> At 09:17 AM 11/14/98 -0500, you wrote:
Good idea! I used it the same way for Starfire a number of years ago. I
believe I used a conversion rate of about 1:10 for the economics.
> Every fourth turn has a production phase.
You can easily change that if seems more appropriate. I had an economic phase
every turn and it worked fine, but that's more in keeping with Starfire. YMMV.
Every third turn would also work, giving you "quarterly" economics phases and
monthly combat phases.
I also ditched the game's tech tree in favor of Starfire's. Any thoughts on
how to handle it for Full Thrust?
> Ship maintence per turn is going to be the NPV/12. From one
Or 100% of cost annually. Might be a trifle steep.
> All hulls include one months endurance built in. Each mass of
Very reasonable. What about colonists? Since populations are counted in the
millions, that's a whole lot of cargo ships. One problem you're going to run
into is that you may find the cost of colony ships unrealistically low
compared to FT ship costs. IIRC, a colony can essentially "bootstrap" itself
by building enough ships in one economic turn to transport all of their
people.
In some of the computer adaptations of these basic rules, they allow colonists
to be turned into troops which were used to conquer enemy planets. Any
thoughts along those lines or do you plan to stick to the old "surrender to
any warship" rule?
> Any comments, suggestion, or insults???
Sounds good. Couple of questions/comments/suggestions from my
experiences:
How are you handling FTL, both in and out of Nebulae? Any combat in deep
space? Will you be using nebulae rules for fights in a nebulae?
I built in a construction delay for ships (buy now, build, get later) which
meant that it was possible to raid enemy construction facilities and try to
knock out ships before they could be completed.
Occasionally, the defender could also use a partially finished ship in the
defense. You might do sort of a "reverse threshold" system for this; if using
you stick to the economics every four turns model, then you could have a
partially completed ship with a proportional number of damage boxes and roll
thresholds prior to the battle to see what systems are online.
I note that missile bases cost about half what a ship of similar firepower
would. That might be a good thing to keep. Or you might have them be
non-FTL defense ships.
I also found it useful to determine how much collateral damage weapons fire at
a planet will do. Something like "X number of points of damage to destroy 1
million colonists" would be useful. For Starfire, I think I used 10 (or was it
100?) points of damage per million colonists. You might also just limit it to
certain weapons like missiles and ortillery.
Any thoughts on how to handle planetary shields? Those tend to force the game
to a conclusion in the original, but that may not be something you want in a
campaign game.
Sounds good! I'm looking forward to hearing more.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the feedback.
> Jeff Lyon wrote:
I
> believe I used a conversion rate of about 1:10 for the economics.
I'm doing 1:1 for FT, and 1:100 for DS
> >Every fourth turn has a production phase.
I like the production phase once every three or four turns. This forces
players to plan ahead. I'm going with the game's every fourth turn.
> I also ditched the game's tech tree in favor of Starfire's. Any
I'm going to use a heavily modified Stellar Conquest tech tree. Starting
economics will discourage players from building the best possible. They simply
will not have the points to do so.
> >Ship maintence per turn is going to be the NPV/12. From one
I'm assuming one year is four turns. This makes annual production 33.3%
> >All hulls include one months endurance built in. Each mass of
Colonists have to be transported on FT frieghters at a rate of 1 colonist to
10 mass of cargo. There will be no population bonus, but population growth is
modified as follows: T 1 per 5, ST 1 per 10, MT 1 per 15, and B 1 per 20.
> In some of the computer adaptations of these basic rules, they allow
"Surrender to any warship?" You must be joking. If you want that planet, your
going to have send your marines DirtSide! Each population point provides 1
team of militia. This means attacking a fully populated T 80 planet is going
to be a blood bath. Also, every 10 population or fraction there of is going to
represent one "city." Any number of cities can be attacked in one turn, but
one individual unit can only attack one city per turn. This will draw out
campaigns on worlds with large populations.
> >Any comments, suggestion, or insults???
Nebulas are going to be just like they are in Stellar Conquest. I probably
will make up some nebula rules, but I'm not sure yet.
> I built in a construction delay for ships (buy now, build, get later)
which
> meant that it was possible to raid enemy construction facilities and
There will be a delay, but I'm thinking that ships will be built in the
following order: Hull, Primary Systems, Drives, Weapons. A incomplete ship my
be able to escape, but it will not be an effective combat vessel.
> Occasionally, the defender could also use a partially finished ship in
if
> using you stick to the economics every four turns model, then you
Planetary defenses are going to be starbases built by the FB rules...
> I also found it useful to determine how much collateral damage weapons
I'm planning on only Ortillery being effective. Each Ortillery will be able to
conduct one orbital bombardment per turn, if it isn't used for ground support.
They will be treated like beam weapons: roll 1d6, and
1-3 none, 4-5 one population, 6 two population. Note that all Industry
associated with those population will also be destroyed.
> Any thoughts on how to handle planetary shields? Those tend to force
They will have to be built for each "city" on a planet and will act like level
3 shields against orbital bombardment, but the first hit that gets through in
a volley damages the shield, dropping it to level 2, etc.
> Sounds good! I'm looking forward to hearing more.
> I'm going to use a heavily modified Stellar Conquest tech tree.
In my first game,I broke the available technology into tech generations; 1st
Generation, 2nd Generation etc. I think it went up to 5th. Once you'd bought
1st Generation Technology, you could develop anything listed under that
Generation heading. It worked very well to break a players fleet up into
different tech levels as the game progressed.
> They will have to be built for each "city" on a planet and will act
To make each world a different attack/defence problem, I thought using a
isocohedron (D20) for a base world map would make all of the difference.
Spread the population out over the 20 sides (sectors) and you have multiple
targets for an enemy to attack. You will also have a rough map you can 'zoom'
in on work out where battles are fought.
If Earth is 75% water, this could equate to 15/20 sectors as sea, and
5/20
sectors as land. Thus a TR planet would 25% land. If you further divide the
triangles of each face in smaller areas (zones) you have an easy way of
distributing that land over the 20 sectors. If you make up a pack of cards
with a random distribution of land/sea zones, you can deal them out
after
shuffling to create a varied terrain pallette to fight over - you could
cross reference where the zone is (Polar, equatorial, etc) and come up with
probable or realistic terrain for the Dirtside bods to fight over. You also
have a nice grid reference for all of your.
> Tron wrote:
I've thought about it, I'm going do something with weapons, but I haven't made
up my mind yet. Technologis I am going to keep track of include Ship
Communication Range, FTL Ship Speed, and Industrial Technology. These strike
me as being very important. There is going to be one new system for the FB,
Sub Space Communications Beacon, mass 20, points 60. This can be installed in
any ship or base, and is for all purposes the Command Post from Stellar
Conquest.
> >They will have to be built for each "city" on a planet and will act
You
> also have a nice grid reference for all of your.
An intersting idea, but I don't know if I will use it. I'd rather spend the
time making the game board for DSII.