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[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Someone's kicking up a Sci-Fi arms race game, utilizing Aurora 4X.  Could be interesting to see how it goes down.

[Aseaheru]

 Anyone who is not playing one of my current games(whether it be on this forum or another) and wants to try their hand at coming up with some designs for one of my games, feel free to PM me.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

PTW

[Kashyyk]

I've had the idea of a space age arms race in my mind for a while now, and I think I have come up with a set up that would be reasonable. However, I'm hoping you could give some critique.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 The science of the universe will be as accurate as possible, unless explicitly said otherwise, such as with the natural exception of faster than light travel. Both sides rely on a hyperdrive to travel between systems. The drive allows the ship to actively travel through more than just the three dimensions we humans can perceive, traveling a shorter route than the one that exists in the base three dimensions. Due to external gravitational effects interfering with the workings of the drive, it cannot safely activate when within a certain proximity of a celestial body. The distance is relative to the size of the body, thus hyperdrive travel within a system is generally inhibited by its star. Therefore a ship must travel to the outer edge of a system before activating its hyper drive to cross the interstellar distance. It will be entirely possible to improve this drive or develop other FTL methods.

The drive requires exotic materials to work, which are exceedingly difficult to find and process. Exotics are considered a resource (like the oil of old), and having more available allows for the creation of larger drives, needed for putting large ships into hyperspace. Exotics are commonly mined from a certain breed of asteroid. The other main resource is Labour. The ship yards and skilled labour available for constructing and maintaining warships (our equivalent of ore) is limited, and is typically found in orbit around colonised planets or space habitats. Having more Labour directly correlates to a higher number of better equipped, larger ships.

Each system is linked to the other systems closest to it, and battles will move from one system to the next through these links. Each system has a number of strategic locations, centred around resources. In a contested system, combat will typically occur at these points or enroute between them. Whilst not scientifically accurate, each strategic locations will have some form of "terrain" such as open space, asteroid thickets or a gravity well, in order to provide some variety to the combat environment. The effects of each of these will be explicitly stated to avoid confusion.

As the difference between a small design and a large revision is blurry, there will instead be three design actions per turn, each the power of a revision action. It is possible, recommended even, to spend multiple actions in the same turn on an ambitious design. As we do not have the benefits of hindsight in this game there will also be a single science action. This discovers new technologies that can then be used in future design actions. There are rolls made for design actions, but not for science actions. If you attempt to research a topic, you will find something[\b] useful even if it is not exactly what you asked for. Asking for a particularly advanced topic may cause you to receive a similar, simpler result or guaranteed progress towards it.

Combat will come in a number of forms. The most obvious is ship to ship, occurring in orbit at a strategic location, between two such locations or at the edge of a system at the hyperdrive limit. The second type is the siege. This will occur when the attacking side controls the siege around a location, but not the location itself. Here, fixed defences, such as ground laser batteries, will attempt to hold off the orbiting vessels whilst they bombard key locations on the planet. Whilst it would be a lot more simple to just crash an asteroid into the entrenched defenders, the loss of Labour and Exotics is not considered to be worth it.

Once a location is sufficiently bombarded, the invasion will begin. This will involve landing ground forces at key sites and deploying atmospheric craft for  support with the intention of eliminating any hostile presence that was able to resist the orbital bombardment. Once all enemy units are either destroyed or contained, the population is subjugated under threat of orbital space lasers.

Thus engineers will want to design warships, with their armaments and defences, defence systems, such as battle station and ground laser batteries and more conventional equipment, such as tanks, planes and rifles.

If no one has any particular issues with this, and I garner enough interest, I'll create a map and some dressing technology then throw up a thread.

[Taricus]

I'd suggest simplifying it a bit, by removing the siege stage in it's entirety.

[Aseaheru]

Also, theres a typo. [\b] instead of [/b]

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Sounds sort of like adding another layer or two to the 0/X system. Sort of like 0/X for ship to ship which progresses into and interrupts the 0/X for sieging which progresses into and interrupts the 0/X for invading.

It looks like it would be a hell of a lot of extra book keeping, but if you want to run it that way, that's your prerogative. Removing the siege stage like Taricus said or combining it with the invasion stage should provide you with the feel that you want while making things easier all around.

So Science is similar to Tech in the latest Sensi game as far as I understand, in that having it allows you to make things relating to it a lot easier and with signficantly less complications?

You're going to want to make sure that your prep work is thorough and that you have detailed explanations of the starting designs and science in regards to how they work and why it was decided to use technology in that way. The most difficult part I see is making sure the players have a grasp of the general physics involved and how new physics affects that. All in all, I'm interested.

