1

(28 replies, posted in Starmada)

Duskland wrote:

My 2 cents smile .  I don't particularly like fixed fleet restrictions (there are enough other games that restrict what you can take).  The only point I could see them at would be in a tournament setting and I would expect any tournament organizer to set such restrictions themselves.

I'm not fond of arbitrary restrictions either (though I will concede that they are very quick). I'm suggesting a means of avoiding this by generating a pool of available units that the player can pick and choose from for a particular engagement - which units they choose to take is up to them but at least they will have faced a level of constraint on which units are available.

Duskland wrote:

Phroggelator: Looking at ship design from a standpoint of current wet navy building trends is only one way of looking at things.  What about a case where a single fixed volume system (a drive or power plant) necessitates larger ships?  Multiple science fiction universes work on such a system and it forces certain design considerations.  The best example would be David Weber's Mutineer's Moon series (+Armageddon Inheritance and Heirs of Empire) where moon size battle planetoids are the ship design of choice and smaller ships are used only as parasites on the larger ships or as in-system ships.  The system in question in this case is the core tap (power source) and faster then light drive (a variation on an old traveller stutter drive).

Another area or discussion would be organic or partially organic ships.  Would there be a ship yard requirement for a ship that grows itself?  In such a case wouldn't it be likely for one or two sizes or species of ship to be prevalent?

What about species whose societal structure necessitates larger ships?  Races like the Borg from Startrek or the K'kree from Traveller.

The wet navy viewpoint is indeed, just one way of looking at things. I picked it because of the likely wide familiarity with most people, however it's just a wrapper around the underlying constraints - resources and time. There are other potential constraints as well as you pointed out but none of them remove the need for resources and time.

Single fixed/minimum volume system? Sure, you'll have a few more big ships with the critical system, but then I'd expect that they would carry smaller ships to mitigate the risk of losing such a resource. Note, though that each ship still requires resources and time to build - big ships just take longer and consume more resources.

Moon-sized ships? An extreme case, but again you still have find the resources and time to build something that big - although I'd argue that anything smaller is essentially so far out of scale that they're irrelevant to something that size (I haven't read the books though). Still if everyone has to build at that scale to be effective then you can also scale the build times and resources (assuming small ships can be ignored).

Organic ships? They fact they self-assemble/grow in no way removes the resource or time requirements for them to be finished. It may be that in place of a yard the action takes place in a gigantic birthing suite or surgery assuming any such is required. As for species variability, if we assume the species in question is totally artificial and therefore completely outside anything resembling an ecosystem, there is no reason to limit designs available and the reasons why you might want a different species become the same as why you might build differing classes of ships. If *is* part of a ecosystem (ie. a found species modified or adapted if necessary), then your variability comes from choosing a species that can operate optimally in differing environments. Basically a species adapted for deep/interstellar space unlikely to be operating at it's peak when it's too close to a star for example. In any case they still require resources and time to be finished.

2

(28 replies, posted in Starmada)

Which is why I suggest having a way of determining your available fleet units. While a navy may well want all of its units to be largely the same, the reality is that a facility to build naval units (expecially *big* units) is a serious investment in both materials and skilled personnel (and skilled personnel are usually the sticking point) and they take time to come online and build up. This naturally limits their ability to deliver a never ending stream of heavy units. What's a Navy to do? Wait 12 months for a slipway capable of handling a BB or CV, OR punch out 3 FF's or a pair of DD's and at least be able to get something into space that you can use for some kind of defense....  Once you have gone through this decision process you have the units to deploy as you will in any fleet composition you like (presumably informed by your strategic situation if relevant).

Depending on the socio-political structure (or maybe even the species if you go for non-humans) underpinning the navy some of these decision points can be adjusted, but the basic points remain valid. You need to be able to get the right people in the right numbers together in the right facility with the right resources to be able to build a naval unit. Which units you build are determined by a whole slew of factors such as your ability to keep the facilities supplied with resources and staff, how much time you have, how your general population feels about supporting a massive navy, external factors such as what your enemies are doing and how they are doing it.

