VBAM Games Forums

Introduction

The legends say that we once lived in the Heavens, striding between the stars, sharing them in friendship with other long lost peoples.

Until the coming of the darkness and a war in Heaven, our homes were destroyed and we were cast down and fled ...

Until recently these were just myths, ancient stories which were only studied by our theologists and anthropologists ...

Until we found the tablets, with writing none could understand, made from a material tougher than anything we possessed ...

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Pictogram of Tablet found in the Akarosian Sea


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Background

The Tablets of Akaros were found 50 years ago by a resource team looking for radioactive fuels, a negligent technician had left the satellite scanning an ever expanding circle while she meditated. The search pattern had expanded its sweep to include the Akarosian Sea, when it accidentally found a massive and unusual energy signature.

Having found what appeared to be a major resource, the resource team attempted to claim the location with the Council. Normally, given the potential ecological damage, the Council would have refused the request. However given the size of the find and the ever growing need for energy, permission was finally given.

However no radioactive minerals were found when digging began, but something much more intriguing. It wasn't long before the info-casts were full of images of twenty dull grey stone-like tablets, engraved with a mixture of pictograms and an unknown language. The pictograms appeared to show our homeworld and the surrounding star systems, but the language evaded our ability to translate it for a further ten years.

The interest in the tablets died down within a few years as they were moved from research team to research team in our Centers of Knowing. Our linguists worked for years on the unknown script, unable to find understanding, until in the end only a few truly devoted souls continued to work on the linguistic problem.

Our scientists on the other hand soon discovered that each tablet had a 'heartbeat' pulsing with energy. The same energy detected by the satellite, emanating from the exact center of each tablet. However nothing could be found that would cut the tablets, our energy beam cutters made no marks, we truly seemed to have reached a dead end.

In the end, unusual as it sounds, our faith showed us the way. With the passing of our elderly High Prelate, her young successor ascended to the role. The role of High Prelate is for life and as such the solemn and ancient ceremony is performed rarely. The ceremony is info-cast live around the planet, watched by almost all our people.

It was during the ceremony something amazing happened, a lone scientist working late was watching the ceremony in his lab on the far side of the planet. When the ancient atonal hymns were sung by the High Prelates attendants, a massive spike in energy was recorded from a tablet and the letters of the unknown language illuminated and shone with inner light.

This improbable incident re-ignited the investigation of the Akarosian Tablets. With the atonal hymns, which had been known only to the High Prelate and her attendants as a key, it was finally possible to unlock the meaning of the unknown language. Oh what wonders were revealed ...

[to be continued]

So far I have created my home system ...

http://vbam.spellbound.co.uk/vbamsysgen ... table=true

if your interested in the System generator you can find out more here http://forums.vbamgames.com/viewtopic.php?p=6215#p6215

My system is giving me 168 economic points and 6 unexplored jump lanes to play with in the next post ...

That home system gives you a very strong industrial base to build from. Having two RAW 6 planets is pretty rare, especially two of them with decent Carrying Capacity values to back them up. My luck usually runs that I find planets with one good stat and one bad one, or both bad (much like my luck in most games).

I could see you shifting Census from Nomord V to Nomord II to maximize your economic output. You'd have to build some transport fleets and make sure you have enough military forces present to guard against any raider attacks, but Nomord II is just such a better planet all around -- it even has a lower climate variance that will make Productivity increases cheaper.

This morning I rolled my AIX and got 35/100/38 and decided based upon my backstory and AIX the following racial traits.

AIX

• Aggressiveness - 35 - This gives me a relatively passive race.
• Integrity - 100 - This might prove interesting, having to stick to most agreements.
• Xenophobia - 38 - Aimed mainly at non-humanoid races.

Traits

• Contemplative (+1) - The Nomord colony was originally a spiritual retreat before the fall and their descendants follow their calm and careful ways.
• Social Solidarity (+1) - As above the community is united in its purpose and commitment.
• Humanoid (+0)
• Novice Armies (-1) - No experience with large scale wars.
• Prejudice non-humanoid (-1) - The darkness which invaded the Heavens was Non-Humanoid in form. The Nomordians don't realise that non-humanoids exist which are not from The darkness. I decided to make the chance of a non-humanoid race to be 20% per encounter for the campaign

Government

• Meritocracy +Science -Trade - With the unity and focus on science after the discovery of the Tablets, profits and trade suffered.

