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mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Ken_Burnside
Oh dear God.
Please tell me Dan isn't doing page layout in Word...
(cringe)
Dan, it's not that bad! Get off of that ledge! We can find you help!
(Doing page layout in Word isn't quite as idiotic as doing it in Excel...but it's much more common, because Word tries to convince you that it's got page layout functionality.)
Congrats, Dan.
Fighters are all about the 'rule of cool'.
What's cool is subjective.
Me personally, I'd rather have cruise missiles in my games. However, that tends to suffer when people want to take Cylon Basestars against Imperial Star Destroyers. 
SS uses an approach that's halfway between B5Wars and Starfire.
Fighters move in flights; they get some special movement abilities. Each fighter has a damage track that looks like a ship from Starfire. A dedicated antiship weapon will usually vape a fighter; point defense weapons might take multiple hits to kill one. There is a Defensive fire step before Standard Fire; any unit can fire on small targets during Defensive Fire. Anything that survives makes an attack in Standard Fire,
When you attack a squadron of fighters, you choose which one you shoot at; after seeing how much damage was done, the fighter squadron player may choose to make an evasion roll to put another fighter into the path of the damage. Fighter squadrons that lose too many members in Defensive Fire have a penalty when firing in Standard Fire, due to morale issues.
Fighters in space games are all about the 'rule of cool' - if they're cool, they're worth having. Anyone trying to put realism into space fighters isn't going to be happy with the end result of that discovery process. (Short answer: Cruise missiles.)
Fighters from a game design perspective are one of those places where linear cost increases can bring nonlinear benefits. In Starmada, more than most other titles, this sticks out like a sore thumb, because Dan's been pretty good about making sure that nonlinear benefits get appropriately scaled costs.
Here's how I'd do it.
Every N hull boxes has an asterisk in it. I'd default it to every 3rd, with fragile ships doing every 2nd and durable ones every 4th.
When a hull box with an asterisk is in it, roll 2d6- (2 six sided dice, subtracting the lower die result from the higher die result), and take off that many upgrade systems. The first system taken off is the defender's choice, second is attackers, third is defender's, fourth is attacker's, fifth is defender's.
The distribution for 2d6-:
0 = 3 in 18 (16.67)
1 = 5 in 18 (27.77)
2 = 4 in 18 (22.22)
3 = 3 in 18 (16.67)
4 = 2 in 18 (11.11)
5 = 1 in 18 (05.55)
This way, these sorts of systems don't make a ship any more durable (you're still losing the hull box at the same rate as any other system), but they do mean that you lose capabilities when they get whacked.
Ken_Burnside wrote:I think I may be the only person other than Parduz who's bitched to Dan about the dice herding in Starmada.
The problem isn't the sheer number of dice. It's the iterations.
Huh. I'd always thought your concern was with the number of dice, not the iterations.
It's a bit of both - Roll & Count gets slow when there are more than 10 dice at a time on it. And keep in mind, I still play 'mada every now and then, so I don't hate it to the point where I won't play the game.
The problem is that, if you don't like the three-roll system, there's not much that can be done about it. That is the heart of Starmada -- everything else is details that can (and have) been changed via optional rules.
On this I pretty much agree; it has some very pretty statistics, and it's very good on "I don't have to remember nuthin' but 1-2 is Engine, 3-4 is Shields, 5-6 is Weapons, and Odds are Hull Hits". But it still has a handling time cost.
I put a lot of work into cutting down handling time in Squadron Strike, because it became clear that once you got over the hurdle of learning the game, that handling time was the big time sink in completing battles.
One playtester, the week before Origins, came up with a brilliant suggestion for SS's damage allocation system. Which I was opposed to, in large part because "Oh my god...I've got to re-do umptizillion formulas on the SSD display page! Aiiiagh!"
But the "Roll to-hit", "Roll penetration", "Roll damage" system has been there from the beginning. If you like it, you'll love Starmada: if not, you won't.
I disagree. I enjoy Starmada, but I think the cascading re-rolls are about my least favorite part. I think your zoom to boom ratio is skewed a bit high to boom for my tastes, but that is just a taste difference.
This isn't to say I'm opposed to looking for solutions -- just that this is the one part of the game that is going to be highly resistant to change.
The short answer is "It works, and nothing you can change is going to make both me happy and not piss off the vastly more numerous fan base. They're more important than I am."
I'll play 'mada and herd dice when I do so. If I see a clever idea that might solve the issue, I will...but this is one of those fundamental design decisions that not only can't be changed, shoulddn't be changed without a very good reason. And neither I nor Pazur constitute even a bad reason, let alone a reason worth listening to.
