sfBanaNES - Quaero Terra
- Thread starter BananaLee
- Start date
Abaddon
Deity
?
This isnt something im still grasping (shuttit Alex
)
How does the colony ships work?
This isnt something im still grasping (shuttit Alex
)How does the colony ships work?
Colony ships cost 30PP, next turn you can move etc (and if they end up in an empty system, colonise). and when a colony is created it automatically has a production value of 5. Thus in your system above, 5PP is produced from the lowest Tier. i.e. D6.
Upgrades at D6 cost 6 PP for 1 PP return, thus 5 PP = 30PP investment.
Upgrades at D6 cost 6 PP for 1 PP return, thus 5 PP = 30PP investment.
Indeed... and as I said, strategic concerns are also important, so there are no easy answers.a 0/0/0/30/20 world for example could really mess things up
Oh, and Bandana Lea, I'll keep Earth out of future storys for you
Symphony D.
Deity
Decloak: Actually Niklas is right in that due to the delay between construction and movement (if one does not have a shipyard-type improvement presuming they exist), it is a minimum of a D7 as you have to wait an extra turn to get your profits back, and an additional +1 for every turn it takes to get to its intended destination. Which is why I also mentioned this in my initial spiel.Ar-Pharazôn;5694666 said:
On that note, building defense grids and shipyards in every system is a waste of money. More free advice.
Actually my strongest problem is with ship costs, which are a carbon-copy and which are dreadfully awful because there is a best solution, and it is the Dreadnought, because it will mop the floor with any other ship and most conceivable equivalences (per cost) of other ships. 200EP worth of fighters (or the equivalent for the faction in question) will not triumph over it. Nor will any other equal combination of ships except perhaps Battleships or another Dreadnought. It is a solved situation, and that is never a good thing.
In your case, you decided to run battles based on rough equivalence in costs of the fleets assembled--I am aware you took some tactics into account, but it was your stated goal not to have to deal with complex battle resolution. That's all well and good for simplicity, but part of having a space opera game in my opinion is big rolling space battles. And in that context, the current prices mean the Dreadnought wins every time by economy of scale against smaller opposition for the same price.
A much better way of doing it would be to have large numbers of small ships relative to big ships per EP. You can do an attritional, swarm-type strategy with small ships (overwhelm your opponents) and possibly take very high casualties, or concentrate your forces into a few powerful ships (which are more survivable, but also more targeted) but the loses of a few can set you back greatly. Or you can adopt a middle-of-the-road approach.
That actually introduces some measure of strategy into fleet composition without introducing much in the way of complexity instead of the current set up of "I have bigger guns than you therefore I win." At the risk of increasing complexity slightly, you could add an upkeep cost for naval fleets to give the more restricted ship numbers provided by capital ships an advantage to the cost-benefits of smaller ships. Hey, look, balance and choices for players to contemplate in their strategies.
That is what I meant by hideously broken--at the end of the day, systems will be colonized, some people will have fewer than others, and when that time comes, people will fight for system rights. Boardgames with military forces tend to ultimately turn into wargames. Under the current system, the Dreadnought is rex mundi unless you wipe away logic (its huge / many guns and thick armor) to presume 200EP worth of fighters (or other lesser ships) could defeat it instead of being wiped away like so much trash. I am personally in favor of preserving logic when possible and adding a minuscule amount of complexity to make it work.
On a similar note, planetary invasion being a full-round action is also incredibly silly, particularly when colonization is a standard action--it takes a lot longer to drop people onto a planet and have them build stuff than it does to drop them onto a planet and blow stuff up, particularly when such warfare--the defenders likely always outnumbering the invaders--will tend to be based on rapid raids, vertical envelopment, and overwhelming firepower on the part of the aggressor--eg: Starship Troopers. You don't want to sit in orbit for a year with everybody able to see your troop ships, because to see something in space is to be able to shoot it down.
That is the sort of thing I mean when I say hideously broken--combat is very, very funky. The economy system is more or less fine, with only marginal room for improvement at the current level of complexity.
Awesome, like the quoted name [Ar-Pharazôn], but uhmm Why?
[no comment on the actual stuff quoted, I mean its correct, my current model incorperates it etc, I'm actually kinda curious how many people are paying attention to these speels however].
However on your second LARGE chunk of text; I can only offer up the 'sage' advice that the game will end up being about stratagy rather than tactics. But the combat is a bit 'funky'
TerrisH
Mischief?
Disagree with Symphony, in that drednoughts are the end game ship. a balanced fleet will beat the drednoughts everythime, since the advantage thing seems to be cyclic. fighters beat big ships beats medium ships beats small ships beats fighters.
but I do agree on the ground invasion. Unless you want to spend MAssive amounts on a ground invasion fleet, Glazing the planet and just colonizing it your self.
but I do agree on the ground invasion. Unless you want to spend MAssive amounts on a ground invasion fleet, Glazing the planet and just colonizing it your self.
Ah yes, I thought your comment was directed specifically at the economic system. Yes, there are likely improvements to be made regarding the military system, but it hasn't been put to very much use in my game, so I wouldn't really know what's wrong with it.
