There have been two competing schools of thought about economics in this campaign. One school takes the view that the system should be uncomplicated, the other that it should be more detailed and force people into more realistic decisions.
In considering how to reconcile these two notions, I've been picking back and forth through the numbers, trying to find a simpler method of billing for maintenance which will still place players under pressure to keep trade routes open and compete for limited resources.
I flirted with the idea of giving every planet a dice roll, so as to make income variable each turn. Since every player would have half a dozen planets to begin with, a D6 roll should have averaged out over the Empire, but with a bit of uncertainty which I thought would be interesting. Looking at this made me look again at the numbers for maintenance, and it suddenly hit me that I was going round in circles.
From the beginning the idea was to set income levels within empires so as to make it testing to maintain a fleet without taking the risk of attacking something potentially profitable. This is, of course, completely circular and mad, since I was setting the income on the basis of the size of the fleet I wanted. There's nothing wrong with that, except that it made the entire process of calculation and billing pretty much redundant.
So I'm now presenting for you to consider a much simpler model. I'll need to do some banging around with the detail, but the concept is simple enough;
Every planet will have a support rating; it will be able to support a set number of credits worth of ship. That support rating can be applied either to ships in the system or to the fleet, but it's only available to the fleet when the planet itself has a working link to the rest of the empire.
There will be a higher support rating which will apply when the planet is trading with another world. Every world will have a primary resource type. Trade bonuses can only be obtained by trade with a world which is both in another empire and has a different primary resource. Primary resources will also make it easier to build things, in ways which I haven't got round to thinking out yet.
Surpluses can be banked; if you have planetary support capacity greater than your fleet, it can be added to your account for later use for either construction or repair.
This leaves the question of construction and repair. Repair is easy enough - at the moment I figure to add an extra support cost equivalent for each row of hull boxes with damage; so if you've got damage in the first row the support cost doubles, and so on. Construction; I figure that construction ought to cost between five and ten times the support cost. 10 seems punitive, 5 not much more than the cost of major repairs. However, whatever base number we settle on, I would expect to vary that so that it gets cheaper to build ships if you have easy access to resources.
The idea behind all of this is to cut the amount of book-keeping down. The very crude approach to repairs means that it's no longer necessary to add up the price of everything that got shot up or to worry about combat repairs. However, the need for some kind of banking of money means that we can't get away from some form of turn based accounting. This is a pity - I really wanted to come up with a system where you simply compared the size of your fleet with the size of your empire at the end of the turn and counted as out of supply if you didn't have enough money.
Finally, I still want to stick with endurance penalties. As an outline, ships will be able to operate without support vessels for a limited number of turns. The rough and ready formula will be divide 800 by the points cost of the ship to get the number of turns it can work without either returning to friendly space or being accompanied by an auxiliary with a cargo capacity equivalent to the mass of its weapons and fighters (you could get sticky and add something about refuelling, but I'm going to start from the position that they're WARships, and that penalising them on the basis of weapon fit will hit everything else as well). Each auxiliary cargo equivalent will save the vessel(s) supported from having to make one return to friendly space. (it is entirely foreseeable that players could choose to rotate auxiliaries back and forth and since that kind of convoy protection makes for an interesting game, it's something I'd encourage). The idea here is to put a stopper on using nothing but super ships without having to write weird rules to increase their actual cost. I can probably come up with some handwaving rationalisation for the notion that a small ship can somehow get by for longer without supply than a big ship, but it would just be a specious rationalisation for the real thought, so I'm not going to bother and I recommend that you don't try using "but in real life" logic on this one. Tell me another way to get the same overall feel, and I will listen to that. The objective of the endurance rule is to make it very easy to send out small patrols of light ships and much harder to send out large task forces of very heavy ships. That's a desired outcome for the kind of campaign I want to try to run; if everyone finds that unbearable, then I'm wrong in my outlook and the field is wide open to someone else to run a different campaign more to everyone's liking.
As always, feedback is welcome.
Monday 26 November 2007
Tuesday 25 September 2007
first of a million revisions
Supply will have to include provision for stockpiling resources. I'll work out the mechanism when I see what else may need to be changed in the overall design.
Monday 24 September 2007
Philosophy of the Second Edition Campaign Rules;
Rule 1 Space and Time
this comes out of the need to give more space for expansion with other players and to deal with the dispersion/concentration issue. It also moves away from the previously simplistic approach to unassigned worlds in favour of a model where people will think a bit about whether they're going to attack rather than co-exist; when you can get the income benefit of the world without invading it, players will be less likely to launch strike forces at neutral and more likely to skirmish, which is what we've been trying to get to.
Rule 2 Economics + Rule 10 Trade
Between them these two rules are intended to create a more realistic income model which will give direct incentives to operate patrols and escorts instead of vast strike forces. Since on average you need 1.7 credits to run 100 points of fleet, the model is built to give roughly 80 credits worth of income per week from your starting allocation of worlds, or about 13.3 on average per world. Because we've moved to a weekly budget, the base numbers are lower. They're also affected by the fact that trade is needed to make the most of the income; if you don't trade among your worlds and with other players, you won't have enough money to cover costs.
You're restricted to one trading partner per world for a couple of reasons. The first is that although there probably won't be that many worlds which could readily trade with more than one partner, it would be messy figuring out the links if it was made possible. The second is that it gives more incentives for trade warfare if only one person can have the benefit of trading with any given world.
Rule 3 Logistics
These rules are intended to give a more realistic supply model without creating too much of a burden on players and and the referee. Players will have to work out the weekly operations cost of each design, but this is a pretty simple calculation. Under the old system, average cost per week of a ship was 5 credits (this being roughly a heavy cruiser). Under the new system, cost per week is the same. The supply tonnage is 1 credit per ton. A standard 100 ton fleet auxiliary costing 193 points can carry 56 tons, or enough for eleven heavy cruisers for one weeks, or for the same number of frigates for five weeks, or five capital ships for a week or one capital ship for five weeks. It looks initially as if weaponry supply requirements are lax (in that you don't have to pay weapon maintenance if you don't fight), but they amount to half of the supply requirements for the average force; the resupply requirements for weaponry after a fight are the same as the resupply for two weeks of non combat operations. Weaponry costs is a flat rate, regardless of actual consumption of power and/or ordnance. Essentially it assumes that the cost of delivering X amount of hurt is pretty much invariant; what beam weapons save on materials cost, they waste on fuel and constant adjustments, and so on. It also means that weapons which cost more to install cost more to run. Generally, the more weapon heavy a ship is, the greater the cost burden of running it
Rule 6 Interdiction and Commerce raiding
These rules are intended to make commerce raiding worthwhile mostly as a way of annoying the other player, but tempting when you're short of resources and can't trade for them. The actual income from commerce raiding isn't likely to pay for the trouble involved, but the nuisance effect for the other player may be enough to make him commit resources once there's more than one commerce raider in a system. Note that pirates are commerce raiders controlled by the umpire. I am open to arguments to increase the take from commerce raiding so that it really hurts, but a significant increase would make it indistinguishable from interdiction.
Rule 7 Offensive operations
These rules were written with two objectives in mind. Firstly, they meet some of the criticisms about the old abstract system for attacking worlds that belonged to players. Secondly they ought to force players to start making serious investments in dedicated assault ships. In both scenarios the intention is to make it labour intensive to attack a planet. Ground assault will take weeks to succeed unless overwhelming force is used, and attacking to destroy will use up prodigious volumes of supply, with each individual attack using the same amount of materiel as five normal combat turns.
Rule 8 System defences.
The numbers had to be changed to meet the new income levels, but the outcomes should be broadly similar.
Rule 9 Reconstruction
If you've got destruction, you have to have reconstruction. I considered, but decided against, a discount scheme for reinstating orbital defences.
Rule 15
Note the significant decrease in dummy markers. Essentially, we had so many of them that they made for clutter above and beyond any game utility. Now most counters will not be dummies, although they might just be weasel boats.
Rule 17 Attacking fleets
Basically, this just strips out a lot of crap in an effort to avoid stupid battles of disengagement where one side is completely overmatched by the other. Now players simply decide whether they're in or out, and once they're in, they're committed. I thought about pursuit battles, but the reality is that by the time the attacking force could close to the withdrawing force, they'd have FTL'd out.
this comes out of the need to give more space for expansion with other players and to deal with the dispersion/concentration issue. It also moves away from the previously simplistic approach to unassigned worlds in favour of a model where people will think a bit about whether they're going to attack rather than co-exist; when you can get the income benefit of the world without invading it, players will be less likely to launch strike forces at neutral and more likely to skirmish, which is what we've been trying to get to.
Rule 2 Economics + Rule 10 Trade
Between them these two rules are intended to create a more realistic income model which will give direct incentives to operate patrols and escorts instead of vast strike forces. Since on average you need 1.7 credits to run 100 points of fleet, the model is built to give roughly 80 credits worth of income per week from your starting allocation of worlds, or about 13.3 on average per world. Because we've moved to a weekly budget, the base numbers are lower. They're also affected by the fact that trade is needed to make the most of the income; if you don't trade among your worlds and with other players, you won't have enough money to cover costs.
You're restricted to one trading partner per world for a couple of reasons. The first is that although there probably won't be that many worlds which could readily trade with more than one partner, it would be messy figuring out the links if it was made possible. The second is that it gives more incentives for trade warfare if only one person can have the benefit of trading with any given world.
Rule 3 Logistics
These rules are intended to give a more realistic supply model without creating too much of a burden on players and and the referee. Players will have to work out the weekly operations cost of each design, but this is a pretty simple calculation. Under the old system, average cost per week of a ship was 5 credits (this being roughly a heavy cruiser). Under the new system, cost per week is the same. The supply tonnage is 1 credit per ton. A standard 100 ton fleet auxiliary costing 193 points can carry 56 tons, or enough for eleven heavy cruisers for one weeks, or for the same number of frigates for five weeks, or five capital ships for a week or one capital ship for five weeks. It looks initially as if weaponry supply requirements are lax (in that you don't have to pay weapon maintenance if you don't fight), but they amount to half of the supply requirements for the average force; the resupply requirements for weaponry after a fight are the same as the resupply for two weeks of non combat operations. Weaponry costs is a flat rate, regardless of actual consumption of power and/or ordnance. Essentially it assumes that the cost of delivering X amount of hurt is pretty much invariant; what beam weapons save on materials cost, they waste on fuel and constant adjustments, and so on. It also means that weapons which cost more to install cost more to run. Generally, the more weapon heavy a ship is, the greater the cost burden of running it
Rule 6 Interdiction and Commerce raiding
These rules are intended to make commerce raiding worthwhile mostly as a way of annoying the other player, but tempting when you're short of resources and can't trade for them. The actual income from commerce raiding isn't likely to pay for the trouble involved, but the nuisance effect for the other player may be enough to make him commit resources once there's more than one commerce raider in a system. Note that pirates are commerce raiders controlled by the umpire. I am open to arguments to increase the take from commerce raiding so that it really hurts, but a significant increase would make it indistinguishable from interdiction.
Rule 7 Offensive operations
These rules were written with two objectives in mind. Firstly, they meet some of the criticisms about the old abstract system for attacking worlds that belonged to players. Secondly they ought to force players to start making serious investments in dedicated assault ships. In both scenarios the intention is to make it labour intensive to attack a planet. Ground assault will take weeks to succeed unless overwhelming force is used, and attacking to destroy will use up prodigious volumes of supply, with each individual attack using the same amount of materiel as five normal combat turns.
Rule 8 System defences.
The numbers had to be changed to meet the new income levels, but the outcomes should be broadly similar.
Rule 9 Reconstruction
If you've got destruction, you have to have reconstruction. I considered, but decided against, a discount scheme for reinstating orbital defences.
Rule 15
Note the significant decrease in dummy markers. Essentially, we had so many of them that they made for clutter above and beyond any game utility. Now most counters will not be dummies, although they might just be weasel boats.
Rule 17 Attacking fleets
Basically, this just strips out a lot of crap in an effort to avoid stupid battles of disengagement where one side is completely overmatched by the other. Now players simply decide whether they're in or out, and once they're in, they're committed. I thought about pursuit battles, but the reality is that by the time the attacking force could close to the withdrawing force, they'd have FTL'd out.
Campaign Rules; 2nd edition; first draft for comments
1. Time and Space
1.1 The edges of the campaign area are soft; players are free to explore beyond them, and new players may be added on the edges of known space at any time.
1.2 The initial playing area will contain about 80 systems in a grid of 169 hexes (13 by 13). All systems will have been randomly assigned economic stats ahead of time. Players will be aware of the economic value of all worlds.
1.3 Players will select their planets semi-randomly with playing cards. Red cards will give vertical co-ordinates, black cards will give horizontal. Each player will be dealt twelve cards. These can be secretly paired up however players choose. Players will then take it turns to play a pair of cards to claim a system. The first two pairs played must exactly match the coordinates of a system. After this, players may claim any system adjacent to the coordinates of their pair. Cards which can't be paired up are put to one side face down. When all pairs have been played out, the paired cards are reshuffled and each face down card has a second card dealt on to it. Any pairs which result from this process are then allocated to the players in turn. Where a pair gives a world which has already been claimed, the second player may claim any system within two hexes of his first system or within one hex of the system which he just lost out on.
1.4 This system is intended to give players more control over whether their domains are compact or dispersed without needing any rules to govern dispersion levels. It should result in players having between 5 and 8 worlds each, with players who have not been able to pick worlds of their choice being compensated with a slightly greater number of worlds.
1.5 The standard turn is a week. Any use of the FTL drive takes a week.
1.6 Unassigned worlds will have a randomly determined allegiance, discovered only when someone visits;
(1) Fully independent unified world government - will trade with all neighbors, but insist on keeping half of the player's trading profit
(2) Friendly to nearest player power - will trade with that power without insisting on extra profits. Can be used as a resupply base for 20% extra cost
(3) Hostile to nearest player power - will not trade with that power under any circumstances; may trade with others as if (1)
(4) Allied to the UN/Savasku/The Random Empire of Scary Things - as (1) but very dangerous to attack
(5) Balkanised stable as (1) but keeps two thirds of the player's trading profit
(6) Balkanised war-zone (6) No trade possible, peacekeeping mission required to stabilise it to (5), (4), (2) or (1) depending on outcome of the mission
1.7 Hexes are populated as follows; roll 1 d6. 1-3 a world is present. Roll again. On a 1, it's a resource world. Roll 1 d6. 1=Mining 2=Food 3=Fuel 4=Manufactured Goods 5=Luxuries 6=Major Trading Hub
1.8 A space lane automatically exists between each Major Trading Hub. Once these space lanes are drawn, dice for each system within three hexes of the hub. On a 1 or 2, a space lane exists between that system and the Hub in question. For each system which has a link to a hub, dice for each neighboring system within two hexes. On a 1 or 2, a space lane exists between those worlds.
2. Economics
2.1 Worlds will be allocated an income level and in some cases a resource base.
2.2 Income levels have been set to make it challenging at the outset to maintain a fleet of 4000 points.
2.3 Where uninterrupted trade is maintained between two worlds, the owners of both worlds get the combined income value. If there is no trade, the owner gets only the base income value. Where the trade route exists on a space-lane, benefits are doubled.
2.4 Fleet maintenance also requires access to resources. If you do not have and are not trading with a world which has a required resource, that aspect of fleet maintenance will cost double. Resources are: Fuel: Food: Manufactured Goods: Mining/Ore; Luxuries
2.5 Costs and income accumulate weekly; there are no separate economic turns
2.6 Initial income of a world is 2d5 credits. Resource worlds roll an additional d5, except for luxuries, which will roll 1 d10 every turn.
