BSG: Unification

DownWithOPP

Now that I've had over a month under my belt on this game, I can give some thoughts on it.

Pros

Chargen: OMG, I love the web based chargen. The interface is beautiful, easy, and fun to use, you can easily get through a char in a few hours instead of having to go room to room and try to figure everything out.
Scenes: There have been so many scenes since I made my first char there. Yes, I've killed or removed a couple of my characters, but at the same time, there has never been a true lack of RP. The main drawback to this will be in the con sections.
Faraday: She's running the game as a single staffer that handles everything, and that is great. She's done a great job in setting things up, getting us running and allowing a ton of player feedback. I've never come across a headwiz that 's so open and accepting of suggestions - not to mention //implementing// them. It's simply amazing.
The Combat System: FS3 3.0 is easy once you get used to it.
The Players: Everyone has been pretty welcoming, I love meeting new people and getting in touch with those I thought lost.

Cons:

The Combat System (setup): Can we please please please set up a web interface to set up combat. I've run a few combat scenes on the game and setting up the combat is the biggest time killer of them all. If we can get an interface where you can do a drop/down of vehicle/weapon/armor types to put on a char and to add NPCs to a combat, I'll love you forever @faraday .
Scene Time: Most of the major plot scenes are late at night. This is a bummer to the East Coasters, and hurts the EU players, but with Fara letting players run plots passed by her helps a great deal with that.
Beta Mode: We're Ares test bed, so code's always changing and updating, so there are bugs galore at times - but this is almost a feature in a way, because for those that like code, you get to peek into the kitchen - unless you're code dumb like me and you get lost sometimes.

Now can we get off Canceron please? So hating that place now, lol!

Overall, it's a well-told game with currently a small player base (20 players on average at peak time, but with alts, it's closer to 12-15.). Strong theme, some small bugs, but great for late nighters.

8.5 / 10

Thenomain

@DownWithOPP

....

Why don't we have more web based combat setup systems? I mean, besides that most hosting systems can't process this.

faraday

@Thenomain said in BSG: Unification:

@DownWithOPP

....

Why don't we have more web based combat setup systems? I mean, besides that most hosting systems can't process this.

Because it's a PITA to code, mainly. Web UIs take a lot of work.

I could to it, for sure, but I'd like to understand more what @DownWithOPP is talking about. Setting up a combat takes me about 30 seconds, so I think something may be getting lost in translation here.

combat/start   <-- gets you a combat number, say 54
combat/join Harry Joe Mary=54/Viper  <-- adds some Viper pilots
combat/join Raider1 Raider2 Raider=54/Raider <-- adds some badguys

There are similar options for adding people as Raptor pilots, Centurions, Heavy Raiders, Unarmed (for Raptor ECOs), etc. All their weapons/vehicles/armor should be set up for them automatically. From there, the individual players can fine-tune things if they've got a weird weapon or something, but those exceptions are few and far between.

So I guess I'm not quite understanding what's such a pain to set up?

Thanks for the review @DownWithOPP. A couple misc. replies:

Re: Scheduling... yeah that's a totally fair assessment. Later evening EST is our peak activity time (we have a lot of PST people), and it's what fits best with my schedule personally. But I don't think EST folks are completely SOL. Most events start around 9pm and run 2 hours, which seems to be the happy middle ground between EST and PST. And as you said, players are empowered and encouraged to run their own events whenever suits them.

Actually - Friday's event started at 10pm because I had some PST folks complain that the 9pm events were too early! It's all perspective.

Re: Bugs. I think "bugs galore" is a bit of an overstatement. I mean, yeah, it's beta and there are bugs, but the system is pretty stable over all. What bugs we have tend to be pretty minor and fixed quickly.

DownWithOPP

@faraday Well, now that you've shown me that, my life just got a whole lot easier, lol. I'd like to have a cheat sheet for setting things up - I know BSO had one:

http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/combat-faq

Just for things like NPC set up and weapons switch and the like. Maybe it's me being lazy, I'd just like it all streamlined into one page.

Okay, not bugs galore - but it wasn't really a complaint (a weak one at best) as things are figured out.

And I'll just keep running things during the day when I can!

faraday

@DownWithOPP There's this one: http://aresmush.com/fs3/fs3-3/combat-quickref/

It doesn't cover the organizer commands but I can add that. Or you can use the online help: http://mush.aresmush.com:8081/help/fs3combat/org

Auspice

Regarding setting up combat-
When I run combat in FS3 (this goes back to all FS3 games I've been on), I will set it up in advance of the scene. Often hours before. And if I have moar mobs coming in later, I'll keep the commands in a notepad file to copy and paste in a Notepad file.

kitteh

@DownWithOPP said in BSG: Unification:

Now can we get off Canceron please? So hating that place now, lol!

Didn't we... just get to Canceron?

It's actually one of the things I like about the game, that it does have a pretty brisk paced episodic kind of structure. Not huge if you're not there for minute 1 and active in every plot you'll never catch up-'episodes', but... like ~2 week stints where we're at place X, doing thing Y, and then we go somewhere else?

This comes a lot closer to feeling like we're RPing the structure of a TV show than most games.

DownWithOPP

@kitteh It's the second time we've been there - finished one set of TPs there, went to Scorpia for two weeks and turned around and went back. It's not a bad thing, just want to share the love with some of the other colonies.

