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mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Ken_Burnside
Mike, is there a "watertight" checker in DoGA?
I ask because what caused our minis to get produced was Charles finding a plug in that would check his Lightwave models for being watertight.
I know how to get minis into production, if you guys can make watertight .STL files.
Your prediction from the other thread is essentially correct.
Now if you could predict the numbers for the next Florida Lottery... :shock:
7, 8, 40, 41, 44, 45
Hmm. Need to reset the time machine again.
I think it'd be amusing to watch your brain sizzle and pop as you tried to make something that was munchkin enough that you'd fly it...and not so munchkin that you'd stand no chance of getting it without paying a crippling handicap. :twisted:
Where are you doing this at Ken? Mentioned a Con...but which one? :wink:
Well, this will be the tourney format for Squadron Strike. However, it'd work just as well for Starmada.
What I'd like to do is arrange a situation where both games (which have overlapping fan bases) will play in both tourneys.
My first run of this will be at Origins of 09.
If there's interest (and about 6 people willing to give it a swing) I'm willing to do a dry run at Origins 08 at the end of next month.
Is it a tourney format you'd play in?
In the interests of seeing both games thrive, would you play in a Squadron Strike event if it meant that there'd be a Starmada event in alternating years?
There will be 6 RDP allocations set up and publicly available. RDP allocations will not be modifiable by entrants. Each player designs weapons and ships from that RDP allocation. Fleets are built to 800 points, and must contain ships of three different sizes, with no more than one "big", three "medium" and four "small" ships. (These size restrictions are in place to facilitate the painting competition.)
[An RDP allocation is a package deal listing the limits for ablative shields, armor, what weapon traits are available, etc. It's "what this hypothetical star nation knows how to make."]
Because the RDP allocations are posted in advance, you are welcome to design a fleet in advance of the convention; however, all fleets must be turned in to the judge's desk by 5 PM on the first day of the convention. Fleets will be numbered by the time of entry; it is mildly advantageous to have a lower fleet number if you're going for the Architect's prize, so there's an incentive to turn your fleet in early (which makes the Judge's job easier.)
All fleets will be validated by the judges, printed out and posted publicly by 7 PM of the first day of the convention. Bonus karma for people who hand us filled out spreadsheets to make the check in easier.
Fleets are assigned by single round, sealed bid - you will be bidding match points to get the fleet of your choice. See below for round scoring. To keep bidding from getting ridiculous, all bids are matched by pledges to the charity the event is sponsoring - the charity will be publicly disclosed at least four weeks before the event, at the same time the RDPs allocations are disclosed.
We do not accept cash for charitable contributions for the fleets; we will sign you up for a pledge sheet. We CAN take physical possession of a check made out to the charity.
Each fleet will be represented at least once in the bidding process; most will be represented more than once as we expect more players than builders. We take the number of bid sheets and divide by the number of fleets created, keeping the remainder - remainders are assigned by fleet number as defined above. For example, with 7 fleets and 16 entrants, there would be 2 of each fleet and 2 remainders, meaning an extra of fleet 1 and fleet 2.
You may bid on your own fleet; to win the auction for a fleet you designed, your bid must be twice as high as the next lower bidder for that fleet. You may bid zero on a fleet. You may not bid a negative value; see below if you see a fleet designed to do nothing but lose, badly.
You may submit a fleet of "BS" (for "builder swaps") on a fleet. If one quarter of the bids submitted by players for a particular fleet are "BS", the designer of that fleet (and only the designer) is forced to play that fleet. This is used to curb the "duffer" fleet.
After sorting out for BS bids, fleets are assigned in the order of highest bid to lowest. Once you've been assigned a fleet, all your remaining bids are nullified.
If the minis painting competition is going on, minis sets are chosen by the players in bid order. See scoring below.
Playing the game:
The tourney will be run as three rounds of Swiss scoring. If there are fewer than twenty entrants, the fourth round will be a finals match between the two highest scoring entries. If there are more than twenty entrants, the top four scores will be seeded to a single round elimination tree.
All games have a disengagement clock of 15 turns. At the end of 15 turns, players may disengage whatever units they wish that are still capable of doing so, and scoring is done. This should result in games that run between 1.5 and 3 hours.
Scoring:
The standard victory rules will be used, and the victory levels printed.
