Dirtside

I've had the 2011 Summer of Starmada on my mind lately.  There were a couple of things that made Starmada successful, I think.  One was that it was simple enough to introduce new players without too much difficulty, with many options disabled-by-default.  This allowed us to achieve a critical mass of regular players and establish a metagame.  Finally, the availability of design rules led to strong participation in the game away from the table and allowed players to play fleets representing whatever science-fiction background they came from.  Unfortunately, it was that same design system that tore the metagame apart.

Dirtside 2 shares some, but not all, of these characteristics.  It does have a design system capable of modeling a wide variety of forces, and if the rulebook were better organized it would be easy to separate into a simple core and a number of optional components.  Compared to its brother Stargrunt, its morale system is simpler, it is larger scale, and it has a greater focus on combined arms. Unfortunately, as a ground-combat wargame, it depends heavily on terrain, and it uses a weird miniatures scale (6mm "microarmor").  Also, like Stargrunt, it does not handle alien psychology very well.  Finally, it uses a really weird damage resolution system involving drawing chits from a bowl; simple enough in practice, but an annoying number of moving parts.  If you lose a damage chit, your probability distribution is going to be skewed forever.

I've had my eye on Dirtside for a long time, but it just never seemed viable, due largely to hardware.  I looked at using roll20, but roll20's support for facing is very awkward, the asymmetric DM-player model isn't a great fit for wargames, and it sort of chugs on large maps in my experience.  I considered writing a VASSAL module, but java.  Now I think I might've found the correct tool, though - Tabletop Simulator.  TTS is already widely-available to the group that I game with, and is cheaper than miniatures.  It is easy to import hexmaps into it (I've looked at just taking Google Maps screenshots, imposing a hex grid at 100 meters per hex, and dropping them in), which solves the terrain problem.  It supports the "drawing damage chits" idiom very nicely with either decks or bags.  There are already steam workshop mods for it with models from the Dawn of War games, intended for playing Epic 40k, which would be perfect for representing units (I've been looking at using NATO-standard counters instead, but for some reason NATO has no symbols for "antigrav tank" or "giant mecha".  Gotta get on that, guys).  It seems like a very good solution to the "need miniatures", "losing damage chits", and "terrain is complicated" problems (though it may introduce some new problems, like "playing against opponents face-to-face is fun, and so is standing over a big physical map".  Maybe I need a ceiling-mounted projector aimed down on to a real table for that "war room" effect...)

The "poorly-organized rulebook" problem remains, however.  The rulebook is also not OCR'd, which is pretty annoying.  These two facts combined lead me to the conclusion that maybe I should transcribe / rewrite the rulebook, cutting it up into independent modules like Starmada had:

• Core / Armor
• general sequence of play, units, objectives
• armored vehicle (tracked, wheeled, GEV, grav, mechs) movement
• big index of combat actions, direct fire, guided missiles, damage resolution
• Infantry
• Artillery
• Aerospace (I'm conflicted about VTOLs; most of the time they play like armor, but then they're also vulnerable to air defense)
• Engineering (mines, fires and smoke, bridgelaying, ...)
• Optional Stuff (oversized vehicles, experimental rules for drones and aliens, ???)
• Vehicle Design and Points

It's already mostly organized like this.  The problem is that (for example) infantry movement is in the movement section with armored vehicles, rather than in the infantry section, and chit validity for artillery fire is in the direct fire chit validity table rather than the artillery chapter.  That's fine for a reference, but bad when you're first learning the game.  It's (only) a 60-page rulebook, so cutting it up and figuring it out is less work than learning all the quirks of an RPG, probably.  Combined with making tokens in TTS and a unit design spreadsheet (though there is already an online vehicle design tool, but it doesn't really support houseruling), it should be a reasonable, but not overwhelming, prep effort.

Return to Starmada

Matt and I played a game of Admiralty Edition this evening, using fleets from the Imperial Starmada book (I had Imperials, Matt had Negali) and the Newtonian movement rules.  I had played one of the Hammer and Claw fleets against Negali before, and had had my cruisers cored by their high-impact, high-damage weapons, so I played pretty defensively, stacking up Evasive Action with my Countermeasures and forcing Matt's to-hit numbers up towards 6+ for most of the game.  By the time we got into a close enough range that he could start shooting at 5+ (or 4+ with double range mods), I had destroyed most of his escorts and mostly won by points.

Points of frustration:

• Book fleets have lousy accuracy and prioritize impact and damage instead (compared to home-rolled fleets in our previous meta, where 3+ and 4+ were the norm for to-hit).
• Countermeasures+Evasive Maneuvers+Fire Control is very effective.  The extra -1 to Matt's to-hit from evasive action halved his expected hits per shot (5+ -> 6+), and Fire Control let me ignore evasive action's penalty on my firing.  Fire Control, in effect, became a second Countermeasures.  This variable-rate stacking of to-hit modifiers was fixed in Nova, which we're talking about playing next week.
• Shields 5 on Matt's cruiser - there was not much I could do about this, even with the impact 2 weapons available to my fleet.
• Escorts are bad.  The optimal force composition for a straight-up, no-scenario fight in Admiralty Edition is, IMO, three ships of roughly equal point value.  This forces your opponent to destroy two-thirds of your fleet instead of half.  Escorts are best used as filler, for those last 50 points, in such a way that the destruction or survival of the escorts cannot impact the outcome of the race to 50% of the VP limit.  Matt constructed a fleet of three escorts, a destroyer, and a cruiser, while mine was two battlecruisers and a light cruiser.  Destroying all of his escorts and his destroyer in detail was easier than destroying his cruiser, and because a ship will often have guns left when it is destroyed (due to the random nature of damage allocation), destroying escorts piecemeal reduced incoming fire very effectively.  It is also sometimes possible to opportunistically destroy or badly damage escorts that stray into the wrong arcs, as their great speed sometimes lets them; flanking just lets the opponent bring more of his firepower to bear.
• Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions addresses the weakness of escorts by changing the scaling factor on the point value of hulls from linear to quadratic with the growth of hull size, so that all other things being equal, a ship twice as big costs four times as much.
• Battlefleet Gothic addresses the weakness of escorts with forcebuilding rules requiring everyone to have them.  I forget how they handle scoring / victory conditions.
• BFG also has a rule that ships must fire on the closest target in each arc, unless they pass a leadership test.  Which is maybe silly, but a reasonable way to make escorts useful (and hardly the silliest thing in BFG...).
• BFG escorts are also flotilla-esque; deployed in squadrons, take a single hit to destroy.  But they carry much stronger defenses and heavier armament than Starmada flotillas.
• I am not sure if Colonial Battlefleet does anything in particular to make escorts useful, though I imagine there might be something in its Ship Role rules that would help.
• Starmada Nova...  adds an Escort trait, which blocks line of fire through the escort ship's hex and costs about as much as adding three flights of fighters to the same ship.  This sounds like it would exacerbate the problem that "escorts lack survivability and are too expensive for their utility", especially given the somewhat-dubious utility of symmetric LOS-blocking with a ship that can be killed and is worth points.  Starmada could really, really use a better force composition system and non-VP victory conditions (for example, this battle I won by VP, but could probably not have effectively killed Matt's cruiser).
• Newtonian movement was...  more work than it was worth, I think?  I don't think we ever did anything that we couldn't've done with basic movement; the only times it mattered were when some of Matt's ships took engine damage and had their potential destinations fixed, which allowed me to guarantee that they'd be in my arcs.  But that's typically also true of badly-engine-damaged ships in the naval or basic movement systems; if you're low on thrust, your options are limited.  There may have been one turn where I moved at speed equal to my thrust while using Evasive Action, which is not viable under basic movement.  I think Newtonian movement favors short-ranged fleets; it enables them to close more quickly under cover of Evasive Action (but then also forces them to slow and turn after making their pass at the enemy, during which time they are taking fire - so they must crush the enemy during their first pass).  In this case Matt was unable to turn his substantial thrust advantage into a tactical advantage, in large part because our ranges were matched and we favored similar arcs.
• Matt commented that Starmada would make a much better video game than a tabletop game...  and he's not wrong.

 So...  meh.  We solved some of the old problems with fleetbuilding by using prebuilt fleets, and found new problems.  Nova solved some of these, but hardly all.

Maneuver Warfare Handbook

I read most of Lind's Maneuver Warfare Handbook this evening, and as usual when reading this prompted a few thoughts relevant to gaming (although, unusually, more ideas related to my job - maneuver warfare applied to software development looks like a particularly weird, German flavor of Agile I expect).  The quick summary is that maneuver warfare is a mode of fighting which emphasizes distributed action rather then central control, and which has a few standard tools (mission orders / commander's intent, schwerpunkt, and the search for gaps in the enemy's surface) to make that organizational structure work.  When used properly, the more rapid reaction times of unit leaders closest to the action (who no longer have to wait for high command's permission to act) allow them to out-react their adversaries, forcing confusion, panic, and defeat.  Also emphasized are adaptability to circumstances and initiative by small-unit leaders.  This allows a smaller force to defeat a larger one by capitalizing on failures in enemy command and control.

Which sounds a lot like the sort of thing a human force in Domains at War could use to defeat the numerically-superior orc force in Battle of the Teeth, for example.  Create and exploit weaknesses in their formation as a result of their poor command and control, punch through, kill their commanders and force morale collapse.

Some of the small-unit fire-and-maneuver examples also had me thinking about Stargrunt again (where suppress-then-assault is king), though to some extent using ranged units to disorder troops in Domains at War is similar, and the section on never doing the same thing twice reminded me of the Starmada metagame of old (and that one time I cloaked ships but didn't move them, because my opponents were used to cloaked ships reappearing on their flanks and rear and had started turning to counter).

