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[10ebbor10]

At that point you may as well not include the die rolling at all.

[Kashyyk]

Not really. Its no worse than the "deck of rolls" used by Iron Behemoths to ensure equal dice rolls, with the added side effect of not being able to count cards.

Having no rolls at all removes all the randomness based fun.

[Rockeater]

PTW

[evictedSaint]

I've considered that system.  Honestly it might be one of the fairer systems out there - even with perfect dice distributions, one side may get better rolls right off the bat, leading to more resources, leading to an early-game advantage that becomes very tough to beat.

[10ebbor10]

So, what's next. Time-adjusted dice values?

[evictedSaint]

No, averaged dice rolls.  Both sides get a 3.5 for every die roll.  100% fair and average distribution.

[RAM]

I've considered that system.  Honestly it might be one of the fairer systems out there - even with perfect dice distributions, one side may get better rolls right off the bat, leading to more resources, leading to an early-game advantage that becomes very tough to beat.

Without naming names...

Even then, if both teams roll high, one went ambitious and one didm't, the ambitious one will win. And the inverse can happen... It is still largely up to chance unless both sides are scared to take risks. It might be better to just let them choose from identical pools. At least then they can choose to try rushing resources early or saving good rolls for counters and high-tech designs while burning their bad trolls on pure experience projects and delaying tactics... Might not be as exciting, but at least there is something to think over and there are enough different games of chess without any dice involved...

Or every second result could be the inversion of the previous roll. So you if you randomly roll a 2 and know that the next roll will be a certain 5, then the next is random again... This'd be a mix of mystery and strategy and guaranteed averages. But I guess that wouldn't work. A guaranteed six is worth a lot more than a mystery six, and is much more significant than a guaranteed 4 or 1... But it still gets the G.M. off of most hooks! They can just point to the perfectly average totals and scream that it is totes fair!

I am a bit concerned over different scales in projects. A ship typically has multiple different guns, armour, engines, propellers... A wheeled A.T. gun has a gun, and wheels, and maybe some braces and sights if you want to get technical... If you build a battleship, the guns, engine, armour... It'll all be unique, and it is impractical to have a separate design for each component, but if you let them just build it, then they might decide to port the 320mm guns to their field artillery, the 320mm armour to their pillboxes, and the house-sized engines to their trains, each as a revision, on the grounds of porting existing technology rather than creating new. The alternative is to either force them to build all of the parts prior to the battleship, have the battleship be a storm of bugs even on a perfect roll, or arbitrarily declare that big projects are special and their parts can't be regarded as separate.

[Kashyyk]

That's why I tried to draft an idea for how many "new things" were involved in the design, with each "thing" needing a die roll. Thus a battleship revision for improving it's engines is approximately equal to designing a completely new rifle.

I imagine the Easy/Medium/Hard mechanic could be applied here, and I believe that's part of the logic behind the "progress" requirement in Cinder Spires.

[NUKE9.13]

I am a bit concerned over different scales in projects. A ship typically has multiple different guns, armour, engines, propellers... A wheeled A.T. gun has a gun, and wheels, and maybe some braces and sights if you want to get technical... If you build a battleship, the guns, engine, armour... It'll all be unique, and it is impractical to have a separate design for each component, but if you let them just build it, then they might decide to port the 320mm guns to their field artillery, the 320mm armour to their pillboxes, and the house-sized engines to their trains, each as a revision, on the grounds of porting existing technology rather than creating new. The alternative is to either force them to build all of the parts prior to the battleship, have the battleship be a storm of bugs even on a perfect roll, or arbitrarily declare that big projects are special and their parts can't be regarded as separate.

The actual solution to that problem, RAM, is Draignean's system in Spires Race. Where not all projects take the same amount of time to complete, meaning a simple gun might take only a turn or two, where an entire battleship would take more like 6 (or somesuch)*. It is, to be sure, a more complex system, but it works reasonably well.


*Draignean also uses variable progress based on spendable dice, so it's more like the simple gun costs (on average) 3 progress dice and the battleship (on average) 18.

[Draignean]

If you'd like, here's a copy of the upgraded version of the Cinder Spires progress system. The tweaks ended up being too large-scale to incorporate into the original, but I still liked the variant.

Spoiler: Designs (click to show/hide)

In this arms race, designs immediately result in a prototype model that accurately depicts what the finished product will be like. However, you will not immediately be able to manufacture this new technology at a grand scale until you've completed the requisite research. This requisite research is referred to as the Project, and is a general reflection of how much time and expense needs to be invested before your empire is able to make a particular piece of technology viable for widespread deployment. When a project reaches 50% completion it reaches the prototype stage and a couple things can happen depending on the type of project. For projects that cannot be 'manufactured' (their end product has no unit cost), reaching prototype may give access to a reduced form of the technology or may grant a limited improvement in another area. For projects that do have a manufacturable end product,  the team gains the ability to construct prototypes for three times the cost of the finished technology, and this cost scales downwards as additional progress is made. For instance, if the progress cost of a project is 20, then prototypes will cost 300% at progress 10, 200% at progress 15 120% at progress 19. 

