darbycmcd wrote:(edited) Task force: i am not sure task force is defined
I was wondering if that was the case or not. It is such an old 1E term that I've been using it out of force of habit, and in the back of my mind I sometimes wondered if I had forgotten to define it. I'll add a note about it at the start of the Encounters Phase.
Intensity: it is presented in the first contact section, but I get the impression it is used in all the scenarios, so probably move all the combat/scenario generation rules to one section.
First Contact is a separate sub-section before Surprise and Intensity, and first contact occurs and has to be resolved during the Encounters Phase. Originally this was located in the diplomacy rules, but I had moved it to Encounters so that players would know that they have to resolve those situations first before they can proceed to resolve any actual encounters.
Also, I think it is too random to let the dice decide in total the intensity level, after all, the player is the commander, and the commander decides the intensity of effort, no? I am not sure it is great that I can launch a major attack on a planet say, and we both roll 1 for intensity and I can't actually do more than skirmish. I like very much the concept in general, but there perhaps should be some player control, military operations are not really that random!
An early version of the rules had an intensity bonus based on the number of squadrons/corps present in the system, but I scrapped that because it was fiddly and easy to game. An alternative I've considered is to add +1 Intensity per X Construction Cost of units in the system. This would probably be set to 50 or 100. This requires the players to total their construction cost of units before an encounter, but is easier to control and is a good gauge for determining how big of a confrontation might take place in a system.
Even then, the rules can create situations where one empire pushes into a system to attack and gets stymied by the intensity system and can't press home their advantage. This is semi-intentional, but not to the degree that no fighting could occur at all (unless neither side sees each other until the last minute and panics, which is what a very low intensity battle more or less means). A +1 per 100 EP intensity bonus would increase the base amount of intensity in these larger fleet and ground actions and give the attacker a better chance of being able to force an engagement.
readiness multiplier: Is this just rolled for once at the beginning of the scenario? If that is the case it may be a bit too much because it cannot change over the engagement. It sort of presumes some surprise scenario which I am not sure is a good assumption.
I have to find the write up for Readiness and put it back into the draft. Readiness works the same as in 1E, where you roll for Readiness at the start of the scenario and then it moves +-1 towards zero at the end of each combat round. So an empire that rolls a +3 Readiness would have +3 on Round 1, +2 on Round 2, +1 on Round 3, and +0 on each subsequent round. It gives a task force an initial bonus or penalty based on their surprise.
Surprise demonstrates how prepared a fighting force was for battle that turn, and the readiness takes that a step further into how prepared the force commander was at the start of the battle. The effects of poor readiness wear off fairly fast, and the new formation level and damage systems make it more likely that a force caught off guard will be able to survive, so long as they don't roll really, really bad for Readiness. Which can happen, but it is very uncommon.
darbycmcd wrote:why do all units have to be in squadrons all the time? is it not possible to just have a force pool per location and organize them for an engagement? this gives all the flexibility of the reorganize segment and the reorganize command action. players could track by squadron on a roster outside a combat scenario, but free formation creation at the outset for all engaged forces....
This is a concession towards speed of play, particularly PBEM play. As a CM, I don't want to have to wait several days for the players to finally decide exactly how they are going to arrange their units into squadrons before a battle, and even in CM-less games it was proving tedious to assemble units by command cost. That was actually the original way that the 2E rules were setup: you didn't have squadrons outside of combat, you just formed them when combat scenarios were generated. It became an extremely tedious process to setup and resolve battles that just slowed the game down.
darbycmcd wrote:hahaha, ok, i am on a roll here...
And it's much appreciated!
Science stat: I have to say, I find this one a bit difficult to really swallow. I understand you want some modifier to TP production, but really is it reasonable to say that systems themselves are so very different for tech research? It isn't that there are scattered anomolies (which would give a bonus) but systems are each different. would it not make more sense to allow for very occasional anomolies which give a bonus and then let the majority of research centers be effective based on investment? it just seems to stretch credibility that colony A is 2x better at research, just because of the natural conditions, than colony B. especially with the table, you are almost (not quite) as likely to get a 1 as a 5....
I plead guilty, it is strictly a game simplification that is used to maintain rules consistency between system and colony statistics and enforce popular space opera tropes of some systems containing interesting things for an empire's scientists to dig around and poke sticks at (either figuratively or literally). Therefore, the Science stat can represent everything from space anomalies to alien ruins.