There was an excellent line about how attrition-warfare forces seek to engage and destroy the enemy "where and whenever" possible via superior firepower, which reminded me of 3.x gamers and how hard it is to get them to refuse a battle when they start playing ACKS.

One thing that I haven't gotten much sense for while wargaming has been friction (and in general properly confusing fog-of-war), though.  To some extent Starmada's written orders created some of this, because it was easy to goof and put your ships out of position.  Unfortunately, that's about as far as serious fog-of-war and friction can go without becoming a huge pain on the tabletop.  Computers could handle the sheer volume of chaos required better, but most computer wargames these days are not for audiences interested in unpredictability (to the point where some players argue that a good competitive RTS should have no randomness).  Perhaps I ought to write one.

In any case, pretty good book.  Very to-the-point!

The High-Low Mix

I've been reading some criticism recently about US aircraft acquisition policy which is sort of interesting from a wargaming perspective.  The opposition allege that the Air Force has a problem where it tries to construct a fleet solely of maximum-capability airframes with stealth and mach 3 and all the bells and whistles required to fight an adversary with advanced air defense capabilities while making cuts to areas like close air support and aerial reconnaissance that don't require the same degree of technological sophistication and are much more useful against technologically inferior opponents.  As it turns out, these sort of high-tech aircraft are really expensive and hard to manufacture and maintain in large numbers, leading to numerical inferiority and either reliance on old models for pedestrian missions like bombing guerillas (for which all the bells and whistles are not required), or extreme maintenance costs for those missions if advanced aircraft are employed.

The opposition further argues that the Air Force should strive for a "high-low" force mix, with 20% of the force consisting of highest-end specialist hardware designed to punch holes in technologically advanced adversaries at any expense, and the other 80% consisting of less-expensive, less-specialized, general-purpose aircraft capable of performing a wide variety of missions at lower costs.

This reminds me of a time when someone tried to build an all-cataphract army - it was very strong on paper, but availability was low and they weren't good at going in and digging lizardmen out of caves.

This discussion is also interesting in light of our Starmada games.  I think part of the reason we didn't really see mission-specialized ships was that basically all of the Starmada victory conditions boiled down to "destroy the enemy fleet".  It probably didn't help that some scenarios banned Cloaking, Hyperdrive, and other options which would permit the construction of specialist ships for those missions.

...  and now I have the itch to build a better (less complex) BattleTech on top of Starmada's chassis while avoiding Wardogs' mistakes.  Bother.

Balancing Starmada

A follow-up to last post's thoughts on applying Colonial Battlefleet's tech rules to Starmada: Admiralty Edition.

At the end of the day, what are we really looking for here?  Perfectly balanced combat (ie, pick any two fleets designed with these parameters and run by perfect players and each will come out with a 50% win rate) obviously isn't happening - even if we did figure out how to design ships this way, it wouldn't be any fun.  On the flip side, a 100%-0% split between two fleets is probably also unacceptably unfun.  Is 75-25 good enough?  66-33?  Where do we draw the line (and how do we draw it without a combinatorial volume of playtesting, given also that familiarity with how to use a particular fleet effectively follows with time playing it)?

One (probably simplest) solution follows from the ancient principle that battles are almost only fought when both sides believe they have a chance of victory.  If, after reading the enemy fleet designs, you honestly believe that you have zero or negligible chance of victory, say so!  Yield preemptively, thereby denying your opponent the satisfaction of crushing you, or request a fleet swap at a handicap (ie, "your ships are so much better than mine that if I were to play yours and you mine, I could beat you at a 30% handicap in fleet points".  If your opponent agrees with your assessment, no battle need be fought.  If your opponent disagrees correctly, then they can have the satisfaction of handing you your ass with your own fleet.  If your opponent disagrees incorrectly or dishonestly, then they suffer on the receiving end of their own cheese).

This does rely on knowledge of the enemy fleet.  I argue that this is representative of a functioning naval intelligence apparatus in a post-first-contact scenario.  It is not, however, traditionally the way we have played, and it also does not scale well up to larger numbers of players.

Another thought might be to establish some sort of tier rules for the construction of fleets, much like Magic the Gathering does for decks.  This would allow us to classify certain traits, abilities, or combinations of traits into tiers.  Starmada is ultimately a toolkit game; it makes sense that we should select subsets of the game to use for different purposes. I think it makes sense to have two scales: shipbuilding complexity (cheese) and tactical complexity.  Consider the following a request for comments:

• Basic (Cheese 0, Tactics 0):
• Max hull 15
• Default movement: Naval
• Max range 12 if Naval movement is in use, 15 with vector
• Max engines 8 with naval movement, ??? with vector movement
• Discontiguous firing arcs are not permitted.
• The only options permitted from Appendix B are Armor Plating, Countermeasures, Fire Control, Point Defense, and Hyperdrive.
• The only options permitted from Appendix C are (list of weapon traits generally regarded as simple, non-problematic, uniformly effective, and/or easily mathematically verified).  I would suggest for this list:
• Anti-Fighter (situational but non-problematic)
• Area Effect (situational but non-problematic)
• Double Damage (easy math)
• Extra Hull Damage (easy math)
• No Hull Damage (non-problematic)
• Non-Piercing (non-problematic)
• Slow-Firing (non-problematic)
• Variable RoF/Imp/Dmg (easy math...  though actually I have my doubts about relative balance among the Var* traits)
• Notable omissions: range-based traits (extremely situational), Piercing (strongly situational based on opponent fleet build).  Extended Arcs and Extended Accuracies are right out.
• The only options permitted from Appendix D are Naval and Basic movement modes, which are recommended for ease of use.  Sequential Movement is permissible by agreement of all players.
• From Appendix E, only Explosions are enabled.
• The only option permitted from Appendix F is customized fighter flights.  However, only numerical customization of fighters is permitted, not fighter traits.  The following limits apply to fighters:
• Flight size: 4 to 8
• Speed: 8 to 12
• To-hit: 4+, 5+, or 6+
• Defense: <= 2
• From Appendix G, planets, asteroids, and asteroid fields are permitted.
• Cheese level: Monty Pythonesque; no cheese in stock.
• Extended (Cheese 1):
• Max hull 20
• Max range 15
• Max engines ???
• Discontiguous firing arcs are not permitted.
• All options from Appendix B except Stealth, Tech Levels, and Flotillas are permitted.
• All weapon traits from the Core book except for Continuing Damage, Inverted Range-Based traits, Increased Hits, Increased Impact, and Repeating are permitted.  Anti-Fighter and Catastrophic from the supplements are permitted.  No more than one range-based trait per weapon is permitted.  Extended Accuracies, Ranges, and Firing Arcs not permitted.
• All customization options available for fighters under rule F.1 of the Core rules may be used, except that fighter defense is capped at 4.  No other rules from Appendix F are enabled by default.
• Cheese level: Burrito.  There may be some cheese here, but it will hopefully be tasty rather than unpleasant
• Expected metagame: Not sure.
• Advanced (Cheese 2 - More or less where we ended last cycle, with a few extra patches):
• No max hull
• Max range 24
• Max engines ??? / all ships with engines must carry at least one weapon.
• Discontiguous firing arcs are not permitted.
• All options from Appendix B except Flotillas are permitted.
• All weapon traits from the Core book are permitted.  
• Repeating and Increased Hits weapons firing at 2+ do not repeat on results of 2, and count extra hits from 3 rather than 2.
• All weapon traits from the supplements except for Starship-Exclusive, Piercing +3, and Ignores Shields are permitted.
• Increased Impact weapons may not generate more than six points of impact per die (as might happen if combined with Piercing +2 and Halves Shields...). 
• Multiple range-based traits are permitted, but no more than three total traits per weapon.  
• Extended Firing Arcs are permitted, but 2+ Accuracy is not.
• Spinal Weapon Rule: Maximum 1 G-arc weapon, which must be in its own battery and is not reparable by damage control.
• All fighter customization options available under rule F.1 in Core and supplements are permitted.  Independent fighters are also permitted.
• Cheese level: Limburger. Possibly too cheesy.
• Complete (Cheese 3 - stuff we banned last time):
• Nothing is forbidden, all is permitted.  Notably the following should be restricted to Complete:
• Flotillas
• Ammo
• Strikers / Seekers
• Starship-Exclusive, Ignores Shields, Piercing +3
• Cheese level: Casu Marzu.  Dear god why.

Running semi-orthogonal to the Cheese Axis is the Tactics Axis.  This mostly deals with the movement type, sensors, optional orders, and such, as well as a few shipbuilding options which contribute strongly to tactical complexity

• Simple (Tactics 0):
•  Movement: Naval or Basic
• All other options from appendices D and E are disabled, except for Explosions and optionally Sequential Movement.
• From Appendix G, only planets, asteroids, and asteroid fields are permitted.
• Less Simple (Tactics 1 - this is about where we were last time):
• Movement: Naval or Basic
• From Appendix B, Cloaking Devices and Mines are enabled.
• From Appendix C, the Slow-Firing trait and Dual-Mode Weapons are enabled.  The Carronade trait is enabled, but may only be used on one mode per dual-mode weapon, and not at all on single-mode weapons (As much as I love my Range 15 Carronade "Long 9s", this, I am told, was its intended function, and so this is what it is most likely balanced for).
• From Appendix D, Emergency Thrust and Evasive Action are enabled.
• From Appendix E, Damage Control, Directed Damage, and Shield Reinforcement are enabled (Shield Reinforcement, incidentally, seems potentially helpful for short-range ships trying to close the gap with long-range ships).
• From Appendix F, Combat Interception, Dogfighting, and Launch and Recovery are enabled.  Launch Tubes are permitted during shipbuilding.
• From Appendix G, all terrain except Black Holes are permitted.
• Less Complicated (Tactics 2):
• As Less Simple, but with the addition of Newtonian Movement, Screens, Critical Damage, Sensor Modes?, and Breachers
• Complicated (Tactics 3):
• As Less Complicated, with the addition of Pivots, Rolls, Sideslips, Delayed Turns, and Overthrusters
• Searchlights may be used to model even more active sensor management.