2.7 Major Trading Hub base income is increased by one credit for each world connected only to that Hub and no other Hub.
3. Logistics
3.1 Maintenance costs accumulate under three headings; fuel, crew and weaponry. These will rough out at 1%-1.6% of construction cost per week depending on ship types and mix.
3.2 Maintenance costs for fuel are based on the purchase cost of the drives for each vessel (yes, this means that it costs more to keep a Kravak drive running than a standard drive). Cost = 3% of the purchase cost of the FTL and Manoeuvre drives.
3.3 Crew costs are based on the number of crew boxes per ship at 0.2 credit per crew box.
3.4 Weaponry costs are based on the installed cost of weapons systems on the ship, including fighters and missiles. Cost = 3% of the build cost of the systems.
3.5 Fuel costs double if you have no access to a Fuel resource. Crew costs double if you have no access to a food resource. Weaponry maintenance and repair costs double if you have no access to a Manufactured goods resource. Hull construction and repair costs double if you have no access to Mining/Ore resources.
3.6 All ships are rated for operational endurance in weeks. This is the number of weeks which the ship can spend away from friendly bases without running out of supply. Fuel and crew supply requirements accrue each week. Weaponry supply requirements only accrue after combat. Ships are resupplied by returning to friendly bases or by rendezvousing with Supply Ships. Resupply requirements apply to entire task forces based on the requirement of the neediest ship present. Adding a heavy cruiser to a frigate task force puts all ships on the shorter supply cycle.
3.7 Each five turns of combat will reduce all endurance by one week and trigger a requirement for weaponry resupply. Ships which do not meet weaponry supply requirements will roll all future weapons system checks at the next worst level.
3.8 Each player may construct up to 500 points worth of supply ships at the same time as his main fleet. Supply ships have maintenance costs on exactly the same basis as warships. Supply Ships can also be leased from the private sector at four times standard maintenance cost. Supply ships must have their cargo holds allocated to a specific type of supply before the supply mission departs. One tonne of cargo capacity translates to 1 credit worth of supply.
3.9 Endurance limits;
Weekly maintenance cost= 0-2:6 weeks
Weekly maintenance cost = 2-5 4 weeks
Weekly maintenace cost = 5-8 3 weeks
Weekly maintenance cost 8-12 2 weeks
Weekly maintenance cost 12+ 1 week
4. Construction
4.1 Starting fleet is up to 4000 points.
4.2 Starting capital is 50 times initial planetary income.
4.3 Starting capital not spent on the starting fleet can be spent on supply ships, on spare parts (4.4), on system defences (8.2), or just kept for dealing with future problems.
4.4 Prepositioned spares cost 75% of normal price and have to be assigned to specific worlds in your empire or to cargo space on supply ships.
5. Movement
5.1 It takes one FTL jump to enter an empty hex from any other hex. It takes one jump to move between any two worlds not more than two hexes apart (ie, you can jump over an intervening hex between two systems).
5.2 Travel along a space lane takes one week between any two points on the route unless interdicted (5.4).
5.3 Travel in FTL is in a parallel universe and ships in FTL mode cannot be interfered with by other forces, either from normal space or on the same FTL route.
5.4 Space lanes require maintenance and support infrastructure which can be interdicted by hostile action or turned off by the owner. Where space lanes have been blocked, travel along the space lane ends at the last system before the block.
6. Attacking systems I; interdiction and commerce raiding
6.1 Interdiction of a system occurs when there is a hostile force within the system which is sufficient to deter commercial traffic through the system. Deterrence is deemed to be in place when the points value of hostile ships working in concert in the system is 50 times the trade value of the system. Trade benefits for that system are lost. The owning player continues to draw the base income.
6.2 Commerce raiding occurs when any armed hostile vessel is in the system. For each commerce raider in the system, the system owner loses one point of trade. The commerce raider's owner rolls 1d6; on 1-3, he gains the trade point the system owner lost (but see 6.3). On 4-5 he gets no benefit. On a 6, the raider is driven off and damaged, taking hits equivalent to the trade value of the system.
6.3 To benefit from the gained trade points, the commerce raiders must have 10 tons of cargo capacity available for each point, either on their own ships or an accompanying auxiliary. Successful commerce raiding against resource worlds will count as having access to that resource
7. Attacking systems II; Offensive operations
7.1 Offensive operations are divided into two phases, system control and planetary attack.
7.2 System control is achieved when any other fleet in the system has been driven off and the system defences have been defeated. (8. System defences). Once system control is in place, the owning player loses all benefit from the system.
7.3 Planetary attack is either intended to destroy the planetary infrastructure, denying all players benefit, or to take it intact by ground assault.
7.4 Planetary attack of either kind requires dedicated assault ships.
7.5 Destructive attacks can be carried out by warships either with dedicated orbital bombardment weaponry or with standard weaponry of class 4 and above. It takes five such weapons to knock out one point of infrastructure/income. Each strike consumes one week's worth on endurance for the vessel delivering it. For each strike, roll one d6. On 1-2 the infrastructure point is destroyed; 3-4 no effect; on 5-6 attacking ship takes damage equivalent to 5 x the remaining planetary income points.
7.6 Ground assault will require dedicated assault landing ships. This requires an minimum of 10 tons of assault dropships per planetary income point. For each 10 tons of dropship, roll 1 d6; 1-2 successful attack, 3 infrastructure destroyed rather than taken intact, 4-5 no effect, 6 dropship destroyed. This process continues each full turn until the planet is subdued or the supply of dropships runs out.
8. System defences
8.1 Players may construct system defence vessels and installations equal to 100 points per income point of the system. System defence vessels need not have FTL drives.
8.2 Players may elect to spend starting capital on strengthening system defences. System defences bought with starting capital get a 50% discount on normal costs, but can never be moved out of the system and are replaced and repaired at full original cost.
8.3 Non-player worlds have abstracted system defences equal to 150 points per income point of the system.
8.4 Player attacks on non-player worlds are handled abstractly; roll 1 d6. On a natural or modified 6, the non-player system surrenders. On a natural or modified 1, the player is driven off and takes damage equivalent to 20 times the planetary income. On 2-5 the outcome is inconclusive, the system is interdicted and a fresh attempt can be made to attack next turn.
8.5 The dice roll is modified based on the difference between the attacking force and the strength of the system defences. No attack is possible when the attacker has less than 50% of the system defence force. There is a -1 to the dice roll when the attacking force is between 50% and 100% of the system defences. +1 if more than twice the size, + 2 if more than three times the size and so on.
8.6 After surrender, roll 1 d6 to check the effects of fighting. On 1, the system has been devastated; defences and income have been wiped out. On 2-3 two-thirds of economic and defence capacity have been destroyed. On 4-5 one-third of economic and defence capacity have been destroyed. On 6, the conquest was peaceful and all systems have been captured intact.
8.6 Players may elect to use the abstract system in attacks on their own systems.
9. Reconstruction
9.1 Economic capacity of planets is restored only with time. It takes four weeks to restore each point of income lost. This can be reduced to two weeks per point if a neighboring planet with a higher base income than the original base income of the damaged planet foregoes all income to assist with reconstruction.
9.2 System defences can only be restored by replacing the lost equipment at cost.
10. Trade
10.1 All worlds within one FTL jump of each other can opt to trade. (Thus worlds on a space lane can trade with any other world on that space lane). To avoid insanity breaking out, every world trades with just one other world. A pair of worlds trading with each other each get income equal to the combined incomes of the pair of worlds. Players may make side deals sharing out the benefits differently. Non-player worlds tend to be greedy.
10.2 Once any world in a player empire is trading with a resource world, all worlds within the empire benefit from the resource.
11. Repairs
11.1. Damage can only be repaired in a friendly system or with the assistance of supply ships which have been pre-loaded with spare parts.
11.2. The general rule is that repair to combat damaged systems is charged at the same price as the original construction of the system.
11.3. Exceptions to the general rule on costs
11.3.1. Pre-positioned parts have already been paid for and are installed for free by your engineering staff.
11.3.2. Parts can be stripped from identical ships in the same task force and installed for 10% of the normal cost.
11.3.3. Parts can be stripped from other ships (including captured enemy vessels) and installed for 20% of the normal cost; but these parts will always test for damage at one level worse than original specification parts. Captured parts can be used only if they are functionally identical to the part being replaced. For avoidance of doubt, this expressly bars installing alien weapon systems in human vessels (and vice versa) and installing weapon types other than those originally installed in the weapon station.
11.3.4. Combat damaged systems which were repaired during combat have been jury-rigged and at least have to be recalibrated; during refitting roll 1 d6 for any such system. On a 1-3, the part has passed inspection. On 4-6 it needs to be completely replaced.
11.4. Minor repairs take a week. Major repairs take two weeks. Major repairs involve any weapon or drive system with a number higher than 3 (Including wave guns, nova cannon and anything generally weird), all core systems, the FTL drive, simultaneous repair to more than one hangar bay and level two shielding or any system equivalent to that. Doubling the speed of repair doubles the cost.
11.5. Repair costs of core systems are one third of the cost of the keel of the ship, in the unlikely event that you ever find yourself in the position of repairing one.
12. Capture
12.1. Anything left drifting in a system after a battle is considered to be captured by the victorious fleet. Boarding is not covered well by the rules and is not worth the extra trouble to worry about.
12.2. Captured vessels can be rebuilt, stripped or sold on.
12.2.1. Rebuilding is only practical where at least two rows of hull boxes remain intact and and at least three of the five major systems (three core services, main drive and FTL drive) have not been completely knocked out. Rebuilding is done at normal costs. If the vessel is not a type already in service with your fleet, add 20% to repair costs.
12.2.2. Useful parts can be stripped out and reused subject to the repair rules above. What is left is effectively useless and has no resale value
12.2.3. The capture can be sold on as is to unscrupulous scrap dealers for 10% of construction cost per intact row of hull boxes.
13. Construction
13.1. Ships can be built in game time at a rate of 100 pts per week per keel laid down. Alternatively, they can be bought on the open market at the beginning of each economic turn, but only from the designs in the Fleet Books or on designated websites. Any one navy can be designated as an ally, and their designs are available at 20% off. No-one can be allied in this sense outside their species (you would need alien crews to operate the ships, and alien crews are not available on the open market).
13.2 When construction begins, the umpire should be told the design mass of the ship and the vessel type. As construction continues, the umpire should be notified of what's been added on. Subsequent changes to construction will be billed under Rule 16; essentially this means that if you've half built a heavy cruiser, it's probably going to cost you quite a bit more to change it at the last minute into an escort carrier.
14. Abstracted battles
14.1. To speed things up, battles between task forces can be carried out in any manner that the engaged parties decide on. It may prove convenient to run a battle on hex paper with counters in the margins of something else. Players are encouraged to be imaginative.
15. Task groups and pre-battle recce
15.1. Strategic movement is by task group. Each task group gets one counter on the strategic map. A task group can be as many or as few ships as the player wishes. When a player has two or more task groups together in the same location, he may re-organise freely. Task groups may be split up at any time. Players are required to maintain a record of what each counter represents.
15.2. Each task group with at least one capital unit (BB, BDN, SDN, CVA, CVH, CVL) generates one dummy counter. All other counters used for strategic movement must represent at least one ship.
15.3. The composition of a task group will not be known to opponents until after it is contacted. Composition of all groups is to be notified to the umpire.
15.4. Movement each turn is pre-plotted and simultaneous. Where possible, moves should be notified to the umpire by email.
16. Non-standard designs and refitting
16.1. Anything listed in the Full Thrust rule book, in either of the two fleet books, More Thrust or the GZG website (at present this covers only two UNSC weapon systems) is considered standard. Any ship designed using only these sources and utilising the technology of only one race is considered standard.
16.2. Everything else is considered non-standard, and can be used only with the prior approval of the umpires at game start and after notification to all other players. Players may, for the purpose of subterfuge, clear and notify technologies they do not intend to use, but should be mindful that the umpires have limited patience and will simply disallow requests of all kinds once they start to feel put upon. Approval is likely in the case of the following designs already documented on the web: UNSC, IJN, New Israel, Arab League, OUDF. On a case by case basis, some of these ship designs may be deemed standard when used by that player; this will only happen if the entire fleet is constructed in that design idiom. Non-standard weapons will never be deemed to be standard, not least because very few non-standard weapons have been fully play-tested to the stage where points values are reliable.
16.3. Non-standard ships and equipment can be repaired or replaced only through pre-positioned stocks or at your capital. Anything not indigenous to the technology used in the majority of the fleet construction costs 20% more to install (and thus consequently to repair) and can only be repaired or replaced through pre-positioned stocks or at your capital. Thus, players choosing (for example) to install K-guns in otherwise human fleets will be penalised for doing so.
16.4 Oceanic Union Defence Forces and the Islamic Federation
Both fleets use modular weapons fits which can readily be swapped out. These should be costed as ship construction, not spare parts. So they count towards your 4000 pt cap on initial ship construction. They do not attract maintenance costs while not in use. They have to be placed in pre-designated locations. It takes a week to swap in a module. You can't swap two modules into a ship at the same time. Where the simplified fleet rule for maintenance is being used, the benefit is not suspended simply because module swaps have led to more than five distinct ship types, so as long as no more than five hull designs are being used at any one time.
16.5 Ships in your fleet can be refitted with other weapon systems at your option. Where the new system is of a similar type and of identical mass, this is treated as a repair and billed accordingly. Where the system is a different type or a different mass, add 20% to cost to take account of the structural changes required. Beams, grasers, pulse torpedo launchers and PDS systems are similar types of weapon to each other. Missile launchers are similar to missile racks. And so on. Hangars aren't similar to anything else, but uniquely can simply be replaced with something else (a single something else) at repair cost (not vice versa). Hull boxes are not similar to anything else, for those of you thinking about weakening your hulls to add more systems. Loading existing missile tubes with new and improved missiles counts as a refit, not just as a reload from existing stocks, and you will have to pay for it over and above maintenance costs - which will also be increased to reflect the change.
Refitting can never exceed the design weight of the ship. The design weight of the ship is chosen at the point when it is first constructed and cannot be exceeded for any reason subsequently.
It is open to constructors to make the design weight bigger than the actual weight at launch; but drives must be bought for the design weight of the ship, and deliver that performance. For clarity, that means that you can make a ship with a design weight of 100 and and an actual weight of 80; the FTL drive must weigh 10, and the M-drive will weigh 5 for every point of thrust you want to have. If that weight of M-drive would give the ACTUAL build weight of the ship a higher Thrust, this can optionally be used in combat, but the drive will be subjected to a system check whenever it is used at that Thrust.
16.6 Refitting of supply ships
Subsequent conversion of cargo spaces into fighter hangers or weapons racks costs 20% more than normal (because the engines cannae take it without extra strengthening brackets).
Freighters don't manoeuvre better when they're empty than when they're full. It wouldn't be economical.
17 Attacking other player's fleets
17.1 When two or more fleets move into the same system, the owning players will advise the umpire of the fleet composition.
17.2 The umpire will inform each player whether the other force(s) are significantly larger than their own, significantly smaller or roughly equal, and if there is a glaring discrepancy in the size of vessels involved.
17.3 Players will immediately decide whether to withdraw or attack.
17.4 If one attacks and all others withdraw, the attacking fleet has undisputed occupation of the system and remains there for the turn. The withdrawing fleets immediately select a destination and this is their move for the next turn.
17.5 If all decide to withdraw, each immediately selects their destination for next turn's move, and that's it.
17.6 If two or more players decide to attack, combat takes place. Before ships are put on the table, force commanders should make an unambiguous note of formation and speed. Formations can be as dispersed as you like. However, if you left your last system under fire, you must use the speed and formation you had at the moment you hit the FTL button.
