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.