It might also be worthwhile to backport some of Starmada Nova's more tactical features.  Flares (deployable temporary cover), escort ships (ships that block line of sight/fire for enemy ships), and their seeker implementation (normal weapon that doesn't hit until the turn after it is fired, shots in transit can be fired at and destroyed) were all promising.  I'm vaguely tempted to permit weak AE-style seekers somewhere up the Tactical chain, since seekers actually do pose a lot of interesting choices and lack a lot of the swarmy board-control features of strikers, but all direct-fire expendables to date have shown themselves to be problematic so I'm filing that away under "Cheez-Whiz: May or may not be cheesy."

In any case, the way I see this working is that regular players maintain a handful of fleets at varying cheese levels, so that when a new player shows up and it makes sense to play Cheese 0 / Tactics 1, we actually have sane ships around to do it with rather than throwing them into the deep end with Ammo and Flotillas and suchlike.  This approach scales better than trying to build a tech tree with every trait or suggesting that we read each others' fleet lists before games.

Boardgames: Iron Dragon, Sentinels, Reflections on Starmada

Some folks from out of town were around this weekend, and so a gathering was had and games were played!

First we played Iron Dragon.  I am told it is a long game, but frankly it broke my time-sense and I could not tell you how long it took.  My initial allocation of cards caused me to allocate my effort in the south-east at the two magically-joined cities and up the coast of the Olde Worlde.  This worked fine in the early game, but sorta screwed me in the late game.  I'm not sure how else I'd've played it given the cards I had, though.  As Jared commented, being able to trade cargo loads or contracts would make the game much more interesting, but probably slow it down even further.  It would also be interesting to build an index of possible opening moves (with your 60 starting cash to build) based on available foremen, drawn cards, and desired margin of safety to cover things like floods destroying your tracks.

After Iron Dragon we played three games of Sentinels last night, and another this afternoon.  The three games last night were not super-notable; played some new heroes, fought some new villains, won two games and lost one.  It turns out you can stab Satan to death, and La Capitaine is not, as I had assumed, a French supersoldier set on rebuilding Napoleon's empire, but is instead a time-travelling pirate.  The game this afternoon was interesting, in that everyone else died and we pulled off a victory with me as the "last best hope".  It took a long time, and my fellow players were less than excited because, while Sentinels does give you some support abilities when you are dead, they aid players who are still alive, which places you somewhat at their disposal.  Inexperienced player that I am, I was perhaps not ideal for making suggestions regarding support abilities.  It worked out against all odds, though, which was kind of neat.  Looong game, though.

There was also some reminiscing about Starmada, both how much fun it was and the process of the decay of the metagame.  Pre-generated fleets were suggested as a countermeasure, and while they could work, I think you/we would need to design the inter-fleet meta as a cohesive whole in order to achieve balance this way.  This is certainly possible (and is the standard solution for most games, like Firestorm Armada and Battlefleet Gothic), but would be substantial work.  I also suspect this process of coordination would take a lot of the fun out of Starmada, since we do so enjoy designing ships.  I still think Colonial Battlefleet's tech system might be a solution, in that it would let you build fleets whose access to powerful capabilities like long ranges, strikers, and catastrophics weapons were all similarly restricted, and would also let you cut out certain broken combinations entirely.  The problem, of course, is that there are a lot more 'techs' in Starmada than there are in CBF, and it seems unlikely that we will predict and eliminate all potentially cheesy combinations in designing a tech system.  I suspect another flaw of a CBF-style tech system for Starmada is that similar traits in Starmada are generally better when used with other, similar traits (Increased Hits + Repeating + Variable RoF all one one weapon), while in CBF you don't really see these sort of self-similar synergies.  Further thought is required.

Logistics

I've been thinking about grand strategy games recently, and it occurs to me that supply rules are a lot like encumbrance rules, in that they're a pain in the ass but also worthwhile because they convey the same concerns the character experiences up to the player.  A dungeoneer worries about how much weight he's carrying; a general worries about how to keep his men fed.  What's more, as Keegan's History of Warfare suggests, supply concerns dictated the largely-coastal structures of campaigns in the Hellenic era.  Without supply, you get all kinds of crazy long-term unsupported actions in the enemy rear (this is a problem I have observed in, say, the Civilization series of games).

But the difference between supply and encumbrance is that we're reached a reasonablish compromise between complexity and realism in our encumbrance rules, with encumbrance by stone or with Traveller's low-kilos threshold.  I don't know if supply is amenable to simplication...  but until I find a set of rules for it which are really light-weight, I expect that it will remain one of those much-begrudged rules which is ignored by the players whenever I forget about it.

(Been thinking about wargame campaigns again, since I'm back in Collegetown and one of my main wargaming opponents / buddies is still around)

A Return to Wargaming?

Jimdad suggested on the recent organizational resources post that it would make sense for me to do some test runs of all the tech before trying to run a full-blown campaign with it.  This is sensible, but one-shots are unsatisfying as a rule.  Unrelatedly, I've had VBAM and space wargaming on the brain recently for no apparent reason.  But they do suggest an alternative means for tech-testing, in that wargames are primarily one-off affairs (at least in our group) which work well with a small and irregular player pool.  Playing one-off wargame scenarios also leads nicely into campaigns, which might beget universe generation and lead to workable RPG settings.

I'm sort of looking back at the Starmada Summer of 2011 as a model, but hopefully with a less flexi-fragile system (or a gentleman's agreement that if something is broken, you use it to win once and then can it).  I think Full Thrust in one of its several incarnations would probably serve us well, as it is a very simple core game with lots of optional things to experiment with (I for one would be curious to try Colonial Battlefleet's initiative system on top of FT's general mechanics; I'm just not a huge fan of pre-plotted movement).  Full Thrust is also old enough and well-enough vetted that its exploitable flaws are known (documented and discussed in the expansion books) and can hopefully be avoided.  It also has a nice-looking sample campaign in the back of the FT2E manual.

Other options:

• Starmada: Nova - we never really gave this one a fair shake, and the seeker rules are pretty neat.  On the minus side, forum reports that stacking up weapon traits is still pretty broken.
• Colonial Battlefleet - sort of hampered by lack of good shipyard spreadsheet.  I have one half-thrown together, but got bored.  Good stealth and initiative rules, and the Raider type from the expansion book looks like fun.  On the minus side, fairly heavy bookkeeping for shields.
• Battleshift - Fleet engagements with some cool tactical warp mechanics.  If I recall correctly, though, it needs a pretty big playing area, and I've seen roll20 lag out under less. 
• Space Hulk.  The problem with Space Hulk is that it's unusually stressful, because there is some serious "oh god oh god we're all going to die" going on continuously  (...  holy cow, this must be what it's like to play in my ACKS games.  No wonder they keep disintegrating!  On the other hand, if you play ACKS well, it's less of a problem than if you play Space Hulk well, because the DM is slightly less actively malicious than the 'stealer player).  Also the maps are deceptively expansive.
• BattleTech Lite - light to medium mechs from the earliest time period only, and perhaps no melee.  Could be fun as long as you keep the total number of armor / structure points low.
• Domains at War: Battles - Our experiences so far suggest that DaW:B is too heavy unless there's some significant investment in the outcome (ie, a PC realm at stake). On the other hand, two games between inexperienced players is not a whole lot to go by.  I've been meaning to write some scenarios for this - the system could definitely use one highlighting the fortification rules, and everybody loves Helm's Deep.
• Hell, a sample DaW:C campaign would be fun too, and if the battles were resolved using the Campaigns rules, it might work alright for one-off afternoon games (though I sort of expect a lot of overhead from the recon rules - TODO automate recon).  I could steal something from Crusader Kings and keep the magic-and-wyvern-cavalry level historically low for ease of use.
• Anything in the 15-25mm infantry sphere - I have my doubts about how well roll20 would handle these, and Vassal suffers from limited plugins.  Options include Stargrunt, Gruntz, WH40k, and many many others.
• Dirtside or other 6mm microarmor games - Again, I don't think this one would do well on roll20.  Also chit-based damage.

So if anybody from the old Starmada crew is reading this, hit me up via the usual channels if something here's interesting.

RennFest, Colonial Battlefleet, and Setting Work

Just what it says on the tin:

Had a good time at the Maryland Renaissance Fair(e) this weekend.  Rediscovered mead; much like honeyed whiskey, but with strong overtones of water.  The jousting at German renn faires was better, but this one had elephants and pythons and a cursing well which I am stealing for my upcoming campaign, so hey.