Drawing an analogy to to an airforce is, I think, tempting but incorrect. For starters aircraft are fairly small and fragile (which is why the airforce buys in bulk) and although complex, building one is a very different engineering challenge to build a ship that is huge and can take multiple hits. In this respect modern ship building is the closest existing model for building large spaceships. Sure, the high-tech required for a ship negates some of the issues around building large structures, but then you are building something that is vastly more complex than a ship for a wet navy, so it balances out. Also, if a navy somehow had only one or two kinds of unit then those units would have to be capable of performing every task the navy requires and therefore unless the ship is truly enormous (and even then) it's unlikely to be able to do everything well. Even in combat related matters, your enemies will be trying to find tactics that will work against you and only having one or two designs makes that job quite  bit easier for them, because your available set of "good" tactical and strategic choices becomes very well defined and fairly inflexible.

The only way you might get anything an endless cookie cutter set of vessels is if your resources are so vast that you effectively have an unending (re)supply of units. In this scenario the only real challenge you would face is an equally vast opponent, sufficent combined oppoents that you cannot muster enough local superiority to crush each individual opponent or massive internal dissent that essentially break your forces in half.

Hmmm... another ramble. Hopefully useful though.

3

(28 replies, posted in Starmada)

I would have thought the best way to get a "realistic" fleet would be to emulate in some manner the forces that cause a real world fleet to be diverse. While mission requirements will cover some of that, the primary force that dictates your fleet not ending up composed of DN's and BB's is politics, time and resource availability (and partially your ability to move those resources around).

As a start point your ability to build ships is governed by yard capacity (the number slipways and the size of each slip), the number of yards and lead time to build things. Someone else on this board suggested measuring yard capacity in SU and that seems reasonable to me, although because I'm a bit of a perfectionist I'd go down to SU/slipway and allow each slipway to only build ship in a specific SU ranges. The total SU capacity is probably a function of overall resource availability and the breakdown of that into individual yard capacity is up to the user. Though would you really want all your yard capacity in one tempting spot?

Unless it's a specialist yard, I'd doubt you would have more than 30%-50% of each yards capacity allocated to slipways capable handling the largest designs - for example in a yard with 2500 SU of finished capacity you would probably only have two slips capable of handling ships of 500-700 SU and the rest a mix of 250-400 SU and smaller (though obviously at any given time the total finished SU under contruction cannot exceed that 2500 points). Assume a construction rate of something like 20 to 25 SU per month per slip (ie a 100 SU ship takes roughly 4 to 5 months to complete) and give each player 120 to 180 months of construction time.

Design-wise allow no more than say 2 designs of each class (FF, DD and so on) and perhaps only one of the large classes (carriers, BB, DN). Once the engagements have started allow each player one revised design at each smaller class and one revised design from the larger classes. Normal construction rates apply to new builds. If you choose to build on a war footing then you get a faster construction rate (say up to 35-odd SU/month/slip) for the older designs and maybe a liitle faster for the revised new designs (say somehwere in the 25-30 SU/month/slip range). For an extra wrinkle adapt the lemon-dice rules from Heavy Gear (especially if you go in for building at war footing rates - corners get cut to build faster...)

As a nice side bonus your campaign will now feature juicy logistics targets - afterall if your enemies cant build any more ships your life gets much easier. If you choose to build new yard capacity I'd say make it expensive, say every SU of new yard capacity ties up 2 SU of existing yard capacity while under construction and a whole new yard built from scratch would require you to build a mobile yard (10 SU/month in a single slip) or build at a colony (where you can say that the first 50 SU of capacity can be built from scratch, say at 5 SU/month) and thereafter extra space requires yard capacity in the normal manner. Yeas that does mean once you finally build that initial 50 SU yard at a colony (or wherever), it will be able to self-expand quite rapidly until you hit your ability to ship resources to it. This also makes cargo shipping enormously important to both the player and his opponents.

