Dramatic SFB: Long response

[Daniel Crispin]

I wrote a super long answer to Frank’s long message and Outlook crashed on me 30 minutes in! ARG!!!!!!

So I will do the same with Matt’s message, this time using Microsoft Word to protect my sanity from a potential crash.

I will answer inside each point, to make it clearer to everyone.

Structure first:
- No Map
This means borders are an abstraction. Wonder how a Klingon can find a border with the Gorn? They must have met in the middle while carving out Fed turf or worked around the Feds.

RE: To me it make so sense that two empires at the other end of the galaxy can have a border.  Your explanation for a single encounter makes sense, but a border means actual contact between the two empire’s territories.  How about fixed borders set by historical maps and the possibility of opening and closing fronts between the empires on your borders?

- Simple econ
That means we don't track what your econ is from colonies, we don't track supply lines, no supply-tax, no bookkeeping. I know some of you really prefer 4X campaigns. I do to. I have one in the works (I've had it in the works for a couple years now. Don't hold your breath.) But bookkeeping has to be a minimum here. Just point your fleet and shoot.

RE: Completelly agree with you on this..  Paperwork for tracking repairs and such are boring and make no sense.  In reality a galactic empire would have hundreds of ships, several repair docks, several base stations, starbases, and fleet construction yards.  We only use a small fraction of the empire’s actual navy.  No need to add tedious paperwork.


New Tweaks:
- Remove the {NO}INCOME rewards:
All of the scenarios will give and take away some amount of EPs. Your income won't ever be touched, but your stockpile will roller-coaster.

RE: Good idea!

- Add fleet Limits
While editing the scenarios for their rewards, I'll be introducing fleet limits on some scenarios. Particularly the common ones where it's unreasonable to see large fleet elements. Since I am planning to keep the CR system (I had floated the idea earlier to use the BPV cap system and it was unpopular), My original intent was to limit the size class (and thus limit the fleet size) allowed at certain scenarios. I might instead limit it by Move Cost (which will have the same effect - No ship with MC greater than 0.5 at such-and-such scenario) or by move-cost of all ships on a side (so limit one to MC 3.0, which would be three cruisers of six destroyers.) Other methods exist. Different scenarios might have different methods.

RE: My suggestion would be to simply slash the command rating of ships by half or even by three.  Command variant could have a +1 command after the slash.  This would make to manageable battle fleets and not restrict players in the choice of ships to use.  It would also prevent endless battles where a Carrier could be present with 6 or 7 other ships making the battle take weeks.

Possible Tweaks:
- Buy your starting fleet
At the start of the campaign, players might be given a certain stockpile and no ships. The first turn is spent buying ships and ignoring the scenarios (much to the chagrin of the players who draw the huge-BPV scenarios right off). Players who enter mid-stream will probably not be able to do this because of the one-sided benefit it gives to the player who shares borders with the unprotected new guy.

RE: This is a must!  Getting handed a fleet is no fun.  Each player has preferences in ships they like to fly.  Also on a strategic level people should be able to decide the kind of fleet they want.

Starting with a fixed amount of BPV and knowledge of what will be your initial borders would be ideal in my book.

Also, I think Frax should not be part of the available races.  This is a conjectural race designed to test ships.  If each race cannot build the conjectural units, why is an overpowered race that never existed be allowed in the campaign?


- Define ending conditions
I wasn't a big fan of this, but I got some push-back at the start of last game about this. Basically, we define a set of circumstances where someone is declared a winner. A certain income, fleet BPV, or we get to a certain turn/year. I prefer the flexibility of saying "Player A is unreachable, let's stop this" or "Half our player base is leaving next week. Let's call it here and start fresh." If you guys want to set up some certain goal (and accept that some people will set up their whole tactics on reaching that first, regardless of the "realistic" way to handle an empire), then I will go with that.

RE: Great idea.

- Exploration
There is no programmed-in mechanic for setting aside ships and getting income or borders for it. But if we can hash out the boundaries of such a mechanic, I can manually perform this. By reaching into the player settings, I can add/remove either part of the econ, and add/remove ships. But it would require players share their orders with me (which could be icky if I am also playing) in order to show what ships they are deliberately not sending to a battle. It also requires more behind-the-scenes administration from me.

RE: I feek Frank”s proposal to send scouts to do missions adds a lot of randomness to a very strategic campaign.  I would personally do without exploration.


- Weapon Status
I'm not married to the WS-Chart. But it was introduced in order to increase variation in the scenarios and to provide the possibility for reaching WS-III. I can roll things back to a defined-WS for each side in each scenario, if you prefer more stability with WS.

RE: WS is something very strange for this kind of campaign.  Question: If you are the captain of an attacking fleet headed to a planet, or enemy convoy or something.  Why would you not be at red alert and have your ship ready for battle before arriving?  This is not Star Wars where you make an hyperspace jump and only see conditions when you get there.  Even so, the attacking captain would load everything before leaving hyperspace.  In the Star Trek universe, all ships have powerful sensors and know that ships are approaching long before they enter weapon range.  Only exception would be with cloaking ships.  So to me, this is a very stupid game mechanic we should do without.  In fact, I think only the defender should roll in the case of cloaked ships attacking.  The roll would indicate if the defender managed to detect the ships before it’s too late.

- Starting Year
There are four main eras to start things in.
General War (GW) era: this starts in Y169 +/- 3 years.
Late-War era starts at the introduction of PFs: Y180 +/- 2 years. There is spotty support in the ship-lists for X-ships. However, this does allow more empires to join (as the Selts have ships, the Vudar have something besides a few base hulls to pick from, and there is a difference between the PF Feds and the 3rd-Way Feds.)
Early Year era (EY): this starts at Y120. I only have module Y1 in the DB, though "recently" have gotten Y2 and Y3.
Dawn of Warp era: this starts at Y60 +/- 10 years. As with the EY, support for this is currently spotty but will improve in future iterations. if we push back the start of the next campaign, I may have better support for this.

RE: Only thing I think we should try to avoid are X-Ships.  They are on a completely different level of capabilities and make regular ships obsolete.  I think the sweet spot is around Y174.  You mentioned the idea of having more turns per year.  My suggestion, 12 turns per year, that way each turn represents a month (Earth calendar) and it would be easy to track.

Can’t wait to get started!


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