SM2/3rdR basically every "turn" is a year for economic purposes while for military purposes they are a month.
And frankly, I think that this time compression is a good thing, otherwise the game would be far, far too slow to be interesting.
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We tried lots of things in our local game...reduced NPR chance, reduced growth rate, lowered ship construction rates, increased costs...all of these; however, are treating the symptoms not the real issue. Also since we were using Starfire assistant we were somewhat limited in what we could change "home rules wise" since Steve had to consent to add it to the program, but he did a great job adding in options.
And this is a problem any time you depend on a program (well, someone else's program) to do this... The program basically sets the rules in stone and limits your ability to use house rules. Of course, one can balance this against all of the other perceived benefits that one gets from such a program, and believe that you come out ahead.
Post by: crucis on March 25, 2010, 10:00:01 PM
The concern that I have is this... Many people complain about out of control fleet sizes. But are they willing to accept the extra work that tracking PP's would require to try to rein in fleet sizes?
I could write a set of personnel point rules right now (and actually have a framework already). But if people aren't willing to use such a mechanism to counter their complaints about fleet sizes, the effort would be wasted.
Post by: Erik L on March 25, 2010, 10:15:12 PM
Post by: Steve Walmsley on March 25, 2010, 10:36:11 PM
Quote from: "crucis"
I think the difference of opinion may be a difference of scale. I have played Imperial Starfire using pen and paper, including rolling up systems manually, although it was only 30-40 systems and 3-4 races.Quote from: "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.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...
The Rigellian campaign has almost two thousand systems with over fourteen thousand planets, seventeen active races and nearly ten thousand ships in five hundred and seventy different fleets. There is no way that is playable with pen and paper. ISF is playable with PnP up to a point, but once you get beyond a certain size of campaign (and that size may differ between different gaming groups), you do need computer support. If you want a game that does not rely on computer support, the question becomes how large a game you can play with pen and paper before it becomes unmanageable. Next question is how quickly do you get to that point in a normal game and is that length of time how long you think a reasonable game of ISF or Cosmic should last?
Steve
Post by: crucis on March 25, 2010, 11:06:54 PM
Quote from: "Erik Luken"
One thing I did in Astra Imperia was to limit the amount of tonnage a population can support. I'd have to look up the rule to see what the excess incurs, but I believe it was along the lines of 2-3 months of stationing a ship at a population that cannot support it would cost near the purchase price of the ship.
Erik, I actually have thrown together a loose framework for some new PP rules. I've started with 1 PP per 1 PU population (not worrying about PU/PTU conversion factors, for reasons I'd rather not explain). And 1 HS of ship requires 1 PP (no exceptions for certain types of tech systems, for simplicity's sake). (Also, no tracking of PP's for PCF's, since they'd eat up TONS of PP's and too many PCF's aren't the problem being addressed.)
Note that this 1 PP per 1 PU is different from the ISF model which actually has no limit on fleet size (in PPs). It only has a limit on the rate of growth, since the ISF rule allowed for a number of PP's equal to the number of EVM per month.
As for what happens when there's "an excess"... well, that's a slightly more complex issue.
Still, the real key is the willingness to accept the tracking of PP's as the method of keeping fleet sizes under control. If such willingness exists, it is possible to create a reasonably simple and workable set of personnel point rules.
Post by: crucis on March 25, 2010, 11:18:12 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
I think the difference of opinion may be a difference of scale. I have played Imperial Starfire using pen and paper, including rolling up systems manually, although it was only 30-40 systems and 3-4 races.
The Rigellian campaign has almost two thousand systems with over fourteen thousand planets, seventeen active races and nearly ten thousand ships in five hundred and seventy different fleets. There is no way that is playable with pen and paper. ISF is playable with PnP up to a point, but once you get beyond a certain size of campaign (and that size may differ between different gaming groups), you do need computer support. If you want a game that does not rely on computer support, the question becomes how large a game you can play with pen and paper before it becomes unmanageable. Next question is how quickly do you get to that point in a normal game and is that length of time how long you think a reasonable game of ISF or Cosmic should last?
Steve
Yes, I agree, Steve, that it's very much a matter of scale. But I should also point out that it's also a matter of scale in how one defines "computer support". As I've stated, I've used self-written sysgen utilities since the 2e days, since I've always found system generation to be terribly tedious, particularly when the intended result is the production of a single star system. But that's about the limit of my "computer support".
I also agree that after some point, it probably won't matter how simple the rules are, the sheer volume of data will exceed even the most patient person's willingness to deal with in a P&P mode. (Heck there will be a point after which even with something like SA that the volume of data will be too great...)
Regardless, my underlying point remains that the game should be designed as a P&P game at a level of complexity/simplicity that is acceptable for a P&P game, not at a level of complexity that pretty much requires full computer support from the start and ends up treating the rules like they were nothing more than a design spec for a computer game.
Post by: sloanjh on March 26, 2010, 12:35:14 AM
Quote from: "Erik Luken"
One thing I did in Astra Imperia was to limit the amount of tonnage a population can support. I'd have to look up the rule to see what the excess incurs, but I believe it was along the lines of 2-3 months of stationing a ship at a population that cannot support it would cost near the purchase price of the ship.
I wasn't going to respond to this thread, but Erik's post kicked me over the edge.
I think that the fundamental problem with PnP SF is that it's trying to be at least 3 different games for three different player archetypes:
1) Naval combat PvP - For this archetype, the Imperial SF part of the game is primarily there to set up "realistic" OOB and start configurations for battles. For this group, the details of planetary population growth, Imperial economics, etc. aren't important - they're just there to provide a backdrop. I view this as the group that's looking for something like Carriers at War.
2) Space 4X PvP - For this group, the opposite is true - colonization, growth of colonies, resource allocation, etc. are the interesting part of the game; the combat rules are there to "keep score" when empires go to war. I view this as the camp that is looking for something like Civilization or Galactic Empires (or MOO or ...).
3) Space 4X role playing - This is the group that likes to write after-action reports. This group wants lots of random variation in NPR, since that adds interesting flavor to the story of the game. The best I can come up with for this group is D&D.
Note that a lot of this has already been said in this thread and on the board, and that most real-world players will typically be a mix of the archetypes. In addition, there are in-between states such as those who want to game out an entire fleet campaign or war (e.g. 3rd Reich players). My contribution is that #1 and #2 are in direct conflict in terms of level-of-detail and timescales - the tactical game takes place on a scale of days, while the 4X game is on a scale of decades. The problem is that there are a LOT of days in a decade, and a lot of ships in an empire :-) ) - the "detail freak". These are the gamers who like to track and control individual squads in an entire theater (what's the WWII Pacific game of this sort - War in the Pacific?). This is exactly counter to the separation of scales methodology, and winds up with games where the wall-clock-time to play a turn increases exponentially with the size of the empires. In other words, these games grow until the empires reach a certain size, and then they stop. For an example of this, take a look at the size and frequency of turn writeups in Steve's Rigellian Diaries (and this was with computer support). Note that Civilization suffers from this disease too (at least if you micro-manage city production like I do).
In my opinion, Imperial SF didn't go far enough in abstracting away the individual movements of ships and units - it still has the detail-freak disease. The player still gave individual movement orders to individual ships (or TG); as the size of the empire grows, this becomes excessively cumbersome. I think that, in order for the game to meet both sets of needs (4X and tactical) the Imperial game has to be ruthless in cutting out detail - I think this is where Imperial SF falls down.
In order to build a game that doesn't suffer from this, I think one would have to go to a "macro-economic" version of fleet management for the strategic game. Rather than tracking individual ship movements, one would assign ships to fleets which had patrol responsibilities - a fleet would have a certain number of certain classes of ships. Rather than tracking which ships are in maintenance, one would go with the USN's "1/3 deployed, 1/3 training up, 1/3 refitting" ratio to determine how many ships in a particular fleet are available at a particular time. For the single-battle tactical players, one could then use the patrol responsibilities (e.g. 1 CVBG is always in Westpac) to generate random encounters between Navies. For the campaign tactical players, one could randomly assign locations upon a patrol to the various patrol responsibilities. For the 4x players, one could generate "tracer" battles for the various patrol responsibilities that were then multiplied by some factor to determine the entire campaign (or just use straight attrition formulae). For the detail-freak players, they could intersperse full campaigns with 4x segments.
The reason that Erik's mail prompted me to write this is that his statement of "stationing a ship at a population" struck a chord with the thoughts I've been having along these lines. Basically, the 4X game would involve building ships for fleets, stationing them at fleet bases, and assessing the costs of the fleet deployments (in addition to colonization activities, of course). It should be expensive to station a large fleet a long way away from core worlds, unless port facilities were explicitly built up. The player could turn knobs to e.g. "surge" readiness if he thought war was imminent, or set levels of war-like encounters with neighboring empires (e.g. "friendly" vs. "covert harrassment" vs. "open warfare"), but these levels would have costs in the 4X game.
Of course, this brings up the question of how much Crucis wants to change Cosmic away from 3rd Ed. On the plus side, I don't think many people are arguing that the core tactical game is broken (other than maybe the smaller=faster hard-wiring that, in my opinion, is a major contributor to swarm tactics) - it's the Imperial side that has the problems. The question is, how much can this be changed? Also note that none of this is a solution for the exponential growth "rich get richer" issue that's common in 4X games - that would require some sort of change in the economics rules that sets a scale size of empires, so that growth of big empires is (proportionally) slower than growth of small empires.
John
Post by: Steve Walmsley on March 26, 2010, 12:44:29 AM
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on March 26, 2010, 12:52:04 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
The worrying thing is that I have played all the games you mentioned :-)
BTW, they put out a new version of CAW a few years back - doesn't have as many scenarios as the original, though. I keep hoping that they (the SSI guys) will redo MacArthur's War (mine stopped working a few OS upgrades back).
John
Post by: crucis on March 26, 2010, 02:26:02 AM
John, I can't talk about the nitty-gritty of how similar or dissimilar Cosmic will be to 3E. I prefer to play things a fairly close to the vest, as the saying goes...
As I've said before and elsewhere, the tech systems will be entirely familiar to 3e people and have a 3e feel to them. Also, while as I've said that I'm entirely willing to take things from any edition of Starfire, my general preference is to try to maintain a general level of simplicity on the strategic side that's lower than exists in Ultra, and perhaps in SM#2 as well (well, at least for those areas in SM#2 where things became more complex than in ISF...).
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On the plus side, I don't think many people are arguing that the core tactical game is broken (other than maybe the smaller=faster hard-wiring that, in my opinion, is a major contributor to swarm tactics) - it's the Imperial side that has the problems. The question is, how much can this be changed? Also note that none of this is a solution for the exponential growth "rich get richer" issue that's common in 4X games - that would require some sort of change in the economics rules that sets a scale size of empires, so that growth of big empires is (proportionally) slower than growth of small empires.
There are a number of little points here...
I agree that the adjustment of speeds for ES-DD hull types in 3rdR was a significant contributor to swarm tactics. But I'd also suggest that the hull cost curve (small hulls having lower per HS costs than larger ships) is also a contributor, as well as the 4 HS SYD rebate.
And another contributor is, IMO, the need to pay for ships entirely upfront. This tends to make larger ships more expensive (sort of) to build than smaller ships, well, in that you are forced to pay the entire cost upfront. For example, let's say that you could build 4 30-hs DD's for the same cost as 1 120 HS DN (not sure if that'd actually be true or not). But if the DD takes the same SY capacity as the DN in any given month, you could build one DD per month for 4 months (i.e. 120 HS's of DD's) and basically be paying 25% of the cost of those 120 HS of DD per month, whereas the single 120 HS DN has to pay the full price tag all at once. If a ship that was going to need 4 months to build was able to pay in 4 equal installments, it could put larger, multi-month-to construct ships on a more equal footing with small one-month-build ships.
As for "how much be changed?" ... well, that's a tough one to answer. For example, how much change would people accept? (That may seem like an overly leading question, but it's not intended that way.) I can also say that if people are expecting me to simply take all of the 3e source documents and re-edit them, they're going to be disappointed. That is NOT what I'm doing. This isn't to say that I'm ignoring what's come before (aka 3e, 3rdR, SM#2, UTM) or what is (Ultra). What I'm trying to do is to create something new, not something that's re-hashed, but with strong 3e sensibilities... OTOH, just because I say "something new", don't take that to mean that I'm trying to do anything radically different (although "radically different" may be a very relative term from person to person).
As for the economics scale issue, I have no answers yet... I'm working on trying to simplify economics. There are some things that could add up to help in this regard. Do not all natural growth on Desolate and Extreme worlds, for starters (this was the rule in ISF, BTW). Use a concept similar to what's in SM#2 wherein worlds that are Medium and larger have half the growth rate of worlds that are Small and smaller.
However, an idea that has only occurred to me upon reading what you wrote, I suppose that an additional factor could be included that took the total size of an empire (i.e. its total PU) into account, and above a certain point, the empire's growth rates were further reduced... But I have no idea what would be proper total PU breakpoints for this sort of concept to work properly.
Crucis
Post by: Erik L on March 26, 2010, 02:44:21 AM
Sadly, from my point of view, even in Astra Imperia the tech advances are too fast, though I do feel the population growth is approximately right. The average growth is between 2-4% per year with the breakpoints sufficiently spread out.
Back to the population supporting ships. In the currently available rules, there is no penalty for exceeding the limit. In the re-write, the current penalty is paying the 10% upkeep monthly instead of yearly. One thing I should note, the ships in Astra Imperia are much much smaller than anything in Aurora (a superfreighter weighs in at 9000 tons and I can see waresky weeping now). I also wanted to avoid the 200+ ship fleets hammering things out. A basic low-tech scout ship of 300 to 400 tons costs around 1 year output from a small core world population.
Post by: procyon on March 26, 2010, 02:52:46 AM
I hope my post didn't start what I have come back to find. I was only trying to say that what was out there now for Starfire (if you were a new player and didn't know what you were looking at) was a confusing mess and would make it difficult to get started. There is nothing right now aimed at a new player that is in production (that I am aware of). I in no way wanted to start any sort of heat in a discussion about where it should go/what it is/what it should be. If anyone out there has ruffled feathers due to my post, I offer my deepest apologies and will gladly edit it off the thread.
That said, I will speak (post?) once more, and then remain silent.
I agree with many points out there.
To crucis - more complicated won't make for a friendlier game. I whole heartedly endorse attempts to reduce the complexity. Folks can always make it more complicated. The attempt to get their particular form of complicated to be the 'official' form of complicated seems to be the thorn in the paw of Starfire for some time now. This may be heresy (if not impossible), but an official recognition that there is more than one 'right' way to play Starfire seems long overdue. In the end, what you find fun, is right.
As a side note, we do use PP points, but base them off of your income instead of your pop. You already have to total your income every turn, and totaling your PU was just one more hurdle we didn't care to jump. We use 1 PP per 10 MC, so a starting world (2000MC+/-) doesn't support much, but we like smaller fleets. 10 was just an easy number for the kids to work with. Adjust as you would like. Or ignore it if you don't.
To PaulM - you only need a computer if that is the game you want to play. If you want 1000 systems- you need a computer, so be my guest. We get along fine without, but we slow the rate of surveying and growth to keep the (I agree, eventual runaway) economics slow. Surveys usually take five times the normal amount of points, and with the limited PP I mentioned above, big survey fleets put a crimp on your combat power. We have had campaigns 'get away from us', but I blame that on me (the SM), and not the rules. We learn, and change the rules to fit what we want. But I do run the games for my family and friends, so competition has some oversight and (on good days) balance. We have one game well past 90 turns without any sign of 'runaway' yet. (Perhaps moving away of my kids will end it, but that won't happen for a bit)
To sloanjh - if it matters, we are definitely the 'role player' types. My group wants the universe to write a story that they want to be a part of. But they help and enjoy, and that is what makes it fun for us. I have alway said that I want my rules to be a framework to paint on. Much like some types of poems, a form is required, but within that you have total freedom to tell your own story.
To anyone who might have been offended - I in no way meant to compare the games of Starfire and SFB. I like and play both. I wanted to compare that SFB is trying to find a way to introduce itself to new players. Easily (and to my surprise - free of cost for the Cadet PDF. You can even print off your own counters and cut them out. Finding Starfire counters now is a little tricky.).Help from an experienced player is best, but SFB is trying to help if one isn't there, and a group would like to try. Starfire isn't hard if you have a teacher, but we are getting fewer as the years go by. And the array of products doesn't help. Our own internal squabbles wouldn't help to get anyone interested either.
In the end, what I was trying to say is that Starfire has nowhere at the moment for a new player to start if he doesn't know an experienced player. I haven't heard anyone say they have bunches of new players in their group. But in my Nemesis Campaign thread, I've already had two folks who just wanted a site they could go to and look at simple rules to tryand understand ship designs, etc. Sounds like people who would really like to play, but at the moment, I really don't have a direction to send them. I'm sure if I've heard from two, there have to be others out there who would like to join the Starfire 'family'.
Once again, I have always loved playing Starfire. My group had changed parts of it to suit ourselves, but we are happy with what we have. And to crucis, I again wish you the best of luck, and hope that if I in some way am responsible for the amount of time you have put into this thread - instead of your work - you have my most sincere apologies.
Post by: crucis on March 26, 2010, 03:12:37 AM
Quote from: "Erik Luken"
One of the major points of impetus behind me writing Astra Imperia was the fact that SF was so condensed in time scale. I didn't like the "go from Apollo 13 to Star Trek in 5 years" situation that seemed to be the norm. One thing I wanted was a (pardon the term) Weberian feel to the empires. Decades passing between tech level jumps. Officers growing older and retiring over the course of the game.
Sadly, from my point of view, even in Astra Imperia the tech advances are too fast, though I do feel the population growth is approximately right. The average growth is between 2-4% per year with the breakpoints sufficiently spread out.
Back to the population supporting ships. In the currently available rules, there is no penalty for exceeding the limit. In the re-write, the current penalty is paying the 10% upkeep monthly instead of yearly. One thing I should note, the ships in Astra Imperia are much much smaller than anything in Aurora (a superfreighter weighs in at 9000 tons and I can see waresky weeping now). I also wanted to avoid the 200+ ship fleets hammering things out. A basic low-tech scout ship of 300 to 400 tons costs around 1 year output from a small core world population.
I guess that the condensed time frame thing never bothered me at all. I like the idea of trying to get things moving along. The idea of slowing things down to a "real life" speed seems horrifyingly boring to me.
As for the fleet exceeding its PP limits... the basic concept would be that if you build a unit that would require PP's in excess of the Navy's current PP limit, the ship could not be activated, since the personnel simply wasn't available. OTOH, if for whatever reason, the size of the Empire's total population has decreased, and the total # of PU's becomes less than the current fleet PP size, my thinking is that the personnel have already been allocated, so it's not like they disappear into thin air. But the Navy would be unable to add any new ships to the fleet, unless it transferred PP's from already existing ships (which would have to be mothballed or scrapped).
Post by: crucis on March 26, 2010, 03:34:12 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
Oh my.
I hope my post didn't start what I have come back to find. I was only trying to say that what was out there now for Starfire (if you were a new player and didn't know what you were looking at) was a confusing mess and would make it difficult to get started. There is nothing right now aimed at a new player that is in production (that I am aware of). I in no way wanted to start any sort of heat in a discussion about where it should go/what it is/what it should be. If anyone out there has ruffled feathers due to my post, I offer my deepest apologies and will gladly edit it off the thread.
That said, I will speak (post?) once more, and then remain silent.
No no, Procyon. No need to apologize. While PaulM and I may be disagreeing, I'm in no way angry at him and hope that he's not angry with me. We're just exchanging some opinions, and I appreciate that.
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I agree with many points out there.
To crucis - more complicated won't make for a friendlier game. I whole heartedly endorse attempts to reduce the complexity. Folks can always make it more complicated. The attempt to get their particular form of complicated to be the 'official' form of complicated seems to be the thorn in the paw of Starfire for some time now. This may be heresy (if not impossible), but an official recognition that there is more than one 'right' way to play Starfire seems long overdue. In the end, what you find fun, is right.
I'm trying to do my best to simplify things in ways that attempt to retain the essential value of the concepts, while stripping away the overly complicated parts whose benefits don't seem to be worth the cost in complexity.
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As a side note, we do use PP points, but base them off of your income instead of your pop. You already have to total your income every turn, and totaling your PU was just one more hurdle we didn't care to jump. We use 1 PP per 10 MC, so a starting world (2000MC+/-) doesn't support much, but we like smaller fleets. 10 was just an easy number for the kids to work with. Adjust as you would like. Or ignore it if you don't.
1 PP per 10 MC seems extremely low, but whatever floats your boat.
I suppose that it might be possible to base PP's off of total income rather than PU totals. I'll have to think about it.
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To anyone who might have been offended - I in no way meant to compare the games of Starfire and SFB. I like and play both. I wanted to compare that SFB is trying to find a way to introduce itself to new players. Easily (and to my surprise - free of cost for the Cadet PDF. You can even print off your own counters and cut them out. Finding Starfire counters now is a little tricky.).Help from an experienced player is best, but SFB is trying to help if one isn't there, and a group would like to try. Starfire isn't hard if you have a teacher, but we are getting fewer as the years go by. And the array of products doesn't help. Our own internal squabbles wouldn't help to get anyone interested either.
Procyon, I'm curious about this part. When you print these counters and cut them out, are you printing them on any sort of light cardboard or heavy paper stock? This issue of counters is something that Cralis and I have discussed recently, and I'm very curious about this. Whatever you can tell me would be very useful.
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Once again, I have always loved playing Starfire. My group had changed parts of it to suit ourselves, but we are happy with what we have. And to crucis, I again wish you the best of luck, and hope that if I in some way am responsible for the amount of time you have put into this thread - instead of your work - you have my most sincere apologies.
Don't worry about that... I've actually enjoyed the time I've put into this thread...
Post by: procyon on March 26, 2010, 04:27:24 AM
Oh, and as I said, we like smaller games. Helps when some of the players (my kids) are only 10ish when they start. To big or to fast just overwhelms them. Small fleets also pretty much wipe out swarms, which we don't care for a great deal.
Post by: sloanjh on March 26, 2010, 09:45:35 AM
Quote from: "crucis"
This is really the answer to "I'm not sure what you're suggesting", but the other stuff cc'd is relevant so....Quote from: "sloanjh"In my opinion, Imperial SF didn't go far enough in abstracting away the individual movements of ships and units - it still has the detail-freak disease. The player still gave individual movement orders to individual ships (or TG); as the size of the empire grows, this becomes excessively cumbersome. I think that, in order for the game to meet both sets of needs (4X and tactical) the Imperial game has to be ruthless in cutting out detail - I think this is where Imperial SF falls down.
In order to build a game that doesn't suffer from this, I think one would have to go to a "macro-economic" version of fleet management for the strategic game. Rather than tracking individual ship movements, one would assign ships to fleets which had patrol responsibilities - a fleet would have a certain number of certain classes of ships. Rather than tracking which ships are in maintenance, one would go with the USN's "1/3 deployed, 1/3 training up, 1/3 refitting" ratio to determine how many ships in a particular fleet are available at a particular time. For the single-battle tactical players, one could then use the patrol responsibilities (e.g. 1 CVBG is always in Westpac) to generate random encounters between Navies. For the campaign tactical players, one could randomly assign locations upon a patrol to the various patrol responsibilities. For the 4x players, one could generate "tracer" battles for the various patrol responsibilities that were then multiplied by some factor to determine the entire campaign (or just use straight attrition formulae). For the detail-freak players, they could intersperse full campaigns with 4x segments.
I'm not entirely sure that I understand what you're suggesting. But I never really worried about movement orders for individual ships (well, unless I was sending individual ships on missions). I never used the crew grade rules, so I never had to pay attention to specific ship IDs, except when there were some specific units that had suffered damage and didn't match the standard undamaged unit of that class. Thus, if First Fleet had 9 Revenge class BB's and 12 Concord class CA's, I'd just order First Fleet to its destination, knowing that it had those 9 BB's and 12 CA's, and I didn't have to be concerned with the individual id's of the 21 ships.QuoteThe reason that Erik's mail prompted me to write this is that his statement of "stationing a ship at a population" struck a chord with the thoughts I've been having along these lines. Basically, the 4X game would involve building ships for fleets, stationing them at fleet bases, and assessing the costs of the fleet deployments (in addition to colonization activities, of course). It should be expensive to station a large fleet a long way away from core worlds, unless port facilities were explicitly built up. The player could turn knobs to e.g. "surge" readiness if he thought war was imminent, or set levels of war-like encounters with neighboring empires (e.g. "friendly" vs. "covert harrassment" vs. "open warfare"), but these levels would have costs in the 4X game.
