No, that wouldn't work. Remember that the combat cap was imposed at game start. Well before the ship design spreadsheet, back when all the designs were canon designs. Any other rule would have had to make sense in that context too.
A tonnage cap would massively disincentivize us from building more explorers. Plus we were working only with canon designs back then, and the tonnage numbers for the available canon designs are completely schizo- and were more schizo back then. Look at the statline for the Niagara or the Saber, and tell me how that makes sense in the context of a tonnage cap.
A ship number cap would disincentivize us from building more escorts. At game start, I don't think Oneiros wanted to pressure us into picking one path over the other.
A combat cap makes a lot more sense as trying to put a flexible limit on overall fleet size, one we can 'bend' by building designs with low firepower but cannot bend without limit. It was certainly never meant to deter us from building designs with the firepower of the canon Ambassador or Galaxy designs.
Basically, the task you seem to think our combat cap is supposed to do, it doesn't do. It does do what I think it's supposed to do.
What you're ignoring is that another mechanic also does what you think the combat cap is supposed to do, and does it better.
There are plenty of ways to limit the fleet which would actually limit the fleet. This doesn't really limit the fleet now, and it really wouldn't at all under Forward Defense plus Lone Ranger. I think it's more sensible to assume that's not its purpose.
The stat bonuses associated with Forward Defense and Lone Ranger did not fully materialize until about one or two months into the game. They postdate the combat cap's implementation.
You're acting as if the tech tree came first and the game rules came second. It's the other way around.
As to the question, 'why would the council have redundant system to keep Starfleet from being to militarized?' I'd chalk that up to getting burned by our predecessor. It is entirely possible to build nearly pure warships that don't get any militarization, but the combat cap starkly limits the appeal of such ships.
Except that none of that makes sense in the context of game mechanics, and furthermore there is no evidence that Oneiros would let us build warships that don't cost militarization. Considerable evidence that he wouldn't. Like the part where he wrote that into the custom ship design spreadsheet.
I'm very sure that star trek ships move much faster than a few hundred times the speed of light, it's not typical for journeys to take many months or even years from one star system to another. At least if you go by the depictions in the series.
That said they do sometimes do rather daft things in the show writing so eh.
The problem is that the published numbers for "warp speed flight times" are around 150 to 300c (for moderate warp factors like 5) and cap out at something like 1000c (for speeds like Warp 8 or 9 that are implied to be unusually fast even for Starfleet's modern vessels).
Then you combine that with the fact that even ignoring the plot of Voyager entirely, there have been multiple episodes where "Enterprise gets stranded halfway across the galaxy, too far to ever get home by normal means without taking years or decades to fly back" is a major plot point.
So what it comes down to is that the realistic upper limit on how big a polity can be in Star Trek is not that large compared to the size of the whole galaxy. There's no reasonable way to hold together an empire that stretches across a quarter of the galaxy, if that means your ships need ten years, or even one year, to travel that far.
Yeah, we'll have to hand them over to our member world fleets and we'll only get half of them back during war from the Decisive Battle tech.
I think it's worth remembering that this comes from Lone Ranger, and automatic reclassification is a stronger argument against Combined Arms then Lone Ranger.
Is it? I mean, we don't know if anything will be automatically reclassified, and I see very little reason it should be, unless we go out of our way to abuse our doctrines-say by making a huge fleet of relatively low combat score ships and parking them permanantly out by the borders to net -3 combat on them for the purposes of the cap. If we do that, I would not be surprised at all if there were a move by the Federation Council to reclassify certain classes of ship and make that kind of exploitation impossible.
I won't disagree that Combined Arms is kinda week right now, especially for Cruisers who receive no benefits at all from it. You would think it would be the 'Cruiser Friendly' design tree, wouldn't you?
Just checking, but your argument seems to be that it would be absurd if two comparable techs had a comparable bonus?
