Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Newtonian Aurora => Topic started by: sloanjh on December 07, 2011, 12:05:18 AM
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I just saw a picture of the galactic map in the map question thread, and that reminded me of a conversation about Honorverse military strategy I had late at night at a con many years ago, probably sometime after Ashes of Victory. The point I was making was that in the early HH books, the "island hopping" strategy that Weber was pushing was all wrong for their hyperspace mechanics.
In the early HH books, the war with Haven focused on battles for forward operating bases between the two powers. The problem is that forward operating bases only matter if they can be used as bases for interdiction, or if the combat radius of combatants is small enough they're needed for refueling/staging. In StarFire or Aurora, this works because you've got choke points at the jump points, so there's a high probability of detecting and fighting transiting bad guys. In WWII pacific, the islands were used as bases for air power. The aircraft gave the bases a significant range both for detection (search planes) and attack (bombers). In other words, the forward operating bases could at least detect ships in a significant fraction of the available (2D) space.
In the HonorVerse, however, you can go from anywhere to anywhere in hyperspace, and there are no significant fuel restrictions on range. This means that the bases will have a search radius that's effectively zero (even considering the compressing effects of hyperspace and the channeling effects of grav waves), and ships don't need to stop off to gas up. This in turn means that forward operating bases are almost useless - the correct strategy would be one of "deep strikes", where you send a large fleet/TG to lay waste to an important enemy system. It is interesting to note that in the most recent books, Weber has transitioned to deep-strike strategy, with a little bit of white-wash dialog to explain why things have changed :)
The reason I'm going here is that I just realized that Newtonian Aurora will produce a strategic environment that is MUCH closer to Honorverse than to SF or Aurora. If Steve doesn't want the game strategy to be a collection of deep strikes (i.e. if he wants to encourage forward bases), he'll have to think of something that makes forward bases useful and/or able to interdict enemy transits in hyperspace. The obvious knob to twirl is fuel - if it's expensive to jump vast distances then ships will have to make refueling stops (fuel scoops and gas giants, anyone?). Another possibility might be to make fuel consumption go like the square of the distance, and require that you can only exit hyperspace at a point where the gravitational gradient has a certain value, i.e. at a specific distance from a particular star. This would encourage jumps that are hops from one system to another, while still avoiding jump points that are strict choke points.
Note that I'm not invested in any of the ideas above, I'm just trying to point out some possibilities....
John
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I dunno. You kinda have to keep your fleets concentrating on protecting your most important assets anyway, with pickets and nodal forces at best to cover other stuff. Would that really change? Only by using defensive advantage (ie: PDCs, stealth) can you hope to effectively cover a wide area.
The main problem is that the fuel situation is already going to be really harsh with newtonian mechanics. So unless hyperspace fuel is completely different... *shrug*.
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A possible thought, which I will cross post to the main NA thread, might be this.
Under current rules, the 'deep strike' would be the way to go. Other than the fact that you won't know where the enemy's main bases are without looking.
Perhaps part of the jump drive tech could be a max duration of the drive to maintain itself in hyperspace. I am not sure I would tie this to fuel use as you could simply build larger fuel reserves to make these deep strikes. Perhaps the drive begins to generate a 'sub-space charge' that will damage the drive after a certain level - forcing the ship out of subspace/hyperspace after a certain amount of time. This would of course increase with research.
So civ ships designed with lower delta V budgets would have lower speeds at jump and would jump shorter distances. Mil ships with higher delta V budgets could afford the high speeds to make longer jumps - but not infinite ones. In this way you would need to operate forward bases to stop - refuel/resupply - reorient on the next system - then jump.
Some ships could be designed to make very long jumps by being very fast, but this would likely require a smaller ship with a large percentage of fuel to reach the required speed for the long jump. A small ship that is mostly fuel probably isn't an ideal warship. A good scout probably, but not a planet killer.
Just a thought. Any opinions?
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Pretty much.
Just ignoring everything and having a straight duel between two homeworlds would be a bit bland.
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Deep strike under current rules makes sense.
You won't have a 'front' so much, but battle will still happen around targets of opportunity like colonies, in addition to the core worlds. You just can't leave a far away system undefended.
I'm still thinking about this, but it makes defence harder than offence. Basically to protect your empire you need ships at EVERY one of your systems, since any one of them can be a target. I'm not sure how long it would take for a defence fleet to travel from a neighboring system, but I can imagine that by the time they arrive there could only be ruins left, I don't know. But if so, you need an effective defense at every planet.
For offence though, you can concentrate your forces since you pick the target, which makes it easier.
A suggestion has been mentioned to have a pulse go off a long time before an enemy fleet arrives, which might make reinforcement from nearby systems practical since they can get there quicker since they don't have to travel as far. This would go a long way to countering the disadvantage of a dispersed defense.
On the flipside... defense is cheaper and more powerful. The price of a PDC is low compared to a ship with similar capabilities. In addition fighter fleets become far more viable since you don't have to worry about building ships with large enough bays to transport them anymore. You might even make in-system ships that don't have a jump drive, saving cost and allowing them to put on more guns. This might make it possible to balance it out.
As mentioned it risks turning into simply two homeworlds dueling it out ignoring everything else (but considering it might take decades to have a secondary planet with the production and defense of a homeworld it might be moot), but that also depends on how valuable your outlaying colonies are. If you battle a NPR with similar strength than you it might be an effective strategy to destroy his colonies first and deny him minerals than to attack his homeworld directly first, assuming you even know where his homeworld is.
In short, I'd like to know about the timing and viability of reinforcements from closer systems, the effective battle capability bonus per cost that single system ships and PDCs have and the relative value of attacking outlying colonies versus attacking core worlds. If these things balance out okay then deep-strike capability might not be such a bad thing.
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I expect colonies outside your home system to be only minor sites with a few million colonists top and a few mining endeavors.
Those would then be 'shot' at the homeworld in slow, cheap freighters, who cares if they take a half year.
A single system can be reasonably defended, the population spread over several planets to prevent complete loss.
Additionally, all those systems really should have a use.
That's mainly why I argued for conventional materials as well; Every systems gonna have some, so there's no argument "Thats a nice world, easily defend-able, good atmosphere, but it's friggin useless!"