Also picked up a copy of Colonial Battlefleet from the wargame vault today.  Interesting system.  Their initiative mechanic and the roles mechanism are both interesting changes from Starmada, and the fact that they provide a Big List of Weapons should prevent some of the guncheese we had in Starmada: Admiralty. I don't like how they laid out said table (by weapon tonnage, rather than alphabetically by weapon name or weapon 'family'), but that is at least a useful ordering during ship contruction.  Their shields are also very different from S:AE shields (would be interested in seeing some non-forward-focused shields, but I'm happy enough as-is without the extra complexity).  I like the way they handled tech levels, mostly, except for Laser Weaponry, which I think they screwed up with regards to Screen role availability.  One thing that does torque me off a little is some of the really implausible faux science used to justify mechanics that are in place for game balance reasons - things like "When you teleport something, all inorganic chemical reactions in it cease.  As a result, you can only teleport marines, not bombs."  That grinds my gears a bit; you could've just said "You can't teleport bombs because the yield isn't sufficient for a man-sized bomb to damage a starship" (since scale is intentionally vague), or built a bomb-teleporter weapon, or left the players to not think of it like we didn't in six months of Starmada games with teleporter-marines, but no.  Instead you had to make something ridiculous up and call attention to it, which might produce a counter like "OK, that's cool, we're the Tyranids and we're going to build living bomb-marines with organic detonators.  Wheee-BOOM."  That said, upon running a test game against myself with some converted Homeworld ships, it was quick, bloody, reasonable simple, and overall satisfactory.  So if any of the old Starmada Crew is reading this, I'm down for some games over internet (it's hex-based, so should work fine with VTTs).  Fair warning, though - I have been growing out my beard since the weather cooled off... (for those unfamiliar, we observed that gamers with beards were significantly more likely to win at Starmada than were clean-shaven gamers.  The prevailing hypothesis is that this was due to the increase in planning efficiency acquired by stroking one's beard)

Oh yeah.  The editing is not fantastic, and some areas are lacking examples, but the intent of the rules is generally clear, so it's just sort of annoying rather than obstructionary.

Finally, ACKS setting.  Contemplated Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Northern Reaches (Western Marches into mythic Scandinavia), and Midnight in the Late 3rd Age.  Am currently settled on "The Scaled Continent".  The pitch:

In elder days, the children of squamous gods ruled the world, and man, elf, and dwarf suffered beneath their forked and envenomed lash.  But now their empire has fallen to ruin under rebellion and internal strife, and the men of Aura seek the reclaim the treasures that were once stolen from them and taken across the Sea of Tears, to line the jungled halls of the serpent-kings.  From the Isle of Voltager, their settlers and adventurers struggle against the environment, the natives, and sometimes each other for the riches of... the Scaled Continent.

Thematic elements:

• Settings: 
• heavily-trapped temples to bloodthirsty gods
• overgrown and ruined cities of the Old Masters
• human frontier settlements (incl. abandoned and overtaken)
• the Serpent's Tongue (major river)
• sailing ships anchored off the coast
• volcanoes
• Opposition: 
• Lizardmen, frogmen, toadmen, turtlemen, crocodilemen, &c
• With accompanying witch-doctors and guardbeasts
• Prehistoric and/or gigantic beasts 
• yes dinosaurs 
• also giant cockroaches 
• and dire armadillos carrying dire leprosy
• Monsters from South American and/or African myth and ecology
• (some research required, void where inaccurate)
• Dragons 
• Pirates
• Dragon-pirates
• not, however, from Ninja Island
• Screaming river-eels
• Wereleopards (forvalaka)
• Anything with scales that didn't fall into the above categories
• Ambulatory plant life
• Dysentery and worse jungle diseases
• Monsoon season
• Resources:
• Local guides
• Mules
• Dugout canoes
• Treasure maps of dubious veracity
• Steel and alcohol (as trade goods with the natives)
• Gullible henchmen (but when aren't those a resource?)
• Treasure:
• Golden idols
• Crystal skulls
• Rubies the size of a man's fist
• Holy grails?
• Spellbooks containing forgotten and forbidden spells of the reptile mages, written on halfling-skin vellum (demium?)
• Exotic spices and hardwoods
• Rescued slaves
• Cities of gold
• Fountains of youth
• Possible untimely death
• Modules:
• Caverns of Thracia
• DCC#16: Curse of the Emerald Cobra
• A source of fond memories from my youth
• Isle of Dread 
• Temple of the Frog (inasmuch as it is a ruined temple "in the city of the enemy")
• Thematic fiction:
• "Lost World" stories
• Heart of Darkness
• Pulp portrayals of the tropics (eg, King Kong)

 So!  Time to map!  Oh wait, I can just write "JUNGLE" in great big capital letters on a hexmap and be mostly good to go.  Just have to draw a coastline, some islands, a river, and a distant mountain range...

Miscellany - Of Ships and Burning Oil

Wasn't feeling well last night, so no real post today.

I've been reading up on naval tactics and strategy with the idea of getting some context for Starmada and Full Thrust.  Found two interesting things that kind of mirror our experiences with Starmada.  First, from wikipedia:

Naval tactics throughout the 16th century and well into the 17th century, however, was focused on countering the oar-powered galleys that were armed with heavy guns in the bow, facing forwards, which were aimed by turning the entire ship against its target. Though far less seaworthy than sailing vessels and highly vulnerable to boarding by ships that rode higher in the water, the galleys were a serious threat due to their ability to aim accurate heavy gunfire low in the hulls of larger sailing ships.

So there is historical precedent for G-arc superweapons!  Doesn't make them any more fun, though :\

The other interesting point was a discussion of the continued usefulness of aircraft carriers in the missile age, with arguments made here (caution - pdf), here, and here.  I thought it was neat to see kind of the same discussions we had go down in the Real World.

Also, looking at ACKS again, I think we were playing military oil wrong the entire time.  We were applying fire damage every round for standing in a burning area, which (as we noted at the time) was strictly better than using oil as a single-target weapon for 1d8 damage for each of two rounds.  However, further inspection shows that oil spread on the ground covers only a 5' diameter rather than a 10' diameter, which means that there're large non-burning areas in a 10' square containing fire.  Also looks like area-deployment of oil require careful pouring, rather than throwing, so it can't be done at range.  So I think the tradeoff is that poured deployment requires either pouring oil in the front line (in which case intelligent adversaries will realize what you're up to) or pouring in the rear and then retreating, which yields ground, while thrown oil can be used to immediate effect from the rear but has lower damage potential.

On Wargame Campaigns (and BattleTech)

As I read back through some of the BattleTech material I have around which has been collecting dust, I'm led to reflect on our experience with Starmada campaigns and with some of the campaign systems I've seen in other wargames.  Looking back at our attempts at 'mada campaigns, I can't help but think that we drastically overcomplicated them.  We built a grand strategic game system, not a campaign system - we had star systems with planets with their own productivity values and infrastructure and population and stuff, we had spies and treaties and hostile natives and pirates and research and all kinds of crap.  We had Master of Orion.  A wargame campaign, though, in its purest form, eschews most of these things.  You have some forces which persist through multiple scenarios, which you have to direct and allocate, and which grow, shrink, or otherwise change composition as a result of those scenarios.  Continuing the video game analogy, Homeworld is a good representative of this model - you're always trying to eke as many resources out of each scenario as possible so that you can carry it over to the next in the form of ships, and if you haven't completed all research available in the scenario when you finish, you sit around and wait for it to complete before declaring victory and hyperdriving out.  Starmada's Simplest Campaign System is a canonical example of this as well.

Moral of that story - when embarking on a campaign, make your intentions clear, choose a system that matches them, and make sure everyone's willing to carry through with the sort of time investment that the chosen system entails.

Before I move on to BattleTech, there's another campaign system I happened on once that I think is worth mentioning as interesting.  It was from MechWar '77, an old SPI hex-and-counter game portraying the Arab-Israeli War(s) of 1977.  It had a very curious campaign system.  You had two players, each of which had some pool of forces to secretly divide between each of three fronts - north, south, and center.  A single battle was then fought on each front with the forces each commander had assigned it, and the victor of the campaign was determined based on who had won which battles and to what degree.  I found this campaign system to be unusual in that it split battles and forces across space rather than time; most of the time when we think of campaign systems, we focus on the "over time" aspect, rather than the allocation aspect.

This brings us to the BattleTech bit.  I found, in the Combat Operations book, a very nice and fairly simple campaign system.  Each campaign turn, each player assigns each element (depending on the scale of the campaign) an order to Fight, Defend, Scout, Repair, or Supply.  The relation between the number of Fighting, Defending, and Scouting units then determines what scenarios are fought during that turn and between which units, while Repairing and Supplying units can fix damage or purchase new equipment and are vulnerable to combat only if the other side's attacking forces drastically outnumber and swamp their defending forces.  Campaign points are scored based on the degree of victory in each battle, and lost for defeat, with the three ways to win the campaign being to destroy the enemy to a man, to capture his base of operations, or to amass a sufficient morale and supply advantage by winning many battles, as represented by gaining enough campaign points.

Overall, I think this system strikes a good balance.  It has unit change over time, with units taking damage and being repaired between scenarios, but it also has MechWar '77-style unit allocation to different tasks; thus, but operational and tactical resource management.  In BattleTech, there is very little hidden information built in; hidden unit assignments does create a degree of hidden information, and turns the campaign into a light lateral-thinking game which the wargame itself is not.  It has a means of unit advancement, both through pilot improvement and using the Supply order to purchase new units, which limits the potential for Starmada Simplest-style degeneration (where each side ends up with units which are barely fieldable).  Finally, it seems that for a reasonable small force (say a company of four lances to each side), the game would likely be very reasonable to run, complexity-wise and in terms of number of games required to complete the campaign, especially if one limited the availability of supplies.  Salvage then becomes imminently important for getting ammunition and replacement parts - it keeps striking me as odd how heavily BT emphasizes salvage compared to other wargames, but I think I like it.  It emphasizes the "we just can't build stuff like this anymore" aspect of the setting from the early Succession Wars.  That might be another post, though.

But yeah - I think I might want to run one of these.  Heck, multi-faction might work too; the only really critical addition would be making Fight and Scout orders specify a target, though the scenario determination rules might need a bit of tweaking too, and with limited supply I feel like such a game might get very treacherous very quickly.  But I can kind of see it, if you replace the setting; in the ruins of post-apocalyptic Earth, the only units capable of operation in the blowing dust of the radioactive wastelands are ancient mechs, the likes of which can no longer be produced, and those who have such mechs war amongst themselves for control over those which remain...

