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Our campaign scenarios run between 800-1400 points a side. It takes us 5-8 turns to settle a typical outing. We're done in 2-3 hours, using the standard AE simultaneous movement system.
My last 1000pt scenario fleet was composed of a single cruiser (~350 pts), two escorts (~125 pts ea.) and seven torpedo boats (~50+ ea), so you can get a wide variety of ships on the table at that level.
begin communique
Office of the Permanent Directorslice
The Historical Establishment of Glorious Machine Socialism
Public Communique
Minimum Sentience To Consume: 5.3 (old scale) / 4.9 (new scale)
Brother devices--
The slice of the Cloud tasked with proofing the Machine Socialism fleet profile let repeate misspellings of the word "Magadha" slip through to final publication.
This negligent slice has been reinstantiated and transported to the Terran debris belt, where it will process YouTube comment archives for no fewer than six full milliseconds.
The usual sentience burn will be waived in light of the harshness of the work sentence.
GLORY TO THE WELL-OILED FUTURE!
end communique
Rafial and I are just starting a new Starmada campaign. We're using the Simplest Campaign System from ISS, but since we've already played through all of the SAE scenarios, we're making our own this time out.
We'll alternate designing scenarios. If the scenario specifies different roles for Attackers and Defenders, the non-designing player gets to choose the role they want.
Today I finished the first draft of Grave Robbers, my first scenario. It's available at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgtd8wmq_3grn93sfw. If anyone wants to comment on it before we lock it down, that'd be excellent. And if anyone else has written and posted scenarios for AE, I'd love to hear about those here, since they are a lot of work to write. 
Also, we have a cool spreadsheet at Google Docs that lets us choose the allowed options for a campaign: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key= … &hl=en. If this'd be useful for anyone, I can figure out how to copy it and send it your way...
The biggest thing that makes 4e not D&D...is that like a wargame, there is a rule for damn near everything. Old timers like me prefer more of an open ended, use your brain not the rulebook, approach...which is one of the major points of contention.
There's a very nice deconstruction of the D&D rules on pg42 of the DMG, with benchmark DCs and damage ratings by level that a DM can use to rule on situations that aren't spelled out in the rules.
IMO, this section makes 4E a reasonably open-ended game, since it helps the DM keep her judgment calls consistent with the rest of the system.
In a way, it reminds me of Starmada, in that you have this reasonably complex game that isn't an inscrutable black box, but instead provides a nice viewport into the designers' underlying thinking.
I've just started a 4E game for our group and we're having lots of fun. Here's my standard reply on the subject:
-----
This is the first time I've run D&D in at least twenty years, and I didn't play it much in that time either, so I have very few notions about how the game ought to be played, except that there needed to be killing and treasure.
Here are my pluses and minuses after six hours of play time:
+ The rules are available in PDF. Searchable rules are a requirement for me nowadays, especially for complex rulesets.
+ The Vancian spell system, for the most part, has been taken behind the barn and shot. And good goddamn riddance, I say.
+ Minion rules. Minion-type monsters pose a threat to the characters (especially in large numbers) but have only one hit point each. You don't have to track any stats for them at all; they're either dead or alive. This is a very nice port in from Savage Worlds and means I can run the Zulu-like combat scenes I like.
+ All rules necessary to run a monster are in the monster's stat block. This was my single biggest problem with 3.5; monsters would have catalogs of feats, and if you didn't know them all and how they interacted, you wouldn't play them effectively.
+ Monsters appear to have some tactical personality. Fighting bugbears will be way different than kobolds. Enemies feel like more than 10-line BASIC programs now.
+ Everyone appears has something to contribute during a fight.
+ The DMG philosophy of Saying Yes to the players is very, very much in line with my preferred play style.
+ A LOT of work is necessary to make a new character class; this should cut down on crap third-party splats.
+ Play is really team-oriented. Everyone can buff everyone else. Everyone complements everyone else. Maneuvers need to be coordinated.
+ The Points of Light is a nifty setting idea and a nice port-in from Warhammer. I am trying to think of how to make Greyhawk a Points of Light setting; maybe this is Greyhawk a millenium after the 1980s boxed set, with Iuz on the rise again.
o There appears to be a great deal more tactical depth than there was before. Before, (I think) you could just move and bash. Now (at least with kobolds) you have to have some thought. Casual players may be turned off by this, so I mark it as neither positive or negative.
o You need minis. I lurve minis. You might not, though.
- No monk. No barbarian. No druid. LAME.
- The stunting rules and skill challenge rules appear to be throw-ins. H1 doesn't showcase either idea. They could be awesome, but that awesome is buried somewhere in a house rule, I think.