Now, we come to the point this applies to entire systems.
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Colonies RIGHT NOW are just minor sites. Either just for mining, or in case of planets that one can live on, population wealth farms.
If the ability to automate and make easier the distribution of minerals across all your worlds is implemented then potentially any world can be an industry world. You might create your core fleet on your homeworld as a priority, but local defenses and lower priority manufacturing might occur on these colonies. I know its often that I need a PDC on this world, but I also need to build more mines, so I prioritize the latter with the former often never happening.
I did make a suggestion a while ago that in part is that traditional manufacturing installations should naturally be built on worlds based on unemployed population, or perhaps like infrastructure does now, which would improve the value of these colonies.
Once you have this, actual valuable colonies that can contribute industrially to a war effort, a war SHOULD evolve to be more than just a homeworld vs homeworld.
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Why would you set up colonies?
The cost of infrastructure to distribute them over one good system is way cheaper than to move them somewhere else, so every other colony will literally be only a few million people manning the spaceport so that the mining stations in system can be utilized properly, with a single PDC that is probably worth as much as the entire colony (- the mines).
Why would I attack that if any freighter ultimately arrives in the primary system?
Why would I defend it if the fuel burned to get a fleet there, fight, and jump back afterwards costs more than to just set up a new hub after the enemies gone again?
If you go for more realistic, useful colonies that evolve without you telling them to, you'll also have to calculate that those people won't magically reproduce faster.
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Going back to the drive, if you figure that going to hyperspace puts the ship in its own little pocket universe, then the very fact that it is radiating heat will mean that it will sooner or later have to emerge. More efficient drives carrying smaller ships are of course less susceptible, so there is a mix of strategies; send your skirmisher ships ahead on long jumps to scout and harass, while your larger vessels make small, island-hopping jumps.
I have to say, I really like both strategic approaches, and I'd love to see them both possible.
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Just a thought.
There could be a lost in space factor depending on the distance. Obviously, a small imprecision mistake in you jump gets more and more dangerous if you go very far. You may just miss the system.
To avoid that mistake you could set a beacon in the systems you own. If jumping to a beacon, the error change would be Zero. So then it is very important to make small jumps to enemy system, but you could still try it. It would just be dangerous. That would also be an objective of attack, destroying the ennemi beacon when entering a system to avoid reinforcement.
There could also be reverse beacon, something that would hide the system (a bit) so you have to jump from a closer range.
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Just a thought.
There could be a lost in space factor depending on the distance. Obviously, a small imprecision mistake in you jump gets more and more dangerous if you go very far. You may just miss the system.
To avoid that mistake you could set a beacon in the systems you own. If jumping to a beacon, the error change would be Zero. So then it is very important to make small jumps to enemy system, but you could still try it. It would just be dangerous. That would also be an objective of attack, destroying the ennemi beacon when entering a system to avoid reinforcement.
There could also be reverse beacon, something that would hide the system (a bit) so you have to jump from a closer range.
I quite like something like this. As it stands, the situation does strike me as entirely too fluid. There is no point in fighting anywhere in the middle. At all. You just jump for your opponents, he jumps for you, end of story. That's boring.
The heat buildup is also a good idea. If Steve implements heat (which I don't think he's going to, but if he does) then that would mesh nicely.
Sloanjh:
That exact point was discussed in one of the earlier books. It came down to "We can't hit them hard enough without stripping ourselves bare". And I'm not sure that PDCs will be quite as good. They can't dodge, and ships can.
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There is no point in fighting anywhere in the middle. At all. You just jump for your opponents, he jumps for you, end of story.
Just a thought, but without jump gates you won't necessarily know where your enemy's homeworld is. You would fight to take anything of his that you can find so that you can discover his star charts and learn where his homeworld is.
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Also, homeworlds are guaranteed to have by far the heaviest concentration of forces. Sending the greater part of your military into a hornet's nest is a gamble. A strategy of picking at the edges will offer more vulnerable targets.
I guess it depends on how quickly you want the war to end either way. :P
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We ultimately have to look at the larger strategic design. Currently, your capital planet is pretty much self-sufficient, and if not that, your capital system is.
Consider if the system generator was modified so most systems had only poor concentrations of resources, but one in a dozen has large, highly accessible reserves of one specific resource. In that case, attacking an enemy's critical duranium mines would be an attractive strategic move, something that would presumably make further attacks on the enemy empire easier.
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That would pretty much screw the NPRs worse than they are on minerals. In any case, Sol is kind of an abberation, most systems arn't as mineral rich.
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Another factor to consider is the possibility that you won't know where the enemy HW is. Considering how the new FTL system seems to work you could very well run only into colonies or have a faulty idea of where the HW is. Naturally if you take the time to do scouting or get lucky this may not be the problem, but if you decide for in-character reasons to launch the war (or was attacked first) before knowing the strategy is already decided for you. At least in the beginning.
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Even more reason to not establish notable colonies unless absolutely necessary.
Decreases detection risk. ;)
And hell, do we get a new solar system?
Terraformable Titan, that tenth nearly planet, etc.
With a bit of requirement shifting, we could go as far as to have "homeworld minerals" to only include those that are needed, with everything else that may only be required for missiles or the like by as random as any.
Maybe have a "home system algorithm" that makes sure there's at least a small concentration of everything in system.
I'd say it'd be thrilling if at start you first have to find that damn mineral you need for the jump drives.
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1 - Ships could suffer gradual light damage while in hyperspace based on some combination of traveling speed, tech level, time in hyper and components that mitigate it. Damage could include one or all of internal damage, armor damage, crew dying.
2 - Add a 'maintenance yard' that can repair and maintain ships, but not build them.
1+2 together would strongly encourage developing partially self sufficient forward bases to resupply, launch attacks from and retreat back to. Maybe military FTL's could have a higher safe speed or get to travel longer without harmful effects. Habitable planets would be strategically valuable as military bases and to service the civilian trade routes.
The flavor could be anything from harmful radiation to vengeful hyperspace gods :)
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Even more reason to not establish notable colonies unless absolutely necessary.
Decreases detection risk. ;)
And hell, do we get a new solar system?
Terraformable Titan, that tenth nearly planet, etc.
