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I agree with the comment about research - it would make for a better story if research were banned, except for research that takes place within the confines of the game. For example, Miranu can develop a Miranu Gunship, Igadzra can develop the Plasma Siphon, humans can develop the Nebula Penetration Device. Allowing research outside the canon of the game makes the entire story one big arms race - and that doesn't make for an exciting plot. I've tried to steer away from military research in the game, but that's clearly not a popular choice among many other players.
As for a battle calculator, well, I think an impartial moderator would suffice - a battle calculator would require exact ship counts, and would make it difficult to take into account tactics and formations. Any battle calculator sophisticated enough to do the job would be quite an undertaking to program... probably more trouble than it's worth for a webstory.
Sorry you've decided to leave the story Selax, but thanks for writing for the time you did.
Selax, on Feb 19 2005, 10:40 PM, said:
Effective as of now, I resign as leader of the South Tip Renegades. I hereby quit this webstory. My fleet is no longer in existence. Groned is surrendered to Captain Carnotaur. To Captain Carnotaur and Paranoid: I hope you win. View Post
I'm sorry that you feel you have to leave. I'm sorry also that you're quitting because you don't agree with my moderation, but I guess I can't please everyone. I really wish that I could express to you how that wasn't a decision meant to put you in a bad position, just a decision I thought was fair to both. As far as I can see you still have a massive advantage in this battle.
What confuses me is that you didn't even lose more than a handful of the huge number of ships that you brought in, and you're already giving up.
The other thing I feel that I need to point out to everyone here is that this story isn't about winning or losing. It's about writing a story. It really makes me angry that someone would start writing here... then quit without writing an end just because they think they're not going to "win." I don't know what I did to make people think that this was some kind of sci-fi nerd dick measuring contest.
C'mon people, we're supposed to be friends here. People in a community that loves a game enough to get together and build something from it... not a bunch of guys out to prove that they're better than each other. As far as I'm concerned, one of the best webstory players I've ever written with is Grundy in Eve of Destruction. I don't say that because he overwhelmed everyone else with the best technobabble and psuedo-tactics, it's because he played his faction till the end, and when that end came, made the best he could out of it.
Selax, I hope you come back... but if you're more concerned with beating the game than you are coming together with the rest of us to have a good story then we can do without you.
Quote
In addition to my other reasons (and the fact that I had considered quitting earlier), what would probably be the loss of 600 Crescent Fighters to clear a minefield that cannot be big enough to kill that many with two or three days of production devoted to it is reason enough for me to be upset. As far as I can tell (and if one considers the sheer area that these mines have to cover-not to mention the necessary concentration-this is stretching it) these mines and suicide ships at the very most (getting clear through it) should kill 200 fighters, not 300 for getting half way through. I am irritated because those losses are simply unrealistic. The amount of mines needed to make a spherical (it must be spherical else I could go around it) minefield that would be threat (that couldn't be punched through easily) would take a gigantic amount of production. The surface area (since his fleet and the station are inside it) that these mines are supposed to cover would be tremendous. Maybe if the mines were one deep this could be done, but they seem to be in layers of more than one. The amount of production devoted to this minefield (not to mention the fact that not all of the production went towards this) wouldn't yield a minefield that large and it should not yield something that much more effective then the normal production would have been. Why would I participate in a story where production can yield defenses totally out of proportion to the amount of ships that that production would normally yield?
I joined this story to have fun-this sort of battle and unrealistic production is not what I would consider fun. These losses and the other reasons that I mentioned are the reasons that I am quitting.
And how do you think Wing feels about you saying that all that hard spent time should just be considered totally useless? You'll notice that if I was taking his side, you wouldn't be able to clear the mines at all, and your entire fleet would have been destroyed by suicide ships the moment you entered the system.
The fact is that Wing deserves to have good, but not invulnerable defenses from the time he spent developing them. At the same time you deserve to have a decent chance of getting past them and the ability to use the strengths of your tech. You'll notice that if I was doing everything Wing wanted your SAD modules would be totally useless. Due to the interferance and his ECM you only have 30% effectivness... but with the size of your fleet you can easilly use that to your advanatage.
I'm sorry that you can't consider that Wing has just as much invested in this story as your do, but I refuse to shortchange one writer just because another continues to protest. I'm not a perfectly fair moderator, nobody is... but I don't have any bias towards either of you, so I'd appreciate it if you just trusted my judgement.
I'll say again Selax, that I hope you return, but if the only way you can have fun is by having every battle go exactly the way you want it, then we can do without you.
If you come back, this is how the battle stands:
ST Renegades: 3/22 Crescent Warships Destroyed, 6/49 Laziras Destroyed, 55/172 Renegade Aradas Destroyed, 300/1119 Crescent Fighters.
