- Location
- Australia
It's okay, was just joking at the moment! Haven't decided on anything yet.
It would give you a reason to keep your spreadsheet up to date though 
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
It would give you a reason to keep your spreadsheet up to date though 
Worse comes to worse, you can always just NPC it
I mean, somehow ensure there are less than 10 "theaters/sectors" or whatever high level partitioning that voters assign ships, and let theater and sector admirals (and their attributes/personalities) handle the sector deployment details. It's a loss of some control for the players and requires some work on your end, but it would simplify things as long as you're not aiming for hyper-optimality.
I mean, I rather enjoy doing the deployments. If it's so other players can have a greater level of control that's one thing. If it's just going back to NPCs, I'd be happy to keep putting up deployment plans, adjusted for the occasional comment.
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
See someone should create an automated Ship design program with a GUI and everything, a combat program to use those ships to spit out a result, and one to assign those ships/"units" to areas and roll on event tables.
Make it modable and franchise-secular, so you can use it for whatever, then I dunno sell/give it away for quests and RPs and stuff.
I'd pay / patreon support for that. (Me can think of all sorts of uses)
Make it modable and franchise-secular, so you can use it for whatever, then I dunno sell/give it away for quests and RPs and stuff.
I'd pay / patreon support for that. (Me can think of all sorts of uses)
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Aeqnai is a totally normal human being and you know it!
Or maybe a Lecarre in a mask.
You could introduce something between the theatre and sector level that has no In Universe representation.
Lets call them areas. You then just fuse and slice our current sector into areas until you reach a point where deployment is easier but there are still enough areas that our ships are sufficiently spread. I would keep the border zones separate though and only do this for internal sectors.
We as players then just interact with these abstract areas that you can shuffle around as you please and dont need to respect theatre lines while the unflexible political sectors are only relevant within the narration now.
This shouldnt require any mechanical changes, but would lower the amount of interactable pieces for deployment plans to whatever you want+self inflicted BZs.
Well, I've got the ship deployments pickable from a dropdown list in a spreadsheet. Need to do a little scripting to save to a quarterly record / spit out a deployment vote. Then after that I'll have to see about a map...
First, bedtime.
First, bedtime.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
Let me put it this way. If for the next years, you are the only one creating fleet distribution plans and uncontested ones at that, then you might as well be "deputized" as part of the game. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.
Hmm I like the overall structure. At what level are you supposing ships are assigned at and what level are you envisioning them being voted at? Are the affiliates listed there the responsibility of the "region" force rather than their own task forces? I'd say each member major world is arguably just as an important as any affiliate (with exceptions) and thus should be listed there.
- Location
- Central Standard Time
Hmm...
Stratum also sounds nice.
I think UE will obtain all of the rights to it, so it'll probably be human dominated within a decade or so.
Oversector is boring, but fits.
Stratum also sounds nice.
SakSak
Unbound
- Location
- The Cold Wastes of the North
What I'm afraid of, is how big of a murderball they can gather as well if they decide to truly try and crush us.
Worst of all, I'm fearing if they slowly gathering a Hammer fleet behind the lines where we can't see it, partially by building partially from their allies/subjects and partially by depleting local garrisons once they set out, while they keep a modest force only in GBZ.
Then, suddenly, a 200-300C murderball appears their side of the border, annihilates our border forces, and begins to smash our defences.
It is partially an irrational fear I admit, but it is also something I could imagine the Cardassians doing.
I think making the name as boring and unflavourful as possible would actually be a nice way to show that they are just a mechanical thing to prevent deployment complexity from ballooning and not something that exists on the narrative level.
aeqnai
Nerdy Homu
- Location
- Laniakea Supercluster
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The idea would be to deploy at the 'region' level, yes. I don't think the affiliates have their own task forces in any case, other than 'the closest few sectors', which are already being grouped into region deployment anyhow. If an area within a region needs its own deployed force, like the Ataami within the Rimwards Border Region, they get elevated to (temporary) region status until said threat is over. The ASTF, if it still existed, would be a separate region from the RBR, for example.