A draw gets 5 points for each player.
A minor victory gets 10 points for the winner
A victory gets 20 points for the winner
A major victory gets 25 points for the winner
An overwhelming victory gets 30 points for the winner
A legendary victory gets 35 points for the winner.
At the end of each game, each player gets a number of match points equal to their opponent's fleet bid. Scores will be reported on the format of X+Y: X match points from the game, Y points from the handicap.
After the first round, players will be paired up by match point totals, highest going against second highest, and so on.
Architect Prize:
The designers of the best fleets also get prizes -- even if they don't play in the game.
Scoring: Each fleet gets an initial score equal to the average bid it receives, not counting bids of BS or bids by the designer. Each round, it receives additional points equal to the base match points accrued for every time it's flown. If your fleet shows up three times, and scores a draw, a minor victory and a loss, your fleet got 15 points for the round. Architect scoring is not altered by player bids for the rounds; that's factored in in the average bid received.
Fleets used in the finals score the rounds normally; it is possible to win the Architect prize with a fleet that didn't make it into the finals, though it's unlikely.
Painting Contest:
At least three months before the tournament, a listing of acceptable miniatures for a fleet will be made known; these will include manufacturers and part numbers, and we will try to get a package deal arranged.
The fleet will have one large, three medium and four small ships in it, for eight ships total. All ships must have Ninja Magic adapters and bases; we will make sets of angle adapters available, and all must be painted. These fleets will be available for other people to play with; keep that in mind when doing your paint jobs. Each person who submits a fleet for others to use gets a gift certificate usable on the Ad Astra web shop.
Each player picks which minis they'll use in bid order.
For the painting prize, the initial score is equal to the bid of the person who selected your fleet. You score additional points equal to the base match points won by your fleet's player in combat, just like the Architect award.
Prizes are awarded for Admirals, Architects and Painters, with the top three in each.
Beowulf, I've got a tourney format that I think you'd hate...
It would be eminently suitable for Starmada.
I'll post it in another thread.
I'd imagine that a VASSAL client for this would be pretty easy to make.
I'd never considered it as a PBEM game, but I tend to prefer my "blowing up spaceships" games in person. More smack talk, and the dice herding is less annoying. 
Would AV:T-style box minis be of interest?
I've got a web app for Squadron Strike that will let anyone who's got 6-views of a ship make a box mini. It generates PDF pages that can be printed on card stock and cut out with an Exacto knife or scissors.
I'll be perfectly happy to give Mike or whomever else Dan asks access to it to run some tests, with a non-expiring serial number. Dan can then have something to sell for cheap, or give away as a support item.
Note - this will also give that person access to the Squadron Strike playtest areas on my forums; preference goes to someone who'll poke holes in my game so I can fix them.
I watch a LOT of cartoons...
You need to be designing more games, not rotting your brain with cartoons.
It sounds like range 24 and 30 might be underpriced, particularly when combined with "break off" speed.
The way I see it (and I'm a heretic):
There is a finite number of check boxes and record keeping/complexity that any given gamer is willing to deal with, and it's constant within a given game engine.
Low resolution games spread them out over multiple ships, and most players move those ships in 4-8 maneuver elements.
Higher resolution games clump them into the larger ships, and most players move 4-8 ships.
The difference is that in the first game, there's more map clutter, so there's a greater reward for shooting that point defense turret off of the maneuver element (because blowing up that 3 hull escort takes a mini off the map) than there is for shooting the same weapon turret off of a hull 14 behemoth.
What keeps SFB from being an effective fleet game is the tax form and fractional accounting needed to run a ship. Fed Commander does this better, but in my opinion, didn't quite go far enough.
Me, I generally find it frustrating that destroyers are hit point markers for point defense turrets, but everyone has their own taste.
Ken_Burnside wrote:One of the things we do for cloaks isn't to remove the mini from the map - we replace it with a dummy counter that doesn't show facing.
A level 1 cloak means the dummy counter is within 1 hex of the cloaked ship's actual position.
A level 2 cloak means the dummy counter is within 2 hexes
A level 3 cloak means the dummy counter is within 3 hexes.
A level 0 cloak doesn't remove the ship - but everyone shoots at it as if it were a detected cloaked vessel.