17.7 All fleets dice for initiative. Highest initiative is assumed to have the drop on the others. Players who entered via a space lane get +1 on their initiative rolls. Players who were actually present at the beginning of the turn get +2
17.8 Relative positions on table. Top of the table (Brian's end, if that helps), is equivalent to top of the campaign map. The bottom is equivalent to the bottom. Task forces enter the table from the side equivalent to the hex side they move through to enter the hex on the campaign map. Forces already in the system can pick any side for entry, but must make a note of it before dicing for initiative.
17.9 Players with higher initiative will be able to make changes in their dispositions, getting one change for every two points by which they beat the opponents initiative roll. These can be used to change the point of entry on the table (one point per edge segment) the distance between forces (either to move your point of entry in by one foot, or the opponent's point of entry back) or to split your formation.
17.10 No matter how that goes, all fleets begin facing in towards the centre of the table
18 Departing under fire
18.1 The standard rules in Full Thrust for FTL'ing out apply. Executive summary, six inch spacing between ships, no use of manoeuvre drive and no weapons fired during the run-up to departure. The rules say that shields can be left on during this process. The firing up of the FTL drive is apparent during the previous move, and the blink out happens half way through the normal move.
18.2 Your departure takes the place of your normal move in the next strategic turn. This is also the case with recce units sent into a system which elect to leave after looking around. Immediately write down your destination; that's where you're going to be in a week. You arrive at your destination travelling in the same formation, spacing and speed that you had when you left the last hell hole.
18.3 You can try FTL ing while under fire, or you can try to build up enough distance to do it safely. Disengagement is not automatic; there is no real edge to the table, so getting off the table does not get you out of trouble. The first step to disengagement is to get out of weapons range of the enemy. This is considered to be the distance at which the enemy can't get more than one dice on you per working gun or 36 inches, whichever is less. At that point, check relative speed and the thrust of the poorest accelerating ship in each fleet. It should be clear cut whether the separation is going to increase or shrink. If not, roll one d6 each. If the disengager gets higher, he gets away, otherwise the pursuit continues. Plus one on the dice roll to whichever side has the highest acceleration in its poorest accelerating ship.
1.1 The edges of the campaign area are soft; players are free to explore beyond them, and new players may be added on the edges of known space at any time.
1.2 The initial playing area will contain about 80 systems in a grid of 169 hexes (13 by 13). All systems will have been randomly assigned economic stats ahead of time. Players will be aware of the economic value of all worlds.
1.3 Players will select their planets semi-randomly with playing cards. Red cards will give vertical co-ordinates, black cards will give horizontal. Each player will be dealt twelve cards. These can be secretly paired up however players choose. Players will then take it turns to play a pair of cards to claim a system. The first two pairs played must exactly match the coordinates of a system. After this, players may claim any system adjacent to the coordinates of their pair. Cards which can't be paired up are put to one side face down. When all pairs have been played out, the paired cards are reshuffled and each face down card has a second card dealt on to it. Any pairs which result from this process are then allocated to the players in turn. Where a pair gives a world which has already been claimed, the second player may claim any system within two hexes of his first system or within one hex of the system which he just lost out on.
1.4 This system is intended to give players more control over whether their domains are compact or dispersed without needing any rules to govern dispersion levels. It should result in players having between 5 and 8 worlds each, with players who have not been able to pick worlds of their choice being compensated with a slightly greater number of worlds.
1.5 The standard turn is a week. Any use of the FTL drive takes a week.
1.6 Unassigned worlds will have a randomly determined allegiance, discovered only when someone visits;
(1) Fully independent unified world government - will trade with all neighbors, but insist on keeping half of the player's trading profit
(2) Friendly to nearest player power - will trade with that power without insisting on extra profits. Can be used as a resupply base for 20% extra cost
(3) Hostile to nearest player power - will not trade with that power under any circumstances; may trade with others as if (1)
(4) Allied to the UN/Savasku/The Random Empire of Scary Things - as (1) but very dangerous to attack
(5) Balkanised stable as (1) but keeps two thirds of the player's trading profit
(6) Balkanised war-zone (6) No trade possible, peacekeeping mission required to stabilise it to (5), (4), (2) or (1) depending on outcome of the mission
1.7 Hexes are populated as follows; roll 1 d6. 1-3 a world is present. Roll again. On a 1, it's a resource world. Roll 1 d6. 1=Mining 2=Food 3=Fuel 4=Manufactured Goods 5=Luxuries 6=Major Trading Hub
1.8 A space lane automatically exists between each Major Trading Hub. Once these space lanes are drawn, dice for each system within three hexes of the hub. On a 1 or 2, a space lane exists between that system and the Hub in question. For each system which has a link to a hub, dice for each neighboring system within two hexes. On a 1 or 2, a space lane exists between those worlds.
2. Economics
2.1 Worlds will be allocated an income level and in some cases a resource base.
2.2 Income levels have been set to make it challenging at the outset to maintain a fleet of 4000 points.
2.3 Where uninterrupted trade is maintained between two worlds, the owners of both worlds get the combined income value. If there is no trade, the owner gets only the base income value. Where the trade route exists on a space-lane, benefits are doubled.
2.4 Fleet maintenance also requires access to resources. If you do not have and are not trading with a world which has a required resource, that aspect of fleet maintenance will cost double. Resources are: Fuel: Food: Manufactured Goods: Mining/Ore; Luxuries
2.5 Costs and income accumulate weekly; there are no separate economic turns
2.6 Initial income of a world is 2d5 credits. Resource worlds roll an additional d5, except for luxuries, which will roll 1 d10 every turn.
2.7 Major Trading Hub base income is increased by one credit for each world connected only to that Hub and no other Hub.
3. Logistics
3.1 Maintenance costs accumulate under three headings; fuel, crew and weaponry. These will rough out at 1%-1.6% of construction cost per week depending on ship types and mix.
3.2 Maintenance costs for fuel are based on the purchase cost of the drives for each vessel (yes, this means that it costs more to keep a Kravak drive running than a standard drive). Cost = 3% of the purchase cost of the FTL and Manoeuvre drives.
3.3 Crew costs are based on the number of crew boxes per ship at 0.2 credit per crew box.
3.4 Weaponry costs are based on the installed cost of weapons systems on the ship, including fighters and missiles. Cost = 3% of the build cost of the systems.
3.5 Fuel costs double if you have no access to a Fuel resource. Crew costs double if you have no access to a food resource. Weaponry maintenance and repair costs double if you have no access to a Manufactured goods resource. Hull construction and repair costs double if you have no access to Mining/Ore resources.
3.6 All ships are rated for operational endurance in weeks. This is the number of weeks which the ship can spend away from friendly bases without running out of supply. Fuel and crew supply requirements accrue each week. Weaponry supply requirements only accrue after combat. Ships are resupplied by returning to friendly bases or by rendezvousing with Supply Ships. Resupply requirements apply to entire task forces based on the requirement of the neediest ship present. Adding a heavy cruiser to a frigate task force puts all ships on the shorter supply cycle.
3.7 Each five turns of combat will reduce all endurance by one week and trigger a requirement for weaponry resupply. Ships which do not meet weaponry supply requirements will roll all future weapons system checks at the next worst level.
3.8 Each player may construct up to 500 points worth of supply ships at the same time as his main fleet. Supply ships have maintenance costs on exactly the same basis as warships. Supply Ships can also be leased from the private sector at four times standard maintenance cost. Supply ships must have their cargo holds allocated to a specific type of supply before the supply mission departs. One tonne of cargo capacity translates to 1 credit worth of supply.
3.9 Endurance limits;
Weekly maintenance cost= 0-2:6 weeks
Weekly maintenance cost = 2-5 4 weeks
Weekly maintenace cost = 5-8 3 weeks
Weekly maintenance cost 8-12 2 weeks
Weekly maintenance cost 12+ 1 week
4. Construction
4.1 Starting fleet is up to 4000 points.
4.2 Starting capital is 50 times initial planetary income.
4.3 Starting capital not spent on the starting fleet can be spent on supply ships, on spare parts (4.4), on system defences (8.2), or just kept for dealing with future problems.
4.4 Prepositioned spares cost 75% of normal price and have to be assigned to specific worlds in your empire or to cargo space on supply ships.
5. Movement
5.1 It takes one FTL jump to enter an empty hex from any other hex. It takes one jump to move between any two worlds not more than two hexes apart (ie, you can jump over an intervening hex between two systems).
5.2 Travel along a space lane takes one week between any two points on the route unless interdicted (5.4).
5.3 Travel in FTL is in a parallel universe and ships in FTL mode cannot be interfered with by other forces, either from normal space or on the same FTL route.
5.4 Space lanes require maintenance and support infrastructure which can be interdicted by hostile action or turned off by the owner. Where space lanes have been blocked, travel along the space lane ends at the last system before the block.
6. Attacking systems I; interdiction and commerce raiding
6.1 Interdiction of a system occurs when there is a hostile force within the system which is sufficient to deter commercial traffic through the system. Deterrence is deemed to be in place when the points value of hostile ships working in concert in the system is 50 times the trade value of the system. Trade benefits for that system are lost. The owning player continues to draw the base income.
6.2 Commerce raiding occurs when any armed hostile vessel is in the system. For each commerce raider in the system, the system owner loses one point of trade. The commerce raider's owner rolls 1d6; on 1-3, he gains the trade point the system owner lost (but see 6.3). On 4-5 he gets no benefit. On a 6, the raider is driven off and damaged, taking hits equivalent to the trade value of the system.
6.3 To benefit from the gained trade points, the commerce raiders must have 10 tons of cargo capacity available for each point, either on their own ships or an accompanying auxiliary. Successful commerce raiding against resource worlds will count as having access to that resource
7. Attacking systems II; Offensive operations
7.1 Offensive operations are divided into two phases, system control and planetary attack.
7.2 System control is achieved when any other fleet in the system has been driven off and the system defences have been defeated. (8. System defences). Once system control is in place, the owning player loses all benefit from the system.
7.3 Planetary attack is either intended to destroy the planetary infrastructure, denying all players benefit, or to take it intact by ground assault.
7.4 Planetary attack of either kind requires dedicated assault ships.
7.5 Destructive attacks can be carried out by warships either with dedicated orbital bombardment weaponry or with standard weaponry of class 4 and above. It takes five such weapons to knock out one point of infrastructure/income. Each strike consumes one week's worth on endurance for the vessel delivering it. For each strike, roll one d6. On 1-2 the infrastructure point is destroyed; 3-4 no effect; on 5-6 attacking ship takes damage equivalent to 5 x the remaining planetary income points.
7.6 Ground assault will require dedicated assault landing ships. This requires an minimum of 10 tons of assault dropships per planetary income point. For each 10 tons of dropship, roll 1 d6; 1-2 successful attack, 3 infrastructure destroyed rather than taken intact, 4-5 no effect, 6 dropship destroyed. This process continues each full turn until the planet is subdued or the supply of dropships runs out.
8. System defences
8.1 Players may construct system defence vessels and installations equal to 100 points per income point of the system. System defence vessels need not have FTL drives.
8.2 Players may elect to spend starting capital on strengthening system defences. System defences bought with starting capital get a 50% discount on normal costs, but can never be moved out of the system and are replaced and repaired at full original cost.
8.3 Non-player worlds have abstracted system defences equal to 150 points per income point of the system.
8.4 Player attacks on non-player worlds are handled abstractly; roll 1 d6. On a natural or modified 6, the non-player system surrenders. On a natural or modified 1, the player is driven off and takes damage equivalent to 20 times the planetary income. On 2-5 the outcome is inconclusive, the system is interdicted and a fresh attempt can be made to attack next turn.
8.5 The dice roll is modified based on the difference between the attacking force and the strength of the system defences. No attack is possible when the attacker has less than 50% of the system defence force. There is a -1 to the dice roll when the attacking force is between 50% and 100% of the system defences. +1 if more than twice the size, + 2 if more than three times the size and so on.
8.6 After surrender, roll 1 d6 to check the effects of fighting. On 1, the system has been devastated; defences and income have been wiped out. On 2-3 two-thirds of economic and defence capacity have been destroyed. On 4-5 one-third of economic and defence capacity have been destroyed. On 6, the conquest was peaceful and all systems have been captured intact.
8.6 Players may elect to use the abstract system in attacks on their own systems.
9. Reconstruction
9.1 Economic capacity of planets is restored only with time. It takes four weeks to restore each point of income lost. This can be reduced to two weeks per point if a neighboring planet with a higher base income than the original base income of the damaged planet foregoes all income to assist with reconstruction.
9.2 System defences can only be restored by replacing the lost equipment at cost.
10. Trade
10.1 All worlds within one FTL jump of each other can opt to trade. (Thus worlds on a space lane can trade with any other world on that space lane). To avoid insanity breaking out, every world trades with just one other world. A pair of worlds trading with each other each get income equal to the combined incomes of the pair of worlds. Players may make side deals sharing out the benefits differently. Non-player worlds tend to be greedy.
10.2 Once any world in a player empire is trading with a resource world, all worlds within the empire benefit from the resource.
11. Repairs
11.1. Damage can only be repaired in a friendly system or with the assistance of supply ships which have been pre-loaded with spare parts.
11.2. The general rule is that repair to combat damaged systems is charged at the same price as the original construction of the system.
11.3. Exceptions to the general rule on costs
11.3.1. Pre-positioned parts have already been paid for and are installed for free by your engineering staff.
11.3.2. Parts can be stripped from identical ships in the same task force and installed for 10% of the normal cost.
11.3.3. Parts can be stripped from other ships (including captured enemy vessels) and installed for 20% of the normal cost; but these parts will always test for damage at one level worse than original specification parts. Captured parts can be used only if they are functionally identical to the part being replaced. For avoidance of doubt, this expressly bars installing alien weapon systems in human vessels (and vice versa) and installing weapon types other than those originally installed in the weapon station.
11.3.4. Combat damaged systems which were repaired during combat have been jury-rigged and at least have to be recalibrated; during refitting roll 1 d6 for any such system. On a 1-3, the part has passed inspection. On 4-6 it needs to be completely replaced.
11.4. Minor repairs take a week. Major repairs take two weeks. Major repairs involve any weapon or drive system with a number higher than 3 (Including wave guns, nova cannon and anything generally weird), all core systems, the FTL drive, simultaneous repair to more than one hangar bay and level two shielding or any system equivalent to that. Doubling the speed of repair doubles the cost.
11.5. Repair costs of core systems are one third of the cost of the keel of the ship, in the unlikely event that you ever find yourself in the position of repairing one.
12. Capture
12.1. Anything left drifting in a system after a battle is considered to be captured by the victorious fleet. Boarding is not covered well by the rules and is not worth the extra trouble to worry about.
12.2. Captured vessels can be rebuilt, stripped or sold on.
12.2.1. Rebuilding is only practical where at least two rows of hull boxes remain intact and and at least three of the five major systems (three core services, main drive and FTL drive) have not been completely knocked out. Rebuilding is done at normal costs. If the vessel is not a type already in service with your fleet, add 20% to repair costs.
12.2.2. Useful parts can be stripped out and reused subject to the repair rules above. What is left is effectively useless and has no resale value
12.2.3. The capture can be sold on as is to unscrupulous scrap dealers for 10% of construction cost per intact row of hull boxes.
13. Construction
13.1. Ships can be built in game time at a rate of 100 pts per week per keel laid down. Alternatively, they can be bought on the open market at the beginning of each economic turn, but only from the designs in the Fleet Books or on designated websites. Any one navy can be designated as an ally, and their designs are available at 20% off. No-one can be allied in this sense outside their species (you would need alien crews to operate the ships, and alien crews are not available on the open market).