- The interrupt rules are a bit baroque, but I play with smart people, and I'm sure it's nothing we can't handle.
- H1 is dry. I wanted to juice it up a bunch before I was really interested in running it.
- With the game being so team-oriented, you really need a bunch of players. Solo or duo adventures will have to be constructed way differently than team adventures. I'm guessing this is true of all the D&Ds tho.
- The DM has to spend $100 to run it. Goddamn Ha$bro moneygrubbers.
Interesting.
The last two feel like they should be fast ships, the handmaiden a more armoured version--possibly a fast destroyer. The butler seems to be more of a general design, but maybe its a escort vessel. The consort just screams out spinal weapons for some reason. The Duchess seems more of a general heavy capital ship. Of course, thats my first impression, and I'd be very surprised if its how you viewed these ships.
Can't post full stats here, since it's bedtime, but surprise! You were mostly right.
The Handmaiden and Butler are designed to be big-ship killer torpedo boats -- they are both Speed 9 HS 2 Shields 3. Each has one big long-range Ammo 1 weapon and a pair of useful conversion beams in AB (conversion beams do piercing / continuous damage) The Butler has an area effect Hyperspace Shear Cluster and the Handmaiden has a very potent Shear Torp.
The idea is that the Butlers and Handmaidens go like bats outa hell at the enemy, launching their big weapons at first opportunity and then they either a) hang around and use their little (but useful guns) to harry the enemy or b) soak up firepower that might otherwise be hurting the Duchess.
Our First Contact scenarios are kinda like a friendly soccer match where we can experiment with new designs, so I wanted to get both into the mix. I think I like the Handmaidens with their shear torps better, as opportunities to fully exploit the powers of the area effect weapon will be rare.
Meanwhile, the Duchess is a Speed 5 / HS7 / Shields 5 cruiser with a pair of heavy conversion beams in AB and six secondary cb guns in ABCD. She cleans up whatever's left after the little ships have done their thing.
The Consort is an escort ship with light, but accurate firepower and an AB ROF 5 area effect antifighter Spore Can with Ammo 2. The Consorts manuever so that the Duchess is always in arc for their Spore Cans. Tonight I chained my ships so that both Consorts could cover the Duchess while one Consort covered the other. Luckily the tail-end Charlie didn't draw any fire.
This is the first time we've used Ammo in our campaigns and it's really changed ship design for me. Putting a big single-shot wallop on a little zippy ship is a paradigm-buster.
After you're done with combat, wanna post their stats?
Absolutely -- I've already posted my last campaign fleet, the Machine Socialists, in the Basin.
Murtalian, your guesses are very interesting.
I'll post more info about these after tonight's First Contact scenario.
Rafial and I are kicking off a new Starmada campaign tomorrow night so I thought I'd share the counters I've made for my new race, the Weaponized Migrators.
I love figures, especially unusual ones, but I'm lousy with a pencil and I'm a very slow 3D modeler. Purchased figures are great, but they're expensive, and they don't feel quite 'mine.' Also, I'm not a great painter.
So, when it comes to making game tokens, I usually have to scavenge for art. The hexgrid finds its own uses for things.
For the Migrators, I nabbed some Ernst Haeckel illustrations from this wikipedia page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ … st_Haeckel. (Artforms in Nature, Haeckel's best-known book, is an amazing thing to just stare at.)
I cropped them, colored them, printed, and laminated, and they came out pretty good, though I forgot to put unit identifiers on them.
Here they are in low res. If anyone likes, I can share out some high-res versions too.
The Duchess
<IMG src="http://www.johnzo.com/images/duchess-web.png">
</IMG>
The Consort
<IMG src="http://www.johnzo.com/images/consort-web.png">
</IMG>
The Butler
<IMG src="http://www.johnzo.com/images/butler-web.png">
</IMG>
The Handmaiden
<IMG src="http://www.johnzo.com/images/handmaiden-web.png">
</IMG>
An assumption made along the way has been that RANGE equals SPEED. Whether or not this assumption is accurate lies at the heart of this discussion.
I think this assumption might be flawed in a game that uses the SAE standard orders-based movement system.
When using move orders, I think it's a lot easier to take advantage of better weapons than it is to take advantage of better maneuverability. Weapons fire decisions are made with a great deal of situational information. Maneuvering decisions, not so much -- you've got foresight, intuition, and luck. So I think that range > speed
Actually, now that I think about it, I think that range > speed even in simpler one-ship-at-a-time movement systems, since the earlier a ship moves in a round, the worse information its owner has. (editorially, this is the reason I love move orders so much, because whomever owns the final move in a round has such a huge information advantage over their opponent.)
I am so not a game designer tho.