The alternative is to have tech capacity just be equal to utilized Tech capacity squared, which works but just seems so... mundane? I know where you're coming from, and fully admit that there is no good reason why the scientists in one system should research faster. This could easily be just a flat 5 multiplier, too, but I have liked the way that adding the extra system resources into play influences things. It diminishes the importance of RAW in particular, which is a very good thing.
would it not be a bit more rational to say everyone gets a xY and some rare systems get a bonus?
This was how it worked originally in earlier versions of the rules. Now things like alien ruins just give a Science bonus.
Morale: what is the starting morale of a new colony?
That's in the colonization rules; new colonies start with 0 Census and 2 Morale. Morale used to start at Carrying Capacity / 2, but that ended up giving empires too high of Morale so that they never really needed to worry about Morale.
biosphere and agriculture: with a min. bio rating of 1, every colony can always be self-sufficient in food production, and that will only be the limit 8% of the time. is that intended? it just makes bio really only important for pop growth, not sufficiency. maybe bio as carrying cap for agriculture, with a tech modifier to production would allow you to really have bread-basket worlds supplying inferile mining worlds....
Originally the Biosphere values could go to zero, and while I liked how that worked (made the high Biosphere worlds more important), it led to a situation where an empire couldn't expand if it didn't manage to find any verdant worlds to develop as agricultural centers.This was exacerbated by Census having an agriculture cost of 2 at that time.
With all worlds having a minimum of 1 Biosphere now, they can be self-sufficient, but the cost to get them to that point is extremely inefficient from an economics perspective. That is the case with most of the system stats. Now that systems average 3 in each stat, systems with less than that are even less valuable for development for whatever colony infrastructure is tied to the inferior statistic. This is as true for Biosphere/Agriculture as it is for Science/Tech or Jump Lanes/Intel.
Your idea to handle all of the system statistics as carrying capacities that limit the amount of their related infrastructure is interesting, and might be worth exploring as an optional rule. That is a substantial shift away from how the current incarnation of the rules works, though, and it is too late to head down that particular path. But it does give me something to think on.
darbycmcd wrote:orbital: also, i don't see why this makes sense. why does it make a shipyard more or less efficient, by such a huge multiplier? Some system will be 5 or 6 times more efficient, using the same construction tech etc, than other systems?
I'll try spelling it out better, but the rationalization for this (which exists by handwave like Science, and I'll openly admit it) is that systems with high Orbital stats have easy access to ship building materials, either because they have lots of asteroid belts that can be mined or because the gravity wells around the planets are shallow enough that it is cheaper to lift materials off into orbit for construction or assembly. A system with 1 Orbital might lack raw materials for ship construction or have such deep gravity wells that it is cost prohibitive to launch goods into orbit.
darbycmcd wrote:commerce: it should probably not be jump lanes that are the multiplier, because jump lanes going nowhere would not generate trade. maybe something like x number of colonies jump adjacent. this might also be good because it will help an 'intensive' rather than 'extensive' colonization strategy, which is a nice option to be viable
In theory, the jump lanes will eventually go somewhere. Granted, unexplored jump lanes really shouldn't count in a system's favor for the purposes of trade... and didn't earlier in the rules. This is a simplification that is intended to remove special exceptions and tie Commerce value to something that makes some sense. I didn't want to tie Commerce value to a colony's economic output like we did in 1E as there are just too many other variables in play now that could make a colony a major commercial hub. At one point we had a separate Commerce colony stat, and in another iteration it was an average of stats and some other arcane math to figure things out. The current system shook out as the best option of the ones we had available, kind of like how Biosphere/Agriculture now acts as a population growth engine where before it served solely in a "feed your people or they will die!" role.
what about making a link actually a link, defined by two systems, with a value equal to 10% of the combined income? a bit more accurate and also rewards intensive colonization.....
That is the equivalent of placing trade links in the middle of a jump lane, which while still easy to track (just much more verbose) opens another can of worms of when you decide one is being disrupted and when a player can destroy them. Would they have to control or contest both ends of the jump lane? Or would just driving through the lane destroy it? I can see the possibilities, but I have a knee jerk reaction against multi-location trade fleets after 1E and having the 3-system route mechanic.
Jay may be able to weigh in with a better perspective on the trade link concept and your counter-concept, as he developed that originally for the Federation Admiral Star Fleet Universe book.