Another variation on how to do it is to treat shields as a modifier to Accuracy.
For example: A shielding unit of 3 means that your Accuracy should be halved. Any weapon that hits with this reduced Accuracy just rolls for damage normally.
However, that really screw over high IMP weapons.
There isn't a good way to get the effect of the dice cascades without the dice cascades. 
I think I may be the only person other than Parduz who's bitched to Dan about the dice herding in Starmada.
The problem isn't the sheer number of dice. It's the iterations.
You can't resolve one weapon with one throw of the dice. Then count the ones that beat your Accuracy number. Then multiply that number by the Impact rating of the weapon and roll that many dice, compare them to a number that's on the other side of the table, sort out which ones exceeded that number, multiply by the damage value, and roll that many dice a third time.
This can result in unwieldy amounts of dice for each throw, but they do consume a lot of time due to sheer repitition
One way to speed it up is to use three batches of dice of three colors and roll them all at once...but for a RoF 3, IMP 3, DAM 3 terror weapon, that results in rolling 3+9+27=39 dice at once...so that's a false economy.
Ad Astra Games sells a 1.5" GeoHex space map, that has the A-F rosette in the center of it, which is handy for tracking vectors.
www.adastragames.com, then click on Products to go to our web shop (which we share with a couple of other companies under the name genreconnections.com)
Or pick up Squadron Strike, which also has a built in campaign engine...
Actually, I wasn't planning on having players build the ships themselves, anticipating newbies who need to learn the system (and to be honest, a gm who's still green.)
So I'm trying to balance forces of roughly the same strength, from totally different universes. (Star Wars, Trek, B5 and Galactica). There are many fine conversions out there, but they're consistent only within their own universes, not across franchises.
The plan is to start small, with a few key iconic ships. Write a kewl scenario, and let it evolve from there.
This is a good plan.
The scenario I use is a Cylon base star with fighter wings and lots of SFB-inspired ships, piloted in groups of 2 to 4 by the players.
It never fails to attract a crowd; the first turn is teaching the game, the second turn is watching the game sink in. (which for my scenario means grasping 3-D movement), the third turn is getting comfortable with the mechanics, and the fourth turn and on turns into flying shrapnel.
Scenario is carefully balanced so that it looks like the Trek ships can lose. If they man up, it's not likely.
1) They are more aesthetically pleasing to my eyes.
Ah, but the d12 is also lovely.
2) Most players have an excess of d6s... not so with d10s, d12s, etc.
Of course, providing dice with the game is also an option....I have never met anyone outside of the indie RPG community who refused to buy a game because it used different dice types.
3) Six-siders lend themselves to nicely-distributed results: for example, you can have a 1/1 split, a 2/1 split, or a 3/2/1 split. On a ten-sider, you can do 1/1 and 3/2, but then you jump to 4/1. About the only thing the ten-sider can do that a six-sider can't is 4/3/2/1, but that's not as useful, IMHO.
Every argument you make about d6s applies to d12s, with the added benefit of being able to go to a 3:1 split. and less granularity.
And 12 siders are thematic with your company name. What die could possibly be more majestic than the 12?
More seriously, because you're doing roll and compare as your base mechanic, d10s or d12s would about double the time needed to use your mechanic, which already invokes a lot of sequential processing rather than parallel.
I put a lot of thought into die rolling mechanics in SS over the last year and a half, and wasn't afraid to rip the damage allocation engine apart to get what I wanted, and I spent a lot of time going "OK, this needs to go - too slow." I iteratively tested a lot of things, including a Starmada style "roll to hit, roll for armor save, roll hot location" with different weapons doing different amounts of damage going deep into a hit location table.
(Then we got rid of the separate hit location table and damage tracks.)
If "Kill things and take their stuff" is what you want, D&D 4e is the best version of that that I've ever seen; it is either a brilliant marketing tool, or an attempt to get too close to the computer games that will eat its lunch.
I also dislike 400-500 page RPG rulebooks. I specifically dislike rulebooks that try to pedantically iterate 3,000,000 things that are all common sense.
So I wrote one of my own.
http://www.adastragames.com/downloads/RPGs/Minimus.pdf
Complete RPG in 4 pages. One of these days, I'll even finish off the sample relationship map for the 4th page.
(Note: iDonation-ware. If you think it's fun to read/have, etc, feel free to send me the amount listed in the footer.)
I voted. And misled an exit pollster.
just a couple of pennies for your thought.
I can't say that Starmada has suffered for only having a d6, in fact very early in the starmada X playtesting we toyed with the d10 idea, in fact I was extremely vocal about having d10s.