[Aseaheru]

 And also the state of technology in the universe. For instance, what do ships use for propulsion in normal space? Is there artificial gravity? Whats the state of energy weapons, caseless ammunition firing weapons, missiles, computers, communications, robotics? What about cloning, AI, nanites, cybernetics, bio-engineering, 3d printing, and all those other fun things?


 Thats the main problem with open-ended games like this, you need to infodump and hope the playrs read and understand the whole thing, otherwise it just gets strange. But hey, it could be worse. If there was magic involved, hoo boy...

[Kashyyk]

I was thinking of having two or three 0/X counters per system (one per location), as it wouldn't make sense to have a fixed order for conquering them.

I think I'll merge siege and invasion though as most of the tech will overlap anyway, I suspect.

Science is similar, though it's mainly there as a mechanic to allow me to give players hints on possible designs whilst keeping it somewhat balanced. I suspect will be needed due to not having a convenient wiki of technology that works and when it was invented. If anyone wants took do some pre-research though, I'll be basing things off of the Orbital Vector site, amongst other places. We'll probably start at about tech level 12. I'll list the current state of affairs for each of those topics in a bit.

[Kashyyk]

Have an info dump. Any more thoughts/questions?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Propulsion: Ion drives are the basic engine for all ships, with the majority of cheap vessels using them. Those wanting more thrust go for  MPD thrusters, with VASIMRs being military grade tech and only just ranking the high end of the civilian market.
Artificial Gravity: Typically every section bar storage, engineering and command have centrifugal gravity and the vast majority of stations spin as well. When preparing for combat, most military ships will stop spinning.
Energy weapons: Lasers are chemical based and used predominantly in point defence against fighter craft and missiles or by those same fighters. They are more commonly used in space than ETC, due to being light speed weapons.
Caseless Ammunition: ETC weaponry is a developing technology, with it being present in almost all non-small arms (bar those mentioned above), which still use caseless solid propellants. Railguns, while technically applicable, suffer from significant wear and lose out to ETC and laser tech.
Missiles: Typically driven by enhanced liquid chemical thrusters and carrying ETC warheads, the on board computer is capable of making course corrections, switching between preapproved targets and swapping the fuel between the warhead and thrusters as needed.
Computers: With the equivalent of a terabyte flash drive being easily affordable by most preschoolers, computing is still electronics based, but optical electronics (Optronics) is a readily provable technology. User interfaces are typically projected onto convenient surfaces, where the computer then recognises gestures performed.
Communication: The hyperspace ansible is still hypothetical, due to a quirk in the laws of physics. Communication between systems requires a courier ship to physically move the data from one to the other, before beaming it with high frequency communication lasers. External communication, or even observation whilst in hyperspace is impossible.
Robotics: The majority of manual, dangerous or repetitive labour is automated. The smallest commercial robot is approximately the size of a quarter, and is used as part of facility-wide diagnostics systems.
Cloning: Full body cloning is illegal under ethical grounds, but cloned replacement body parts are available for those who can afford it.
AI: In restricted environments, AI performs better than humans in almost every field. The current stumbling blocks are social interaction and infinite variable environments. Another known failing is the inability to have a successful broad AI, with all current applications having a handler program selecting from a set of narrow AI. This leads to issues when the situation cannot be correctly categorised and assigned.
Cybernetics: Currently limited to replacement limbs and identification, with implanted chips carrying a copy of medical and criminal history, bank payment details, licences and the like. These can also be used to unlock equipment for specified people.
Bio-engineering: The majority of non-genetic illnesses are curable. All food is genetically modified in some form, with animals raised for slaughter only a rare sight, due to artificial meat being really available and quite comparable. Humans, by law, remain unmodified.
3D Printing: The mainstay for custom manufacturing when the repeated retooling of automated assembly lines is inefficient.

[Aseaheru]

 By ETC you are talking about Electrothermal-chemical technology, right?

Also, anything on Railguns, matter converters(a longshot, sure), the size and flexibility of 3d printers(could we, say, attach one to a cannon and feed it raw material for reloading), coilguns, plasma launching devices, energy generation, nanites, things like nanotubes...

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

the size and flexibility of 3d printers(could we, say, attach one to a cannon and feed it raw material for reloading)

For attaching it to cannons, I would think the speed it takes to create something (Maybe in X cm^3/s?) would be more relevant than size and shape constraints.

[Aseaheru]

Well, that also depends on the speed of the printers.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Well, that also depends on the speed of the printers.

I'm guessing you meant 'size' here, which could be accounted for by having it displayed in speed per size.

[Aseaheru]

 No, I was talking about how fast it could make something there.