13.2 When construction begins, the umpire should be told the design mass of the ship and the vessel type. As construction continues, the umpire should be notified of what's been added on. Subsequent changes to construction will be billed under Rule 16; essentially this means that if you've half built a heavy cruiser, it's probably going to cost you quite a bit more to change it at the last minute into an escort carrier.
14. Abstracted battles
14.1. To speed things up, battles between task forces can be carried out in any manner that the engaged parties decide on. It may prove convenient to run a battle on hex paper with counters in the margins of something else. Players are encouraged to be imaginative.
15. Task groups and pre-battle recce
15.1. Strategic movement is by task group. Each task group gets one counter on the strategic map. A task group can be as many or as few ships as the player wishes. When a player has two or more task groups together in the same location, he may re-organise freely. Task groups may be split up at any time. Players are required to maintain a record of what each counter represents.
15.2. Each task group with at least one capital unit (BB, BDN, SDN, CVA, CVH, CVL) generates one dummy counter. All other counters used for strategic movement must represent at least one ship.
15.3. The composition of a task group will not be known to opponents until after it is contacted. Composition of all groups is to be notified to the umpire.
15.4. Movement each turn is pre-plotted and simultaneous. Where possible, moves should be notified to the umpire by email.
16. Non-standard designs and refitting
16.1. Anything listed in the Full Thrust rule book, in either of the two fleet books, More Thrust or the GZG website (at present this covers only two UNSC weapon systems) is considered standard. Any ship designed using only these sources and utilising the technology of only one race is considered standard.
16.2. Everything else is considered non-standard, and can be used only with the prior approval of the umpires at game start and after notification to all other players. Players may, for the purpose of subterfuge, clear and notify technologies they do not intend to use, but should be mindful that the umpires have limited patience and will simply disallow requests of all kinds once they start to feel put upon. Approval is likely in the case of the following designs already documented on the web: UNSC, IJN, New Israel, Arab League, OUDF. On a case by case basis, some of these ship designs may be deemed standard when used by that player; this will only happen if the entire fleet is constructed in that design idiom. Non-standard weapons will never be deemed to be standard, not least because very few non-standard weapons have been fully play-tested to the stage where points values are reliable.
16.3. Non-standard ships and equipment can be repaired or replaced only through pre-positioned stocks or at your capital. Anything not indigenous to the technology used in the majority of the fleet construction costs 20% more to install (and thus consequently to repair) and can only be repaired or replaced through pre-positioned stocks or at your capital. Thus, players choosing (for example) to install K-guns in otherwise human fleets will be penalised for doing so.
16.4 Oceanic Union Defence Forces and the Islamic Federation
Both fleets use modular weapons fits which can readily be swapped out. These should be costed as ship construction, not spare parts. So they count towards your 4000 pt cap on initial ship construction. They do not attract maintenance costs while not in use. They have to be placed in pre-designated locations. It takes a week to swap in a module. You can't swap two modules into a ship at the same time. Where the simplified fleet rule for maintenance is being used, the benefit is not suspended simply because module swaps have led to more than five distinct ship types, so as long as no more than five hull designs are being used at any one time.
16.5 Ships in your fleet can be refitted with other weapon systems at your option. Where the new system is of a similar type and of identical mass, this is treated as a repair and billed accordingly. Where the system is a different type or a different mass, add 20% to cost to take account of the structural changes required. Beams, grasers, pulse torpedo launchers and PDS systems are similar types of weapon to each other. Missile launchers are similar to missile racks. And so on. Hangars aren't similar to anything else, but uniquely can simply be replaced with something else (a single something else) at repair cost (not vice versa). Hull boxes are not similar to anything else, for those of you thinking about weakening your hulls to add more systems. Loading existing missile tubes with new and improved missiles counts as a refit, not just as a reload from existing stocks, and you will have to pay for it over and above maintenance costs - which will also be increased to reflect the change.
Refitting can never exceed the design weight of the ship. The design weight of the ship is chosen at the point when it is first constructed and cannot be exceeded for any reason subsequently.
It is open to constructors to make the design weight bigger than the actual weight at launch; but drives must be bought for the design weight of the ship, and deliver that performance. For clarity, that means that you can make a ship with a design weight of 100 and and an actual weight of 80; the FTL drive must weigh 10, and the M-drive will weigh 5 for every point of thrust you want to have. If that weight of M-drive would give the ACTUAL build weight of the ship a higher Thrust, this can optionally be used in combat, but the drive will be subjected to a system check whenever it is used at that Thrust.
16.6 Refitting of supply ships
Subsequent conversion of cargo spaces into fighter hangers or weapons racks costs 20% more than normal (because the engines cannae take it without extra strengthening brackets).
Freighters don't manoeuvre better when they're empty than when they're full. It wouldn't be economical.
17 Attacking other player's fleets
17.1 When two or more fleets move into the same system, the owning players will advise the umpire of the fleet composition.
17.2 The umpire will inform each player whether the other force(s) are significantly larger than their own, significantly smaller or roughly equal, and if there is a glaring discrepancy in the size of vessels involved.
17.3 Players will immediately decide whether to withdraw or attack.
17.4 If one attacks and all others withdraw, the attacking fleet has undisputed occupation of the system and remains there for the turn. The withdrawing fleets immediately select a destination and this is their move for the next turn.
17.5 If all decide to withdraw, each immediately selects their destination for next turn's move, and that's it.
17.6 If two or more players decide to attack, combat takes place. Before ships are put on the table, force commanders should make an unambiguous note of formation and speed. Formations can be as dispersed as you like. However, if you left your last system under fire, you must use the speed and formation you had at the moment you hit the FTL button.
17.7 All fleets dice for initiative. Highest initiative is assumed to have the drop on the others. Players who entered via a space lane get +1 on their initiative rolls. Players who were actually present at the beginning of the turn get +2
17.8 Relative positions on table. Top of the table (Brian's end, if that helps), is equivalent to top of the campaign map. The bottom is equivalent to the bottom. Task forces enter the table from the side equivalent to the hex side they move through to enter the hex on the campaign map. Forces already in the system can pick any side for entry, but must make a note of it before dicing for initiative.
17.9 Players with higher initiative will be able to make changes in their dispositions, getting one change for every two points by which they beat the opponents initiative roll. These can be used to change the point of entry on the table (one point per edge segment) the distance between forces (either to move your point of entry in by one foot, or the opponent's point of entry back) or to split your formation.
17.10 No matter how that goes, all fleets begin facing in towards the centre of the table
18 Departing under fire
18.1 The standard rules in Full Thrust for FTL'ing out apply. Executive summary, six inch spacing between ships, no use of manoeuvre drive and no weapons fired during the run-up to departure. The rules say that shields can be left on during this process. The firing up of the FTL drive is apparent during the previous move, and the blink out happens half way through the normal move.
18.2 Your departure takes the place of your normal move in the next strategic turn. This is also the case with recce units sent into a system which elect to leave after looking around. Immediately write down your destination; that's where you're going to be in a week. You arrive at your destination travelling in the same formation, spacing and speed that you had when you left the last hell hole.
18.3 You can try FTL ing while under fire, or you can try to build up enough distance to do it safely. Disengagement is not automatic; there is no real edge to the table, so getting off the table does not get you out of trouble. The first step to disengagement is to get out of weapons range of the enemy. This is considered to be the distance at which the enemy can't get more than one dice on you per working gun or 36 inches, whichever is less. At that point, check relative speed and the thrust of the poorest accelerating ship in each fleet. It should be clear cut whether the separation is going to increase or shrink. If not, roll one d6 each. If the disengager gets higher, he gets away, otherwise the pursuit continues. Plus one on the dice roll to whichever side has the highest acceleration in its poorest accelerating ship.
Friday 21 September 2007
One brief thought about campaign revival
The question of restarting the campaign is still lumbering along. There's a lot of work I need to do on putting together a draft of the revised rules for logistics and so on. I'd hope to get this done in the coming days.
However, there is one thing which I need to get out of the way before we move on towards that. For the moment at least, there's a growing consensus to rule out the Savasku as players. This doesn't seem likely to spoil the day for anyone just at the moment; there's only one putative player tied to the SV and he's pretty much out of play for the foreseeable future due to other commitments. The rest of us have no particular investment in them, and won't miss out on anything by not being able to use them.
This is not to say that they're ruled out for all time. But there are things to sort out before we can add them in.
The first problem is that it's genuinely pretty hard to come up with a way of beating them on the table. All arguments about energy allocation and so on to one side, the real problem is that the only way to do serious damage to an opponent is to get in close, and the damage that SV can do effectively doubles every time you close by a range band. No-one else has firepower which ramps up the same way. You can't get anything in close to an SV heavy and expect to see it live. Now, in a one-off game, you could cook up various designs of ship and fleet configuration which might deal with this problem. And that could be an entertaining game in its own right. But from a campaign point of view it would mean building weird fleets which weren't much use for any other purpose.
The second problem is that SV don't have the same logistic challenges that everyone else has. Essentially, they just grow everything, and this involves less outlay than the other players have to face. So they have ships which are more effective than the competition and which are cheaper to run.
These two problems can be solved in harmony - we're going to need to cook up some logistical rules for the SV which balance out their on-table advantages a bit. Doing this fairly will take some thought.
I don't want to do that thinking until I've got a logistical system for everyone else which is fair and balanced and satisfactory. Once that's in place, I can cook up a distorted version for the SV which will impose similar costs on them for similar outcomes, and perhaps raise the ante slightly on some of the outcomes. My logic for doing this is that I want to raise the sense of jeopardy for SV in battle; since they're less likely to lose their ships outright in a fight than humans or Kravak or Phalons, I'd like to rig it so that significant damage will be almost as worrying as outright loss of the vessel. That ought to make SV sort of like Dragons in Hordes of the Things; a dragon is a scary thing in HOTT, but the first adverse result they get, they leave the table immediately.
However, there is one thing which I need to get out of the way before we move on towards that. For the moment at least, there's a growing consensus to rule out the Savasku as players. This doesn't seem likely to spoil the day for anyone just at the moment; there's only one putative player tied to the SV and he's pretty much out of play for the foreseeable future due to other commitments. The rest of us have no particular investment in them, and won't miss out on anything by not being able to use them.
This is not to say that they're ruled out for all time. But there are things to sort out before we can add them in.
The first problem is that it's genuinely pretty hard to come up with a way of beating them on the table. All arguments about energy allocation and so on to one side, the real problem is that the only way to do serious damage to an opponent is to get in close, and the damage that SV can do effectively doubles every time you close by a range band. No-one else has firepower which ramps up the same way. You can't get anything in close to an SV heavy and expect to see it live. Now, in a one-off game, you could cook up various designs of ship and fleet configuration which might deal with this problem. And that could be an entertaining game in its own right. But from a campaign point of view it would mean building weird fleets which weren't much use for any other purpose.
The second problem is that SV don't have the same logistic challenges that everyone else has. Essentially, they just grow everything, and this involves less outlay than the other players have to face. So they have ships which are more effective than the competition and which are cheaper to run.
These two problems can be solved in harmony - we're going to need to cook up some logistical rules for the SV which balance out their on-table advantages a bit. Doing this fairly will take some thought.
I don't want to do that thinking until I've got a logistical system for everyone else which is fair and balanced and satisfactory. Once that's in place, I can cook up a distorted version for the SV which will impose similar costs on them for similar outcomes, and perhaps raise the ante slightly on some of the outcomes. My logic for doing this is that I want to raise the sense of jeopardy for SV in battle; since they're less likely to lose their ships outright in a fight than humans or Kravak or Phalons, I'd like to rig it so that significant damage will be almost as worrying as outright loss of the vessel. That ought to make SV sort of like Dragons in Hordes of the Things; a dragon is a scary thing in HOTT, but the first adverse result they get, they leave the table immediately.
Sunday 12 August 2007
Thoughts on the direction of the campaign
1. Probable restart
1.1 I would like to accommodate more players
1.2 Eddie has come up with some interesting ideas on economics which will need a new map to implement properly
1.3 I'd also like to have enough "grey space" around the edges of the map to allow for external threats
1.4 I'd welcome people's thoughts on the overall amount of real estate on the map.
1.5 At present I am thinking of roughly six or seven worlds per player, with the same number of worlds again in non-player hands. This would give about 85-90 worlds. I'm interested in hearing whether people think there should be more worlds and in whether people would prefer their holdings clumped or scattered. My preference is that everyone would have about the same degree of scatter rather than the last map where some players were very much clumped and others were very scattered.
2. New Economics
2.1 It's likely that the campaign economic engine will be adjusted to make income dependent on trade rather than inherent value of worlds. Every pair of worlds would have a trade income which will be vulnerable to interdiction, both by other players and by non player pirates controlled by a malevolent DM.
2.2 The overall income generated by this system will be give each player slightly more than what is needed to maintain the overall fleet. Obviously exact detail will depend on fleet levels.
2.3 Each planet is likely to be coded in a very crude way as to its principal outputs, the aim here being to make people act to preserve specific resources or acquire more of them. Availability of resources will be a background constraint on operations; if you don't have the resources for operations, you'll have to buy them with money or make trades with people who do.
3. Timings
3.1 The economic turn will be dropped; turns will be a week, income will accumulate on a weekly basis (or not), spending will also be weekly, income will be tweaked to make this simple to integrate with the maintenance overheads. As much as possible the game week will be the real week; turns will be handled by email, and battles that have to be fought will be fought on the Mondays.
4. Greater level of abstraction
4.1 Following receipt of all moves, players who find themselves in contact in a system will be notified as to the rough level of opposition and asked what they plan to do. It will be open to either side to withdraw if they feel overmatched; if both sides engage, the first option will be to try to play out the battle, and if this is not practical, abstract solutions will be considered. The overall aim will be to have tabletop fights which will be quick, fun and if possible involve everyone.
4.2 This greater level of abstraction will nail a lot of the problems encountered with the pre battle manoeuvring and the orbital defence rules.
5. Logistics
5.1 Sorry, but it has to be done. It fixes too many problems and I think Eddie and I may have cooked up a simple mechanism which will work without causing too many headaches.
5.2 All units will have a limit on their endurance outside home space. The lighter the unit, the longer the endurance - the assumption is that frigates have been optimised for extended patrol, SDNs for deliberate assault. Endurance will be expressed in weeks.
5.3 Endurance can be extended by deploying supply ships (RFAs) with task forces. RFAs will carry fuel, life support and weapons support. A task force which does not bother with the third will not be able to resupply after combat.
5.4 Combat will reduce endurance. Every five turns in combat will knock a week off the endurance of the force.
5.5 In essence this places a realistic penalty on super heavies without having to write new rules to discourage their construction or make it more difficult to give them orders or anything like that; they're just going to be harder to use in operations without a lot of preparation.
5.6 Balancing this, a lot of the maintenance costs are going, particularly the contentious costs of replacing munitions, which are taken up instead in the cost of maintaining RFAs.
5.7 RFAs will effectively embody much of your maintenance costs. It will be more bookkeeping for the DM, but you shouldn't notice it; essentially vessels will have a three factor maintenance cost and this will be met either by return to base and a direct charge or by loading the maintenance cost into the RFAs and moving it to where it's needed.
6. SV
6.1 I'd almost prefer to abolish the damn things, but instead I'm tilting towards the idea of making their campaign rules specific to them. This is likely to lead to a situation where combat repairs of SV ships will take a long time (recuperation) or carry a serious risk of going wrong (surgical intervention). This is necessary because otherwise SV are in the position of repairing everything at a lower cost than their opponents, and it's not as though they're labouring under disadvantages for which this would be a welcome balance.
