Jim writes,
>I'll be glad to have someone else moderate. I'd prefer to play TCS, including
>the high gaurd ship designing. That's half the fun... I'd also prefer to play
>(the first game at least) in the published TCS background
Eeeek, that background is a little on the large side for play testing purposes.
I'd be willing to offer to moderate assuming that a reasonable set of rules
(for combat) can be arranged. I'd want to limit the number of players and
the sizes of the fleet they'll be using to something I can handle in my spare
time.
>More information later...
I'll be interested to see this stuff...
>I'd *much* rather play TCS then FFW (this time), and *much* rather use High
>Guard then MegaTraveller, which I know nothing about.
It wasn't Steve who wrote this, it was me.
vvvvv
>Steve: My current ideas for combat involve a line of battle (list the ships in
>some order) and a tactic selection (e.g. Retreat, ship on ship, suicide fighter
>screen, ... [ any suggestions ]). The player's tactics are compared and damage
>/ destruction is assigned to each side. The player can also specify a retreat
>threshold and upon taking that many casualties the player's fleet attempts to
>retreat from the engaugement.
>This is about how I hope things will work out in practice, although I don't
>rule out individual turns. I expect people involved in combat to do a turn a
>day or more, and resolve a combat in a week at most. That sounds fast enough
>for me, and still possible to capture most of the detail of the combat.
I rule out individual turns as soon as the players are located in different
continents. The time zone shifts are going to kill daily turns. So far, we've
got potential players from the US (-7 hours GMT?), England (GMT) and Australia
(+10 hours GMT). If somebody from either the US or Australia GMs it will
take more than one day to receive/reply to mail. (I haven't worked out the
time shifts for an English GM). I can give lots of examples from the current
PBeM game where I've arrived in to work only to discover that heaps of things
have happened and I have had no chance to react to any of them. (e.g. I
received the warning that the PBeM turn was about to close well after midnight
time). Turns every two days is the fastest possible rate we can reasonably
sustain and slower than that would be even better, players have to think about
what they are going to do. Once things like flakey mail connections are taken
into account fast turns become an impossibility.
>Steve: I'd also split the ships into 4 classes (Battleship/ cruiser/ destroyer/
>fighter). The split would probably be by volume not weaponary. Also, if the
>TL is kept down, you only have to worry about lasers/missiles/sand casters. PA
>spinal mounts can be treated specially targeting a single ship and rolling to
>damage/destroy it. Meson spinals (if they are available) would roll to
>destroy. Fusion/plasma weapons could be converted into extra beam batteries.
>Why do you think this is necessary?
I'll try to explain my reasoning, please bear in mind that my intention is to
allow combat to be resolved in a single turn (and also that the combat will
initially be resolved manually). The spinal mounts are pretty much a kill or
miss suite of weapons so they will require some special handling (target them
on a class of ships or the largest surviving ship). I haven't worked out
details of this special handling but it should not be too difficult to do in a
reasonable manner. The reason for classing ships into the four groups I
mentioned are:
1) Simplifies shot allocation (the player specifiec a class not a specific
ship to shoot at).
2) Doesn't require the exact nature of the enemy fleet to be revealed, thus
increasing the fog of war (which must be good clean fun ;-)
3) Simplifies the tactics effects on the combat (e.g. the fighter screen
tactic might increase the defence of the large ships at a cost
to the fighters defence).
*) I'm sure I could think of several other reasons if I tried hard.
I was also toying with the idea of reducing ships to a few numbers (just
like in the game Imperium which has beam/missile/defence though probably not
quite so sever as that). What is really necessary for a ship?
Armour, Laser attacks, Missile attacks, Sand casters, Jump factor and
possibly Agility. There are most likely some others that should be included.
I am sure people will help out and tell me all about them.
Since everything will be run initially by a single person, simplifications like
this must be made. It might be possible to allocate combat resolution to a
third party player who would have to be trusted by the ref and the combatants.
In this case, the combat system could be made more involved.
Hopefully the orders will end up looking something like:
- -------------------------------8<-------------------------------
BEGIN TURN
<Tactic choice>
<damage before retreat attempt>
For each ship:
<ship ID> <target class> [spinal target class] {special orders}
END TURN
- ------------------------------->8-------------------------------
Where the stuff in []'s only applies if the ship has a spinal mount. And the
stuff in {}'s is yet to be defined in a reasonable manner. The ships would
probably be listed in the line of battle order (on a per class basis?)
Pauli
Paul Dale | [email removed]
Department of Computer Science | [phone removed]
University of Queensland |
Australia, 4072 | The virus has infected my signature,
| copy it to yours too.