Every project has both a duration and a cost. The duration is a number, usually between 3 and 35 that determines how many man-hours of engineering it takes to make a particular design deployable. The cost factor determines how many resources need to be diverted to actually make any progress at all. A project header for an ambitious new ship generator looks something like this,

Hastur ξ-Phase Generator: 12/32 | 100 Metal + 150 Transplutonic + 40 Synthetic | Rushed 0 times | 300 metal, 450 transplutonic, 120 Synthetic invested

Name, followed by current progress/total needed, then how much each die of progress costs, the number of times the project has been rushed, and the total resources that have been currently invested.

Every round, during the design phase, a team can elect to spend any number of their dice on progressing projects. For each die they spend on a project, they have to pay that project's resource cost. So if you elect to spend 2 die on the above, you have to spend 200 metal, 300 transplutonic, and 80 synthetic. For every die you spend resources on, you can also elect to rush the project. This gives you an extra die that adds to project progress normally, but has a 50% chance to add a bug to the project, or worsen an existing bug. It's not as bad as getting a -1 on your bug roll, but it can add up.

A project can be canceled at any time, and its resources re-allocated. When a project is canceled, the team gets 50% of the invested resources back at the end of the next turn, and a number of die equal to the project's current progress divided by six and rounded down.

Edit: Short version of the changes. Basically it's so that any project takes between 1 and 10 dice worth of progress to complete on average. If you're running the 5 dice per turn system that was designed on, that means even more difficult projects can be reasonably finished in 2 or 3 turns, and an emergency rush can give you enough dice to complete even very large projects very quickly with only a chance of bugging everything up.

The ability to manufacture expensive prototypes also means there's much less of a harsh penalty for bad rolls knocking you short of project completion- instead the object in question is just overly expensive until you get things squared away.

[Blood_Librarian]

Looking over the system Draignean, It gave me an idea for a AR;

A  one-sided arms race in which the designers have to engineer ships, weapons, and other interstellar equipment and for the purpose of defending against a first contact turned into a war of extermination.

The Designers species would control around 100-150 colonized worlds of varying development, and would start off with basic patrol ships and doctrine developed around the suppression of local populace rebellions, with fast acting ship fleets, autonomous drones and other support systems developed towards beating frigate sized hit and run fleets.

The Determined Exterminators could field with around eight to nine times the amount of raw tonnage then the Designers, but most of it is not deployed due to unknown reasons.

FTL speeds would be the only thing limiting engagements, as although the Designers have a different method of FTL that is much faster, it will still take weeks or even months between each battle, but the Designers can bring out their hardware much faster then the Exterminators.

There will also be the tactical side; Worlds will have to be chosen to be protected or to let fall, as well as certain doctrines will be proposed to the designers or something along those lines.

One thing that I might need more development on is on the subject of what kind of numbers both sides has; How those numbers get to the fight and the flow of the battle field.

In short, a Arms Race based around a campaign that could be described as a little bit similar to Halos Arch, but without the Forerunners.

[RAM]

force them to build all of the parts prior to the battleship

the simple gun costs (on average) 3 progress dice and the battleship (on average) 18.

But then the battleship costs six times as much as the gun, so it needs to have six times as much impact on the war. If your battleship is flying and your targets are vertical spires sticking into the air, and there is almost nothing on the ground or sea, then a battleship being that important is not so difficult. Intercontinental though has battleships that, in theory, only affect the sea and shore, while much of the fighting doesn't involve them at all. There is an argument to be made that the sea is the most important front, but still, extending the production time out to six times will almost always be a net loss unless they somehow can't improve anything else significantly...

[andrea]

that is the development cost, mind you, not the deployment cost.

[Draignean]

force them to build all of the parts prior to the battleship

the simple gun costs (on average) 3 progress dice and the battleship (on average) 18.

But then the battleship costs six times as much as the gun, so it needs to have six times as much impact on the war. If your battleship is flying and your targets are vertical spires sticking into the air, and there is almost nothing on the ground or sea, then a battleship being that important is not so difficult. Intercontinental though has battleships that, in theory, only affect the sea and shore, while much of the fighting doesn't involve them at all. There is an argument to be made that the sea is the most important front, but still, extending the production time out to six times will almost always be a net loss unless they somehow can't improve anything else significantly...

Counterpoint 1: I believe the point you made earlier was that the typical system of rolling allows the battleship to be created and then all of its parts farmed off via revision- which rather makes the efficacy argument moot. If you wanted the 18 progress dice to represent the effort of creating this nice battleship with all of its battleship parts properly integrated into a non-buggy mess, then your 18 progress isn't just a ship. It's the gun, it's the armor, it's the generator, it's the ECW suite, it's whatever the players tacked on that they can then revise away as you earlier put it. Thus, 18 dice gets you the three dice gun, the two dice armor, the four dice generator+propulsion, the actual battleship hull that's competently and cohesively designed to put it together, etc.

Counterpoint 2: You can tailor those numbers as you see fit, one of my favorite parts of the system. Scale it to where you think things are comfortable, or give people more dice and let them pursue parallel development.

[RAM]

That was only part of my point. My point is that there can exist a disconnect between the value of a design and the ability to farm its parts(and from an immersion perspective, the practical effort required to design it) which makes it difficult to justify either building complex designs at all or building anything else when designing new parts. If Spires successfully makes all designs accurately match the investment then good for it! I still worry that such is not always plausible...