I more or less agree for 'Mada.  I might see making an advanced fighter that could shoot to range 2 or 3 rather than 1.

Might.  And they should be easily 4x to 6x as expensive in points.

Oh, and Barmy - any time Dan can't keep you fixed up with product, check out my stuff in The Other Guys topic.

I make crack cocaine for people who like ship design tools.

You can put some boundary effects on possible scales.

First, scale is hex size, turn length, and thrust level for thrust 1.  It's not one number, it's three.

We know the turn length isn't likely to be longer than 10 minutes - much longer than that, and facing changes are free.

We know the turn length is long enough that multi-turn arming isn't a good part of the game.

We know that hexes are small enough that an explosion blocks line of sight, and that the turn length is short enough that this blockage has a duration.

Does this make for a consistent game scale?  Nope.

Should you care?  Nope.

(If having a defined game scale is important to you, AV:T has one that underpins everything.)

One rule that we've used is the Lemon Rule.

10% of your force composition is picked by your opponent; you pick 10% of his.

This tends to reduce over-optimized fleet building to some extent...

Floating maps can be balanced...they just can't be balanced easily with non-inertial movement.  Inertial movement changes things a lot even if it's not vector driven.

The other thing to do to compensate is make the 6 firing arcs that point out the front and the rear of the ships cost more to cover their effectiveness.

*laugh*  No, you said the Admiralty went "Ugggh" when something similar was proposed and it was buried with extreme prejudice.

Indeed - which may indicate that the factor is a quadratic curve.

Null answer - because your model here assumes that both ships will retain their full speed while reaching their engagement range.  Factor in the loss of speed here, and you'll see range take its point of prominence again.

This is also why non-inertial movement systems have issues.

I feel that you can isolate the terms of the equation - whether or not it's a worthwhile exercise given other constraints on your time is open to debate.

In general, I assume that a rear firing ship gives up 2 hexes of range every 3 turns against an opponent with identical movement values in your basic movement system.  This can vary between 1 and 0 depending on the battle setup, with 0 being the Kaufmann Retrograde)

This means the net rate of closure is 2/3 of a hex per turn.

Divide 12 by 0.667 and you get 18 turns of unanswered fire.

How likely is it that the 18 turns of unanswered fire will reduce the speed by 1 (turning the net rate of closure to a divide by zero problem)?

Agreed!

No.

I'll believe that it is when Beowulf plays IS ships against his own and wins as regularly as he does now.

Range is an area function - a longer range weapon is not just linearly better for the range, but threatens a wider area than a shorter range weapon with the same arc.  This presents more opportunities to fire, and since there's no drawback to firing in Starmada (no cooling time, or arming cycle, or power management), the natural response is to fire everything all the time, no matter how bad the shot.

As a first approximation for the relative value of range, look at the number of hexes that a weapon can threaten.  (We found that using a straight cubic function for a 3-D game overpriced range...)

As a general rule of thumb, I've found that "double the range equals 3.5x the price" works well for Squadron Strike. 

Questions to factor:

1) How many unanswered shots will the longer range weapon get against its target?

2) How effective will those shots be?  Will the opponent be able to retain enough additional firepower by the time they close to their effective weapon range to make up for the damage they've taken?

Your speed = range assumption worked well for the old Starmada Basic system, but is less accurate for the new movement system, and much less accurate for vector systems, where thrust is cumulative.

Of course you don't - you're the one winning battles handily with them. Every battle report I've seen from you has been "I destroyed the enemy, and took light damage..."  If someone were able to pin you to a wall, maybe this wouldn't be a problem. 

However, in your next game, I'd like you to face your own creations with "standard" Starmada ships...and see how fun it is to be on the receiving end of that.

Well, for one, it shows that the point costs are probably "wrong" in that there's a singularity (undefined section of the mathematical problem space) where one side will win, and this will be known before the game begins.

I recommend reading up on Lanchester Equations.

Yes, they're historically accurate - but the important question is this:

Are they fun?

And for most people, fun means "I take equal points, you take equal points, and we have a game that could go either way." 

By "Skilled" you mean "Able to read a weapon table and recognize that his best advantage is to maintain range", yes.

If the scenario conditions require that the Germans be sunk by a certain point in time, or that the QE needs to prevent them from exiting the map, it becomes more difficult.  But if it's "Equal points on an open sea, last person standing wins", this does not result in a fun scenario.

You will convince me that it's a fun scenario when I see battle reports from you about how you took the Germans and sunk the QE.  *grin*

No, it means there's an area of the problem space defined by the point system that results in a singularity.  It cannot compute a valid comparison factor between these two forces as a set of scalar numbers.  This isn't surprising; singularities are endemic in multi-variable field equations.  However, good game play means that you want the widest range of viable ships possible.

Translation:  I can use this to abuse people, and they can't make anything that can beat my ships.  It's not broken - all they have to do is fly ships like mine.

Good game design is "Maximize the possible number of fun to fly ships".  If your fleet can only be countered by a fleet identical to it, you've identified a problem with the game that needs fixing.

Let's assume I'm right and that the surcharges are too low.

How high should they be?  I'm guessing that my solution may not be ideal for 'mada, given it's built for different modalities and 3-D.

I calculate ranges differently than Dan does, and have slightly different movement rules (and 3-D).

However:

I calculate the surcharge for ranges as a quadratic function (Mike Dugan, you might want to avert your eyes.  Scary math ahead):

For a 3 band range bracket (say 5/10/15), the costs run like this:

5^1.732 (16.241) * %chance to hit * damage
10^1.732-5^1.732 (53.951-16.241=37.709) * %chance to hit * damage
15^1.732-10^1.732 (108.890-53.951=54.939) * %chance to hit * damage

Summing these values, we get 16.241+37.709+54.939=108.899.  For a real weapon, we'd divide by the percentage of coverage given.

If we run this for a range 30 weapon with identical stats, we get:

53.951+125.267+166.261=361.721 for the range term.

Which means that double the range is roughly 3.33x the total weapon cost in effectiveness assuming all other things remain equal.  (There are other factors that come into play in Squadron Strike that make that about 3.5x the effectiveness for a doubling of range).

What this is doing is abstracting for the fact that there's a volume of space that's being threatened, rather than a linear distance term.

I'd change the exponent to 1.414 for a 2-D game like Starmada, since you're threatening an area.

What this does mean is that if you have two weapons with the same "point cost", they have (to date) been of roughly equal effectiveness. 

Basically, is it possible to take an equal point and speed fleet with range 15 weapons against a fleet with range 30 weapons on equal points and have it be a close game in Starmada?

When you run out of unpainted minis, you die.

Give the gift of life.  Give minis to your gamer friends.  Their wives will eventually understand.