Hopefully thats clear and vaguely useful.

4

(59 replies, posted in Starmada)

Well, yes, they are *very* big ships. Even in the D6 RPG they were listed as being 1,600 metres long and some sources claim them to be even bigger. A pair of Imperial (Imperator if you prefer) Star Destoyers (Type I or II) is considered to be the backbone of an Imperial Navy combat line as described in the WEG Imperial Sourcebook (surpisingly in depth about Imperial naval doctrine such as it is). The rare heavy combat line might reach 4 of them. Anything bigger is a special - there were for example supposed to have been only 4 super star destroyers built. Typically as I recall there is about 2 to 4 Imperial class ships per sector (around the time of the Imperial collapse post-Endor), but this is somewhat flexible depending on the sector's importance and the political clout of the Govenor. The older Victory class star destroyers were optimised for ground attack in preference to space superiority and were able to enter the upper atmosphere of a planet, but as far as I know nothing that size can land (the Venator designs you see in the most recent movies are smaller again I believe and may represent something of a limit in the size of ship that can truly land).

On the topic of big ships the other really big ship you might see and actually use in a scenarios is the torpedo sphere. Never a common design, they were still much more common than the SSD's. Specialised attack ships to destroy planetary shields, they have a startling number of capital scale proton torpedo launchers. They are also the only ships that can effectivley mount some of the nastier Imperial terror weapons like Two-wave grav shock devices and Orbital Nightcloaks. Nifty for special scenarios.

One thing that isn't easily represented though is the various hyperspace performaces of the ships. This of course is really only relevant at the strategic level, but it's worth noting that in the Late Empire Era (ie about the time of the Endor incident) Victory class star destroyers were still actively deployed. Despite their comparatively (to say an Imperial class) weak ship-to-ship capacity, low engine speed, and small(-ish) fighter wing, they had a hyperdrive with twice the capacity of an Imperial class making them very fast to deploy from system to system. Thus they were kept around mainly heavy pirate suppression duties (in particular the larger pirate groups) and fast reaction missions.

A note on fighter wings - Imperial doctrine declares a full fighter wing to be 72 fighters, in (IIRC) 12 by 6 fighter flights. Rebel doctrine has 36 fighters to the wing, in 6 by 6 fighter flights. The should, in theory, be about as dangerous as each other. The Empire throws weight of numbers and the Rebels have the better fighters and pilot training.

I'd offer up some designs, but I'm renovating and the books are all mostly packed away at the moment. So it might be a little while until I have a chance to dig them out unfortunately.

5

(59 replies, posted in Starmada)

The problem with doing an effective starwars conversion is the huge range of scale of the ships. Essentially, at the top end you have the Super Star Destroyers (the Executor from the movies, the D6 RPG goes even bigger) which has, as I recall, 1040 weapon batteries across about 5 types of weapon, 9 dice of shields and 10 dice of hull (yes, I played a lot of D6 starwars in the day). Whereas at the bottom end you have the corvettes and frigates that might only have a few batteries (8 or so for Nebulon-B frigates I believe) with 2 or 3 dice of shields and 3 or 4 dice of hull. So you can't simply divide the battery count by 10 and get meaningful numbers at the extremes.

You would, I should think, need some kind of logarithmic scale to keep numbers sane with battery counts. Shields and hull probably convert more directly. Fire control varied per weapon type usually (say 3 dice for turbolasers but only 2 for concussion missiles for example) as well. Ignore things like double/triple/quad/two-point-five-and-a-squiggly-thing turbolaser batteries as that's all just fluff - the only things that matter in a weapon battery description is range, damage, and fire control. The real trick will be balancing the weapon damages against shields and armour and handling the specials like the Mon Calamari heavy cruisers (MC-80's and later on the MC-90's) that have 6 dice of backup shields that come on as initial shield dice are lost. The other thing that comes to mind with weapons is that weapons battery damage on those vessels with ridiculous battery counts is not going to really affect the amount damage it can inflict on other nearly as quickly as it does on smaller vessels. If you use a log(n) scaling on battery counts in the conversion perhaps an inverse on the destroyed battery count might better reflect this. I also suspect that using a log(n) conversion would do strange things to the point value of the conversion.