With some gene-modifications i came to iirc 7 full working 0 infrastructure worlds alone in Sol. I reached 50 non-habitat collonies after a dozen jumps :P
I could see that production also gets diversified and moved to other locations if there are enough suitable locations. I mean we have to do that anyway with shipyards to ensure we dont loose to much repair and building power in a singe strike. I think that even Orbital habitats will be more usefull to get an extensive trade and shipping network running where you dont rely on single sources, production-centers or routes. Instead of 1 Shipyard with 20 slipways for 3000 ton Frigates we might have 10 with each 2 slipways and so on. What would be needed for such a network to work would be civilian Shiping of minerals and a better overall trade and shipping structure.
Didnt the mineral-content of system hinge on the mass of it(s) Star(s) thus higher mass = more minerals? Anyway dont think that the current sol needs any rework minerals wise.
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Minerals wise?
It's completely random.
It just needs a rework in general.
it is a set figure instead of generated, and the values don't match with todays view of this very system.
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I just saw a picture of the galactic map in the map question thread, and that reminded me of a conversation about Honorverse military strategy I had late at night at a con many years ago, probably sometime after Ashes of Victory. The point I was making was that in the early HH books, the "island hopping" strategy that Weber was pushing was all wrong for their hyperspace mechanics.
In the early HH books, the war with Haven focused on battles for forward operating bases between the two powers. The problem is that forward operating bases only matter if they can be used as bases for interdiction, or if the combat radius of combatants is small enough they're needed for refueling/staging. In StarFire or Aurora, this works because you've got choke points at the jump points, so there's a high probability of detecting and fighting transiting bad guys. In WWII pacific, the islands were used as bases for air power. The aircraft gave the bases a significant range both for detection (search planes) and attack (bombers). In other words, the forward operating bases could at least detect ships in a significant fraction of the available (2D) space.
In the HonorVerse, however, you can go from anywhere to anywhere in hyperspace, and there are no significant fuel restrictions on range. This means that the bases will have a search radius that's effectively zero (even considering the compressing effects of hyperspace and the channeling effects of grav waves), and ships don't need to stop off to gas up. This in turn means that forward operating bases are almost useless - the correct strategy would be one of "deep strikes", where you send a large fleet/TG to lay waste to an important enemy system. It is interesting to note that in the most recent books, Weber has transitioned to deep-strike strategy, with a little bit of white-wash dialog to explain why things have changed :)
The reason I'm going here is that I just realized that Newtonian Aurora will produce a strategic environment that is MUCH closer to Honorverse than to SF or Aurora. If Steve doesn't want the game strategy to be a collection of deep strikes (i.e. if he wants to encourage forward bases), he'll have to think of something that makes forward bases useful and/or able to interdict enemy transits in hyperspace. The obvious knob to twirl is fuel - if it's expensive to jump vast distances then ships will have to make refueling stops (fuel scoops and gas giants, anyone?). Another possibility might be to make fuel consumption go like the square of the distance, and require that you can only exit hyperspace at a point where the gravitational gradient has a certain value, i.e. at a specific distance from a particular star. This would encourage jumps that are hops from one system to another, while still avoiding jump points that are strict choke points.
Note that I'm not invested in any of the ideas above, I'm just trying to point out some possibilities....
John
Yes, this is a good point. I have so far avoided any restriction on the distance of hyperspace travel to make things simpler for NPRs/AI, especially now they will have to worry about fuel. One of the reasons for changing to a non-jump point system is that jump points made managing NPR Empires a lot trickier than an open space universe. In fact, quite a few of the mechanics decisions I make have to bear the AI in mind. It was so much easier when there was no AI and I could create whatever I wanted on the basis that a human brain could easily cope with it :)
Having said that, some type of restriction is probably inevitable for the reasons you mentioned above and for any concept of borders, or spheres of influence, to exist. I'll read through the thread and see what suggestions have been made.
Steve
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A possible thought, which I will cross post to the main NA thread, might be this.
Under current rules, the 'deep strike' would be the way to go. Other than the fact that you won't know where the enemy's main bases are without looking.
Perhaps part of the jump drive tech could be a max duration of the drive to maintain itself in hyperspace. I am not sure I would tie this to fuel use as you could simply build larger fuel reserves to make these deep strikes. Perhaps the drive begins to generate a 'sub-space charge' that will damage the drive after a certain level - forcing the ship out of subspace/hyperspace after a certain amount of time. This would of course increase with research.
So civ ships designed with lower delta V budgets would have lower speeds at jump and would jump shorter distances. Mil ships with higher delta V budgets could afford the high speeds to make longer jumps - but not infinite ones. In this way you would need to operate forward bases to stop - refuel/resupply - reorient on the next system - then jump.
Some ships could be designed to make very long jumps by being very fast, but this would likely require a smaller ship with a large percentage of fuel to reach the required speed for the long jump. A small ship that is mostly fuel probably isn't an ideal warship. A good scout probably, but not a planet killer.
Just a thought. Any opinions?
I too am a little reluctant to have fuel involved in hyperspace jumps for a couple of reasons. Firstly fuel is going to be a LOT more important in Newtonian Aurora so having to reserve fuel for FTL as well is going to make life very difficult. Secondly, one of the major points of the game is that you don't need fuel to retain speed - you only need it to accelerate or decelerate. With that in mind, I can see an argument for expending fuel to enter hyperspace or leave it, but not to maintain speed while in hyperspace. If you don't need fuel to maintain speed in hyperspace then it is no restriction on distance.
As you mentioned, one option is a tech line that restricts max hyperspace range, although that would lead to deeper strikes as tech advanced so I am not sure if that would resolve the problem or just delay it.
Another is the hyperspace race mentioned in a different thread, or just a general hyperdrive failure rate (either in transit or on arrival). If the chance of detection/failure was dependent on distance (or maybe even the square of distance) then that would tend to make races favour shorter jumps.
Another one that just occured to me is making the length of the jump a factor in whether you could be detected in the arriving system. Maybe the square of the LY distance in hours, so a 5 LY jump would give the defenders 25 hours warning of arrival, while a 10 LY jump would provide over four days warning. Although I guess that would eventually lead to you being detected before you jumped :).
Steve
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If you go for more realistic, useful colonies that evolve without you telling them to, you'll also have to calculate that those people won't magically reproduce faster.