No, I am saying that it would absurd if colony worlds-which already outnumber Member worlds, and which we can expect to get many more of because we have techs that boost the chance for a Explorer to find a Colony-got a boost which made them so obviously superior to actual members of the Federation. This seems both naratively and mechanically unsupportable. And I would not be surprised if we do wind up with about 4 times as many colonies as member worlds, because we don't slow down discovering things in our own territory that much unless we research that one tech.[/QUOTE]
I'm very sure that star trek ships move much faster than a few hundred times the speed of light, it's not typical for journeys to take many months or even years from one star system to another. At least if you go by the depictions in the series.
That said they do sometimes do rather daft things in the show writing so eh.
Writers in Trek have always been massively inconsistent with travel time for plot convenience, but there is an agreed warp speed formula that is followed whenever they're not fudging things.
Two of them, in fact, one for TOS and ENT, and one for TNG, DS9, and VOY.
For TOS, warp is calculated as v = w3 c, where w is the warp factor, v is velocity, and c is the speed of light.
For TNG, warp is calculated up to Warp 9 as v = w10/3 c. After Warp 9, the speed follows approximately a handmade curve drawn by Michael Okuda which approaches infinity at warp ten. For that era of the show, actually, they had a big chart drawn up with said curve for the writers' benefit, which was reproduced in the TNG Technical Manual.
The problem is that the published numbers for "warp speed flight times" are around 150 to 300c (for moderate warp factors like 5) and cap out at something like 1000c (for speeds like Warp 8 or 9 that are implied to be unusually fast even for Starfleet's modern vessels).
Then you combine that with the fact that even ignoring the plot of Voyager entirely, there have been multiple episodes where "Enterprise gets stranded halfway across the galaxy, too far to ever get home by normal means without taking years or decades to fly back" is a major plot point.
So what it comes down to is that the realistic upper limit on how big a polity can be in Star Trek is not that large compared to the size of the whole galaxy. There's no reasonable way to hold together an empire that stretches across a quarter of the galaxy, if that means your ships need ten years, or even one year, to travel that far.
Yea I'm aware of how the warp scale works it's kind of bonkers tbh. I'm reminded of an episode in TNG when the enterprise is 'cruising' towards a target at warp 3 and I remember thinking to myself. "Welp the crew clearly dont mind dying of old age before they get there" Travel times in the shows though never jibe with it at all unless they decide to make it plot central.. :/
Writers in Trek have always been massively inconsistent with travel time for plot convenience, but there is an agreed warp speed formula that is followed whenever they're not fudging things.
Two of them, in fact, one for TOS and ENT, and one for TNG, DS9, and VOY.
For TOS, warp is calculated as v = w3 c, where w is the warp factor, v is velocity, and c is the speed of light.
For TNG, warp is calculated up to Warp 9 as v = w10/3 c. After Warp 9, the speed follows approximately a handmade curve drawn by Michael Okuda which approaches infinity at warp ten. For that era of the show, actually, they had a big chart drawn up with said curve for the writers' benefit, which was reproduced in the TNG Technical Manual.
I think this is our fundamental disagreement here. I feel militarization isn't very good at doing its job, because it's fine with designs like this:
(Yes, I know there are other reasons we shouldn't build this ship, but one of those is the combat cap.)
I won't disagree that Combined Arms is kinda week right now, especially for Cruisers who receive no benefits at all from it. You would think it would be the 'Cruiser Friendly' design tree, wouldn't you?
A ship number cap would disincentivize us from building more escorts. At game start, I don't think Oneiros wanted to pressure us into picking one path over the other.
This would actually be relatively easy to handle. You get some number of Explorers, a similar number of cruisers, and a slightly larger number of escorts. The doctrines for each class of ship would then increase that cap directly. Combined arms would probably increase each category by a small amount. This seems like better way to do what you want then what we have.
There is no need for a complicated system (which would be necessary when it comes to dealing with things like possible threats, general mentality of the Council etc.) when the GM can easily handle that via narrative.
While this is true, I doesn't appear to be how @OneirosTheWriter handles this game. I suspect he likes these sorts of complicated systems, because he uses a lot of them.
