Space Lords and Ladies

[bored]

Eh, I guess to me this sounds like far too fragile of a balance. Games rarely (never?) do even simple economies well, and this is SC level crazy spreadsheet fuckery. You can say the fancy and conventional stuff balances each other, but from experience... no it won't. Whatever's the most efficient will be what gets made, the people in charge of those facilities/assets will win, etc. It also sounds very zero sum, so you can expect pretty nasty PvP (complete with accusations of favoritism) followed by rapidly losing players both to said perceptions of favoritism (true or not) and 'well, I lost all my stuff so why keep playing?'

Or basically, you'lve kind of failed at this:

@Packrat said in Space Lords and Ladies:

• Keep It Simple Stupid when it comes to economy

[Lithium]

@bored I have to agree. If the scale of power is that different for those exchanges /and/ moving manpower is an issue, then it will hardly ever be worth having anything but the best, because a high powered strike force is going to overwhelm even when they are outnumbered by large amounts.

This will apply to ship battles, ground combat, and just about anything else.

Why even bother regular infantry if they are nothing more than a speedbump at best? It's a bad investment of time, money, and resources.

It's the same thing with the ships, Space Nobles will make alliances with empires and things will go haywire very fast.

ESPECIALLY if the 'Space Elves' aren't even as powerful as the PC's. There's absolutely no restraints then, they can act pretty much with impugnity because at the very worst the conventional navy will never be able to catch them when they choose to run. So they can run in, smash some ships, run away. Rinse and repeat until they win. The end.

[Packrat]

@bored said in Space Lords and Ladies:

You can say the fancy and conventional stuff balances each other, but from experience... no it won't. Whatever's the most efficient will be what gets made, the people in charge of those facilities/assets will win, etc.

The main thing being missed here is that you cannot build/make the Space Noble tech starships, there is no way to manufacture them in the area the game is set. They only exist where somebody has made a Space Noble ship captain and bought x type of ship as a merit in character generation, which is comparable in cost to ruling a continent or having a few orbital cities. Their ship and its power is their family inheritance and their ticket to being politically important, but it is probably not able to actually conquer anything without conventional support which has to be raised by other people.

If you are actually choosing your military as a 'landed' Space Noble then there is absolutely a most efficient path for raw offensive combat power if you can afford it, you get as many Ships of the Line as possible and load them with Infantry Battalions, which are absolutely not speed bumps. The most efficient possible composition is deliberate and will be clearly signposted rather than being left for people with spreadsheets to determine after number crunching, stuff like Cruisers loaded with Shock Troops or large formations of Drop Commandos are cool and have niche uses but will just lose to the basics given they will be hideously outnumbered.

Notably, the most powerful regular Space Noble ships are also not capable of outrunning fast conventional warships by any significant margin. A use of Cruisers loaded with Shock Troops? Engaging Space Noble (Or Space Elf) starships. A half dozen cruisers (note – this is crazy expensive but affordable for a landed Space Noble who wants to channel Admiral Fisher) will lose to their own cost in Ships of the Line every time but is also a serious threat to any Space Noble warship other than a Battlecruiser and can give that a really stiff fight (they -could- win if they damaged the engines then boarded, they would have triple the number of troops and are not much slower) – the lighter ones cannot fight them, the larger ones cannot outrun them.

A battlecruiser is legitimately terrifying but then that is probably on par with the character who decides they want their own entire planet in character generation. Welcome, you are an Imperial Admiral! You are a political appointee who has the position because they were someone really important's little sister, because that is how they decide who gets to be an admiral. You get spotlight time because everyone wants your terrifying monstrous starship and you also need the money/bullets/fuel to keep it going, not because you are super cool at anything (you are still a Space Noble and so pretty badass, but you are not the Space Noble who is the biggest badass at anything, apart from chilling on your gold plated Captain's Chair perhaps).

Added: I will be so happy if somebody makes like a 19 year old Space Admiral who is basically interested in parties and has minimal skills in actual Space Admiral-ing. But does have really well turned out bridge crew.

[deadculture]

@Packrat Are you going to add Psychism or Cybernetics in any way?