They don't reproduce faster solely as a game mechanic. Less developed populations and colonies historically have a higher population growth than developed countries.
Steve
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After reading through the other replies, at the moment I am leaning toward a chance-based penalty for long hyperspace jumps. This could be FTL Drive failure in deep space, an optional hyperspace race, or other mechanic to be decided. This allows long jumps if you really want to try them but with a risk involved.
Steve
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They don't reproduce faster solely as a game mechanic. Less developed populations and colonies historically have a higher population growth than developed countries.
Steve
That of course assumes that the environment is friendly to the population. Presumably, as a population approaches the carrying capacity of the infrastructure/environment, population growth slows due to more accidental death and fewer successful pregnancies, regardless of education and economic freedoms.
I would encourage you to tie the safe jump range of a vessel to, in some way, the mass of the ship. Having ships with significantly different strategic movement capabilities is an interesting gameplay element. I forsee using light ships to scout out ahead of a major military force, followed by the civilian support fleet, each group taking different routes to maximize survival.
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Steve,
One option to diversity FTL movement a little is to base 'safe' FTL range on target star mass. This means that you can easily jump to more massive stars, which then by nature end up as 'nexus' points on the map, at the expense of being harder to grav survey which seems rather elegant in my opinion. There is no penalty for exceeding the max range, except for a chance for something to go very 'wrong'.
Things that could go wrong on a jump include emerging at another system along the same vector some time later, getting lost in hyperspace or falling out of hyperspace somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and maybe letting things from beyond into this side?
Drives could be specialised in two directions; commercial drives which have large drive flares, and possibly large early warnings (if you decide to go with that), but are very stable up to a certain range, but inaccurate unless the system is surveyed.
Alternatively, military drives, which reduce flare and warning signal, but are generally shorter range, and are more precise exit wise even in unmapped systems (though never as good as in a mapped system).
These would be on some kind of sliding scale.
Scout/survey designs could either mount the commerical drives and suffer the flare, but have longer ranges, or mount the military kind for increased stealth, but pay for it in safe survey range.
This means the commercial drive would also be more delta v efficient in the long run since you would not have to realign at systems along the jump path.
An extra idea is that of the hyperspace gates for linking surveyed systems (possibly requiring a 'second stage' survey?), at the risk of letting enemies through too.
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One option to diversity FTL movement a little is to base 'safe' FTL range on target star mass. This means that you can easily jump to more massive stars, which then by nature end up as 'nexus' points on the map, at the expense of being harder to grav survey which seems rather elegant in my opinion.
That's actually really cool. It could also work in the reverse, so that it's easier to jump away from large stars. That would make them useful as major stopping points without making them attractive invasion targets.
The jump safety could even be based on the average of the two stars.
This does seem like it might bump against the AI's capacity.
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After reading through the other replies, at the moment I am leaning toward a chance-based penalty for long hyperspace jumps. This could be FTL Drive failure in deep space, an optional hyperspace race, or other mechanic to be decided. This allows long jumps if you really want to try them but with a risk involved.
Steve
The problem is that short hyperspace jumps need to have less cumulative chance of trouble.
I do have one point about deep strikes:
Delta-V.
Deep strikes are problematic for a very simple reason. The ship has to have enough fuel to get up to speed, then decelerate at the end of the jump, fight, and come back. If you try a deep strike, I would imagine that it would be wise to get there and back as quickly as possible to minimize maintainence and vulnerability. That requires a lot of delta-V. If you have a forward base in the area, it's not as much of an issue. Shorter distance lets you get away with lower hyper speed, and you can transit to home about twice as fast.
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Even more reason to not establish notable colonies unless absolutely necessary.
Decreases detection risk. ;)
Indeed. I can't but imagine some Empire going around and instituting some kind of colonial camouflage/stealth scheme. Automated mining colonies with more heat dampeners (or whatnot to reduce thermals) then mines.
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It's called Atmosphere. 8)
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Once the War on Atmospheres get underway we'll be removing those!
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The problem is that short hyperspace jumps need to have less cumulative chance of trouble.
I do have one point about deep strikes:
Delta-V.
Deep strikes are problematic for a very simple reason. The ship has to have enough fuel to get up to speed, then decelerate at the end of the jump, fight, and come back. If you try a deep strike, I would imagine that it would be wise to get there and back as quickly as possible to minimize maintainence and vulnerability. That requires a lot of delta-V. If you have a forward base in the area, it's not as much of an issue. Shorter distance lets you get away with lower hyper speed, and you can transit to home about twice as fast.
Actually, a decent while back I raised an issue for why deep strikes might be overpowered.
The drive by nuclear holocaust.
Provided you go fast enough and have enough box launchers, you can zip past the hostile capital, leave it about as hospitable as Chernobyl, jump to a neutral star after you passed through the system, and manouvre for a return home. Obviously this last bit could end up being a bummer, but losing a single fleet will almost always be worth the destruction of a hostile homeworld. If you're the top dog you can afford to lose them because you have more fleets, if you're about to lose, well, you have nothing to lose and all to gain.
One suggested penalty for over-range jumping is a decrease in accuracy, perhaps even to the point where there is no official maximum range, just a point where the deviation becomes impractical.
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One suggested penalty for over-range jumping is a decrease in accuracy, perhaps even to the point where there is no official maximum range, just a point where the deviation becomes impractical.
I really like that idea.
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One suggested penalty for over-range jumping is a decrease in accuracy, perhaps even to the point where there is no official maximum range, just a point where the deviation becomes impractical.
I also really like this idea in principle. My only concern is whether jumping in a really long way out from the star could be used for tactical advantage. I guess it depends on the definition of "a really long way out" :)
Steve
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Hmm... are maintenance checks still done on ships in transit? Because that alone would discourage super jumps. Maybe if they can't repair the drive with maintenance parts onboard the ship, then the ship either drops out of jump right there in whatever system it's closest to, or else gets obliterated when it does an uncontrolled drop from jump.
One thing I like about the concept of deviation over long jumps is that it might allow you to make a very long jump to a distant star for non-tactical reasons, such as fleeing an enemy fleet. Perhaps when making very long jumps, it should be possible to arrive at a nearby star to the intended destination, or even scatter task groups about over several systems- presumably by making new subsidiary TGs for the lost ships.