They are, but we've played with a pretty high degree of consistency so far, mostly by virtue of massively shrinking the Federation itself. The flip side of which is that maps of the kind @Leila Hann was poking fun at (which is how this conversation came up) generally seem unable to resist the urge to "fill up the galaxy" with the known Star Trek polities... when plotwise it makes much more sense if all the known Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers fit into an area a few thousands of light years across at most.
You...do know that Forward Defense is a defensive doctrine, not a Ship Design doctrine, right? And there is only one tech in it that benefits Cruisers? That 'flat -1 to combat' benefits ESCORTS more than cruisers. And the bonus to researching new cruisers, while okay, isn't something I would write home to mum about and tell her I have to get. Lone Ranger gives some benefits to cruisers but the lion's share to Explorers, Swarm benefits apply to either Escorts or Everyone. Cruisers haven't got their own doctrine, and it shows.
I think this is our fundamental disagreement here. I feel militarization isn't very good at doing its job, because it's fine with designs like this: (snip C10 S8 H3 L8 P1 D9 ship)
Yeah, because you cranked up the science stat. In fact, you're spending almost as much tonnage on the science suite as you are on the guns. The only difference between this and one of our normal explorer-class ships is a relatively fragile hull and a stupidly nerfed Presence stat. Raising Presence would be an obvious and easy step. I doubt it would even require us to weaken the ship that much.
Your ability to deliberately minmax Oneiros's formulas and still get an effective warship that is also a pretty fair general-purpose explorer except for low presence... does not really disprove any of my points.
No, I wouldn't.
As a reminder, the cruiser doctrine is actually forward defense.
I get that other people had hoped that the doctrine would do that, but it didn't say it would, and it doesn't.
"Forward defense" isn't a fleet construction doctrine. It's a deployment doctrine. There's no particular reason why forward defense should favor the construction of cruisers, or for that matter why centralized deployment of a fleet should favor it.
So this doesn't invalidate or even address Vehrec's point that while there are doctrines that provide significant mechanical benefits to escorts and explorers, there isn't really one for cruisers. Except for the one side-benefit they get from Lone Ranger, which is one of the main reasons people voted Lone Ranger in the first place as far as I can tell.
This would actually be relatively easy to handle. You get some number of Explorers, a similar number of cruisers, and a slightly larger number of escorts. The doctrines for each class of ship would then increase that cap directly. Combined arms would probably increase each category by a small amount. This seems like better way to do what you want then what we have.
I think a flat combat cap makes more sense precisely because it says "look, YOU decide how much fleet you want, this is roughly the upper bound on how big it can be, you can fudge it a little but you can't just build infinity ships forever."
Could Oneiros have settled on separate caps, constantly being rebalanced on the fly, for each of the three ship types? Yes. But it's farcical to claim that this is objectively 'better' as a way of putting some reasonable upper bound on the size of the fleet than just "okay, your ships can only have so much total combat power."
The combat cap is a great mechanic for limiting overall fleet size and fleet militarization at the same time.
Yes, we could get stupid and abuse the custom ship design rules to deliberately spam low-combat ships and 'break' the combat cap. However, doing so would carry its own very obvious mechanical disadvantages, even without Oneiros stepping in to do something about our metagaming (the way he did when we started overdoing the diplomatic pushes).
While this is true, I doesn't appear to be how @OneirosTheWriter handles this game. I suspect he likes these sorts of complicated systems, because he uses a lot of them.
Yes, but he doesn't normally design two different rules to do the same thing. And he does use a measure of common sense when it looks like people are going to try and do something stupid in an attempt to minmax his existing rules in ways that don't make narrative sense.
This is why I've got a lot of respect for him, by the way, as a game-runner.
Well is positioning large forces on the border potentially ready to launch attacks into foreign space, while stripping core areas, in line with Starfleet's mission?
Forward Defense really isn't a "more Starfleet" doctrine than Fleet in being. Both can be argued to be in line with Starfleet's goals and if anything Fleet in Being is more in line with the Federation's goals, as from a diplomatic perspective, it is less threatening for other polities.
Neither doctrine is about turtling, there is an enourmous amount of lightly explored space within our nominal borders. Why do you think mapping missions keep showing up inside Federation space?
