One of the things I liked most about 3rdR was the epic scale and the way in which it lent itself to fiction ...
I agree with this FULLY. I also think that one of the major strengths of 3rd ed was the canon history. It gave a deep flavor to Starfire that is totally lacking in Ultra. While I believe that there are a number of interesting things in Ultra (particularly in the strategic rules), I find the lack of any historical background to be a devastating blow to Ultra's likeability. Also, from a business standpoint, 3rd's canon history provided the opportunity to produce historical module products that were another source of revenue. OTOH, Ultra's only source of revenue is Ultra itself.
Yes this was a great disappointment with 4th. The problem was that Marvin just saw the background material as unnecessary fluff and could never understand why 3rdR players thought it was so important.
I think that he understands it now. Unfortunately, probably too late.
[/quote]
That's very true. There was far more 3rdR fiction and the 3rdR fans seemed far more devoted to the game, probably because 3rd appealed to role-players and 4th appealed to competitive gamers. The problem for 4th is that almost every successful game that take months to play is a role-playing game, because you need to keep people's interest and competitive players don't stay interested once there is little chance of winning. If I want to play competitive games I usually play something that lasts a few hours, or at most a weekend. [/quote]
I've never played an ISF campaign "competitively". From everything that I've read of other people's observations on the matter, it seems incredibly difficult to keep a decently sized group of players together long enough to play a good, competitive strategic starfire campaign. It almost seems better suited to solo play, since the solo player can guarantee his (or her) enthusiasm over a long period of time, and he could even set the campaign aside for a time and come back to it later, whereas coordinating the availability of multiple players seems like a nightmare.
While 3rdR is one of the best games I have played and far superior to 4th and its successors, it still has a few issues (for me anyway)
Frankly, some of these issues with 3rd ed are not uncorrectable or aren't really that big a deal (IMHO, of course).
The "sameness" of planetary systems would be terribly easy to correct. Simply edit the existing system generation rules to produce a wider variety of star systems. Ultra produces a somewhat wider variety of star systems, and I have no doubt that it's possible to take it even further without that much effort.
The system generation in Aurora was written before I gave up on Starfire and was originally intended to be added to SA for 3rdR Starfire. However, it is really a computer-only process because of the detail level. There is just no way to get that level of detail in a paper-based game. I remember playing second edition starfire with no computer support and it took about 30-60 minutes to roll up a star system.
Star system generation is one thing in particular that greatly benefits from computer support. I never particularly spending time on managing my empires' economics and such. But time spent rolling up star systems seemed rather wasteful, since I wasn't getting any enjoyment from the process. Odd as it may seem to some, I suppose that I have a bit of an accountant's soul (my father was one, after all) and doing the "books" for my empires always seemed like fun to me. But that was a "creative" thing. Rolling up star systems is just tedious. Thus, star system generation programs are a major boon to any ISF campaign that I played.
The "magical" CFN: The pre-SM2 IFN was more complex than the SM2 CFN. But I think that the point here is that when you're playing a paper game, you have to make choices about balancing "realism" and playability. Sure, using an assistant program can allow for more complex processes for handling such things as a CFN, but not everyone may want to use an assistant program ... so the rules should really be written for a paper-based game.
The IFN was more complex (probably too much so for a paper game) but also more realistic. I agree that simplication is necessary but the CFN was very oversimplified and unrealistically flexible. You could lay a million mine patterns anywhere in the Empire in about an hour. Any ship, anywhere, always had full access to maintenance and missile resupply. It wouldn't have required much imagination to come up with a slightly more realistic system based on proximity to major population centres.
The thing that I don't particularly like about the SM2 CFN is that there's no apparant time constraints. Money just instantly moves across your empire. I don't mind the idea of an IFN/CFN without any freighters that you had to build yourself. But resources should take time to move in the CFN. If I want to send 10,000 Mc to a planet that's 12 systems away, it ought to take about 3 months to get there.