Well, this is an area of interest for me. In the SM#2 thru Ultra model, when you pay for maintenance in a given month, it will support any and all units regardless of where they are, well, at least as long as the CFN has a clear path to reach them. While this model has the benefit of extreme simplicity, it just doesn't feel right to me.
At this time, I haven't actually put a lot of thought into this issue, but I was thinking that perhaps this "instant availability" of maintenance should only be allowed as long as you are within 4 StMP of a CFN terminal (i.e. essentially any outpost). Of course, this doesn't exactly match up to what you say above about requiring some sort of full blown "port facilities", but it's a start. Also, with this idea, there'd be some consequences...
First, it would create pressure to build outposts or colonies on or near the frontier to provide for places where forward formations could get their maintenance. And as the "frontier" moved forward, so too would the navy need to establish new forward bases.
Second, there would need to be a way of handling maintenance supply for ships/fleets that were not within supply range of their bases.
I think that what I'm suggesting is two things:
1) Introduce "the uncertainty principle" to ships/TG/fleets when you're working in the "strategic" game. By this I mean that, in the strategic game you do not know which system (or refit state) a ship is in at a particular time. Instead, you know which fleet the ship is in, which systems are areas of responsibility for the fleet, and how the fleet has divided its resources to patrol those areas of responsibility.
2) 1-month timescales are too short for the strategic game if you want to be able to run enough decades or centuries for the empire's colonies to grow at a natural rate. If you go to 1-year (or even longer), then you solve at least two problems:
A) You don't need to worry about tracking a ship's movement between stations (by which I mean fleets/port facilities), because the transit time is signficantly shorter than a turn. In other words, on a scale of a year, any ship can be anywhere in your empire.
B) The complaints about CFN being unrealistic because you can magically teleport the cargo ships from one end of your empire to the other go away, for the same reason (one turn has enough time in it for multiple transits across the empire).
Your comment about "port facilities" crystalized what I meant by #1. Let me throw a few concepts out there (all for the strategic game):
1) The game is centered around "home ports" and "stations". A "home port" is where a ship is based and undergoes training and refit. A "station" is a patrol area where you assign patrolling resources (ships or TG) on "missions", such as WestPac or the Med for the USN. A station will probably map to a system or group of systems.
2) "Missions" are the sorts of activities that a patrolling resources might perform on a station. Example missions might be: Commerce Protection (i.e. CFN escorts), Planetary Defence (for inhabited systems), Border (WP) Defence, etc. For tracking purposes, this could actually be done pretty easily using index cards - you can use a card to define a patrol area, and other cards (or regions within the card) to define missions within the patrol areas, then put counters or write numbers of ships for tracking.
3) A home port has a set of ships assigned to it, which can be divided up into TG. TG are assigned missions on stations.
4) Just because you have 9 ships assigned to a home port, that doesn't mean that they'll all be available for missions. During normal operations, only 1/3 will be deployable - another 1/3 will be training in the home port's system, and another 1/3 will be in refit (parts strewn about on the deck), which brings you down to 3. There should also be a range penalty - if a station is a long way from the home port where the ships are based, then there should either be a drop in coverage (sometimes the ships aren't there) or some other penalty. Now that I think about it, you might want to introduce the concept of "naval CFN", which has a set number of "deployment points" - putting ships on station a long way from home port costs a lot of deployment points, which would naturally lead to less coverage time on station if logistical resources are limited. Note that naval CFN points would come from building real logistics ships for your navy, and assigning them to home ports just like any other ship.
5) The tactical game is invoked by "encounters". Encounters happen randomly when two empires have ships with missions in the same system, and if the empires are on some sort of hostile footing. For example, if two empires had a "patrol 25% of the time" missions in a system, then there would be a good chance of an encounter between patrolling elements at least once in the course of a year (it would be fairly large since each fleet would do multiple patrols over the course of a year). If one empire had a "patrol 25%" order and another had a "probe" order, then the odds would be 25%, since the probe would only enter the system once for a short time.
6) When an encounter happens, you basically randomly determine an OOB for each side based on the 1/3 availability rule, then roll up a starting configuration. You might want to have the idea of "standing orders" defined by the players for each mission, so that the starting configuration could be based on this.
7) On the subject of construction, if your turns are long enough (5 years, which is probably too long), then you don't need to worry about how long it takes to build a SY - you just need to worry about SY throughput. What's probably best is what Steve does and what you allude to - SY operations are paid for as you go, so the cost of a big ship is spread out over the several years it takes to build it.
:)
John, I can't talk about the nitty-gritty of how similar or dissimilar Cosmic will be to 3E. I prefer to play things a fairly close to the vest, as the saying goes...
[/quote]
Wasn't probing for information, was trying to point out that I recognized that this might be too big a conceptual change.
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And you answered it here
As I've said before and elsewhere, the tech systems will be entirely familiar to 3e people and have a 3e feel to them. Also, while as I've said that I'm entirely willing to take things from any edition of Starfire, my general preference is to try to maintain a general level of simplicity on the strategic side that's lower than exists in Ultra, and perhaps in SM#2 as well (well, at least for those areas in SM#2 where things became more complex than in ISF...).
As for "how much be changed?" ... well, that's a tough one to answer. For example, how much change would people accept? (That may seem like an overly leading question, but it's not intended that way.) I can also say that if people are expecting me to simply take all of the 3e source documents and re-edit them, they're going to be disappointed. That is NOT what I'm doing. This isn't to say that I'm ignoring what's come before (aka 3e, 3rdR, SM#2, UTM) or what is (Ultra). What I'm trying to do is to create something new, not something that's re-hashed, but with strong 3e sensibilities... OTOH, just because I say "something new", don't take that to mean that I'm trying to do anything radically different (although "radically different" may be a very relative term from person to person).
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However, an idea that has only occurred to me upon reading what you wrote, I suppose that an additional factor could be included that took the total size of an empire (i.e. its total PU) into account, and above a certain point, the empire's growth rates were further reduced... But I have no idea what would be proper total PU breakpoints for this sort of concept to work properly.I like the idea of bigger empires having more unrest/chance of rebellion. If you go this route, then players have an incentive not to grow like crazy, 'cuz it might break up their empire. The economic penalty idea I mentioned was based on the "corruption" penalty in Civilization.
John
Post by: Erik L on March 26, 2010, 11:24:39 AM
Quote from: "crucis"
I guess that the condensed time frame thing never bothered me at all. I like the idea of trying to get things moving along. The idea of slowing things down to a "real life" speed seems horrifyingly boring to me. :) Just not as fast as Starfire.
Post by: crucis on March 26, 2010, 12:57:23 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
lots o' snippage
In all honestly, John, what you describe above is the sort of change that is far, far, far too great for my taste. It changes the strategic side so greatly that it would no longer feel like (strategic) Starfire to me, and in all honesty, I'd never want to play it this way, and probably would have never started playing a strategic game that was handled this way. I want control over my ships' movements and my fleets' strategies and do not want them abstracted away and do not want my fleets' orders of battle and locations randomized. Yes, this may increase the complexity of things to some degree, but it's a level of detail that I'm not willing to lose.
I don't mind increasing the abstraction level of certain things to try to simplify the strategic game, but (IMO) I'm not trying to change the essential nature of the game. What you've described above is changing the nature of the game to the point that it's entirely unrecognizable... to the point that it is, for all intents and purposes, a different game.
Regardless, thanks for the input.
Post by: boggo2300 on March 28, 2010, 09:04:28 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Quote from: "boggo2300"Damn you John!!
Thats exactly what I was looking for when I started playing SF (1st edition), then VBAM, so when are you giving up your day job to become a game designer :-) I'd end up trying to track every single little thing - a case of "do as I say, not as I do"
John
PS - VBAM?
Victory By Any Means, its another P&P 4 X game, a lot more abstract than starfire, and it's tectical game is either an abstract factors vs factors exercise or you use one of the myriad tectical starship combat games out there (the one they link to most in VBAM is Starmada) Unfortunately from my point of view they abstract the wrong things (ie tech advancement) and it still doesnt give the granduer and long timelines I'd like, I love the idea of it taking a decade to get a self supporting colony, ship construction taking 5 years for a capital ship, research projects being 10 years. of course as a rider theres no way that would be playable with month long turns, it would be more boring than, um, err anything I can think of!
Matt
Post by: Paul M on March 29, 2010, 06:45:12 AM
As for playing Starfire with PnP. I've done this with 2E rules, that works up to a point. At about 20 systems to track the game bogs dramatically. This game was heavily modified and used the 3rdR time warp thing in that we had had income only from one month but a year per turn. It still got overwhelming, I had a binder to try and keep track of things. Also the SM is pretty much left with accepting that the player did the math right since double checking would be a serious effort.
I've done various 4thE games with only Excel spreadsheets. Though the computer you would think would simplify stuff that is true only to a point. Excel is spreadsheet not a database so it gets complex at between 10 and 20 systems. Also tracking ships is a major major pain. One of the issues is just how hard it is to scroll...stupid as that is. But with 50 lines per system as an average you are at 500+ lines in your empire rather fast. And each line needs to be entered by hand so there is huge chance to make a mistake. Cut and paste only goes so far. Plus the turn to turn issues. It is doable but the death by bookkeeping sets in rather quickly. This version is really just PnP using the computer as a binder/calculator.
In the second case the SM at least can maintain control and make sure that no major errors creep in. But neither works with empires that are beyond small. This is what Steve and I are trying to point out. I played my games with the locals using Starfire Assistant for over 2 years, with weekly or at worst biweekly turns. We were probably equal to Steve's game in total though my empire was only 70-80 systems. But this requires a proper database program. That is why our SM said no way without it.
There are other issues but PnP is only possible if the galaxy size is constrained to extremely small. This shows up immediately in VBAM where they limit the galaxy in their campaign supplements to very few stars. Which is good if you are just trying to generate battles with realistic OOBs. That is what Marvin set out to do, and he succeeded. It isn't really what I enjoy most about Starfire...being more in the "builder" category.
My point about complex economies is perhaps not so clear. By complex I don't mean bookkeeping intensive but simply that there is more to them than MCr. Starfire is actually extremely bookkeeping intensive and offers little for it. In ISF Webber tried to head off at the pass a number of aspects, which is why there were PP, reduction in population to produce settlers, and delays before you got your money from the new colony. The flip side is that the game then became all about NPRs. 3rdR made it much harder to get a friendly NPR amalgamation and made colonization more worthwhile. But the net result is that your income eventually spirals out of control since you have 3 growth mechanisms: tech level, colonization, and NPRs. You can shove the problem back (Marvin's solution) which only works if the game is over with quick. That doesn't remove the problem and so for me that is not a viable solution. The removal of the NPRs probably makes exploration luck even more critical but then a game of 5 players in say 50 starsystems is likely to devolve into 4:1, 3:1, 2:1 and then either 1:1 or end as one player has the economy and military to overwhelm the remaining one. It might go 3:2, 2:1, 1:1 as well but clearly the first players to unite have the highest chance of "winning" and outsystem colonization is going to be limited regardless since the time scale to make such things worthwhile won't exist. I could be wrong since it isn't the sort of game I have played but long term investments don't seem to play a major role in a short game. The board game Twilight Imperium is a good example of this kind of game. Basically in a 3 player game the first to attack will loose militarily so it is worthwhile only doing so if you can win via victory points in some way before the defeat matters.
A suggestion for an economic change would be to have an economy that has: money, 4 resources (food, energy, metals, consumer goods), shipyards that build only certain hull sizes or smaller (but can't build multiples), have slow ship construction, and have maintenance points and have the ships require these in integer amounts so that small ships really aren't efficient. I would also make it so that the player be rewarded for building an infrastructure network (assuming it becomes less of a pain and more of a strategic asset). My feeling is that you have to give the players strategic choices, do they invest in a colony that looses money but gives their fleets more range and allows access to that warp point chain or do they forgo it and invest in a money making colony. The IFN basically destroys this sort of thing in 3rdR. The changes introduced in AD and onwards either removed the infrastructure, or made it maintenance free so that nothing impeded the rich getting richer, faster and faster.
The problem of the time scale. It is what would make multiplayer Aurora un-enjoyable as you would have long periods of idleness. I don't have a solution, I ran into this when I was thinking up game rules years ago and the problem doesn't go away. One possible solution would be to slow down dramatically the speed of ships so that one year tactical would match up with one year economic but this will clearly slow down the expansion and has other issues. Another option would be to give a fixed amount of money on turn 1 and then no more money till turn 10 (slow down the economy to match the military) plus cut the build rates by the same factor of 10. But there are issues with this as well.
But to make the game playable PnP you have to go well away from the bookkeeping nightmare that Starfire becomes. Smaller numbers, more integers, that sort of thing.
Post by: crucis on March 29, 2010, 03:32:28 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
Also tracking ships is a major major pain.
I believe that the biggest reason that "tracking ships is a major major pain" is the crew grade rules. Those rules basically turn each and every ship into an individual entity with its own unique number of XP. I never play with crew grade, and have never had to bother tracking crew grade XP, and thus have been able to treat all ships of the same class much more simply. That is, say that I have 30 Longbow BC's in system "A", and I decide to order 12 of those BC's to travel to system "B". I don't need to care which 12 BC's will be moved, since they're essentially anonymous. I'm moving a single group of ships, that just happens to be 12 BC's, not 12 individual units each with its own identity and XP total. Saves a LOT of headaches.
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I've done various 4thE games with only Excel spreadsheets. Though the computer you would think would simplify stuff that is true only to a point. Excel is spreadsheet not a database so it gets complex at between 10 and 20 systems. Also tracking ships is a major major pain. One of the issues is just how hard it is to scroll...stupid as that is. But with 50 lines per system as an average you are at 500+ lines in your empire rather fast. And each line needs to be entered by hand so there is huge chance to make a mistake. Cut and paste only goes so far. Plus the turn to turn issues. It is doable but the death by bookkeeping sets in rather quickly. This version is really just PnP using the computer as a binder/calculator.
A part of the paperwork annoyance problem from a P&P perspective is the constant or semi-constant need to recalculate each world's GPV due to monthly or yearly growth. And on top of that, allowing populations on Desolates and Extreme worlds to naturally grow makes this problem MUCH worse, since there are likely MANY more Desolate and Extreme populations in a heavily colonized empire than there are habitables. Of course, the habitables will account for more of the overall income, but the desolates and extremes will be much more numerous and if allowed to naturally grow, each would require GPV recalculation every growth cycle. If Desolate and Extreme population growth is removed, the paperwork annoyance in this regard is considerably reduced.
Also, there are some other factor contribute to making certain aspects of the paperwork more difficult in the PU/PTU model vs. the EVM model. For example, with the existence of mineral values and incremental colonization, all those little Desolate and Extreme populations are far, far less homogeneous in their GPV numbers. Now, this may be pleasing for some for the sense of realism, but it also makes dealing with all those little individual populations more tedious than if they all had the same value.
For example, in ISF, the EVM value an OP or a Colony on a Type O1/O2 world was a set value. It didn't change due to mineral values or incremental colonization or growth. Only a change in the empire's TL would cause an increase in the EVM. (And yes, a change in the TL would require the REI's to be re-rolled, but the REI concept also tended to be one of the largest factors in my ISF planetary economies could be so huge.) So, in the ISF model, all those Desolate and Extreme OP's and Colonies did tend to have very GPV's, which might seem rather bland, but it also greatly simplified dealing with them.
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My point about complex economies is perhaps not so clear. By complex I don't mean bookkeeping intensive but simply that there is more to them than MCr.
Actually, I did understand what you meant... ;)
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You can shove the problem back (Marvin's solution) which only works if the game is over with quick. That doesn't remove the problem and so for me that is not a viable solution.
I don't necessarily agree with you here. I'd argue that Marvin's solutions probably work best in a smaller game because of the numbers of T/ST's he allows. I think that if T/ST are "too" common (a very relative term, mind you), in a shorter game, not enough time/turns will pass to cause those "too common" T/ST's to become to economically explosive, but after a certain point they will be. But if you want a longer, larger game, you could considerably delay this by reducing the numbers of T/ST's in the game galaxy. Of course that will also increase exploration luck as a factor. But IMHO there are some tradeoffs that just can't be avoided. if you want to keep economies from growing too large too quick, you need to have fewer economically explosive T/ST's in the mix, even if it does increase the exploration luck factor. But if all one cares about is "exploration luck", then make every system exactly the same (1 T, 1 ST, and the usual other junk) and exploration luck will be a total non-issue. Of course, you'll have T/ST's everywhere and imperial economies will go nuclear in a very, very short time.
Another related point is the relative values of the 3 habitable environment types: Benign, Harsh, and Hostile. In SM#2, Harsh's were capped at Medium and Hostiles at Settlement. OTOH, in 4e, Harsh's were capped (loosely) at Large, and Hostiles at (loosely) Medium. I think that this change was done to mitigate exploration luck, since it reduced the difference in economic value for Harshs and Hostiles relative to Benigns. But at the same time, by increasing the values of Harshs and Hostiles, it also increase the overall value of all T/ST's taken together. In simple terms, if each of the 3 hab env's has a 33% chance of existing, that means that the average T/ST population in SM#2 would be a Medium, whereas in 4e it would be a Large... and since Larges are twice the PU size of Mediums, this means that the average total GPV has potentially increased by factor of 2. Something to consider...
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The removal of the NPRs probably makes exploration luck even more critical but then a game of 5 players in say 50 starsystems is likely to devolve into 4:1, 3:1, 2:1 and then either 1:1 or end as one player has the economy and military to overwhelm the remaining one. It might go 3:2, 2:1, 1:1 as well but clearly the first players to unite have the highest chance of "winning" and outsystem colonization is going to be limited regardless since the time scale to make such things worthwhile won't exist. I could be wrong since it isn't the sort of game I have played but long term investments don't seem to play a major role in a short game.
It took me a few re-readings to absorb this paragraph, Paul. The ratios caught my eye and prevented me from absorbing the really important point. Yes, 5 players in only 50 star systems with no NPR's would tend to limit the value of outsystem colonization. Then again, I suppose that I could say that if you were playing that many players in so small a galaxy, you're really looking to have a bunch of battles, and exploration would seem to be more about finding routes into enemy territory, than exploration for its own sake and for finding colonizable real estate.
While this isn't the sort of campaign that would really interest me, I could see that it might be pretty good for people looking for a more "operational" game with a number of battles. And actually, if that IS the sort of game that they're interested in, I'd say that it'd be better to not include any NPR's in that small galaxy, since any hostile NPR would be terribly bad luck and any friendly NPR would be amazingly good luck. It'd probably be better in such a small galaxy to just let the players be knocking heads with each other and not let such a highly random factor as NPR's affect the outcome.
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A suggestion for an economic change would be to have an economy that has: money, 4 resources (food, energy, metals, consumer goods), shipyards that build only certain hull sizes or smaller (but can't build multiples), have slow ship construction, and have maintenance points and have the ships require these in integer amounts so that small ships really aren't efficient. I would also make it so that the player be rewarded for building an infrastructure network (assuming it becomes less of a pain and more of a strategic asset). My feeling is that you have to give the players strategic choices, do they invest in a colony that looses money but gives their fleets more range and allows access to that warp point chain or do they forgo it and invest in a money making colony. The IFN basically destroys this sort of thing in 3rdR. The changes introduced in AD and onwards either removed the infrastructure, or made it maintenance free so that nothing impeded the rich getting richer, faster and faster.
There are many interesting points here.
Honestly, though this sort of complication just doesn't sound like Starfire to me. The "4 resources" thing only makes an already complicated game more complex.
Slower construction times? This doesn't do much for me, though it's the easiest thing to do within the existing framework without causing many secondary effects. I would worry that slower construction times would only serve to make smaller ships even more attractive, since it would make larger ships that much slower to build.
You also have a "time scale" issue here, I'd tend to think. Not a "time scale" issue similar to the supposed economic speed up. I'm thinking more along the lines of construction times vs. movement times. It's one thing to have ships taking a year or 2 to build if it's taking a long time to cross a number of star systems. But in that 5 player/50 star system galaxy, it may not be terribly uncommon for the players to be no more than 5 StMP apart (just a swag BTW), depending on the layout of the WP network. Or to put it another way, their home systems may not be much more than 2-3 months travel apart, once all the warp interconnections have been scouted out. Who's going to bother building big ships if the other player could be in your home system in 2-3 months? The one unalterable (I suppose) advantage of small ships over large ones is that you can build about 3 DD's in the same time that you could build 1 BB. Now, while the BB may be more powerful than those 3 DD, that's only true IF the BB gets completed. But in the meantime, you might have 1 or 2 of those DD's already finished.
Regardless, increased build times only slow the rate of fleet growth. They don't do anything to place caps on it. It would seem that only something like PP's could do something like that.
Maintenance Points? Well, I suppose that a ship's maintenance cost could be required to be rounded to the nearest whole number. Not sure how that would help out larger ships over smaller ones in terms of efficiency, unless you start assigning hardcoded maintenance fees to each hull type and have those fees arbitrarily favor larger ships over smaller ones. But then that doesn't take into account the relative costs of warships having different designs with more expensive and more advanced technologies. Oh, I suppose that one could multiply the total of all those hardcoded maint fees by some TL factor, but that wouldn't seem to be fair as it wouldn't take into account that you might have some classes that aren't up to current TL standards. Or heck, your empire's TL may have just increased, but none of your ships have any tech systems from that TL yet. Frankly, the question of rounding to the nearest whole number aside, it seems that the current method of calculating a ship's maintenance cost is the most fair and effective one that I can see at this moment.
"Infrastructure network"? This is a bit vague. Do you mean, something like saying that saying that fleets could only get their maintenance from the CFN "free" if they were within 4 StMP of a CFN terminal (really just any ol' Outpost)?
I understand what you're saying about the changes to the CFN (the IFN was what it was called in ISF) made in SM#2 do make dealing with maintenance "easier". This is an issue of differing perspectives and player desires. Some players don't want to deal with the issues of logistics, such as you're describing. And the CFN as it exists from SM#2 and forward has basically taken this element out of the game. All ships in your empire magically receive their maintenance every month, as long as they're not cut off, under the subsumed theory that all of those shipments are pre-planned months ahead of time below the player's "radar screen". And that can work to a degree to me, so long as they were well within the borders of the empire. But that theory falls on its face when you have ships that are pushing the frontiers of your empire forward. How does anyone in the CFN or the Navy's Logistics Division know where those ships are? How can you plan for maintenance shipments to ships that have passed beyond the frontiers of your empire and are god knows where?
I don't know that this iffy CFN/maintenance model contributes to the so-called "rich getting richer" issue, but it does stretch credulity a bit far for me. I sort of like the idea that you'd have to be within 4 StMP of any CFN terminal (basically any Imperial population) to be in the "instant" maintenance infrastructure of the empire, but if you wanted to move outside of that infrastructure, you'd have to bring along your own maintenance funds in Imperial FT's (or carried in your warship's cargo holds).
Or there could be a different way to look at this... While I'm not particularly interested in an economics and colonization model that actually produces colonies that truly are not profitable, it could be possible to require more specialized, non-income producing facilities to support the Navy's logistical (i.e. maintenance) network. Something like naval bases. They wouldn't necessarily be particularly expensive. They might not be much more than an outpost, but a non-income producing OP that was dedicated to naval logistics, etc.
I'm not unalterably opposed to re-including Personnel Points back into the game, though it seems unlikely. I'd only do it as a means of controlling fleet sizes. (For example, I wouldn't bother linking PP's to PCF's, since it's fleet size that's the issue, not the size of the Imperial Marine Corps.) The trick is finding the right balance between PP and PU.
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The problem of the time scale. (snip)
I don't see time scale as a problem at all. I *like* the idea that it's speeded up so that things happen at a quicker pace and the game moves along.
Post by: Paul M on March 31, 2010, 08:46:25 AM
My comment on adding to the number of resources so you have 5 rather than 1 is that you can make the interactions work better. Ships would take: metal, energy and money to build, but maintenance points to support. Maintenance points cost metal and energy to produce at a rate determined by your fraction of economy devoted to the military-industrial complex. And so forth. This allows the designer to introduce checks and balances. You can't balance a purely compound interest growth economy by simply requiring more money over a long time period. The costs have to rise with the income and they don't. They don't rise because a lot of things were introduced into the game to make things simpler (the CFN/IFN), no maintenance for AW, free SY, etc. The trouble is that each change individually may make sense and may even be a good design choice but the collective effect was not taken into account.
A simple example is no maintenance for IDEW/mines/DSB-L. The stockpiles of those in most player empires is such that a warp point assault truly becomes a nightmare of epic proportions. Since anything that costs no maintenance killing stuff that cost maintenance is a good deal for the defender well I think everyone who has played the game understands the issue.
