The BattleStar Challenge

[ardem (OP)]

I am putting together a challenge to players out there, which I am calling the battlestar challenge. This is a great way to show your aurora talent.

The object of the challenge for you to launch a fleet of ships, from your homeworld and find a new 0.00 Planet.

Goal
Create a functioning home world, the home world before colonisation must be a 0.00 planet

Rules

- New game
- Chance of NPR 75%
- Start with 1,000,000 of Research
- 400,000 tons of Military
- 2,000,0000 tons of Commercial, which need to include passenger liners, Minerals, cargo holding installations etc.
- No planet landings
- You capital ship must fly a linear path, unless come to a blockage where no jump point can traverse, and no ship is allowed more then 1 jump from the capital ship.
edit: - Terraforming only a planet which is below 1.00.
edit: - You can colonise for the purpose of overhauls from a orbital station, shipyard repairs, or shipyard building, but when you leave you must abandon the colony
edit: - You can salvage parts and create ships from those parts, or upgrade your ships with those parts
edit: - You can use ruins, conquer alien facilities for as long as you are there, but must abandoned once you leave


How to accomplish a new game setup
New game turn Spacemaster race on
Turn NPR to 75%
All invaders, precursors, swarm other ticks on
Edit: Real Stars Tick is Off
Start the game
Go into SM mode, add a system and delete system until you get planet capable of supporting a empire.
Create empire, make sure you put 1,000,000 tech on start and don't let it choose tech
Select that race and delete the default sm race
Go to research, use instant and your 1,000,000 points of tech don't forget you need to leave some to make designs and turrets etc.
Create your ship designs
SM your minerals, ammo, structures you need, maintenance and fuel
Add as much finance as you think you will need
Add ships using instant build SM option, until you get your require tonnage
Load the colony minerals, commanders, installations, fuel, maintenance and ordnance
Abandon Colony then off you go.

Please register below, if you wish to take the challenge and will be interested in ship layouts and designs, how you expect to survive with maintence issues, fuel etc

Any concerns or rules additions please state below to be considered

Good Luck!

[Brian Neumann]

A note for anybody not used to the random system setup.  You will need to uncheck the real stars option.  

A question for you Ardem, Do you want the inexperienced fleet option to be checked or unchecked, and do you want a starting npr to be present as well?

I am going to try this, no boxes unticked unless you said to.

Brian

[ardem (OP)]

I generally go with the defaults which is

Promotions On
Political Bonus On
Inexperience On
No Overhaul is Off
Jumpgates Off

Other then Overhaul and Jumpgate being off, the other three is personal choice, want you guys to have fun too, you can still train your fleet in periods of downtime while your survey ships are working and your sorium harvesters are collecting, jumpgate is creating.

Starting NPRs number are up to yourself in all my games I never run into the starting NPRs once, but with the amount of systems you need to go through who knows, also I rarely find a 0.00 planet, but people maybe get lucky within 10 systems.

Brian look forward to your kit out of your fleet. Good Luck!

[jseah]

Not sure I could manage this, but I could espouse some theory.  

Classical travelling fleet:
Maintenance is your biggest problem.  You need a 5k ton maintenance module to maintain a 200 ton vessel.  Therefore, your entire military fleet must aim to be as small as possible.  

I would aim for a fleet of 6k to 10k tons ships.  10 kiloton ship = 50 maintenance modules = 250 kilotons of civilian shipping.  1/3 of all your cargo.  Which you will need another 1/3 to hold automines and such while you move around to keep your maintenance running.  

You need to tow a shipyard for armour damage.  Which will be painful to repair, since you need orbital habitats.  
 - This is not going to work since OBs are 250 kilotons a piece and therefore your fleet will have to build it.  And you can't build one without an OB unless you have alot of engineer brigades.  
Therefore, your shield research must be literally insane, might as well forgo all armour for shields.  Luckily, you have 1 million RP.  


Terraform fleet: <- this looks the easiest
Instead of finding a colony cost 0.00 world, make one.  Dump all your RP into terraforming speed and get the module.  1/3 civ fleet is cryo, 1/3 is cargo with CF and automines, 1/3 is terraform.  
Find a suitable gravity world in a reasonably mineral rich system, terraform it, viola.  


Invader fleet:
You have 1 million RP and an instant 400 kilotons of military strength.  NPR is at 75%.  
Winning one battle should be easy.  Avoid all non-NPR battles with good thermal sensors and out-tech them in engines.  

When you find an NPR, simply use terraformers to pump toxic gases into atmosphere to kill them off.  Waltz in, claim their stuff.  If planet is suitable, you got your planet.  If not, you have a base to work from, with shipyards, CFs and mines; engineer brigades build one OB, then land pop. to activate CFs to build more OBs.  Most importantly, you get automines and tons of resources.  

[Narmio]

Yeah, the inability for populations to function 'on the move' is a significant hamper in a Homeworld/Battlestar style setup.  Missiles, for example, are going to be virtually impossible to replace. The progress of such a fleet would be more like 'stellar nomads', setting up camp every decade or so on whatever barren rock they can find, relocating whenever they find something better.

[jseah]

Just did a test:
1 OB module with 0.05 mil pop, 252 kilotons shipyard, shipbuilding rate 560.  ABR ~55: time for 1 OB = 11 years
1 CF, BP 25: time for 1 OB = ~20 years

OBs are impossible unless you have an army of engineers. 