And: what system are you going to use for that? It all seems mighty complicated, and I know only of a few systems that let you build ships or whatever.

[bored]

@Packrat said in Space Lords and Ladies:

@bored said in Space Lords and Ladies:

You can say the fancy and conventional stuff balances each other, but from experience... no it won't. Whatever's the most efficient will be what gets made, the people in charge of those facilities/assets will win, etc.

The main thing being missed here is that you cannot build/make the Space Noble tech starships, there is no way to manufacture them in the area the game is set. They only exist where somebody has made a Space Noble ship captain and bought x type of ship as a merit in character generation, which is comparable in cost to ruling a continent or having a few orbital cities. Their ship and its power is their family inheritance and their ticket to being politically important, but it is probably not able to actually conquer anything without conventional support which has to be raised by other people.

If you are actually choosing your military as a 'landed' Space Noble then there is absolutely a most efficient path for raw offensive combat power if you can afford it, you get as many Ships of the Line as possible and load them with Infantry Battalions, which are absolutely not speed bumps. The most efficient possible composition is deliberate and will be clearly signposted rather than being left for people with spreadsheets to determine after number crunching, stuff like Cruisers loaded with Shock Troops or large formations of Drop Commandos are cool and have niche uses but will just lose to the basics given they will be hideously outnumbered.

Notably, the most powerful regular Space Noble ships are also not capable of outrunning fast conventional warships by any significant margin. A use of Cruisers loaded with Shock Troops? Engaging Space Noble (Or Space Elf) starships. A half dozen cruisers (note – this is crazy expensive but affordable for a landed Space Noble who wants to channel Admiral Fisher) will lose to their own cost in Ships of the Line every time but is also a serious threat to any Space Noble warship other than a Battlecruiser and can give that a really stiff fight (they -could- win if they damaged the engines then boarded, they would have triple the number of troops and are not much slower) – the lighter ones cannot fight them, the larger ones cannot outrun them.

A battlecruiser is legitimately terrifying but then that is probably on par with the character who decides they want their own entire planet in character generation. Welcome, you are an Imperial Admiral! You are a political appointee who has the position because they were someone really important's little sister, because that is how they decide who gets to be an admiral. You get spotlight time because everyone wants your terrifying monstrous starship and you also need the money/bullets/fuel to keep it going, not because you are super cool at anything (you are still a Space Noble and so pretty badass, but you are not the Space Noble who is the biggest badass at anything, apart from chilling on your gold plated Captain's Chair perhaps).

Added: I will be so happy if somebody makes like a 19 year old Space Admiral who is basically interested in parties and has minimal skills in actual Space Admiral-ing. But does have really well turned out bridge crew.

OK you seem to think I care about the specifics, or I'm arguing about them. @Lithium is upset about the void ships, my point wasn't that they'd win (I have no idea how your stuff is actually balanced), it's that something will win. Which you acknowledge. But more than that, you started this thread criticizing SC's hyper-spreadsheet nightmare economics, and now you're recreating them. It won't be balanced. That's a guarantee. I know it all sounds good to you in your head, and its not an insult to you as a person, but professional game designers routinely fail at this stuff, and I have never seen a MU do it well. So it will be broken. And it will detract from staff focus, from RP, etc.

[Misadventure]

This post is deleted!

[Lithium]

Also, not upset, just discussing.

[Seraphim73]

Several others have covered the fragility of game balance here (if you do want to go into something so complex, I would gather together a half dozen of the munchkiniest power-gamers you can and have them try to break the system before you even -think- about opening to the public), so I'll leave that alone except to say that gathering an alliance of PCs to overwhelm other opposition won't necessarily create RP... you'll get a group of OOC friends together who will stealth-group-app, having everything they need to support the wild-ass warships/troops.

No, what I want to address is the names used for the various ship types. They're utterly intuitive. Frigates and Corvettes work well enough, they're both patrol/escort vessels iRL, but if a Ship of the Line is a Battleship, it should be a heavy combatant, better than Cruisers or Battlecruisers (and certainly Destroyers). May I suggest instead the term "Monitor," "Assault Ship," or "Gunboat" (or if you want to keep the Age of Sail-y feel, "Galleon")? Then you can keep the "Cruiser" larger than it without dissonance from people who know ship classes. Next up, Destroyers are less powerful than Cruisers in modern parlance, and having it be the other way around provides cognitive dissonance. Perhaps using Destroyer for the ship between Frigate and Cruiser, and Battlecruiser and Dreadnaught for the two Space Noble ship types?

