darbycmcd wrote:I think they look really good. They seem much more focused. I really like the 'Detection' and 'Surprise' interaction. i think that opens up some interesting game possibilities. You could have sensor platforms which give bonus to a side, but could be vulnerable to sabatoge missions... it is great.
I know the Surprise/Readiness issue was a sticking point for you in the previous draft, and that is something that Jay and I sat down to try and hammer out some solutions to. The current version of the rules seems to make more sense in this regards, as you roll for detection to see how well you can detect each other and then that in turn influences the actual surprise modifiers.
Walking through the Federation Admiral rules from that point, Jay and I were able to figure out a way to make his surprise and advantages system work with 2E -- and they seem to work very well. The best change there is that rolling poorly for surprise doesn't necessarily mean the battle is going to be a complete washout. The die roll modifiers only affect the first turn of combat when they're present, and moving all of that to the advantages seems to work better. The advantages do need to be solidified and their prices locked down, but it is a good step forward.
i like the way maintenence is calculated on mass rather than cost. it will make high tech fleets relatively smaller than low tech, which is a good thing i think. it is clever and has nice game consequences.
This was the best way I could find to handicap the more advanced empires and keep them from completely dominating a game. They can still build the units cheaper, but the extra maintenance cost prevents them from fielding quite as many at one time or concentrating them into a single force as easily.
As a solo player, part of the upshot from this is that any random high tech power that you come across (Minbari, Dominion, Shivans, etc.) hopefully won't have a strong enough economy to completely overwhelm you with ships, but their units will be decidedly better than anything a less advanced empire can throw at it.
i am curious about why you decided to drop intra-empire commerce? i don't have an opinion on it, but i am just curious.
Talking with Jay, it appears that his original intention was that you couldn't trade with your own colonies, but at some point in 1E development that floodgate was opened (for good or ill). After some additional deliberations, and looking at rules options, it appeared that it made more sense to restrict commerce to foreign colonies but widen the net to make it easier to actually conduct trade at those colonies.
Mechanically, another advantage to going this route was that it gave Census more to do, and more importantly gives players a reason to establish high Census colonies along the borders to manage its trade operations.
Credit goes to Stephen Rider for the core of the new commerce rules. He contributed these after the last round of internal playtesting when I roped him in to test out some of the new rules.
The goal for this weekend is to finish the diplomacy rule update. Then I'll move on and get the military chapter finished, including finalizing the special abilities and figuring out if there are any other important ones I've missed.
One thing of note: while it isn't made clear in the current draft, some playtesting has made us decide to set the Carrier ability to a cost of 1 MU and allow 1 Carrier to base 1 CC of flights. This means that a 5 Carrier unit can carry anywhere from 5 EP of flights to 25 EP of flights, which is a wide variance, but actual combat tests seemed to indicate that it wasn't as unbalanced as I originally thought. If maxed out on "heavy fighters", a pure carrier force versus a pure cruiser force ended up being pretty evenly matched. The larger the battle the more it favored the cruisers.
The biggest impact that fighters seem to have on the rules is that it forces an opponent to split their PD fire between formation level increases and anti-fighter fire. The lack of defensive fire available for formation improvements makes the opponent's ships easier to damage, but fighters usually pretty easy to destroy and/or don't have that much firepower compared to a cruiser.
The strategic implications of carrier warfare also means that while small battles against carriers can be very deadly, the carrier force has to get replacement fighters from somewhere; this isn't 1E where fighters could magically teleport to the carriers that are within supply range. This means that the carrier force must either constantly be moving itself back to a colony to pick up new fighters or else rely on transports or other carriers to ferry the fighters to the front lines.
Another aspect of the 1 EP fighter vs 5 EP fighter both fitting in 1 Carrier slot is that the more expensive flight is going to take 3 turns to build, whereas a 1-2 EP flight only requires 1 turn to build. When it comes down to filling fighter bays in a hurry it might become a necessity to rely on the cheaper flights.