Logistics isn't fun, but on an operational scale which is largely what "Imperial Starfire" is trying to reproduce, ignoring it can't be a good idea. Fleet bases, supply pipelines, running costs for things all force the player to make choices, and choices are good for the game. The major issue is how to make these things not contribute to the whole book keeping nightmare.
My point about tracking individual ships is that if the ships are damaged you need to track that, plus as you point out the whole crew grade effect is the primary issue. But your example also fails when you consider that you might not (especially in 4thE) have uniform ship classes. So you won't have 12 longbow CAs, but 5 Longbow-1, 3 Longbow-2, 3 Longbow-3, and 2 Longbow-4 CAs. Also ships can be active, in mothballs or refit/repair. Even not taking into account crew grade the spreadsheet work to track your ships is non-trivial. I know I wrote a spreadsheet to track it. It is the shear number of classes (including varients due to technology changes) that causes this. For example with my Starfire Assistant 3rdR game I had: 2 SD classes (1 GP, 1 WP assault), 2 BB Classes (1 GP, 1 WP assault), 2 BC classes (1 command ship, 1 Rc), 3-6 CA classes, 3-6 CL classes, 3-6 DD classes, 3 FT classes, 7-10 classes of smaller ships (couriers etc), 3 construction classes and probably more I've forgotten. Each at any one time would have 2 variants due to the delays of refits. That even without crew grade or individual ship damage is a lot of effort and a lot of careful work to make sure you don't make mistakes. And the incremental changes to tech in 4thE only make the situation worse as you are likely to have far more variants per class type. Compare this to the TFN in Crusade where they had an extremely limited number of ships (by player standards) and very very few classes of ships (by player standards). Since each ship has potentially different maintenance costs due to different construction costs you can make errors with cut and paste fairly easy. On a more minor note not tracking individual ships means the role players are going to be left out...I named my ships inside their class, and had named admirals and captains in my command structure.
By errors I don't mean that I think people will deliberately cheat. The problem is that even an accidental error for several turns (regardless of it was paying too much or too little) is a nightmare to correct since the compound interest effect is going to bite hard. It is one of the nice things about using Stafire Assistant...if there was an error it affected everyone. That is a huge load off the SMs shoulders. And if you do the economic parts without a spreadsheet you have a even greater probability an error will show up and it is harder for the SM to even notice it is being made.
I'm honestly not sure what you are trying to do. If you take 4thE and limit the size of the galaxy to 10-20 stars per player then the game is playable as is without anything more complex than Excel. This will give you a game with random battles and a more or less death match outcome. It is what Marvin intended for 4thE and I think the changes he introduced works well. If you try a "New Empires" campaign the lack of computer support will kill you at a point that depends largely on both the SM's ability to oversee the galaxy as a whole and the players tolerance for book keeping details. Something like SFA will push both dramatically back, probably far enough for the players to stop due to the "Steve/Kurt" empire size effect than anything else, fleet size rather than bookkeeping killing you. Much the same thing that kills (at least for me) the ISW4 supplement. If you just want a simple economic scheme adopt starfire combat and construction mechanics to VBAM and again play in small galaxies. If you want a game that allows "new empires" without death by book keeping or death by fleet bloat then I can't see how you can do anything but to go back to the economic model and dramatically improve-modify it, superficial changes won't change the underlying problems to the existing Starfire economic model all of which are variants of the 3rd edition rules.
Post by: Paul M on March 31, 2010, 09:18:24 AM
Sure sweeping it under the table with the CFN/IFN makes life easier for the player but you said it yourself...magic starts to happen. Supplies instantly appear in various places for example. And more importantly it is largely for free contributing to the rich-get-richer-faster-and-faster. There is no cost to having a big empire since there is no fixed additional cost to hooking that system up to the rest of the empire. You don't have to pay a "subsidized merchant" to go to that system using a Traveler example. Even worse there is no question about if putting PU into that system there makes sense even though it is only 5 moons or something. Why not? There is no cost to securing the system since you aren't require to satisfy the populations security issues. The TFN had a huge investment in colony security via bases given the scenarios in The Stars at War. I would suspect that a majority of their naval budget was tied up in fixed defenses.
Logistics aren't fun but they are what put the breaks on things. I think logistics and realistic command and control rules are two aspects of wargames that people have a love hate relationship with. Without them things are obviously easier...but they ultimately become too easy. Then, at least in a wargame attempting to simulate reality, you get dramatic diversions from reality.
A simple C&C rule for starfire would be to increase the turn mode of green ships by 1 and poor ships by 2. Further increase the turn mode of fleets by the same amount depending on the training status of the fleet.
But ultimately anything that interferes with the players direct control tends to cause wailing and gnashing of teeth...even I do it from time to time in games that simulate command confusion or have supply lines. I just think that on the whole these are things that ultimately add a great deal to the game.
Post by: crucis on April 01, 2010, 01:54:57 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
What I mean by infrastructure is just that. Actual fleet bases. Range of ships depending on drawing supply from a specific fleet base. Supply storage. Supply routes. Bases on the WPs for communication link. Sector capitals. Spaceports. All the nuts and bolts that keep stuff moving and connected in an empire.
The problem here is that it seems to me that trying to do supply base rules for fleet maintenance could get to be massively complex and annoying. Even with a relatively inoffensive looking rule, like saying that you can only get the magically instant maintenance for ships within 4 StMP of any Imperial population, you'd then each turn have to check every single fleet and ship you had to see if it was within those 4 StMP of a any population. Of course, given that this particular version might only require being within 4 StMP of even the merest OP, it shouldn't be all that difficult to try to place lots of OPs throughout your empire, even in systems without any T/ST worlds, just to make certain that the core of your empire had no holes in its supply network, just to make it simple to know that ships within the empire's known borders had no supply issues... Of course, on the flip side, all those little OP's also represent a security risk. They're people who could be at risk from raiders, they might also cough up intel data on your empire, and who knows how many other risks. It might also be rather annoying to have to pay attention (economically speaking) to scads of solo Outposts in a bunch of otherwise empty systems. In a lot of ways, it seems like a bit of a pain...
WP ICN bases: Those exist in both 3e and 4e. Having to create the infrastructure to support the ICN. Of course, if one wanted to make them simpler, I suppose that one could try to abstract ICN infrastructure, and just pay a fee to add a system to the ICN, and also possibly require a monthly maintenance fee. Arguably, these fees wouldn't be all that hard to determine. Come up with the cost of ICN WP relay bases (or perhaps FT-based). You'd know the cost and the maintenance cost. And you'd need 1 for every WP in the star system... Or you could only pay for those WP's you wanted in the ICN, if you wanted a smidge more detail, and didn't feel like paying for emplacing ICN links into dead end systems... (at your own risk, potentially).
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Sure sweeping it under the table with the CFN/IFN makes life easier for the player but you said it yourself...magic starts to happen. Supplies instantly appear in various places for example. And more importantly it is largely for free contributing to the rich-get-richer-faster-and-faster. There is no cost to having a big empire since there is no fixed additional cost to hooking that system up to the rest of the empire. You don't have to pay a "subsidized merchant" to go to that system using a Traveler example.
I could argue that some of these things are happening below the player's radar screen and have been abstracted... such as the cost of adding systems to the CFN.
As for the cost of hooking a new system up to the rest of the empire, of course there is a cost,... the cost of emplacing the ICN relay bases. If you're talking about some sort of "administrative" cost, what's the point? If the point is to reduce incomes, why not just reduce incomes overall, instead of trying to find complex and potentially annoying ways to do it.
I won't disagree that certain aspects of the CFN's abstractions do have a rather "magical" feel to them at times...
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Even worse there is no question about if putting PU into that system there makes sense even though it is only 5 moons or something. Why not? There is no cost to securing the system since you aren't require to satisfy the populations security issues. The TFN had a huge investment in colony security via bases given the scenarios in The Stars at War. I would suspect that a majority of their naval budget was tied up in fixed defenses.
Well, this sort of thing starts taking control out of player's hands... There's nothing stopping a player from establishing patrol fleets around the empire. And if he doesn't, there are risks to not doing so. Should we really be telling players where they must be placing their fleets and ships? Wouldn't it be better to just let them make up their own minds and make their own mistakes?
Also, from a role-playing perspective, some races would be more security conscious than others, as arguably can be seen in the NPR rules. Should player races be forced to obey all those limitations as well? I hope not.
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Logistics aren't fun but they are what put the breaks on things. I think logistics and realistic command and control rules are two aspects of wargames that people have a love hate relationship with. Without them things are obviously easier...but they ultimately become too easy. Then, at least in a wargame attempting to simulate reality, you get dramatic diversions from reality. (snip)
I just think that on the whole these are things that ultimately add a great deal to the game.
The problem that I foresee is that in trying to add certain aspects of "reality" to things such as logistics and C&C, you can end up with some overly complex nightmare situations. OTOH, sometimes some details are required to prevent certain "things" from getting out of control. Mines, etc. Without maintenance on emplaced Automated Weapons (AW's), it's possible, as you correctly point out in the previous post, that players can place some vast minefields that are just plainly deadly to the game. Maintenance costs are necessary to keep minefield sizes under a reasonable degree of control. Of course, this means that the player then has to track those maintenance costs...
I guess that the question then becomes is the solution to control the apparent problem worse than the problem itself.
Post by: procyon on April 01, 2010, 02:37:35 AM
I like the idea of fleet bases. We kind of do the same thing in one of the games I have. It is 'mostly' 4e (we house rule a lot if you haven't noticed), but we 'resurrected' Spaceports. Not just any outpost can support combat ships just like a battleship needs a deep water port (Pearl Harbor as opposed to one of the beaches). The old SP's could only land/handle 40HS so we gave each SP the capability to support 40HS of ships. Limit the range to 2StMP (speed 4 at 2 out and 2 back for the supply ships), and you began to limit fleet size. Tack on a healthy cost to build with a decent rate of maintenance for the SP and building the colony just barely supports your fleet base (or helps subsidize it if it is a big fleet and needs several SP). The players had to keep Imperial FT's/extra hold space on warships to deal with deployments beyond fleet bases and prepay the amount they would need. The FT's just won't go where they aren't protected/escorted. And the TF still had to have a SP to support it/channel the maint through if they leave behind escorts to accompany FTs and to return to. Also makes those bases a big target and a risk to move the fleet from. Take one out and the Fleet starts to degrade quickly. Just a thought.
As for the multiple models of ships creating a BIG fleet roster, that is one of the main reasons we like to try and limit fleet sizes. My wife in particular drives me nuts with a different type of ship for every occasion. A 'new class' cost doesn't slow her down. I don't have a way to deal with that other than small fleets.
On crew grade, it is fun on small fleets. As are graded admirals, commodores, etc. My wife and kids have held the better admiral back from a battle just because they didn't want that one lost or killed, was better at training, etc. They have pulled ships back/disengaged because they didn't want to lose the one they had worked so hard on. Gives a more realistic feel than the weapon last and fight to the death play that otherwise seems to crop up. They leave the old baggie 'escape package' to try and get the beloved ship out of harms way. Even to the point of moving engines back and weapons to the front of the ship. (We seem to be in the minority in this though) If you had a fleet of 1000+ ships, you'd go nuts tracking crew grade. A big fleet for us currently is held on one sheet of loose leaf paper - front and back in three columns, with some room to spare. Crew grade is just a note by the ship. We do like the 4/5e way of advancing being based on a roll each month trained or after a battle. No tick marks to keep track of, just the grade.
On logistics, we try to keep it simple to deal with, but somewhat encompassing - see the SP above or our PP based on income. The less paperwork the better, just let any part of it affect a large portion of the paperwork. Does make a detail oriented SM a must, as mistakes get compounded the more they affect (and dealing with the upset player who got shorted is never fun). I like logistics though. I worked in several Army Commands and what they say is true - amateurs study tactics, professional soldiers study logistics.
Post by: crucis on April 01, 2010, 02:43:18 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
The main point about the complexity of starfire economics is that it is not complex. It is just book keeping intensive. I agree with you completely that removing the arbitrary PU colonization in favor of ISF's defined sizes would reduce that substantially. Rolling the multiplier and letting the dice fall as they may would also be a good change if you use the ISF mechanic since economies periodically expand and collapse, unlike in ISF where you only would take the new number if it was higher...leading to eventually all economies having a x12 multiplier. This is somewhat what is done in Squadron Strike where your income tends to fluctuate around a mean value.
When I speak about the relatively simpler economics of the EVM system in ISF, I wouldn't take that to assume that I was also saying that the REI multiplier was also a good thing. I don't disagree that the overall sizes of ISF economies was too large. My general point in defense of ISF's EVM economics was that I think that dealing with planetary GPV's tended to be a little easier because you didn't have to concern yourself with worrying about incremental colonization which leads to populations having constantly changing population sizes (whether you manage that in PU's or EVM's or whatever). In ISF, once you placed an OP or a Colony, its EVM number didn't change, except when your TL increased. You didn't tend to need to constantly pay attention to what the GPV of those various worlds were, except for at TL upgrades.
However, for better or worse, if one decreases general GPV levels, it also tend to have the effect of making bulk colonization, which was the model used in ISF, much more difficult since bulk emplacement costs would tend to eat up a much greater proportion of a Large/VLg planet's GPV... which would tend to seriously hurt colonization as a game strategy.
It must also be considered that not including any sort of incremental population growth also hurts colonization as a strategy, since population sizes would tend to be limited to Small. Of course, one could seriously reduce the "all at once" growth times in ISF to playable levels, which would probably cause a planet to jump a bracket roughly every 40 turns. However, you are still faced with the desire on the part of some players to have constant and visible growth, rather than big leaps every X years. But this sort of constant (monthly) or semi-constant (yearly) growth also increases the amount of paperwork one must do to maintain one's planetary economies... (and causes some players to want computer support to automatically cause that constant growth to happen... i.e. they want the constant growth to happen but don't want to be bothered to do it themselves).
Also, I don't think that there's a chance in hell that I'd allow rerolled REI's to actually decrease. As a multiplier, it could cause catastrophic drops in planetary incomes and also since it's a die roll, you end up with the size of your economy being very much at the whim of lady luck. I don't see any reason whatsoever that when your TL went up that you should actually see a DECREASE in your planetary income.
Anyways, at the moment, I'm currently working on a slightly simpler economic model that's sort of between the EVM and PU/PTU model that does retain incremental Yearly growth as well as incremental colonization, but without PTU's or the annoying, though reasonably realistic PU/PTU conversion factors. It's still a work in progress and I'm not sure that it will really be an improvement on PU/PTU economics or not.
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My comment on adding to the number of resources so you have 5 rather than 1 is that you can make the interactions work better. Ships would take: metal, energy and money to build, but maintenance points to support. Maintenance points cost metal and energy to produce at a rate determined by your fraction of economy devoted to the military-industrial complex. And so forth. This allows the designer to introduce checks and balances.
Honestly, this seems to be ... very un-STARFIRE-like to me... running an economy on something other than megacredits... a massive paradigm breaker...
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You can't balance a purely compound interest growth economy by simply requiring more money over a long time period. The costs have to rise with the income and they don't. They don't rise because a lot of things were introduced into the game to make things simpler (the CFN/IFN), no maintenance for AW, free SY, etc. The trouble is that each change individually may make sense and may even be a good design choice but the collective effect was not taken into account.
Oh yes, I agree that even minor changes can have ... consequences... :roll:
Crap happens. Mistakes happen. You do the best you can do and move on.
Post by: Paul M on April 01, 2010, 04:14:11 AM
Removing logistic constraints was one of the main things that was done in 3rdR (or SM2) and propagated into 4thE. It has a significant effect on things like the number of missile ships, the use and size of AWs, rate of growth of colonies, etc. I don't think that in the end the effects were worth the book keeping savings but that is a personal view. I had a good number of mine layers and buoy control ships, also I had 2 FTs that accompanied each exploration fleet loaded up with maintenance, mines, DSB-L, DSB, DSB-Xr, the control systems for them, boatbays with Pn and extra Q.
As for not tracking ship grade there are another two aspects here. Firstly crew grade of NPRs was a considerable factor in the threat of a NPR. It made the more militant NPRs dangerous. Facing a small fleet of elite ships was not the same thing as facing a larger fleet of green dweebs with 3 thumbs. Also and more significant from the players point of view was crew grade increase was a pay off to maintenance costs. A ship that is active adds its construction cost every 5 turns due to 20% maintenance. If over time you can add to its grade then you get a reason to have a standing fleet otherwise you might as well just build directly to mothballs, and activate only when a war threatens. This allows a near total focus on colonization. This means that when the war inevitably starts you will have a far larger economy to draw upon. I have seen the effect of this sort of thing in our local game.
One concrete suggestion I can make to reduce the book keeping of the economy is to remove direct colonization of anything but planets. Limit 02 to settlement and O1 to colony. Fix the "PU" per colony step as well as is done in ISF. Either you can afford to put down the full step or you wait a turn. But the main suggestion I would make is to just treat moons like asteroid belts. Sum up the number of moons in the system and give +1-2% system income per 10 moons (round to the nearest). Also prorate it and the asteroid bonus by the maximum planetary population: settlement (25%), small (50%), medium (75%) and large (100%). This substantially reduces the book keeping for each system. You just need now a few lines for each system (the rock worlds only) and the number of asteroid belts plus the number of moons total. The system generation is also reduced since you don't need to track moon economic value. You could then make some economic investments such as asteroid processing centres that add a certain amount of "PU" to the system to represent the old style direct colonization of the asteroid belts...or allow for a higher IU purchase limit on systems with asteroid belts. The specific numbers don't really matter since that needs to be adjusted in playtesting but this is about the only way I can see to substantially reduce book keeping in starfire economics without changing the economics.
Another thing is to include support costs for systems only containing O2 or O1 colonies. You would have to ship in stuff to keep them alive anyway so have a Q and H cost to the system that comes from the CFN. You can even do this for the T and ST worlds until they build up to small or larger size. Otherwise the CFN expands with the growth of the economy allowing the economy to grow faster...contributing to the standard Starfire the rich get richer faster and faster syndrome.
Post by: crucis on April 01, 2010, 01:55:23 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
Well at least to a certain degree we share the same opinion which is good.
Yes, to some degree...
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Removing logistic constraints was one of the main things that was done in 3rdR (or SM2) and propagated into 4thE. It has a significant effect on things like the number of missile ships, the use and size of AWs, rate of growth of colonies, etc. I don't think that in the end the effects were worth the book keeping savings but that is a personal view. I had a good number of mine layers and buoy control ships, also I had 2 FTs that accompanied each exploration fleet loaded up with maintenance, mines, DSB-L, DSB, DSB-Xr, the control systems for them, boatbays with Pn and extra Q.
I want to hit on the 3 points you mention in the 2nd sentence...
Number of Missile ships: I don't know if the SM#2 changes had any affect here. I made extravagant use of missile ships in pure ISF, and I personally was never bothered much by the missile tracking rules. I just had a number of Imp FT, built up stockpiles of missiles, and dealt with it. It never seemed like a big deal to me. ... oh well, different strokes and all that...
AW's... I think that we've covered the issues of AW's pretty well. No maintenance on emplaced AW increases their use and causes massive, massive use of them. Allowing the CFN to emplace AW's causes minefields to grow in size incredibly, and allow the empire to have an semi-unlimited fleet of minelayers. I believe that AW's should only be allowed to be laid by dedicated minelayers, which must be built, maintained, etc. and in this regard will be a severe limiting factor on the rate of growth of minefields, since it's rather unlikely that any player would build up vast fleets of minelayers...
"Rate of growth of colonies": this phrase could have two different meanings, so I'll hit both...
1. (Population Growth) I don't particularly think that population growth rates when applied to OP's and Colonies really matters much at all, particularly for OPs and COLs on T/ST's. The way I look at T/ST's is that unless you have reasons for being unable to expand a perfectly good T/ST's population (such as being at war), the best thing you can do is push hard to expand the T/ST's population to Settlement, then to Small... so that pop growth can kick in and get you to Medium ASAP. Emplacing an OP or a Col on a T/ST and just sitting around and waiting for the pop to grow just seems like a waste of a perfectly good T/ST to me... :| However, I somewhat get the gist of the direction of your suggestions...
Reduce tracking of moon populations and economies by finding some abstract way to deal with them. This was brought up ten or so years ago when Marvin was working on GSF. The idea of treating all moons in a star system similar to how each asteroid belt is currently handled in 4e, as a single merged population. As I recall, the idea was met with little to no support. Players wanted to know where their colonists were. The opinion IIRC seemed to be that it was OK to merge an AB population but not OK to merge all moon populations. I'm a bit hesitant to go against that... OTOH, perhaps it's time to reconsider...
As for using fixed EVM-like economic values for worlds at each TL, you don't know how much my heart aches to do that. As I've said to many people, I'm old school Starfire, as in pre-SM#2. And I've tried working on economic models that could use fixed EVM-like economic values. The problem that I come up against is this: Some (many? most?) players want to see constant or semi-constant and visible economic growth to their economies. This requires an incremental growth mechanism with either yearly or monthly growth. And as a result, those "fixed economic values" are never "fixed". They float just like in the PU/PTU model. Secondly, with reduced economies, it appears that trying to maintain any sense of an aggressive colonization as a powerful game strategy requires the use of incremental colonization, i.e. being able to colonize in blocks smaller than the full size of the OP, Colony, Settlement, etc., because bulk colonization is quite expensive. Oh, bulk colonization of outposts, if one looks at 4e colonization costs, max OP size (i.e. 20 PTU), and such, isn't really particularly expensive. But as you start looking at bulk costs for Colonies and Settlements is gets increasingly nasty. And Bulk colonization of a Small ... that's just down right rude, it's so expensive.
You (or perhaps it was someone else) may say ... well, just save up for that expensive bulk colonization. But from an economic standpoint, you're talking about a lot of money that you're forced to let sit around and "do nothing" (well, possibly buy up IU's in the interim), rather than just ship it out and get on with the colonization, even if it is incrementally.
Getting back to the idea of a merged moon population and merged AB populations...
If one tries to use a Fixed EVM-like system, the merged population for AB's falls apart, since that concept (in 4e) depends upon the underlying assumption that there are 2 OP's per system hex, hence 20 PU per LM of AB orbit. Thus, you end up with a non-fixed economic size ... at least if one wants to stick with those assumptions. Now, one could make some different assumptions, such as AB's closer to stars are denser than those more distant from stars, and hence there's a rough average (max population) size to all AB's regardless of distance. I made this rough guess at about a Large. However, there's also the question of whether populations in Desolate and Extreme environments actually grow. If they do not, you'd never see a "large" population in an AB in the merged pop model. About the max you might see is a Small.
These same issues would also be true if you tried to use a merged population model for moons, though with a couple of twists since you'd sort of just count up the # of moons for the merged pop. I suppose that you should have a merged moon pop for Desolate moons and Extreme moons, since the colonization costs would differ. However, you still have the same problem that merged populations that do not have a fixed size (whether floating due to AB orbit size or # of moons in the system) and thus do not mesh well into a fixed EVM-like economic value model. Frankly, if one uses this sort of merged population pool, you almost have to use an incremental population model.
However, you also seem to suggest that desolate and extreme moons could be treated similarly to the asteroid belt bonus ... as a income modifier to Planetary economies. This could be doable. It's simple enough. However, I do have to question the relative value of moons vs asteroid belts in this regard. I've always thought of asteroid belts as giant strip mines. Aside from a few near moon-sized "planetoids", you have a giant field of nicely broken up rocks just waiting to be stripped down and loaded onto ore FT's and sent off to some ore processing plants... Of course, I suppose in a sense, you've covered this disparity of value and ease of mining in your suggestion that it require TEN moons per 1 or 2% of income bonus. OTOH, that might actually be too low. Using 4e numbers, let's compare a Lg pop to an OP (ignoring all other factors). A Lg pop would have (at max) 2000 PU's, where as a single OP would have 20 PU's (again, at max). That's 1% of the economic value of the Large ... for a single Outpost. Of course, this percentage rises if the T/ST pop is smaller or drops if the T/ST pop is VLG.
I suppose that that for a truly simple and extremely abstract model for this, you could say that for each desolate or extreme moon (and you'd probably just want to treat them the same) in the system, you get a 1% income bonus to any planetary population in the system with a Small population or larger. You'd also need the presence of an in-system CFN (which I currently define as the presence of 200 PU's in the star system, not 200 MC). However, I should say that if one was going to use this model, asteroid belt colonization should not exist either, and AB's should only contribute their AB bonus to planetary incomes.
I should note that I'm hesitant to allow for multiple asteroid belts to contribute multiple AB bonuses, because it seems to me that there's only so much raw material that any planetary economy can absorb, and that it seems to me that even a single AB is going to be strip miner's dream ... a vast, VAST strip mine of seemingly unlimited potential. Assuming a second or third (or more) AB can add additional increments of raw material to the planetary income somehow seems wrong to me. OTOH... it occurs to me that if one kept the ABB but dumped explicit colonization to the AB, you'd dumped a lot of income, since you have made the AB's outposts (merged or not) disappear... so perhaps the ABB should be higher (20%?) to account for an assumed population to the belt...