In addition I have decided to keep my Campaign Documents online, I am using Google Documents to store everything. This should allow me to keep everything up on the web and accessible at any time no matter where I am. With luck the Google drawing tools should let me handle the map too!

The final benefit of Google Documents is they allow storage of PDF documents too, so I have my VBAM & Starmada rules up there also.

A non-editable view of my System spreadsheet can be found here.

I think the most important thing I can say about the last 24 hrs is ... Don't try and learn two different systems at the same time! You cannot even begin playing your campaign till you have space ships designs to build, which meant learning Starmada before I could complete my pre-build.

In the end I now "get" Starmada ... and have designed my first ship. I tried it first manually to get the hang of the design system and then using the excellent "Shipyard" spreadsheet. My little scout ships design is here ..
With 1/6 Maintenance I think I will be building 12 or so of these little explorers for about 36ep

I also think 2 Orbital Shipyards for another 40ep
With a Military Institute for a further 25ep

So far it looks like about 101ep. I now need to look at building a few bigger ships for a Navy.

I just went over the Shipyard spreadsheet, very informative. I made a mistake with the small scout above, looks like it should have 100 science allocated to get the "Explorer" benefit, not the 10 I chose.

Back to the drawing board!

Yeah, unfortunately you need to allocate 100 SUs of space to get the Explorer or scout ability, which means you need a minimum of hull 2 to get even an unarmed explorer. At your low TL, it might even require hull 3.

You are so right about the Hull 3 .. I went for Hull 4 in the end to get a little more functionality.

Ok .. here is the finalised Explorator class ship. Its a much bigger ship (Hull size 4) because of the Science lab space usage. It has CR 4 and CC 2, so I am thinking of groups of 3 (1 Command ship and 2 accompanying). This should give me a +2 bonus on the Exploration Attempt Table thereby reducing the risk of "Scout force in Peril" to rolling double 1's (which is an auto peril in any case). To reduce maintenance costs I am going with 12 ships ( 3 maint cost per 4 ships = 9 maint per turn), maintenance being the most important consideration as it deducts from available spending.
So with my previous purchasing decisions we end up with ..

2 Orbital Shipyards @ 20ep = 40ep
1 Military Institute @ 25ep = 25ep
12 Explorator Frigates @ 4ep = 48ep

= 113 ep so far out of 168 available (55 ep left), with a current running maintenance of around 12 per turn.

I think I will spend the rest on 5 gas siphoning stations @ 50ep with a maint of 2. These will generate 5 ep each turn for a net profit of 3ep per turn. With an maint of 1/3 I can build another one an not pay any more maintenance.

In keeping with the VBAM : Starmada rules I have another 4 designs (based starting productivity) to produce. I think a Cruiser of some sort, a fighter wing, maybe a command ship ... any advice ?

A versatile light cruiser design might be nice so that you have something with some firepower available that you can move into nearby systems as they are explored to keep watch and defend them in case any pirates or aliens show up. A 6-8 Hull ship might fit the bill without being too expensive to build or maintain.

I think Starmada X gave starbases a bonus to their mass units (+50%?). If that's the case, you might want to invest in a small- to mid-sized starbase or defense platform that could be used as a cheap defense option for the home system until some more powerful cruisers can be designed.

Ok here is an attempt at a light command cruiser, 8 hull.
More tomorrow I hope

@Tyrel: There was never any official starbase rules in S:X--however, I think unofficial rules gave them a 50% increase to SUs, yes (so a hull 1 base would have 150 SUs, hull 2 330 SUs etc). I believe I suggested at the time starbases were discussed that bases should only have 2 hull hits on the damage track as opposed to three (the closest I could get to the Compendium stations), but not sure if anyone took that up.

@Brennall: the units look fairly good. I'd second Tyrel's comments about bases--they're fairly useful at low tech levels, I'd say, as you're not wasting large volumes of space on engines and you get extra space for shields and weapons.