Of course the odds are against actually "hitting" a system if you're going by a purely trajectory-based deviation. It could be justified by the the ship being pulled in by the gravity of the star.
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One thing to keep in mind with the inaccurate jumps is that in our 2D map (at least the current version of it we're seeing) ships that miss their target are not going to be "lost in space" they are going to hit another system, and probably fairly soon. It will always be an annoyance for this to happen, even in the best circumstances the fleet will lose some fuel correcting and probably a couple weeks in the new system traveling in real space until they can jump out again. In some circumstances (like entering a system that needs a 90 degree course change to attack the target, and then another 90 degree change to go back home) the mistake may cost the attackers so much fuel that they may have to abort the attack, but that will probably be much more rare than the mild inconvenience.
However this change may be enough to get us back to the territory control gameplay that we've been worried will disappear. Even if the systems right next to you aren't all that valuable for other reasons, they will still be the systems that enemy misjumps are most likely to appear in, so it will be important to have enough of a presence there to give you a good chance to at least detect these misjumps to give you warning, or even enough of a presence to destroy the attackers in the system.
And then that in turn gives the attacker a choice: they aren't in an empty system, but in an enemy system. Do they take the couple of weeks to reorient and continue to attack their original target, who may now know they are coming, or do they change their plans and attack the enemy holdings in the system that they have ended up in?
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what about long jumps affect crew rating, the longer the greater the amout of crew experience is temporary lost, this could then recover over time the result of which means that after a jump the ship would accel slower (to simulate the pilot and engineers being less efficient) less accurate guns ect giving a soft cap depending on the loss the player finds acceptible, this could spell the difference between victory and defeat in battle and affect almost all flights to a greater or lesser degree.
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what about long jumps affect crew rating, the longer the greater the amout of crew experience is temporary lost, this could then recover over time the result of which means that after a jump the ship would accel slower (to simulate the pilot and engineers being less efficient) less accurate guns ect giving a soft cap depending on the loss the player finds acceptible, this could spell the difference between victory and defeat in battle and affect almost all flights to a greater or lesser degree.
Hmm, that could work. The problem with using the Jump Blindness approach in Newtonian is that you would need the affect to last a very long time to actually have a chance to matter, and being blind for a very long time is probably not workable. However introducing a more minor, but still substantive penalty that lasts for much, much longer...
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I also really like this idea in principle. My only concern is whether jumping in a really long way out from the star could be used for tactical advantage. I guess it depends on the definition of "a really long way out" :)
Steve
What if you blended that inaccuracy with a potential for damage to ships that come out too close to the jump limit. IE Set the random jump in as going potentially too close as well as too far. Depended on how much deeper you land every ship coming out of jump would take random damage based on structural overload from the gravitational forces arising being too close (or what ever technobabble works!) to the sun. This means you could make those great big jumps but as the accuracy decreases you increase the chance that on exit your ships could be crippled or in extreme cases destroyed by the jump.
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What if you blended that inaccuracy with a potential for damage to ships that come out too close to the jump limit. IE Set the random jump in as going potentially too close as well as too far. Depended on how much deeper you land every ship coming out of jump would take random damage based on structural overload from the gravitational forces arising being too close (or what ever technobabble works!) to the sun. This means you could make those great big jumps but as the accuracy decreases you increase the chance that on exit your ships could be crippled or in extreme cases destroyed by the jump.
Good idea.
A lot of interesting ideas in the thread. At the moment, I think I am inclined toward a variety of different events, including the above, that can take place during a hyperspace jump. The chance of such events will depend on the length of the jump on a non-linear scale, although I haven't decided on a formula yet.
Steve
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I like the idea of a deviation factor - I especially remember how in the Honorverse it was always tricky to translate out of the hyper bands with any reasonable accuracy (thank goodness Honor always seemed to have incredible helmsmen!) but I always got the feeling that it was easier for Manty nav systems to translate with more precision than Haven, to say nothing of the Solarian league ships. Perhaps this could be one of the components of the engine/hyper system that could be improved, or perhaps a character bonus for naval officers?
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I'd especially like the ability to, say, design ships to do far longer, more accurate jumps than normal at the expense of much greater FTL drive mass.
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Lots of good points, thought I might throw my 2 cents in as well.
This argument if pretty similar to the one had back in the 80's with the old GDW game Renegade Legion. The naval portion of the game system was called "Leviathan" and their jump drives worked very similarly to whats being discussed here. Their solution to prevent long distance jumping was detection, and charge build up. Their movement system was "Newtonian lite" but with more advanced rules that added much more realistic thrust rules.
1st- Deep strikes.
Overjumping sounds like a great idea, and adding in a penalty to accuracy sounds even better. To add to that, as a limiter to prevent "drive by nuclear annihilation", add a tech line to jump accuracy as a radius. So, much like jump drives work in Aurora now, add a tech multiplier that would add to the accuracy of your jump. Sort of a jump radius limit. As you exceed your "safe" jump limit, your chances to introduce errors starts to increase significantly. You could even put it in bands, so if its inside the "safe" margin, its a milk run, or maybe its the ONLY jump transition that civilian ships can use. Jumps further out, say in the 2x or 3x band, get increasingly dangerous, to the point of losing ships to systemic failure or running into objects in space.
In Leviathan, jumping ships build up a charge in T-Space "heat shimmer", that if it exceeded a months duration, caused systemic failures in the ship until something catastrophic happened. The only way to bleed off heat shimmer, was sitting around in real space letting it slowly dissipate.
Skipping the handwavium aspects of jumping, you could make the argument that jumping produces short lived high energy radioactivity on ships, that needs to disperse. So, you could say the limits would be either accuracy or the build of of radioactivity/high energy particles or both.
So there is one option. :)
2nd- Detection. In Leviathan, T-Doppler arrays sat in most major systems, and even in some ships. As a fleet transitioned into T-Space they had to build speed in precise alignment with their destination prior to jump transition. Once they transitioned into T-Space, they traveled in a straight line path to the destination. The longer the jump, the easier it was to detect the moving ships/fleet, and relay the detection and path of travel information off to naval forces in the targeted area (done via FTL communications using the same principal as the jump drive). The locals then got to arrange for a warm welcome. So, in the Renegade Legion universe, while you COULD deep strike, the chances were very slim to have it work in a well developed area with good detector arrays up.