A problem that I have with this interesting and very abstract model is that you no longer have any visible populations on these moons. Are they all assumed to have OP's on them? Do these assumed OP's have assumed sensor capability? Can these assumed OP's be captured and "interrogated" for intel? And so on and so on...
Also, even if one assumes 1% for each Desolate or Extreme moon, that also assumes that all of those moons only have OP's on them. Perhaps Desolate Moons should count as 2 or 3% since they could actually have Colonies, which are worth 3 times more than an OP on an Extreme moon. Also, why bother allowing explicit colonization of extreme planets (i.e. mercury-like planets)? Why not just count them in with the moons? They're small and could be easily subsumed into the mix. I'd suggest keeping O2 aka Type B planets as explicitly colonizable, because frankly, larger O2 planets should have a higher pop cap than Settlement. Mass 1 planets are really about the same size as the largest of Jupiter's moons. OTOH, a Mass 2 planet, even a Mass 2 O2/B planet would be more Earth sized, and even if not particularly hospitable (i.e. a Desolate environment), should be capable of a Small population.
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Also prorate it and the asteroid bonus by the maximum planetary population: settlement (25%), small (50%), medium (75%) and large (100%).
I've copied out a portion of your above quote because I don't understand it at all. (I realize that I may have killed the context of this sentence by removing the surrounding sentences...) Paul, could you explain what you mean here. It's completely going over my head right now... ;)
I believe that the most interesting idea was to treat all non-T/ST planets (and O2/B planets (my addition) ) as only an abstract bonus to planetary incomes. This is a very interesting idea, since it would certainly simplify economic and population tracking. I do have a concern that you gain this bonus essentially for free (i.e. because you never had to establish any of those outposts and colonies on all those moons). OTOH, perhaps the simplification more than offsets this concern.
Another concern that I have is what about star systems without any T/ST planets or a (large?) O2 planet? Within this model, you'd have a bunch of moons, minor planets, and AB's without any major planet that could receive their income. Does that mean that economically speaking, such systems are no better than starless nexuses? Well, perhaps that would just be a "cost" for the greater benefit of this simplification. And it may be a case where the value of the benefit (greatly, in this case?) outweighs the value of the loss (i.e. no economic benefit from systems not having any T/ST/B planet)... and thus justifies the change.
I'm also concerned that players may not like the idea of colonization and income of all those moons becoming nothing more than an abstract income bonus. OTOH, if simplification in the name of playing the game more P&P style is desirable, then to that end, this sort of abstraction should also be desirable.
Thanks, PaulM.
Post by: mavikfelna on April 01, 2010, 03:14:28 PM
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As for crew grade being a payoff for maintenance costs... bah... (Minor error on your part... warship maintenance is 15% not 20%). I agree that people often put most of the starting fleets directly into mothballs as well as building directly into moth balls. I find this annoying, but I'll let it pass and move on, as it's not really the point here...
Remember that thing I said at the end of my previous post (I think) about how sometimes the solutions to problems can often be worse than the problems themselves? I see this as one of those cases. Let me be plain. As much as some people in the past have griped about ISF's missile tracking and personnel point rules, I personally find crew grade rules to be much more annoying than those other two ...combined!!! I utterly loathe tracking individual ships, crew crew, crew grade XP.... and none of these so-called benefits come close to the cost of all that extra tracking!!! (/rant)
Now this is a huge difference between you and most of the rest of us in the thread. I would much rather have crew grade than not. It makes a huge difference to the flavor of the game and adds worthwhile complexity. Now, I never really minded the missile tracking in ISF, though I dislike PP as they made sense to me. If I have a planet with billions of beings on it, how is it I can only come up with enough crews for 20 ships, or whatever. If nothing else, you could conscript the crews, take the grade penalty and just train them up over time eventually.
But not having crew grade gives no reason what so ever to keep units in active status. And the thrill of working up that special cruiser (or whatever) through the grades to those exalted Star Trek like heights of legendary status just goes away with no reward.
--Mav
Post by: procyon on April 02, 2010, 12:36:17 AM
As for sensor capability on the moons, I don't know of any mining companies running sophisticated ground to air radar setups today. If the players want a sensor outpost, build a PDC with sensors.
And on crew grade, I like it. So does everyone I run games with. Just make it optional for those who don't care to mess with it.
Post by: crucis on April 02, 2010, 01:38:45 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
After looking it over, the bonus to income for moons actually seems like a good idea. If you look at the moons of Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus/Neptune, the area resembles an asteroid field. Particularly if you factor in the Trojans in Jupiters orbit. Would really cut down on paperwork.
I've actually put some thought into the idea... and while I still think that it's "interesting", it has some issues. Also, I read back thru the Starfire List archive back when Marvin first suggested combining Asteroid Belt pops and also combining Moon pops, and the prevailing opinion was strongly against combining moon pops, but a bit split on the issue of combining AB pops.... which I suppose represents what ended up happening in 4e... each AB having its own merged population, but moons continuing to be tracked separately.
This is a case that is in a sense similar to Crew Grade below. There are people who simply like having moon populations exist as separate entities and like having the ability to choose which of those rocks they want to colonize in which order.
So, it's most likely that I won't bother changing that and will keep moon pops as is, but will most likely use merged pops for each AB...
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As for sensor capability on the moons, I don't know of any mining companies running sophisticated ground to air radar setups today. If the players want a sensor outpost, build a PDC with sensors.
Pretty fair point. Heck, this argument would be just as true for explicit OP's and Col's, though I suppose it would tick some people off just a bit if only major populations had innate sensor capabilities, and minor pops needed to build their own PCF's or BS's with long range sensors...
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And on crew grade, I like it. So does everyone I run games with. Just make it optional for those who don't care to mess with it.
I had no real intention of removing crew grade rules, much as I dislike them...
Post by: procyon on April 02, 2010, 03:19:44 AM
Seems a little off. If you keep moon populations, you could address that if you keep the PU/PTU. (If it uses the ISF steps it isn't an issue.) It would make my wife and kids happy. We never have been able to come up with a good solution that worked well. If we based income on PU x some EL factor, it never seemed to work well. If it just applied to moons/AB, des/ext eventually became a better investment than T/ST. If it was applied to everything, income shot up too quickly for our tastes.
Of course if the income was a % of the T/ST's, then they would follow the TL increases of the planets.
Post by: mavikfelna on April 02, 2010, 12:17:40 PM
Quote
Of course if the income was a % of the T/ST's, then they would follow the TL increases of the planets.
Actually, I'm liking this idea the more I hear it.
And I like having discrete populations. I'd say the assumption would be that once a system had a large enough population base, that base population would then exploit the moons and asteroids. If you set the limit at a small pop before gaining Ast and Moon bonuses that might be too large a requirement. So say make it Settlement level, that would mean even a system with only a barren world could still get the benefit. And you'd only have to track populations on the most important bodies in the system.
Give Ast a flat +10% if one, +15% if multiple and give moons a +1% per moon to a max of, say, +15%.
You can still emplace installations on or around any body in the system, and I would include SY in that, as long as the system had a population size allowing for full system exploitation as it would be assumed the major population is routing everything appropriately.
--Mav
Post by: crucis on April 02, 2010, 01:13:48 PM
Quote from: "mavikfelna"
QuoteOf course if the income was a % of the T/ST's, then they would follow the TL increases of the planets.
Actually, I'm liking this idea the more I hear it. ;)
As for the minimum required population to trigger this moon colonization, I'm actually thinking that it should be Small or Medium (though for two different reasons).
If it's Small, it would be because Small is above the minimum required number of PU's needed to trigger the in-system CFN... which in Cosmic will be 200 PU. (Not 200 MC. By setting it in terms of PU's there's no question about whether ABB or other factors affect the requirement or not. 200 PU is 200 PU. Ya got'em or ya don't.)
If it's Medium, it would be because Medium is the minimum required pop bracket that triggers the production of "free" colonists... without which you really aren't doing this sort of in-system colonization.
Yes, you "could" ship them in from elsewhere. But frankly, if you're shipping PTU's into a system, you're gonna dump them on the T/ST, if there is one. And unless your empire is really hard up for colonizable real estate, you're not too likely to be wanting to ship PTU's to other systems to colonize moons, particularly extreme ones. Also, this is an abstraction. And like any abstraction, it would be imperfect and have flaws. It's the nature of the beast. Expecting abstractions to be perfect is usually pretty futile.
As for the question of systems not having any T/ST's, I have two answers. A. I've been seriously considering allowing Mass 2/3 Type B planets to have a pop cap of Small. All other factors being equal, a Mass 2/3 planet should have 4 or more times greater surface area as a Mass 1 planet. This isn't a problem for T/ST's because they are only Mass 2 or 3. And it's not a problem for Type H planets because they're only Mass 1. But currently, Type B planets can be Mass 1, 2, or 3... which means that they have a much wide range of planetary size (and surface area) than T, ST, and H's.
Of course, even if I were to allow M2/3 Type B's to have pops up to Small, it still wouldn't matter if the min required pop to trigger this moon percentage thing was a Medium.
Beyond this, if a system didn't even have a M2/3 Type B, there'd be no world of sufficient size to either trigger the percentage thing. This is another point where this abstraction is weak. Without a sufficiently large population to which you can "anchor" the moon percentage thing (and trigger its creation and the in-system CFN), you'd end up with no colonization of the moons in the system, due to the abstraction. Now, from a simplicity PoV, this may not be the worst thing imaginable. However, there are always going to be some players who would bemoan the inability to colonize these systems.
Mav, last night, I dug into the Starfire List's archive and read thru all the posts on a thread from March 1999 (IIRC) where Marvin first asked about the idea of merging moon and AB populations. The general consensus tended to be very, very much against any merging of moon populations, and it was split on the idea of merging AB populations... which sort of tracks to what was done in 4e. Moon populations kept as is, but AB populations were merged on a per-AB basis.
I am rather hesitant to step away from explicit colonization of moons, because I don't want to piss off a rather significant portion of players who would dislike the loss of control. I suppose that I could include it as an option, with the strong caveat that it will not be a perfect parallel for explicit moon colonization, but would simplify the process considerably for p&p usage.
Post by: crucis on April 02, 2010, 09:30:00 PM
Quote from: "procyon"
I meant to mention this a while back. One sore point for my group with the PU on moons and AB is that when we went from 3rd to 4/5e, increases in TL didn't improve your income on Des/Ext. moons. 20PU earned a set amount. T/ST got better (bigger) to a point, but an EL1 moon makes the same as an EL8 moon. You would think they would get better at mining/prosecting/etc.
Seems a little off. If you keep moon populations, you could address that if you keep the PU/PTU. (If it uses the ISF steps it isn't an issue.) It would make my wife and kids happy. We never have been able to come up with a good solution that worked well. If we based income on PU x some EL factor, it never seemed to work well. If it just applied to moons/AB, des/ext eventually became a better investment than T/ST. If it was applied to everything, income shot up too quickly for our tastes.
Of course if the income was a % of the T/ST's, then they would follow the TL increases of the planets.
Procyon, I don't think that you realize it, but this is definitely a bit of a 3e vs. 4e can of worms. :mrgreen:
This all comes down to the differing concepts of TLF (Tech Level Factor, a 3e/SM#2 concept) vs. EL Growth (a 4e concept). Additionally, there's also a matter of misperceptions about what the PU in 4e (but not SM#2) actually represents.
In SM#2 with its TLF, all of those little OPs and Col's get a little GPV bump every time the EL/TL goes up, and all of the T/ST's get a big GPV bump as well. And while this does cause large and very large populations' incomes to grow considerably as TL's increase, it is necessary that the TLF remains constant across all pop brackets. Otherwise, smaller pop brackets with larger TLF's would eventually pass larger pops with smaller TLF for the same TL in GPV. In SM#2, the TLF uses a 10% per EL increment, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be smaller. But it would still have to be constant for all pop brackets, nonetheless.
OTOH, in 4e, when EL's go up, you get EL Growth, which amounts to a number of free PU's added to your population. However, as you point out, certain populations have hard PU caps, such as OP's and Cols. And when such capped pops get their EL Growth, they will either lose those free PU's, or sometimes, players will shift some PU's off of OP's and Colonies just prior to EL Growth to make room for the bonus PU's (which I think looks like a massive pain in the butt). I think that the only way that you could do what you'd like to do in 4e while keeping EL Growth would be to add floating caps to all population levels.
This is where the aforementioned misperception comes into play.
In SM#2's version, the PU is truly a unit of population. Its actual size is undefined and varies from bracket to bracket, but it remains a unit of population, nonetheless. And any technological advances (i.e. EL increases) are represented by the TLF which modifies the economic output of each PU.
OTOH, in 4e, the PU is actually a unit of economic output, not of population. 1 PU produces 1 MC of economic output, regardless of EL. Period. And any technological advances are represented by EL growth, with the underlying concept being that as EL's increase, fewer and fewer people are needed per PU to produce 1 MC of economic output, and that those freed up people are turned into the new PU's added by EL Growth.
The misperception is, IMHO, the fact that the 4e rules call the PU the "Population" unit, not the Economic Unit. The entire rules section covers population. IMHO, the entire rules section's terminologies and title gently get the players to think that the PU is about population, when at the same time its definition in a single sentence states otherwise.
There's also another "problem". The idea that those little OP's and Col's don't derive any economic improvement from EL advancements. If one is assuming that EL growth is freeing up workers to "create" new PU's, and if the population of an OP is held static (1 million people, BTW), then should not the upper limit of the Outpost bracket increase a little bit with each EL to allow those freed up workers to create their new PU's of economic output for the OP? Of course, I suspect that the fact that this does not happen represents a simplification, since it could be a pain to increase the size of a OP every time the EL increases. OTOH, it's already a pain when EL's increase if you try to offload excess EL growth PU's. There's pain whichever way your turn unless you just throw up your hands and say F-it and let the growth PU's disappear... which is simpler for bookkeeping, but causes you to lose growth potential. Of course, with the current model of EL growth, if you want to use those excess growth PU's from a capped world, it actually costs you money to keep them ... which can be an incentive to just let'em disappear...
There are some other subtle differences going on in SM#2 vs 4e economics that I won't go into at this time, as they don't affect the issue in your post, procyon.
If you want to try out some floating caps for Outposts, Colonies, and Settlements, here are some quickie guesstimates of what they might look like. These are conceptually similar to the caps used for Benign, Harsh, and Hostile populations.
Settlement: 160 + 20*EL
Colony: 54 + 6*EL
Outpost: 18 + 2*EL
Note that each bracket is set so that the value at EL1 equals its normal value in the PU table.
Honestly, I'm not sure if I'd suggest using floating caps such as these, as they will likely require a fair amount of paperwork at each EL level up. OTOH, as I've already mentioned, if a population is at its cap, you're already faced with some annoyances at EL level ups. So, I suppose that it's a case of picking one's poison.
Post by: crucis on April 03, 2010, 08:57:11 PM
Quote from: "procyon"
I meant to mention this a while back. One sore point for my group with the PU on moons and AB is that when we went from 3rd to 4/5e, increases in TL didn't improve your income on Des/Ext. moons. 20PU earned a set amount. T/ST got better (bigger) to a point, but an EL1 moon makes the same as an EL8 moon. You would think they would get better at mining/prosecting/etc.
Seems a little off. If you keep moon populations, you could address that if you keep the PU/PTU. (If it uses the ISF steps it isn't an issue.) It would make my wife and kids happy. We never have been able to come up with a good solution that worked well. If we based income on PU x some EL factor, it never seemed to work well. If it just applied to moons/AB, des/ext eventually became a better investment than T/ST. If it was applied to everything, income shot up too quickly for our tastes.
Of course if the income was a % of the T/ST's, then they would follow the TL increases of the planets.
I didn't intend to write a second response to your post, Procyon. And I do not intend for this one to be particularly long. I didn't want to edit the previous reply and add more text to an already long tome... What I forgot to include was my thoughts on where I was going with Cosmic's economics.
Procyon, I am currently envisioning that Desolate and Extreme populations will not "grow". Also, because I'm currently envisioning the use of a Economic Growth model (yearly, with Monthly optional) that is a merged population and economic/technological growth rate, this will also mean that those D/E populations won't receive any benefits of technological advancement. Those poor OP's and Col's will stay stuck at 20 EU and 60 EU once you fill them up, and won't change after that (well, unless you remove some EU's or get bombed).
I recognize that this will feel wrong, but it's necessary to simplify the paper work for those dozens upon dozens of dinky little OP's and Cols... unless I really went nuts and used the previously discussed Moon-percentage model... which would GREATLY simplify paperwork ... though with some rather iffy secondary effects. ;)
Post by: miketr on April 05, 2010, 12:30:21 PM
If you remove population growth AND the benefits of tech level then no one will ever colonize such rocks if they can do anything else. Instead players will buy more Industrial Units till those are maxed out.
At the end of the day Starfire's about making good economic choices. If you make bad ones then the effects of those bad choices linger on like a weight around your neck. Colonizing O1 & O2's becomes a weight compared to anything else.
EDIT Addition:
In games that my group plays for a long time now we have just banned colonization of O1/O2 environments. It was even simpler to deal with. I see little difference between our groups house rule and your suggested change. The result will be the same no one will colonize such rocks.
Post by: crucis on April 05, 2010, 01:00:43 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
Crucis there is IMHO a rather large problem with the idea your are suggesting for the O1 & O2 envir populations.
If you remove population growth AND the benefits of tech level then no one will ever colonize such rocks if they can do anything else. Instead players will buy more Industrial Units till those are maxed out.
Of course, that presumes that the relative colonization costs remain the same. It would obviously be possible to help out Desolate and Extreme colonization (relative to IUs) by simply reducing the Emplacement Costs...The problem is the need to deal with tracking growth for all those little rocks. Removing growth from those rocks also removes the need to deal with doing growth on those dozens upon dozens upon dozens of OPs and COLs every year (or worse, every month).
Quote
At the end of the day Starfire's about making good economic choices. If you make bad ones then the effects of those bad choices linger on like a weight around your neck. Colonizing O1 & O2's becomes a weight compared to anything else.
Of course, I don't disagree with these statements. But the strategic side of the game needs to be simplified somewhat to make it a bit more p&p friendly. The rules shouldn't be written with the assumption that spreadsheets (at a minimum) will be used. They should be written with the assumption that it's a p&p game, but if players wish to use spreadsheets, they're certainly free to do so. But the complexity of the game shouldn't be expanded simply because of the presence of spreadsheets allows that to be the case. What you end up with then is a game that essentially requires a spreadsheet to play and may be at a level of complexity that it cannot be played P&P, and may not be understandable by people like procyon's kids.
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EDIT Addition:
In games that my group plays for a long time now we have just banned colonization of O1/O2 environments. It was even simpler to deal with.
Well, that's certainly one way to deal with it. Seems a bit extreme, but I have no doubt that it reduces paperwork considerably.
Post by: miketr on April 05, 2010, 01:53:56 PM
Quote from: "crucis"
QuoteEDIT Addition:
In games that my group plays for a long time now we have just banned colonization of O1/O2 environments. It was even simpler to deal with.
Well, that's certainly one way to deal with it. Seems a bit extreme, but I have no doubt that it reduces paperwork considerably.
Yes it does. We talked it over and decided that the economic benefit of the hostile and extreme colonies wasn't worth the paper work load. Especially when you no longer have to defend them. Warp Point defense was still critical but but planetary defense became more common. With all peoples eggs in fewer baskets there was more of a tendency to try to defend them.
Michael
Post by: ZimRathbone on April 06, 2010, 07:27:29 AM
Quote from: "miketr"
Crucis there is IMHO a rather large problem with the idea your are suggesting for the O1 & O2 envir populations.
If you remove population growth AND the benefits of tech level then no one will ever colonize such rocks if they can do anything else. Instead players will buy more Industrial Units till those are maxed out.
At the end of the day Starfire's about making good economic choices. If you make bad ones then the effects of those bad choices linger on like a weight around your neck. Colonizing O1 & O2's becomes a weight compared to anything else.
EDIT Addition:
In games that my group plays for a long time now we have just banned colonization of O1/O2 environments. It was even simpler to deal with. I see little difference between our groups house rule and your suggested change. The result will be the same no one will colonize such rocks.
Well thats one way of resolving one of the classic SF Flamewars!
Post by: Paul M on April 06, 2010, 10:45:48 AM
I was suggesting not having any population directly in either asteroids fields or on moons just using both as a system income multiplier.
AST give +10% per belt
moons give +1-2% per 10 moons in the system (round to the nearest). But both the bonus and the number of moons needs to be balance by actual testing. The thing is that I am balancing the moons against the +10% from asteroid belts.
Both bonuses are adjusted for the maximum population in the system (since this reflects the processing capacity locally available) at x25% for settlement, x50% for small, x75% for medium, and full for large+
Yes I liked having AST in hexes solely for the sensor net they provided. You can also do this with variable PU sizes. It is solely a way to reduce the bookwork.
Post by: crucis on April 06, 2010, 12:24:53 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
I see my suggestion wasn't clear.
I was suggesting not having any population directly in either asteroids fields or on moons just using both as a system income multiplier.
AST give +10% per belt
moons give +1-2% per 10 moons in the system (round to the nearest). But both the bonus and the number of moons needs to be balance by actual testing. The thing is that I am balancing the moons against the +10% from asteroid belts.
Both bonuses are adjusted for the maximum population in the system (since this reflects the processing capacity locally available) at x25% for settlement, x50% for small, x75% for medium, and full for large+
Yes I liked having AST in hexes solely for the sensor net they provided. You can also do this with variable PU sizes. It is solely a way to reduce the bookwork.
No, Paul, I actually understood the suggestion quite well.
I actually spend some time brainstorming the idea. I wouldn't use the scaling percentages you included for pop sizes, since I'd think that the fact that this model is already percentile based would make it self-scaling to the populations/incomes it modifiers. That is, if you applied this to a small population, you'd get rather less of an income bonus than if it was applied to a VLg.
Also, this bonus shouldn't exist unless the in-system CFN exists.
As for the size of the bonus on a per-moon basis, 1-2% per TEN moons seems quite low. If you compare 1 OP with 20 PU vs 1 Lg pop with 2000 PU, that one moon represents 1% of the Lg population all by itself. OTOH, you make a good point that it's rather difficult to balance the per-moon percentage against the value of an asteroid belt, since AB population sizes aren't fixed... they're based on the size on the AB's orbit.
Crucis
Post by: Paul M on April 07, 2010, 04:29:51 AM
If you adjust the bonus per belt upward then it would make sense to adjust the number of moons necessary downward or the benefit per group of moons upward. One could go to as highs as +100% per belt and +2% per moon to represent full development but I would say that you can make that available via system upgrades or technologies or whatever should you want to give higher incomes.
Allowing only the colonization of rock worlds (O1, O2, ST, T) dramatically reduces the book keeping per system. If you limit the O1 and O2 to outposts and colonies then they get no benefit from the moons and belts (since they should be well below the in system CFN threshold) which makes them less attractive and thus reducing again the book keeping by reducing the number of settled systems.
*(6 hexs/radius)x(radius)x(5 sites/hex)x(16 PU/site)
Post by: crucis on April 07, 2010, 12:19:11 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
The exact numbers need to be adjusted by testing I was just putting out something to make it clear what I meant. Also as this income is free (baring the need for the in system CFN) then it isn't intended to represent exactly the same benefit you would get from actually putting down the colonies on the moons. If ast give +10% for, at a minimum, 30 outposts (radius 1 AST belt) and that is 6x1x5x16* = 480 PU, which is about 10 moons with 50 PU colonies then 1% per moon, but most asteroid belts will be higher radius then that. Say take radius of 5 and you have 2400 PU (6x5x5x16), which is 48 moon colonies...and now you are very close to 2% per 10. I can't recall enough about the system generation mechanics to estimate what radius is the mean. Since 01 moons (if included) have a lower colonization potential and could represent a reasonable number of moons of the total the 2% per 10 looks not too bad as a starting point.
If you adjust the bonus per belt upward then it would make sense to adjust the number of moons necessary downward or the benefit per group of moons upward. One could go to as highs as +100% per belt and +2% per moon to represent full development but I would say that you can make that available via system upgrades or technologies or whatever should you want to give higher incomes.
Allowing only the colonization of rock worlds (O1, O2, ST, T) dramatically reduces the book keeping per system. If you limit the O1 and O2 to outposts and colonies then they get no benefit from the moons and belts (since they should be well below the in system CFN threshold) which makes them less attractive and thus reducing again the book keeping by reducing the number of settled systems.