7. Texture
7.1 Enough with the empty blackness of space - future battles will involve more clutter, both to avoid running into and to hide behind.
7.2 RFAs will need to be bought and paid for - there will be some interesting decisions to be made on speed and protection versus cost containment.
7.3 Actually taking a planet will require ground assault and specialised equipment. This will usually be not that interesting to game, but providing cover and support to the ground assault force will give another mission type, and replacing any assault equipment you lose will give you something else to complain about the cost of.
1.1 I would like to accommodate more players
1.2 Eddie has come up with some interesting ideas on economics which will need a new map to implement properly
1.3 I'd also like to have enough "grey space" around the edges of the map to allow for external threats
1.4 I'd welcome people's thoughts on the overall amount of real estate on the map.
1.5 At present I am thinking of roughly six or seven worlds per player, with the same number of worlds again in non-player hands. This would give about 85-90 worlds. I'm interested in hearing whether people think there should be more worlds and in whether people would prefer their holdings clumped or scattered. My preference is that everyone would have about the same degree of scatter rather than the last map where some players were very much clumped and others were very scattered.
2. New Economics
2.1 It's likely that the campaign economic engine will be adjusted to make income dependent on trade rather than inherent value of worlds. Every pair of worlds would have a trade income which will be vulnerable to interdiction, both by other players and by non player pirates controlled by a malevolent DM.
2.2 The overall income generated by this system will be give each player slightly more than what is needed to maintain the overall fleet. Obviously exact detail will depend on fleet levels.
2.3 Each planet is likely to be coded in a very crude way as to its principal outputs, the aim here being to make people act to preserve specific resources or acquire more of them. Availability of resources will be a background constraint on operations; if you don't have the resources for operations, you'll have to buy them with money or make trades with people who do.
3. Timings
3.1 The economic turn will be dropped; turns will be a week, income will accumulate on a weekly basis (or not), spending will also be weekly, income will be tweaked to make this simple to integrate with the maintenance overheads. As much as possible the game week will be the real week; turns will be handled by email, and battles that have to be fought will be fought on the Mondays.
4. Greater level of abstraction
4.1 Following receipt of all moves, players who find themselves in contact in a system will be notified as to the rough level of opposition and asked what they plan to do. It will be open to either side to withdraw if they feel overmatched; if both sides engage, the first option will be to try to play out the battle, and if this is not practical, abstract solutions will be considered. The overall aim will be to have tabletop fights which will be quick, fun and if possible involve everyone.
4.2 This greater level of abstraction will nail a lot of the problems encountered with the pre battle manoeuvring and the orbital defence rules.
5. Logistics
5.1 Sorry, but it has to be done. It fixes too many problems and I think Eddie and I may have cooked up a simple mechanism which will work without causing too many headaches.
5.2 All units will have a limit on their endurance outside home space. The lighter the unit, the longer the endurance - the assumption is that frigates have been optimised for extended patrol, SDNs for deliberate assault. Endurance will be expressed in weeks.
5.3 Endurance can be extended by deploying supply ships (RFAs) with task forces. RFAs will carry fuel, life support and weapons support. A task force which does not bother with the third will not be able to resupply after combat.
5.4 Combat will reduce endurance. Every five turns in combat will knock a week off the endurance of the force.
5.5 In essence this places a realistic penalty on super heavies without having to write new rules to discourage their construction or make it more difficult to give them orders or anything like that; they're just going to be harder to use in operations without a lot of preparation.
5.6 Balancing this, a lot of the maintenance costs are going, particularly the contentious costs of replacing munitions, which are taken up instead in the cost of maintaining RFAs.
5.7 RFAs will effectively embody much of your maintenance costs. It will be more bookkeeping for the DM, but you shouldn't notice it; essentially vessels will have a three factor maintenance cost and this will be met either by return to base and a direct charge or by loading the maintenance cost into the RFAs and moving it to where it's needed.
6. SV
6.1 I'd almost prefer to abolish the damn things, but instead I'm tilting towards the idea of making their campaign rules specific to them. This is likely to lead to a situation where combat repairs of SV ships will take a long time (recuperation) or carry a serious risk of going wrong (surgical intervention). This is necessary because otherwise SV are in the position of repairing everything at a lower cost than their opponents, and it's not as though they're labouring under disadvantages for which this would be a welcome balance.
7. Texture
7.1 Enough with the empty blackness of space - future battles will involve more clutter, both to avoid running into and to hide behind.
7.2 RFAs will need to be bought and paid for - there will be some interesting decisions to be made on speed and protection versus cost containment.
7.3 Actually taking a planet will require ground assault and specialised equipment. This will usually be not that interesting to game, but providing cover and support to the ground assault force will give another mission type, and replacing any assault equipment you lose will give you something else to complain about the cost of.
Thursday 12 July 2007
Nothing to do with starships
Who knew we needed this product
Kallistra, who are more and more becoming a plastic moulding company, have brought out self adhesive flocked paper. What's wacky is what they think you should use it for; stick it to the bottom of the figure bases so that they velcro onto the flock you've used on your terrain and that way your bases don't fall over on slopes. A mere £2.50 for an A4 sheet.
Of course, I'm seeing this in the week when GW think they can get people to pay £8 for a single rocket launcherDeathstrike - what it does to your wallet, so there's obviously some hideous "too much money for stuff you don't need" thing going on.
Kallistra, who are more and more becoming a plastic moulding company, have brought out self adhesive flocked paper. What's wacky is what they think you should use it for; stick it to the bottom of the figure bases so that they velcro onto the flock you've used on your terrain and that way your bases don't fall over on slopes. A mere £2.50 for an A4 sheet.
Of course, I'm seeing this in the week when GW think they can get people to pay £8 for a single rocket launcherDeathstrike - what it does to your wallet, so there's obviously some hideous "too much money for stuff you don't need" thing going on.
Tuesday 10 July 2007
A wonderful opportunity to spend way too much real money
Because it's about the lead, folks, is there any way to doubt it?
Those of you forced to listen to my interminable ramblings in real life are more than familiar with me rabbitting on about the way in which Games Workshop actually has a good side. Just as Microsoft has a sideline in making pretty good mice to balance their really godawful software, in the past three or four years GW has been making a lot of its rules available as free downloads on its specialist games site. So you could download all of Blood Bowl (who knew you could get 170 pages of rules out of American Football for Orcs?); all of 3rd generation Epic Space Marine (some surprisingly mature and interesting ideas in those rules) and all of the final version of Battlefleet Gothic (not even on a bet; the QRF for Battlefleet Gothic is enough to make a grown man cry). Because GW was no longer pushing figures for any of these rules, Epic Space Marine in particular was a surprisingly wargamer-friendly set of rules - use whatever figures - and whatever base sizes - you wanted, very few gimmick troops, and generally very little of the gothic encrustation which always sets my teeth on edge.
Well, that's all over now. A fresh generation of suckers has been detected (the bellwether has to be the immense outpouring of cash at ForgeWorld's stand at Salute) and all the rules have been republished - at GW's trademark how-the-hell-much-did-you just-say? prices. I'm thinking that what happened was that enough people downloaded the free versions of the rules that they started to think at GW Mansions (suggestions as to what GW HQ should actually be called are welcome) that the market was big enough to fire up the centri-cast machines again.
Because, with the rules, come the figures. My word, it's breathtaking.
Some of the stuff is pretty, but as always it's shockingly priced. Plastic 6mm (8mm in GW speak) figures at £12 for about 150 figures. Tanks and aircraft in the same scale at about £3 each. And upwards; anything fancy is closer to a tenner. Not necessarily closer on the single digit side either. I had thought Peter Berry's Baccus stuff was a special treat for when I'd been particularly well behaved; I'd have to cure cancer to justify spending this kind of money on micro-armour.
The spaceships are the same ones which came out last time, which means that most of the Imperial ones look like the Hungarian House of Parliament with engines, but made of plastic. Up at the top end of the size register, you're looking at £18 to £25 for about the amount of lead which Brigade or GZG would shuffle their feet and ask for £12. Even the boys at Mongoose might show a little shame looking for this kind of money and they have Babylon 5 licensing fees to cover.
It's good news for the boys at GZG and Brigade, I think, as long as they don't decide to get greedy and push their own prices up; at these small (with starships, purely nominal) scales it's harder for GW to retain the exclusivity that they hold at 28mm. Other people's figure would look just as good and cost a fraction of the money - as long as the fanboys are willing to think more widely and get on the net, there should be business for the smaller guys.
And looking down the road, in two years or so it will be good news for us, as the Bring and Buy stands groan with discarded GW 6mm and BFG stuff at affordable prices. Pity I have to wait that long.
Check out the hardware here Battlefleet Gothic and Epic Armageddon; Try to imagine my Bruce Willis in Die Hard laugh as I read this text
"Bag With Epic Bases (4 Sprues) This includes 4 sprues of Epic bases, giving you 16 bases in total.Price: £7.00"
I should perhaps make the point that Epic bases are bits of plastic 1 cm by 5 cm. 43.75p seems like a lot to pay for one.
Those of you forced to listen to my interminable ramblings in real life are more than familiar with me rabbitting on about the way in which Games Workshop actually has a good side. Just as Microsoft has a sideline in making pretty good mice to balance their really godawful software, in the past three or four years GW has been making a lot of its rules available as free downloads on its specialist games site. So you could download all of Blood Bowl (who knew you could get 170 pages of rules out of American Football for Orcs?); all of 3rd generation Epic Space Marine (some surprisingly mature and interesting ideas in those rules) and all of the final version of Battlefleet Gothic (not even on a bet; the QRF for Battlefleet Gothic is enough to make a grown man cry). Because GW was no longer pushing figures for any of these rules, Epic Space Marine in particular was a surprisingly wargamer-friendly set of rules - use whatever figures - and whatever base sizes - you wanted, very few gimmick troops, and generally very little of the gothic encrustation which always sets my teeth on edge.
Well, that's all over now. A fresh generation of suckers has been detected (the bellwether has to be the immense outpouring of cash at ForgeWorld's stand at Salute) and all the rules have been republished - at GW's trademark how-the-hell-much-did-you just-say? prices. I'm thinking that what happened was that enough people downloaded the free versions of the rules that they started to think at GW Mansions (suggestions as to what GW HQ should actually be called are welcome) that the market was big enough to fire up the centri-cast machines again.
Because, with the rules, come the figures. My word, it's breathtaking.
Some of the stuff is pretty, but as always it's shockingly priced. Plastic 6mm (8mm in GW speak) figures at £12 for about 150 figures. Tanks and aircraft in the same scale at about £3 each. And upwards; anything fancy is closer to a tenner. Not necessarily closer on the single digit side either. I had thought Peter Berry's Baccus stuff was a special treat for when I'd been particularly well behaved; I'd have to cure cancer to justify spending this kind of money on micro-armour.
The spaceships are the same ones which came out last time, which means that most of the Imperial ones look like the Hungarian House of Parliament with engines, but made of plastic. Up at the top end of the size register, you're looking at £18 to £25 for about the amount of lead which Brigade or GZG would shuffle their feet and ask for £12. Even the boys at Mongoose might show a little shame looking for this kind of money and they have Babylon 5 licensing fees to cover.
It's good news for the boys at GZG and Brigade, I think, as long as they don't decide to get greedy and push their own prices up; at these small (with starships, purely nominal) scales it's harder for GW to retain the exclusivity that they hold at 28mm. Other people's figure would look just as good and cost a fraction of the money - as long as the fanboys are willing to think more widely and get on the net, there should be business for the smaller guys.
And looking down the road, in two years or so it will be good news for us, as the Bring and Buy stands groan with discarded GW 6mm and BFG stuff at affordable prices. Pity I have to wait that long.
Check out the hardware here Battlefleet Gothic and Epic Armageddon; Try to imagine my Bruce Willis in Die Hard laugh as I read this text
"Bag With Epic Bases (4 Sprues) This includes 4 sprues of Epic bases, giving you 16 bases in total.Price: £7.00"
I should perhaps make the point that Epic bases are bits of plastic 1 cm by 5 cm. 43.75p seems like a lot to pay for one.
Sunday 8 July 2007
Looking ahead
It's been a month since there was a post on this blog, largely because we have been doing other things and the campaign itself was thus on hold.
I have been thinking a little in the interim about the future of the campaign.
Let's start with the two big options short of just never going back
1) Maintain it from where it stopped last
2) Restart it from zero
There are two problems with restarting the campaign from where it started last.
The first is simply administrative, and could be sorted out; I'm not sure I've got an accurate record of where everyone was when we paused. But I think it could easily be argued out.
The second is a little harder to tackle; Con has effectively dropped out, through no fault of his own, and Frank has taken his place, though there's been no follow up on that. So a decision has to be made about whether to put Frank into Con's planets, or add a wing to the map or what. And what ought to happen to allow Frank to catch up on the progress everyone else made on capturing local worlds and whatnot. And that's assuming that Frank can actually make the time to get into things.
Restarting the campaign from zero; why am I even suggesting this? It knocks Eddie back to where he started when he's manifestly well ahead of the rest of the players, which is frustrating and unfair. But I'm still throwing the idea out there.
Here's a few of my reasons, which have a bearing on either option and how we go forward.
Firstly, it might be better to redesign the campaign for the actual player environment we have - four reasonably committed players, one of whom is trying to umpire the thing, and a couple more players interested in principle but not able to turn up often or commit much time, and the two or three other players (like James and Sean) who are willing to take part in whatever is going on, but not necessarily into getting deeply into campaign dynamics.
Secondly, it might be that we need to think again about the overall approach of the campaign. As things stand, you've got a certain amount of interaction for the strategic moves, but the tactical games have a tendency to be one on one, which leaves everyone else as spectators to the use of the entire table. This isn't all that great a use of the big table as a resource.
Thirdly, the original thought behind the campaign was to use it as a way of generating battles which would be asymmetrical and more interesting than the battles which we were having. In practice the design behind the repair rules drove everyone towards big ship navies with small numbers of light scouting ships and battles have been between small fleets of very big ships with pretty much even points values. And to be honest, we could have had those battles without the trouble of a campaign system. So I have to say that my campaign ideas were not a huge success in delivering my original objectives.
From this I come to asking, what do we want to get out of Full Thrust type games? And what's the best way of getting that?
Things which are interesting about FT:
It's relatively easy and painless to cook up your own designs for ships, and there are hundreds of designs out there if you want to try something different but haven't the patience to cook up something of your own.
The fleet organisations are completely loose - you can field whatever you choose in whatever mix you like
The battles themselves are quick and easy - you can teach someone the basics of FT in an hour or less, and it's pretty easy to suss out the trade-offs between the weapons systems and so on.
Things which are limited about FT
It really only works well with small numbers of ships (less to keep track of) and with two sides (because the game is written in a way which makes more than two sides very difficult to administer fairly).
So short of rewriting the rules to change these things, it seems to me that what we really want to see - for club games - is something which will allow us to have a game with two defined sides, each with more than one player, with each player having the opportunity to fine tune a force to his own preferences, and with the game playing out - for preference - in two nights or less.
This suggests to me that what we might need is a change to a sort of meta-campaign, played out in the background, which would be used to generate scenarios from time to time which would allow for interesting battles either of SG II, Dirtside or Full Thrust as the case might be. These individual actions would be played out against the context of a campaign so large that the players themselves would be merely local commanders doing small battles in theatre with tailored forces drawn from much larger contingents. The larger conflict would trundle along in the background, dealt with at an abstract political level and whenever we wanted a game, we would look at the abstract, pick a point of friction which suited the people available and then play out the game.
At which point, I welcome comments - maybe there's a better, simpler idea I've overlooked.
I have been thinking a little in the interim about the future of the campaign.
