Lazy weekend...
Nov. 30th, 2003 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothI've spent the whole weekend -- since Thursday -- sitting around the house doing mostly nothing. This did not come as a surprise, it's what I always do.
Of course, there were some things that made it less 'productive' than normal -- on Thursday, while waiting for the Time to be Right to go over to Anna's place, I managed to get horribly slaughtered in Jak 2 and FF X-2, in ways that made me want to give up and never play them again. I've since got past that part of X2 (it turns out I'd taken a wrong turn and didn't even need to go that way) and Jak 2...
Well, I'm still stuck at the same place, but I got close enough once to have *hope*. At least, I hope I was close to the end, because damn, that mission's hard.
So instead, I've been working on space combat rules for 'shadake', Lazar's game system that we've been using on Fridays. The first try, a few weeks ago, was very simple and fast. Too fast. Most battles lasted one or two rounds, regardless of scale. And too simple - a battle between battleships was the same as a battle between fighters.
So I revised the rules using some linear/square/cubed stuff to make the size of a ship matter, and spent hours and hours (days! not solid days, though) crafting a starship construction system that I was happy with, and making ships for all the major nations, and some for pirates and civilians.
THEN I remembered that I had yet to playtest it, so last night I ran some 'small craft' (about the size the players would be on, if they were going to be active participants in a space battle, since they can be controlled by a crew of 4 or 5) against each other in a playtest.
OH MAN, was it boring. I guess it was sort of realistic - the ships were evenly matched, and had reasonable armor and defenses that deflected most blows entirely, and even so it was over after three minutes... but three minutes is THIRTY ROUNDS. Using this system as is would take all night!
I think the main hurdle is the maneuvering system, which is a bit... well, let me put it this way. If you're using an exponential system for range, and allowing ships to have acceleration instead of using inertialess drive, then to close from range N to range N-1 takes almost the same amount of time as to close from range N to range 0.
To keep things simple, I was assuming that whoever won a skill check would just get to set the range, and the time it took was taken off a table. So to close from range '20' (that is, the range where weapons that do 20 ship-scale-damage are still effective) to range '5' takes 12 rounds.
That's a long time, but a ship with decent defense and damage control can survive 12 rounds of fire. I mean, really, the numbers worked out almost perfectly. The ship was battered and damaged, and took some casualties 'charging the guns', but wasn't crippled or anything.
The thing is, each of those 12 rounds involved calculating all kinds of crap including things like the degradation of armor due to energy absorbed (necessary to avoid ships being immune to harm just by plating on armor) and how many crew were killed when the crew compartment took 6.24 damage...
Anyway, I basically have two options. One is to automate it with an Excel sheet or a small program, so that each attack (a real battle could involve an awful lot of attacks each round) can be resolved quickly.
The second, which I like better, is to give up on trying to use shadake's main task resolution system for ship-to-ship combat, switch to (say) one-minute rounds, and do aggregated rolls that lead to X hits and Y misses. Assigning damage will still be a pain, but not nearly as much of one, since adjusting ship stats to account for damage can wait until the end of each minute.
And I also need to redo the maneuver section. I don't think it should involve skill at all -- the calculations to intercept another ship with acceleration A when you have acceleration B are pretty deterministic. So a faster ship will always be able to catch up to a slower ship.
Ties, though... well, maybe I'll make skill factor into it there.
Of course, there were some things that made it less 'productive' than normal -- on Thursday, while waiting for the Time to be Right to go over to Anna's place, I managed to get horribly slaughtered in Jak 2 and FF X-2, in ways that made me want to give up and never play them again. I've since got past that part of X2 (it turns out I'd taken a wrong turn and didn't even need to go that way) and Jak 2...
Well, I'm still stuck at the same place, but I got close enough once to have *hope*. At least, I hope I was close to the end, because damn, that mission's hard.
So instead, I've been working on space combat rules for 'shadake', Lazar's game system that we've been using on Fridays. The first try, a few weeks ago, was very simple and fast. Too fast. Most battles lasted one or two rounds, regardless of scale. And too simple - a battle between battleships was the same as a battle between fighters.
So I revised the rules using some linear/square/cubed stuff to make the size of a ship matter, and spent hours and hours (days! not solid days, though) crafting a starship construction system that I was happy with, and making ships for all the major nations, and some for pirates and civilians.
THEN I remembered that I had yet to playtest it, so last night I ran some 'small craft' (about the size the players would be on, if they were going to be active participants in a space battle, since they can be controlled by a crew of 4 or 5) against each other in a playtest.
OH MAN, was it boring. I guess it was sort of realistic - the ships were evenly matched, and had reasonable armor and defenses that deflected most blows entirely, and even so it was over after three minutes... but three minutes is THIRTY ROUNDS. Using this system as is would take all night!
I think the main hurdle is the maneuvering system, which is a bit... well, let me put it this way. If you're using an exponential system for range, and allowing ships to have acceleration instead of using inertialess drive, then to close from range N to range N-1 takes almost the same amount of time as to close from range N to range 0.
To keep things simple, I was assuming that whoever won a skill check would just get to set the range, and the time it took was taken off a table. So to close from range '20' (that is, the range where weapons that do 20 ship-scale-damage are still effective) to range '5' takes 12 rounds.
That's a long time, but a ship with decent defense and damage control can survive 12 rounds of fire. I mean, really, the numbers worked out almost perfectly. The ship was battered and damaged, and took some casualties 'charging the guns', but wasn't crippled or anything.
The thing is, each of those 12 rounds involved calculating all kinds of crap including things like the degradation of armor due to energy absorbed (necessary to avoid ships being immune to harm just by plating on armor) and how many crew were killed when the crew compartment took 6.24 damage...
Anyway, I basically have two options. One is to automate it with an Excel sheet or a small program, so that each attack (a real battle could involve an awful lot of attacks each round) can be resolved quickly.
The second, which I like better, is to give up on trying to use shadake's main task resolution system for ship-to-ship combat, switch to (say) one-minute rounds, and do aggregated rolls that lead to X hits and Y misses. Assigning damage will still be a pain, but not nearly as much of one, since adjusting ship stats to account for damage can wait until the end of each minute.
And I also need to redo the maneuver section. I don't think it should involve skill at all -- the calculations to intercept another ship with acceleration A when you have acceleration B are pretty deterministic. So a faster ship will always be able to catch up to a slower ship.
Ties, though... well, maybe I'll make skill factor into it there.