I'm less bothered by the CFN relative to the maintenance issue, although I do have my own issues on the topic. I wouldn't mind seeing fleets of ships that want to operate far from large bases/major populations need to have a "real" (as in not CFN) fleet supply train of freighters that carry maintenance resources for the fleet. I haven't given this much thought, but maybe if you're going to operate a fleet a distance from major population, etc. you should have to have an overall fleet train H capacity equal to the number of months travel you are from your source of maintenance. And, BTW, those freighters actually have to HAVE that amount of Megacredits of maintenence resources in their holds, meaning that you had to pay to fill the holds with maintenance "stuff" prior to leaving your base. Something to think about....
Now, mind you, I'm not outright defending the SM2's version of the CFN. But I can fully understand where the desire to simply some rules, particularly on the economic side, comes from.
I understand the need for simplification and I am still a huge fan of 3rdR in general, but the CFN just failed the giggle test for me.
"Unrealistic timeframe": Repeat after me... It's a game! You've got to make things happen in a (real time) time frame that won't cause players to lose interest. Frankly, I don't find the time frame of ISF to be particularly offensive, as I understand that it's yet another decision made in the interest of playability.
The Rigellian Empire was a huge star-spanning empire with knowledge of almost a thousand systems and a population of over one trillion. It somehow managed that in 14 years from single starting planet. The problem is that from a fiction perspective it's hard to maintain an illusion of reality given those timescales. Symon Cook played a Starfire campaign with much reduced growth rates and from his description of events, it played very well. It wouldn't have been too hard to give Starfire more realistic growth rates and shipbuilding times and it would have also made larger campaigns much more playable. One of my goals with Aurora was an epic campaign system that really felt epic in terms of historical timelines. When writing a history, it should cover decades and even centuries.
I suppose that it's entirely a personal matter. What offends your sensibilities, may appeal to mine.
I'm not terribly sure that I could get particularly excited about playing a campaign where it took a hundred turns (10 years, if you go with 10 month years) to go up a TL, and so forth.
I've never terribly minded the time compression in the campaign game, since I tend to prefer "getting on with it". But that's just me.
"internal inconsistency in the area of weapons and fighters": I'm a little unclear on this particular point, so I'll let it pass.
A fighter in Starfire is less than 1 HS in size. A fifth generation fighter could carry 3 internal weapons and 4 on XO racks, so it could carry seven fighter lasers, each of which could do 3 points of damage at point blank range. A ship-based HET laser is 6 HS and can do 8 points of damage at point blank range. If that ship used fighter lasers instead, seven of which can fit into one HS along with the fighter itself, it would have forty-two lasers doing 126 points of damage (and still space for the six fighters). If fighters can carry such powerful weapons, why can't ships? Keeping fighters and ships consistent has been another Aurora design driver. Fighters can be powerful in Aurora but they still have to abide by the same physical constraints as larger ships.
Yes, this is just what Shinanygyz said.
And like I said, I'm not sure that you can do after the fact, given how heavily this topic is covered in the canon history and the "historical" Starfire novels.
I mean, a number of solutions are possible, if people were willing to accept some divergence from the novels.
a) ban all beam weapon packs, only allow internal beam weapons on fighters.
b) downgrade the damage of fighter beams. Perhaps 1 dp for fL, and 2 dp for fL2. Or maybe even just 1 dp for fL2, but increase its range.
c) rule that fighter's XO hard points are for ordnance or non-weapon packs only. That is, only fR, fM*, f?, fQ, f, fXr, and so forth.
It should be noted that DW's original fM2's and later FM's were 2 load point missiles, and that these were downgraded to 1 lp in the UTM (maybe even 3rdR). And of course, this has an impact on the damage potential of fighters.
I suppose that one can even get touchy about even 1 dp fighter lasers. But unless you're going to go the route of Ultra with replacing individual fighters with fighter squadrons, where you could then rule that an entire squadron could do only a single dp of laser damage with its lasers, there's no much lower you can go than saying a fighter laser can only do a single point of damage.
I suppose that another alternative would be to ban fighter anti-ship energy weapons altogether, and rule that only their expendable ordance, which have either nuke or anti-matter warheads, have the punch to damage ships. Of course, this idea smashes headlong into the historical novels. But it certainly might be a viable solution.
"a tendency toward cookie-cutter ships because of the set speeds and hull sizes"
To some degree, I understand what you're saying here, but I think that part of the problem here is in a lack of advancement in engine tech in 3e.
