Re: Galaxy

From: js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan)

Date: Wed, 03 Mar 1993 10:35:33 +0000

Ingolf Markhof writes :
> Sorry, but I can't aggree to this. Why do you think that it's to hard to
> defend?!?

Why is it hard to defend?  Because if I have a fleet (which I do have in one game
I'm playing in) capable of moving 20 or so in one move, I can send 4/5 scouts out
to the planets I can reach in one hop, and see which has the least defenses.  I
can then hit that particular planet, or the second least defended planet with my
fleet before the opponent has a chance to build any new defense ships.  He is
left with either moving a defense fleet to one of the planets he thinks I will
attack (and that fleet costs the same to build as my attack fleet) with a 20% or
so chance of being right.

Static defenses are cheaper to build than the equivalent attack fleet, but suffer
from being static - you can go round them.  And to defend 5 planets you need to
build 5 times as many of them, which outweighs the saving in having no engines on
them.

> Moreover, there is in fact no sufficient advantage if you attack someone else.
> As industrial development is very hard and time consuming, you will usually
> have enough uncontested planets to develop.

This may be true at the start, though in one game I'm in the number of
uncontested planets I had to colonise was one.  It doesn't take that long to
develop if you don't have many planets.  And once you do fully develop your
planets, you are going to look for somewhere to expand.  I agree with you and
David desJardines that you shouldn't attack until you are mostly developed, but
as that happens at different times for different players, you have to be wary of
someone whose total potential is less than yours maxing out earlier and attacking
while you still try to.

> Sorry, but there _is_ a maximum speed that ships can travel

So?  Its already higher than most people are wide.

David Gibbs writes :
> I don't like this, unless you get a good initial setup, this can be really
> difficult.  For instance, in the last game that I started, my closest
> initial planet was over 10ly from my home planet -- ie I couldn't
> safely jump to my closest colonisable planet.  (In fact the nearest
> nearest 5 planets were: 10.49, 13.21 14.6 and 14.98 light years.
> With this rule, I would be crippled from the start, since I
> could expect to lose 20-50% of my colonists and capital on
> my colonisation.)

I'm perfectly aware of this problem.  As my neighbour in the relevant game, you
should have noticed that I had only 1 planet within 10ly, 3 withing 20ly and 2
home planets at 21 and 22ly from me.  Now not having any withing 10ly is
singularly unfortunate, but that could be fixed by a tweak in the
galaxy-generation code to refuse to place anyone at further than 10ly from the
nearest planet.  Not a difficult mod, and one I think should be in there already.

CHO writes :
> I guess if you were to have that...you might even want to incorporate
> a retreat option. Allowing a ship to flee back to its origin after a
> certain % of damage...

Now thats a different game altogether, really.  Something I wouldn't mind seeing
is being able to retreat your ships from a planet after a certain % of casualties.
Much trickier change to the code, I imagine.

---

While I'm at it, I'll mention the other idea I came up with.  On each planet,
have a new type of resource.  Call them Marines, or something, and they represent
the armed forces of a planet.  Put an upper limit on the number you can have
relative to the size of the planet.  Make them use resources to maintain.  Now
when you blow up all the ships round a planet, you don't take it over.  Instead,
you have to beam down enough marines to beat up the marines on the planet (using
a simple formula to do this such as largest force wins, taking losses propotional
to the ratio of the forces - e.g. 100 vs 50 the 100 would take 25 losses, 100 vs
10 the 100 would take 1 loss - Or something equally simple).  Have a % of the
population on the planet killed and a % of the industry destroyed by this messy
little planetary war.  You could even have a Marince training tech, which would
increase the effective size of the force linearly.

You now have quite a few of the things David desJardines wants - one a planet is
developed, it stays (more or less) developed.  So once you start attacking each
other, the production optimisation stage is mostly over.  You have a reason to
have shielded transports, unless you want to spend several turns taking over each
planet.

What it adds to the gameplay is this : a larger person will still be able to
flatten a smaller and less technologically advanced person, it will take longer
to do, by dint of requireing large numbers of Marines to be shipped in - which
gives the smaller person more time to scream for help.  As is, a player can be
wiped out in 1/2 turns moderately easily.  You could still do this but it would
be harder.

As always, I'll read any comments with interest.

John Sloan

(aka Scottish Premier, for those of you with inquiring minds)

References

Galaxy
js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan)
Mon, 01 Mar 1993 11:52:02 +0000
Re: Galaxy
jcho@nmsu.EDU (CHO)
Mon, 01 Mar 1993 23:18:03 +0000

Referenced By

Galaxy
js138@cus.cam.ac.uk (John Sloan)
Mon, 01 Mar 1993 11:52:02 +0000
Re: Galaxy
jcho@nmsu.EDU (CHO)
Mon, 01 Mar 1993 23:18:03 +0000