Let's start with the two big options short of just never going back
1) Maintain it from where it stopped last
2) Restart it from zero
There are two problems with restarting the campaign from where it started last.
The first is simply administrative, and could be sorted out; I'm not sure I've got an accurate record of where everyone was when we paused. But I think it could easily be argued out.
The second is a little harder to tackle; Con has effectively dropped out, through no fault of his own, and Frank has taken his place, though there's been no follow up on that. So a decision has to be made about whether to put Frank into Con's planets, or add a wing to the map or what. And what ought to happen to allow Frank to catch up on the progress everyone else made on capturing local worlds and whatnot. And that's assuming that Frank can actually make the time to get into things.
Restarting the campaign from zero; why am I even suggesting this? It knocks Eddie back to where he started when he's manifestly well ahead of the rest of the players, which is frustrating and unfair. But I'm still throwing the idea out there.
Here's a few of my reasons, which have a bearing on either option and how we go forward.
Firstly, it might be better to redesign the campaign for the actual player environment we have - four reasonably committed players, one of whom is trying to umpire the thing, and a couple more players interested in principle but not able to turn up often or commit much time, and the two or three other players (like James and Sean) who are willing to take part in whatever is going on, but not necessarily into getting deeply into campaign dynamics.
Secondly, it might be that we need to think again about the overall approach of the campaign. As things stand, you've got a certain amount of interaction for the strategic moves, but the tactical games have a tendency to be one on one, which leaves everyone else as spectators to the use of the entire table. This isn't all that great a use of the big table as a resource.
Thirdly, the original thought behind the campaign was to use it as a way of generating battles which would be asymmetrical and more interesting than the battles which we were having. In practice the design behind the repair rules drove everyone towards big ship navies with small numbers of light scouting ships and battles have been between small fleets of very big ships with pretty much even points values. And to be honest, we could have had those battles without the trouble of a campaign system. So I have to say that my campaign ideas were not a huge success in delivering my original objectives.
From this I come to asking, what do we want to get out of Full Thrust type games? And what's the best way of getting that?
Things which are interesting about FT:
It's relatively easy and painless to cook up your own designs for ships, and there are hundreds of designs out there if you want to try something different but haven't the patience to cook up something of your own.
The fleet organisations are completely loose - you can field whatever you choose in whatever mix you like
The battles themselves are quick and easy - you can teach someone the basics of FT in an hour or less, and it's pretty easy to suss out the trade-offs between the weapons systems and so on.
Things which are limited about FT
It really only works well with small numbers of ships (less to keep track of) and with two sides (because the game is written in a way which makes more than two sides very difficult to administer fairly).
So short of rewriting the rules to change these things, it seems to me that what we really want to see - for club games - is something which will allow us to have a game with two defined sides, each with more than one player, with each player having the opportunity to fine tune a force to his own preferences, and with the game playing out - for preference - in two nights or less.
This suggests to me that what we might need is a change to a sort of meta-campaign, played out in the background, which would be used to generate scenarios from time to time which would allow for interesting battles either of SG II, Dirtside or Full Thrust as the case might be. These individual actions would be played out against the context of a campaign so large that the players themselves would be merely local commanders doing small battles in theatre with tailored forces drawn from much larger contingents. The larger conflict would trundle along in the background, dealt with at an abstract political level and whenever we wanted a game, we would look at the abstract, pick a point of friction which suited the people available and then play out the game.
At which point, I welcome comments - maybe there's a better, simpler idea I've overlooked.
Monday 4 June 2007
Fighters
This is, lest anyone bridle instinctively, a rumination on fighters as a way of getting things done, not a statement of intent.
The obvious work of fighters is blowing up large ships. The only way to take a large ship out of play quickly is to inflict literally dozens of damage points in a single turn, and it's quite hard to inflict that level of damage with ship mounted weapons without taking a matching beating of your own. Fighters let you throw damage at the enemy before he can reach you, and if you can put enough of them on the target, the damage can be significant enough to take a large combatant off the table.
So the argument for fighters is pretty simple; large amounts of damage delivered without risk to the launching platforms. This argument only holds good when fighters are used in large numbers; the most you can expect to get out of a single fighter squadron is a limited amount of local protection from other fighter groups. Even six fighter squadrons, the average number in a "book" heavy carrier, is not really enough to deliver a killer blow to a combatant the same size as the launching platform
However, the risk to the fighters is very high, and fighter operations have a high attrition cost. And given the length of time a battle actually lasts, fighters have to be seen as one shot weapons. You're unlikely to recover them and rearm them in time to use them a second time, even if enough of them survive to make up a worthwhile force for a second strike.
The question I want to ponder in this post is whether fighters make economic sense; does the inevitable cost of using them work out lower than the costs they inflict on the enemy? It's taken as a given that winning a battle can deliver benefits that have no way of being measured with mere money, let alone the limited economic model this campaign uses. What I'm interested in here is trying to tease out whether fighters are affordable in the longer run when no dramatic resolution of the conflict can be expected. I'm partly driven by the parallels in the real world; to what extent does maintaining an unassailable military hollow out your economy to the point that you're defeated by making yourself undefeatable?
Fighters have two principal roles in our games; blowing up large combatants, and shooting down other pesky fighters. The ideal machine for the first job is the torpedo bomber, and the ideal tool for the second job is the heavy interceptor.
Starting with the already trodden ground; an interceptor squadron is all but guaranteed to knock out a normal squadron in a dogfight (two kills on a 5 or 6, one kill on a 3 or 4, six dice rolled). They will take losses in doing so; a vanilla dogfight between normal fighters results in the loss of four fighters from each squadron on average. Heavy fighter squadrons ignore 4s and so only lose three fighters per dogfight. Send in a heavy interceptor squadron against a torpedo squadron and the torpedo squadron will be wiped out; the interceptors will lose one fighter. (The current rules give a dogfight kill to Attack and Torpedo fighters only on 6, and allow heavies to ignore rolls of 4, so perversely, being heavy makes no difference to your chances of surviving a dogfight against Attack or Torpedo fighters). The attacker thus has to take out the interceptors in advance or send in enough fighters to make them irrelevant
Our conclusion, such as it is, is that for every interceptor squadron you expect to face, you'll need either at least two torpedo squadrons or one torpedo squadron and one interceptor squadron to fly cover. The second option is a lot cheaper in points/money terms, although the mass cost is the same.
Next, how much damage can a torpedo squadron actually do? Each fighter has a 50:50 chance of a hit and a hit does one d6 damage. So in some wonder universe where all you roll is sixes, you could do 36 points of damage with one squadron, but on average you're going to do 6/2*3.5 = 10.5 points. If you're going in against serious opposition - and it's hard to imagine doing this against anything else - it's taken you two squadrons of fighters to do it, one of which you've pretty much lost in the process. If you went cost effective and bought one torpedo squadron backed by one heavy interceptor squadron, that cost you 66 points to do and you lost 24-30 points in interceptor losses on the way in. Your opponent will repair the hull damage for 21 points...
Now this analysis is flawed, because it overlooks the fact that you're not sending in one squadron; you're sending in several, and you're going to do so much damage on average that you're looking at inflicting system checks and all kinds of other repair bills; this tilts the repair economics the other way. Let's say that a single large carrier can put eight squadrons on target and you go for an even mix. 42 points of damage on the target is going to obliterate all but the heaviest combatants and give pause for thought to anything; it's about half the hull boxes of a typical SDN or CVH. Put two groups like that onto a target, and you've knocked out anything in existence. And most of the time, when we've seen carrier operations, that's what we've seen, so that should be our typical business case; two CVH sending everything they've got against a single high value target. So 66 by 8 is 528 points to buy, and you should expect to lose almost half of them to interceptors. So you take out about 700 points worth of ship for 250 points - and of course your opponent has lost about the same points worth of fighters inflicting the losses. This starts to look like an argument for never doing anything else.
However, I've left out till now two things. The first is point and area defences. Each PDS knocks out .8 of a fighter on average. A high value target is studded with PDS, typically 4 to 6. They can't fire into a dogfight, but fighters in a dogfight are not attacking you at the same time; whatever comes out of the dogfight will have to run the gamut of the PDS during the attack run. So knock off another three or four fighters from the torpedo bombers. Doesn't really affect the arithmetic, but it's a shame not to be complete. And of course there's no way that the enemy is sticking around putting a high value combatant at risk from two CVHs unless he's got the idea that he's still in with a chance. Which means he's got as much heavy metal in the system as you do. One thing which you can be sure of - anything worth attacking this way will have escorts with area defence. So expect to lose more torpedo fighters to those PDS. Now this does affect the arithmetic because a couple of serious escorts will add eight to twelve PDS to the gauntlet for your torpedo bombers, and that adds 6 to 9 fighters to your likely losses. Add that to local defence by the target and you're looking at losing two squadrons from the eight you put in; which gives the hulk of the target a chance of survival and escape. Not looking quite so good, although the balance sheet is still in your favour; the interceptor losses cancel out and the cost of replacing the fighters is far less than the cost of the likely repairs to the target.
The second thing is less amenable to analysis. The enemy is only sticking around because he thinks he's got the weight to make it pay. So the question you need to ask is, what's he going to do while I'm sending in the fighters? Up to now the analysis has assumed that he's got at least enough carriers to cancel out your interceptors (and that if he doesn't, you have to expect that he will, and field interceptor cover anyhow). If that's true, you have to expect that something very similar is about to happen to one of your high value combatants. Let's assume, however, that he's fielded a single carrier stuffed with interceptors, and used other approaches instead of torpedo bombers. I think it's fair to say that the one thing which comes out of all verbiage above is that the likely effective weight of strike you'd actually deliver with 2 CVHs is eight squadrons of torpedo bombers; although you will have spent as much again in support fighters and hangar space and a lot more on top of that for hulls and systems to make the ship, what delivers the damage is the fighters you get on target and your opponent will have spent similar sums on putting up his defences and the hulls to mount his weapons.
Eight squadrons of torpedo bombers weighs in at 72 mass (the hangars) and costs 243 (hangar cost plus fighter cost) points to do an average of 75 points of damage at a range of more than 24" in a game, making a modest allowance for PDS attrition. For the same mass and less money, you can have 8 class 2 grasers or 3 class 3 grasers; 18 Class 3 beams 9 class 4 beams or 4 class 5 beams and one class 4; or 14 class K guns. Assuming that setting up and executing a fighter attack is going to take three turns, what sort of damage could you expect to do with ship mounted weapons in the same period of time at say, 36" or less?
With Class 2 grasers; 8*2.8*3 = 67
With Class 3 grasers 3*5.6*3=50
With Class 3 Beams 18*.8*3 = 43
With Class 4 Beams 9*1.6*3 = 43
With Class 5 Beams 4*2.4*3 = 30.6
With K Guns 14*3*.75= 32 (to thirty inches only)
These all go up dramatically if you get in close; if you close to within 24" you can double the effect of the Class 3 beams or the K guns, for example, which brings them into the same sphere as the torpedo bomber damage; come in to eighteen inches and you double the Graser 2 damage and add a further 50 percent to the Graser 3 and K gun damage. And you don't have to accept attrition to these weapons as the cost of doing business; even when you lose them to system checks, they come in cheaper per ton than advanced fighters do. On the other hand, all of these weapons require aggressive manoeuvre to be any use at all, because they have restricted arcs. Another thing hard to analyse on pure numbers.
I'm not sure I've convinced myself yet, but I'm coming around to the idea that aggressively handled, ship borne weapons give you more for your money than fighters do - the key being aggression.
One of these days I must think about missiles.
Monday 21 May 2007
Rule 10.8 clarification; damage from system defences
Where it says that damage will be spread evenly over damaged ships, "evenly" means proportionally to the mass of the ships affected, not the same amount of damage to each ship. Note; mass, not number of hull boxes.
The reason for adjudicating it this way is that this way, no damage goes to waste. If the same amount of damage was done to each ship irrespective of size, the individual helpings would probably be big enough to knock out small ships entirely with damage left over (and thus not applied to anything); meanwhile the bigger ships would barely be scratched.
As an extreme case, picture a task force which consists of one very large ship 200 mass) and a cloud of 19 couriers (5 mass). It attacks planetary defences and takes 100 points of hull damage. Each ship takes five points of hull damage. The couriers have a single hull box each and are evaporated five times over. The battlewagon is barely scratched. If the damage is spread proportionally, the couriers are still evaporated in all likelihood, but the battlewagon also takes very heavy damage, which is more reasonable, if not exactly fun for the owner.
The reason for adjudicating it this way is that this way, no damage goes to waste. If the same amount of damage was done to each ship irrespective of size, the individual helpings would probably be big enough to knock out small ships entirely with damage left over (and thus not applied to anything); meanwhile the bigger ships would barely be scratched.
As an extreme case, picture a task force which consists of one very large ship 200 mass) and a cloud of 19 couriers (5 mass). It attacks planetary defences and takes 100 points of hull damage. Each ship takes five points of hull damage. The couriers have a single hull box each and are evaporated five times over. The battlewagon is barely scratched. If the damage is spread proportionally, the couriers are still evaporated in all likelihood, but the battlewagon also takes very heavy damage, which is more reasonable, if not exactly fun for the owner.
Sunday 20 May 2007
rule clarifications
1. At different spots in the rules it says a normal move is two hexes and three hexes. It's two. I wrote three because I spazzed out on ordinal versus cardinal numbers. The intent is that in normal travel you can skip over a single intervening empty hex if you start and end the move in a system.
2. Seeing off an isolated scout from a system is not enough of a victory to give you plus 1 in attacking planetary defences.
3. Because it's too much trouble to calculate for the added "realism", combat damage to a fleet does not count against its notional points total for attacking system defences. Actual ship losses do; you can only count the points values of ships you choose to commit to the fight (remember,it's open to you not to commit ships which might be completely destroyed by hull damage in the event of a defeat). Handwaving rationalisations: a) the dice roll models a lot of things, including morale, which counts the ships, not whether they're broken b) that much loose energy probably damaged lots of things apart from the original targets.
4. Freighters, if any of you have them, cost 10% for maintenance just like everything else does. For those of you who say, but they should be cheaper than warships to run, they are; you haven't put any weapons in them, they presumably have less powerful drives, and I'm not billing you for crew factors in the first place. 10% of a cheaper ship is less money. Cowboy up.
5. If any of you want to use heavy missiles, the ones in MT are fine, other designs can be raised with me in the normal way and either blessed or damned on my whim and or the force of your argument.
6. Although it may not feel like it in practice, one underlying assumption in the campaign is that news travels no faster than starships. This has all kinds if implications, all of which were intended, so before you ask a question about, for example, coordination and communication, ask yourself how it's affected by the fact that there is no communication system faster than a courier boat.
2. Seeing off an isolated scout from a system is not enough of a victory to give you plus 1 in attacking planetary defences.
3. Because it's too much trouble to calculate for the added "realism", combat damage to a fleet does not count against its notional points total for attacking system defences. Actual ship losses do; you can only count the points values of ships you choose to commit to the fight (remember,it's open to you not to commit ships which might be completely destroyed by hull damage in the event of a defeat). Handwaving rationalisations: a) the dice roll models a lot of things, including morale, which counts the ships, not whether they're broken b) that much loose energy probably damaged lots of things apart from the original targets.
4. Freighters, if any of you have them, cost 10% for maintenance just like everything else does. For those of you who say, but they should be cheaper than warships to run, they are; you haven't put any weapons in them, they presumably have less powerful drives, and I'm not billing you for crew factors in the first place. 10% of a cheaper ship is less money. Cowboy up.
5. If any of you want to use heavy missiles, the ones in MT are fine, other designs can be raised with me in the normal way and either blessed or damned on my whim and or the force of your argument.