- Location
- Australia
The other advantage is that if we get it to a Theatre or Region level of assignment, it becomes much easier to just shift one ship. You don't have to have the accompanying juggling of taking away a D5 ship here means you have to shift a D3 ship there, etc etc. If one theatre needs reinforcing we can distil it to a "Transfer x ship" single line vote.
- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
i personally have no problem with n'Gir. she is doing her best and can not read our minds.
that we are somewhat counter to her plan make for this trouble we are having.
she wants to build what we have, we seem to want to expand past what we can do.
but hey at least we are not being full on hawks about things that might make it even more of a problem
that we are somewhat counter to her plan make for this trouble we are having.
she wants to build what we have, we seem to want to expand past what we can do.
but hey at least we are not being full on hawks about things that might make it even more of a problem
aeqnai
Nerdy Homu
- Location
- Laniakea Supercluster
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Basically the same result as making 'regions' a thing, since the sectors as they are would still exist-- they also serve as administrative boundaries for our members, and changing that would involve redefining each member's jurisdictions and possibly shifting political systems around...
Honestly, in our end, they're just where our ships patrol. Sub-state colonies can just be tracked separately; they probably don't even need to be mapped fully.
Nevermind in the context of a post-scarcity Fed the borders as such probably don't matter that much.
Random Member
Gardener of Human Happiness
- Location
- Behind You
Name them Sectors, but instead of naming them after a species living there, just give them a number. That way Sector 001 can be an actual thing when the Borg invade.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'd honestly rather NOT reorganize sectors to simplify deployment. I'd much rather just have some kind of general agreement to maintain stable sector fleets.
Address that concern, and you eliminate the problem of overly complicated deployment issues. It becomes much easier to maintain semi-permanent sector fleets instead of all this 'churn.' Though the rise of the Rennies, Keplers, and Constellation-As is going to have that effect to a large extent anyway.
The only reason deployment is so chaotic right now is that we've been spending most of the 2310s refitting some very unsatisfactory escorts and 'cruisers' we had at game start, forcing us to randomly shuffle our ships all over the place to fill the holes left by the old TMP-era ships going in for refits. This is less likely to be a major problem in the future, because we won't have such a glut of obsolete ships urgently needing refits all at once.
Is Kenichi your baby? If so, shoot me a concept for how they come to meet each other and we'll make it work. If not, I forget whose character he is, originally.
Honestly... the only reason that "just shift one ship" is hard NOW is because we take it for granted that something terrible will happen if we fail to meet a sector defense requirement. As it stands there are always sectors that are over defense requirement; if we weren't worried about being down, say, a few points under requirement for a couple of quarters, a lot of the weird messy stuff just wouldn't be a factor.
Address that concern, and you eliminate the problem of overly complicated deployment issues. It becomes much easier to maintain semi-permanent sector fleets instead of all this 'churn.' Though the rise of the Rennies, Keplers, and Constellation-As is going to have that effect to a large extent anyway.
The only reason deployment is so chaotic right now is that we've been spending most of the 2310s refitting some very unsatisfactory escorts and 'cruisers' we had at game start, forcing us to randomly shuffle our ships all over the place to fill the holes left by the old TMP-era ships going in for refits. This is less likely to be a major problem in the future, because we won't have such a glut of obsolete ships urgently needing refits all at once.