Foward defense rushes outward for exploration, while demphasizing thorough exploration. While Fleet in Being encourages thorough exploration rather than rushing on to the next area. Both include emphasis on different branches of exploration. We are likely to actually get more exploration done with Fleet in Being as it increases net event rates more than Forward Defense and it encourages building more starbases which gain the ability to boost event rates further when we research the appropriate sensor tech.
Well is positioning large forces on the border potentially ready to launch attacks into foreign space, while stripping core areas, in line with Starfleet's mission?
I'm going with 'yes, pretty much.' Ever wonder why Enterprise or Defiant or some other specific vessel so often seems to be "the only ship in range" to respond to a crisis on a Federation core world during the TNG/DS9 era?
So ran a tally, 28 voters with only doctrine being close , 17 to 11 Forward vs Fleet in Being, though do you guys think we will be starting offensive doctrine soon? Also the turn after we finish the first stage of the defensive doctrine we should pick up a second defensive doctrine team.
Well, yes- but the point is that this would make a negative amount of sense, like actually less than zero sense, unless we posit that "normal" for the Federation is to have most if not all of their starships off doing specific important things out on the borders of Federation space, with few or no such ships actively garrisoning the homeworlds.
Today is not going to be a good day - I don't think I will be able to participate much. Sorry, it will take extra time to reply to your questions. Because of this, I will keep open the voting for now.
But looking through the two plans, there are some deficits in Forward Defense compared to Fleet in Being. The primary difference is that forward defense doesn't provide the opportunity to prioritize targets while Fleet in Being does. The second issue with Forward defense is that it lacks any means to improve the amount of crew and resources we have to use, while Fleet in Being does.
sebsmith already provided a counter argument for the resource and crew part, but I want to point out that target priorities are NOT mutually exclusive. We can research multiple exclusive doctrines and even without adopting one of them, we'll still get all the target priority techs in all the ones we've researched. In fact, we should be researching multiple exclusive doctrines once have the RP and research teams for that - which will probably happen by the end of this decade - if not just for this reason, but also for the flexibility to switch if necessary.
I agree with this sentiment. While I like the idea of having divergent doctrines, especially on how it influences infrastructure, grand strategy, and ship design, I do think that tactics available to ships or even fleets have little in-character reason to be constrained by the overarching strategic doctrines.
The highly trained ship captain or fleet commander should be able to pick and choose between all the known attack patterns and defensive patterns (read: target priorities, enemy firing priorities), and other tactical ship/fleet maneuvers. The overall doctrine itself can still provide bonuses for individual tactics, but I don't think the current doctrine should restrict captains/commodores from choosing tactics once its unlocked via research.
I'm not sure how that could play out in gameplay though.
Already, allowing ships to choose attack patterns is an unclear mechanic: I don't want battles (especially in captain logs) to get bogged down by players having to dictate tactics, and the standing orders approach constrains attack patterns too significantly, so it would make sense for ships to be able to choose which patterns to use within battle. However, can the combat engine actually optimally decide which attack patterns to use?
If it can somehow, then that's where doctrinal bonuses can come into play.
I also think that allowing at least some immediate benefits like unlocking attack/defensive patterns when researching alternative doctrines (and not switching to them) is a good thing, since that introduces more research tension and also incentives not necessarily going all-in within a doctrine, leaving the alternative doctrines looking like wasted effort.
Picking individual tactics really isn't something that is ever going to raise up to the level of players. After all, Commander of Starfleet, not Captain of Starship.
In practice that means me which I'd pick based on situation, commander disposition, and any applicable standing orders.
The most min-max thing to do with Forward Defense would be to build a fleet of around 80 Excelsior style low combat Explorers and 100 forward posted Oberths.
It will be a sad, sad day when the Excelsior-B design, sometime around 2340, reclassifies all our Excelsiors as Cruisers and our combat cap fills up significantly.
