Empire of the Stars - Comments Thread

[MinuteMan]

Hey Steve,

How does this campaign compare to your previous ones in terms of scale?
Amount of NPR's, amount of colonies, fleets, etc.

It seems to me that it's starting to get rather big. 
Is the performance still fine after the civilian line updates?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Hey Steve,

How does this campaign compare to your previous ones in terms of scale?
Amount of NPR's, amount of colonies, fleets, etc.

It seems to me that it's starting to get rather big. 
Is the performance still fine after the civilian line updates?

This is the largest one I have documented for C#, although I had a larger one for which I didn't post an AAR (500+ known systems, 7 swarm races, etc.).1

Performance is fine - at least I haven't noticed anything except that saves are taking longer.

[Bughunter]

Great read as always, I love the short, direct to the point format of Steves AAR:s.

23rd October 1983
After an NPR clears the orbital defenders, maybe they should consider the loot on the ground theirs and take offense if you move in with ground forces and snipe it for yourself? On the other hand if you add in every special case like this you will soon have a very complex AI especially considering different goals will sometimes conflict.

30th December 1983
Mechs.. should have seen it coming in a japanese campaign but it just hadn't crossed my mind, brilliant 

[Kurt]

Just finished wading through your massive set of updates.  Great writeups! The massive scale of your campaign continues to impress. 

The communications issue continues to intrigue me.  Your assumption of instantaneous comms across the length and breadth of your empire simplifies matters greatly, not only allowing the coordination of forces across multiple systems, but allowing you, the gamer, to not have to deal with light speed delays, or comms that depend on courier traffic.  It makes it easier for you to control your empire and perceive the big picture, and also gives your campaign a more "modern-day" feel, as you have nearly instantaneous comms between ships and worlds.  Whereas in my campaign, with no FTL comms, communication is limited to light speed within a system and to courier or other ship speeds between systems. 

My campaign is much smaller than yours at this point, but communication takes much longer, obviously.  The times (by courier) are as follows:

Terra to Victory Base in Groombridge (14.6 billion kilometers): 17 days
Terra to Shield Base in Monoceri (9.32 billion): 10.9 days
Terra to Bastion Base in Chi Draconis, beyond the frontier(12.1 billion kilometers): 14.1 days
Terra to Omega Ceti system, new swarm location (22.6 billion kilometers): 26 days

Compared to your campaign, my campaign has a more World War I or even 19th century feel to it, as comms are limited and frontline commanders have great latitude and independence to do what they see fit without referring to higher command. 

To be honest, I'm not sure I could manage this setup in a campaign the size of yours.  The complexity of tracking who knows what and when they knew it would likely become unmanageable in short order. 

I noticed that in your first post from yesterday, one of your carriers launched an attack using its missile equipped fighters.  I was particularly interested in this as this is a major issue I'm dealing with in my campaign.  The Imperial Terran Fleet's initial design concept was large beam-armed combatants, supported by smaller specialized escorts and patrol craft.  The demands of engaging the swarm have forced me into deploying carriers with small fast fighters equipped with missiles.  I have struggled to design carriers that carry sufficient fighters and large enough magazines to rearm to the fighters for additional attacks.  Currently my carriers have magazines large enough to rearm their fighters twice, giving them a capacity for three strikes before needing to reload at a colony or munitions ship.  I keep thinking I'm doing something wrong and that I should be able to have larger magazines, but after reading about your carrier strike I realized that I'm probably just channeling a previous version of Aurora in thinking I could cram more magazines into the design.     

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Just finished wading through your massive set of updates.  Great writeups! The massive scale of your campaign continues to impress. 

The communications issue continues to intrigue me.  Your assumption of instantaneous comms across the length and breadth of your empire simplifies matters greatly, not only allowing the coordination of forces across multiple systems, but allowing you, the gamer, to not have to deal with light speed delays, or comms that depend on courier traffic.  It makes it easier for you to control your empire and perceive the big picture, and also gives your campaign a more "modern-day" feel, as you have nearly instantaneous comms between ships and worlds.  Whereas in my campaign, with no FTL comms, communication is limited to light speed within a system and to courier or other ship speeds between systems. 

My campaign is much smaller than yours at this point, but communication takes much longer, obviously.  The times (by courier) are as follows:

Terra to Victory Base in Groombridge (14.6 billion kilometers): 17 days
Terra to Shield Base in Monoceri (9.32 billion): 10.9 days
Terra to Bastion Base in Chi Draconis, beyond the frontier(12.1 billion kilometers): 14.1 days
Terra to Omega Ceti system, new swarm location (22.6 billion kilometers): 26 days

Compared to your campaign, my campaign has a more World War I or even 19th century feel to it, as comms are limited and frontline commanders have great latitude and independence to do what they see fit without referring to higher command. 

