X2 BPV
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Star Fleet Battles: SFB Proposals Board: The "X" Files: OLD X2 FOLDER: X2 BPV
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By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 04:16 am: Edit

Quote:

While it's very easy as a designer to say "Change your tactics to suit the circumstance. Adapt, survive and overcome", from the consumer perspective, this is supposed to be fun. Having to adjust your tactics you've been using for years isn't fun - it's proof that the designers built overpowered ships that nobody will want to play against.

So, consider this a cautionary tale about balancing BPVs and the factors that make ships fun from someone who spent 15 years developing a product. It's not as easy as it looks, and your designs will be grumbled at by playtesters.


I think to some extent giving the X2 ships lots of options helps all tactics have a chance.
The ASIF will help starcastlers. Phaser-5s will help saber-dancing.
Neither of these things (nor both) will help so much as to be a garrenttee of victory.

By Joe Stevenson (Alligator) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 07:52 am: Edit

Quote:

Having to adjust your tactics you've been using for years isn't fun - it's proof that the designers built overpowered ships that nobody will want to play against.



That's not necessarily true.

Tactics you use against the Roms are probably different that what you do against the Klingons, generally speaking, regardless of which race you are flying. You play against Hydrans different than you play against the Klingons, etc. That doesn't mean the game is broken; it's just part of the game.

Now, tactics against X2 will have to be somewhat different. To me, figuring out what works is part of the fun.

To go further with this, in the real world, tactics change all the time. If someone were to try and fight a war WWI style, they'd get creamed by anyone using modern tactics, even if both sides had identical forces; the weapons dictate what tactics are better than others. Hell, I dare say even in game, your tactics against the Klingons, Roms, Feds, etc. changes from Y168 to Y182. PFs, X1, fast drones & sabot plasmas, mega fighters, etc. ALL force changes in tactics. I do not think it is reasonable to not expect there to be some change in tactics with X2, no matter how tame and handcuffed it's made. If it's different, the tactics will have to be somewhat different. Otherwise, I have to ask if it is really different at all. That doesn't mean it has to be radically different (although I'm not against that either), but some adjustment should be expected, and that doesn't make it broken

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 12:04 pm: Edit

Joe wrote (and thank you for the input):

Quote:

That's not necessarily true.

Tactics you use against the Roms are probably different that what you do against the Klingons, generally speaking, regardless of which race you are flying. You play against Hydrans different than you play against the Klingons, etc. That doesn't mean the game is broken; it's just part of the game.



Joe, I held a position 99% congruent with this statement all through Magellanic playtesting. I got told that telling people to "suck it up and fly differently" was going to divide the player base unacceptably for the product to go forward. It's Steve's ball, and Steve's game. We played by his rules.

The logic was this: the people who insisted LMC was unbalanced would convince their groups to ban the product entirely, rather than adjust their play styles, much as happened with the Andromedans.

The same thing happened with the old X1 ships. It might not have happened with the revised X1 ships. It absolutely CAN happen to X2, and will happen if all the proposals put up here (even in the consensus model) are accepted.

Don't go through what I went through if you can avoid it; beyond a certain level of "different", you're harming your product more than you're helping it.

Here's another case study: Old X1 ships:

Let's assume that the phaser firepower goes up by 25%, and heavy weapon throughput goes up by 50%. Net overall firepower increase is about 45%.

If the shielding goes up by about 30%, and internals go up by 15% (and reserve power per battery goes up by a factor of 3, effectively adding to shielding), you get most of the SSD changes to X1 ships.

Which, for the most part, feel like eggshells armed with sledghammers. Once you get past the shielding, they shrivel up FAST.

We got rid of phaser overloads in X1, and made heavy weapons more reliable on fast loads in 2003, because the X-ships had gone too far in the "eggshells armed with sledgehammers" phase - they'd go from "I'm OK, I'm OK...oh, wow. Every box is GONE..." by going from range 8 to range 5.

One of the other hidden effects of X1 is that the weighting in maneuver choices from seekers is different from conventional SFB: It's almost never worth your while to maneuver around drones, even X drones, because with rapid pulse phasers, and double phaser capacitors, the opportunity cost of shooting them is greatly reduced.