*(6 hexs/radius)x(radius)x(5 sites/hex)x(16 PU/site)
Ahh... I was working from the 4e formula which is 20 PU per LM (which comes out to 2 OP of 20 PU each, per system hex). Applying the same logic as 4e used for this 20 PU/LM, the equivalent formula using SM#2's 5 OP's per sH and 16 PU per OP would be: 80 PU per LM of AB orbit.
I can see better why you'd be leaning towards that 10% for AB's vs about 1-2% per 10 moons. At 5 OP's/sH per AB (or 80 PU/LM), each system hex of AB has as many OP's as a single Type I planet with a max # of moons, or 3 system hexes of AB would have roughly the same number of PU's as a single Type G planet with its max number of Type O2 moons, which could have Colonies. (actually, the 3 sH of AB would be 18 PU short ... or need 1 more OP for near equivalency). Regardless, the SM#2 5 OP/sH puts a LOT of PU in any AB... essentially 4 times as many as in 4e ... not that 20 PU per LM doesn't still come out to quite a high number for larger belts...
Let me skip to the start of your reply where you state: "Also as this income is free (baring the need for the in system CFN) " Yes, this is something that I observed about the concept ... that you aren't paying for the colonization. I think that one could say that the abstraction is assuming that the reduced benefits of the "moons bonus" (relative to the actual value of explicitly colonized moons) represents payments over time for that colonization, or something to that effect. I added the need for the in-system CFN, since if one is going to be sending out these abstracted colonists to the moons and getting the income in return, the in-system CFN would need to exist. Also, assuming that you are sending these abstracted colonists from a planet in the same system, that pretty much requires that the planet be at least a Medium. The problem here is that this pretty much rules out any system that doesn't have a Type T/ST planet in it that you can get to the level that it's producing its own colonists. Systems without a T/ST would be out of luck, and either have no moon colonization, or require explicit colonization of those moons (but mixing the two models would probably be a very bad idea for game balance).
=======
At this time, let me suggest an alternate idea for simplification of moon colonization. Pool all moon populations for the star system into two pools. One for Desolate moons and another for extreme moons. This has the advantage that you'd still have to engage in placing PU's at their normal costs for whichever pool is receiving them. The Desolate pool would have a population of 60 PU per moon (or 50 PU, using the SM#2 colony size), and the Extreme pool would have a population of 20 PU per moon (or 16 PU, using the SM#2 outpost size). Mineral content would assumed to be average for the each pool.
Also, the PU's would probably (!) have to be spread evenly amongst all moons in the pool. Alternatively, I suppose that one could use this method... Fill up the moons orbiting planets closest to their star first, moving outward, and for each planet, fill up the moons closest to each planet. And for binary systems, I'd suggest using the same proximity process, but starting with the component having the largest T/ST population. For example, if comp B has a T/ST and comp A doesn't, start filling up the moons around comp B's planets first. Or if both comps have populated T/ST's, start with the component having the largest T/ST population. Or if neither comp has a T/ST, then just start with Comp A. Personally, I like the simplicity of the "spread evenly" method. But the beauty of the alternate method is that there's a clear order that's entirely based on proximity, and its benefit is that by filling up moons and leaving others empty, you have fewer moons that need to be defended.
This idea has a number of benefits. Colonization costs remain ... and remain the same. Colonization of star systems without any Type T/ST remains as is. All star systems (well, those with stars and planets) will have only two moon pools that have to be tracked for colonization, population, and income purposes. That's 2 data lines, rather than, what ... 10, 20, 30 or so individual moon populations? That's a lot less data tracking, while retaining the same relative costs and incomes. In a sense, it's similar to 4e's merged AB populations, though obviously the size of the moon pools would be calculated differently (i.e. counting up the actual moons generated by the sysgen process).
Crucis
Post by: Paul M on April 08, 2010, 03:30:21 AM
If you want the game to playable in PnP beyond something like 20 systems, then what I suggest is going to accomplish that better since it reduces dramatically the book keeping. You can also add technological developments to improve the bonuses from moons or asteroid belts. These can then have a cost to install as well. This gives the player a feeling of improvement without substantially altering the book keeping. You can say start with +2% per 12 moons and let that improve to +2% per 5 moons in steps of one such advance every 2 TL. For AST you could have systems that add +10, +9, +8, +7, etc to the bonus from asteroid belts developed in the alternative TLs. I would, thinking about it, give a employment cost that dependent on the number of systems in your empire as well.
If you basically want to reduce somewhat the book keeping then the suggestion of a moon pool does the job. But it also needs to be tracked for colonization, and growth each turn for each system. It is much less less work but it is still a lot more work, since it means that every system will have this. This means more systems for the player to deal with. Also be aware that merging populations may lead to higher growth rates since there is never an issue with reaching the limit and needing to pay to shift PU around. This is the singular draw back to merged population pools.
And yes AST can hold huge populations. They can for say a binary star system with both outer positions being belts out perform most other systems, they are a long term investment but an extremely good one under SM2/4thE economics. Then consider how much IU you can stockpile there. I always considered multiple belt systems a real find.
From the perspective of the SM it is easier to use the first method since it dramatically cuts down on the paperwork to be reviewed. For players I think you end up in a six of one, half dozen of another situation; some will like one more or much more than the other option. Some will like neither of them as well.
Ultimately computers are to book keeping issues what mines and DSB-L are to warp point defense.
Post by: crucis on April 08, 2010, 04:33:32 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
It depends on what you want to accomplish.
If you want the game to playable in PnP beyond something like 20 systems, ...
I have a hard time accepting this number. But IF it is no longer true that the game cannot be played p&p beyond 20 star systems, then perhaps the game has become too complex starting with SM#2 to do so, since I never had these problems with 2e and 3e with its EVM economics and oversized economies (as well as many other issues).
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then what I suggest is going to accomplish that better since it reduces dramatically the book keeping. You can also add technological developments to improve the bonuses from moons or asteroid belts. These can then have a cost to install as well. This gives the player a feeling of improvement without substantially altering the book keeping. You can say start with +2% per 12 moons and let that improve to +2% per 5 moons in steps of one such advance every 2 TL. For AST you could have systems that add +10, +9, +8, +7, etc to the bonus from asteroid belts developed in the alternative TLs. I would, thinking about it, give a employment cost that dependent on the number of systems in your empire as well.
If you basically want to reduce somewhat the book keeping then the suggestion of a moon pool does the job. But it also needs to be tracked for colonization, and growth each turn for each system. It is much less less work but it is still a lot more work, since it means that every system will have this. This means more systems for the player to deal with. Also be aware that merging populations may lead to higher growth rates since there is never an issue with reaching the limit and needing to pay to shift PU around. This is the singular draw back to merged population pools.
A. Don't assume that non-habitable environments will grow. Not allowing non-habs to grow removes a significant amount of paperwork, though it also does happen to affect their ROR's as well.
B. Even were they to have growth, I wouldn't say that their growth rates would be "higher". Given that the pool size is exactly equal to the population that those moons could have had if tracked separately, you'll end up with the same population in either case. Of course, the effective rate of growth for individual OP's might be limited by whatever rounding of PU's was used (i.e. are you tracking in only whole numbers or in tenths of PU's, for example). And of course in a pool process, this sort of issue is reduced since you would apply growth (if it existed) to the pooled population as a whole, not against individual OP's and Col's. This really is no different from what occurs in 4e with its merged asteroid belt populations. Rather than track many dozens of individual OP's, you just have one merged population per belt.
C. And it has to be considered, remembered, and accepted that whenever one uses abstractions, there will be certain losses of detail and granularity. It's just the nature of the beast. This pool concept stays much truer to the rules of the game than the percentile suggestion. And yes, I did just say that abstractions will cause certain losses, etc., etc. But I'm not sure that people would accept that degree of loss of detail.... and if the abstraction isn't accepted ... well, the battle's lost.
Frankly, it'd probably be better to use miketr's house rule and just ban all (or nearly all) colonization of non-habitable worlds... or perhaps make it so expensive that about the only justifiable reason to establish a colony on such a world would be to create an absolutely necessary naval base in a strategically critical star system that had the bad luck to not possess a T/ST. Of course, there'd be a number of issues with this approach. Banning or simply making non-habitable colonization unprofitable would remove a significant investment option that's used by stay-at-home races (whether by choice or otherwise). It would also seem to enhance the effects of exploration luck since the only real sources of planetary income would be T/ST's (and HGT's if such things existed).
Honestly, I'm not sure that I could bring myself to take this major leap and go the route of banning non-habitable colonization or making it unprofitable, for the reasons I mention above.... bit it would represent a MAJOR simplification for tracking economics. However, it would also remove a significant chunk of income...
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And yes AST can hold huge populations. They can for say a binary star system with both outer positions being belts out perform most other systems, they are a long term investment but an extremely good one under SM2/4thE economics. Then consider how much IU you can stockpile there. I always considered multiple belt systems a real find.
So true. And if non-habitable colonization was banned or made unprofitable, those AB's would suddenly no longer be massive income producers... I think that I can hear the screams now!!! And also if non-hab colonization was ... blah, blah, blah, then the only way to access the asteroid belt bonus(es) (assuming they still existed without non-hab colonization) would be if there was either a T/ST, or (if not outright banned), one established an otherwise unprofitable non-habitable colony to gain the bonus if that would make the colony sufficiently profitable.
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From the perspective of the SM it is easier to use the first method since it dramatically cuts down on the paperwork to be reviewed. For players I think you end up in a six of one, half dozen of another situation; some will like one more or much more than the other option. Some will like neither of them as well.
Yes, I agree with this paragraph whole heartedly. Suggest any 2 new ideas on the same general topic, and you'll quite likely end up with something like a 50/50 split.
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Ultimately computers are to book keeping issues what mines and DSB-L are to warp point defense.
Shudder... mines and laser buoys.... man, o man.... WP stagnation... There's a grim problem that I'll eventually have to get back to...
Post by: crucis on April 08, 2010, 04:36:55 AM
Quote from: "ZimRathbone"
Quote from: "miketr"Crucis there is IMHO a rather large problem with the idea your are suggesting for the O1 & O2 envir populations.
If you remove population growth AND the benefits of tech level then no one will ever colonize such rocks if they can do anything else. Instead players will buy more Industrial Units till those are maxed out.
At the end of the day Starfire's about making good economic choices. If you make bad ones then the effects of those bad choices linger on like a weight around your neck. Colonizing O1 & O2's becomes a weight compared to anything else.
EDIT Addition:
In games that my group plays for a long time now we have just banned colonization of O1/O2 environments. It was even simpler to deal with. I see little difference between our groups house rule and your suggested change. The result will be the same no one will colonize such rocks.
Well thats one way of resolving one of the classic SF Flamewars!
ZimRathbone, I'm not sure if this is what you meant with your comment, but as someone who's read thru a lot of the Starfire List's archive (particularly pre-2000) I suspect that you're referring to the very old debates about O1 vs IU profitability...
Post by: miketr on April 08, 2010, 10:05:40 PM
Quote from: "crucis"
Quote from: "ZimRathbone"Quote from: "miketr"Crucis there is IMHO a rather large problem with the idea your are suggesting for the O1 & O2 envir populations.
If you remove population growth AND the benefits of tech level then no one will ever colonize such rocks if they can do anything else. Instead players will buy more Industrial Units till those are maxed out.
At the end of the day Starfire's about making good economic choices. If you make bad ones then the effects of those bad choices linger on like a weight around your neck. Colonizing O1 & O2's becomes a weight compared to anything else.
EDIT Addition:
In games that my group plays for a long time now we have just banned colonization of O1/O2 environments. It was even simpler to deal with. I see little difference between our groups house rule and your suggested change. The result will be the same no one will colonize such rocks.
Well thats one way of resolving one of the classic SF Flamewars!
ZimRathbone, I'm not sure if this is what you meant with your comment, but as someone who's read thru a lot of the Starfire List's archive (particularly pre-2000) I suspect that you're referring to the very old debates about O1 vs IU profitability... :)
Post by: Paul M on April 09, 2010, 03:43:15 AM
Pool growth is different then individual sites because it is a pool, so the inevitable result of reaching a population maximum of a colony is avoided. This is particularly true of AST belts. If you have a limit per site of 16 PU then assuming you invest in 4 PU originally...after 9 growth turns that outpost would have 3 spare PTU which you would have to pay to move to a new site. This is the cost of using the growth which is not present when the whole belt is treated as a pool. It is a non-trivial difference between the two systems as using that growth costs you money on one hand and nothing on the other. Also your insystem CFN capacity might be insufficient to move them in one turn so your growth in PU would be spread over multiple turns. This is true of moon pools as well. It is the singular drawback to the pool system.
If you remove growth then the issue becomes moot.
"Stay at home" is not a viable strategy. No single system, no matter the system can compete with a empire of multiple star systems. Kurt demonstrated this with the cat people that eventually spawned an AI race, and that was a heck of a system (triple star system if memory serves). The thebans are a threat in crusade because of Webber wanting them to be that way not because it is viable in game terms, in my experience most of webber's fiction on starfire is fiction on fiction since none of it would actually work in game, his battle outcomes in Stars at War never corresponded to outcomes from actually playing the scenario out and in many cases were beyond belief..."When enemies join forces"..."Rigilian's dance on their graves!" Even the bugs in ISW4 are not much of a threat since they have only 6 primary systems compared to what the other races have, they are actually only a threat due to their stockpiled fleet. 3rdR is all about colonizing every rock you find, it is just a question of prioritizing them nothing more. A stay at home race is competitive economically only for a relatively short time.
Twenty systems is about the limit for a 3rdR or 4thE game. For PnP you have to copy over 20-30 lines of information (assuming per turn growth) updating the PU per line for each system. Recalculate the income per site and total the system up. The exact time that takes is dependent on too many factors to estimate properly but lets make a WAG and say 5 min per system...that is around 2 hours of time just spent doing the books. Then you have to work out your budget for your empire, update your RP totals, figure out your fleet builds, track your ship yards, track your fleets, update your fleet lists. Work out the colonization. Update all the information, write a summary of the SM. When I was using 2e (with house rules) and playing PB-snail mail it used to take me 10-12 hours over a week at the minimum to do a turn.
If you use spread sheets 25 lines per system is 500 lines in the spreadsheet which is a lot of scrolling you have to do during the update process, the other option to make each system a page is as much clicking and scrolling but on a different axis and makes finding a system harder. All the rest of the stuff still needs to be tracked but you have to make sure the linkages back to the last turns spread sheet function correctly and the fiddle faddle of all this adds about as much effort as the paper process above but at least the calculations of the numbers are faster. If you over spend you can just quickly reduce the number of PTU moved to balance the budget. Fleet maintenance is simpler as again you don't have to recalculate it every turn since it is automatically updated, but even making sure that you manual shift ships from one category to another takes time. Updating, tracking and moving fleets and ships is as much a chore with a spread sheet as on paper...if not maybe more so since some of starfires rules are a pain to program (especially 4thE RP limits).
After your empire is 20 systems all these tasks become more a chore and less fun in my experience. I've done both PnP and computer assisted, and both computer assisted with Starfire Asssistant and with self written spread sheets. I am also not incompetent with excel and can use a lot of advanced functions to make life easy in the long run. The result of all of these is that Starfire Assistant is the best way to do things either for the player or the SM. Starfire empire management is best handled by a database program.
Admittedly I used to spend upwards of 6 hours doing a turn with SFA but that is for a 50+ system empire, with 500 or so ships, and at least 1 NPR. Kurt or Steve could give numbers that they spent. My last solo 4thE game I ended when I encountered a NPR and realized how much my work load was about to increase. I played a NPR in a PBEM game because the SM had too much going to keep track. That was fun but also a lot of work and I had only about, at most, 10 systems under my control.
I play War in the Pacific AE and that takes me several hours per game day...so possibly the fault is mine for spending too much time looking at my starfire empires--or reviewing how the pacific war is going--in detail but I doubt seriously my estimates are out by much more than a factor of 2.
Post by: crucis on April 09, 2010, 04:35:47 AM
Let's be clear, the problem is explosive economic growth. Huge fleet sizes are largely a symptom of this, though having some other limiting factor, like PP's, might help as well (but this is outside of what I was thinking about tonight).
Why does explosive economic growth occur? As you've said, the overall economy size growth seems exponential.
I think that the problem lies in the aggressive Colonization strategy that was developed starting in SM#2 and moving on into 4e. But I don't think that it's related to the costs of Colonization itself, so much as the ease with which colonized worlds grow into colonist producing worlds in their own right. Furthermore, I don't think that free PTU's are really the problem, at least in SM#2. (It's probably much more of an issue in Ultra, since you get 2% of your world's PTU total as free PTU's, for worlds with populations of 1000 PU or greater... which for VLG's is a truly IMMENSE number.) The real problem (IMHO) is that once colonial worlds start reaching Large level, each PU of growth can be turned into 90 PTU's in SM#2 or 70 PTU's in Ultra. And given the considerable number of growth PU's you will normally get, it's a rather minor sacrifice to give up 4-7 Large pop PU's to turn them into around 460-490 PTUs ... and create a Small population all at once, as long as you have the free cash to pay for the colonization costs.
Thus, it seems to me that the culprit is applying growth to PU's not PTU's. Think about it.... assuming the Ultra monthly growth rate of 1% per month... this means that the VLG population (PTU) growth rate is actually 500 times larger than for Settlements and below. True population growth actually accelerates as you move up thru the pop brackets. Interestingly, if you calculate times required to move from bracket to bracket when you apply growth to PTU's instead of PU's, the times start looking rather similar to those in ISF.
And if growth rates happened to be slowed down in this manner, something else happens. Growth would not produce any Large populations in the time frame of the game unless the player was willing to try to pay a premium and dump a vast number of colonists on a Medium population to try to force it up to Large level... and I expect that that would be disgustingly expensive...
And if growth can't produce any Large pops, you don't end up creating any of those PTU producing "factories". Your colonial populations will tend to hang around the Small and Medium range. So, most of your colonists would have to come from the homeworld ... and as the distances to new colony worlds increased, the cost of colonization would increase (due to the increased shipping costs) ... which should slow colonization growth. And to put it another way, colonization RORs would drop as the distance from the home world to new colonial worlds increased. Of course, if your empire's economy is growing, then you should be able to afford those increased colonization costs.Also, the fact that your colonial worlds are topping out around Small to Medium would greatly slow income increases since PTU-based growth would mean that on larger worlds (above Small), the derived PU growth rates would start slowing down (as CF's increase).
Of course, basing growth on PTU's does tend to be a bit complicated since you'd need to be constantly or semi-constantly converting back and forth between PU and PTU... (or use a different model). This isn't a particularly P&P idea, though perhaps not too bad, since you'd only have to worry about it when the CF was greater than 1.
However, the benefit is that overall economic growth gets slowed considerably above the Small population level.... with all the consequences I foresee described above.
Also, another thing that can be done is to reduce the numbers of Type T/ST's, though this is very much of a secondary solution to the above thoughts. Simply making the star types more closely match their percentages in real life (as astronomers know it) would cut the numbers of T/ST's by half or a little more (I ran the numbers on this...). Of course, this also increases the effects of Exploration Luck, which for some people seems to be a bigger concern than explosive economics... but not for me.
This has been a overly long post, so I think that I'll end it here... Let me know what you think.
Crucis
Post by: crucis on April 09, 2010, 05:05:19 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
On the question of profitability...all economic investments in starfire 3rdR or 4thE are profitable. This includes O1-normals. The question is only if you could have made more money investing it in another option. The problem with this argument is that it is based on assumptions (depending on which other option you wish to mention, the assumption changes) that are subject to sudden change due to events in the game. The issue with starfire economics at its basic level is that the economic model is compound interest growth. As all aspects of the game are tied to money, and money grows according to a compound interest growth model so to do all other aspects of the game (research...which itself increases income, colonisation...which further increases income and will kill the game due to book keeping, and fleet size...which costs you money admittedly but eventually will kill the game due to fleet bloat). At some stage your empire becomes so wealthy that money becomes essentially no longer a limiting factor.
You've said this before... "all economic investments are profitable". Well duh. Who in their right mind is going to knowingly make one that is NOT profitable? The closest thing to an unprofitable investment is establishing a colony that gets conquered or nuked before it paid off its original cost. Seriously... who in their right mind is going to knowingly make an economic investment that will NOT be profitable???
Moving on...
Aside from the previous long post, I've had some other new ideas on colonization and how to limit the number of "economic records"... Rather than pool Desolate and Extreme moons, a more drastic step could be taken that would cut the number of "economic records", while retaining discrete system body colonization, and reducing overall income due to colonization "growth"... Ban colonization of moons (and asteroid belts) in the Gas and Ice Zones. (Or make them unprofitable, if there was a good reason for them to exist without generating income.) This would remove a massive number of system bodies from being colonizable, though they could still support bases if need be. (It's worth noting that Ice zone moons weren't colonizable in 2e.) Rocky zone O2 (which I call Type B for Barren in Cosmic) bodies would still be colonizable normally. This one change by itself would remove on average about 13-14 system bodies (not counting AB's) as sites for colonization per system (meaning 13-14 fewer "economic records" to track).
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Pool growth is different then individual sites because it is a pool, so the inevitable result of reaching a population maximum of a colony is avoided. This is particularly true of AST belts. If you have a limit per site of 16 PU then assuming you invest in 4 PU originally...after 9 growth turns that outpost would have 3 spare PTU which you would have to pay to move to a new site. This is the cost of using the growth which is not present when the whole belt is treated as a pool. It is a non-trivial difference between the two systems as using that growth costs you money on one hand and nothing on the other. Also your insystem CFN capacity might be insufficient to move them in one turn so your growth in PU would be spread over multiple turns. This is true of moon pools as well. It is the singular drawback to the pool system.
I agree that there are some little differences between growth when using discrete bodies and pools. However, these differences are, to me, some of the more annoying things about the entire PU/PTU system. Too much worrying about picky little details ... moving around a PTU here and a PTU there ... worrying about CFN pool capacities, whether in-system or otherwise. Too many annoying little details... I guess I like things to be a little more "macro" and a little less "micro".
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If you remove growth then the issue becomes moot.
Entirely true about removing growth from Desolate and Extreme worlds.
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"Stay at home" is not a viable strategy. No single system, no matter the system can compete with a empire of multiple star systems. (snip) 3rdR is all about colonizing every rock you find, it is just a question of prioritizing them nothing more. A stay at home race is competitive economically only for a relatively short time.
I agree that "Stay at home" is not a viable strategy of choice. Of course, there may be times when it's not your choice....
Post by: procyon on April 10, 2010, 01:55:01 AM
I think you are being a little hard on the limit a PnP game can manage. Granted several of my kids have been at it for a few years, but our current 5e game has over 123 systems explored, currently almost 230 that I have to track as SM, and a fair number of NPR's thrown in. The oldest boy has the most systems (about 40ish if I remember), and a fleet of 189 active ships and about a third of that mothballed. The rest of the players are all close to that number. They track their populations, crew grades, admiral/governor/general/diplomat grades. Write for fleet deployments/movments/colonization. Ship upgrades/refits by shipyard. The list goes on. Unless a massive assault is going on, or they are working out some trade deal, they can usually finish off a turn in less than 2 hours writing it up. They each have a binder with dividers, and well set routines in how to go about processing their turn. They do use calculators, but the only one who tends to use a computer is the oldest boy who prefers to look in the rule PDF so that he doesn't have to fight his brother/sister/mom/me for the printed copy. The kids are 14, 17, and 19. They learned using a binder and a stubby pencil, and are pretty good at it.
If they wanted a game with 1000's of systems, then a computer would be needed to to avoid carrying 16 pounds of paper around to work out your turns (although we heat with wood so it wouldn't go to waste). But if a 14 year old can manage 40 systems and over 150 combat ships (plus many more FT's, SS, Bases, Bouys, etc), then I am sure most other people could manage the same feat if they chose to - in the same 2 hours.
It's all in what you are used to, and how much fun you have doing it. And if the power goes off, the candles come out and the games go on (which did happen during the long ice storm we had here in the midwest a few years back - 2 weeks/no electric power).
It has also done wonders for their grades in school.
EDIT
I will admit that we have done several things to simplify the math load though in the way of house rules.
Post by: crucis on April 11, 2010, 04:31:19 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
Twenty systems is about the limit for a 3rdR or 4thE game. For PnP you have to copy over 20-30 lines of information (assuming per turn growth) updating the PU per line for each system. Recalculate the income per site and total the system up. The exact time that takes is dependent on too many factors to estimate properly but lets make a WAG and say 5 min per system...that is around 2 hours of time just spent doing the books. Then you have to work out your budget for your empire, update your RP totals, figure out your fleet builds, track your ship yards, track your fleets, update your fleet lists. Work out the colonization. Update all the information, write a summary of the SM. When I was using 2e (with house rules) and playing PB-snail mail it used to take me 10-12 hours over a week at the minimum to do a turn.
