From: B Lin <lin@r...>
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 14:53:29 -0700
Subject: [OT] Campaign detail and playability - was RE: [semi-VV] Multiple resources
I think it comes down to how much can be expected of a campaign player. Essentially, to make a game quick and fun, it should basically boil down to about 3 major decisions per turn. As you add detail you add complexity and the number of decisions you have to make increases rapidly, and trying to determine the ramifications of each decision becomes harder and harder. So for campaign games, there should be essentially only 3 major decisions - A military decision, an economic decision, and a resource decision. On the Resource side it should be fairly simple - you have a set amount of resource production and the only question is to increase or maintain your current level (i.e. investment in mines and factories). The Economic decision will be more complicated as it will involve trade agreements and allocation of money for building factories, ships and colonization. The military decision will be the most complicated as you will have to choose whether to take military action (an attack), move strategically, build reserves and/or future fleets and capture or denial of the opponent's resources. When decision making, ideally it is cut and dried - a yes/no proposition, the fewer choices the better. So to that end, I would try to make as many of the campaign decisions binary or maybe trinary, and reduce the number of choices that have a sliding scale. Throwing out a hypothetical scenario, postulate 3 resources, money and ships. The resources are FTL material (FTL), Weapons material (W) and Hull material (H). Money is the nice generic Mega Credit (MCr) and ships are FT ships. A generic nation (Generica) might be: 3 star systems (A, B, C) connected by wormhole transits Star System A produces/refines FTL - 2 units per turn Star System B produces W and W at 2 units per turn Star System C is the national capital with the shipyards The treasury is 1000 MCr and the nation has a fleet of 12 military ships and 6 cargo ships. Since this nation produces 6 units of resources at locations different than it's shipyards, it requires 6 units of cargo ships to "transport" the materials, although in reality this would also encompass the appropriate planetary and orbital dock facilities to handle such cargo. The game system should track 2 possible bottlenecks - manufacturing and transport. A running log of the available resources (i.e. 2 FTL, 2 W and 2 H) and transport available (6 cargo ships) would be required. Therefore on any given turn, Generica can use up to 6 resources in building ships. If ships required more resources than were available on hand, then resources could be stockpiled over multiple turns. Ship building - FTL for Escorts, 1 unit, Cruiser-sized, 2 units and for Capital ships, 3 units. For weapons, 1 unit per 3 dice of beams or equivalent. For Hull, 1 unit per 10 boxes. So to build a Dreadnaught might require 3 FTL, 8 W and 4 H. Using Generica's stats, it would require at least 4 turns to build a Dreadnaught, the main limitation being the weapon requirements. If the rules allow, the "X-class Dreadnaught" could be launched with a partial weapon load after two turns. If, using the same example, but Generica only had 2 cargo ships available, then the Dreadnaught would take 8 turns to complete. If using the first example, but Generica only had 1 W production, it would again take 8 turns to complete the Dreadnaught, the limit being the W production. If necessary, shipyards can be limited in the number of hulls or overall mass that can be built per turn. (i.e. Shipyard Level 1 can work on a single hull up to 25 mass, Shipyard Level 2 can work on up to 2 hulls of 50 mass total, Shipyard Level 3 can work on up to 3 hulls of total mass of 75 and Shipyard 4 can work on up to 4 hull with total mass of 100. Paperwork for Generica should then be relatively simple - a listing of Systems, noting their resources (FTL, W, H, Shipyard, Capital) a listing of resource production capability (5 main items, FTL, W,H, MCr, ships), a list of resource stocks (4 main items, FTL, W,H,MCr) and a list of ships (military,cargo and those building) Paperwork will increase as nations get larger - a 10 system nation with 2 shipyards and half a dozen resource planets will require more paperwork than Generica, but I don't see that there is any simple method to deal with that. --Binhan [quoted original message omitted]