Starmada Sunday Retrospective: Starmada as War

After responding to a comment on my last post about Admiralty Edition, I spent a little time reflecting on our Starmada experience and realized that, in the latter days of Admiralty, we achieved Combat as War.  We managed to do sufficient planning in design that we had ameliorated the impact of both tactics and luck.  We (and by we I mean mostly Jared, Matt, and I) were indeed out to win the battle before it began, rather than going for a 'fair fight'.  The only thing we needed, which we tried to achieve but repeatedly failed at, was resource management between battles (because that's how you make iterated Combat as War interesting).

Starmada Sunday: Continuing Damage, Repeating, and Geometric Series

The Homeworld ion frigate - inspiring G-arc inverted range mods repeaters since 1999

So I mentioned in my previous post on ship design that there were a number of other topics I wanted to cover.  A lot of this is going to be rapidly obsoleted by Starmada Nova when it launches, but for those who don't convert (ha), it might be useful.

So, first topic.  Of the weapon traits, Continuing Damage and Repeating get a lot of discussion as being terrifyingly good.  While this is actually true of Continuing Damage, it's only situationally true of Repeating.  To show this, it's necessary to show that the number of hits generated by both of these traits can be modeled as a geometric random variable.  This is is a formalization of the process of flipping a coin until it comes up tails for a coin which has a probability p of landing heads-up, and its output is the number of flips it took to get tails.  Try it a few times and write down how many flips it took each time.  If you do this enough times, and your coin is fair, you'll get an exponential function, where it'll take i flips about 1/(2^i)th of the time (so 1 flip half the time, 2 flips a quarter of the time, and so forth).  If you work out the math with generating functions, the average number of flips it'll take to get heads works out to be 2 for a fair coin.

Continuing Damage's performance is easy to explain under this idiom.  Rather than ending the series when we get heads, we end it when we roll an odd, which happens with the same probability.  Thus, we can expect to get two points of systems damage per die of Continuing Damage, on average.  Further, under the standard interpretation of how Continuing Damage works, we get a hull hit for each point of Continuing Damage; if we roll an odd the first time, then it's a hull hit, and if we got an even initially, then we keep rolling until we get an odd, and hence a hull hit.  Therefore, each point of Continuing Damage is exactly twice as effective as a normal point of damage against starships, as a normal point of damage is guaranteed 1 point of systems damage and gets a point of hull damage half the time.

So, what's the problem with Continuing?  The issue actually isn't, mathematically, that it guts ships without killing their hulls, since it does hull damage on each die, and the ratio of systems damage to hull damage is the same, on average, as with non-continuing damage.  The problem is actually that it's underpriced, at a price multiplier of x1.7.  Since it's twice as effective as normal damage (on average), it should probably be x2, like Double Damage.  It also has the nice property that it scores a hull hit on every die, which is only shared by Extra Hull Damage, which is much more expensive at x3.  It's possible that the community as a whole has misinterpreted the wording on Continuing Damage, but it appears that if Cricket originally intended it to work differently, he has since forgotten.

So, short version: Continuing actually is probably the most reliably cost-supereffective anti-ship weapon trait in the game, scoring x2 hits all the time for x1.7 price, for a 1.18 effectiveness / price multiplier.  Use it if you like blowing up the enemy's ships (and I think most of us probably do), or houserule it to an x2 price multiplier.  For all that Continuing looks like a swingy trait on the surface, it's actually very reliably effective, since it always gets a hull hit.  For bonus points, combine with Catastrophic.

Repeating's a bit harder to analyze.  Here we have a coin that we quit flipping when we miss...  which means that the number of hits we get varies with accuracy, and our probability isn't always 1/2.  Fortunately, the expected number of heads we get before we get tails on a biased coin with probability p of heads is p / (1-p).  We can then work out the expected number of hits per point of RoF based on our accuracy rating:

• 6+: p = 1/6, so (1/6)/(5/6) = 1/5 hits per repeating RoF, on average.  1.2 times as effective as 6+ Acc without repeating.
• 5+: p = 1/3, so (1/3)(2/3) = 1/2 hits per RoF, 1.5 times as effective as 5+ non-repeating
• 4+: p = 1/2, so (1/2)/(1/2) = 1 hit per RoF, 2 times as effective as 4+
• 3+: p = 2/3, so (2/3)/(1/3) = 2 hits per RoF, 3 times as effective as 3+
• 2+: p = 5/6, so (5/6)/(1/6) = 5 hits per RoF, 6 times as effective as 2+

So, what this analysis shows is that Repeating is much, much better on highly accurate weapons.  OK, that makes sense.  But when is it cost-effective?  Repeating has a cost multiplier of x3.  This means that with Repeating on a 3+ weapon, you're breaking even.  With repeating on 4+ or higher, you're paying for more than you're getting.  And on 2+, you're getting twice what you paid for; for the price of one 2+ repeater with 6 expected / effective RoF, you could instead get 3 RoF of 2+ weapons, which would be half as effective on average.

Thus, repeating is only broken if you can use it on 2+ weapons...  or if you can make your weapons 2+ during combat by way of range modifiers.  In general, you're going to want to use Inverted Range Mods with these; you want to be obliterating people far away before they obliterate you, ideally during the first round of real firing.  3+ Inverted Range Mods Repeaters and 4+ Inverted Double Range Mods Repeaters are both terrifyingly effective; I've seen them in action, and can attest that they core battleships like nobody's business.  My first win ever was with the Grumm from Hammer and Claw, whose capital ships mount several variants of the aptly-named Eviscerator as their bow weapons.  Range 12-15, Acc 3+, Imp 3-4, Damage 1, Inverted Range Mods, Repeating.  Now, the Grumm only ever being a few of these to battle, and no more than one per ship, so when you score a weapon hit on the Grumm, there's always that chance that you'll get the Eviscerator (and then you celebrate, and the Grumm are sad).  But if you were to build a fleet armed with these as their primary weapons, rather than a few specialists...  Eesh.

On the flip side, if you know your opponent is bringing the good kind of repeaters (3+ or 2+), bring Countermeasures.  That -1 Acc really mitigates Repeating's effectiveness.  Evasive Action can likewise seriously reduce the amount of hurt they can put on you; try to get up to speed, then coast on evasive action through their long-range killzone if you're playing with Newtonian Movement.  Once you get into short range where they're not at 2+, you'll at least be on even footing mathematically.  On the flip side, if your enemy knows you're bringing out the Repeater-cheese, they'll have Countermeasures, so buy Fire Control.  It's worth it (and hey, if they don't have Countermeasures, then it becomes free Directed Damage, which can increase your expected number of hull hits by a factor of 1.5).  Also bring some secondary guns in case they close past your long-range repeaters.  You could also try to maintain a dispersed formation of killzones, so that each ship is in the long-range, high-effectiveness area of another ship's repeaters.  This suffers from the standard problem of dispersed formations, though, namely that the enemy only has to deal with part of your force at a time, and can use his entire force effectively.

So, the verdict on Repeating: it's situationally good, or tactical by my reckoning.  The problem is that getting into that sweet spot is pretty easy; with inverted range mods and long ranges, you can pull it off most games.  Likewise, the payoff when you do is huge, and the penalty for failing to do so is not very severe (even when you take into account the x1.4 cost multiplier for Inverted Range Mods, 3+ repeaters at medium range are still fairly cost-effective).  You only lose at close range.  This is what pushes it into borderline-degenerate territory.  Also: never ever put repeating on 5+ or 6+ weapons.  Generally avoid putting it on 4+, since you'll usually be losing effectiveness if you do.  3+ is fair game, and if you're buying 2+ weapons, Repeating is extremely cost effective.

Mailbag 3: Starmada Ship Design

Got several hits recently for the search term "starmada ship design".  Initially I kind of ignored them, but upon further reflection I realized that there's actually a lot to say on this topic.  There are several schools of thought, a lot of crunchy math to be done, and plenty of personal experience to draw on.  Plus, if I queue up a bunch of posts about Admiralty Edition, maybe Nova Edition will come out, by the Umbrella Principle (looking at starting an AE Simplest Campaign for the same reason, actually.  Well, that and the fact that I'm kinda jonesing for 'mada...).

So much for motivation.  While reflecting on this topic in the shower, I realized that there are essentially three types of 'traits' in Starmada: AE (well, kind of five, but two are degenerate).  The three interesting ones are Reliable traits, Swingy traits, Tactical traits.  The degenerate types are Awful and Awesome traits.

Swingy traits vs Reliable traits are fairly clear.  A swingy trait can perform strongly, but relies on luck to do so.  Examples of swingy traits include Fire-Linked, Variable RoF (and similar), and high damage ratings.  On average, you'll get exactly what you paid for by expectation, but the actual results vary wildly across games.  Reliable traits include good Acc values (3+, 4+), high RoF, Fire Control (when used to power Directed Damage), and Extra Hull Damage.  These are traits that are always good, and work to mitigate the effects of randomness on the way that you play.  Often you pay a premium for this reduction of randomness, but not necessarily.  An illustrative contrast is between Extra Hull Damage from Core, and Catastrophic from Rules Annex.  Both traits work to increase hull hits per die of damage, but they do it in different ways.  EHD guarantees a hull hit on every die of damage, even if you roll a 1 against an Armor-Plated target.  That's about as reliable as it gets.  Catastrophic works a bit differently.  Whenever you roll a hull hit with a catastrophic weapon, the target instead takes 1d6 hull hits.  Scary, and can lead to instant obliteration of a hull 6 or smaller target from a single die of damage...  but not reliably (only 1 in 12 times, or 1 in 18 against armor-plated targets).  Catastrophic is the poster child for swingy traits.  Another example is Countermeasures versus Armor Plating.  Countermeasures provides a nice, reliable -1 to all weapons fire against you, unless they have Fire Control.  The effectiveness of this actually varies based on the accuracy of their weapons, but it's never completely ineffective.  Armor Plating negates damage rolls of 1.  If your dice like to roll 1s, Armor Plating's great; it can negate huge piles of damage (but you might want to use different dice for firing...).  On the other hand, it's entirely possible to play a game with a fleet where every ship is Armor Plated and have AP negate exactly 0 hits.  It does happen.