I had initially skipped over that latter half of the post which included the above paragraph because I didn't want to get into debating P&P vs. spreadsheets, etc.
However, I just reread this particular paragraph and hit the bold/underlined clause and it it me..... doing monthly growth in p&p? Are you serious?
You increased your workload by a factor of 10 and it's the fault of the game? Really? IIRC, yearly growth was the standard in SM#2.
Stop doing monthly growth and revert to yearly growth, and you should save yourself a decent chunk of time and effort right there.
All its other faults aside, at least in ISF's economic model, once you'd emplaced a population, you didn't have to worry about recalculating its GPV unless you added "industrial" EVMs or your TL increased.
It seems to me that the great majority of these complaints about how much work the economics in Starfire take is very much due to the increased detail that the PU/PTU system added to the mix. Yes, being able to see small incremental increases in a population and its economic output may be interesting or enjoyable. But the cost of seeing those increases comes with the requirement to do the calculations that produce those little incremental increases. If people really want increased simpler bookkeeping in economics and population, then they'd need to accept a less granular, non-incremental model, similar to the ISF EVM economic model, since it is the the increased detail and granularity of the PU/PTU model that greatly complicates the economic model and greatly increases the amount of time and effort required to support that model.
Post by: Paul M on April 12, 2010, 06:49:47 AM
Per turn growth is what 4thE calls for. Yes you can simplify and use growth turns, and we did in our 3rdR game but you still need to recalculate system incomes per turn more likely than not as new colonization is an ongoing process. In a PnP 3rdR I would use growth turns yes. Pools have advantages and disadvantages I am only being thorough by mentioning them. The key to reducing system book-keeping is as you say to reduce the number of moons you can colonize and reduce the number of settled planets per system.
As the NPR I was crash colonizing a planet so don't think it won't happen. Our group really really stressed the Starfire economic model. Our MCr growth was grotesque.
Your suggestions about slowing down growth via the use of PTU growth is probably a good idea. The growth in starfire is extremely quick due to the x10 economic time multiplier. The effect of slowing down the income effects of colonies would be a knock on benefit. The cost increases for things and the decrease in incomes for 4thE were a big plus in my view. But still my outsystem income as a fraction of the total was growing quickly in my solo 4thE game. I should look and see if I have still got the spreadsheets.
I asked the ex-SM on his thoughts on size and he said 5 systems per player. So my 20 is in his mind generous, but I think his is a bit on the too few side. So, how many you can do is going to be limited by individual tastes. But when you have to scroll through 500 lines in a spread sheet page I think it becomes harder to find the fun, in principle flipping through 30 pages in a binder would be easier, but the effort it takes to update the growth, etc with the spread sheet is substantially reduced. I would also think that there is a lot of basic math skills that can be developed playing it PnP. But ultimately it is a question of book keeping and that is better handled by a computer database program. I wasn't using any house rules, I was playing by 4thE as it is stated in the rule book, so please accept that my comments on the number of systems is based on that. Largely it was the fact I found an NPR and realized that I would need to do exactly the same thing for the NPR I was doing for my race that stopped me and not my own book keeping.
From the sounds of it though the people who do this PnP should chime in on their "house rules" and see if a collaborative effort might not yield some positive results.
Post by: crucis on April 12, 2010, 11:48:53 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
On profitability of everything. The point I am trying to make is there is no trade offs. There is no "good short term only" investments. There are no "short term cash sinks but long term valuable" investments. There is no need in fact to think about it. If the rock exists; colonize. To paraphrase a court room comment. As I was talking with one of the ex-SMs over supper before we went to see Clash of the Titan's his comment is that the income growth is actually double-logerithmic. We stressed the system to the limit I must admit and we had lots of money.
Well, I suppose that one might describe colonization in ISF as short term money sinks, due to those emplacement times during which you got no income. In PU/PTU colonization, you start getting income the instant that your PTU's arrive on the destination world. I also think that you can call EL Research as a short term money sink with long term value.
I don't see any good short-term only investments in SF. The closest I could probably come is say that IU's are sort of like this when growth is allowed on non-habitables, since the non-habs will become an increasingly good long-term investment as their pop's grow. But since I'm envisioning not allowing non-hab growth, this would make this probably tend to put non-habs on the same level as IU's to some degree, as neither would grow.
I'm not sure what would qualify as a short-term-only investment. I suppose that one could create something like 5 or 10 month "bonds", where you put in X amount of money, and after 5 or 10 months, the bond matured and you got X+Y money back. And while leaving the money in that bond wouldn't earn more money, you could just roll the money over into another bond and keep the ball rolling, so it really ends up being a long term investment as well. (Of course, the money wouldn't be usable while sitting in the bond, and would be subject to some sort of penalty for early withdrawal.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that short-term-only investments can be turned into long term investments simply by rolling over the income after the "short term", into another purchase of this short-term-only investment with the output of the first instance of the investment.
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The main gist of what I am saying is that you automatically have more money available the next turn.
If you mean you automatically have more income available for the next turn (well, perhaps not until the next year, with yearly growth), I don't see that as an issue. (Note that I'm not talking about money being carried over in the treasury.) I don't expect to see income levels dropping, although it may be happen to a small degree, if one didn't have any free colonization PTU's (any significant number of free PTU's) and was forced to convert PU's into PTU's to produce colonists.
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Then every 10 turns you get a massive growth boom. Every 20 or so turns your economy goes up by 10% as your TL increases.
I agree that that's the case. But size of those increases aside, if you do growth every single turn, you have increased the scale of your paperwork by a factor of 10. If you do it yearly, you've reduced the amount of work required. Yes, the size of the jump in income and PU's will be larger than if you did it in 10 smaller increments. However, that's the price you pay for reducing the workload. There are no perfect solutions that provide perfect accuracy with limited paperwork.
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Per turn growth is what 4thE calls for. Yes you can simplify and use growth turns, and we did in our 3rdR game but you still need to recalculate system incomes per turn more likely than not as new colonization is an ongoing process. In a PnP 3rdR I would use growth turns yes. Pools have advantages and disadvantages I am only being thorough by mentioning them. The key to reducing system book-keeping is as you say to reduce the number of moons you can colonize and reduce the number of settled planets per system.
I agree with everything you say in this paragraph. Yeah, monthly growth is the standard for 4e, but optional in SM#2. And yes, GPV's will likely need to be recalculated very often due to new colonization. Frankly, this is a downside to the PU/PTU system's incremental colonization model... too much moving around of a PTU here and a PTU there, which causes the need for regular GPV recalculations.
As for the advantages and disadvantages of pools (or anything else, for that matter), I appreciate the thoroughness. I may have misinterpreted your comments in an overly negative light and not appreciated that you were simply trying to point out the upsides and downsides of the ideas.
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As the NPR I was crash colonizing a planet so don't think it won't happen. Our group really really stressed the Starfire economic model. Our MCr growth was grotesque.
I have no doubt that it's not that difficult to do just that (i.e. stressing the system and causing "grotesque" income growth). I think that it's important to consider that it's not necessary that income growth and population growth be the same thing. The two things aren't exactly the same thing in SM#2, since the TLF causes a separate between income and population (in PU's). OTOH, in 4e, they are pretty much the same thing, since EL increases enhance a world's economy by increasing the number of PU's on that world. And I'm coming to believe that one can make a strong case that doing this is a long term negative to the game's economic system because it only decreases the time it will take for your colony worlds to reach the magic "Large" population level when those worlds become major colonial source populations. On the flip side, while the TLF does enhance income (perhaps too greatly at SM#2's 10% per EL), it does not cause increases to population on any world.
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Your suggestions about slowing down growth via the use of PTU growth is probably a good idea. The growth in starfire is extremely quick due to the x10 economic time multiplier. The effect of slowing down the income effects of colonies would be a knock on benefit. The cost increases for things and the decrease in incomes for 4thE were a big plus in my view. But still my outsystem income as a fraction of the total was growing quickly in my solo 4thE game. I should look and see if I have still got the spreadsheets.
I don't mind things moving along. The problem that PU based growth causes isn't so much that it increases the income of the world gaining the growth PU. The real problem is that it's increasing the number of PTU's that the empire has to use for colonization far, far too quickly... And it's not really a problem (IMHO) at the homeworld. The problem is that PU based growth creates Large populations far too quicky, not for their income, but for their ability to turn into PTU-source populations that are much closer to that empire's frontier regions, thus shortening the distances to those frontier colonies and decreasing the costs of heavy colonization. The longer you can force mass colonization to come from the homeworld the better, since it as empires grow, the cost of colonization will continue increase as the distance to those new world to be colonized grows.
It's also worth considering that PTU based growth would slow growth for world of Settlement size or smaller, since their PU/PTU CF equals 1. And all in all, it wouldn't be too bad for Small populations. PTU based growth really starts getting slower (in terms of its effect on PU totals, that is) once you transition into the Medium level.
There's also something else here to consider about the differences between SM#2 and 4e... EL Growth. In SM#2, the economic benefit due to EL increases is due to an increase in the TLF multiplier. But in 4e, the economic benefit due to EL increases is "EL Growth". Now, given the considerable size of the growth rates in SM#2, it may be that there's not all that much difference in population numbers between SM#2 and 4e. However, those are things that can be adjusted. The problem that I see with EL growth vs. a TLF multiplier is that EL growth is creating more PU's (more PU based growth, BTW) that a) could be turned around as more PTU's for colonization and b) causes all those habitable planets to grow that much faster and getting to the Large pop level that much faster. In SM#2, its higher population growth numbers aside, when your EL/TL increases, this doesn't cause a massive bump in your planets' PU totals. Yes, you get income increases, but NOT increases to your PU totals, which have long term effects on your ability to colonize more cheaply as your habitable world populations reach the Large level more quickly.
OHHHHHHH!!!!! I just realized another significant difference between SM#2 and 4e. (I hadn't realized this before. But then again, I'd only come to the conclusion about the problems of PU based growth a few days ago.) In SM#2, Harsh and Hostile populations are hard capped at Medium and Settlement. OTOH, in 4e, Harsh and Hostile populations are capped at 1500 + 200/EL and 750 + 150/EL. The problem I see with the 4e numbers here is that Harsh's are automatically Large with the ability to transition to VLg at EL3, while Hostiles start as Mediums, but transition to Large at EL2. Of course, as colony worlds, it'll take some time for them to actually reach Large, but still, Harsh and Hostile worlds both have the ability to reach Large (and above) pop level and become the same massive producers of PTU's as Benign worlds.
This is not the case with the hard pop caps used in SM#2. An SM#2 Harsh Medium pop isn't going to be a major source of colonists... whoa... wait a sec.... I think (could be wrong here) but once an SM#2 Harsh Medium will still have a growth rate of 25% on a capped population of 800 PU, which would be 200 PU every 10th turn, which at the SM#2 CF rate, comes out to 3600 PTU ... which must be moved quickly or lost. That's still pretty considerable production of new colonists. And even SM#2's Hostile pops being hard capped at Settlement level may be little bit of an issue here, since at a 50% yearly rate, once at their hard cap, they'd still produce 75 excess PTU's per year. Not exactly huge numbers, but not non-existent.
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I asked the ex-SM on his thoughts on size and he said 5 systems per player. So my 20 is in his mind generous, but I think his is a bit on the too few side. So, how many you can do is going to be limited by individual tastes. But when you have to scroll through 500 lines in a spread sheet page I think it becomes harder to find the fun, in principle flipping through 30 pages in a binder would be easier, but the effort it takes to update the growth, etc with the spread sheet is substantially reduced. I would also think that there is a lot of basic math skills that can be developed playing it PnP. But ultimately it is a question of book keeping and that is better handled by a computer database program. I wasn't using any house rules, I was playing by 4thE as it is stated in the rule book, so please accept that my comments on the number of systems is based on that. Largely it was the fact I found an NPR and realized that I would need to do exactly the same thing for the NPR I was doing for my race that stopped me and not my own book keeping.
Yes, individual tastes may vary. But even considering spreadsheets, the number of lines, the number of what I call "economic records" where 1 "economic record" equals one discrete population with one discrete GPV that must be calculated, is a key element in determining the scale of bookkeeping involved. Thus, if the number of "economic records" can be reduced, the scale of the bookkeeping should be reduced.
This can obviously be accomplished in a number of ways.... treating all moons in a system as a percentile modifier to planetary incomes; 2 population pools for desolate and extreme moons (and possibly any desolate and extreme planets as well); or limiting non-habitable colonization to rocky zone desolate planets and moons (and increasing their pop limits to counter pop losses elsewhere) while making all gas zone moons and extreme planets and moons in the Rocky Zone either unprofitable or banning colonization from them entirely. The point in this latter idea wouldn't be to make some statement about the inability to colonize moons of gas giants or whatever. It would be about trying to find a way to limit the level of record keeping, while keeping the benefits of discrete world colonization and avoiding certain issues that come from the use of pools, i.e. where are the PU's?.
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From the sounds of it though the people who do this PnP should chime in on their "house rules" and see if a collaborative effort might not yield some positive results.
I'm always happy to get input.
Post by: Erik L on April 12, 2010, 02:43:02 PM
). One thing I'm doing with the re-write of Astra Imperia is in the area of taxes on colonies. Populations are categorized by size, these being Outpost, Small Colony, Colony, Large Colony, Small Core, Core, Large Core, Very Large Core. With each one is an associated tax modifier. Outpost to Large Colony all have varying degrees of negative tax modifiers. This modifier is applied to the base tax rate (which could result in a negative number). This means that an Outpost with a -50% modifier will usually end up costing money until it has grown to a sufficient size.
You might look at something similar for Cosmic if you've not done so already.
Post by: crucis on April 12, 2010, 03:03:35 PM
Quote from: Erik Luken
I skimmed through a lot of the posts (especially the mega-wall ones ;)
One thing I'm doing with the re-write of Astra Imperia is in the area of taxes on colonies. Populations are categorized by size, these being Outpost, Small Colony, Colony, Large Colony, Small Core, Core, Large Core, Very Large Core. With each one is an associated tax modifier. Outpost to Large Colony all have varying degrees of negative tax modifiers. This modifier is applied to the base tax rate (which could result in a negative number). This means that an Outpost with a -50% modifier will usually end up costing money until it has grown to a sufficient size.
You might look at something similar for Cosmic if you've not done so already.
Erik, a problem here that I see is that income from all populations in Starfire is considered come from taxes in the first place, since this money is the money that's usable by the government, not the total wealth production of the entire planet.
That being said, if outposts were intended to be drains on the Imperial government, then perhaps they should actually have negative "incomes". But if that were the case, it would seem like there'd be little reason to create an outpost on any world where the population was to be capped at Outpost in the first place. (Of course, I mentioned this as a possibility for Desolate and Extreme populations in a previous post...) About the only reasons to accept such an OP would be a) on a habitable world that may grow to a larger, more profitable level, or b) to emplace a "listening post" OP on some outer system moon, where a minor negative income could be seen as a "maintenance cost" for the listening post. But unless the minimum size at which positive returns on smaller populations was sufficiently high, I could easily see players just dumping a sufficient number of colonists on a habitable world and jump right over the colony's negative income phase.
BTW, don't consider this as negative criticism. I'm trying to think the ideas thru as I type...
As I said, for worlds with sufficiently large pop capacities (i.e. above the tipping point for turning a negative income smaller population into a positive income larger population), this idea would only seem to serve to encourage players to dump a large group of colonists on the world.... if they could afford it.
As for worlds with lower pop caps, such as Desolates and Extremes, if for example, the tipping point was between Outpost and Colony (i.e. OP's negative income, COL's positive income), it would seem to make Extreme OP's all but useless, except for the possibility of listening posts... which, BTW, may not be a "bad thing"...
Post by: procyon on April 13, 2010, 03:17:04 AM
When we capped it at 180PU, the Small pop had to trade 30PU to put 60PU on a moon. Not quite so good. Especially if it put the small pop back to settlement - in that we also limited natural growth to colonies with a minimum of 180PU unless it was the homeworld - to allow LEL's to grow if they were tiny (In a hostile or harsh enviroment, you are still probably living in a habitat with limited ability to support a population - particularly ST's. Pregnancy under constant 2G's would probably be fatal for both mom and babe). You could allow benigns natural growth below 180PU and not make a large difference. With 10 turn growth at 10% (we go slower, but most probably won't want to), it will still take 20 turns for your Small Pop to reach a size that can colonize a moon fully without shutting itself down or dropping to the 1:1 level where you are just spending money to shift population without increasing your income.
The one thing we plan to try in the next game (whenever that happens, may be years yet), was that if you limit the max emplaced colony size to 180, and growth only can increase it from there, then you can also reduce the PU:PTU conversion rate as the players won't be able to use it to push pops up bigger with colonization. If Med only traded PU to PTU at a 5:1 rate, colonizing a moon would cost twice the income potential of the planet. Dropping the higher pops to lower rates will also slow their ability to colonize in the first place.
As for the pools of PU for moons, don't like it so much. I want to know where to attack and defend if they have pops. If they are just a bonus to income due to mining ops on them, then that isn't such an issue. Simply say that if the system becomes contested, you lose the bonus. The miners are dead/won't leave port until the threat is resolved. The bonus might even be contingent upon requiring a patrol force in the system (perhaps with required tractors, etc) ala the Coast Guard or they won't set up shop in that system. Will force empires to spread out fleets (realistic, the civy's like protection), and the maintenance will eat into the income to slow growth. The bigger the bonus from AB/moons, the more HS in 'Coast Guard' ships required. Use the patrol rules that give a mix size 3 lower than your largest ship with certain required systems on board (T/Ic engines/Bsa/etc) will keep players from using it as a chance to build front line BC's to rescue stranded miners.
Sorry if this rambles, I'm on break and trying to type quickly.
Post by: crucis on April 13, 2010, 12:39:59 PM
Quote from: "procyon"
One thing our group has done to slow population growth (as I agree, growth tends to be what ends the game), has been to declare that non-habs don't grow (the habitats are only built to support so many. If you are going to raise a family, you go home on one of those Qv CFN FT's - why else are they coming out to a colony. Mining ops are seldom touist attractions). The other has been to cap the max size of an emplaced colony at Settlement. Once you place 180 PTU, you have to wait on natural growth. In the game that got away from us, they would push right on through the 2PTU per PU stage and colonize a planet to Med. Then it would generate the 10PTU for each PU of growth and it became the next big colonization center on the frontier. You only lost 6 PU income on the planet to gain 60 PU on a moon. Good trade.
When we capped it at 180PU, the Small pop had to trade 30PU to put 60PU on a moon. Not quite so good. Especially if it put the small pop back to settlement - in that we also limited natural growth to colonies with a minimum of 180PU unless it was the homeworld - to allow LEL's to grow if they were tiny (In a hostile or harsh environment, you are still probably living in a habitat with limited ability to support a population - particularly ST's. Pregnancy under constant 2G's would probably be fatal for both mom and babe). You could allow benigns natural growth below 180PU and not make a large difference. With 10 turn growth at 10% (we go slower, but most probably won't want to), it will still take 20 turns for your Small Pop to reach a size that can colonize a moon fully without shutting itself down or dropping to the 1:1 level where you are just spending money to shift population without increasing your income.
I'm very sympathetic with the idea of having a max size on population produced strictly by colonization. As you point out, it's not too difficult to push colonization right on up to the upper limit of Small before letting natural growth take over and kick the population right into the Medium bracket. I'm not yet sure what the proper "max colonization size" should be.... Small or Settlement.
As for no growth on non-habitables, I agree. In Ultra, it states that non-habs are basically mining facilities and the PU's ... the workers are basically contract employees...
As for Medium pops colonizing a moon by giving up 6 PU for 60 PTU... I'm not too worried about that. It's only a single moon. And 6 PU on a Medium is still a fairly significant chunk of PU (about 1% of a Medium's PU at 600 PU, meaning 1 month's growth...) At least the Medium is actually having to give up something to get something. The real problem start kicking in at the Large level, when free PTU's start kicking in at very significant numbers (117 PTU for a min size Large up to about 1500 for a max size Large), plus each PU converts to 70 PTU. It wouldn't be so bad without the free PTU's, if the player was forced to give up PU to get PTU's. But those free PTU's from Large and Very Large pop really feed the colonization fires!
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The one thing we plan to try in the next game (whenever that happens, may be years yet), was that if you limit the max emplaced colony size to 180, and growth only can increase it from there, then you can also reduce the PU:PTU conversion rate as the players won't be able to use it to push pops up bigger with colonization. If Med only traded PU to PTU at a 5:1 rate, colonizing a moon would cost twice the income potential of the planet. Dropping the higher pops to lower rates will also slow their ability to colonize in the first place.
Procyon, the "problem" with reducing the PU/PTU conversion factor (CF) is that that CF is what determines the number of PTU's on the planet ... and the number of PTU's on the planet describe the planet's actual population. Here are the rough values for planetary populations at the upper end of each bracket:
OP 1M
Col 3M
Settlement 9M
Small 40M
Medium 290M
Large ~3.8B
VLg: ~28.8B
These numbers are based on Ultra's pop brackets and CF's. They're a little different in SM#2. Still, the key thing is from OP to Small, each size is very roughly about 3 larger than the previous size, and from Small to VLg each size is very roughly about 10 times larger than the previous size.
If you were to reduce the CF's in half, you would be effectively reducing the populations of the planets whose CF's you reduced.... considerably. And while there's certainly some wiggle room in defining the population brackets, I'm not so sure that I'd say that you could call a world with 165 M people a max size Medium population.
OTOH, in one of the economic models I'm looking at, I don't have any conversion factor. There would be a max size pop that could be produced with colonists (maybe Small, maybe Settlement). And major populations would be able to produce a number of colonists per month, based on a (to be determined) percentage of their current PU total. The numbers of colonists would be significant but not seemingly unlimited.
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As for the pools of PU for moons, don't like it so much. I want to know where to attack and defend if they have pops. If they are just a bonus to income due to mining ops on them, then that isn't such an issue. Simply say that if the system becomes contested, you lose the bonus. The miners are dead/won't leave port until the threat is resolved. The bonus might even be contingent upon requiring a patrol force in the system (perhaps with required tractors, etc) ala the Coast Guard or they won't set up shop in that system. Will force empires to spread out fleets (realistic, the civy's like protection), and the maintenance will eat into the income to slow growth. The bigger the bonus from AB/moons, the more HS in 'Coast Guard' ships required. Use the patrol rules that give a mix size 3 lower than your largest ship with certain required systems on board (T/Ic engines/Bsa/etc) will keep players from using it as a chance to build front line BC's to rescue stranded miners.
Procyon, the rules for Desolate and Extreme pools would include rules for where the PU's reside. I've envisioned 3 possibilities...
A) The simplest, though perhaps least realistic ... spread the PU's evenly amongst the worlds in the pool.
B) The "inside-out" model: Fill the innermost moon of the innermost planet in the pool first, then move to the next moon of that planet, and so on. This model reduces the number of worlds that need defending by filling up worlds and not simply spreading the PU's evenly.
C) Player's Choice: The player writes out a set of orders for describing which worlds get filled up in what order. In general, if the player is focusing on trying to place a "sensor outpost" around every planet first, the order might be something like "Fill up the outermost moon of the outermost planet, then move to the next outermost planet and fill its outermost moon, and so on. Then after all planets with moons have one OP/Col, start using the inside-out method to place any remaining PU's."
Also note that these pools could easily include Desolate and Extreme planets as well, since they have the same colonization costs. Furthermore, the moons (and planets?) would not have individual mineral values. The pool itself would have a single pool-wide mineral value that would be applied to the pool's income. Also, since the pool's mineral value would really represent an averaged mineral wealth for the pool, the mineral value distribution would look different than for individual bodies, and would have much less deviation from the average value of 100%.
The big upside to pools is that you'd only need 2 pools per star system (well, just the ones with planets, of course)... a Desolate pool and an Extreme pool. And this would greatly cut down on the number of economic records for the star system.
I should note that I've look at writing rules for such pools and it's really rather simple. The most involved section would be the rules covering placement of PU's in the pool on the moons (and planets?) in the pool. But remember that you only need to do this placement when an enemy enters the system. Otherwise, all you need is some placement orders that are basically contingency orders that may never be used.
As for the "bonus to income" idea, there are some ... issues ... in the concept.
1. To get the bonus, you have to have a planetary population whose income can be modified by that bonus.
2. For the bonus to even reach said planetary population, you need to have the in-system CFN in place, which means (by my current CFN rules) you need a minimum of 200 PU's in the system. And since the moons and AB's aren't going to be contributing any PU's to that total, all of those PU's will have to be on planets... So, you'd better have either a T/ST or a O2 planet or two to get enough PU's to trigger the in-system CFN so that you can get the bonus...
