archimage_a

I think it deserves to be in off topic...

~Well, in Hiver terms(sorry, it was Mum's Birthday so wasn't here) Stargates are.... [hide] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_the_stars#Hivers (I had been toying with just suggesting we play sword of stars, since it is pretty much Hegemony as a computer game, Virus bombs, a space system which is confusing(In a good way) and everything is based on money which spawns out of nowhere(seemingly), Anywho) So, translating that to 'Empire'(Can we call it that instead of Hegemony?...You would travel, sublight, to a star system with the gate in tow. You deploy the gate. You then send a proper fleet through, but the gate would be permenant. Why is this good? Well, firstly all your planets would be linked together, meaning if you needed to rush ships from Planet A to Planet B you could do it really quickly...Or if you wanted to trade goods between your planets you could (Cutting out all the tedium of transporting stuff from A to B so you can build stuff)...And it means that your Empire is more of a cohesive mass. On the other hand, it is also good because, Viruses will spread through the gates(if you put them on the ground or something), other people can use them to invade your worlds*, someone could blow up a gate with your fleet on this side, leaving the rest of your Empire defenceless. *On this, imagine you have just set up a colony and suddenly, out of nowhere Archimage springs up and starts sending a fleet through your new gate, directly to your homeworld! Then he blows up the gate(in the homeworld system) and you can't send reinforcements) Thus he lays waste to your wonderful system, then limps home at sublight, arriving just in time to prevent you destroying his, seemingly, undefended territory. As to dialing different gates up....It would probably be more like Peter F. Hamilton's description...which is far more sensible given that wormholes use massive amounts of energy and we don't happen to have wonder material on standby... Thus all your gates would connect to some hub somewhere...For simplicities sakes: So you could come in at 1 point and then go out at another point, traveling across space super quick. All the wormholes would be fixed pairs though...switching or moving them would be foolish for some death dealing reason. [/hide] I think more than one system of transport would be good... [hide]For example I am much more a Liir type of guy, so I would have the Stutter Warp...which is far slower, on average, but when it comes to getting invaded you can't just turn up at a colony and hop straight to my homeplanet. Also I don't mind running a more diverse series of planets, so each would be self supporting, rather than one, large, interconnected, city. The drive would also have other advantages, like having a chance to avoid getting a missile hurled at me by clever stuttering, and it would be faster than sublight. Also, stuff like the node drive would be useful, since it can't be 'blown up', even if the destinations are more limited. So really there are only three systems: Node Drive- Pre-existing, natural, network...kinda like Starports system. Warp Gates- Gates, hauled around at sublight speeds, which can be deployed and then ships sent through instanously(in terms of game time). Stutter Drive- Inertialess drive for travelling across space...the slowest FTL, but the most flexible. In terms of 'Sub-light' and such. I think it should be 24 hours to cross a square(Up, down, side to side or diagonal) in sublight* and 6 hours to cross a square with the stutter drive, and 6 hours to enter a system(0 hours to leave a system). So(using my map) From Opader to Quaelios would be 24 hours by sublight and 12 hours by stutter warp. Where as Opader to Coasce would be 4 days, but by stutter warp it would be 1 day and 6 hours. Obvouisly you can't combine the methods, it would just be stupid if you could. I know people want speed, but 6 hours is just too short for someone to respond...For example, say someone had a massive fleet which they used to engage ships in deep space because they didn't want anything damaged in system...They go to bed for 6 hours and when they come back your fleet is inside their system and trying to blow stuff up... *Since you are only likely to do it once...and 6 hours is no time at all...If I had been playing and had to go to Mum's Birthday Party and got back about 4:30(Left at 12:20) then I would only have 1:50 hours left...if I had been asleep it would have probably been another 8 hours on top of that. [/hide] Economics: 1 heavy battle ship per day, per planet. [hide] Try to keep it simple.* Jobs, People and Power. You need factories to make stuff You need mines to get the materials You need homes to house the people You need farms to feed the people You need power plants to kept everything going. Thus, I suggest that each planet is given a building limit. Then you need to fit these five things into the building limit. Numbers should be modifed based on Research and Commonsense...No farm, no matter how wonderful, will feed 50 million people. A power planet supplies 500 houses or farms, or 50 factories. A Farm supplies 20 houses A house supplies 1 farm, 1/50th of a factory or power plant. Thus, to start, you would need 3 farms and 60 houses for each power plant, and the same for each factory. So 120 to start producing, then 180, 240, 300, 360, 420, 480... So 7 factories per 480 spaces. If a factory produces...shall we say 1 fighter per hour? Which would be 1/100th of a battleship, if I remember correctly. So you would need 100 factories to produce a battle ship, every hour. Or 5 factories to produce 1 per day(rounded down). So this planet would be pumping out 1. 3 battleships per day. So I think, given that we will all research ways of improving this within the first five minutes, a building limit of 3,000 would be a fair average.(Meaning, if you carried on like that, you could fit 49(1 power planet) factory complexs onto an average planet and pump out 10 battle ships a day a day, or 1 heavy battleship(I think?) *Though it all looks complicated it boils down to 1 planet, without special tech, will take 1 day to build a heavy battleship. If you want to develop special tech then you have the figures, just use COMMON SENSE! [/hide] Research: It takes X number of days and you get 1 research point per billion(If we assume the average is about 1 billion each) people, per week. [hide] Research should take time. Obvouisly. I think that research should also be defined with research points, and research points make your technology better. They take your pencil and put an eraser on it, they take a glass window and double glaze it. Basically they let your put your technology ahead of other people's for a while. So how does this work? I am fighting a war. We are pretty evenly matched, but I am pretty imaginative and so I decide to boost my generator from a dull fission generator to a recombinate fission generator, boosting my power output. Now my opponate sees this but, even if they have a research point of their own, they have to research it manually(Taking 4 or 5 days) Obvouisly you can't jump from Fission to Fusion, but you can use it to give you a leg up, so you can keep the game exciting while waiting the 30 or 40 turns for fusion to be discovered. [/hide] For anyone wondering 'whats with the hide tags?' I am trying to keep my posts short...so I stating my point and explaining it for those who care to read it....this probably won't last. Dusty: As long as there is no 'My real life economics knowlage determines what policy you can have' garbage...lets just try to keep it civil...for once.

