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.
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