There is also a threshold effect (we noticed it in FedCom playtesting on Fleet scale); halving everything (box counts, weapon counts, hull, etc) results in ships dying slightly more than twice as fast. The converse applies as well - doubling the internals of a ship gives slightly more than double the "time on the map"; I've noted the effect, SPP, SVC and I tried to figure out why it happened, and could never really agree on the cause.

Now, all of this is NOT an indictment of X2.

The bits I've seen of X-2 (the phaser-5 and phaser-6, especially) are excellent. I think you could take most X1 ships, put the new phasers on them, reduce the weapon counts and re-generalize the ships, do one of the power upgrades proposed, increase the shield repair rate, and have an X2 product that would be about 90% complete, if you accepted X2 as a maturation of the X1 designs.

By Joe Stevenson (Alligator) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 05:36 pm: Edit

Quote:

I think you could take most X1 ships, put the new phasers on them, reduce the weapon counts and re-generalize the ships, do one of the power upgrades proposed, increase the shield repair rate, and have an X2 product that would be about 90% complete, if you accepted X2 as a maturation of the X1 designs.



I think what we're going to end up with is a product that is "easy", that makes SFB people who don't want to learn new things feel comfortable, and create a series of ships that no fleet admiral would waste money to purchase, and not even match up with the "history" that's been previously written that Tos finds so sacrosanct (despite the fact that the "history" has changed so many times and so much over time)


(PS - and we're stil figuring out how to make Andros work in F&E, because now they don't)

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 10:08 pm: Edit

Quote:

There is also a threshold effect (we noticed it in FedCom playtesting on Fleet scale); halving everything (box counts, weapon counts, hull, etc) results in ships dying slightly more than twice as fast. The converse applies as well - doubling the internals of a ship gives slightly more than double the "time on the map"; I've noted the effect, SPP, SVC and I tried to figure out why it happened, and could never really agree on the cause.


I'm not really understanding what you are saying...are you saying "playtime" or "gametime"?

You'll probably find that there is a parabolic effect in what you do with an SSD.
A couple more Warp Engine boxes not only makes you harder to kill but also lets you make the crossing from R5 to R4 more easily/frequently (or with bigger overloads) making you more deadly.
A couple of extra shield boxes not only makes you harder to kill but also means you might not lose that shield in a strike meaning no loss of weapons and no H&R.
A pair of 360° Phaser-3s does wonders for keeping your offensive-phaser-suite still functioning in addition to defendingyou from incomming drones and it lets you squirrel away phaser cap power in your main phasers.

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 10:22 pm: Edit

Joe, I've long understood that F&E and SFB have interesting disconnects.

For example, no SFB Mauler matches its performance in F&E battles. Likewise carriers, etc.

When we were running LMC F&E to "beta test" the history, we cribbed Andros from the CL numbers, and scaled down the fleet densities of LMC ships to match them. It also solved a couple of other problems, and gave them an interesting feel.

For the Andros, we basically let the Andro write down hex numbers where SATBs were, and could move a force from any SATB hex to any other SATB hex before moving "off the net". There were interesting tricks pulled - since everyone knows that the Andromedan appears 4 hexes away from a SATB node, by watching where the Andros appear from turn to turn, you could figure out where to send a ship with scout functions to "prospect" the hex to find the SATB.

Was it official? Nope. Did it work? It "felt right", but none of us are "Ace Grade" F&E players. Would it work for the GP? Nope...but then again, I don't see any way the Andromedans can crack a late war defensive nut.

(Also, to be fair, Andromedan fights should be horribly lopsided. The only way you know an Andro is in that hex is when ships go missing....but nobody wants to play the scenario of the Lone Hunter Frigate Hunted By The Dominator Group. :))

I would be quite content to say that the extreme effects of X squadrons are that they're enough phaser on the fuzzy scale that's smaller than F&E and waaaaay too big for SFB, such that they're able to "be in two places at once" effectively. But I'm not an F&E player, and find F&E to be borderline incomprehensible.

By Joe Stevenson (Alligator) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 10:50 pm: Edit

Quote:

For example, no SFB Mauler matches its performance in F&E battles.



Refresh my memory. With TacIntel, at what range can you detect that a mauler is, in fact, a mauler?

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Sunday, June 17, 2007 - 11:38 pm: Edit

Joe,

Under Tac Intel Level D: Coarse Hull Discrimination it says

"Certain sub-types of hull are known. This refers to a general hull type, such as the D6M and D6V which have substantial outward modifications."