Anyways that my thoughts for this morning, I hope they help.

6

(129 replies, posted in Game Design)

Some more questions and a few observations that may be useful.

First, how big was the Empire? Whole galaxy? More than half? About half? Less than half? Less than a quarter? Smaller still?

This largely defines how good your FTL and Comms are (or you can go the other way and use those values to define how big the empire was). As other people have noted if comms times start getting large then you need to operate the provinces as largely independent holdings (quite probably with significant military and manufacturing resources) as help from the core could take a very long time to get there. Certainly this type of arrangement lends itself to severe fragmentation after the empire collapsed. I'd assume one to two months at most from the Capital to provincial capitals and maybe another two to three from the provincial capitals to the periphery from the sound FTL description (probably a X-Boat network for comms). Are travel times consistent for the same distance everywhere? Is it possible two ships to spend a month in transit yet cover different distances based on the start and end points of the trip?

If transit seems instant to the crews on board, then there is potential for there to be at least a few old Imperial task forces wandering around still in the far reaches of the devestated areas that are not yet aware of the new political arrangements (or even that the enemy has been defeated/driven off). Will they go rogue? Declare for the Emporer? side with a province? Setup their own province (this is less likely unless they can solve their logistics issues independently)?

If you want FTL comms then perhaps a leaf out of Starwars may be useful - almost all ships had FTL comms, but limited to 20 or 30 light years (say about 8 parsecs if you prefer) at most. Longer ranged comms were possible, but required huge installations with massive power (planets and largert star destoyers only). Relaying smaller unit together for comms would also be possible, but not as fast and there would be extra security issues that might make it unsuitable for military comms.

How many of the thirteen provinces are still more or less functioning as entities? I'd assume that since the Capital was devestated, that at least one and more likely three provinces were smashed (maybe more) and at least parts of other were damaged (unless of course the Aracene had enough technical advantage, material and logistics capacity to invade from multiple locations - in which case how did they lose?). How are the provinces arranged? Spokes on a wheel style? Concentric rings, with each ring broken down into sections? An emporer implies a certain level of direct control over each province so each provincial capital is likely to be more or less the same travel time from the capital

The Emporer would have fled the Capital prior to it's destruction, but from the sound of it while he controls a portion space nearby to his new Capital, his ability to project power may be severely limited. Until he can construct more ships that is (and obtain and train personnel for them), but then he needs material to build them with which he cannot readily obtain..... Cue agreements, under-the-table dealings, smuggling, "tribute" missions and whatever else. Do not forget to factor in the level of delusion the current Emporer may have as well. Does this person have an accurate grip on the situation or are they operating under the impression they have more influence than they really do? Are they merely a figurehead for someone/something else. Certainly the defences are being run competently and the troops are still well trained, so something is going right. Power projection though....

From the sound of it the Magistrate (is it *really* the magistrate?) has managed to reproduce some group of alien technologies (it's wildly unlikley to be just one tech in isolation) and has managed to use them mass produce this one particular innovation. What other innovations are being worked on that cannot yet be mass produced? The description implies that he is operating out of one of the devestated areas, so it's likely he is constrained logistically from doing too many things production-wise simultaneously. The questions on eveyones minds are likely to centre around how much of the success the magistrate has had are down to technical superiority? Good Logistics/Strategy/Tactics/luck? Poor opposition? Cue much spying, speculation and the occasional military probe? Let's not forget the traitor in his ranks either...

The Parliament - a semi-toothless tiger strung together by the surviving provinces. The only reason they have even a semi-effective military is because everyone else would be at least somewhat paranoid about the Aracene returning (plus the magistrate, plus the Emporer) and of course what better way to get one of your ships with your spies into someone elses territory legitimately. However with a core command group that is more or less free of other ties it may yet turn out to be the only group capable of withstanding the other forces in play and maybe even grow into something better.