Example from play: Matt fielded Catastrophic weapons extensively during our play of Admiralty Edition.  Most of the time, they were scary but not terribly effective, but there was one battle (the Dreadnought Match) where they really came into their own and just tore Alex to pieces.  Their primary value most of the time was really as terror weapons; in trying to stay out of the Catastrophic arcs, you might go places on the map you otherwise wouldn't, or you might split your fleet, and you often ended up staring into his Piercing +2 secondary guns, which were reliably good against targets of all types.  Because you really didn't want to try your luck against Cata...

Tactical traits are a third point on the triangle.  These traits are great if you have a good ability to predict your opponent (to borrow from Sirlin, they're powered by Yomi), and a good way to screw yourself over otherwise.  Cloaking is the canonical example, but dual-mode weapons, slow-firing weapons, and Screens are also tactical.  You almost always pay a premium for tactical traits, which is why you have to use them well for them to be cost-effective.  However, they're a lot of fun, and used wisely can be really, really good.  Arguably the Range-Based Foo traits are also tactical, though the Inverted versions can be used at a profit pretty reliably by 'dancing' at long range.

Example from play: Ah, Cloaking.  I initially started experimenting with Cloaking because by Eldar conversion to Starmada was performing terribly; speed and short-ranged weapons were just not cutting it.  Cloaking, however, gave them a whole new dimension and sent me on a winning streak; I don't recall ever having lost a game with the Cloakdar, though I did draw at least one (I know I did during their first game).  Cloaking let me choose the time, place, and manner of engagement, and let me focus my fire on small parts of the enemy fleet while avoiding retribution from the rest.  Matt and Tim avoided cloaking just based on the amount of work involved, while Jared tried it once but badly mispredicted Matt's movement and ended up right under his guns.

Awful traits are pretty self-explanatory.  They're traits which are just...  bad.  Mathematically, provably bad.  There aren't a whole lot of these in the game, fortunately, since Cricket did a pretty good job with the balance.  The two that I know of, unequivocally, are Anti-Fighter Batteries from the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook and Halves Shields from the Rules Annex.  AFBs are far too expensive for the degree of protection from fighters that they provide.  They're nice, because they can fire in a 360-degree arc, but range 1, 5+ to hit, and RoF 1 are all bad traits for anti-fighter weapons.  You want to hit fighters far away, and you want to hit them a bunch of times.  Further, AFBs boost both your ORAT and your DRAT, whereas a normal anti-fighter weapon would just boost your ORAT.  Since ORATs are usually higher and pricing works on square roots, the DRAT cost of AFBs just isn't worth it.  Halves Shields is the other flavor of bad.  It's actually pretty good...  but Piercing +2, also from the Annex is as good or better against all target classes, for the same price.  Piercing +2 is better against Shields 3, and exactly the same effectiveness against all other shield ratings.  Thus, there is mathematically no reason to ever use Halves Shields if Piercing +2 is available (ie, not banned).

Awesome traits are things which are too damn good not to use if available.  They include traits which are mathematically super-efficient, as well as traits whose only effective counter is those traits themselves.  The contents of this category are naturally contentious.  Generally-conceded traits here are Starship Exclusive and Ammo.  Other candidates for this category include the various shieldbreakers from the Annex, strikers, flotillas, repeating, G-arc weapons, and increased hits.  Personally, I tend to think that Stealth might be a bit too good too, but there is at least a kind of counter for Stealth (namely Inverted Ranged-Based traits).

Example from play: Ammo is disgustingly good.  I don't think we ever played a game where only one side used Ammo and that side didn't win.  My ammo-based disablers crippled Alex in the first round, Jared used ammo'd polecats from Hammer and Claw in his first game and won (one of a very few first-game wins), my 100-point one-shot torpedo boats annihilated Matt's 300ish-point battleship in Planetary Assault, and Jared used a one-shot area-effect shieldbreaker against Matt's short-ranged fleet for a bunch of shield damage in the opening round, which I believe turned into a win.  The trick with Ammo is that it lets you concentrate firepower across time.  For the same SU cost, you can have one weapon with no ammo limits, or five such weapons, each of which can fire exactly once.  Thus, you can get 5 times the firepower in the first round of firing.  This is the so-called "Glitter Fleet" idea you hear about on the forums.  It might be a bit more expensive in terms of CRAT...  but 5x firepower is more than enough to make up for it, and usually to wipe an enemy fleet.  And if it doesn't, you cede.  For bonus points, put Slow-Firing on your one-shot weapons.  No effective penalty for you, but makes 'em cheaper.

So at this point you're probably thinking, "OK, that's nice that you've split traits into five categories, but largely non-useful for me, the ship designer."  Not so!  Your use of these traits determines in large part how your fleet will play.  A fleet running strictly reliable traits will perform consistently, while a fleet full of swingy traits will sometimes win big and sometimes lose terribly.  A fleet with too many tactical traits will overburden the player's ability to guess and micromanage, and will likely lose unless those traits synergize well (Cloaking + Slow-Firing, for example), but one with one 'gimmick' tactical trait can play well and with a distinct style.  Awful traits should be avoided, and awesome traits should either be used universally or banned.

To build a fleet which is mechanically strong, you must understand which traits (and which combinations of traits) are mechanically strong.  To build a fleet that you will enjoy playing, you must know both how you prefer your fleets to 'feel', and how various properties of your ships influence their qualitative performance.  The best way to learn these things is to play fleets which vary across the reliable / swingy / tactical scale and see which you like most.  I tend towards tactical / reliable, while Matt for example likes to use swingy main guns and reliable secondaries.  That sort of thing.

There's a lot more to say on this topic.  In particular, I'd like to make clear the math behind Repeating, varying Acc values, shield-breaking traits and shields in general, range and speed, and damage and degradation (including flotillas).  This may have to become a regular column (until Nova comes out...  guess I'll just start talking about Nova when that happens).

Mailbag 1: Starmada and BFG

As I was checking my search terms, I realized that some of them were fairly entertaining, and others were questions and might entail answers or responses.  So, here are some of my favorites, biased towards the ones that appear most often:

"starmada fire arcs": Yeah, these are tricky for beginners.  In AE, you have six primary arcs - A, B, C, D, E, and F.  There's also a second set, but they're for munchkins and rules wankers (the G arc is too damn good).  Each arc covers 60 degrees of...  well, arc.  If you take a ship's heading to be 0, directly right to be 90, directly behind to be 180, and directly left to be 270, the arcs cover angles as follow:

• A: 300 through 360; forward-left
• B: 0 through 60; forward-right
• C: 240 through 300; left broadside
• D: 60 through 120; right broadside
• E: 180 through 240; rear-left
• F: 120 through 180; rear-right

 I know that that may not be terribly helpful, and that I should include an image, but my image editing capabilities are rather limited (no mouse), and pulling one out of the manual would be poor form.  One trick we did find helpful in learning the arcs was copying the arc diagram from the book into the map so that we could refer to it rapidly without having to consult the book.

"battlefleet gothic firing arc templates": These I don't have readily memorized (though I thought they were just forward, aft, port, starboard...), but Games Workshops' BFG resources has something which might work.

 "starmada admiralty edition review": Huh, maybe I should write one of those.  A bit late in the game's lifecycle, though, since Starmada Nova should launch in the next month or so.  Speaking of which, most recent news on that front is that the rules are complete, but they're deciding what should go in the core book, and doing layout / formatting.  Also, they have cover art, and it has better texture than in previous versions.

"battlefleet gothic conversion": Let me tell you, when Starmada Nova launches, it's the first thing on my to-do list (possibly after constructing a spreadsheet for accelerated shipbuilding, depending on how fast OldnGrey and the other spreadsheet guys on the forums are about it).  I did do a lot of conversion work on the Battlefleet Gothic ships to Admiralty Edition, too (about 5 revisions of Imperials, Chaos, and Eldar, as well as one version each of Tau and Orks)...  but the files were lost in the great Laptop Catastrophe of Fall '11.  They may be on a backup drive somewhere, but I honestly don't know anymore.  There are three relevant threads on the Starmada forums, here, here, and here.  The first of those has most of my version 1 work, as well as parts of v3 and my v3.5 Imperials. 

"simplest campaign system": It's a simple campaign system for Starmada: Admiralty, originally published in the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook, and republished in the Options Annex.  As the name would suggest, it is in fact very simple.  You have a fleet registry (where hull damage persists across combats), and a pool of resource points which you can use to repair or buy new ships.  After each combat, the winner gets a victory point towards campaign victory, but no resource points, while the loser gets resource points, but no victory points.  First one to n victory points wins, for pre-determined n.  It's known for creating really torn-up fleets by the end of the campaign.  For a series of after-action reports from a game run using a slightly tweaked version, I recommend Blacklancer's posts here.  It starts getting good on page 3, particularly this post.  Note to self: try running Simplest with >2 players and watch the chaos.

"starmada d12 roll": Huh.  Well, there was a forum thread a while back on d10 Starmada.  Never tried d10 or d12, myself; I certainly don't have enough d12s for it, and while I have enough d10s, you'd need to do some serious work on the probabilities and the point costings.  If somebody writes a conversion to make that happen, let me know.