6. Although it may not feel like it in practice, one underlying assumption in the campaign is that news travels no faster than starships. This has all kinds if implications, all of which were intended, so before you ask a question about, for example, coordination and communication, ask yourself how it's affected by the fact that there is no communication system faster than a courier boat.
Saturday 19 May 2007
Savasku; an overdue rant Slightly revised
You'd never know it to look at me, but all I really want is for people to get along. And to do what I tell them, of course, but that's only because people would all get on so much better if they just left the thinking to me. Thinking just seems to lead most people towards discontentment. Why not leave that burden to me? I'm miserable to begin with.
Because of the rather peculiar way my mind works, the usual outcome of me trying to get everyone to agree is that they all reach an instant consensus on how much they hate me and would like me to shut up. Well, at least they agree on something, but what I'm usually trying to do when I start an argument is put the opposite point of view in the hope of putting some balance into things.
There's been such a lot of negativity about Savasku that my natural impulses have rather obscured my own reservations. In the face of people getting excited about how awful the Savasku are, I naturally tended to try to calm them back down again.
I'm actually not that happy about the Savasku. The presence of Savasku in a game is an instant buzz kill, and that rather gets in the way of what I hope to do in a game.
Firstly, everyone hates and fears the Savasku because they seem absurdly powerful. Now, I'm not fully persuaded that they are, but I can't deny that perception is powerful here, and I haven't been able to make much headway in persuading anyone to the view that Savasku are no more worrying than anything else is. So just putting SV on the table tends to create bad energies, and that's not a happy thing. At the moment, what I'd really like to see is an SV force getting a really serious ass kicking, on the basis that letting some of the air out of their cockroach looking tires would cheer everyone else up and make them less jumpy.
Secondly, they bring distrust and paperwork in their wake. Every turn, the SV player has to work out how much of his energy budget is going to what, and he has to get the calculations right and then get a second group of calculations right (I'm already tired to having to tell people how many dice a given amount of energy turns into at whatever range). When players are feeling jumpy and negative to begin with, this is a real recipe for friction and more unhappiness. So I don't much like that aspect of the scaly little horrors. Someone playing the SV has to be very much on top of his game, know his ships backwards and forwards and be especially nice to make up for the fact that he's starting out annoying just by being an SV. Lawrence would have been a good SV player, come to think of it. All in all, they're a bunch of work and what's in it for the rest of us? The SV players might think I'm being unfair; I'm certainly being unpleasantly negative. But this is something which I think needs to be articulated; it's there and it needs to be worked through a little bit. I'm not saying that working it through will make it easier to deal with, but I want to hostility to go where it belongs - don't hate the player, hate the game. We'll all need to be more patient, and the burden's going to fall disproportionately on the SV players.
That out of the way, here's what I think about them in game terms.
Firstly, the superpowers are oversold. Yes, they can all fire a billion dice and accelerate off the table while spinning round their own axes, but not simultaneously. If they're making significant position changes, they aren't using significant firepower. If they're using significant firepower, they're coasting. If they're running their shields, they typically lose a quarter of their energy per shield. They can't be powerful in all senses at once, so they can be outmanoeuvred.
Secondly, is a power generator a system which has to be given a system check when a row of biomass boxes gets destroyed? If so, Savasku are suddenly vulnerable. Taking out the first row of hull boxes knocks out the first generator automatically; if the other three are then system checked, there's a fifty fifty chance one of them will fail. A Savasku ship with only two power generators is pretty screwed. Apart from anything else, it typically doesn't have enough energy to run its FTL drive and get out of the combat. SV players will argue that the power generators shouldn't be subjected to system checks; but there's nothing in the rules which I can see that specifically exempts them. And the rules do specifically permit their repair, which suggests that they're a system, rather than something built into the mass. To be hard headed about it, if the system can be repaired I think it should be threshold checked in the normal way. Adding to my inclination to take this line is the fact that uniquely the Savasku don't have core systems, so they don't have to worry about THOSE checks.
Thirdly, that power requirement is more brutal than the critics acknowledge. If a non Savasku ship gets three rows of hull boxes shot off, it's hurting, but with a lot of luck it might still be able to disengage and what systems are still undamaged can be run at full effectiveness. And there's usually a couple of crew boxes left to repair vital systems with. If a Savasku ship has three rows of hull boxes gone, it's down to a quarter of its power, can't run its FTL, can't manoeuvre, and can't fire at anything like full effect with whatever weapons it still has. And its ability to repair itself is badly shot; to repair anything it has to burn power equivalent to the mass of what it's fixing. (which means that if it wants to repair the FTL, it first has to repair the second power generator - and doing that will take all the power it's got) And that's assuming that the SV ship hasn't been burning through its own biomass getting things done; if it's done any fighter generation or pod launching, a SV ship with three rows of hulls gone is in very bad shape indeed. In practical terms, once a Savasku ship loses even the first row of biomass, the clock's ticking in a way that it isn't for human ships.
Fourthly, stinger nodes are VERY annoying. It's not just that they can pump out any arbitrary amount of energy you put through them, it's that they have three arcs. In practice, most SV ships don't need anything like as many stinger nodes as humans need beam weapons, and an efficiently designed one would have about half as many as the Fleet Book II designs have. Luckily, the only active SV player used off the book designs and is wasting mass on weapons he doesn't use in practice. Because I think the real bottleneck is the energy requirement, I tend to view this feature as annoying rather than unfair.
Fifthly, although I've decided that replacing expended biomass will cost money, which drives up the cost of being SV a little over that of being non-SV (because a number of SV functions use up biomass that don't use biomass in other races, notably repair and ADFC), I'm still a little bothered that the protean nature of biomass lets SV replace things more cheaply than anyone else can. This is a campaign issue rather than a rules issue; have I set the price of running an SV fleet fairly vis a vis the price of fleets which can't, for example, replace their fighters by having a nice lunch. Actually, that's a particularly serious issue. Expended biomass currently replaces at 1 credit per box. It only takes one biomass to make a fighter. So the credit cost of fighter losses for SV is one per. For anyone else it's a minimum of three for a generic fighter directly equivalent to the SV one. Hmmm. That can't be right. Suggestions welcome.
In the same thought you might like to consider this question: Should SV players be able to pre-load the drone wombs? As things stand, SV players have to make a decision to generate fighters and then launch them the following turn. Does this stop them from deploying fighters before the battle begins? Since I've rewritten the entry and attack rules slightly to make it clear that people are not popping out of FTL and straight into combat (in most cases!), it seems to me that any fleet could do elementary housekeeping exercises like popping out its fighters as it makes the approach. Perhaps popping fighters ahead of the engagement should be another thing you can spend initiative points on.
Pre-loading the drone wombs can be seen another way, however; what if you buy your ship, immediately fill the wombs, and then use a standard repair operation to replace to the biomass at the beginning of the next turn? This would let an SV player with the largest carrier they have potentially launch three flights of four squadrons, or even four if he didn't mind knocking his biomass down to a mere eight boxes. One thing I don't think it could do is allow the SV player to run what amounted to an in-game biomass refuelling option, by relanding the fighters to replace lost biomass. Biomass which gets shot off stays shot off. My inclination is to point out that by replacing the biomass while keeping the fighters onboard, the SV vessel is overweight and straining its engines, which is either illegal or dangerous, depending on whether I want to just rule the idea out or amuse myself with arbitrary damage rolls.
Finally, I am still of the view that the SV are not underpriced for what you get. The individual systems are often cheaper than their non-SV equivalents, but behind all of them is the need to pump an awful lot of money and mass into power plants. A SV ship has 10% of its mass in the M drive node, 10% of its mass in the FTL drive and 20-25% of its mass in power generators. That's 40-45% of the total mass in overhead before you decide on weapons and hull boxes. A human ship with an acceleration of 6 has 10% in FTL and 30% in M-drive. And everything it's got works all the time at full capacity. If you decide to run a big SV ship at a constant acceleration of 6 and switch on its shield generator, its firepower starts to converge pretty noticeably to where a non-SV ship would be. They can be taken out. I'm not claiming it's easy, but it's doable.
New versions of Rules 17 and 18; Attack and retreat
17 Attacking systems which have fleets in them
17.1 Philosophy.
The GZG rules cover the tactical aspects of battle, and are written on the assumption that the forces are aware of each other and that at least one side is committed to action. They also assume that the opposing forces have completed their jump into the system and are in a combat formation. The GZG rules DO envisage players jumping straight into combat, but make it very risky. The following rules cover the operational aspects of engagement between jumping into system and moving to tactical engagement.
17.2 All strategic moves must give the destination of the task force and its posture for arrival.
17.2.1. Stand off; fleet will manoeuvre for advantage until it elects to withdraw, is attacked, or changes its orders to attack after assessing the situation
Fleets on Stand Off orders do not attack against either fleets or planetary defences, and do not count as interdicting the system if they are still present at the end of the turn.
17.2.2. Attack; fleet will attack what it finds on arrival; first attacking other fleets on attack orders (attack posture is readily distinguishable from stand off because active sensors are switched on), then other fleets on stand off orders, then planetary defences.
Attack orders give +1 to initiative rolls
17.2.3. Withdraw if contested; fleet will withdraw if any hostile mobile forces are present in the system. If only planetary defences forces are present, a fleet in "withdraw if contested" may remain, and change its orders to attack following recon of the defences. Fleets on Withdraw if Contested bug out as soon as they detect mobile opposition but may pick up some data on what's there.
17.4 If all fleets are on Standoff, each player chooses a fresh tactical posture secretly, repeating as necessary until one way or another the system has no more than one fleet in it. Alternatively, players can leave their fleets in place in standoff mode at the end of the turn. Maybe you'll get reinforcements and the other guy won't. Who knows?
17.5 Once at least one force is committed to attack orders, combat becomes likely. Other players must decide immediately whether they're sticking around or trying to disengage. Check for range; roll 1 d6 and add 6. This gives the distance between task forces in feet. If the distance is too big for both forces to be on table simultaneously, disengagement is automatic. Otherwise forces go on table and disengagement is fought out. If one force is big and slow and the other small and fast, this may be adjudicated quickly without formality.
17.6 Before ships are put on the table, force commanders should make an unambiguous note of formation and speed. Formations can be as dispersed as you like. However, if you left your last system under fire, you must use the speed and formation you had at the moment you hit the FTL button.
17.7 All fleets not disengaged under 17.5 dice for initiative. Highest initiative is assumed to have the drop on the others; note that an attack order makes you more likely to have the initiative. Player with the initiative gets half the difference (rounded down) in the dice rolls to use in making his initial dispositions more useful to him. Anyone rolling a 1 arrives from FTL and has to put up with being in formation 6 inches apart from the moment of arrival. Essentially they've shown up much later than everyone else.
17.8 Relative positions on table. Top of the table (Brian's end, if that helps), is equivalent to top of the campaign map. The bottom is equivalent to the bottom. Task forces enter the table from the side equivalent to the hex side they move through to enter the hex on the campaign map.
17.9 Players with higher initiative will be able to make between zero and two changes in their dispositions. These can be used to change the point of entry on the table (one point per edge segment) the separation between opposed forces (one point per foot in either direction) or to split the formation. No matter how that goes, all fleet begin facing in towards the centre of the table
18 Departing under fire
18.1 The standard rules in Full Thrust for FTL'ing out apply. Executive summary, six inch spacing between ships, no use of manoeuvre drive and no weapons fired during the run-up to departure. The rules say that shields can be left on during this process. The firing up of the FTL drive is apparent during the previous move, and the blink out happens half way through the normal move.
18.2 Your departure takes the place of your normal move in the next strategic turn. This is also the case with recce units sent into a system which elect to leave after looking around. Immediately write down your destination; that's where you're going to be in a week. You arrive at your destination travelling in the same formation, spacing and speed that you had when you left the last hell hole.
18.3 You can try FTL ing while under fire, or you can try to build up enough distance to do it safely. Disengagement is not automatic; there is no real edge to the table, so getting off the table does not get you out of trouble. The first step to disengagement is to get out of weapons range of the enemy. This is considered to be the distance at which the enemy can't get more than one dice on you per working gun or 36 inches, whichever is less. At that point, check relative speed and the thrust of the poorest accelerating ship in each fleet. It should be clear cut whether the separation is going to increase or shrink. If not, roll one d6 each. If the disengager gets higher, he gets away, otherwise the pursuit continues. Plus one on the dice roll to whichever side has the highest acceleration in its poorest accelerating ship.
17.1 Philosophy.
The GZG rules cover the tactical aspects of battle, and are written on the assumption that the forces are aware of each other and that at least one side is committed to action. They also assume that the opposing forces have completed their jump into the system and are in a combat formation. The GZG rules DO envisage players jumping straight into combat, but make it very risky. The following rules cover the operational aspects of engagement between jumping into system and moving to tactical engagement.
17.2 All strategic moves must give the destination of the task force and its posture for arrival.
17.2.1. Stand off; fleet will manoeuvre for advantage until it elects to withdraw, is attacked, or changes its orders to attack after assessing the situation
Fleets on Stand Off orders do not attack against either fleets or planetary defences, and do not count as interdicting the system if they are still present at the end of the turn.
17.2.2. Attack; fleet will attack what it finds on arrival; first attacking other fleets on attack orders (attack posture is readily distinguishable from stand off because active sensors are switched on), then other fleets on stand off orders, then planetary defences.
Attack orders give +1 to initiative rolls
17.2.3. Withdraw if contested; fleet will withdraw if any hostile mobile forces are present in the system. If only planetary defences forces are present, a fleet in "withdraw if contested" may remain, and change its orders to attack following recon of the defences. Fleets on Withdraw if Contested bug out as soon as they detect mobile opposition but may pick up some data on what's there.
17.4 If all fleets are on Standoff, each player chooses a fresh tactical posture secretly, repeating as necessary until one way or another the system has no more than one fleet in it. Alternatively, players can leave their fleets in place in standoff mode at the end of the turn. Maybe you'll get reinforcements and the other guy won't. Who knows?
17.5 Once at least one force is committed to attack orders, combat becomes likely. Other players must decide immediately whether they're sticking around or trying to disengage. Check for range; roll 1 d6 and add 6. This gives the distance between task forces in feet. If the distance is too big for both forces to be on table simultaneously, disengagement is automatic. Otherwise forces go on table and disengagement is fought out. If one force is big and slow and the other small and fast, this may be adjudicated quickly without formality.
17.6 Before ships are put on the table, force commanders should make an unambiguous note of formation and speed. Formations can be as dispersed as you like. However, if you left your last system under fire, you must use the speed and formation you had at the moment you hit the FTL button.
17.7 All fleets not disengaged under 17.5 dice for initiative. Highest initiative is assumed to have the drop on the others; note that an attack order makes you more likely to have the initiative. Player with the initiative gets half the difference (rounded down) in the dice rolls to use in making his initial dispositions more useful to him. Anyone rolling a 1 arrives from FTL and has to put up with being in formation 6 inches apart from the moment of arrival. Essentially they've shown up much later than everyone else.
17.8 Relative positions on table. Top of the table (Brian's end, if that helps), is equivalent to top of the campaign map. The bottom is equivalent to the bottom. Task forces enter the table from the side equivalent to the hex side they move through to enter the hex on the campaign map.
17.9 Players with higher initiative will be able to make between zero and two changes in their dispositions. These can be used to change the point of entry on the table (one point per edge segment) the separation between opposed forces (one point per foot in either direction) or to split the formation. No matter how that goes, all fleet begin facing in towards the centre of the table
18 Departing under fire
18.1 The standard rules in Full Thrust for FTL'ing out apply. Executive summary, six inch spacing between ships, no use of manoeuvre drive and no weapons fired during the run-up to departure. The rules say that shields can be left on during this process. The firing up of the FTL drive is apparent during the previous move, and the blink out happens half way through the normal move.