We wouldn't even need an Excelsior-B refit design - a Base Strike doctrine tech will do that for us (though I don't like how it's so specific to Excelsiors):
We could do that, but if we're in the business of retconning, I'd prefer to say that those Deltans in the Star Trek movies were actually Betazoids, and that we haven't met the actual Deltans yet. Let's not kill off a species that we could have the opportunity to encounter in our explorations
I won't disagree that Combined Arms is kinda week right now, especially for Cruisers who receive no benefits at all from it. You would think it would be the 'Cruiser Friendly' design tree, wouldn't you?
It's more like there doesn't really need to be a specific doctrine for cruisers. Cruisers are actually already great. They're cheap for their utility, except in crew, making them arguably the most cost effective in fleet combat and defensive garrisons, even over escorts. In combination with science ships and a sector explorer (primarily for presence), having a bunch of cruisers should provide adequate event response.
So it's more that escorts and explorers need doctrinal bonuses to help balance them against cruisers.
I think this is our fundamental disagreement here. I feel militarization isn't very good at doing its job, because it's fine with designs like this:
(Yes, I know there are other reasons we shouldn't build this ship, but one of those is the combat cap.)
Ignoring the fact that this is a bad design, I do like how the fleet-wide combat cap and fleet-wide science floor and mostly relaxed militarization cost system allows for more specialized ships rather than completely balanced ones.
But this does make the case that perhaps we should also have a fleet-wide presence floor.
(Funny thing, I was initially using the word "global" to describe "fleet-wide" before realizing how wrong that was )
Foward defense rushes outward for exploration, while demphasizing thorough exploration. While Fleet in Being encourages thorough exploration rather than rushing on to the next area. Both include emphasis on different branches of exploration.
Well, one of those "branches" of exploration allows us interact more with "newer" species on the border, and I like that
We are likely to actually get more exploration done with Fleet in Being as it increases net event rates more than Forward Defense and it encourages building more starbases which gain the ability to boost event rates further when we research the appropriate sensor tech.
Considering we don't know how much the event rates will increase or decrease for each of these techs, it's rather premature to conclude that Fleet in Being would result in more events.
If it's something like +/- 1000 basis points in event rates for each tech (so in FiB, home sector event rate go from 40%=>50%), then I can see FiB being better. But if it's +/- 10% in event rates per tech (so in FiB, home sector event rate go from 40% => 44%), then FiB may not be better, especially if we decrease the home sector to border zone sector ratio.
We also don't know how many border sectors we can create, which muddles the calculation a lot.
edit: updated math since FiB actually only increases event rate once
Well, yes- but the point is that this would make a negative amount of sense, like actually less than zero sense, unless we posit that "normal" for the Federation is to have most if not all of their starships off doing specific important things out on the borders of Federation space, with few or no such ships actively garrisoning the homeworlds.
Alternatively, shit is going down in the Federation core worlds so frequently that it's inevitable for our protagonists to be "the only ship in range" every once in a while
But seriously, this is a long shot argument for forward defense doctrine in canon. We don't really need a Watsonian explanation for what's clearly a Doylist point of having protagonists save the world every now and then. I figure it's just one of those things like Star Trek mapping.
Well, yes- but the point is that this would make a negative amount of sense, like actually less than zero sense, unless we posit that "normal" for the Federation is to have most if not all of their starships off doing specific important things out on the borders of Federation space, with few or no such ships actively garrisoning the homeworlds.
You do realize that most would consider that to be a problem for the canon, right? I don't know about you, but I don't wish for us to set ourselves up for the possibility of one of our members' homeworlds to be wiped of all life due to whatever phenomena that crosses paths with said world. In Star Trek, the foreign powers find themselves less threatening than the anomalies that permeate the fabric of spacetime, and we should acknowledge that fact.
What I'm getting at is that ALL sources on Starfleet prior to the Dominion War (which kind of distorted things) emphasize its exploratory mission, rather than its combat mission. Starfleet can and should provide security for Federation space- but in To Boldly Go, the member worlds do have their own starships for this exact reason. Earth has its own ships; the reason they pay Starfleet is so that Starfleet can be out among the stars doing stuff that does not directly involve the interests of United Earth. If we park half our fleet in Earth/Andor/wherever orbit, then the member worlds can reasonably ask "why not give us your budget and ships? What do you do, that we couldn't do just as well ourselves?"