Because of this, there is a total stagnation of ship speeds throughout the canon history. Also, the stagnation in ship sizes compared to the tech system needs throughout the tech progression causes ships to end up feeling progressively smaller as the TL's advance. That is, a TL3 DD will feel like it's got a lot more combat potential than a TL13 DD, because the TL13 DD will feel the need to include a lot of tech systems in it that didn't exist 10 TL's earlier (such as cloaking ECM, and so on).
Were I in charge of things, one of the concepts that I'd seriously consider is having more advanced versions of the tried and true "I" increase the amount of hull spaces in each hull type. Huh? What I mean is that an I2 engine might have the capacity to move larger (in terms of HS) hulls within each hull type. That is, an I2 might be able to support a 35 hs DD, and an I3 drive migth be able to support a 40 hs DD, while remaining a "DD" with a DD's turn mode and max speed. Indeed, improved generations of I would also have greater max speeds.
The end result of this sort of concept would be, for example, at around TL12-14, an I3 driven, 96 hull space BC with a max speed of perhaps 8.
The benefit of such a concept, aside from increased max speeds, is that larger hulled ships (i.e. 40 hs DD's, 96 hs BC's, and so on) are able to counteract some of the space requirement needs imposed by advancing TL's. Thus, your TL~13 40 hs DD might be able to be viewed as a viable DD design, whereas in the current system, the poor ol' 30 hs TL13 DD seems to have the armament of a frigate.
Another benefit of such a system is that designs would have to adapt to their increasing sizes and to some degree, they'd end up seeming somewhat less cookie cutter. You'd have DD's and CL's and BC's (and so on) of varying sizes. Well, true, you'd probably fall into smaller buckets of cookie cutter sizes, dictated by engine types, but that'd be better than a totally static list of hull type sizes.
The problem though is that because hull sizes are fixed, you will always have the max number of engines so every destroyer of the same TL will be the same size and the same speed. You will also tend to build the largest hull for each level of speed. This was something else I tried to avoid in Aurora by allowing players to build whatever size of ship they wanted and give that hull whatever name they liked. There are no hull sizes or restricted maximum speed, except those limited by physical constraints on engine power vs ship mass. In addition, most ship systems, including engines, are designed by the players so you get a great variety of ship types, speeds and capabilities. Obviously this is more of a problem in a paper game, although the Traveller design system is very physics based and has had a significant influence on some Aurora concepts.[/quote]
What to say here?
For starters, nothing's really stopping players from calling their hulls whatever they want. The "official" hull type names are largely IMHO a common point of reference.
I remember reading in the List archive about someone's campaign where the SM allowed every player to name their hull types whatever they wanted. All they had to do was provide the SM with a "translation table" to cross reference their empire's designators with the official hull type designators. And IIRC, one player did some sort of espionage that told him that his enemy was going to have X "battlecruisers" in system Y, so he showed up with a number of his own (official designator) BB's to deal with the BC's. However, the BC-owning player had actually designated his BC's as 130 hs ships. That is his "battle cruisers" were SD's on the official hull type table. And the spying player had forgotten about the naming hulls whatever you want house rule, and assumed that BC's were BC's... to his regret.
Regardless, I don't mind the hull type table per se. Personally, I think that a number of minor changes could be made to the table to help matters.
For example, start with having a common cost per hullspace, regardless of hull size.
Secondly, have the base turn mode be defined not strictly by hull type, but by the number of hullspaces in the ship. For example, maybe the turn mode should be a flat 1 per 30 hs of ship FRU.
Third, maybe the number of engines per movement point shouldn't be hard coded to hull types, but should be defined as (for example) 1 I per 30 hs of ship, possibly rounding to the nearest 1/2 hs. (ships/hull types below, say 20 hs, might need a special table.)
BTW, these three ideas are concepts that we used in our unpublished Crown of Stars game.
Another idea might be to set no max speed, but let the player decide how many engine rooms he's willing to pack into his ships and how much of all the other stuff he's willing to give up. Of course, this really goes against Starfire "traditional" rules, but it would seem to create variety of designs, as player would have to find their own balance between speed and combat potential.
Another related idea would be that more advanced engines would be defined by improved power to mass (in hs) ratios, this allowing for less space being required to produce the same speed in a less advanced engine, and allowing for more space devoted to other things.
