Hegemony Argument Thread

[The_Mather1]

But can one gate access another or does one have to use them with a ship (after they're set up)?

[a_bert]

I don't really understand what you mean by one gate accessing another?

 

I think this might answer your question: You only need one ship (as I understand it) to deploy your gate pairings, and then you can send your fleet between them. However, I think how it would work is it takes 6 hours to deploy them?

[The_Mather1]

I think Rocco ment that travell without using the gates takes six hours.

 

Does the gates work as normal stargates too?

[a_bert]

Yes, people should be able to prepare for an attack.

 

I have no idea what you mean as "normal stargates"?

[The_Mather1]

Can you travel from one gate to another without using a ship? Just dialing from one to another and walking through.

[Nero]

And no 'your real-life physics knowledge determines what technology your country can have' garbage.

[archimage_a]

~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.

[The_Mather1]

Warp drive is basically a wormhole drive, like that on SGA I understood that right away, but do the gates there work as regular stargates, giving you the abillity to use them without a ship (if they are on planets)?

[Retech]

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.

 

 

^

 

Question:

 

For that fission to other fission thing, are you assuming that you have more research points? Or is it just that you have a clue what a recombinate fission thingy is, so you don't have to research it.

 

That just puts everyone who doesn't play Sci-Fi/Futuristic games with theoretical concepts at a disadvantage, if the second thing I said was correct. An example would be the stratos jet thing (we'll probaly never agree on this), which I didn't even think of that in the first place because I believe that it is completely unfeasible, but you figured out how to make it feasible, even if there were no successful attempts in real life to construct it.

 

Essentially I am saying, we would be penalized if we didn't have the same mindset. Everyone would just be pulling out these random techs from all these different games, and there would be no way to compare them, because who would tell which is better, one of those pizza slice shaped destroyers from Star Wars or those Hive ship things from Stargate.

[The_Mather1]

That would be a hive, at least if it had sufficient power. Since hives don't have shields but use power to regenerate their hulls and make their weapons bigger. But a hive cannot travell for too long at a time because FTL-travell makes the ship itself sick.

 

I think we basically we just have to go by pros and cons.

[a_bert]

I think we shouldn't have such a rigid scheme for the earning of research points, though the points themselves are a good idea.

 

I'd like a system where we can either mass ships, or produce less but higher tier ones. I.e. research points are part of the resource system.

 

And there's no way we'd have to have an intimate knowledge of advanced physics, I think it's easier for everyone if we just have different tiered things. I.e. your base fusion reactor, your tier 2 fusion reactor (can name it, if you guys want) and tier 3 and so on.

[archimage_a]

Basically what Dungeonal said. Fission and Recombinate Fission are just words. In terms of the game it is:

Power = 200

and

Power = 220

Fission would be 200 to 300, Fusion would be 300 to 400 and so on and so forth. Research point techs would just be filler bits to go in the middle, 4 per thing.

 

Anywho Research points would be not be something you would amass(If you do then you are playing the game wrong) and, in any case, you can only spend one point on one project at one time.

You couldn't, for instance, research Fusion normally then tech it to level 5 with 4 research points the same year. You could level it up over 5 years though.

 

I am not sure how to do the research points, maybe fit them into the economy with universities...takes 500 people to run one and 1/50th of a power plant and you get a research point at the end of the week or something.

Also, I guess you could spend a research point on producing a really awesome ship(Compared to normal ships), which would have more powerful strengths and smaller weaknesses....but it would have to be ship by ship, you couldn't just design an awesome ship and then pump that out.

 

I think we need to talk about a modules system, so each module costs X and the ship itself costs Y.

1 factory produces 1, level 1, fighter, per hour so we can use f/h(fighter/hours) as the base figure.

 

I also think Mather is right, each ship should have pros and cons if we are going to use them. No ship is perfect, the closer it is to perfection(say a borg cube) the higher the cost.

So it would be a balancing act of 4 or 5 strengths to weaknesses or strengths and costs.

 

The Warp Gates could be deployed in space or on the ground.

They look like:

So I guess that it would be picking the right hex to go to the right system. So ground based ones would be more expensive and could only link to one system per gate...as opposed to all of them.

[The_Mather1]

I'm guessing those hexagrams are just visualizations of programs containing the address information and that the green sircle is the gate.

