FTL Ships and STL Coms (was RE: [VV] Vectorverse FTL)

> Another question is that of how FTL communications work. Is

One way I've encountered of dealing with this is from

http://www.projectrho.com/game/fifthfrontierwar.html

It makes we want to track down a copy of the game. Looks + good.

<Quote> Fifth Frontier War designed by Marc W. Miller 1981, Game Designer's
Workshop

In this interstellar combat game, there is no FTL communication faster than a
courier ships. So the news that the grand admiral is basing their

strategy on is often several weeks old. The game gem is the elegant way this
is approximated with an abstract game mechanism.

The ugly, brute-force alternative is to have two game maps in two
separate rooms, one per player, and with the assistance of a referee who

provides each player with intelligence delayed by the appropriate time lag.

The FFW solution is far more elegant, abet a bit abstract. Each task force has
an admiral, each with a "leadership rating". Each task force
has to pre-plot their movement several turns in advance. The better the
admiral, the fewer turns in advance the turns have to be plotted (i.e., the
leadership rating is the number of moves in advance that have to be
plotted). The task forces are bound to their pre-plotted moves, even as
the moves become increasingly irrelevant as the situation evolves.

So the finely honed ability of an excellent admiral to predict the future
movement of enemy fleets is here approximated by the flexibility
of not being bound by a lengthy set of pre-plotted moves. An admiral who

can foresee far in advance is modeled in the game by a short set of
pre-plots, giving a faster reaction time.

And of course there is the legendary admiral who has a leadership rating

of "zero".

The FFW solution provides 80% of the effect of the theoretical perfect
solution but with only 20% of the effort.

An amusing feature of the game is how difficult it is to remove moronic
admirals with abysmal leadership ratings. Many owe their positions to
well-connected fathers rather than due to merit. A bit of chrome is the
Imperial Writ, which allows the imperial player to swap admirals between

two fleets once during the game.
</Quote>