[ardem (OP)]

Point of the challenge is to survive as long as possible, not to terraform, that would make things to easy.

Question would be do you throw everything into speed to give you the maximum ability to search the systems for a 0.00 planet, before your maintenance runs out, or do you aim for something that can make stuff on the move, or process things.

I should state a new rule colonization can only happen on a 0.00 planet.

I think we need some guideline around what need to be carried by the commercial cargo fleet. open to suggestions I am thinking something like.

Edit: 1 Construction Modules
1 Automines
1 Deep Space tracking Station
1 Fuel Refinery
1 Ordnance Factory
1 Fighter Factory
1 Maintenance Facility

500,000 civilians, frozen or put to work (orbital habitat)
Minerals are optional

edit:That means you would need 30 cargo holds, and 50 cryogenic modules or go orbital

Also happy to push up the Commerical 750,000 ton starting limit, any figure that would seem correct? 1,250,000?

Thoughts

On missiles, this may not be your best option in fleet design, but I am sure you could sort something out here.

[jseah]

225 cargo holds = 22 500 HS = 1.125 million tons
50 cryo modules = 2 500 HS = 0.125 million tons
25% engines = 1 and 2/3 million tons.  
Before support systems and hull.  

You can't carry that with the civilian fleet limit.  Maybe if we had 2 million tons...

...

Lolz, troop transports are commercial, I forgot.  Engineer brigade = 1 CF without attendant population.  Cost wealth for upkeep and if you have a few divisions of engineers, that might be significant.  IE. you can run out and be forced to build OBs + financial center.  

[dooots]

You have to freeze people to move them, orbital habitats dump everyone if they leave orbit.

If the challenge is meant to be moving a colony/home world my requirements would be.

x population
1 construction factory / engineering brigade
1 (auto)mine / asteroid mining module / resources to make 1 (auto)mine

You can up the numbers if you want but that is all that is required to get a new planet going.  I wouldn't worry about the rest as any attempt will probably include a way to keep the ships maintenance clock low and a way to produce more fuel and ammo if needed.

[ardem (OP)]

I will let you guys sort out, what you want to take to your new home world, but I would caution you on one thing you lose the ship with that resource, you may be in trouble.

Having said that I made a freighter with 10 cargo at 70,000 ton, I would need 3 of these that would be 210,000 ton, based on the new changes as above. Does not leave enough room for redundancy if I was to make 3 sets of these for redundancy, I am happy to bump commercial up to 2,000,000 tons in the rules if you guys agree. Sorry about the figures around Commercial obviously I miscalculated

[Narmio]

It might be worthwhile to pre-generate a universe and hand it out to people interested in this.  Check it in SM first for an appropriate level of challenge.

Otherwise the difficulty of this challenge will mostly come down to luck with system generation. Especially if you're going to disbar terraforming efforts and restrict people to starting with virtually no industry.  You'll either get a 0.0 planet within a five or ten jump radius or you won't.  The effects of whatever strategy you go for will likely be minimal in comparison to the large random effect from system generation.  It's not really a contest of skill at that point.

[ardem (OP)]

Randomness will create interesting scenarios, again there is no prize or first place just to accomplish it would be an effort, maybe next challenge can have something a prize based and structured open to ideas, but this will be a nice start and see how this challenge goes. I probably think the person that fines a 0.00 within 5 jumps would probably start again as they never were challenged, no real braggin rights

As for industry to goal is to survive and get to the planet with your designed ships and limited resources, if you wish to continue after colonisation that up to yourself.

I made some edits based on your feedback of rules, I upped to 2,000,000 for commercial and allowed colonised so overhauls and repairs can be done. Although military and commercial shipyards are treated as commercial tonnage be aware of this.

[Brian Neumann]

The tonnage of a shipyard is twice the tonnage of the ships it can build.  A starting shipyard has 1 slip and is either 2,000 tons, or 20,000 tons depending if it is military or commercial.  This is probably something you wan to tug along as it will significantly jump start your capabilities when you establish a new homeworld.

Ardem, I would actually suggest a small change on the terraforming rule, let them terraform a planet that has a habability less than 1.  This will still be hard to get, and chances are it will take forever to manage as well unless the planet is very close to what the race can handle to start with.  You might also want to put some limits on the range from homeworld standards that can be used.  Use the default, or push the grav tollerance to 90% and oxygen range to 80%.  The latter will let you find far more worlds that are habitable than the former.

As far as my fleet loadout is going to be, I will be using larger ships and have a good chunk of the commercial fleet hauling around maintenance modules.  These will let me keep time off of the clock when the fleet is not moving significantly.  I will also be using some small commercial ships for probing and geo surveying.

Brian

[dooots]

Add in a goal of making a functioning home world once you find the new planet since that seems to be the goal of this challenge.

One question do you need one colony to keep from getting a game over?  I only remember losing to the invaders when they nuked earth so I don't know what counts as a game over.

[ardem (OP)]

Seems to work without it, just did a quick test, worse case scenario keep the home world just don't do anything with it.

Terra forming for your last planet 'only' a planet under 1.00, how does that sound. The trade off is you will lose commercial ship space due to terraforming ships