Area effect weapons effecting the hex of a cloaked ship roll twice, and take the worse roll to see if they effect it.
That's a pretty nifty idea.
It helps (a bit) with the trust issues with cloaks, and lets people try to maneuver against them. We find "roll twice, take the worst" avoids most of the headaches of "AoEs always work against cloaks" and "Cloaks Are Invuuuuuuulnerable!"
One of the things we do for cloaks isn't to remove the mini from the map - we replace it with a dummy counter that doesn't show facing.
A level 1 cloak means the dummy counter is within 1 hex of the cloaked ship's actual position.
A level 2 cloak means the dummy counter is within 2 hexes
A level 3 cloak means the dummy counter is within 3 hexes.
A level 0 cloak doesn't remove the ship - but everyone shoots at it as if it were a detected cloaked vessel.
Area effect weapons effecting the hex of a cloaked ship roll twice, and take the worse roll to see if they effect it.
*I* think Ken doesn't like tracking all those counters...
Yep. I tried very hard to get Fed Commander to go to stateless tracking of drones - add an extra row to the phaser table that gave the odds of killing a drone with a single phaser shot, and treat phasers as ADDs, just so you didn't have to track "This drone has 3 damage points left, that one has one..."
If you failed to kill a drone, it hit you.
Something I've tried to advocate over on the Admiralty group for a while is a slightly different mechanism for tracking drones.
...snip.
The swarm may be shot at, and each 'hit' reduces the "number of missiles/ROF" of the swarm by one. The swarm moves at a set speed - to be determined later - perhaps the speed is universe dependent or analogous to what we do with fighters. I'm thinking Range is effectively unlimited, though we can of course change that to a number of turns or hexes, or whatever.
I'd make it a set number of hexes; this extends it up to plasma torps.
The swarm also has a Accuracy, Impact, and Damage rating - and can be assigned Weapon Traits. For warp seekers that are used in SFB to hit cloaked ships, we can add in a 'warp seeker' weapon trait.
This makes missile swarms more like a normal weapon that moves across the board and can be shot down. It's not like a fighter, as it isn't shot down with a single damage point, but is degraded like a fighter squadron.
..and now that I've thought about it, we could also use a modification of this mechanic for fighters.
How would this interact with hypothetical area effect attacks? Roll once per swarm, does damage to everything in the swarm?
I'm assuming we're going stateless for the damage points on each component of the swarm.
1) Directionality of defenses. Ablative shields would be good. In particular, you're going to have a difficult time handling the Hydran hellbore without this.
Yeah, I'd have to agree that some sort of directional shields would emulate SFU's feel. To those not 'in the know' - you essentially have the ability to hit the backside of a ship if that backside shield is weakened.
I'm not convinced that it's required, as some discussed earlier.
None of these are, in my mind, required - they're all in the "This would be nice..." bits. What's the problem with ablative defenses in 'mada? I feel like I'm walking into the debris field from a vociferous debate that's been hashed out multiple times.
Ken_Burnside wrote:2) Seeking weapons that you can "buy time" against by maneuvering well. In particular, the ability of phasers (and only phasers) to ablate plasma torpedo damage is a dynamic that's important to the feel of SFB.
Tougher, actually, as it's even canon. It would require more counters on the board - slowing the game, and more tracking stats - slowing it down even more.
Yeah - this is why I'm in favor of grabbing FC as your starting point for SFU-Starmada. Fewer seekers, less fiddlyness on them. SFB is a game of maneuver and timing. FC is somewhat less so because it has fewer restrictions on its maneuver engine.
It just happens that SFB is a lovely, elegant game of maneuver and timing that's trapped in a 422 page rulebook with wall to wall 9 point Helvetica type.
Ken_Burnside wrote:3) More moving, less shooting, and a given shot should have more "ow". My radical proposal for SFU-Starmada is fractional RoFs that run from 1 (disruptors and phasers) down to 1/3 (plasma torpedoes). You'd need to extend the price for RoF to fractional RoFs as well.
ANOTHER layer of complication.....
I'm not saying none of it is going in, just that it adds in more stuff that Starmada fans may or may not appreciate.
This is, actually, my second biggest whinge about SM-A. (The first is the removal of the SMX damage system).