This may seem like a small thing, but when you have a complex system with a lot of the details hidden behind the curtain, you want the names to be as intuitive and clear as possible.

Totally separate, conscript units are generally useless for garrison duty on their home turf, as they'll just disappear as members desert. The term you probably want is probably "militia" or "levies."

[Packrat]

I absolutely do plan to play test then revise before going live, this is literally an order of magnitude less complex than SC was already though and I am very much concentrating on simplifying stuff not adding complexity, with as much automated as possible to make the player (and staff) facing side workable. For bonus fun my tabletop RPG group consists mostly of people with doctorates in psychology and statistics who are huge Dune nerds and they are interested in messing with it.

Also I am definitely open for revised names for space craft classes – definitely not a hundred percent happy with them. At the moment I am using the following:

Corvette – Cheap, crappy escort and patrol craft.
Frigate – Fast escort, raider and scout ship. (These two I am happy with)
Ship of the Line – Big, slow, wrecks stuff, cost effective and a good troop carrier. (I like Monitor but then I do like people being able to refer to having X ships of the line as a measure of space strength)
Cruiser – Slightly bigger, very fast, not cost effective and not so great at carrying troops, capable of independent actions. (I am open to suggestions here!)

As mentioned Space Noble class ships are something you pick in character generation for similar investment to having a fief, they do not give the same wealth/combat power as a fief turned to fielding a military would. Any given player will have only one and then if their whole 'thing' is that they want to be a special Space Captain.

For 'Standard' Space Noble class vessels there are:

Carrack – Frigate sized, a little beefier than a cruiser, super fast. Pick this for Heroic Space Adventures.
Galleon – Ship of the Line sized, Cruiser speed, about 3x Ship of the Line fighting ability. Carries as many troops as a Cruiser. Pick this for Space Adventures with sidelines into more economic and military stuff. You cannot always outrun things and cannot always outfight them but have good odds either way.
Dreadnought – Really big, flying space palace, frigate speed and about 8x Ship of the Line firepower. Carries as many troops as a Ship of the Line. This is really more of a 'support' type pick, you have serious hyper tech manufacturing capability, are really militarily significant, etc, but cannot just fly around like a maniac, a good sized fleet is absolutely able to beat up and board such a ship, but it can kill a small fleet by itself.

As you can see I did try to go for a different naming scheme here but it fell down when I got to Dreadnoughts, maybe change it to Sloop, Carrack, Galleon instead or something?

The 'Warship' Space Noble vessels are currently Destroyers and Battlecruisers, so too much overlap with conventional ship names. I am half tempted to just go full sci-fi and go for something weird here, maybe use Culture ship classes (Rapid Offence Units and General Offence Units? Or swap 'Units' for 'Ships'). These are mostly exclusive to the local Imperial Navy detachment, so they could certainly have a very different theme for their names IC. Alternatively something overblown, 'Sword Class' and 'Arrow Class' or whatever.

[Seraphim73]

If you want to use Ships of the Line, then just swap them with Cruisers (although that doesn't really match for the larger ships being faster... which is odd in and of itself... shouldn't these be smaller, faster, more powerful ships, especially if they don't have troop capacity? If so, then they could be Battlecruisers, and the second-most-powerful could still be a Ship of the Line.)

For the Space Nobel ships, if you want sailing names, perhaps Barque, Schooner, or Brigantine for the middle sized ship and Galleon for the largest? Or Sloop, Carrack, Galleon as you suggested.

For Warships, perhaps Gunships and Assault Ships? Purgators and Annihilators? Defenders and Protectors?

[Misadventure]

This post is deleted!

[Packrat]

Maybe less medieval, I like the word Cataphract.

[Misadventure]

This post is deleted!