It doesn't address all maulers. But it does seem to imply that the mauler installation requires sufficient hull modification as to be detectable at Level D. Assuming no other factors, a normal ship receives Level D info on an enemy at range-30. A Scout receives it at range-45.

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 12:16 am: Edit

Likewise, when it doesn't fire disruptors on the approach, or launch drones, it's something of a giveaway. However, this should move to a different topic, as it has nothing to do with X2 BPVs.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Monday, June 18, 2007 - 01:47 am: Edit

I think X2 will be pretty good.
With a shift to heavy weapons rather than phasers and not much extra power ( e.g. no extra BTTY ) and not much extra shielding (I'm considered a maniac trying to make an X2 cruiser have 8 more shield boxes on every shield over X1 levels) and not much extra power (I'm considered a maniac by trying to have 8 more warp engine boxes on an X1 cruiser over an X2 cruiser), the X2 ships should come out better than X1 vessels of the same class but not so powerful as to break the game.
An S-Bridge lets you control drones or ID drones (or have a limited ability at drone knock-downs) so it doesn't give you much extra defensively.
An ASIF lets you have more shield #7 but it doesn't protect you from those ultra critical A3, A4, A10 & A11 DAC hits.
Regenerative shielding won't make you tougher in a short battle...you'll have to really drag things out to start getting an internal-damage-differntial that's meaningful.
Even Full X-Aegis, doesn't kill more drones for you...it just lets you be more judicious about killing drones.

A 300-330 BPV XCA is not likely to break any thresholds that weren't already met by the ISC CCX or Orion CX.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - 02:23 pm: Edit

With X1R published to thunderous applause, its now time for another round of “What’s X2’s BPV?”

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - 02:29 pm: Edit

In this corner, we have the X2 cruisers should be able to take down a battleship. In the other corner we have X2 cruisers should have similar combat capability to an X1 cruiser, but using newer tech. On deck for a rematch is the underdog, which holds that X2 cruisers be geared toward multi-role missions and actually have slightly less combat capability than optimized X1 warships.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - 02:52 pm: Edit

Here's a compromise that has been previously discussed and that I kind of liked.

The first X2 ships are multi-mission. The strategic imperative for all the empires is rebuilding their economic infrastructures, shattered by the General War/ ISC Pacification/ Andromedan Invasion. These ships need to be able to help devastated colonies get back on their feet through such actions as diagnosing and stopping a bizarre new epidemic (perhaps the result of a mutated pathogen, perhaps a deliberately engineered bio-weapon) or assisting in the repair of the colony-wide power generation and life support facilities ruined in the last Andro attack. So a much smaller percentage of their total mass and volume is devoted toward combat systems but is instead taken up with things like lab, fabrication, and a large shuttlecraft contingent. But it's still a dangerous galaxy and they also need to be able to fight. X2 technology enables them to be about as capable, or perhaps slightly better, than their X1 counterparts even though they have fewer combat systems.

Then the Xorks show up in strength and they are so nasty that the only way the Alpha races can effectively resist them is to use X2 technology on combat-optimized designs. These latter ships are not "X3", in that they use the same systems and rules as X2. But, like the GW-era ships, they devote very little volume or mass to functions that aren't valuable in combat. These "Xork-era" X2 ships would be the "Battleship killer" cruisers.

X2 would mostly be devoted to the former type of ship but each race would get one of the latter ships as well, prototypes for the sort of "pure warship" X2 designs that would predominate in Y215+.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - 06:05 pm: Edit

Tos,

I think this is going to be a lot like the "Fix the Jindos" discussion. Everybody has their own conception of X2. There may be common threads.

I see X2 as being something like Web 2.0 - feature upgrades that got packaged as a whole new thing.

The empires were running a number of lines of research and the "low-hanging fruit" results are what we know as X1. The more interesting and esoteric results are what make the difference between X1 and X2.

I see X2 warships as a "return to MY" in some ways. GW ship (and X1 ships) both made design tradeoffs to favor combat power over service life. X2 reverses this course and are built to last, lowering weapons density somewhat as a result.

What distinguishes X2 is that it learns a few new interesting tricks. They aren't just GW tech on higher steroid doses than X1 had.

I have a few suggestions about what those are.

http://www.vorlonagent.com/sfb/x2/vorlonagent/x2-ships.htm

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - 04:33 pm: Edit

In thinking about it some, it occurs to me that an X2 Cruiser should be capable of taking on two of the most common enemy 50-50. The two most common ships are usually two fully loaded war cruisers.