However, there will be some systems, particularly for Red and Red Dwarf systems where it's entirely possible (and will happen fairly often) that you won't have ANY T/ST/O2 planets. You might not have any planets at all in the Rocky Zone. And in that case, you wouldn't have any explicit population to tied the bonus to, and you wouldn't have enough PU's in the system to trigger the in-system CFN. Thus, you effectively are blocked from colonizing the system's moons, unless there's an exception.
3. On the flipside.... what if you have multiple T/ST's in the system? What will happen is that each of those planets will get this moons/AB bonus... Of course, this is already true with the AB bonus, but it would become an even larger bonus with the moons included in the mix. But one has to ask .... exactly why should the presence of a second or third or more planets effectively increase the output of the mines on a moon (with the moon's "output" being measured by the # of MC the bonus produces)? Of course, this is an abstraction, and like all abstractions, it will have its limits.
4. Then there's the issue of what happens to the miners on those rocks. As you suggest, the mere presence of an enemy fleet in the system could cut off the planet(s) in the system from the bonus. In fact, this is pretty much already covered by the in-system CFN rules as they relate to the existing asteroid belt bonus. But how do the intel rules interface with this concept? That is, if an enemy has a fleet in the system, can it claim to have conquered any of those mining moons so that it can use the intel rules to interrogate the moon's population for data?
5. What about the innate sensors that come with populations? Do all moons now automatically have innate sensors once the "moon bonus" is activated by the presence of the in-system CFN? Or are there no innate sensors at all for these very abstracted populations? Allowing all moons to magically have innate sensors the instant that the bonus comes into existence seems too "magical" to me. The no sensors approach seems better to me, since at least you'd have to pay to build some sensor BS's. However, then you'd have to track all those listening post BS's you build, so have you really reduced the level of paperwork? (perhaps to some degree...)
As I said above, this is an abstraction, and like all abstractions, it will have its limits. It's also amusing to me that in the feedback that I've gotten on this topic, it's pretty evenly split between pools and the bonus.
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Sorry if this rambles, I'm on break and trying to type quickly.
Not a problem, procyon. I loved the feedback.
Post by: procyon on April 18, 2010, 03:21:37 PM
Don't think any of my players would want the equal amounts everywhere pool method, as it makes it to hard to defend. They would probably take the inside out method to concentrate the area they need to cover. We usually track planet movement so they seldom park by a WP anyway. If they are worried about the WP they stake it out.
As for the bonus % issue - no T/ST, multiple T/ST, etc, you could always just drop the % bonus. Pops are pops and empty isn't. Exploitation by mining is just assumed in the pops income. That would also slow the income growth to a degree. AB still could have a healthy pop level to make them valuable, just do away with the bonus if you use the pools. I can see where the bonus comes from, but question its value in having to track it.
As for sensor outposts, if folks want to spread out there pops, to each their own. For my players with OP/COL using sensores - it has just usually amounted to the pop having advanced warning they were about to be invaded/nuked. Made little difference from the distress call from the pop.
Sounds like you have some awesome ideas. Keep it up.
Post by: crucis on April 18, 2010, 04:02:12 PM
Quote from: "procyon"
A pool with a method to track the populations seems fine to me, but the abstract method for AB pops drives the players mad as they have no idea where to defend (and as SM I have no way of saying where an attack should be) unless they declare which hex, etc, has the OP and then track all of them.
Don't think any of my players would want the equal amounts everywhere pool method, as it makes it to hard to defend. They would probably take the inside out method to concentrate the area they need to cover. We usually track planet movement so they seldom park by a WP anyway. If they are worried about the WP they stake it out.
As for the bonus % issue - no T/ST, multiple T/ST, etc, you could always just drop the % bonus. Pops are pops and empty isn't. Exploitation by mining is just assumed in the pops income. That would also slow the income growth to a degree. AB still could have a healthy pop level to make them valuable, just do away with the bonus if you use the pools. I can see where the bonus comes from, but question its value in having to track it.
As for sensor outposts, if folks want to spread out there pops, to each their own. For my players with OP/COL using sensors - it has just usually amounted to the pop having advanced warning they were about to be invaded/nuked. Made little difference from the distress call from the pop.
Sounds like you have some awesome ideas. Keep it up.
First, thanks for the feedback. It really does help.
I actually have a third idea for dealing with the situation, though I don't think that it's as popular. (I think that I mentioned it before...) And that would be to make populations in the Gas and Ice zones essentially unprofitable or simply ban them. BUT at the same time, increase the population levels of Type O2 (aka Type B) planets and moons in the Rocky Zone to make up for the population loss in the Gas and Ice zones. This would mean that there'd be fewer bodies to track, but retain the benefits of discrete body colonization (i.e. knowing specifically where your PU's are). There would be a few more economic records to track in this model vs. the 2 pools idea, depending on how many Type O2/B bodies happened to exist in any given system, vs. the 2 pools = 2 economic records. But, again, you'd know exactly where the populations were, whereas in the pools model, you have to worry about some sort of placement orders.
Speaking of Ultra's pooled asteroid belts, if that's what you're saying drives your players mad... well, you could apply a version of the fill'em up from inside-out placement strategy to AB's... But rather from the inside out, maybe try something like this... assuming that the bodies are orbiting the primary just like all of the other planets, create a "pseudo-planet" in the AB. This pseudo-planet doesn't exist except as a marker for strategic hex #1 of the belt. And this pseudo-planet "marker" would orbit at the same rate as real planets. Then what you could do is fill up the equivalent of 2 OP's in that system hex, and then moving clockwise (or counter-clockwise, if that floats your boat), fill up the next system hex with 2 OP's worth of population, and so on until you've wrapped all around the belt.
Frankly, asteroid belts are a bit of a pain, in this regard, and even the above idea isn't all that simple. Oh, you really don't have to track much more than the "pseudo-planet" (aka sH#1 of the belt), but it'd still require you to divide up your X PU of AB population into 40 PU increments and start placing them around the belt. Of course, you really only have to do this when the system is invaded, so it's not really like you have to track all of the individual populations. It just gives you a way to
I had/have an idea for dealing with AB's in a much different manner, though I tend to doubt that it would be well received. I call it the "planetoid" method. In the planetoid method, an asteroid belt is only assumed to have 1d10 (roll at system generation) "planetoids" in the belt... "planetoids" being dwarf planet-like bodies similar to Ceres and Vesta in our own asteroid belt. These planetoids would then be the only places where you could actually colonize. There'd only be 1-10 of them in any one belt, so it's not like there'd be that many to track. Planetoids might be allowed to "have" larger populations than would seem justifiable compared to moons, on the theory that you're really colonizing some nearby rocks as well (but also just to get some more PU's in the belt).... Of course, with the potential of moving to a moon pool type of model, discrete planetoids are a bit contrary to that direction since it creates more economic records rather than fewer. (It also likely means that there might be a lower population capacity in the belt than currently is the case...)
Anyways, this is always going to be a concern when you start coming up with ideas to increase simplicity thru abstraction... When you pool populations for tracking and economic, you reduce the ability to know where each of those populations actually reside, and you end up having to come up with somewhat iffy procedures for placing them. So, you often end up having to ask yourself what's more important, simplifying the tracking of economics and populations, or knowing exactly where those populations are all the time. It's very, very difficult to find any sort of balance... And the more abstract you get on the tracking of economics, the more difficult it is on the flipside of knowing where those populations really are (case in point ... the use of a percentage bonus for moon populations ... very abstract and no way to know how many PU's reside where since there are no such PU's).
To be honest, this is why I sort of have a fondness for the idea of no Gas zone or Ice Zone colonization but increasing Rocky Zone Type O2 (aka Type B) planet and moon populations. It strikes a balance between knowing where the populations are without hacky placement orders. And it reduces the number of economic records considerably, though not as much as only 2 moon pool records. The down side for some people is that they couldn't accept the idea of not being able to colonize in the gas or ice zone, even if it was explained as a method of game simplification. (It is worth noting that Ice Zone moons couldn't be colonized in 2nd edition, for whatever it's worth...) Another downside is that no gas zone or ice zone colonization would probably rule out colonizing gas or ice zone asteroid belts as well, and that's where the majority of AB's reside...
Frankly, there are no easy answers on this... Some people seem to prefer one direction, while others prefer another. Oh well. :wink:
Post by: procyon on April 21, 2010, 03:40:07 AM
As for the discreet pops in the AB's, we already do a version of that by just totaling the number of OP's, turning it into a (roughly) equal number of O2 moons, and spreading them out through the AB (ala Ceres, Hygiea, Vestia, etc.) Our problem with AB pools is that the players like to drop troops on pops to shut down their income, and knowing where they are going in an AB is a problem - let alone how to run the combats. Do you really have to take on the whole belt, or just one OP? How quick can you move through a belt? Does dropping troops on one OP shut down the entire belts income or just that single OP? Way to many questions and arguements....
It has come up several times in binaries or red dwarf systems where the only thing worth colonizing was the ABs, and they would want an OP or two so that another race wouldn't come in and claim the system. The players have contested this type of system and like to drop troops to shut down the income/conquer the pops. (It has also happened to them several times. The simple mention of a system they named Thor will inspire a large number of tales about battles that raged back and forth through that particular system.) Granted tracking the dwarf planets in an AB is a little bit of a chore, but the 'dwarf planet' solution was the only one that quelled most of the arguements.
I don't think my players would grumble much if they just didn't have to worry about it anymore.
For my opinion, I like the no colonization past the rocky zone - but retaining discreet pops there. It cuts down the records, and would help (just a little) slow the economic expansion - but still allow them to know where there folks were at. We would probably just ignore the outer moons (a bunch of planets with moons you will never use just eats up a lot of paper space - some systems branch out into several pages just to track all the moons that will never have colonies on them) and consider each gas or ice planet to have a limited AB equal to the size of the current magnetosphere (ala nebulas) where sensor ranges were reduced by all the moons/radiation belts/magnetic belts - as if they were in an asteroid belt. The outer planets would just become one line of terrain instead of a list four to six lines long of the planet and its moons.
As for losing the colonization in AB's in the gas/ice zone, some will fret. Personnally I find the idea of colonies on rocks that small with generally wild rotations/tiny escape velocities a little hard to accept. Mining yes, but 'colonies' seems a little hard for me to accept. 1-10 dwarf planets to colonize would help to offset the loss of the gas planet moons if folks wanted them, but it looks like our little Sol might have hundreds of those little dwarfs drifting around out past Neptune. Just ignoring them all is fine with me.
Post by: crucis on April 21, 2010, 09:32:34 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
Reallistically speaking, I like the idea of only O2 planet colonization and moons in the rocky zones idea. Most moons orbitting our outer planets would toast any colonists with their radiation. It would be about as easy to colonize Venus as it would any large moon around Jupiter - with the possible exception of Callisto.
As for the discreet pops in the AB's, we already do a version of that by just totaling the number of OP's, turning it into a (roughly) equal number of O2 moons, and spreading them out through the AB (ala Ceres, Hygiea, Vestia, etc.) Our problem with AB pools is that the players like to drop troops on pops to shut down their income, and knowing where they are going in an AB is a problem - let alone how to run the combats. Do you really have to take on the whole belt, or just one OP? How quick can you move through a belt? Does dropping troops on one OP shut down the entire belts income or just that single OP? Way to many questions and arguments....
Yeah, those are definitely some of the issues with population pools. AB's are even worse in that regard than would be a pool of moons. At least with a moon pool, the number of bodies within the pool is known and relatively limited.
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It has come up several times in binaries or red dwarf systems where the only thing worth colonizing was the ABs, and they would want an OP or two so that another race wouldn't come in and claim the system. The players have contested this type of system and like to drop troops to shut down the income/conquer the pops. (It has also happened to them several times. The simple mention of a system they named Thor will inspire a large number of tales about battles that raged back and forth through that particular system.) Granted tracking the dwarf planets in an AB is a little bit of a chore, but the 'dwarf planet' solution was the only one that quelled most of the arguments. I don't think my players would grumble much if they just didn't have to worry about it anymore.
For my opinion, I like the no colonization past the rocky zone - but retaining discreet pops there. It cuts down the records, and would help (just a little) slow the economic expansion - but still allow them to know where there folks were at.
I'm not sure if it would "slow economic expansion" as it'd be my intention to increase the population capacities of rocky zone Type B/mB's to compensate for the lost pop capacities in the Gas/Ice zones. Of course, without any growth, those populations aren't "expanding" on their own...
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... We would probably just ignore the outer moons (a bunch of planets with moons you will never use just eats up a lot of paper space - some systems branch out into several pages just to track all the moons that will never have colonies on them) and consider each gas or ice planet to have a limited AB equal to the size of the current magnetosphere (ala nebulas) where sensor ranges were reduced by all the moons/radiation belts/magnetic belts - as if they were in an asteroid belt. The outer planets would just become one line of terrain instead of a list four to six lines long of the planet and its moons.
As for losing the colonization in AB's in the gas/ice zone, some will fret. Personally I find the idea of colonies on rocks that small with generally wild rotations/tiny escape velocities a little hard to accept. Mining yes, but 'colonies' seems a little hard for me to accept. 1-10 dwarf planets to colonize would help to offset the loss of the gas planet moons if folks wanted them, but it looks like our little Sol might have hundreds of those little dwarfs drifting around out past Neptune. Just ignoring them all is fine with me.
Yes, the kuiper belt may have many dozens or more dwarf planets, but there may be a substantial difference between those and the once in the Mars-Jupiter AB. The dwarf planets in the Asteroid Belt are almost certainly highly rocky bodies, whereas the dwarf planets out in the Kuiper Belt are probably some combination of rock and "ices" (i.e. frozen elements that we'd normally think of as gases). This is a reason why AB's in the Rocky or Gas zones should be more valuable than Ice zone AB's...
The Dwarf Planet (or "planetoid") solution is compromise solution. The thing about these dwarf planets is that in my research on moons and dwarf planets for Cosmic, the smallest moons that fit into my standard definition of "moon" is actually larger than the largest Dwarf planet in Sol's asteroid belt, i.e. Ceres. I define "moons" as being moons with a radius of 500 km or more (ignoring those that are smaller... if you don't ignore the smaller moons, you'd end up with many, many dozens of more "moons" orbiting the Gas and Ice zone planets). OTOH, Ceres, the largest dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, only has a radius that just under 500 km... which should realistically rather limit its population capacity. However, if such a "dwarf planet" concept for AB's is to be a viable alternative, those dwarves need to have a half decent capacity (better than just OP), so it becomes necessary to suspend disbelief to some degree ... after all, limiting an AB to only 1-10 OP's when they previously had 5 OP's per sH or about 2 OP's per sH (the Ultra equivalent).
As for ignoring them or not... I tend to prefer internally consistent solutions ... so if colonization of moons in the gas and ice zone wasn't possible, my internally consistent solution would require that asteroid belts in those zones also not be colonizable. (Sol's AB is in the Rocky Zone and hence colonizable in this model. And IIRC, Sol's AB probably has only around 3-4 dwarf planets in its AB... don't remember exactly.)
So, yeah, I suppose that some will "fret", but I suppose that if the AB bonus is retained, it does help soften the blow ... though I do tend to think that the ABB for an Ice Zone AB should be less (5%) than a rocky or gas zone AB (10%), since it will have a lower rock content (thus, poorer in heavy metals) and a much higher "ices" content.
Post by: miketr on April 22, 2010, 03:45:35 PM
In games that I have run / played in the following pattern has been followed.
Home System, break off a PU a turn and get hundreds of PTU. Dump colonies on O1 / O2 worlds such that they grow to max size in two years; don't care how many PTU I don't use. I keep doing this till I find a useful T or ST world out system to colonize.
Once find useful colonies out system crash use emplacement colonization such that next turn ending in 0 the world will grow to a medium. What I do then is strip off extra PU and convert them to PTU and colonize a bunch of O1/O2 bodies in the new system, again such that they grow to max size in two years. Out home system I am more careful to make sure that I don't waste any PTU.
This process is repeated across space as the empire expands out.
Normally the investment ratio between colonization and IU is 3 to 1, some players refuse to invest in IU as long as there as places to put PTU. After all PTU can grow in time while IU never do.
I would suggest the following options are possible to reduce the rate of expansion.
1) Slow growth rate.
2) Limit colonization locations.
3) Limit colonization rate.
We have talked about so far are options 1 and 2. What I suggest for 3 is the following.
Currently you can get hundreds of PTU on big worlds and 18 PTU on a medium by breaking off a single PU. Limit colonization only to bonus PTU or heavily reconstruct the PU to PTU conversion table or both. As it is right the bonus PTU almost don't matter unless you have a maxed out Very Large Population world. Odds are if you have a maxed out world at Very Large Pop anything within easy range has already been colonized anyways. So just the PU to PTU conversion, limited by freighter fleet or cash on hand matters.
You could also increase the amount H and Q it takes to transport PTU restricting the number of out system colonies you can place. Still this will just slow things down.
So what I would do is just out right eliminate the high end PU to PTU conversions and limit colonization to bonus PTU. Increasing the amount of bonus PTU available. This would I think put a rather large break on colonization.
Michael
Post by: crucis on April 22, 2010, 06:53:22 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
One thing that might be helpful is to consider how does the economic / population explosion occur?
In games that I have run / played in the following pattern has been followed.
Home System, break off a PU a turn and get hundreds of PTU. Dump colonies on O1 / O2 worlds such that they grow to max size in two years; don't care how many PTU I don't use. I keep doing this till I find a useful T or ST world out system to colonize.
Once find useful colonies out system crash use emplacement colonization such that next turn ending in 0 the world will grow to a medium. What I do then is strip off extra PU and convert them to PTU and colonize a bunch of O1/O2 bodies in the new system, again such that they grow to max size in two years. Out home system I am more careful to make sure that I don't waste any PTU.
This process is repeated across space as the empire expands out.
Yes, this is the pattern. But the process (3e or 4e) really, really shifts into overdrive once your non-homeworld T/ST populations reach the Large level. Of course, in SM#2, this is only Benigns, since Harsh and Hostiles are limited to Medium and Settlement in size. But in Ultra, B, Ha's and Ho's can all reach Large in size as the EL's increase and the EL-based population caps increase. As you point out further down (and as I pointed out in an earlier post), Large (and later Very Larges) populations have much higher CF's that produce many more PTU's per PU exchanged. And it only gets worse in 4e, where you can get 2% of a larger world's PTU total as free colonist PTUs. For a Large or Very Large, this can be a huge number of free PTU's for colonization... so huge that you rarely ever would need to "strip off" any PU's to exchange for PTU's.
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Normally the investment ratio between colonization and IU is 3 to 1, some players refuse to invest in IU as long as there as places to put PTU. After all PTU can grow in time while IU never do.
Yes, this is accurate ... i.e. preferring colonization over investing in IU's, and I'm rather certain that that was the design intention.
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I would suggest the following options are possible to reduce the rate of expansion.
1) Slow growth rate.
2) Limit colonization locations.
3) Limit colonization rate.
We have talked about so far are options 1 and 2. What I suggest for 3 is the following.
Currently you can get hundreds of PTU on big worlds and 18 PTU on a medium by breaking off a single PU. Limit colonization only to bonus PTU or heavily reconstruct the PU to PTU conversion table or both. As it is right the bonus PTU almost don't matter unless you have a maxed out Very Large Population world. Odds are if you have a maxed out world at Very Large Pop anything within easy range has already been colonized anyways. So just the PU to PTU conversion, limited by freighter fleet or cash on hand matters.
You could also increase the amount H and Q it takes to transport PTU restricting the number of out system colonies you can place. Still this will just slow things down.
So what I would do is just out right eliminate the high end PU to PTU conversions and limit colonization to bonus PTU. Increasing the amount of bonus PTU available. This would I think put a rather large break on colonization.
Michael
First of all, thank you for the response, Michael.
Let me tell you that I actually am looking at all of this stuff already. I'm fully aware of the role that high CF's play on economic explosivity.... I wrote a rather involved post on it a week or 2 ago. The core problem is the combination of PU based growth (rather than PTU based growth) and the high CFs for Large populations. The problem with PU based growth is that it actually accelerates the underlying population (PTU) growth as PU total increase, due to the increasingly large CF's. Medium pops aren't exactly going to be too large a problem, but once growth pushes a colonial population (i.e. not the home world) to the Large level, you start being able to produce LOTS of PTU's much closer to the frontier, and thus reduce colonial shipping costs. And that's the key explosivity factor, IMHO... the point at which an empire starts being able to produce a massive second waves of colonists sourcing from worlds closer to the frontier and not from the homeworld, since that reduces shipping costs considerably. The longer you can force an empire to have its homeworld be the primary source of large groups of colonists, longer you delay the onset of economic explosivity. And when colonists have to source from the HW and colonization shipping costs are increasing, it also creates an increasing drain on the economy to force heavy colonization due to those increased shipping costs.
As for the high level PU/PTU conversion factors (CF), I actually don't intend to do anything with those ... for a reason. I don't intent to use the PU/PTU system as it currently is. I intend to make some significant changes to it, to simplify it and reduce the number of colonists to useful but reasonable levels.
Let me hit on those 3 points for a moment...
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1) Slow growth rate.
2) Limit colonization locations.
3) Limit colonization rate.
#1) On slowing the growth rate, there's no doubt in my mind that the SM#2 growth rates were rather ... aggressive. I won't be using growth rates anywhere near this high. My intention is to use lower growth rates, though the exact numbers have yet to be fixed.
#2) This is a two part point...
From one perspective, this can be about bookkeeping simplification, which has been discussed considerably before this...
Then there's the more involved question of reducing the numbers of T/ST planets, since they are really the economic engines of any empire. The problem here is that there are two competing arguments.
Argument One is that if you decrease the number of T/ST's, you increase the effects of exploration luck. If the number of T/ST's is reduced, then the effect of finding one T/ST is enhanced.
However, there actually are some ways that this can be mitigated. For example, replace a totally random sysgen model with a model that used sector templates that were pre-generated to attempt even out the numbers of White, Yellow, and Orange stars (the high chance of T/ST-bearing stars), or even go further and pregen it to the degree that you know how many T/ST's are in each sector. (This would be a rather large hassle, though it could be done.)
But, if one uses the standard random exploration model, there's no doubt that fewer T/ST's means that exploration luck is increased. The thing is that this is a HUGE issue for some people and a non-issue for other people. Cralis has told me that he's had some groups of players refuse to play unless the galaxies were pregenerated to be completely balanced in terms of #'s of T/ST's. ;)
Crucis
Post by: procyon on April 23, 2010, 01:47:56 AM
As for the density of T/ST, that is always going to be tough. In a game with an SM, it isn't so much of an issue as long as the SM doesn't play favorites. (I will never be able to let my 6 year old girl play. She has my number when it comes to getting her way.) The random issue is a problem because of what it is. Random. It will (almost) never come out even or fair. The only competitive game I played in was many, many years ago and the solution we decided on was that in every six systems you would find one T and one ST. Not necessarily in the same system. If you rolled up at T in the first, you only got O2's or an ST til you rolled out number 7. If you hadn't found one by 6, it automatically had one. We would either reroll or create an anomoly to make it work. The ST was thrown in so that folks playing the ST races didn't end up shorted. They had the same chances as everyone else essentially.
Change the # of T/ST per number of systems to suit your style, and away you go. Worked ok for us and solved alot of the griping. Wasn't perfect, but nothing will be.
Post by: crucis on April 23, 2010, 02:18:21 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
On the subject of more accurate star type distribution (at least for our end of the universe), my group already uses it to a degree with red dwarfs being the most prominent star type. Slight grumbling when we changed, but not bad.
FYI, here's an approximation of what the percentages would look like if real life star distribution percentages were used:
Blue Giant: 5%
White: 3%
Yellow: 8%
Orange: 13%
Red 36%
Red Dwarf 30%
White Dwarf: 3%
Red Giant: 2%
Note that I left the BG, WD, and RG %'s unchanged, and only adjusted the types between White and RD. Further note that the Star Types "Red" and "Red Dwarf" comprise the spectral classes that are generally associated with what are commonly called "Red Dwarf" stars... so I roughly split the remaining percentage points between those two, somewhat favoring the larger Red type over the smaller RD type.
Also note that the term "blue giant" in Starfire is a bit of a misnomer. True "blue giants" should really be "blue supergiants". But if "blue giant" here is just referring to main sequence stars of the O, B, A, and F0-F5 spectral classes, then its percentage should be really be more like 1% ... with the F0-F5's making up about half of that...