Turns out d10s took some of the fun out of the game. I don't know why, but it just didn't work.
Maybe Dan could articulate more clearly why, but I know we discussed it after some playtesting and both pretty much came to the same conclusion... keep d6.
Remember I was extremely FOR d10s in Starmada, but changed my mind.
I'd be interested in Dan's opinion on this. I've not found much differences between d6s and d10s when using the die rolls for straight comparison.
On the other hand, my designs have a lot less dice herding in them, and any difference between the two gets magnified when throwing more than 3-5 dice at once in terms of handling time.
A die roll I use a lot that might be useful for this thread is 2dX-
Roll 2 dice of size X, and subtract the smaller number from the larger; it gives a 1 tailed curve and a (potentially useful) zero result.
For d6, the breakdowns are 0: 6 in 36, 1: 10 in 36, 2: 8 in 36, 3: 6 in 36, 4: 4 in 36, 5: 2 in 36.
This is particularly useful for "math only goes one way" simplification, which I tend to agree with. Adding positive modifiers is always better than putting in a mix of positive and negative ones in terms of game play and simplicity.
Ken_Burnside wrote:When I put it up for a straw poll, it got voted down FAST.
Well, yeah. It's not like it would actually change anything. you might as well just give each side 30% less hulls, because the analytical tendencies that create min-maxed vessels would be redirected to creating the most useless vessels possible under whatever rules you happen to use. If you're assuming munchkin tendencies, I don't see how anything that comes out of that particular ruling would be any more "realistic". Most of the dogs that came out of naval procurement (such as the Omaha) at least managed to look good on paper, whereas any max-min'd vessel probably wouldn't even pass that muster.
Take a look at the tourney rules we came up with for this as one way to do it.
You design a fleet to X points, following some pre-set guidelines.
It gets printed out and put on the wall, including how many copies of that fleet are going to be in the tourney.
Everyone bids on a fleet in match points in a single round, sealed bid auction. To win your own fleet, you have to have twice as high a bid as the next highest bidder. If 25% of the people entered in the tourney feel that you submitted a BS fleet (one with no engines, no defenses and no weapons, for example), they can bid Builder Swap. At which point, you're charged for your highest bid, and are given the turd fleet you designed.
We award prizes on highest rated fleet design (mix of average bid and how they performed in combat), winning the fly-out part of the tourney (how well you did in the fleet you bought, inclusive of the handicap), and painting minis. (Highest bid for a fleet gets first choice of minis presented to play; modulo how the fleet the minis were used for performed in the tourney).
In a nutshell - you design a fleet, you may not be the one flying it...and if you aren't, you want people to think it's cool.
Or have them design 25-35% of their fleet at one tech level lower than standard to represent the "older designs"...which will by default make them marginally less capable.
Which is one way to do it - but means the amount of work needed before you get to the campaign goes up.
What we do right now for SS is that you spend your Resource Dev Points in two rounds.
The first round is defenses, fighter technology, generalized technology, and technological infrastructure. (Colonies, shipyards, repair yards).
That first round gets revealed, including how many points weren't spent.
The second round is the cost to set a class of ships, and defining what weapon traits your empire knows how to use, on the three families of weapons in the game. Plus other weapon related caps, and how much you're devoting to developing ECCM.
That second round isn't revealed until combat happens.
Now, in theory, it could be broken into three rounds - defense parameters, weapons parameters, and then ship designs. But I'm not sure that two rounds of file swapping prior to the start of the campaign won't be seen as "too much work".
The weapon parameterization would, in Starmada terms, be seen as "OK, he's building a weapon of X spaces, and has these four weapon traits available, but I don't know which ones are going on which weapons."
I understand what you mean, and it's something I've wrestled with in Squadron Strike's campaign rules.
The best answer I can give on that one is to force each player to design some ships for their opponents - about 30% of the total fleet. Players will cheerfully ignore any campaign restriction that isn't fun; the trick is to incentivize making dog ships. Since they won't make them for themselves, they will cheerfully inflict them on someone else....
You might also want to look at the Squadron Strike tourney rules - I posted a copy of them here, I think. Most could be adapted to Starmada.
Of course, that means that the person designing the ships also designs the weapons, which gets rid of the "Haha! You didn't know about my Kaboomatron 3000 Range 30 Piercing Hull Eater! Prepare to DIE!" aspect, which people seem to love in theory (three quarters of the fun of those ships come from wanking with a spreadsheet, not shoving them around a map...)
When I put it up for a straw poll, it got voted down FAST.