So, the way to limit deep strikes and keep more of an island hopping/forward base type system in place would be to include something like those to mechanics (or both). You could also make these tech research items, so that it would be POSSIBLE to do a interstellar drive by at low rish, due to your opponent not having spend any points in that area....
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Maybe add some very small chance (0.02% for LONG jumps) that in case of long jump a ship can expect critical_drive_failure/collision/mutiny/sabotage/be_eaten_by_Warp_Daemons/AI_rebellion (or something along those lines) and be lost forever. ;D
for the Fun :D
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Just a small comment on the direction this thread has gone....
The whole island hopping vs. deep strike issue is not quite the same as "how far can I jump in a single jump". It's "as a defender, is there a reasonable way for me to set up a defence perimeter that will allow me to intercept an enemy fleet before it reaches a target deep in my sphere of influence?" To me, this either means choke points or some sort of supply/maintenance-based "penetration depth". On the choke point front, the more "chokiness" (i.e. the fewer number of approach options available to the invader) the better :) My concern is that, with a simple single-jump range limitation, there won't be enough chokiness because there's a LOT of stars out there than can be used as waypoints. On the penetration depth front, this essentially means that there has to be a mechanism to limit the distance a fleet can travel away from their base before they have to turn around and come back to refuel, resupply, or refit.
From what I've seen in this thread, I think there is a story here that fits together - I just don't remember seeing it explicitly stated. I think the underlying assumption with people focusing on the shortening the jump range is: "Jumping to a star, then changing course to jump to the next star costs fuel". Interestingly enough, the fuel cost should increase as the magnitude of the course change increases. So an invading force hopping on a more or less direct path would have a much deeper penetration depth than one trying to evade enemy emplacements by jumping to stars well away from the direct path. Also, penetration depth would be inversely proportional to speed in this case (and total strike time inversely proportional to speed squared) since deltaV (and hence fuel usage) is proportional to speed.
This still leaves another question: "Is is possible for a defence force which is positioned in a waypoint system to interdict an attack force that's using that system as a waypoint?". The thing I wonder about here is if it's possible for a defending fleet to hit an enemy thats tearing through the system.
John
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This. I really think this is a KEY question for the entire concept of NA, and must be resolved with some combinatorial degree of scientific fidelity and strategy that makes the idea of 'fronts' valid. Without fronts, of any sort, there is little effective strategy to validate conflict.
This concept HAS to be gotten right, IMO, to make a game like this work. As long as it takes.
Just a small comment on the direction this thread has gone....
The whole island hopping vs. deep strike issue is not quite the same as "how far can I jump in a single jump". It's "as a defender, is there a reasonable way for me to set up a defence perimeter that will allow me to intercept an enemy fleet before it reaches a target deep in my sphere of influence?" To me, this either means choke points or some sort of supply/maintenance-based "penetration depth". On the choke point front, the more "chokiness" (i.e. the fewer number of approach options available to the invader) the better :) My concern is that, with a simple single-jump range limitation, there won't be enough chokiness because there's a LOT of stars out there than can be used as waypoints. On the penetration depth front, this essentially means that there has to be a mechanism to limit the distance a fleet can travel away from their base before they have to turn around and come back to refuel, resupply, or refit.
From what I've seen in this thread, I think there is a story here that fits together - I just don't remember seeing it explicitly stated. I think the underlying assumption with people focusing on the shortening the jump range is: "Jumping to a star, then changing course to jump to the next star costs fuel". Interestingly enough, the fuel cost should increase as the magnitude of the course change increases. So an invading force hopping on a more or less direct path would have a much deeper penetration depth than one trying to evade enemy emplacements by jumping to stars well away from the direct path. Also, penetration depth would be inversely proportional to speed in this case (and total strike time inversely proportional to speed squared) since deltaV (and hence fuel usage) is proportional to speed.
This still leaves another question: "Is is possible for a defence force which is positioned in a waypoint system to interdict an attack force that's using that system as a waypoint?". The thing I wonder about here is if it's possible for a defending fleet to hit an enemy thats tearing through the system.
John
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Actually, from that description we're probably fairly close. There is already the issue that jumping scatters your fleet, so each waypoint will involve first gathering your fleet, adjusting course and velocity, and jumping again. Combine this with the limitations put in place by fuel use and the proposed difficulties with long-range jumps and you will be able to extrapolate the course of a fleet encountered far out. This allows for interception if given enough forward warning. Conversely, it will also be possible to sneak around in hostile space unnoticed, but only with exceedingly good intelligence and enormous fuel expenses. Of course, this will require fine tuning and more thought, but the basic trade-offs and possibilities seem to be there already. The main issue to be resolved to fix the basic puzzle is the mechanism of detection.
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This. I really think this is a KEY question for the entire concept of NA, and must be resolved with some combinatorial degree of scientific fidelity and strategy that makes the idea of 'fronts' valid. Without fronts, of any sort, there is little effective strategy to validate conflict.
That's not true. Global thermonuclear war // massive deepstrike is nuts, but there is effective strategy. Namely massive force concentration because of the unlikelihood of interdiction. It might make for either extremely short cataclysmic wars, or it might make for very long wars of raid and counter raid by navies too paranoid to leave the capital uncovered enough to make a massive strike. It might even result in wars with no winners, when two main fleets pass eachother and nuke eachothers capital. There is also the war of information. The side that discovers the other homesystem first has a massive advantage.
Then there are the prewar strategic considerations of establishing multiple industrial and population centers so that instant decapitation is impossible.
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Then there are the prewar strategic considerations of establishing multiple industrial and population centers so that instant decapitation is impossible.
I am not familiar with current Aurora, but by the looks of it I would say that creating multiple industrial and population centers will be a Herculean feat in this game. It will take massive amounts of resources to do and a great deal of time. While this is realistic, it is probably unlikely in a game simulation that will be playable. I could be wrong on this.
But I do agree this tactic will be of major importance in any conflict. If there is no way for an 'extra-solar' colony to impede an attack, there is no point in having one unless the profit outwieghs the cost. Mines - yes as you will need to exploit resources. Populations with defenses - no as they will be a liability.