A Fed or Tholian XCA might confront 2xD5K (124) and have an target BPV of 248.

A Klingon XCA might expect to face a pair of NCAa+ loaded with ADD (124) and have a target BPV also of 248.

A pair of Lyran CWpbu+ (133) might expect to face a Kzinti XCA at 266.

A pair of Romulan SPAb+ (139) might encounter a Gorn XCA at 278.

A pair of Gorn HDDb+ (121) should be 50-50 against a Romulan XCA at 242. This would make the Romulans weaker in the X2 era than the Gorns, a concept that would be supported by the relative economies at the end of the war.

This would work out very nicely for game dynamics and playtesting and create ships generally in the 250-280 region.

If that isn't enough for some players it leaves the door open to XCC, XCCH and XBCH class ships.

By Kenneth Jones (Kludge) on Thursday, September 18, 2008 - 08:29 am: Edit

Most of those BPVs are already in the Ballpark of the current X1 (CX) ships. So they would actually not be XCAs they could be XCL/XDD depending on race.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Thursday, September 18, 2008 - 12:31 pm: Edit

Kenneth Jones,

Well, one of the big unresolved questions concerning X2 is how powerful X2 ships should be. People have argued for everything from X2 cruisers that can defeat a Battleship (which means 400+ BPV) to something slightly less powerful than an X1 cruiser. The rationale for the latter position is that X1 ships were built during the desperate days of the General War/ ISC Pacification/ Andromedan Invasion, and were therefore built to be as combat capable as the hull type and technology allowed. The X2 ships were built for a different strategic imperative and therefore followed a different design philosophy. They (under this interpretation) were built as "multi-mission" ships that could fight effectively but would have a lot more non-combat functions than an X1 ship. So even with their very advanced power and weapon systems they were not (under this particular interpretation) quite as powerful as X1 "pure combat ships" because a much smaller percentage of their mass and volume was actually used for combat-relevant systems.

My own position, for whatever it's worth, is that X2 cruisers should be slightly more powerful than X1 cruisers (a less stringent interpretation of the "multi-mission" ship described above), but not 400 BPV monsters. There really is no overall consensus and some people have argued that "in the Ballpark of the current X1 (CX) ships" is exactly where an XCA should be.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Thursday, September 18, 2008 - 01:10 pm: Edit

What Alan said. In addition, if the Gorn XCA works out to 278, there is no reason an XCC couldn't be 300, XCCH 330 and CBCH 380. On the other hand if the XCA is 350 then by following the same increase the XBCH would be 450, which most seem to feel is too high.

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Thursday, September 18, 2008 - 01:21 pm: Edit

The great conundrum is there has come a disconnect between the game and the logical progression of technology.

One point of view is that everything should get better, both offensive and defensive. The problem with that is that you get moster ships with super high BPV's that everyone seems to agree is a bad thing.

Another is more powerful weapondry but this leads to the Paper Tiger syndrom that everyone says is a bad thing.

Yet still another view, the one I think is best, is to maintain parody with X1 offensively (or even slightly less) and increase defensive capabilities. It seems logical to me that one could say damage output increases were limited technologically, so technology focused largely of defensive capabilities. However, everyone seems to say that this would only lead to longer scenarios and that this is a bad thing.

What is left seems to be X1 in sheeps clothing.

By Kenneth Jones (Kludge) on Friday, September 19, 2008 - 09:13 am: Edit

Loren,

Same damage more resistance to Damage. Sounds like a tougher ship than X1. Meaning it would have more BPV.

Eggshells with Sledgehammers. Sounds more like Galaghers Sledge-o-matic™

I think we want something a little sturdier (IE survivable) in 2X. Able to handle some of the best X1 can dish out and still come out on top. (Class for class not BPV.) Otherwise regardless of the bells and whistles it would be a VERY hard sell to the Admiralty.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Friday, September 19, 2008 - 06:07 pm: Edit

A few days ago I suggested that X2 BPV nirvana could be found against a pair of GW CW. I retract the suggestion. The idea has been found to be in conflict with standard BPV scaling practices.

X2 ship values will need to be calculated as duels against GW hulls.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Friday, September 19, 2008 - 08:24 pm: Edit

Hmm.

Agreed.

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