 

[spoiler=Pro and con examples]

Atlantis:

 

Pros:

Large

Inhabbitable

Strong weapons

 

Cons:

Slow

Requires a lot of power

Expensive

 

 

Hive:

 

Pros:

Large

Regenerating

Strenghtening extremely with more power added

 

Cons:

No shields

Cannot use FTL for long periods of time

Can get sick

 

 

Daedalus:

 

Pros:

Strong shields

Beaming technology

Strong weapon

 

Cons:

Small Only one strong weapon

Balistic secondary weapons

 

 

Ha'tak:

 

Pros:

Cheap

Fast

 

Cons:

Weak weapons

Slow

 

 

[Seraphi]

I'm not entirely sure about these warp gates... It just seems like the SOASE system would be simpler to keep track of.

 

Also, should there be a facility for extracting each individual resource, or shall they be lumped into one building which can be upgraded? Personally, I'd prefer lumping them into a single building, but I'm just throwing the issue out.

 

A research tier list sounds good, as long as you still need to upgrade your facilities and they don't just upgrade automatically when you research something new.

 

One more thing...

 

Could we please not rip off our stuff entirely from a television shows and movies? Mather, I get that you have Aspergers, which limits creativity. But (Gasp!) so do I, and I managed just fine last game.

[The_Mather1]

In that case you should be prepared for a lot of sketchup models.

[archimage_a]

The green thing is the thing that tells you that you have the gate selected...in the game...

The Hexagons are the gates.

 

I think the pro-con system should be more flexible. Ie you write a description rather than fill in a list...because 'Instant transport' isn't a pro or a con, but a mix of the two... Also if you design a massive ship then a con would be it is near impossible to miss the ship with a gun, so having 'All ships are quick and hard to hit' as a racial pro doesn't really come into it...yet some people would argue that it does.,

 

Ross:

The game shouldn't be easy to keep track of. If I want to launch a sneak attack I don't want it to be blazonly obvouis that is what I am doing.

 

Resourcewise, I don't mind. If we just feed everything into the economy system I said, and do some balancing, then it should be fine. A planet should have a max of 2 Heavy Battleships per year if it only has factories, power plants and houses, but should be able to build at least 1 Battleship per year with a full mining/food/this and that system.

 

Upgrading will be difficult to keep track of....If we had a wiki we could create new ships and new Marks of ships as and when we needed them. So I could build 40 Dyth Class Battleships with Fission Drives, then discover Tier 2 and create the Dyth Mk2 Class with that. Then build 40 new ones, then scrap the old ones.

 

I think ripping stuff off is fine, as long as you don't go with a 'Well in the TV show I watched it was amazing, therefore in this game it is amazing'. I don't want a Star Wars-Star Trek battle, I have been in those before and they get complicated in about 5 seconds.

 

I think I am beginning to see a pattern between Hegemony Players and Aspergers....Could it possibly be that we are inherantly argumentative and good leaders?

 

Mather(again):

I think the wiki idea would solve that problem.

[Seraphi]

A wiki is a great idea.

 

The problem with that hiver travel system is that the gate is made to be a mandatory target, since the enemy can just stick several, well guarded gates in, leave all their ships around them, and you might as well be right next to them.

 

A sneak attack could still be launched through the moderator(s) and should pretty much be the only way to initiate a war, knowing us. Unless of course you're threatening war, which is a decent tactic in itself.

 

Another point is the rate of destruction in the last game.

 

In a battle of 20 heavy battleships vs. 30 battleships, there shouldn't be a loss of any more than about 15 ships in total, the rest would be damaged, but by no means destroyed. That's basically how it works in real life with naval warfare, so I don't see why it shouldn't work here. It's much more logical, and since ships are going to be harder to build in this game, it makes more sense to have it work like that since it means that players must be more cunning and use real tactical knowledge, instead of throwing a higher number at the enemy.

 

As for the module system, I'm thinking we should use a sort of tetris style grid, so we only have a certain amount of space to fit modules into, with each module costing a different amount of resources and providing different boosts.

[archimage_a]

The gate thing is wonderful though.

I think the last game proved that you can't have 100% anti-missile defences, so if you created a missile ship, flew in, blew up the gate/gates(I think there should be a limit to how many deployed gates you can have in a system(and they have to be in system to deploy)...one per planet?) and then the bulk of your fleet arrived elsewhere to blow seven shades of death out of other colonies while the victim tries to sublight it or build a new gate before their empire is destroyed.

It sort of does away with the tedium of sending transports through or moving ships between planets....and makes it an element of guess work too...since you can choose to mass your fleet just before the battle begins, and if you choose wrong you are stuffed.

 

Anyway, you could still use the Node Drive if you wanted to the SOASE system.