Quotes from 5e Devs, and Starmada Next Fighter Firing

A few aftershocks of the D&D 5e announcement.  EnWorld has a news aggregator up here; this is pretty standard for them with new editions (the site was initially created as a news site for 3e during its development, then developed forums during the Third Age which persisted through its coverage of 4e).  Currently it's mostly little soundbites from the lead devs, but a couple of them look fairly promising (all credit to EnWorld for gathering these):

"The new edition is being conceived of as a modular, flexible system, easily customized to individual preferences. Just like a player makes his character, the Dungeon Master can make his ruleset. He might say ‘I’m going to run a military campaign, it’s going to be a lot of fighting’… so he’d use the combat chapter, drop in miniatures rules, and include the martial arts optional rules." - Mike Mearls

This is a nice idea, though one that might make life difficult for the players during character creation.  It does, however, suggest that the supplement treadmill may be stoppable by DM fiat; if he doesn't choose rulebases from other supplements, then you're good.  It may also eliminate the Grapple Problem - the existence of gross, annoying subsystems that nobody really wants to deal with.  Make 'em optional, and then they're not problems.  Final point here is that miniatures / grids may be optional, rather than required (as they were in 4th and basically were in 3rd for adjudicating AoOs).  Sweet.

 "I don't think 'requiring someone to be a healer' is a sacred cow, but having healers in the game is. I wouldn't want to see D&D do away with healing, but I don't think there's anything keeping us from exploring a version of D&D where players can simply play anything they want, ignoring concepts like role and function when putting together their party. To do so, we would need to take a serious look at the way player resources are allocated in D&D, and make some adjustments to the assumptions behind the design of everything from adventures to encounters to monsters." - Rodney Thompson

This reminds me a lot of Iron Heroes, which was another Monte Cook / Mike Mearls project.  In IH, you had a pool of Reserve Points with a cap equal to your max HP, and you could convert a reserve point into a hit point with one minute of resting.  This creates a dynamic similar to healing surges, but not in-combat and somewhat more realistic.  Healing, by skills or magic, added to your reserve pool, rather than to your HP, so it was useful in terms of extending combat endurance, but not a combat activity, and having a dedicated healer was not a necessity.  Healing was something that you could choose to pursue, but that 1) you didn't have to, and 2) you didn't have to make your sole specialty if you did.  And that was cool.  I hope they draw on IH for inspiration here.  'course, that was what I said during 4e development, too (also by Mearls), and look how that turned out...

Ignoring role and function is also a neat idea, and something we've seen to a limited degree in our Traveller games; sometimes you go "Man, we need an engineer badly", but then when you try to roll an engineer, you often get someone who can engineer, but is also an awesome hacker or ninja too (or all three plus sniper, in the case of Jared's character last campaign).  You're not constrained to your class / career, and everyone from the same career is just a bit different from everyone else.  Contrast with D&D, where if you're the fighter, pretty much all you can do is fight.  Classes in D&D serve as hard limits on the things you can do; in Traveller, careers serve as soft guidelines, where it's not hard to pick up some pretty oddball skills (Thief Remote Ops?  Really?).

 "We'll have more information on the GSL as it relates to the next edition in the near future. Personally, I have a copy of 'The Cathedral & the Bazaar' on the shelf at work.  From my days as a programmer and as a freelance RPG designer, the bulk of my work involved open platforms which did a lot for a game that relies so much on individual creativity." - Mike Mearls

This is good for two reasons.  First, it looks like the devs at least are in favor of something resembling the OGL or opensourcing.  Second, it's an interesting cross-cultural reference to we programmers.  However, Mearls is being really vague here, and it wouldn't surprise me if WotC's legal department got the final say on this one.  On the third hand, the era of D&D's greatest success was marked by the OGL, with the more restrictive GSL significantly decreasing third-party support and arguably sales, so maybe WotC legal will learn from it.  Time will tell.

In non-5e news, got a confirm from Underling on the sequence of actions in the next edition of Starmada here.  When I read the alpha core review rules, which contained no mention of fighters, the change to "all damage is applied immediately during sequential firing" immediately suggested to me that fighter firing could be rolled into the ship firing phase, with an activation being usable either for a squadron of small craft or a single ship.  Turns out I was correct, and Underling also confirms that under alternating movement, an activation can likewise be used on either a ship or a fighter squadron (which makes great sense, when you make alternating movement the default).  I believe that the primary advantage of fighters now will be their ability to move without regard for the Newtonian thrust rules; combined with their (expected) short range weapons, this means you'll probably want to move them last-ish.  This again mixes up the traditional order of movement employed in alternating movement games, as I discussed previously, that you usually want to move your fast, light things first and then move your slow, heavy hitters last.

The most important thing about this change is that it makes point-defense weapons / anti-fighter batteries potentially useful.  If the entire enemy fleet is fighters, and you only have ships with AFBs, you're no longer SOL like you were in AE, where you'd get mauled by the fighters before you had a chance to fire.  Now, they'll attack you, and you'll get a chance to attack back before more of their fighters get to attack.  This also creates an interesting tactical problem when you have a mixed fleet of ships and fighters - do you fire with the fighters first before the enemy gets a chance to fire their AFBs at them, or do you use your ships first?  Probably situational, but it's an extra wrinkle in a system where this wasn't even a question before.

So, I like this change a lot.  First, it simplifies the rules by removing the fighter phase.  Second, it solves the much-maligned AFB problem of the previous edition.  Third, it introduces an interesting choice or series of choices, which the game really needs more of.  Finally, I like being right in my predictions.  When I said back in December that I expected the new edition to fix fighters, this is exactly what I had in mind, and MJ12 has not disappointed.

A Farewell to Starships

Jared, Eric Faust, Matt Glisson, and I played another game of Starmada last night using ships from the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook only.  Glisson and Jared had Imperials, while Efaust and I had Arcturans; 1200 points per side, straight-up 'to half VP' around a small planet with four moons.  We played this particular fleet matchup in response to a post here, which claimed that the Arcturans were underpowered compared to the Imperials.  Considering that in previous games, the Imperials had not pulled their weight, I found this surprising, and so we set out to test this hypothesis.  Upon a reading of both fleets, though, things do look skewed towards the Imperials - while the Arcturans do have 4+ weapons (with the Imperials stuck at 5+), they lack Fire Control and most of their 4+s are slow-firing.  Likewise, the Imperials all have Countermeasures and Fire Control, giving them a distinct advantage at long range (their 5+s were at 5+ to hit at long, while our 4+s were at 6+ to hit at long).  Finally, their close-range anti-fighter weapons were simply superior to ours in volume of fire, as they had a comparable number of mounts in any given arc, but with RoF3 compared to our 1.  Our lasers had Anti-fighter, but all of their ships had Fire Control for an equivalent effect.  The only things we had going for us were Armor Plating, larger hull sizes, and higher shields; it looks like the Arcturans have to get in under the Imperial long-range advantage to really have a shot.  So that's what we tried to do.

The Imperials deployed a few ships in the moons, but kept most of their fleet out at long range on the right edge of the map.  We pushed into the moons and destroyed their ships there, scoring about 290 VP of the 600 we needed to win, at a cost of 55 VP scored for them by destroying one of our independent fighter flights, and some damage to our carrier.  We were than at an impasse, though - they had no incentive to advance and fight us in the rocks, because they would lose their long-range advantage, and we had no incentive to run out into their guns.  We did anyways, though, because sitting around plotting movement orders of 0 until somebody breaks is terribly uninteresting.

We advanced through the cover of the moons to as close as we could get, but the carrier was out of cover for one turn and was mauled badly; it wasn't destroyed, but it lacked sufficient engines to actually make it to the front in time for the assault, and was worth enough points that we couldn't risk leaving out in the open for fire support, so it hid for the rest of the game.  Our fighters crippled one of their cruisers, but were then obliterated by their close defense cannons, and then we charged.  Emergency thrust was deployed to debatable effect; while the boosts did help close the gap from long to medium, the subsequent (higher than expected) engine damage was problematic later.  We had awful luck with our firing, with only one of our four ships hitting with any weapons.  In response, we took around 30 points of damage, though after damage allocation all of our ships were still functional as a result of armor plating.  However, between an unusually high numbers of 2s rolled and the emergency thrust penalty, we were dead in the water, running on Engines 2 for most of our ships, and our Slow-Firing weapons were shot for the next turn.  As a result, we ceded, as the sheer volume of close-range CDC fire they could bring to bear on our sitting ducks next turn would have been almost-certainly sufficient to win the game for them.

Conclusion: Hypothesis confirmed.

Secondary conclusion: In Starmada, ship design > luck > tactics.  Good ship design can protect you from luck (with 3+ or 2+ ACC, high rates of fire, Fire Control, things like that), and as long as you don't do something terribly stupid tactically, good ships can generally annihilate mediocre ships and win the game by VP.  With less good ship designs, where you start seeing 5+ ACCs and low rates of fire, luck trumps tactics - you can play as well as you like, but the dice will still keep you from winning.  Tactics come in a distant third as far as determining factors of victory go, in our experience.  When 'tactical decisions' do arise, the optimal course is typically to maintain range if you have an advantage over the enemy at range (as a result of ship design), or to hide behind terrain from the enemy's long range guns if you don't (as a result of your own ship designs).  This results in the kind of deadlocks that we keep seeing - short-ranged fleets take and hold the blocking terrain, then do nothing, while the longer-ranged fleet sits back and does nothing from the start.  There are both really dissatisfying outcomes.  And sure, there are counters for this type of thing - ship design counters include cloaking, stealth, and tons of engines, while tactical counters include evasive action and emergency thrust as means by which a short-range fleet can try to take the offensive and do its thing.  In our case, though, Evasive Action would have been no good - we'd've given them -1 to shooting, but since we would've ended up in their medium range bands and they had Fire Control, we just end up inflicting a -1 to our shooting and halving our speeds for no benefit.