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There might not be such a thing as a defensive liability if defense is practically impossible to begin with. :)
Establishing other population centers is difficult, but hardly impossible. Steve has posted multiple AARs where he moves the entire population of a faction (and associated industry) to another star system. Though to be fair, NA will have a lower, uh, economic multiplier.
TBH, the main reason for homeworld centralization is simply ease of management. All your minerals flow to one point. Maintaining secondary industry centers is difficult to manage unless they have their own complete (every mineral) input chains. Establishing mining colonies and secondary shipyards is actually pretty straightforward.
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There might not be such a thing as a defensive liability if defense is practically impossible to begin with. :)
So true. And very eloquently put.
Establishing other population centers is difficult, but hardly impossible. Steve has posted multiple AARs where he moves the entire population of a faction (and associated industry) to another star system. Though to be fair, NA will have a lower, uh, economic multiplier.
TBH, the main reason for homeworld centralization is simply ease of management. All your minerals flow to one point. Maintaining secondary industry centers is difficult to manage unless they have their own complete (every mineral) input chains. Establishing mining colonies and secondary shipyards is actually pretty straightforward.
Love Steve's fiction :) (and miss it also... :'( ). Moving it would be possible, creating a new one... well, probably not in the span of a normal game. The mining colonies I see as a good thing. If you split up your population to different worlds, I just see that as more chances for an enemy to find one and cripple your ability to strike back.
You would also need to spread out your defensive forces which would leave all of your populations more vulnerable.
So I am not sure I see the multiple population centers happening unless something was different. But I will wait to see how the game plays out and reserve the right to change my mind...
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Maybe the population growth could be revisited? It would also be nice if that is in relation to surface area of a world, the habitability and remoteness. A good colony with lots of space to grow food will grow much faster and bigger over a long time when say a colony on a small titan like moon because its easy to sustain people and the crowd can disperse further.
The remoteness of a world could influence how many new settlers land in the spaceports which should be some kind of bell-curve on a axis between "very remote" and "right next to earth".
Heck Humans can propagate like Bunnies in the right circumstances so i can see a world quadrupling its population every couple of years. Just look how we did it in the last century. In 1900 we had ~ 1.5 Billion and are now by over 7 and reaching 8 In the next 8 Years if the worst estimates holdup.
edit: some spelling
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The point is that the reproduction rate goes down dramatically if wealth and education is present, and most people settling somewhere else by means of large spaceships will probably have one or the other.
And a perfectly habitable world is extremely unlikely; an Oxygen Atmosphere for example is a dead giveaway for plants on that planet, which might mean problems with an existing biosphere, or for the lack of water and natural resources that could react with free oxygen; As such, the very most planets will require some sort of infrastructure.
Agreed on these factors, though.
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Right thats another thing. I have now 3 waterworlds thus worlds with 100% ocean with col-cost factor of 0. While Oceanworlds are nice (well for one you can do 3D farming and transportation is effecient) you cant just plop down 100K people, you need some sort of Base-infrastructure that allows you to produce buildingmaterial for swimming cities say filtering out magnesia from the water which can be made to blocks or some sort Carbonfiber and epoxy production.
Gardenworlds are iffy yes, i guess one could torch an area and plant plants from earth (resp. you could use greenhouses) or you somehow extract the needed vitamins, starch and sugars from local plants by industrial means. Since starch ans sugar are rather easy molecules the probability of them existing in xeno plants should be quite high.
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Maybe the population growth could be revisited? It would also be nice if that is in relation to surface area of a world, the habitability and remoteness. A good colony with lots of space to grow food will grow much faster and bigger over a long time when say a colony on a small titan like moon because its easy to sustain people and the crowd can disperse further.
The remoteness of a world could influence how many new settlers land in the spaceports which should be some kind of bell-curve on a axis between "very remote" and "right next to earth".
Heck Humans can propagate like Bunnies in the right circumstances so i can see a world quadrupling its population every couple of years. Just look how we did it in the last century. In 1900 we had ~ 1.5 Billion and are now by over 7 and reaching 8 In the next 8 Years if the worst estimates holdup.
edit: some spelling
I think this could be one of the factors and cloning technology combined with AI technology could lead to pretty rapid population gains, of course needing supplies and the right conditions and materials to work it would be the other side of the coin
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Throw in the possibility of greatly extended human lifespans and those numbers go up even faster, since you aren't losing as much population to age related illness either.
When you look at the general life expectancy numbers, and extrapolate, you can retain an awful lot of people. Unless, of course, they are eating themselves to death and dying from morbid obesity like where I live....
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Well, if you go that way, you should also factor in pollution, overcrowding, logistics, and unemployment, and the unrest and running costs rising from all of those.
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Well, if you go that way, you should also factor in pollution, overcrowding, logistics, and unemployment, and the unrest and running costs rising from all of those.
pollution from industrial activities versus clean up factors, logistics relating to supply chains and civilian transports mass drivers etc, unemployment well u have to keep the bees busy. Maintence and political unrest factor in aswell are we missing anything
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^^ hey if you are a socialist minded government universal Wellfare (guarantied minimum income, free Healthcare, subsided housing) could keep the unrest low for a substantial fraction of your income.
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Let's step back for a minute here before we go over the internet political discussion cliff.
Here's a system, if we really want to make planet management a bigger concern:
Have a "civilian manufacturing" side of the manufacturing group. That side slowly adapts to give exactly as many jobs as there is excess population.
There is also a "reinvestment" slider. This represents money spent to regulate the economy or paid back in subsidies. The higher this value is, the faster the Civ manufacturing segment grows and shrinks to match demand.
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Well the civilan economy works in a fashion do the things trade automatically ?
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More on-topic, how about a sort of hyperspace tracking station? There's a tech line increasing the range, and any ships passing through could be detected. At minimum, it encourages listening colonies, and at most prevents deep strikes as any force will be seen far from their objective.