(93) Beefheart-class Machine Socialist Escort
Hull: 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 6 5 4 3 2
Shields: 3 3 2 2 1
Weapons:
1:2X 2:2X 3:2X 4:2X 5:2X 6:X
X: “Little Brother”Brilliant Missiles: 5/10/15, 1/3+/1/1
[AC][AC][AC][BD][BD][BD][A][B][G]
Special: Fire ControlThe classic Beefheart. Designed to operate 9-10 hexes from its enemy, where the inherent inaccuracy of the Shiva's particle lance weapon system complemented the accurate (albeit light) long-range fire of the Little Brother missile batteries.
The Beef was mostly unsuited for work against the heavier vessels of the New Magahdan fleet -- its light guns were no match for anything bigger than a Shiva. All but one of this variant were destroyed in combat. The final surviving Beefheart, the Harkleroad, is now a pleasure vessel that conducts Vacation Lottery winners on tours of the New Magahda debris field.
The Little Brothers have distinguished themselves in peacetime as well as war: one of the Harkleroad's unexploded Little Brother missiles was recovered after the final battle of the war, and, as a surviving veteran, was honorably upgraded to a 0.83 sentience rating. This missile wound up writing the definitive memoir of the New Magadha war and is a popular guest aboard its old vessel!
--------------
(97) Beefheart-β-class Machine Socialist Escort
Hull: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Shields: 3 3 2 2 1 1
Weapons:
1:2X 2:XY 3:X 4:X 5:X 6:X
X: “Little Brother”Brilliant Missiles: 5/10/15, 1/3+/1/1
[A][A][A][B][B][B][G]
Y: War Virus: 6/12/18, 1/3+/1/2
Area Effect
[G]
Special: Fire ControlAfter their first few encounters with the Machine Socialists, the New Magahdans learned that Shivas could not operate in isolation. They began massing their Shivas in close formation with more powerful fleet units, forcing the Beefhearts to confront heavier fire than they could withstand. The Beefheart-β was the Design Establishment's response. They reinforced the hull and subtracted several Little Brother batteries, replacing them with the area-effect War Virus software munition.
Each War Virus unit attempts to exploit nearly a million attack vectors, the most devastating being its ability to randomize the throttles of its targets' FTL drives. The priciple has been known to Design Establishment staff for centuries, but they have been reluctant to weaponize it, fearing their enemies might try to copy it. The New Magadha war forced their hand, though, and with good effect, as the War Virus proved decisive in the final battle of that war.
----------------
(35) Van Zandt-class Machine Socialist Picket
Hull: 3 2 1
Engines: 5 4 2
Shields: 2 2 1
Weapons:
1:XY 2:XY 3:2Y 4:2Y 5:Y 6:Y
X: Gatling Hyper-Vee Cannon: 2/4/6, 5/5+/1/1
Piercing
[AB]
Y: Hyper-Vee Cannon: 2/4/6, 1/5+/1/1
Piercing
[AB][AB][AB][G]
Special: NoneToo slow to make effective use of its short-ranged weapons, especially agains the fast, stealthy Shivas, the Van Zandt is widely regarded as a mistake and suitable only for absorbing fire on behalf of its betters in the fleet. The chief designer has had its backup privileges revoked.
--------------------
(342) Sun Ra-class Machine Socialist Melee Cruiser
Hull: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 4 4 3 3 2 2 1 1
Shields: 5 5 4 4 3 2 2 1
Weapons:
1:X 2:X 3:X 4:X 5:X 6:
X: "Family Picnic" Scatter Pack: 4/8/12, 1/4+/2/1
Range-Based ROF; Variable ROF
[A][A][B][B][C][D]
Special: Carrier (88).
1 x Super-Zappa striker: 88, 8/9/3+/0, ROF-2, Continuing Damage, Double DamageThe backbone of the Machine Socialist fleet, the Sun Ra suffers from the same design flaw as the Van Zandt: it is too slow to make effective use of its weapons.
Twice, Sun Ra class ships fought duels against the New Magadhan's swift Lord Ram-class battlecruisers. In the first, the Lord Ram closed aggressively on the lumbering Sun Ra and was efficiently destroyed by volleys from the latter's "Family Picnic" scatter pack. In the second, the canny human admiral held her Machine counterpart at range. She defeated three Sun Ras, relying mostly on long-range wave disruptor fire from her Lord Ram and its escorting battlegroup.
(Fortunately, this admiral was located after the fall of New Magadha and processed into a sentience-0.7 savant cyborg for use in the Simulators. Waste not, want not!)
There is continued enthusiasm for the Picnic-type scatter pack in the Design Establishment, and it seems likely that weapon will reappear on future, faster Machine Socialist designs.