I couldn't remember if there were official starbase rules or not. I know there was an option for them on the old MJ12 spreadsheet, but they weren't mentioned in the rule book so that they might have been either later errata or a popular fan addition. The mass unit bonus does make them appealing as early garrison units to protect your home world just in case you do run into an overwhelming force early on.

VBAM 2E uses a similar conceit for starbases, with them costing half as much to maintain instead of increasing their mass, which still allows them to be maintained quite economically compared to comparable starships.

If I remember correctly there were starbase rules in the compendium which did not get carried over to Starmada X.
There are new rules for "space Stations" defined as pretty much anything without engines, which get 20% extra space. These were introduced in Klingon Armada so Space Stations already get this in the shipyard.
On going over the Armada books rules again I intend to apply this bonus to Bases and DEFSATS (as per the SFU stations, DEFSATS etc.)
I am just waiting on some clarification so that I can tie these in with Starmada Fleet Ops at the same time.

Brennall,
There is a page or two giving the Starmada AE requirements for VBAM ships in the shipyard guide which may be of help. I am glad that the shipyard is of some use.
If you have any problems with it or questions you can post either here or over on mj12.

Paul

Thanks for the information Paul ... There is one problem if you would not mind helping.

While looking at Fighters / flight design I noticed that Tech level was applied to the SU. While I feel this to be appropriate (old tech = big tech) I did notice that after feeding through the various charts the results were producing large VBAM fighters (appropriate), costly VBAM fighters (appropriate) but worryingly with high lvl VBAM statistics accompanying them. So fundamentally while the Starmada statistics were correct and appropriate the resulting VBAM statistics were skewed and overly powerful.

After some time thinking about it I came to the conclusion that the VBAM statistics (DV,AS,AF should be based upon an tech level unmodified SU stat and the craft size / cost / maintenance should be based upon the tech level modified SU.

This would lead to fighters with poor VBAM statistics and large body size, which would be more appropriate than large size and powerful statistics for an early tech level. Correspondingly more advanced designs would have smaller VBAM sized craft with more powerful statistics, which seems in keeping with the adopted starmada handling of tech levels.

The problem is visible below where the same Starmada statistics are seen to get worse in VBAM as the TL increases (gets better). So the same number of fighters with the same weapons get worse performance as TL increase, however the size (class) does appropriately reduce.

Starmada Fighter Statistics
Number 4
Speed 9
Attack 6
Def 2

Traits
Atmospheric

VBAM TL -2
Cap Rqt 59
TL -2
Cost 1/5
Mnt 1/16
DV 3
AS 1
AF 2
Class (Med)

VBAM TL 0
Cap Rqt 30
TL 0
Cost 1/6
Mnt 1/24
DV 2
AS 0
AF 1
Class (Lt)

VBAM TL 2
Cap Rqt 15
TL +2
Cost 1/7
Mnt 1/27
DV 2
AS 0
AF 1
Class (ULt)

If we take the TL 0 VBAM stats as the ones we want .. we would merely raise the cost / mtn / class and Starmada Cap Rqt. to the same as the TL -2 version.

This would then look like this ..

Amended TL -2
Cap Rqt 59
TL -2
Cost 1/5
Mnt 1/16
DV 2
AS 0
AF 1
Class (Med)

In Starmada TL only changes the SU requirement and all of the VBAM calculations come from this as a base line. Oh the hours of fun I had trying to balance things out to get stats that mostly agreed with the books
Excuse 1) At the time I don't think that anyone noticed/used the TL for VBAM fighters which is probably why this did not come up.
Excuse 2) I am still learning. Never had a lesson on spreadsheets (or anything else to do with computers) and never had to use them. Only really started when I took over the shipyard in 2005 I think it was. Cor don't time fly.

Seriously, now you have pointed it out I can see the logic and by adding a few columns I can sort it so that TL does not change the baseline DV,AS & AF (Additional Starmada AE traits still will).
I will do this for the next version of the shipyard (and update the conversion document).

Thank You.
Paul

Firstly Paul, there is no need for excuses, with the amount of effort you put into maintaining and improving this spreadsheet.

I look forward to seeing the new version, I have found the spreadsheet a great help!

Last night I took a glance at Stars Divided : Terran Civil War ... it helps a lot trying to understand the VBAM-Starmada connection, I would recommend it to anyone going this route.