To be honest, I'm not sure I could manage this setup in a campaign the size of yours.  The complexity of tracking who knows what and when they knew it would likely become unmanageable in short order. 

I noticed that in your first post from yesterday, one of your carriers launched an attack using its missile equipped fighters.  I was particularly interested in this as this is a major issue I'm dealing with in my campaign.  The Imperial Terran Fleet's initial design concept was large beam-armed combatants, supported by smaller specialized escorts and patrol craft.  The demands of engaging the swarm have forced me into deploying carriers with small fast fighters equipped with missiles.  I have struggled to design carriers that carry sufficient fighters and large enough magazines to rearm to the fighters for additional attacks.  Currently my carriers have magazines large enough to rearm their fighters twice, giving them a capacity for three strikes before needing to reload at a colony or munitions ship.  I keep thinking I'm doing something wrong and that I should be able to have larger magazines, but after reading about your carrier strike I realized that I'm probably just channeling a previous version of Aurora in thinking I could cram more magazines into the design.     

It's the first time I have done comms this way. Usually I assume I can transit using the stable jump network, but not outside it. This approach does make life easier for large campaigns.

I used to build carriers with two reloads too, but I realised the battle was often won or loss bt the time I needed the second reload, so I decided for this campaign to go with a single reload, and use colliers if necessary.

[Kurt]

<snip>

It's the first time I have done comms this way. Usually I assume I can transit using the stable jump network, but not outside it. This approach does make life easier for large campaigns.

I used to build carriers with two reloads too, but I realised the battle was often won or loss bt the time I needed the second reload, so I decided for this campaign to go with a single reload, and use colliers if necessary.

This does raise an interesting facet of campaign play style.  The NPR's and Spoilers are assumed to have instant FTL like you are using now, I assume.  A player race could use one of several methods to communicate between systems.  No inter-system comms at all, like my current campaign.  Light speed comms between system, like Starfire, with buoys at the jump points assumed to be using small jump-capable torpedoes.  And instant comms, like you are using.  In a multi-player race, with different player races using different comms methods, it might introduce interesting situations, although the instant FTL comms using race would have a significant strategic advantage. 

For the carriers, I find two reloads to be useful in engaging the swarm, as they tend to use large numbers of small ships and this gives my carriers the ability to deal with them effectively with multiple strikes.  The recent engagements have strongly motivated me to up my support ship game.  My flagship, the Andromeda, an 80,000 ton dreadnought, survived a close encounter with the swarm, but was almost gutted by acid damage after the battle.  The ship's crew managed to repair a lot of systems, but ran out of maintenance supplies.  And my carriers ran out of missiles before they ran out of targets.  I failed to effectively coordinate my attack with the support units, and my UNREP ships were slow and ungainly, meaning it took time to catch up with the fleet and were hideously vulnerable to attack by the enemy. 

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

<snip>

It's the first time I have done comms this way. Usually I assume I can transit using the stable jump network, but not outside it. This approach does make life easier for large campaigns.

I used to build carriers with two reloads too, but I realised the battle was often won or loss bt the time I needed the second reload, so I decided for this campaign to go with a single reload, and use colliers if necessary.

This does raise an interesting facet of campaign play style.  The NPR's and Spoilers are assumed to have instant FTL like you are using now, I assume.  A player race could use one of several methods to communicate between systems.  No inter-system comms at all, like my current campaign.  Light speed comms between system, like Starfire, with buoys at the jump points assumed to be using small jump-capable torpedoes.  And instant comms, like you are using.  In a multi-player race, with different player races using different comms methods, it might introduce interesting situations, although the instant FTL comms using race would have a significant strategic advantage. 

For the carriers, I find two reloads to be useful in engaging the swarm, as they tend to use large numbers of small ships and this gives my carriers the ability to deal with them effectively with multiple strikes.  The recent engagements have strongly motivated me to up my support ship game.  My flagship, the Andromeda, an 80,000 ton dreadnought, survived a close encounter with the swarm, but was almost gutted by acid damage after the battle.  The ship's crew managed to repair a lot of systems, but ran out of maintenance supplies.  And my carriers ran out of missiles before they ran out of targets.  I failed to effectively coordinate my attack with the support units, and my UNREP ships were slow and ungainly, meaning it took time to catch up with the fleet and were hideously vulnerable to attack by the enemy.

I really need to catch up with your campaign and others. I've been too busy playing and developing

I'm currently working on adding the ability to drop a large, very high tech and fully developed NPR with many systems into the middle of an existing campaign, without any immediate connection between the NPR systems and the existing systems.

[Garfunkel]

That sounds amazing!

And also, what an epic string of updates!

[doodle_sm]

Empire of the Stars has been informative and a joy to read. I never thought I'd be so invested in characters like Kurosawa Rai and Suzuki Saya.