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As for the density of T/ST, that is always going to be tough. In a game with an SM, it isn't so much of an issue as long as the SM doesn't play favorites. (I will never be able to let my 6 year old girl play. She has my number when it comes to getting her way.) The random issue is a problem because of what it is. Random. It will (almost) never come out even or fair. The only competitive game I played in was many, many years ago and the solution we decided on was that in every six systems you would find one T and one ST. Not necessarily in the same system. If you rolled up at T in the first, you only got O2's or an ST til you rolled out number 7. If you hadn't found one by 6, it automatically had one. We would either reroll or create an anomoly to make it work. The ST was thrown in so that folks playing the ST races didn't end up shorted. They had the same chances as everyone else essentially.
Change the # of T/ST per number of systems to suit your style, and away you go. Worked ok for us and solved alot of the griping. Wasn't perfect, but nothing will be.
I most certainly agree... The problem is that randomness is just that ... random. So you are left with either using something like sector templates, pre-genning the game galaxy and manually editing it, or using something like you've done above.
Post by: miketr on April 23, 2010, 10:52:49 AM
Looking at exploration luck as a side issue from the economic explosion.
One thought is to borrow an idea from Steve's Aurora and allow terraforming of worlds. What you do is increase the range of worlds between O2 and T. What we have currently is T (HI 1 to 10) and O2. Currently O2 covers things like the empty rocks in hard vacuum such as the Moon and Mars. Possibly also the V type worlds for Venus. Allow players to be able to terraform worlds just make it stupidly expensive. So what we do when worlds are found is do a generation based upon the following factors.
#1) Distance from primary in terms of the liquid water zone for the star
#2) Mass of body
#3) You consult a table with the above data, perhaps another roll and you get your world type.
Maybe you have a world of perfect mass but its on the outer edge of the liquid water zone so is harsh frozen world most of the time. Maybe the worlds mass is questionable and so its atmosphere is to thin. So you erect massive atmospheric transformers to alter the planets environment.
From a realistic point of view for many worlds just doing Genetic Engineering of the colonists might make more sense. The time scale would be huge but we have it currently very possible to go from zero to multi-billion population worlds. The positive is its classic science fiction so it doesn't take much of a suspension of disbelief.
In the long term people who have really bad luck could hope to be able to do something about their situation short of war.
Michael
Post by: crucis on April 23, 2010, 12:01:34 PM
Quote from: "miketr"
It has been my experience that the games work better when the GM makes heavy use of pre-generation.
Not that I've seen it personally, but I tend to agree with you on this, Michael. pre-generation allows the GM to make some tweaks to even things out. I also tend to think that this is more of an issue earlier in the game when finding a single T/ST can have a proportionally larger impact than later in the game after everyone's found a number of T/ST's.
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Looking at exploration luck as a side issue from the economic explosion.
One thought is to borrow an idea from Steve's Aurora and allow terraforming of worlds. What you do is increase the range of worlds between O2 and T. What we have currently is T (HI 1 to 10) and O2. Currently O2 covers things like the empty rocks in hard vacuum such as the Moon and Mars. Possibly also the V type worlds for Venus. Allow players to be able to terraform worlds just make it stupidly expensive. So what we do when worlds are found is do a generation based upon the following factors.
#1) Distance from primary in terms of the liquid water zone for the star
#2) Mass of body
#3) You consult a table with the above data, perhaps another roll and you get your world type.
Maybe you have a world of perfect mass but its on the outer edge of the liquid water zone so is harsh frozen world most of the time. Maybe the worlds mass is questionable and so its atmosphere is to thin. So you erect massive atmospheric transformers to alter the planets environment.
From a realistic point of view for many worlds just doing Genetic Engineering of the colonists might make more sense. The time scale would be huge but we have it currently very possible to go from zero to multi-billion population worlds. The positive is its classic science fiction so it doesn't take much of a suspension of disbelief.
In the long term people who have really bad luck could hope to be able to do something about their situation short of war.
Michael
This is actually a VERY interesting idea.
I know that some would probably think that true terraforming might be beyond the capabilities or timeframe of the game. However, in a game where there's already a time compression, and other items requiring suspension of disbelief ... it may not be the worst possible idea to allow for terraforming. It seems that the key should be that TF-ing probably ought to be sufficiently expensive that it's a bad investment when other options exist, but not so expensive that it's simply not a reasonable option.
There are also some related points here that you didn't bring up ... exactly...
I think that there's some room for questioning what happens if a Type V planet that's close to the inner edge of the Liquid Water Zone (LWZ) (On a side note ... this gets confusing at times, as there are at least 4 different terms used here ... "biosphere, ecosphere, liquid water zone, and habitable zone" are 4 that I've seen used. I prefer the latter two.). Let me explain...
There seems to be some reasonable justification to believe that a big reason that Venus is the way it is because it lacks a magnetosphere. Without a magsphere, lighter molecules (including oxygen molecules) get stripped away by the solar winds, leaving heavier molecules, thus creating the deadly, super-dense CO2 atmosphere that Venus possesses. And it's very likely that a huge reason that Venus lacks a magsphere is because it's nearly tidelocked to the Sun, since it had a rotational period (i.e. day) that's equal to a little over 240 Earth-days. That is, Venus turns VERY slowly. But what if Venus had a mutually tidelocked moon that dragged the planet into rotating much more quickly? Would that have prevented the core from cooling and allowed the planet's magsphere to remain active.... and thus prevented the stripping away of the planet's lighter atmospheric gasses.... and possibly allowed the planet to be far, far less deadly and possibly something on the order of a "warm desolate" (if it was close to the inner edge of the LWZ).
I have not included this possibility in Cosmic's sysgen rules ... at least yet, mostly because it gets a little complicated... but such a world might be a possible candidate for terra-forming. I doubt that it could ever really be Benign or Harsh.... but it might be possible for it to be a form of Hostile. OTOH, even if you dumped a large number of icy comets onto the planet for a water supply, it may also be that not being in the LWZ could simply prevent the planet from retaining any of that water in liquid form, thus preventing it from ever really being able to make the leap from being a "warm desolate" to a habitable "hostile". I don't know...
On the flip side.... larger Mass 2 or 3 Type B (O2) planets. One reason why Mars doesn't have a significant atmosphere is that it has no magnetosphere. Now a major reason for this is that smaller planets, such as Mars, have a much more difficult time retaining a magsphere over the eons than larger planets, such as Earth. Then there's also some question about whether the presence of a large moon (such as the Moon) helps in this regard by producing increased tidal stresses on the planet that help to keep a planet retain sufficient volcanic activity to assist in retaining its magsphere. (Such a moon wouldn't need to be mutually tide locked. It'd only need to exist, since the issue is the presence of tidal stresses, not the use of the mutual TL-ing to drag the planet into rotating.) The key thing here is that if such a planet is able to retain a magnetosphere, it might then retain a reasonably dense atmosphere, since the magsphere would prevent the solar winds from stripping the atmosphere away as it has with Mars.
So, if such a M2/3 Type B planet were to exist (think of it as a "cool desolate", rather than a traditional "cold desolate"), this could be a candidate for TF-ing.... though it would probably need to be close to the outer edge of the LWZ. Of course, such a world probably wouldn't lack for water. It's likely that it would have plenty of water locked up as ice, though with some volcanic activity, it may be possible that there were some bodies of liquid water under the ice near warmer volcanically active regions. The question here relative to TF-ing would seem to be whether terraforming could overcome the fact that the planet still really wasn't in the LWZ. Also, the atmosphere on such a world may not be particularly life-supporting. Without any liquid water and without any plants (assuming that they're not possible in such a cold environment) to produce a lot more oxygen thru photosynthesis, the native atmosphere may not be life supporting. So, what could terraforming do to overcome its location just outside the LWZ? And even if you could miraculously make a lot of oxygen appear in the atmosphere, what could be done to prevent any open water from simply refreezing, since the planet's average temps are likely to be below freezing, due to its location.
Wow. I seem to have argued myself against TF-ing.... I guess that I'm left wondering what terraforming could do to overcome the immutable fact of these two orbital locations. That is, if you're not in the LWZ, you're not going to have any liquid water... at least any liquid water that's out in the open. On the "warm desolate" non-Venus, the water would want to turn into vapor. And on the "cool desolate", water would want to freeze. It seems to me that what needs to happen for a planet to attain any semblance of being "habitable" would be to overcome these tendencies, so that water would want to remain in a liquid state. But I'm hard pressed to see how one overcomes "location, location, location".
Side note: even aside from these concerns, I could see such "warm desolate" non-V and "cool desolate" non-B planets could have different planetary types. But would a "cool desolate" really be all that different from a traditional "cold desolate" to not still be a "Desolate" world? Of course, in the case of a "warm desolate" non-V, the shift from a Deadly Type V to a "warm desolate" non-V would be an environmental change that would allow some colonization to occur, though probably as a "desolate".
It's also worth noting that these sorts of scenarios wouldn't be terribly common in Starfire, for a specific reason. The sysgen process in Starfire is simplified to the point that orbits are based on even 1 LM increments. This tends to mitigate against these sort of narrow special scenarios, since the black body temperatures that would be necessary for such scenarios to be viable do not always occur for every orbit that's "the first orbit inward from the inner edge of the LWZ" (or next orbit outward from the outer edge of the LWZ). Many times, that orbit just happens to be well outside of the temp range that could arguable support such a special scenario world... though I do happen to know what orbits are required by star type for such situations.... They're usually orbits that are within 1 LM of the inner/outer edge of the LWZ, though in the case of White Stars, that "zone" is a bit wider, due to the LWZ's much greater distance from the star.
I seem to have argued myself out of thinking that terraforming is possible, if only because I don't see how terraforming can overcome a planet's basic blackbody temperature due to its distance from the star. Even if many other factors can be mitigated, such as having a magsphere thus allowing for a decent atmosphere to be retained, and using terraforming to add water and oxygen to the planet, I don't know how you overcome the planet's location ... the amount of heat received from the star due to its distance from said star.
Regardless, it's still an interesting topic ... and a possible way to deal with a lack of T/ST's ... if a half decent justification could be produced to counter these distance issues.
Post by: procyon on April 23, 2010, 09:23:32 PM
Is it worth the effort to put together for the game, I don't know. I like to write the stories, not the rules.
As for body location and habitability, that actually is a lot more mutable than what some might think. If you popped into Sol system through a warp point a sufficient amount of time ago, Mars would have had a magnetosphere, slightly denser atmosphere, and liquid water on it. I don't think there are many people left who will argue whether Mars used to hold liquid water, its just a question of how much and when. Depending on the time frame, Venus might be much closer to habitable than what we currently see. Earth has managed a much longer habitable period, but as you say, location, location, location.
Tempature could be moderated with liberation of CO2 from most rocks on a planet/moon, is opaque to IR light so it absorbs heat well (as is methane and several other gases), and would in sufficient quantity would allow for plant/bacterial life if temperatures were adequate. I'm sure 'super science' could come up with equally useful compounds that weren't as toxic as high concentration CO2 would be.
Protection from ionizing radiation would be the problem, as would be the soil of most planets without an atmosphere. Radiation isn't going to care about CO2, and sterile plants would be poor at repopulating themselves. Soil exposed to this same radiation will form compounds that are peroxides and would be a great anticeptic in and of themselves. Not impossible to overcome, just tedious and most likely expensive.
Is terraforming worth it in a game where you can just survey and jump to the next system? I don't know... that is a hard one. If T's got rare (devious SM thoughts at work for a future game if this became an option) and terraforming was competative with multi month colonization transport, maybe. With the current availability of T's, and the ease of looking for more, I just don't see it getting used unless it was cheaper than looking for one, which would only increase the number of habitables and speed of the economic spiral.
Unless T's got rare, I just don't see terraforming (increasing the number of T's) helping the game.
Post by: crucis on April 23, 2010, 10:08:28 PM
Quote from: "procyon"
Terraforming is a neat, but probably complicated idea. If simplified, it probably doesn't required much more of a suspension of 'reality' than everyone having reactionless drives capable of relativistic speeds and conversion of matter to energy.
Is it worth the effort to put together for the game, I don't know. I like to write the stories, not the rules.
As you point out below, procyon, Terraforming is probably only a useful concept if Type T/ST planets are sufficiently rare and if Terraforming was capable of being carried out in a sufficiently short time (even within the game's compressed time scale) at something approaching an affordable cost.
Quote
As for body location and habitability, that actually is a lot more mutable than what some might think. If you popped into Sol system through a warp point a sufficient amount of time ago, Mars would have had a magnetosphere, slightly denser atmosphere, and liquid water on it. I don't think there are many people left who will argue whether Mars used to hold liquid water, its just a question of how much and when. Depending on the time frame, Venus might be much closer to habitable than what we currently see. Earth has managed a much longer habitable period, but as you say, location, location, location.
As for Mars and its magnetosphere, you'd have to have showed up about 4 billion years ago, since that's the current estimate for how long ago Mars lost its magsphere. And remember that the solar system is about 4.5 or so billion years old. AND IIRC, Earth's atmosphere is younger than that. As I mentioned earlier, from what I've read on the topic, smaller planets appear to have difficulty retaining magnetospheres due to their small size. Also, smaller planets have weaker gravities and thus a weaker ability to prevent lighter molecules from escaping its gravitic influence.
Regarding Venus, yes, it's possible that that is true for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's believed that liquid water zones migrate outward as stars age and emit more energy. So, it's likely that Venus was closer to the inner edge of the LWZ at some point in the distant past. Secondly, Venus may have had a decent magsphere at some point in its past, though I don't recall reading anything on when it's believed that Venus lost its magsphere. I've also read that it's been hypothosized that Venus may have been hit by one or two moons over the eons and that those collisions are responsible for its very slow rotation.
I agree that there may be some "slop" in the "habitability zone". But a part of the "problem" in Starfire is the relatively simplistic model being used.
A. Orbits are only measured in single LM increments. This prevents planets from existing every so slightly closer to LWZ borders and having slightly better and friendlier black body temperatures that could mean the difference between being uninhabitable and being barely habitable. The use of single LM increments causes each planetary orbit to have some very specific black body temperatures, which are used to produce the various planetary zone borders, and tends to make those borders appear be very "bright lines". However, trying to do the Titius-Bode tables in non-whole numbers is probably nothing but a total horror show, and only realistically do-able on a purely computer model.
B. The Star Types used only represent a single semi-average sub-type within the actual range of spectral classes represented by that star type. That is, the Yellow star type represents Spectral Class G0-G9 stars. However, the purposes of limiting the number of planet-producing star types to a reasonable number, the Yellow star type is represented by the G5 spectral sub-class's planetary zone range values. If I were to used all of the spectral sub-types represented by the White, Yellow, Orange, Red, and Red Dwarf star types, you'd have a 35 different star type rows in the planetary formation zone tables. But on the flip side, you'd have star systems that had a considerably more granularity in differentiation from subtype to subtype. That is, a Class G2 star (Sol is a G2) wouldn't have the same planetary formation zones as a Class G8 star. A G8 would have PFZ ranges closer to the current Orange type than the current White type.
I've actually considered doing this, but it may be a bit too much for some people, though it would create a very realistic feel when you could say that your binary system was a G3/K7 binary, rather than just a Yellow/Orange binary. If all of these sub types were used, on the primary star type table, you'd instead first roll for Spectral Class F, G, K, or M (rather than a star "color"), then you'd roll 1d10 (0 to 9) for the sub type, with values of 0-4 being ignored for Class F stars. The fact of the matter is that I actually constructed the tables for all 35 spectral sub-types from F5 thru M9, so putting them into the rules wouldn't be difficult at all, aside from the fact that the table itself would be rather more sizeable. The rules for using such a table would be no different than the way the PFZ tables currently work... there'd just be about 7 times as many rows ... but a lot more variety.
Quote
Tempature could be moderated with liberation of CO2 from most rocks on a planet/moon, is opaque to IR light so it absorbs heat well (as is methane and several other gases), and would in sufficient quantity would allow for plant/bacterial life if temperatures were adequate. I'm sure 'super science' could come up with equally useful compounds that weren't as toxic as high concentration CO2 would be.
Protection from ionizing radiation would be the problem, as would be the soil of most planets without an atmosphere. Radiation isn't going to care about CO2, and sterile plants would be poor at repopulating themselves. Soil exposed to this same radiation will form compounds that are peroxides and would be a great anticeptic in and of themselves. Not impossible to overcome, just tedious and most likely expensive.
Is terraforming worth it in a game where you can just survey and jump to the next system? I don't know... that is a hard one. If T's got rare (devious SM thoughts at work for a future game if this became an option) and terraforming was competitive with multi month colonization transport, maybe. With the current availability of T's, and the ease of looking for more, I just don't see it getting used unless it was cheaper than looking for one, which would only increase the number of habitables and speed of the economic spiral.
Unless T's got rare, I just don't see terraforming (increasing the number of T's) helping the game.
As I said above, I tend to agree regarding terraforming, for the same reasons as you detail.
Post by: procyon on April 23, 2010, 10:27:19 PM
Problem - most folks wouldn't have a clue what they were looking at unless you put together a fairly long explanation of the classes.
The rules for starfire seem to be long enough without adding more. Fun thought, but if you hope to be able to draw in more players, I doubt adding a seven page table and description section just for stars, let alone the zones and habitibility of the bodies, is going to help much.
Keeping some things simple isn't always a bad thing.
(Although a supplement with that table for we old physicists would be AWESOME!)
Post by: crucis on April 23, 2010, 10:53:35 PM
Quote from: "procyon"
Spectral class could be fun, especially if you get into realistic star sizes (one that reaches the orbit of Mars - like Antares).
Problem - most folks wouldn't have a clue what they were looking at unless you put together a fairly long explanation of the classes.
The rules for starfire seem to be long enough without adding more. Fun thought, but if you hope to be able to draw in more players, I doubt adding a seven page table and description section just for stars, let alone the zones and habitibility of the bodies, is going to help much.
Keeping some things simple isn't always a bad thing.
(Although a supplement with that table for we old physicists would be AWESOME!)
Yes, I agree that there will be a segment of the player population that may have no clue what spectral classes are. But I've always had a perception (perhaps an incorrect one) that Starfire players are sci-fi fans at heart, and sci-fi fans will have a bit of science geek in them (some more than others, of course)... so I don't think that most Starfire fans would be so ignorant of astronomy to not know what spectral classes are at a very basic level, or at least lack the ability to understand what they are. It's
really not THAT difficult to explain.
Quote
Stars come in different sizes and temperatures, and while for a basic table, star "types" are grouped into rather large "buckets", in reality, those buckets are a bit smaller, and are referred to as Spectral classes and subclasses. Starting at the smallest and coolest subclass used (M9) and going up thru the largest and hotest (F5), stars grow increasingly large and hot as the spectral classes and subclasses increase from 9 to 0, and from M to F. And as those spectral subclasses grow hotter, their planetary formations zones are pushed increasingly farther from the star... with the zones being very, very close to very cool M9 stars and much more distant for hot F5 stars.
That would seem to cover most of the high points without delving into serious detail.
As for the length of the planetary formation zone table, actually a 35 row table should really only be about the same size as the Titius-Bode table, which is also about the same number of rows.
Please note that I wouldn't inflict this on anyone as the standard rule. But it could make a very interesting optional rule for some people, and it would inject a good deal of variety in star systems since, for example, a G0 and a G9 would no longer have the same PFZ's, since the outer edge of the G0's LWZ might place planet at a similar distance from a G9 in that star's gas zone.
Anyways, it's just a vague thought... and not of any real importance at this point in time...
Post by: miketr on April 24, 2010, 12:01:25 AM
For now just keep in mind that we don't have to worry about Terraforming needing to last in the long term, IE millions or even billions of years. Thousands is a fine time scale. Again looking back to classic Science Fiction Mars is often shown as a dying world, or having once held a highly advanced civilization but that civilization collapsed or was destroyed for whatever reason it and human explores or adventures discover the tech and make Mars green once more.
Or what I am trying to say is we don't need to worry about terraforming be a permanent change to a world.
Michael
Post by: crucis on April 24, 2010, 12:11:31 AM
Quote from: "miketr"
I will give a more detailed response Sunday or Monday.
For now just keep in mind that we don't have to worry about Terraforming needing to last in the long term, IE millions or even billions of years. Thousands is a fine time scale. Again looking back to classic Science Fiction Mars is often shown as a dying world, or having once held a highly advanced civilization but that civilization collapsed or was destroyed for whatever reason it and human explores or adventures discover the tech and make Mars green once more.
Or what I am trying to say is we don't need to worry about terraforming be a permanent change to a world.
Michael
That's a fair point, Michael.
Sort of reminds me of the terraforming of the "Spacer" worlds in Isaac Asimov's Foundation/Robots universe. In the time of the Robot novels, the Spacer worlds had been terraformed into great places. But by the time of the Foundation series (about 20,000 yrs later), some of the Spacer worlds had degenerated considerably (Aurora, in particular). The only Spacer world that had retained its environment intact (that was seen in the stories) was Solaria, which was still inhabited by millions of robots, as well as its roughly 10,000 Solarian "humans". Of course, I'm not sure that these terraformed worlds were actually desolates that had been terrformed into habitables. They may have been more like TF'd harsh or hostiles to benigns.... (which I suppose could be another terraforming option...)
Crucis
Post by: procyon on April 24, 2010, 12:14:27 AM
Giant mass drivers blowing off your atmosphere into space, etc.
'nuff with that thought.
Post by: crucis on April 24, 2010, 12:21:44 AM
Quote from: "procyon"
Of course 'terraforming' for an O2 race would be a whole different thing.
Giant mass drivers blowing off your atmosphere into space, etc. :mrgreen:
Post by: rmcrowe on June 23, 2010, 12:16:36 PM
robert
Post by: procyon on June 25, 2010, 06:57:10 AM
I think crucis is planning on using the PTU model for Cosmic, but that's just based on what I've read of his posts. If it goes that way, the wait times just don't work so well. But that is all just my opinion.
Hope that helps.
Post by: Tregonsee on September 17, 2010, 01:39:10 PM
Several things:
1) Is there a chance that someone (Steve W, Administrators) break off this thread? I mean, I came back thinking that this thread was about getting the UTM, something I still want, and it has morphed to Starfire economics and scaling issues. Someone looking for these new issues might never find it, based on the thread title.
2) I don't think it is the economics that is stretching out things in Starfire, but it is a symptom. The problem seems to be scope of command. One single person cannot easily manage all of the decisions that need to be made in a timely manner. Whether it is economics of 20+ planets or fleets of several hundred corvettes, it is too big and clunky to easily handle without computer aid, and even then it is hard-
2a) In a battle, you take a ship, find out what weapons you have usable, find a suitable target ship(s) (by determining what is shields down, breathing atmosphere, fired a certain weapon type last turn, etc), figure range, fire weapons, figure missile interceptions if any, and apply damage. Imagine trying to do that for a 400 ship simultaneous WP assault against a fleet, deployed Base Stations of varying types, minefields, DSB-s, and IDEWs of multiple types. It actually got to be work, not a fun battle. This took place over 5+ nights and then I had to finish it up using SA because the logistics of getting together to finish the battle was just too great...
3) As for such a battle, even in SF classics, there was an acknowledgement of the complexities involved. There is such a big span of control that no one person can control it all. In 2nd Stage Lensman by E. E. "Doc" Smith, they built huge special ships that all it was was a "tank" by which the battle could be "seen" by the Admirals.
4) The economics seem to be more like a runaway petri dish without the petri dish capping growth.
THEREFORE, I make the following suggestions for discussion-
A) A limit be placed on the number of ships an Admiral can control, and limit on how one gets admirals. This could be a limit like the old personnel points without having to track so hard. It would induce players to have smaller amounts of larger ships over massive "swarm attacks", and would force a player to be a little more conservative in tactics, in that they have to conserve the number of Admirals they have, and would even have an inducement for more diplomacy between players (Admiral prisoner exchanges).
B) Economics is based on two basic concepts- population and its growth, and the money derived thereof. Now in every military that I know of, the budget is based on a yearly basis. People can grow and die and be born all of the time (monthly population growth) but the money is given on a yearly basis. You get that amount and it has to last the entire year. This does several things:
B1) Chops amount of money available for shipbuilding, etc by a factor of 12. We only get taxed once a year, right? Government gets yearly budgets and doles the money out by quarter for various things.
B2) Since you don't get money again for 12 more turns, it forces more planning, and for you to set aside money for emergencies.
B3) Less bookkeeping. Now a colony placed at the end of the year will produce the same amount of tax revenue as one that has been around for awhile, but it is also true (at least in the US) that a wedding or childbirth affects the whole tax year for income taxes, even if it occurrs on 31 December. Sorry, it can't be easily helped.
B4) If emergencies occur, one can sell ships or IUs for fast cash.
B5) These changes would lead to smaller fleet sizes as well, which lead to smaller and more manageable battles.
I hope everyone does not mind me getting on this soap box, but I read the whole thread without replying, having to read 6+ pages...