The provinces - Those few that survived largely intact will likely be the current economic power houses in the current scheme of things. The other breakaway groups or smaller provinces that haven't been absorbed will be treating them like the 800lb political and economic gorillas they are. They are probably wary of each other to differing degrees and playing diplomatic and/or military games with the smaller players as suits their current rulers temperaments. Cue much spying of course. Depending on what their fleets are like there is probably a fair bit of piracy and things like letters of marque may well be in play. Mercenaries and "independent naval operators" are also likely to be popular. The partially damaged provinces are likely to be military and diplomatic hotspots as the larger provinces try to gain control of their resources and they try to recover the devestated areas - unfortunately for them populations only grow so fast and recovering a lost colony isnt cheap (though less expensive than establishing a completely new one).

The periphery - Anything goes out here. The major navies are likely to be focussed on more internal issues than out here, but they might have bases secret or otherwise and depending on how much attention they pay to things this far out. even very large events may go unnoticed.

Well that's my current brain dump. Hopefully these questions get the thoughts flowing.

7

(40 replies, posted in Game Design)

The basic utility of Friday Night Firefight aside, the basic Cyberpunk d10 system had a few flaws. Mostly the equal (slightly greater even) emphasis given to stats over skills. Supposedly moving to Fuzion as the underlying system fixed that, but I wasn't really convinced.

Another choice might be Silhouette from DP9 - I find it offers a pretty good solution to skills versus stats issues. It isn't terribly granular though as each increase in stat or skill is closer to an exponential increase rather than linear, this isn't necessarily a bad thing though. It does have the advantage that it maps directly to a miniatures game (with multiple scales) and already uses d6's everywhere.

Speaking of d6's, I was always very fond of WEG's d6 system. Dead simple, capable of a fair degree of subtlety, it's a basic dice pool mechanism. Admittedly it's skewed a bit towards slightly more heroic style games, however I seem to recall there being ways to tune it somewhat. WEG may or may not be dead though - it's been a while since I've heard anything about their fate.

Was there an RPG scale version from Renegade Legion? I seem to recall there being one(Legionaire?), but I could be mistaken (I only have Leviathan, Interceptor and Centurion).

Finally the other system that would probably be useful would be Tri-Stat. It's adaptable to a fairly wide range of game types from mundane to superheroic and is pretty simple. It's something of a testament to the systems popularity that the 3rd edition of BESM was published (by a White Wolf imprint) after GOO finally imploded.

What not to do! Stay away from level based systems - they work OK for fantasy, but tend to be lousy at more technological settings. Staty away from the overly complex as well (Hero, I'm looking at you!). Some sort of point buy or use based experience setup would be the go. Ideally some sort of effects based setup as they seem to be most flexible - Tri-Stat or Silhouette would be the best matches, with the other requiring a bit more work to be useful.

8

(40 replies, posted in Game Design)

Friday Night Firefight was a pretty good system in the day (i.e. original black box edition), if a little brittle around the edges. Later versions tried to fix this in various and uniformly bad ways. However, the core premise of the original system was pretty good - basically each weapon did a certain amount of damage per unit of energy. Unfortunately it fell down at the mid-to-high range damages because the armour system scaled linearly and damage did not (physics is wonderful, no?).

I was going to say it's fixable with some minor changes, but really, looking back at what I did to fix it is really more down the lines of at least a lung or liver transplant (with kidney thrown in for good measure). The end result was a system that was as deadly as the original but without the narrow working range - once you started using 7.62mm NATO in the original you started to really break the system (namely you could fairly reliably bring down AV-4's), after my tweaks this was no longer possible (as should be the case - the armour on an AV-4 should be proof against small arms fire).

Later versions, just broke everything and are best stayed a long, long, long way away from.