Freeport: 0/18 Turncoats destroyed, 1/45 Helians destroyed, 30/225 Kraits destroyed, 25% of bomb-ships (overall) destroyed.
Selax's Fleet is 50% through the minefield.
Oh, and another thing... can we please stop all of this in topic bickering? Selax, if you have any more problems you want to express PM me. This argument isn't helping anybody.
I know that he spent time on it, but a minefield as a spherical defense (in space) is simply not practical-it was his decision to waste time on its construction (it would seal his own ships inside for one thing). There is simply too much space to cover. Realistically, with the production that he had, he probably would not have even been able to build a completely inclosing minefield. He deserves to have good defenses, but, realistically, they would not be as good as they are being made out to be. What matters is realism, not what each deserves.
I know that he had invested as much in the story overall, but he hasn't invested as much in this battle.
At the same time you deserve to have a decent chance of getting past them and the ability to use the strengths of your tech.
A decent chance? Losing most of my fighters to a gigantic minefield that took two or three days to days to build with partial production is a decent chance?
I am angry because the way this battle is going is simply not realistic. I happen to care about realistic battles and do not wish to participate in a bunch of unrealistic battles.
Edit: if you wish to continue this conversation, please do so via the PM system. Edit again: I just noticed that you already suggested doing what I suggested doing above.
This post has been edited by Selax : 20 February 2005 - 03:57 PM
As VAI said, stop this pointless bickering. The fact that he even has a minefield is atribbuted to two things: 1)Because of time constraints things take considerably less time than they do in-game 2)Its a bloody game, its supposed to be unrealistic.
Just because things aren't going your way durring the first few posts doesn't mean that you won't be able to turn things around. Furthermore, even if you loose the considerable loses that wing would sustain would give you time to make another base nearby undisturbed by raids. Even if the minefield isn't spherical, you're in the fringes of the proxima nebula--your sensors are going haywire, the fact that you can remove the mines at all is a mystery as you would only be able to detect them the moment before impact, but we're letting you have the benifit of the doubt. Webstories are not about winning or losing, it's about creation a dynamic story and having fun doing it. And while I agree that battle calc is useful, it is somewhat ignorant to tactics, advantages, and battle-values other than ship-count, it works fine for well-balanced factions like in EV:Classic but the override universe is wildly unbalanced, the equilibrium in warfare easily disrupted by the player's intervention. Almost every government in EVO fights a two-front war (with few exceptions) meaning the balance between defense and offense can lead to the endurance or fall of systems and stellars. The voinian push into UE territory was a success, but it drew excessive forces from the Emalgia border and many core-worlds, thus leaving them more vaunerable. You Selax are caught between the strandless, the Igadzra, and the human renegades. By abandoning Neslaut and Groned you removed the threat of the Igadzra but you also negated ship production--it would have been wise to kep Histiri Station for the duration of your offensive as a fall-back point. Wing's forces are highly concentrated, with the decline of pariah Gorky and Riomor have been re-enforeced. Wing has the UE, you, and the Nadir to contend with--they are not about to lose their HQ to a desperate raid. Selax, you've pushed Wing between a rock and a hard place, it is only fair he be allowed to use the only real advantage he has to defend himself when he is almost garenteed to fall to other powers without your influence...And as Wing said, you would be better off trying to rent part of the station than trying to capture it, never underestimate a pirate's greed.
Ending a counter-rant ~tHe vIsitor~
I agree, visitor, except for that the game actually is supposed to be somewhat realistic, within the boundries of technobabble.
Just so you guys know, I didn't mean for Selax to be the only one to stop posting arguments in the OOC topic. Selax already knows all he needs to know about this situation, and more people berating him isn't going to help anything.
Let's move on.
The second stage of the Veldegrass project: The Veldegrass Beam
Due to the unusual qualities of the reaction of the Veldegrass chemicals, they will explode uncontained in the vacuum of space even with the extremely low energy level. This feature makes them ideal for a launching out separately, under pressure from a ship and creating a sustained explosion. This blast creates an effect similar to that of an old-fashioned flamethrower. The difficulty is in the storage of the chemicals, in order to even maintain a few grams the vessel must have specialized storerooms that freeze to temperatures a few fractions of degrees lower than deep-space and this takes up a substantial amount of room. The entire system takes up thirty tons of space, and twenty-eight of that is just for storing the chemical safely.
The chemical is consumed as an ammo, but in the standard system approximately twenty-tons of Veldegrass can be held in the storage facilities. That allows a vessel to fire the Veldegrass Cannon for up to forty-minutes continuously before requiring more ammunition.
The Veldegrass beam that comes out of the cannon is shaped conically and at the outside has a radius of approximately twenty meters. The range is slightly longer than that of a phase cannon. The energy damage is approximately equivalent to eight phase cannons, but the chemical also melts almost any solid fairly quickly dealing a fair amount of mass damage. These weapons cannot be equipped on any form of turret because of the conical shape. The final advantage in this weapon is that any unshielded or even lightly shielded weapon or vessel coming in contact with the beam will be destroyed.