I'll (probably) do a full write up later but if we take the Tailward Theater:
Sol Sector
Vulcan Sector
Rigel Sector
Andor Sector
Klingon Border Zone
Romulan Border Zone
Licori Border Zone
we've got a D78 Theater covered by 19 starships with a combined Defense of D70 and 7 Starbases for another D35:Vulcan Sector
Rigel Sector
Andor Sector
Klingon Border Zone
Romulan Border Zone
Licori Border Zone
5 Excelsior (30) [Pathfinder, Avandar, Pleezirra, Thirishar, Rru'adorr]
4 Centaur-A (12) [Lightning, Cloudburst, Winterwind, Typhoon]
2 Constellation (6) [Docana, Selaya]
2 Miranda-A (4) [Lion, Dynamo]
3 Constitution-B (15) [Huascar, Korolev, Lexington]
3 Oberth (3) [Inspire, Hawking, Torbriel]
7 Starbase I (35) [Earth, Betazed, Vulcan, Andor, Rigel, Beta Indi, Shrantet III]
4 Centaur-A (12) [Lightning, Cloudburst, Winterwind, Typhoon]
2 Constellation (6) [Docana, Selaya]
2 Miranda-A (4) [Lion, Dynamo]
3 Constitution-B (15) [Huascar, Korolev, Lexington]
3 Oberth (3) [Inspire, Hawking, Torbriel]
7 Starbase I (35) [Earth, Betazed, Vulcan, Andor, Rigel, Beta Indi, Shrantet III]
This also shows the problem with switching to Theaters for events; if we assume an average of one event from each sector (7) per quarter and that all ships in a Theater roll to check if they can attend that event then just the Tailward Theater alone means 133 rolls.
- Location
- somewhere
It's self-enforced in so far that mechanical punishments were never finalized. What's different from the state of affairs described in the quoted post:
- It turned out inspiration didn't actually influence what year a project would finish as often as I then thought, quite often the year could be calculated in advance, and if not it almost never made more than a year difference (this required actually calculating enough project times in advance to see). Event bonuses do throw a bit of a wrench into long term predictions and I sometimes try to model them for the categories that seem to receive them more frequently, but for most projects I don't.
- Boosts were introduced that 1. allowed many of the non-deterministic project times to be made deterministic and 2. helped quite a lot with the issue of "cutting off almost the entirety of a team's research output".
- The benefit:cost ratio tends to drop with project tier, so high priority higher tier projects being unlocked is relatively rare, and cases where multiple high priority projects are being unlocked at the same time even rarer, so assigning teams to the currently highest priority open project is usually fine (this required looking through all research trees and roughly prioritizing to see).
- People turned out to usually be fine with some particular assignment being the same in all presented plans/not being in a task or raised the question when discussing the preliminary plan(s), so the research plan didn't usually have to explain choices that were particularly difficult to explain.
Items that ended up being both a genuine choice and difficult to explain turned out to be rare enough to not be too much of a problem, generally. The very first plan after that post did turn out to be just as much work as described, though.
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lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
Okay that's good. Was just saying that if you're listing affiliates, might as well list the the homeworlds as well if a sector contains multiple (like Sol sector).
Until we get 10+ theaters
So just to make sure, the gist of this tentative idea is that sectors remain for ship location and event purposes and garrison requirements, but players vote at a theater/region level and NPCs (or player deputies) are responsible for the actual sector ship assignments?
Er... If it was just meeting garrison requirements and if there were no benefits for going above them, then I could agree that the problem is easy to address by all the ships we're planning to build. I hope you don't mean that, because there are more concerns beyond garrison requirements and there are benefits to "over-garrisoning", altogether making the problem not so easy.
I do think deployments are quite chaotic at the moment, but you'd be fooling yourself if you think this is not going to repeat or even get worse in the future. We'll likely have a larger refit wave sometime next decade or two (especially if custom refits are a thing, phaser arrays & torpedo burst launchers become available, and Centaur and Renaissance refits are available by then), crises/wars/distractions tend to mess things up anyway, and we'll continue to have more and more ships that need to be (re)assigned over time.
- Location
- Central Standard Time
I suppose Naval District has a nice ring to it.
Athena Naval District (Amarkia, Apinae)
Apollo (Indoria, Seyek, Qloathi)
Hestia (Sol, Tellar, Vulcan, Andorian)
Hermes (Orion, Ferasa)
Boreas (Rigel, Honiani)
Naming convention is Greek Mythology, because that was what I first thought of at Sleepy O'Clock AM.
These are organized by strategic concerns; as the original four are our industrial heartland, they are grouped together. Also, Hestia seemed like a fitting name.