18.2 Your departure takes the place of your normal move in the next strategic turn. This is also the case with recce units sent into a system which elect to leave after looking around. Immediately write down your destination; that's where you're going to be in a week. You arrive at your destination travelling in the same formation, spacing and speed that you had when you left the last hell hole.
18.3 You can try FTL ing while under fire, or you can try to build up enough distance to do it safely. Disengagement is not automatic; there is no real edge to the table, so getting off the table does not get you out of trouble. The first step to disengagement is to get out of weapons range of the enemy. This is considered to be the distance at which the enemy can't get more than one dice on you per working gun or 36 inches, whichever is less. At that point, check relative speed and the thrust of the poorest accelerating ship in each fleet. It should be clear cut whether the separation is going to increase or shrink. If not, roll one d6 each. If the disengager gets higher, he gets away, otherwise the pursuit continues. Plus one on the dice roll to whichever side has the highest acceleration in its poorest accelerating ship.
The Philosophy of this Blog
The written word is a pesky thing. Misunderstanding abounds whenever people communicate, but the written word throws up special challenges, all of which come down to people reading things without getting any balancing feedback. So they read what they see, and you're not there to fine tune your words to their concerns. If I was talking to you all, I'd be able to see your expressions and your feet shifting and you reaching for heavy objects, and well, I'd change the tone or explain what I really meant, or well, flat out lie. Like people do. Writing stuff for the blog, I don't have the sense of what the eventual readers will be preoccupied with when they finally read my words, and from this, sadness and recrimination can flow.
So it seems like an overdue idea to put down some ground rules about the editorial voice here. Rules is probably too strong a word; it's not as though every post will come with a heading and a sarcasm level warning.
But that said, posts are going to fall into the following rough groups
Rules and rulings; Rules will deal with purely campaign issues. I had thought that the campaign rules would be locked by now, but they're still evolving a little, and I suppose I'm going to be tinkering all the time. Rulings will deal with collisions between the canonical GZG rules and the campaign framework - the GZG rules were primarily written to govern tactical engagements and sometimes it's going to be necessary to add some wording glue to fasten them into the bigger frame. I know I have a tendency to pronounce all this as the word from on high, but in reality I am a kindly tyrant and will listen to anyone who has a better idea. So if a ruling or rule appears which you think is unfair, stupid, unnecessary or directly against something in the GZG rules, email me, put in a comment or raise it with me when you see me.
Cogitation; there are a lot of posts put up which simply think aloud about things. As we play through the games, it strikes me that weapon system X is worth talking through. It might be that weapon system X is your most favourite thing in the world. In which case, your love should be stronger than my scorn. If I find myself thinking aloud about something, it's just my opinion; until I put up a rule, you have nothing to worry about. Your own views could be just as interesting as mine, and that's why there's a commenting system; use it. There's been a tendency for cogitation to shade into ruling; I will be resisting this in future.
Status reports; When something happens, I'm going to try to put a note of it on the blog. This is going to involve reporting on screw-ups, and occasionally pointing out that they WERE screw-ups. Cowboy up, people. I am not going to be mocking you for spite, and I'm not going to be taking sides, but victory goes to the guy who makes the fewest mistakes and how on earth am I going to report on that without mentioning those strokes of anti-genius from which we're all going to learn so much?
Guff; UN press releases, bad jokes and pure whimsy are going to pop up when i have the energy to do them. Disrespectful things will be said about player forces. We're all adults here, so don't make me spell out the obvious.
Finally a word about the peculiar objectives and ruling structures of this campaign and blog.
The campaign proper is a two headed step child, having come out of a semi-drunken confab between John and me earlier in the year. We wanted a structure into which we could fit interesting Full Thrust battles, and we decided to aim for a campaign which could run itself once it was set up - that way both of us would actually be able to play in it. This was a must-have a) so that we could have some fun and b) so that we'd have enough actual players to get a decent dynamic in the game. We figured on a joint umpirate, reckoning that it was unlikely that both of us would be under attack in any given engagement, so we could resolve any arguments using an outsider to any given fight.
The initial rules were written collaboratively, with me doing the initial drafting and John weeding out idiocy. This continues to be my preferred approach to writing the rules; most of the rules and rulings are arrived at collectively, after some measure of discussion between us. There's rather less collectivity when the rule involves an issue that affects John directly, and it should be taken that when I pronounce on something in that area I am doing it after hearing submissions from all parties, or alternatively, from none of you.
However, what goes up on the blog is first and foremost my responsibility; if you have an issue with it, it's my fault not John's, because I do the typing and the posting. And even where John has had an input into a rule, he has little control over how I choose to express the thoughts.
The overarching philosophy of the blog and campaign is that it's supposed to be fun. And it's not fun if people are cranky and out of sorts. So I encourage feedback. If you're annoyed with something I've said, tell me about. If I'm wrong, you have the right to expect me to admit it and redress the balance.
Normal programming will now resume.
At phenomenal expense
Our production will now have a new special guest star
Fresh from sell out engagements in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and the People's Community Hall, Mombasa, I bring you Frank Walsh, who takes over from Con in the previously quiescent Savasku lands in the middle of the board. It wasn't easy to get Frank on board. I had to send a whole text message. But that's how much I love my players, each and every one of them.
This isn't quite as much of an all done deal as I'd like it to be. Frank is going to have to cook up his forces and I think it's expecting too much of him to be looking to see fully worked out fleets popping up on the coming Monday. But after that we should be able to shake the dynamic up somewhat.
Con will be joining us eventually, I hope. Similar worlds to the ones he's just graciously vacated will magically appear at some edge of the map. Who's going to have new neighbours? It will be a dice roll. Mind you, the way things are going, that still gives a fifty fifty chance that Con and Eddie will be neighbours given the way that Eddie has pretty much spread over three sides of the map.
In entirely unrelated news, there will, as earlier advertised, be newer, prettier, simpler and less controversial rules on LEAVING systems. The entering systems rules will be subjected to a very minor clarification.
At the same time that these are posted, I hope to put up a summary of the current state of play in financial terms, which I need to do to inform Frank of what he's getting into, but which will be interesting for everyone, except whoever happens to have the most money and planets. Traditionally whoever has become the leader of the pack in multiplayer games hates to have this pointed out to people, so I will preface this by saying that it's a terrible burden being stronger than anyone else. Weirdly, leaders never welcome suggestions that the rest of the players lighten this burden, so none of you are to interpret me as suggesting this for a moment.
And as a fitting to cap to all of this, I will have something to say about the pestilence of the age, the Savasku. Specifically, I will be cogitating on whether there's a campaign issue arising from the fact that biomass is cheap as chips compared to everything it mirrors in the non-organic world. I don't expect to make any hard and fast ruling about it, but there's something there i want to try to tease out.
And an availability announcement; I'm going to be in TRIM (dear god have mercy) on Monday 28 May, and you will somehow have to stumble through your evening without me.
Fresh from sell out engagements in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and the People's Community Hall, Mombasa, I bring you Frank Walsh, who takes over from Con in the previously quiescent Savasku lands in the middle of the board. It wasn't easy to get Frank on board. I had to send a whole text message. But that's how much I love my players, each and every one of them.
This isn't quite as much of an all done deal as I'd like it to be. Frank is going to have to cook up his forces and I think it's expecting too much of him to be looking to see fully worked out fleets popping up on the coming Monday. But after that we should be able to shake the dynamic up somewhat.
Con will be joining us eventually, I hope. Similar worlds to the ones he's just graciously vacated will magically appear at some edge of the map. Who's going to have new neighbours? It will be a dice roll. Mind you, the way things are going, that still gives a fifty fifty chance that Con and Eddie will be neighbours given the way that Eddie has pretty much spread over three sides of the map.
In entirely unrelated news, there will, as earlier advertised, be newer, prettier, simpler and less controversial rules on LEAVING systems. The entering systems rules will be subjected to a very minor clarification.
At the same time that these are posted, I hope to put up a summary of the current state of play in financial terms, which I need to do to inform Frank of what he's getting into, but which will be interesting for everyone, except whoever happens to have the most money and planets. Traditionally whoever has become the leader of the pack in multiplayer games hates to have this pointed out to people, so I will preface this by saying that it's a terrible burden being stronger than anyone else. Weirdly, leaders never welcome suggestions that the rest of the players lighten this burden, so none of you are to interpret me as suggesting this for a moment.
And as a fitting to cap to all of this, I will have something to say about the pestilence of the age, the Savasku. Specifically, I will be cogitating on whether there's a campaign issue arising from the fact that biomass is cheap as chips compared to everything it mirrors in the non-organic world. I don't expect to make any hard and fast ruling about it, but there's something there i want to try to tease out.
And an availability announcement; I'm going to be in TRIM (dear god have mercy) on Monday 28 May, and you will somehow have to stumble through your evening without me.
Developments in Savasku space
Glammed up version may follow, but Con has made contact and is still swamped for the next little while. He's agreed to turn his domains over to someone more active while I set up an area from which he can issue forth spreading fear and terror all around him at some point in the future.
Who takes over the areas is a puzzle. Suggestions are welcome. Frank has first call, but I don't know if he's in a position to take up the ball running like this. I thought about using the area to let people who didn't have a fleet in play have something to play with, but that's going to be a bit of a pain for the theoretical owner....
Who takes over the areas is a puzzle. Suggestions are welcome. Frank has first call, but I don't know if he's in a position to take up the ball running like this. I thought about using the area to let people who didn't have a fleet in play have something to play with, but that's going to be a bit of a pain for the theoretical owner....
Your attention is directed to changes
Made in the posts about Nova Cannons and Cloaking Fields.
Your attention is particularly directed to the last sentence of the post about Cloaking Fields, which is reproduced here for convenience:
In practice, this whole area of the campaign rules will be revisited in detail tomorrow, assuming that there's actually still going to be a campaign.
Your attention is particularly directed to the last sentence of the post about Cloaking Fields, which is reproduced here for convenience:
In practice, this whole area of the campaign rules will be revisited in detail tomorrow, assuming that there's actually still going to be a campaign.
Thursday 17 May 2007
The depressing news about the edge of the table
No more edge of the table. If - for example - a carrier moves itself to a position two feet off the edge of the table, everything else gets moved back up the table as necessary to get the carrier back on. In most cases that should be all that's necessary.
This is driven by a couple of things, but mostly by the campaign imperatives for quiet withdrawals. You're withdrawn in campaign terms only when you FTL out without interference; you don't get to leave the table and say Wey-Hey, you can't catch me now. You're in normal space until you do the FTL thing.
This is driven by a couple of things, but mostly by the campaign imperatives for quiet withdrawals. You're withdrawn in campaign terms only when you FTL out without interference; you don't get to leave the table and say Wey-Hey, you can't catch me now. You're in normal space until you do the FTL thing.
The terrible truth about Cloaking Fields (with edits)
Have you seen the price of those things? Not quite 10% of the ship's mass and costing twice the mass of the ship.
It has been drawn to my attention that Fleet Book 1 halved the price of Cloaking Fields and slightly upped the mass (it was 1 mass for every ten of the ship and with Fleet Book 1, it's 10% of the mass and 10 credits per mass). Still the most expensive system money can buy, mind you.
Because doing the moves after the fact seems more annoying than it should be, we're suggesting that in future the move be plotted out on hex paper. Suitable hexpaper will be provided.
This suggestion is being made because it's easier, not because I think otherwise people would cheat. It actually gives the cloaking player a slight edge over just writing out orders, because he can see the track properly instead of trying to visualise it in his head.
The working assumption in these parts is that mistakes will be made, people will screw up or make faulty assumptions, and that no-one's going to be either perfectly accurate or perfectly good mannered under pressure. It is assumed that no-one's wilfully breaking the rules. If I thought people were cheating, I wouldn't be playing with them in the first place. So please read suggestions with that in your mind.
We like, but will not enforce, the charming notion that people in cloak ought to leave the room.
Because it's funny.
We're wondering about the campaign impact of cloaking devices, because they make disengagement a little too easy; a force equipped with this technology can never be brought to battle on unfavourable terms. Which is really the only way you ever want to bring someone to battle. This could seriously unbalance the campaign by allowing anyone with cloaking devices to swagger around picking only the fights he's guaranteed to win, and we're not immediately sure we know what the counter to it might be.
The tactical impact is kind of two edged. Witness John's ability to chunk out pretty much half his hull mass in fighters while Eddie was cloaked and in no position to do anything about it. You DO forfeit the tactical initiative. On the other hand, what difference does it make if you're not going to fight at all?
There's an unanswered question about cloaking devices and FTL
I have been told that this question is, in fact, answered by the rules.
; I am ruling here and now that you can't have both switched on at the same time.
Handwaving explanations will involve references to the requirement with FTL that you switch off all kinds of other systems and to the slight insanity of going into hyperdrive when you can't see the universe you're leaving. The game explanation is simpler; once you can FTL in and out in cloak, there's not really much left for anyone to do. It's still open to players to say that they're heading off out of sensor range with their cloaking device, which would have the same net effect, but see the next post, which will be about the edge of the table that we're not going to be having any more.
In practice, this whole area of the campaign rules will be revisited in detail tomorrow, assuming that there's actually still going to be a campaign.
It has been drawn to my attention that Fleet Book 1 halved the price of Cloaking Fields and slightly upped the mass (it was 1 mass for every ten of the ship and with Fleet Book 1, it's 10% of the mass and 10 credits per mass). Still the most expensive system money can buy, mind you.
Because doing the moves after the fact seems more annoying than it should be, we're suggesting that in future the move be plotted out on hex paper. Suitable hexpaper will be provided.
This suggestion is being made because it's easier, not because I think otherwise people would cheat. It actually gives the cloaking player a slight edge over just writing out orders, because he can see the track properly instead of trying to visualise it in his head.
The working assumption in these parts is that mistakes will be made, people will screw up or make faulty assumptions, and that no-one's going to be either perfectly accurate or perfectly good mannered under pressure. It is assumed that no-one's wilfully breaking the rules. If I thought people were cheating, I wouldn't be playing with them in the first place. So please read suggestions with that in your mind.
We like, but will not enforce, the charming notion that people in cloak ought to leave the room.
Because it's funny.
We're wondering about the campaign impact of cloaking devices, because they make disengagement a little too easy; a force equipped with this technology can never be brought to battle on unfavourable terms. Which is really the only way you ever want to bring someone to battle. This could seriously unbalance the campaign by allowing anyone with cloaking devices to swagger around picking only the fights he's guaranteed to win, and we're not immediately sure we know what the counter to it might be.
The tactical impact is kind of two edged. Witness John's ability to chunk out pretty much half his hull mass in fighters while Eddie was cloaked and in no position to do anything about it. You DO forfeit the tactical initiative. On the other hand, what difference does it make if you're not going to fight at all?
There's an unanswered question about cloaking devices and FTL
I have been told that this question is, in fact, answered by the rules.
; I am ruling here and now that you can't have both switched on at the same time.
Handwaving explanations will involve references to the requirement with FTL that you switch off all kinds of other systems and to the slight insanity of going into hyperdrive when you can't see the universe you're leaving. The game explanation is simpler; once you can FTL in and out in cloak, there's not really much left for anyone to do. It's still open to players to say that they're heading off out of sensor range with their cloaking device, which would have the same net effect, but see the next post, which will be about the edge of the table that we're not going to be having any more.
In practice, this whole area of the campaign rules will be revisited in detail tomorrow, assuming that there's actually still going to be a campaign.
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