Estimated time to completion: 2RTD (In present form it's been going for 6 days, in some form the project has been running the entire time the webstory has).
Edit: Blast, I completely forgot I had a second tech slot researching too. Now I have no idea what to do with it, and I can't even do a ship overhaul or something because I used Lou and Ray on it, so I need to be creative and think of something else that a pacifist would build and a psychopath would turn into a weapon.
This post has been edited by Paranoid : 21 February 2005 - 12:01 AM
Weather control.
Helps with farm production. Helps even more with levelling cities with tsunamis and tornados and thunderstorms.
And I'd like to state that I think grundy's latest post should be looked over by Ippy. I can't remember reading anywhere about all these fleet preperations and whatnot he seems to have made.
This post has been edited by Admiral Benden : 21 February 2005 - 03:44 AM
Any lamely non-violent device can be restored into a weapon with enough creativity.
Benden, he let me know about them a few days ago because it was something he wanted to keep out of the spotlight.
What I'm more concerned about is Carno making ships appear in a system just because it's now under threat. The new navy in Fridion is revoked, put the ships somewhere else. In addition to that, I'm not sure how it is that a Voinian commander assumes that freighters sitting outside the main fleet are more of a priority than the fleet of warships pounding on him. That whole series of events smacks of using OOC information.
Returned, and writing up a post now. Will be done in a few hours...
After some discussion with Ipvicus, I'm willing to co-moderate to a degree, but as I'm far behind at the moment, for now at least could people ask me if they have a problem and I'll co-moderate for Ipvicus on that? I'll leave it to Ipvicus to find problems, and I'll concentrate on trying to sort out other people's concerns.
There you go kids... If I say no just go ask your mother, Espy's a softey. : p
A note: only the Azdgari Hyperdrive has been refitted on all Azdgari ships to date. Level 4 shielding hasn't been refitted, nor will hypercubes include actually refitting anything. These two projects don't include refits either.
Yes, refits will come later, most likely all together.
Graviton Impulse Drive (Model I-1) 8 days.
The first version of a revolutionary new system of propulsion which works by generating gravitational singularities within the shield network. This research project is a pioneering one and the end product is a very incomplete version of what will eventually be a far more powerful propulsion system and likely have other applications in the future.
Speaking relative to the Azdgari's highly advanced ion drives that they used before, the most advanced drives in the known galaxy, the Impulse-1 drive allows maximum velocities ~30% higher than previous. Acceleration is ~50% faster, but due to the nature of the Impulse drive, it is expected that later versions will render acceleration virtually instantaneous. Turning becomes almost no concern at all, as the beauty of the Impulse drive is that the same singularity that drives the ship can be used to turn it - rather than using tiny lateral thrusters.
As a result of the Impulse-1, the Azdara expands the gap between its speed and manoeuvrability and every other ship in the galaxy. Azdaras will now be harder to hit, particularly with rockets, and few guided weapons can keep up with their maximum speed.
The Azdgari Arada suffers a modest boost which allows it to enter the region most other factions consider that of the fighter. While not as fast as the Zidagar fighter, the Azdgari Arada will not be far slower and in some areas will have better manoeuvrability. While not capable of dodging attacks with the same skill as the Azdara, the Azdgari Arada is certainly far faster than the Igadzra Arada now, leaving only one ship in the Strands that can outpace the slowest ship used by the new Azdgari navy - the Zidagar fighter. (The Azdgari warship being queued for decommissioning.)
Phase Stealth Field _9 days.
(Yes, as you probably noticed, ALL the major Azdgari projects are coming straight away - I won't keep this up. After this only one slot will be doing anything major for a while, with shipyards and the much needed refits coming after.)_
The phase stealth field is a design being worked on a wide range of Azdgari engineers and scientists. It relies somewhat on existing technologies that were never properly implemented, and involves manipulating how hyperspace sensors actually work. It is a major project (hence why it hits the normal maximum of 9 days Ipvicus outlined, only passed by my Hypercube Project.)
Phase stealth fields are actually quite small devices overall, fitted on to the hyperdrives of ships as they use several similar components. They scramble the ship's identifiable signatures, causing an uncertainty as to their exact location. The further away hostile ship B is from ship A with a phase stealth field, the larger the volume of the uncertainty - meaning that as far as ship B is aware, ship A does exist, but could be anywhere in that region.
There is also one other factor to the stealth coefficient of a ship using the phase stealth field - its velocity, relative to the nearest point considered not to be moving (the nearest star - a realspace-hyperspace nexus of sorts.)
Therefore, the further any Azdgari ship using this field is from a hostile ship, and the slower it is moving, the harder it is to pinpoint its location. The phase stealth field never cloaks a ship - its presence in the system is always known.