That is a problem with many published universes for various games. I still need to re-read the actual ISS book so I didn't remember the details and was just responding to the mention of ship types and classes. One of my pet peeves for gaming has always been that game fleets tend to always be “squeaky clean” in the design and balance arena. I'm sure there are exceptions, but that is a tendency I have noticed.
This is a particular issue with 'Mada and SS, where the *weapon design* system is an accurate rating of the weapon's effectiveness, not how much it costs to deploy; with Squadron Strike, there is, at least, a mechanism in place to keep people from designing and deploying new weapons in a campaign at will...but a given 100 point weapon will be 100 points of effectiveness in both systems.
I would love to see a supplement for ISS or HAC that had stats and OOB for the “Old Fleets”. But I don't think we will see them. Most players of games want their ships to be tough and well designed, not design mistakes built by the lowest bidder on half the promised budget.
The Ten Worlds setting for AV:T has this kind of tech progression, as does the Honorverse, but it's deucedly hard to enforce in a build-your-own fleet system.
Ken_Burnside: wrote:Offered to look at Shipyard 16 if he'll email it to me.
Sorry, must have missed that, I do not have your email address.
I used the "email user" button here. It's design (at) adastragames [dot] com.
Ken_Burnside: wrote:Oh, improvements are being made. Used to be, Calc puked opening up my sheets. Now it takes 10 minutes, and 2 minutes for a screen refresh when you use a drop-down menu.
Slight overestimate? Or is that a large spreadsheet?
It uses that many drop down menus pulling from named ranges. It's about 6 MB all told, but allows you to define campaign parameters, build weapons, design multiple ships using the same weapon list and campaign parameters, and prints a full page "check box" SSD.
And until 3.0, OO Calc didn't handle about half of the things it did, most notably borking INDEX() and INDIRECT().
Glad to say the shipyard and Wardogs is just about instant refresh. My home built PC does not even have a dual core processor.
One way to fix the blank cell problem, From what I gather, is to insert:
IF(ISBLANK(cell ref);" ";cell ref)
My problem with OO Calc, from someone who plays with compilers for fun (scary person) is that OO Calc made some design decisions about how named ranges and data validation are done that would take extensive re-coding to boost performance. He estimates that it would be a 4-month long side project for him to fix the issue.
When inserting a drop down menu using a cell range as reference, the first cell has to be text or something other than an empty cell or 0.
Point is that I think that any problems can be worked around, they just should not have to be.
Completely agreed.
Paul
You might get together with OldnGrey, and try to come up with some work-arounds.
Offered to look at Shipyard 16 if he'll email it to me.
If OO opens most of the spreadsheets I need, I'm happy.
Oh, improvements are being made. Used to be, Calc puked opening up my sheets. Now it takes 10 minutes, and 2 minutes for a screen refresh when you use a drop-down menu.
And it does not surprise me that you use way more excel-fu than I care to learn. 
*grin* I suppose it wouldn't.
I try to keep my Excel-fu within certain bounds. I don't use macros. At all. I try to stick with functions defined within Excel.
What happens with Calc is that the people doing the coding don't actually USE all the functions in Excel, so, sometimes they're implemented via strange, strange misperceptions of how things work.
This is a great area for discussion, but it really can't get started unless you have a tech base to start from. Fleet composition and organization is based on prevailing technology and experience of the current command/govenment. (yes, I know that is obvious :wink: )
So you need to define the tech limits and assumptions of the fleet type in question before you can really talk about composition and organization.
One way to do it is to assign point costs for various technologies and weapon traits and let people spend them.
Round A, everyone spends up to N% of their points, then reveals.
Round B, everyone spends the remainder of their points, but may NOT spend points on anything defined in round A.
Include a mechanism for generating more of these points as a function of time or random events in the campaign, and you can let the campaign grow dynamically.
On page 78 of ISS section 7 of the "Simplest Campaign" seems to give an incentive to "play to lose". The side that loses a scenario, and any player who declines battle recives Replenishment Points, but the victor does not.
Is the intention that the agressor becomes stronger strategicly (more Victories towards the required total to win), but the loser becomes stronger tactically (repaired and new ships)?
Is this a campaign ply balance mechanism, or should the victor be recieving RPs too?
Given that the winner of the battle gets everything other than hull points repaired, I'm not sure that they're at that steep a disadvantage.
I had intended to change the signature, no idea how.
It was true until version 3.
Just cannot understand, why make it incompatible with excel?
Paul
Because someone out there found a "better way" to do it, convinced the people maintaining that part of the project that it was, indeed, better, and that nobody would notice the change.
I have a laundry list of things Calc doesn't do as well as Excel, or handles differently.
mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Ken_Burnside
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