[Packrat]

So for anyone interested, here is an in progress 'Fief Sheet' example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q66ev4ENTeBKq1__AkJ9pDQXJy_iRMBtZhicSRGl4Vg/edit#gid=343899767

The 'System Overview' tab is something that would be visible for everyone and shows details of an individual solar system, the number in each 'square' is the Wealth Factor, an abstract combination of population, productivity, etc. This is basically static unless somebody uses Weapons of Mass Destruction upon a planet.

The 'Yellow Duchy' tab is the example made up fief, I have deliberately come up with a maximum complexity fief, this is an example of a 'continent fief', one PC controlling 1/3 to 1/4 of a planet with significant Wealth and some Industry.

Most of the values on this page are derived, the ones that a player could tweak are Tax Percentage and Lifestyle, Loyalty and Administrative Efficiency would in practise be altered by a character's +sheet. People would be able to spend 'Prestige' (social/political capital) to influence their own or other's Loyalty.

The Ground Forces and Space Forces tabs show what is currently a super laborious example of what might be a maxed out player's military, with a significant fleet and really substantial ground based army. I am very much looking at ways to simplify this, probably involving large numbers of troops amalgamating into larger formations (say, 5 'Brigades' of infantry each with 5x the stats instead of 25 separate Battalions, etc).

It should be noted that Training is a direct multiplier to unit stats, this 'Example fief' has ground army with some exceptionally capable formations but a mediocre navy outside of the flagship and some of the frigates. Most troops start off with 3 Training when created, it can then be raised either through spending or PCs with relevant skills using 'Strategic Actions' (you get 3 per OOC month / 3 IC months).

The Reference tab is where a lot of the other tabs pull their values from. Exciting stuff.

In 'action', each player would have limited read/write access to their own fief sheet, they would be able to adjust tax rates/lifestyle spending (with the effects taking place each 1 month OOC / 3 months IC strategic interval) and freely state where their military assets can be found when they are 'Available' (The Location column). If a unit is then committed to an action (Scouting, joining an expeditionary fleet, etc) or actively in combat then the location field would be locked to staff.

This kind of thing would probably be much more elegant using code and in game but frankly? I am a terrible coder but can do spreadsheets.

The system is definitely too complex right now but the current design goal is that any optimisations are deliberate, there are four types of spaceship and four types of ground troops (plus conscripts, not featured in this example. Their role is emergency fodder if you suffer a surface invasion), each is supposed to be the best at it's particular thing with the optimal strategy clearly signposted. On which note:

Corvettes – Best for patrolling and perhaps scouting.
Frigates – Mix between raiding, scouting and patrolling, whilst being expendable(ish)
Ship of the Line – Raw combat and troop transport capability, slow and cumbersome.
Cruiser – Raiding, also the best ship all around (but not cost effective, it is like half engine or something)

Ground Troops:

Armoured Battalions – Best surface combatants.
Infantry Battalions – Not as powerful as armoured units but able to participate in boarding actions and more efficient for occupation/control duties.
Shock Battalions – 2x the combat power and 4x the cost of infantry, barely better for occupation. Elite, high cost powered armour infantry. Not at all cost efficient.
Drop Company – ¼ the size of normal infantry formations (useful for transportation!) and able to literally jump from orbit. Special forces, bodyguards, planetary assault troops. So cool! These are cybernetically enhanced troops with extremely advanced powered armour. Also each company costs at least twice as much as an armoured battalion with about 1/3 the base combat power.

Note, the example Drop Commando companies are very highly trained leading to them being extremely potent, this is not the 'default', but if somebody invests in Drop Commandos they are also then likely to seriously invest in ensuring they are capable. The best drop commando company (Elite grade) is still inferior in a straight fight to a green armoured battalion – being outnumbered 4:1 against people with artillery and Space Tanks will do that!

[Lithium]

@Packrat just because a Brigade has 5 times the troops does not mean it has 5x the efficiency or efficacy of a unit with less troops. A single trooper has a finite amount of power. Just because you have more of them doesn't mean you have more absolute firepower. It means you have the potential to apply that troopers firepower more often.

For example: If you have guys with spears and hide shields vs an M1 Abrams Tank, it doesn't matter if you have 5, or 500. The 500 still are probably going to lose it's just going to take more time and ammo to get through them.