And like TerrisH says, the idea was never to have Dreadnoughts be the solution to all problems. I do consider ships to have strengths based on their (base) PP cost, but there is also the cyclic element in that 2 cruisers beat 3 destroyers (both forces costing 48 PP), but where fighters have unproportionally large strength compared to their cost, unless faced with corvettes (which will be taken by frigates, etc).
Yes, ground invasion should probably be a standard action. BananaLee, you may want to change that before it becomes an issue in this game.
And like TerrisH says, the idea was never to have Dreadnoughts be the solution to all problems. I do consider ships to have strengths based on their (base) PP cost, but there is also the cyclic element in that 2 cruisers beat 3 destroyers (both forces costing 48 PP), but where fighters have unproportionally large strength compared to their cost, unless faced with corvettes (which will be taken by frigates, etc).
Yes, ground invasion should probably be a standard action. BananaLee, you may want to change that before it becomes an issue in this game.
alex994
Hail Divine Emperor!
OOC: *mutters about how things are getting out of control*
EDIT: It seems that terrisH is not exactly good at keeping a positive PR as well as protecting your image with other nations. Glazing the planet calls for action from other more "democratic" governments and etc
Of course, you were literally cat people in niklas' nes so that wasn't much of a worry.
I actually asked niklas whether or not the Nekomi would taste any different than humans; hypothetically speaking of course
EDIT: It seems that terrisH is not exactly good at keeping a positive PR as well as protecting your image with other nations. Glazing the planet calls for action from other more "democratic" governments and etc
Of course, you were literally cat people in niklas' nes so that wasn't much of a worry.I actually asked niklas whether or not the Nekomi would taste any different than humans; hypothetically speaking of course
Kozmos
Jew Detective
Hey bandanas rock....I know, I have tried.
alex994
Hail Divine Emperor!
OOC: Cleric, I'm sure if you called banana bandana every time you talk to him he wouldn't mind
Symphony D.
Deity
End game. Yes, that's why they showed up in barely over a dozen turns. You could see them in 10 or less if you honestly put your mind to it with NiNES technology. It could be more here depending on what BananaLee has done.
Let us assume all ships are spheres, for easy calculations. Let us say a Battleship has a radius of .5km (500m) and a Dreadnought has one of 1km (1000m), arbitrarily. The Battleship will have an internal volume of 523,598,775.6 cubic meters [(4/3) x Pi x r^3) and 3,141,592.654 square meters of surface area (4 x Pi x r^2), while the Dreadnought will have 4,188,790,205 and 12,566,370.61 respectively. In other words, exactly 8 times as much volume and 4 times as much surface area for doubling its radius. It will also weigh 8 times as much, assuming it's twice as big.
I wonder what most of that additional surface will be covered with? Point-defense guns and anti-capital ship weapons perhaps? It's so big you can have armored sublayers. It's also so big it can afford a large number of additional powerplants to power all of that. So, in effect, it is harder to kill, being exponentially bigger, and simply thicker--it takes much more ordinance to get at anything critical--and it can mount exponentially more weapons to keep you from getting to do that
Now ships are not going to be spheres, contrary to what the Borg may profess, for various reasons. But bigger ones will be vastly better armed, armored, and larger. Fighters and other ships, being smaller, do not have the kind of energy reserves necessary to pierce that sheer additional bulk. Fighters in particular don't as they can't even go FTL.
If you assume they somehow do have a weapon that can pierce kilometers of armored bulkheads, then they instead are the ultimate ship in the game, because then they can just operate in wolf-packs and saturate areas of space holding corvettes with these magical capital-ship killer weapons, unless you want to magically justify that they somehow don't work against corvettes.
This isn't Star Wars. There isn't some obvious 1-meter vent port that will blow up the giant ship. Big ships have big armor, big guns, lots of guns, and big power. Small ships have small guns, small armor, and small power. Big ships swat down small ships and small ships can't do much more than annoy big ships, or if you have the Dr. Device or something, it's the other way around.
The only way Fighters can fell Capital Ships with some stunning awe is in one of three instances: 1) you have extraordinarily incompetent ship designers, 2) fighters have superweapons that make them the best ship, or 3) you're willingly fooling yourself into believing they can because that's why sci-fi at large tells you. Jankenpon doesn't exist in space unless you make it do so.
Now, if you want to do that, great. But don't go pretending it's justified by anything other than being the way the game is built to run, and that it's a completely arbitrary and imagined way of balancing it to boot.
Oh, and as an afterthought: By the logic of Fighters being disproportionately strong against capital ships by all this magical power, all you need then is Fighters and Corvettes to mop the floor with Capital Ships. The system doesn't work when you only need 2 out of 3 options to shaft the 3rd.
Nope, I have no intensions of pretending any such thing. It is completely a balancing issue, and I've been open with that from the beginning. I simply could not reason the way you do because my knowledge of these things is limited. Yes, you can argue that the rules are bad because they are unrealistic. I won't dispute you on that, but it doesn't take away my enjoyment of the game. After all, I like civ...