I've done house ruled fractional RoFs with Starmada, and it works beautifully. It really gives you some more decisions to make - do I shoot now, or do I hold fire for a better shot later? Starmada tends to be "All guns blazing all the time."
Ken_Burnside wrote:2) No electronic warfare.
Seeing as my Marine opponent never used it, I can't argue that point (I'm not familiar enough with it) - but I'd argue that some sort of ECM system would certainly make it more like SFB...
FC more or less tossed ECM out the airlock, though it's (sigh) starting to creep back in with scouts.
Ken_Burnside wrote:3) Only Hydrans get fighters, nobody gets PFs.
For me, that's a non-starter. I just love fighters and PF's too much.
Heh. Everyone loves fighters and PFs because they're very minmaxable. But to me, they don't feel like Trek, and they result in Tidal Waves of Drones.
Unless I've missed some careful sarcasm on your part... :shock:
I'd say that mines are definitely out, though....not that what I say has any bearing on it at all...
It's all moot, unless and until MJ12 and ADB put pen to paper....
Mines got ixnayed in Fed Commander. But yes, getting a deal signed is important.
The idea of only Hydrans having leaves out the Kzintis. They were as much a fighter race as the Hydrans. Why prohibit them from having fighters?
Because in Federation Commander, they aren't a fighter race. At least, not yet, and I hope they don't become one. Nothing sucks the fun out of SFB like watching a carrier group belch out a zillion drones.
Nearly 3/4 of the Hydran navy (other than frigates) carries fighters. I think there's exactly two Kzinti ships that aren't part of dedicated carrier groups that carry fighters - the DDV Long Lean and the Kzinti Super Space Control Ship Of Drone Spasms.
Weapons in SFU:
I wrote an article on designing weapons for SFB that appeared in CapLog 19. I no longer have an electronic copy of it - but it's something that should be looked at. It's a good analysis of why weapons in SFB work the way they do, and defines the "safe weapon design area".
In a nutshell:
Weapons have a conversion efficiency (how much damage they average per point of energy put in), a "firing cap" (how much energy you can put in), and a cycle rate.
Most heavy weapons in SFB, cycled over 7 turns of fire, average out to within 15% of the disruptor/photon pair, which are nearly identical. Taht efficiency (factoring in average damage divided by arming power) is between 1.5 damage per point of power to about 3 points of damage per point of power in the optimum range brackets, and drops to 1:1 at around range 15, and 0.5:1 at shot in the dark distances.
Most phasers (up until the phaser-G) range from 1 damage per point of power put in at range 15, and go as high as 5:1 for a phaser 1, and 8:1 for a phaser 3. A phaser G gets around 15:1
Now, Starmada doesn't have anything mandating power allocation, and shouldn't - so conversion efficiency isn't directly applicable.
The 7 turns of fire averaging means that, on average, each weapon pass should drop one shield for a disruptor ship, drop a shield and do internals for a photon ship, and threaten to drop a shield and do significant harm for a plasma launch unless you turn away.
I'm a little late to the party. Most of you know me - I've played SFB competitively for 15 years, I had a hand in FC's design, and did FC's marketing plan.
I'd like to see the following three elements come over. These are things that give the minimal "SFU feel" with the fewest changes to Starmada.
1) Directionality of defenses. Ablative shields would be good. In particular, you're going to have a difficult time handling the Hydran hellbore without this.
2) Seeking weapons that you can "buy time" against by maneuvering well. In particular, the ability of phasers (and only phasers) to ablate plasma torpedo damage is a dynamic that's important to the feel of SFB.
3) More moving, less shooting, and a given shot should have more "ow". My radical proposal for SFU-Starmada is fractional RoFs that run from 1 (disruptors and phasers) down to 1/3 (plasma torpedoes). You'd need to extend the price for RoF to fractional RoFs as well.
I'd like to see the following things NOT come over.
1) Avoid any kind of power allocation.
2) No electronic warfare.
3) Only Hydrans get fighters, nobody gets PFs.
====
The things that make SFB/FC fun are the important "where will I be in a quarter turn" decisions, and the "do I fire now, or wait for a better shot?" decisions.
The things that make Starmada fun are the general simplicity and not having to think much about how the weapons work. I'm trying to distill the things from SFU that are most critical to making the SFU fun happen so they can be considered (and with any luck, implemented) by Starmada.
mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Ken_Burnside
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