So you're left with a couple of choices depending on how accurate you want to be. You can (and should) beef up the health of the unit, there are more bodies after all in a Brigade then a Platoon. You may wish to bump up the applied damage a /little/ depending on if they get additional more powerful hardware (Like say mortars instead of just rifles and hand grenades) depending on the amount of troops. Or you can ramp up the 'Number of Attacks' while keeping the damage low.

If one trooper has no chance of defeating something's armor (Or very little) then 1000 troopers with identical gear are still not going to have any better chance at it. But there would be a lot more /chances/.

[Duntada]

That is actually a good point about the firepower I hadn't thought about before.

Having a few hundred knives doesn't make the knives any stronger, it just makes them hit a LOT more often than having one. Game design wise the best way to logically assert this would indeed be by making the attacks more common instead of more damaging.

[Packrat]

This was absolutely an issue in Fading suns where you literally would end up with formations of guys with spears and swords facing off vs tanks. This kind of thing is why I decided to lump military forces into discrete (fairly large) units and keep the tech level consistently advanced.

An Infantry Battalion on this scale is not literally 500 Infantry guys with rifles, it is 500 soldiers including armoured flying transport vehicles, light artillery, their logistical support, scouts, anti armour weapons, etc. They can hurt anything even if they might be at a disadvantage against formations with Space Tanks. That said a good proportion of an Armoured Battalion is exactly the same infantry acting in support of their Space Tanks.

If anything locking troops into a larger and less flexible formation should give a net increase in combat power thanks to improved coordination and more support weapons, but I can see it being a pain when it comes to deciding to transport them somewhere.

[Apollonius]

So. Are these numbers/spreadsheets going to be automated by code or hand statted and maintained by staff?

[silentsophia]

Also, balance is awesome. It sucks to be attacked by Blender Wielding death ninja while your super rich neighbor gets the Keystone Kopps.

[Packrat]

Ideally this stuff will be code, but in practice I am probably not going to be good enough at coding to pull it off, so a hybrid with Google document spreadsheets for record keeping/status tracking but actual currency/resource tracking automated and in game. It is going to be a moderate admin burden, depending upon how many people do make fief holding characters, but nothing like as bad as Star Crusade, actually simpler than the system that was used on Vargo many years ago which worked fairly well.

I have also started some amalgamation, no more tracking of individual small starships, Frigates and Corvettes are now grouped into larger formations, making them broadly equivalent in cost and importance to individual larger vessels. This has the added and important benefit that random none capital ships can be crashed into stars or otherwise exploded in plots without it being a huge issue.

Also Ships of the Line are now Battleships, Cruisers are now Dreadnoughts, I have also added another 'sample fief' to the spreadsheet, an orbital one, as I play around with numbers to check balance. Sadly I did have to stop Loyalty from impacting the productivity of a fief directly - it was otherwise possible to make twice as much money by recruiting huge quantities of infantry then have them police state the loyalty of an orbital fief to absurd levels.

For reference the 'Orbital Barony' has a full on space dominance type military, a lineup of capital warships plus scouts and marine compliments but no real surface army outside of a small garrison force and not much by way of patrolling vessels.

Raiding and Patrolling is a mechanic I am still working on - basically though you can commit space forces to Raiding or Patrolling for an OOC month, an opposed roll is then made with the Raiding against Patrolling scores (modified by commanders if any). If the raiders win then they get to loot a lot of Wealth and Supplies from the victim or steal less and force a battle with the odds in their favour. If they narrowly win, they can steal a small quantity, or steal more and face a battle with even odds (not all of the committed ships fight in any given battle). A draw and they can steal a little and face an even battle or get nothing, etc. If the defenders outright win then they can potentially bring in standby vessels that were not dedicated to patrolling - so you can for example ambush raiding frigates with your battleships for a major 'Ohh Shit' moment.

Obviously running away (or trying to) is very much an option if you find yourself outmatched.

Basically a mechanic to create plenty of smaller scale space battles not necessarily on anyone's terms and in interesting places rather than people wanting to death ball their fleets and ram them into each other. Also a risky way for people to pay for starships if they are do not hold land, they can turn raider/pirate.