TerrisH
Mischief?
OOC: *mutters about how things are getting out of control*
EDIT: It seems that terrisH is not exactly good at keeping a positive PR as well as protecting your image with other nations. Glazing the planet calls for action from other more "democratic" governments and etc
I actually asked niklas whether or not the Nekomi would taste any different than humans; hypothetically speaking of course
Glazing a planet Is the only Viable Tactic for taking a planet in this NES right now with the current rule set. the alternative is causing an Equal amount of casualties Battling an ever growing Number of troops on the planet your going to take. the results are the same, except the end is quicker with the glazing, and the faction who did resort to glazing would use less resorcess, and would have a large advantage over the faction that refuses to glaze. I would offer a planet the opportunity to surrender before doing so, of course
Of course, this if hypothetical right now, as there are no conflicts, and the rules might change before their is one.
Symphony D.
Deity
Parting shot: you never had a geometry class?
I'll frame my opinion simply: unrealistic rules work when responses are confined to preprogrammed ones (like in Civ). It's self-consistent in its own frame of reference. When you attempt to apply realistic solutions to a system with unrealistic rules, then the system bogs down because it's self-contradicting and because some things are arbitrary despite making no sense--or the moderator has to reconcile it all and it's a big ugly mess.
NES, unlike Civ, has this range of realistic options beyond the frame of reference. But a lot of them don't make sense because they're being applied to something that doesn't make sense, or they just have no effect and it's wasted effort, or again the moderator has to have a migraine to resolve it. Then you may as well allow unrealistic options, and the whole thing can be expressed as the limit of the NES as it approaches the window.
Space games particularly have people out their Wikipedia-jockeying and looking up all sorts of things. If you're not going to respect that reality (to whatever abstract level) why not let players build bombs they can just warp into the enemy capital, or engineer viruses that only kill Americans or something?
In short, if you're not going to shoot for strong realism, that should be declared up front, boldly, and all the little accommodations to go out of the way of being realistic (like pretty magical girl Fighters that magically fail against swords--I mean, Corvettes) should be stated clearly.
alex994
Hail Divine Emperor!
OOC: Yes, yes, it's more efficient. SO WHAT? It's one thing for us as a player to talk about it; it's another thing for the PEOPLE in that nes who are supposed to make those decisions and their moral consciences. And has it ever occurred to you that glazing the planet could reduce the value of the planet or even ah... make it "barren"?
What I'm saying is terrisH, is that you shouldn't play completely from an OOC position as you tend to do.
TerrisH
Mischief?
OOC: ah, but I'm not.. heh heh heh... *cues doctor who music*
TerrisH
Mischief?
Parting shot: you never had a geometry class?
I'll frame my opinion simply: unrealistic rules work when responses are confined to preprogrammed ones (like in Civ). It's self-consistent in its own frame of reference. When you attempt to apply realistic solutions to a system with unrealistic rules, then the system bogs down because it's self-contradicting and because some things are arbitrary despite making no sense--or the moderator has to reconcile it all and it's a big ugly mess.
NES, unlike Civ, has this range of realistic options beyond the frame of reference. But a lot of them don't make sense because they're being applied to something that doesn't make sense, or they just have no effect and it's wasted effort, or again the moderator has to have a migraine to resolve it. Then you may as well allow unrealistic options, and the whole thing can be expressed as the limit of the NES as it approaches the window.
Space games particularly have people out their Wikipedia-jockeying and looking up all sorts of things. If you're not going to respect that reality (to whatever abstract level) why not let players build bombs they can just warp into the enemy capital, or engineer viruses that only kill Americans or something?
In short, if you're not going to shoot for strong realism, that should be declared up front, boldly, and all the little accommodations to go out of the way of being realistic (like pretty magical girl Fighters that magically fail against swords--I mean, Corvettes) should be stated clearly.
People believe what they want, and I personly see fighter/Carriers outclassing the Dreadnought in long range combat. If for no other reason then History has show it to be true in Real Life. Yes, things may change in the future, but we can only expoliate that future based on past trends.
and your argument seems superficial to me.
waht about power supply?
what about mobility?
what about weapons range?
what about cost/production time?
alex994
Hail Divine Emperor!
OOC: Indeed, I agree starkow; I'm of the impression in both niklas and bananalee's nes that the listed ships are the extent of the technology of humanity before the catastrophe in niklas and the failure of the colony fleet in this one and that future developments would make the Dreadnought obsolete so to speak.
TerrisH, the variables you listed are mostly not included in the rules and even when they were they're mostly useless. With the CURRENT rules, symphony is right. Who says the rules won't change though? And you don't play OOC because your nations or factions are usually twisted to your own desiresp) while I actually have to make IC decisions that go against the OOC me 
TerrisH, the variables you listed are mostly not included in the rules and even when they were they're mostly useless. With the CURRENT rules, symphony is right. Who says the rules won't change though? And you don't play OOC because your nations or factions are usually twisted to your own desires
p) while I actually have to make IC decisions that go against the OOC me 
