Design
A Short, Glorious, Death?
Wednesday 11 April 2007 Filed in: Products
We're in some very early alpha tests of the designs that were submitted for Power Projection: Reinforcements, and have come across some 'interesting' aspects of the TL12 Vargr and Sword Worlds designs. The challenge was aptly described by Nick Bradbeer, who is acting as head design munchkin on Reinforcements. I'll paraphrase one of Nick's comments in email here:
The TL-12 to TL-15 gap is *really* severe. The extra RCP (computer power), combined with having the power to get Agility -1 means the TL-15 Imperials are shooting from three rows higher than the (TL-12) Vargr or Swordies when using secondary weapons. Crucially, if the Imps aren't tied down by the need to protect something slow, they can retrograde and just blow the hell out of the other guys with long range spinal and missile fire.
Now, the canonista in me knows that this is an accurate representation of what happens when a High Guard derived TL-15 force engages a TL-12 fleet. However, the game designer in me sees this as a bad thing because it would really suck to play the Sword Worlds forces.
We thought the quick and dirty way to address this would be to move to use the Trillion Credit Squadron credit exchange rates (PP:F Table 26 on page 48), but these only give a 15% advantage to the TL-12 forces, while initial numerical calculations suggest that the TL-15 advantage may be 50 to 100% in cost terms.
Anyway, we're going to be asking for some volunteers to play with some of the designs (we'll provide a scenario and SSDs), probably under a non-disclosure agreement to see what you feel about the new ships. I'll post details here and on the Yahoo! Group when we're ready to move forward.
Dom
The TL-12 to TL-15 gap is *really* severe. The extra RCP (computer power), combined with having the power to get Agility -1 means the TL-15 Imperials are shooting from three rows higher than the (TL-12) Vargr or Swordies when using secondary weapons. Crucially, if the Imps aren't tied down by the need to protect something slow, they can retrograde and just blow the hell out of the other guys with long range spinal and missile fire.
Now, the canonista in me knows that this is an accurate representation of what happens when a High Guard derived TL-15 force engages a TL-12 fleet. However, the game designer in me sees this as a bad thing because it would really suck to play the Sword Worlds forces.
We thought the quick and dirty way to address this would be to move to use the Trillion Credit Squadron credit exchange rates (PP:F Table 26 on page 48), but these only give a 15% advantage to the TL-12 forces, while initial numerical calculations suggest that the TL-15 advantage may be 50 to 100% in cost terms.
Anyway, we're going to be asking for some volunteers to play with some of the designs (we'll provide a scenario and SSDs), probably under a non-disclosure agreement to see what you feel about the new ships. I'll post details here and on the Yahoo! Group when we're ready to move forward.
Dom
Welcome to the New Look!
Friday 22 December 2006 Filed in: News
It's taken longer than planned, but the site is now relocated onto the main BITS server, and I've taken the opportunity to completely rebuild it. Hopefully, this will allow more regular updates and maintenance. We may even give some better updates on the progress towards completing Power Projection: Reinforcements! However, updates may be a little slow at first, as I am expecting to become a Dad at Christmas.
For the more technically minded amongst you, the site is now built with Realmac Software's RapidWeaver 3.5 rather than Adobe GoLive 6, but is still designed using Mac OS X. I'd love to claim responsibility for the CSS and XHTML the site has, but that is down to the excellent software combined with the theme's designers, Blueball Design. All mistakes are my own.
Dom (Power Projection Author and this site's Webmaster)
Picture ©2006 Tom Zunder (taken at Continuum 2006). Thanks!