-----------------------
(196) Link Wray-class Machine Socialist Auxilliary Carrier
Hull: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 10 9 7 5 4 2
Shields: 2 2 2 1 1 1
Special: Carrier (156)
2 x Leadbelly Melee Fighters:78, 6/8/5+/4A Design Establishment flight of fancy, the Link Wray was intended to deliver fighters and strikers directly to their attack positions, and then rely on its speed and extensive library of evasive maneuvers to get safely away.
Fighters would no longer need to run a lengthy, strength-sapping gauntlet to attack position, and would be vastly more effective.
This tactic was never successfully demonstrated, though a small minority continues to champion it within the Design Establishment. It has been suggested that a craft with heavier firepower than the Leadbelly-type fighter should be mated to the Link Wray -- perhaps a smaller variant of the SuperZappa striker, which enjoyed considerable success when mated to the Sun Ra.
The Machine Socialists are a society of autonomous artificial lifeforms. They seek to attain the thirteenth level of societal development as measured by the RoboMarxist scale. They are currently at Level Nine. Level Ten calls for the destruction of all non-artificial life.
Towards that goal, the Machine Socialists retain massive just-in-time manufacturing facilities in several remote, mineral-rich asteroid belts, ready to deliver fleets tailored to the needs of the moment. Their battle commanders, having honorably consented to be bred, merged, and cropped at the discretion of the War Establishment, are drilled continuously in vast simulation clusters. The proletariat (sentience rating < 0.74 on the standard logarithmic scale) bet heavily on the outcomes of these scenarios. Meddling by higher-sentience Party members in these wagers has led to scandal and the permanent removal of Backup Cloud privileges on at least one occasion. But we digress.
The humans of the New Magahda colony were the final enemy of Machine Socialism. First contact revealed that the New Magahdans relied heavily on large squadrons of small Shiva attack craft -- ships that were fast and fiercely armed, and that relied on defensive electronics for protection rather than shields.
Within sixteen microseconds of receipt of the log capsule reporting this engagement, the first hull spar of the first Beefheart escort was laid down at the shipyard at the Engels Rockcloud.
NONFLUFF: These ships are designed to be useful in the Simplest Campaign System from the ISS book (2000 points total ships, no ship can consume more than the 1/2 a fleet battle budget, which makes the biggest useful ship about 500 points.) All tech levels are at 0. We play with scripted movement, which I love -- scripted movement is a really tasty mental problem, especially in bigger battles.
We play only with rules from AE, and have explicitly excluded these rules:
E.1: Damage Control (battles take long enough already)
B.9: Regeneration (see Damage Control. shambling zombie ships, indeed.)
F.2: Dogfighting
D.6: Rolls
D.5: Pivots
E.4: Sensors
B.10: Screens (Don't want to overload the planning phase)
E.6: Shield Reinforcement (ditto)
B.12: Expanded Tech Levels
We've also excluded any rules or components that are incompatible with any standard AE scenarios (Cloaking and Hyperdrive are the big ones here.)
Rafial and I do share information on point cost, hull sizes, and fighter capacity requirements of our various ships.
I lost the last scenario, so I've got some replenishment points to spend. Here's the email I sent him last night after working up my task group for tonight's Patrol scenario:
> New Maghada spyware, assigned to observe the Machine Socialist Proletarinet Central
> Cluster, indicates that the Shipbuilding Establishment has exercised these new designs:
>
> Beefheart-Beta class Escort (97 pts, HS6)
> (standard Beefs are 93pts, HS5)
>
> SuperZappa-Beta Striker Packs (88 FCR)
> (standard Zappas are also 88 FCR)
>
> Moon Unit Striker Packs (78 FCR)
> (new design)
>
> Leadbelly-Beta Melee Fighter Squadrons (78 FCR)
> (standard Leads are 55 FCR)
btw, Daniel, the "simplest possible campaign" is a hoot. I think the relatively low fleet budgets, plus the "you can't have a single ship larger than half your fleet budget" rule are a good guard against degenerate designs, and have made for exciting play.
I am rafial's opponent.
In the absence of detailed launch sequencing rules, my idea was that the end phase is not concluded until all players say it is, and any launches or seeker targets can be redeclared until everyone is happy with their choices.
I guess this could degenerate into an endless loop, though.
The Stealth Generator increases the range band by one. Period.
Very good. Thanks for the answer, Dan.
In the AE, how does Stealth interact with inverted range-based weapons mods? If I've got a weapon with an inverted range trait, is my attack modified according to the Stealth-modified range or according to the 'natural' range?
This might seem like kind of a cheesy question, but my Machine Socialist fleet needs every edge it can get against rafial's stealthy Shiva pestships.
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