At significant distances, i.e. far out of combat range, it is impossible to detect even so much as the general direction of the ship. At reasonably long distances, a ship's location is too uncertain to launch an attack, although a game of "hot of cold" can of course be played. Guided weaponry can therefore manage over a range of 3-4 times primary weapons range, as it starts off somewhat off track and guides back as it gets closer.
In terms of close-range fighting, the phase stealth field has almost no implications whatsoever. Certainly, as the Azdgari will concentrate almost entirely on close range weapons, opponents need not worry about the stealth field at that range. Azdaras in retreat provide an exception to this, as the farther they travel from enemy ships, the greater the uncertainty of their location.
Basically, these applications may be seen:- 1. Hiding in absolute uncertainty -- far enough away that not even direction is known. This is quite a distance and far out of combat range. Even in this case though, the existence of the ships is still known to anyone passing through the systems - just not their actual location. 2. Increasing distance between an enemy ship and using the phase stealth field to make escape increasingly more possible. i.e. if an Azdara starts moving away from an Igazra, the further it gets the less the Igazra knows where it is. At 2-3 times phase range and still moving, there's little chance of even Halcyon torpedoes getting close enough to decrease uncertainty to the point they can hit the right target. 3. Various other sneaky stuff, all of which can be determined from what has already been said.
Note: this only effects sensors that make use of hyperspace, which at the moment includes all sensors. Ordinary slower-than-light sensors work fine, but that's not much help - stl sensors are far too slow to catch anything anyway except at such a close range that the phase stealth field wouldn't be doing anything significant anyway. Due to Vakhys' research into other layers of existence, modifying the phase stealth field later (not yet - probably prerequisite at least half way into the next Subdimensional Research stage) won't take too long. However, sensors using subspace before any such modification will get through the stealth field.
Main application anyone will notice in firefights: fast Azdgari ships fleeing when under heavy fire, and being able to shake off attack due to the stealth field. Goes hand-in-hand with the Impulse-1 drive in that respect.
Edit I forgot to mention, about the phase stealth field. Different ships will have stealth fields of different powers... an Arada's will be slightly better than an Azdara, and some later ships may have far better stealth.
This post has been edited by SilverDragon : 22 February 2005 - 02:35 PM
I just wanted to let everyone know that each faction is only supposed to have 3 slots for research and projects. Some players seem to be running quite a few more than that, and it needs to stop.
I may have confused some of you by allowing the independant factions to refit their stock ships at the begining, but continued separate refit slots for all governments several pages in is too much.
North Tip Cruiser
Shields: 350 Armor: 35 Speed: 250 Acceleration: 250 Turning: 80 deg/sec Weapons load: 4 Phase Turrets 3 Stalker Cluster launchers + 25 Stalker Cluster missiles 2 SAD Launchers + 30 SADs 2 Dispersal Rocket Launchers + 20 Dispersal Rockets
NT Lazira Shields: 200 Armor: 20 Speed: 280 Accel: 280 Turning: 120 deg/sec Weapons load: 3 Phase Turrets 2 Stalker Cluster launchers + 20 Stalker Cluster missiles 2 Dispersal Rocket launchers + 20 Dispersal rockets
NT Fighter Shields: 30 Armor: 5 Speed: 500 Accel: 450 Turning: 180 deg/sec Weapons load: 5 Swivel Phase cannons 1 Stalker Missile launcher + 8 Stalker Missiles
RMA, wouldn't it be possible that the Renegades would have shot first and asked questions later about your sensor distorted fighters? Especially considering that they could at least tell that some were Aradas that they didn't know?
Maybe a few losses on your part would be appropriate?
Here are the current specs for the Igadzra Navy, including the upgrades to the Igazra and Igara, as well as their new weaponry.
IGAZRA Shield Capacity: 600 Shield Regeneration: 350 Structural Integrity: 50 Maximum Cruise Speed: 130 Acceleration Thrust: 275 Lateral Thrust Power: 3 Vessel Mass: 150 tons Vessel Length: 240 meters Minimum Crew: 52 Weaponry: 1. 4x Particle Beams 2. 12x PDS Batteries 3. 2x Type-2 Torpedo Launchers + 10x Class-3 and 20x Class-2 Halcyon Torpedoes 4. 3x Graviton Beams
IGARA Shield Capacity: 90 Shield Regeneration: 90 Structural Integrity: 10 Maximum Cruise Speed: 300 Acceleration Thrust: 600 Lateral Thrust Power: 5 Vessel Mass: 30 tons Vessel Length: 35 meters Minimum Crew: 3 Weaponry: 1. 4x Swivel Particle Cannons 2. 3x PDS Batteries 3. 1x Graviton Beam 4. 1x Type-1 Torpedo Launcher + 30x Class-1 Halcyon Torpedoes