Star Wars...It seemed pretty simple...the poor were poor and the government built massive star destroyers...somehow. I wonder if George Lucas ever played Hegemony.

Just some ideas on FTL stuff: [hide] Humanity's Node drive allows ships to travel at speeds far beyond the speed of light along subspace fractures between large stellar masses. These fractures are entirely natural in origin, and connections between stars are seemingly random. Ships travelling in "node space" cannot change course mid-jump, but they also cannot be intercepted until they come out of node space. This also requires them to have all the fuel required before jumping, due to the inability to refuel in mid jump and the extreme danger of leaving a node line outside of a large gravity well. During battle, to retreat, Humans must move to a node point on the battle map and activate their engines. Their destination is determined by which system's node point they access. Hiver FTL travel is centered around stargates, massive warp gates that allow instantaneous travel between two solar systems. Each gate must be deployed at the location at which it is to be used, which often means a Hiver fleet will have to travel to another star at sub-light speed, deploy the stargate (mounted on a specialized gateship), and 'gate' in extra ships. Needless to say, the gate is typically a valuable military target and no invasion would be complete without one. Liir propulsion technology is based around teleporting the ship a minuscule distance millions of times a second, a method known as Stutter Warp. This method is inertialess, which is fortunate because Liir ships are filled with a liquid oxygen medium which raises the mass of the ship considerably. Liir ships tend to circle enemy vessels like dolphins hunting a school of fish, and their inertialess drive makes this possible. The teleport effect of this engine often results in a 'ghosting' effect from the viewpoint of other races, who often find it difficult or impossible to get definitive sensor readings on Liir ships. Tarkan FTL travel is achieved via the hyperdrive: an engine that generates an energy shell around the ship, inside of which the normal laws of physics simply do not apply. This allows the ship to accelerate almost indefinitely and perform bone-crushing maneuvers that would kill an unprotected crew. The Zuul use the Rip Drive, which is similar to the human Node Drive, to travel between systems. They create black holes with Bore ships, which open an artificial nodeline to another system. These nodelines are never very stable, and collapse after a time. The Morrigi have a unique way of travel. Using their Grav Flock drive system, they are able to travel faster as their fleets grow bigger. That sounds fairly straightforward but there is more to it than that. Only ships equipped with a Gravboat hull count towards the efficiency of the Grav Flock speed. On the positive side, even when just a single one of these ships is part of the fleet, the entire fleet reaps its benefits. [/hide] I think, when we start as a race, we chose one type of drive and just stick to it...That way things stay simple, without being boring. Anywho, on resources, I am fully in favour of any system which gets us away from the god awful GDP.