 

Combat needs to be discussed, like the modules.

 

I like the prospect of using a power and command limit...So you can store X amount of power for combat and then you expend that...missiles take less power but have their own limit....and you can only send 4(Best ships, or 8 lesser ships and so on and so forth down to 1000 fighters or something) or so ships into combat at one time without suffering some sort of excess command penalty. But you can reinforce your lines as ships are destroyed.

The power limit would be the average power level of the fleet, so wheeling around your most ultimate ship with an army of obsolete vessels would be silly...so no Point-Defence-Battleship missile shields for gates.

 

Sound fair?

 

Modules?

[a_bert]

I agree with the tetris idea, Ross. We could use a similar system to the grids in Kingdoms, to that effect. Higher tier buildings take up more space, so you have to plan your city carefully.

 

Again, no *heavy* losses is the right way to play, it's the most fun and also the most logical.

 

I'd prefer individual buildings per resource, so that there's more planning involved, but I wouldn't have a problem for just having one building for resources.

 

Unless you're already doing so Archi, I'll look into starting a wiki and once we've made our basic ruleset we can start updating it.

 

I would prefer the SOASE system to the hiver one, it seems to me the only advantage hiver gives is immediate reinforcements & trading between your empire/allies, whereas SOASE makes the game more grounded and easier to grasp, which should in the long run mean more people start up (cause even now, there's gonna be a lot to do to "set up" your empire)

 

EDIT: Your command thing sounds like the Total war games, or similar to it. It's logical, but as long as there is room to still initially outnumber your opponent, cause I think if you're more efficient in building your city you should be rewarded for it. (More inital ships = less losses)

 

I'm not sure I get why you want a power limit though? Or how it would work?

[Nero]

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.

I hope you realize you were the worst offender in that one as well...

[Seraphi]

Pretty much exactly that Archi, except some of the modules take up multiple spaces, or are awkwardly shaped, but provide bigger boosts.

 

True that individual buildings per resource will stretch the game out more, but again, I'm not entirely bothered and could go either way, so that's up to you guys.

 

Not sure about the power limit, but the command limit sounds like a good idea. How about ships being worth a certain number of command points each, and going over a certain limit incurs light (If you're not too far over) or heavy (If you've gone way past it) penalties? the command points should be affected by modules, so you can add modules to reduce the amount of command points ships take, just like with offense, defence and speed etc.

[archimage_a]

The power limit would mean you could go into a battle with your ships bristling with weapons...and run out of power in five seconds in and get the person with the sensible amount of weapons come and wipe the floor with you.

Primarily to stop people deploying a bagillion lasers on every ship

[a_bert]

http://empiretif.wikia.com/wiki/Empire_Wiki

 

:o

 

I like the idea of modules reducing command points. I guess the penalty would be a negative bonus to your roll in the combat situation.

 

And I get now why the power limit is needed.

[Seraphi]

Well they would only have a certain amount of space to install laser modules or whatever, and they would be left slow and with weak defenses, meaning as long as you survive the initial attack (Which you in all likelihood will, with the new destruction rates) you can get back to even terms pretty quickly, again making it all about the tactics used.

 

Edit: Cool Wiki. I'll do some editing and add some pretty pictures and stuff.

[archimage_a]

I think ships should be made up of three main modules: Command Section, Mission Section and Engine Section. Each of these modules would have different numbers of slots you could use to place other normal modules.

 

Mission sections tend to define a ship's main purpose, and vary from straightforward sections like the heavily armed Armor section to the Jammer section that creates sensor holes, to the Wild Weasel section that tricks enemy missiles into targeting the Wild Weasel ship instead of its intended target. Command sections can add a secondary function to a vessel, such as the Deep Scan section that reveals more fleet details.

 

There are also four different weapon sizes: small, medium, large and special. Special turrets include heavy beams that can only target straight ahead and torpedo launchers (also targeting straight ahead, but usually able to track targets).. The three different weapon sizes are not mutually exclusive, and weapons designed for a smaller mount may be mounted in a larger turret than intended (except for point-defense weapons). Small weapons mounted in medium turrets are double turreted, and in large mounts are triple turreted; medium weapons mounted in a large turret are double turreted. Though the tracking speed of the turret is determined by the turret class, an increase in firepower can be achieved. Turret amounts and sizes are determined by ship section and the race of the ship designing it. For instance, while deep scan modules increase scanner range, fewer weapons can be mounted on that module and it is less heavily armored.

 

Though it might be a bit too complicated...