Three-Eyed Crow

@DownWithOPP
Fara's bbpost on the latest plot explicitly said that the return to Canceron was due to the two top 'next' colony ideas being ones that she wanted to take some time to do up big. Idk. It hasn't felt particularly long to me (the last Canceron plot did, but this one's had a different feel, at least to me). Mileage, sir, it varies.

ETA: That being said, I'm REALLY excite about where the next plot might be. If it was either the thing I voted for or one of the things people were bandying around on channel most often, I want it done up proper.

kitteh

@DownWithOPP Well I missed those, so I don't mind And we were just at Scorpia before that, which was very different! Shopping, beaches, fancy hotels and ceremonies, etc.

But even on Canceron, presumably the flavor is different? Disaster relief, etc?

Again, I really liked this bit because it was something you don't always see. I mean ultimately, every BSG game is going to be 'fight the cylons, repeat 100x', with some random stuff tossed in for flavor. I thought this flavor was good

faraday

@Seraphim73 can attest to the fact that I was a little leery of returning to Canceron again since we were just there I mean sure we could've done "earthquake on Caprica" or "tsunami on Leonis" but all those things felt a little random. The disaster relief story seemed to fit Canceron the best.

I don't know quite where the sweet spot is for campaign length, but a frequent change of scenery is definitely something I think is key to the game's concept. The freedom of being able to go different places was the primary reason I picked a First Cylon War setting over the traditional Second War one.

Three-Eyed Crow

@faraday said in BSG: Unification:

I don't know quite where the sweet spot is for campaign length, but a frequent change of scenery is definitely something I think is key to the game's concept. The freedom of being able to go different places was the primary reason I picked a First Cylon War setting over the traditional Second War one.

Yeah, this is what's always made me REALLY want to dig into the First Cylon War as a setting. The holocaust of the reimagined series is INCREDIBLY compelling, but it makes those games difficult to sustain. You always have to kind of reach to find excuses for new PCs to rando show up (though we managed on Cerb and other games), and it cuts off a huge amount of the setting. I love how on BSU you can treat Tauron/Picon/Canceron/Etc. as actual planets that are being tangibly fought for, not just blasted wastes people occasionally get sentimental about.

Auspice

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in BSG: Unification:

@faraday said in BSG: Unification:

I don't know quite where the sweet spot is for campaign length, but a frequent change of scenery is definitely something I think is key to the game's concept. The freedom of being able to go different places was the primary reason I picked a First Cylon War setting over the traditional Second War one.

Yeah, this is what's always made me REALLY want to dig into the First Cylon War as a setting. The holocaust of the reimagined series is INCREDIBLY compelling, but it makes those games difficult to sustain. You always have to kind of reach to find excuses for new PCs to rando show up (though we managed on Cerb and other games), and it cuts off a huge amount of the setting. I love how on BSU you can treat Tauron/Picon/Canceron/Etc. as actual planets that are being tangibly fought for, not just blasted wastes people occasionally get sentimental about.

I've actually wanted to do a First War game for a really long time, as a number of people have known. So I was really excited when I learned about BSU.

kitteh

Yeah, I definitely think having the colonies available adds a lot to the game.

In a way, a traditional version of the game is kind of doomed to repeat the problems of the show, where eventually you end up with hokey civilian fleet plots about prostitutes and mob bosses and everything military is very same-y.

Seraphim73

Yeah, @faraday and I talked about how it would be great not to go right back to Canceron, but it would be kind of a waste to "use up" another Colony on a mini-campaign instead of a full one. It wasn't ideal, but it was definitely better than the alternative.

DownWithOPP

@faraday @kitteh @Three-Eyed-Crow I'm not complaining, I promise! I'm one of the people running scenes.. I like the flavor too, just eager to help spread the love. I'm sorry if I came across brash or complaining.

kitteh

On the topic of things getting stale too quickly vs. using up the Colonies (and I realize it's not meant literally, just that we'd probably want to give them all focus at some point), one thing sort of comes to mind:

This isn't Star Wars/Trek and there's nothing saying these these all have to be Hoth or Planet of Hats style things where each colony is a single overwhelming theme. A planet is pretty big, so there's a lot of room to shake things up a bit, even within a mini-arc. No reason we have to go down to the same jungle every time when we're launching from a fancy space ship in orbit, etc.

faraday

@kitteh said in BSG: Unification:

This isn't Star Wars/Trek and there's nothing saying these these all have to be Hoth or Planet of Hats style things where each colony is a single overwhelming theme. A planet is pretty big, so there's a lot of room to shake things up a bit, even within a mini-arc. No reason we have to go down to the same jungle every time when we're launching from a fancy space ship in orbit, etc.

Yeah the theme files are explicit about the fact that each of the Colonies (except Aquaria) are entire planets with varying terrain. But most of the operations are focused on a narrow geographical region for manageability. It just so happened that both of the Canceron storylines focused on the tropics.

Tinuviel

@faraday With bullets to the face instead of mosquitoes.

Ganymede

@faraday said in BSG: Unification:

Re: Scheduling... yeah that's a totally fair assessment. Later evening EST is our peak activity time (we have a lot of PST people), and it's what fits best with my schedule personally. But I don't think EST folks are completely SOL. Most events start around 9pm and run 2 hours, which seems to be the happy middle ground between EST and PST. And as you said, players are empowered and encouraged to run their own events whenever suits them.

2 hours to complete a combat scene? What the heck?

Dude, I'm used to 4+ hour scenes. For 3 people. Throwing down against NPCs.

Like, a 2-hour combat scene is fantastic.

I was part of a scouting mission with @Auspice, and it took a lot longer than that. Didn't mind one bit either.