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good thinking, steve whats youre take on this
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I feel like the easiest way to have a "front," of sorts, is less about handicapping the attackers and more about giving the defenders two key advantages: notice and mobility. Notice would be provided by the proportional warning-vs-distance function discussed earlier. Mobility would, I'd think, be provided by some kind of spaceborne infrastructure, a sort of space-railroad. Your home system would be linked to colonies by "hyperspace tunnels" or equivalent to decrease the theoretical distance between the systems, or perhaps a sort of catapult which imparts a substantial hyperspace velocity at no cost. This way, empires could spend resources to bring systems closer in to their defensive heart. Fringe systems, not necessarily worth the very large investment of building spacerailroads, are more vulnerable.
In this situation, the combination of early warning andr mobility creates a circle around your home system, which is presumably the center of both fleets and sensing equipment. The circle represents the area within which you can deploy your fleet before being reached for a given attackers jump distance.
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I happy endorse the idea of built jump gates as a means of high tech Infrastructure.
The problem with that assumption is that it still won't stop anyone from directly jumping to a races home system to dump a few thousand tons of nuclear warheads on any inhabited planets.
Sure you can kill the fleet, but there is still no direct incentive for the attacker not to try. Fleet versus winning the war? I'd take it.
What else could they possible attack that bears the chance of instantly winning?
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Depends on the person you're attacking. If they've moved important chunks of their industry to other systems, those become great targets. I mean, why not send a fleet to a potentially unguarded system when it contains their primary center of planetary construction? Or stage a diversion to wipe out the maintenance facilities keeping their fleet from degrading. If for whatever reason the opposing player has indeed kept facilities consolidated to his homeworld, he can expect to be attacked there and losing means the end, but then again he's very concentrated. Redundancy will make such attacks harder, necessitating an island-hopping approach until you take enough territory to totally cripple his war fighting ability.
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Thats the entire point.
You only spread if you don't expect to be able to defend yourself anyways.
Which is questionable, because why can't you when you have the very expensive means to move a significant percentage of your Industry?
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Given time, even a small force of freighters can move everything off the homeworld, let alone the merchant marine capacity for most government types. Depending how long the game lasts, you're going to eventually need to transfer at minimum your mining capacity elsewhere. Fortifying and making such areas self-sufficient before they're necessary is a logical step, one that also makes your homeworld redundant. While not everyone will play like that, agreed, I see no reason why someone who wants to bottle up their forces in what amounts to a very small area should be discouraged further then the idea that their opponent is going to be able to expand further and faster.
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"Expansion" is a non-entity.
The cost of moving is measured in fuel, not time, though if the source is abundant it is obviously time to get the fuel.
And if time is the only factor, I'd be a scale of centuries, not years.
Ultimately, an expansion doesn't result in any "frontline", as some people seem to be advocating for.
It might just result in two or three centers of note for a particular race; mining, population industry, whatever;
Expansion won't happen for Expansion's sake, as we are used from Aurora, unless a player deliberately sets himself that goal.
I have no problems with those implications, the whole Project seems to be more or less a test balloon, and I'm eager to fly with it once the tickets are handed out.
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I'm advocating less of a "front-line" and more of a "multiple-ways of crippling the enemy". I'm curious as to how the resource system will work out especially, since lack of TN materials is the usual impetus for expansion.
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One possible form of deep strike that I see is with the new self guided missiles, a task group jumping into a system only for long enough to target an enemy colony/base and fire self guided missiles at where it will be when they reach it, and jumping out. This would let a box launcher salvo of several hundred missiles combined with a deep strike easily wipe out an alien homeworld.
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Unless someone detonates a single nuke in their path.
Or a Canister of Sand.
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Doctrine: 1000km separation between individual missiles.
Doctrine: Missiles perform evasive maneuvers when enemy is within 300 000km.
Then again, there is a different way. The missiles may not be able to reach the planet but demonstrate it one time anyway. Show up with a huge force, announce your presence, launch a deliberately under-strength salvo and leave.
Now the defender is forced to place anti-missile defences at every important colony.
Imagine defending Titan against an incoming missile salvo... while Earth is in opposition. Defending spread out colonies in multiple systems could cost more than the attacking fleet + missiles.
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Resurrection; almost been a year but oh well...
I was thinking more about deep strikes in a 3D environment and I discovered some limitations, most of which have already been discussed.
1. Time: the amount of time from the order to the completion of the task increases as the distance increases. While this may be minor if there is some way to communicate FTL, a universe with a limited communications range will effectively put that unit out of action until the task is completed. It also increases the time between strikes, reducing the effectiveness as the enemy rebuilds any damage received.
2. Range: the range increases twice as fast as the distance, since the unit must turn around and head back home at the end of the mission. A longer range requires more fuel, more supplies, more room for the crew in place of weapons. A long range unit would therefor be weaker than a system defence craft, and this difference would increase as the range required increased.
3. Intel: the intelligence of distant targets will always be worse than closer targets, will be more out of date and will be less frequent. Scout ships would need to be placed nearer to the enemy in order to have accurate intelligence, but that would require either more range or more forward outposts to refuel them. Forward outposts that would most likely be circumvented by the enemy.
4. Firepower: as mentioned before, the firepower of a unit must be sacrificed for range, and the increased range will increase the time required to head back and reload. Therefor, even if you managed to infiltrate a system and bomb a planet, there is no guarantee that the planet would be wrecked enough to justify the fuel costs.
My idea:
Have it so that ships must travel between stars when moving at FTL (which is how it has been explained), and make it dependant upon the size of the star. The larger, less common stars would act as a crossroad for long distance travel, while the clusters of the more numerous small stars would act like islands. More powerful FTL engines could move a ship between much more distant stars, while the weaker starting engines would only allow movement between nearby stars only.
Movement between small dwarf stars would be possible only at short range, while two super giants could allow travel across thousands of ly at high tech levels. The distant super giant would have it's own cluster around itself, allowing for stellar highways across large distances. Further up the tech tree, more advanced travel from larger (and more dangerous stars) could allow for further distances to be travelled (possibly even between black holes).
This would result in forward bases being constructed across multiple systems, as well as the placement of fleets inside large star wells. The 'islands' of dwarf stars would allow for island hopping campaigns across a cluster, but would still allow for deep strikes at higher tech levels (or with better, dedicated engines for long distance travel).
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I got the feeling that Steve backed off from Newtonian Aurora, which is a shame, because I was really looking forward to it.