So I guess that's a systemic criticism of Starmada for us; from the very beginning, from my first game against Alex, short-ranged fleets have perished to even slightly longer-ranged guns.  And there is very little we can do about it, and it makes things less than fun.  The current state of the ship design metagame here is "ships with as much forward firepower with range 15 and Inverted Ranged-Based Something as possible", because that's what wins.  And it's kind of a boring place to be in; I try to liven things up with short-ranged cloakers, but everybody knows that I do that, and I'm pretty easily countered by fighters (can't bring fighter cover with me, or it gives away my position, and can't fire anti-fighter weapons before enemy fighters get a chance to maul me after I decloak.  I've been using Point Defense, and it helps, but it's not nearly enough to save me if somebody decides they're going to launch a cloud of strikers to surround their ships and wait for me to come out of cloak).

In short, I think I'm done with Starmada for the most part.  Jared seems to agree.  It's been fun, and it's been really interesting to watch the ship design metagame evolve (from "fairly innocent" to "oh god so many strikers" to "all guns forward"), but...  yeah.

On a happier note, Glisson suggested StarGrunt II yesterday once we were done deconstructing our problems with Starmada.  I've been reading it, and it looks interesting...  still has the potential to be shafted by dice, but I really like their stance on point values for units (namely that there aren't any), and unbalanced forces / secret objectives.  I'm hoping we'll be able to muster a game of it before the summer's out.

Starmada, 26 June

We got together for more Starmada this afternoon / evening as a break from D&D.  Participants included me, Jared, Matt Britton (of the Royal Brittonic Navy), and Matt Glisson.  Glisson hadn't played before, and we were curious to try a 'vanilla' game with pre-built ships and a lack of craziness, so our first game used the OGRE Starmada conversion.  Matt ran an Ogre MkIII, with Jared, Glisson, and I trying to stop him from attacking our command post.  We gave Glisson howitzer command (looong range, but immobile and terrible accuracy), while Jared ran a trio of missile tanks (slow as infantry, but longish range and excellent accuracy) and I got stuck with GEVs (fast fast fast, but weak weapons and terrible durability).  Terrain was rolled as asteroid belt, so we ended up with a size 4 asteroid field, a size 5 asteroid field, and 11 asteroids.  I like to think of them as irradiated zones within the Ogre setting; they affect targeting by interfering with sensors, and deal damage to units by owning electronics and killing folks.  We placed the big asteroid field in a corner of our spawn area to keep Matt from using it, but he used the other to good effect as cover.  I engaged with the GEVs, but suffered pretty horrible losses.  One of Glisson's howitzers took a flight of seekers, as did one of Jared's tanks, but we dealt enough damage that the Ogre was rendered toothless about halfway across the map.  Matt played well, though; he used terrain properly to hide from the howitzers, got us to split our force, and generally did a decent job.  I think the large map combined with the low speeds was what did him in.  I'm curious to play more 'vanilla' games on a more standard scale; I think by playing vanilla, we could take the focus off of ship design and put it more heavily on tactics.  Remains to be seen.

The second game we decided to go all-out with personal ship designs, with Glisson using the Nations of Earth ships from the Grumm sourcebook.  We rolled Breakout, which we hadn't played before, with Matt and I attacking, Jared and Glisson defending.  Matt ran RBN carriers, I ran my most recent (and untried until today) version of Eldar, and Jared ran...  something?  He fielded a couple of 14-point ships, a small flotilla with some strikers, and a cruiser with repeating increased-hits weapons.  Terrain was a planet and three moons.  They hid behind the planet, but Matt's fighters likewise used the planet as cover to close and laid some hurt down on Turn 2 (as well as trading fighters for Jared's strikers).  Turn 3 they tried to move out around the planet, bur I decloaked and hit them from the side.  One of my cruisers took a pounding from their guns, but remained alive and recloaked and ran for it next turn, while my heavy cruiser (based off the Eldar Shadow Hunter line cruiser) obliterated one of Glisson's cruisers at long range, and my light cruiser took out Jared's carrier flotilla.  Turn 4, most of my stuff recloaked, and Matt's bombers finished off Jared's flotillas.  The only VP they scored was escaping Jared's cruiser off the map, while we destroyed everything else of theirs with no losses for us except for carried fighters.  A solid win (though there was a close moment with that cruiser of mine that got mauled - they dealt 10 damage to a hull 6, and we weren't sure it was going to make it.  Would've given them the win at end of Turn 3).

I left then, but apparently a third game was played with Matt and Jared vs. Glisson and Tim, who arrived late.  From what I've heard, Jared fielded his cruiser again, but this time decided to shoot with it rather than running off the map, and dealt something like 40 hits from a 250-point ship in very little time, causing Glisson and Tim to cede.  Regrettable...

It's been a while since I updated the standings...  sadly, I've missed too many games to keep an accurate count, and the ones played without me haven't necessarily been properly reported (names, sides, scenario, terrain, results).  Campaign games with terribly unbalanced forces only muck things up further.  Meh.  If it becomes a regular thing, might start keeping track again, possibly restarting the counts.  As it stands, it seems like who wins depends mostly on amount of time spent out-of-game designing fleets, as well as how much cheese (be it small craft, flotillas, G-arc only weapons, super-repeaters, turbo engines, &c) one is willing to use.  Kind of a sad state of the metagame.  Calls for banning Rules Annex material are currently being fielded...  I approve, actually.  The shield-breaking traits in Annex (Piercing +2 and +3, Halves and Ignores Shields) have made high shields quite inviable as a defense; Alex and I both tried fielding Shields 5 ships for a game or two, and extremely effective anti-shield weapons were just too common for them to be even close to cost-effective.  Likewise, the group is divided on flotillas...  I think at this point only Jared uses them.  They were kinda fun for a while, and I think an all-flotilla game would greatly simplify things by removing the 'rolling and applying damage' step (and removing damage ratings from weapons), but as far as the rest of the game goes, being able to pack an arbitrary number of guns in a small arc into a very fast package is quite deadly, and speed and defenses don't deteriorate with damage like on a normal ship.  Such a ban would mean a serious re-design for Jared...  and given the success of his repeater, I'm not sure we want to force such a re-design, lest he find more Things of Intense Effectiveness in Core.  I'd also like to ban strikers, but leave seekers in, as seekers produce significantly more interesting gameplay.  They can be countered more readily than strikers by terrain or interposing disposable ships, and require more forethought in target selection than strikers (you can't just dump 20 flights of seekers on the table and expect to win; you have to choose your targets carefully to make sure you get it right).  Meaningful choices and planning, basically.

Basically, there is dissatisfaction with the current state of the metagame, and I'm not sure how to fix it.  Until we figure that out, it will continue to be less fun than it could be for all involved.

Starmada Campaign Rules, Take 2

The last version of the campaign rules met with limited popularity during playtesting.  The primary criticisms were as follows:

• Random appeals meant you could get really screwed for reinforcements just by chance.  Of the four total losses, each of which was followed by a reinforcements check by the loser, two of the reinforcements rolls came up 1s.  Likewise, tech was simply too unlikely to be useful, as were special appeals.  The arbitrary nature of special appeals rankled as well.
• Overloaded flotillas were absolute bears to kill.
• High-engine, low-cost striker carriers could launch every game and then evade enemy fire, meaning that guns were largely useless except for shooting down incoming ordinance (or against foes also using guns).  That strikers were recovered for free after the game added insult to injury.
• The ability to field the same ships over and over seemed unrealistic.
• The ability to capture only one system per game, and even then only half the time, meant that expansion would be unduly slow.
• Scenarios felt somewhat contrived - the whole point of scenarios, as expressed in Starmada Core, was to give the game a little variety beyond "Last fleet standing."  In a campaign system, this is unnecessary - sometimes you will want to run to conserve your forces.  Basically, a campaign system does a better job of providing a context to a battle than a scenario could.

So, to address these concerns, we spent a good portion of last week drafting a new campaign system.  This one abandons the "Play a game with ships from the registries and it counts as a campaign turn for all players involved" approach, which had a nice asynchronity property (in that you didn't have to get the whole gang together to play a turn of the campaign).  However, the new model is significantly more 'realistic', drawing heavily on Master of Orion and other 4X games, and having a full economic model of the game universe.  We've removed scenarios and VP entirely, dropped flotillas back to a hard 40SU limit, added replacement costs for strikers and seekers, restricted maximum engines to 15, and added locality to all independent elements in the game.  We also have some draft rules for pirates, but they're still extra-super alpha, and are not included here (I'm not really happy with them yet, and not just because I'm playing pirates :P ).

And so, without further ado, I give you our Starmada Campaign Rules, V2.  It's not written up all pretty-like, but it'll do for a 'working notes' draft.

Kudos to Matt Britton, Tim Vaughan, and Jared Goerner for helping in development (we saw how well solo development worked out last time...).  Tim, Matt, and I ran a first playtest turn this last weekend, but Jared was out of town, so we've put it on hold until he gets back (because we really don't want to leave his empire in stasis and have it come back only to face a single, monolithic enemy empire, or to be marginalized on the borders of two much stronger warring states.  I think there'd be a lot of opportunity in such a situation, but hey, that's why I'm playing pirate).  I'll post a map here post-turn 1 after Jared's run his first turn.  I'm also sad to say that it seems unlikely that our other two pirate players, Mark and Alex, will be as able to play as they wished...  This is part of what I'm looking to fix in the upgraded pirate rules, but I'm still not sure how I'm going to do it.  Suggestions, internet?