Of course, if you start defining turn modes and engine power (i.e. I/MP) by hullspace ratios, and you have flat per hull space costs, hull types tend to disappear (for better or worse), since currently turn modes and engine power and so on are tied to hull type designators, rather than hull size ratios.
A current concept for a mod(s) that I'm working on (for my personal gratification) is something I'm calling "The Expanse". It'll take place either about halfway between 4th ISW and Insurrection, or immediately after Insurrection. (snip rest of description)
Sounds fascinating. I would be very interested to read the full history. 3rdR had some great scenario books and I have often reread the books just for the interludes.
Same here (i.e. reading the stories, the profiles, and the interludes).
Right now, the problem that I'm wrestling with is getting from the start point (i.e. the Tesaggha Supernova creating new WPs, yada, yada, yada) to one of my envisioned goals (a really, big nasty, blowout of a war with multiple star nations on each side). Trying to create a viable political situation that seems justifiable in a WP paradigm with multiple races is tricky.
I'm also hesitant to go ahead with the first phase of whatever might be the first (chronologically speaking) conflict(s) without trying to plot where I want things to go longer-term.
Simple example: The Shoknavoon and the Osadda are blood enemies and have been for centuries. That's a given in my mind. The trick is that I have two mutually exclusive views of how the Shoknavoon and more importantly the Osadda are viewed by the Star Union and the Zarkolyans. One version has the Sh and the Os both being seen as pretty decent peoples by the Crucians and Zarks (even if the Shoknavoon and Osaddans hate each other) which of course creates its own future issues. OTOH, my second version has the Shoknavoon as the nice guys and the Osaddans as the evil guys, which in turn takes things in a different direction long term.
Truth is that my original ideas leaned toward the first version. But as I've expanded my vision for The Expanse, I've come to see that I may need to have the Osaddans be "bad guys" to create some sort of balance of power in my longer term vision. I'm trying to avoid a ISW4 situation where it's everyone against a single big bad guy (even if the Bugs weren't quite that "big" as was feared at first). I'd prefer to create a situation where there are multiple star nations on each side of a possible future big war, rather than everyone against the big baddie. And this seems to make my planning that much more complex. If my long term story ended up with an "everyone against the Biggggggg bad Empire", it might be easier to plan, but it might feel too much like ISW4 and not be as fun. Of course, I suppose that I could just wimp out and have the big, bad Galactic Empire of Meanness show up to try to conquer everyone. (Yawnnn.) One thing I do want to avoid on any large scale is some sort of machine race attempting to purge the galaxy of all that evil organic life. Sounds like nothing more than Bugs with mechanical bodies. Yuck!
(BTW, refering back to Steve's "sameness of star systems" comment, one of the things that would like to incorporate into The Expanse is the use of some very non-standard star systems. Nebulae, for example. Imagine having to fight a major battle in a nebula and not having your Shield working. Ouch! And this battle happens with ~TL13-ish weapons... double ouch!)
This is something I have added to Aurora for v2.6. No shields, no missiles, reduced sensor range, degraded fire control and a maximum speed, all based on the density of the nebula.
Yep, definitely good stuff!
That's about all the detail I want to release at the moment. I'm currently taking a break from working on The Expanse, cuz I ran into a bit of a writer's block in coming up with ideas, but I hope to get back to it very soon. Hopefully, my muse will return.
I don't know if I'll be able to maintain the enthusiasm to complete The Expanse, but for now, it's a very entertaining diversion to work on.
Can you work on this stand-alone without the need to have "official sanction" to work on 3rdR? I know Damon Bradley has developed extensive scenarios and optional rules for Starfire.
Steve
Oh, I can
certainly work on the product without any official sanction. That's not a problem for me.
Steve, I've sent the rest of my reply on this specific question to you as a PM.
BTW, I notice that you've already replied to my first reply to Shinanygnz. I think that I've got to step away from my computer and get something to eat before I start writing my next tome-like reply.
It's too bad that back in the late 90's that I wasn't involved in Starfire. I think that things may have gone in a different direction if I'd had a strong voice in the development of SF back then.
And it seems that you and I tend to think along similar lines. You and I might have made a formidable 3e development team. Sigh. Oh well.