Well Hegemony in space would be good, because it wouldn't be 'Hegemony'...more like 'Empire'...going around colonising stuff, shooting natives or at least brainwashing them, exporting rare ores from the back of beyond, using slave labour-errr-civilising the natives. BUT with all the fun of firing planets at each other and other stuff like that. With reservations about being able to 'have planets in the middle of nowhere' I think its a good premise. Oh, and how are we, if we are going to, stop Mather from developing photon destablisers and blasting the universe with it? Or going around with miracle tech that cures, makes more intelligent, happy, muscly, speedy and all the other wonderments which having a snake in your stomach is supposed to confer...Cause it kinda makes the game boring when everything can be countered by a snake or a pill of some type. 'I fire my laser' 'My snakes regenerate all my people' 'I virus bomb you planet' 'My snake cures everyone' 'I flipping send in eagles to kill you snakes' 'My snakes regenerate themselves and teleport back inside their hosts' 'I divide by Zero' 'My snakes are immu...Wait, what? Why is the world going dark? OH MY GOD! WHAT DID YOU DO ARCHIMAGE!' Personally, I think that it should be between A and B years for a tech between Y and Z strong. So if I wanted 'Deathstar Laser' it would take between 9 and 13 years and be between 40 and 90 on the Ownage Scale. That way, Retech coming along and going 'Yoink' would take between 9 and 13 years and be between 40 and 90 on the OS...Rather than stealing my tech that took 10 years and was 85, on the OS, in 2 years. Something a bit like that. I think we can be old school about it and let people between themselves what is fair and what isn't though, if people disagree then we ask someone outside the tavern to decide(remembering tl;dr, so no 'I need it because of [2 pages of reasons]) Edit: As a map idea:- No Earth, no Alpha Centuri or other stars we know the names of. The plus and minuses arn't meant to be there but I can't get rid of them, they could mean brightness or something...I don't know. People keep some sort of a record of their own system(s). [hide][/hide]

Right I am off. Toodle pip

I go and look for some more stuff

I carry on removing them.

I try to rip off my one of my puddle jumper's weapons(well remove with engineering skill)

I do it anyway.

I get some bark and write, using something 'SGC personal will be shot on site.'. I then pull off a branch and head back inside, putting the sign up just off to the side of the gate so it doesn't get gaterised.

Archi looks for an exit, then for some trees.

Yay. I look around for some trees.

I Welcome Jen and Ares to Planet Screw SGC I look around for more stuff.

2nd one on the list mather said.

I didn't know I was. I go and look at the shiny thing

I stay watching the gate.

I carry on waiting.

I continue to wait until someone turns up.

I continue to wait for Retech.

This is ridiculous. I wait for Retech to go though the gate to me, then I close it, dial Earth, send the signal though, then throw wave after wave of armed claymores though the gate. Once I have run out of claymores I close the gate and call another gate and escape to that.

I would prefer a map... So I know what to look for...

Cool, I have a few hours.

"Yes" says the disembodied voice of Archi

Ok then, I make a map of the local area(just black lines, squares and a ring for the gate please)