The answer so far, both in canon and in this game to date, has been:
"We explore. We go out into deep space far from the homeworlds and find exciting new things and people, and we deal with crises 'out there' before they can become a problem for you back here."
Should we take it to stupid extremes? No, not even if canon does.
But I'm going to be honest, Forward Defense feels more like Starfleet than the idea of camping out with our fleet overwhelmingly clustered in the home systems.
Considering we don't know how much the event rates will increase or decrease for each of these techs, it's rather premature to conclude that Fleet in Being would result in more events.
For event rates we can probably assume that the techs are roughly equal on an individual basis, given that there are no modifiers listed and event rate modifiers apear all over the tech tree. Having major divergences would be rather odd as most significant difference are listed on the tech tree for other things.
Given that we really can conclude that at most the techs are equal, if the Forward defense acts as a global modifier and the changes are proportional to the number of borderzones/regular sectors and if it is a per sector modifier like the rest of the techs then Forward Defense does result in lower total events. We are regardless of doctrine not going to be able to just randomly declare new border zones to stack the bonus. Even with a generous ability to generate new zones, even without anything to justify them, we will still have more core sectors than border zones and this isn't going to change.
Fleet in Being also incentivizes and discounts starbases which provide rather hefty bonuses from techs (defense boosts, response boosts, event increases) we are going to research in the medium term anyway.
Alternatively, shit is going down in the Federation core worlds so frequently that it's inevitable for our protagonists to be "the only ship in range" every once in a while
That is really an argument to not have Forward Defense though, if random crises keep popping up in core areas we really want to have ships in place to cover them.
But I'm going to be honest, Forward Defense feels more like Starfleet than the idea of camping out with our fleet overwhelmingly clustered in the home systems.
That is not what Fleet in Being does! With regards to exploration Fleet in Being emphasizes though exploration compared to Forward Defenses more scattershot expansive approach. They both have techs that emphasize exploration.
I really wish people would actually read though the techs and think about what they actually represent. Because people keep saying the Fleet in Being is anti exploration, no it is not Fleet in Being literally has a tech that is all about "maximum exploration, lets know everything about our regions of space".
Both defensive doctrines have exploration boosters, they just emphasize different approaches and I personally prefer being thorough to a broader scattershot approach for our regular fleet. It is literally part of the job of the Explore Corps to go ranging out on expansive missions of exploration.
But I'm going to be honest, Forward Defense feels more like Starfleet than the idea of camping out with our fleet overwhelmingly clustered in the home systems.
I'd rather read about us exploring new places than trodding over the same ground again and again. Forward defense is about searching the undiscovered country, which to me feels more Star Trek than having every event take place in the same dozen sectors.
I'd rather read about us exploring new places than trodding over the same ground again and again. Forward defense is about searching the undiscovered country, which to me feels more Star Trek than having every event take place in the same dozen sectors.
For event rates we can probably assume that the techs are roughly equal on an individual basis, given that there are no modifiers listed and event rate modifiers apear all over the tech tree. Having major divergences would be rather odd as most significant difference are listed on the tech tree for other things.
Given that we really can conclude that at most the techs are equal, if the Forward defense acts as a global modifier and the changes are proportional to the number of borderzones/regular sectors and if it is a per sector modifier like the rest of the techs then Forward Defense does result in lower total events. We are regardless of doctrine not going to be able to just randomly declare new border zones to stack the bonus. Even with a generous ability to generate new zones, even without anything to justify them, we will still have more core sectors than border zones and this isn't going to change.
Okay, it seems like there's been some confusion about the event-modifying technologies.
It's true that Fleet in Being has a Technology that increases Event Rate.... VERY VERY HIGH UP THE TECH TREE AND WE MIGHT NOT GET TO IT FOR DECADES. Take a look at Thirst for Answers, which is T4, and consider all the research we would have to do before getting to it. Nor is it likely we would head to it by the shortest possible route, because I think people would likely go for Focused Industry first. We're not going to have three tech teams on Defensive Doctrine. It will take a long time to get to stuff.
Meanwhile, Forward Defense has T2 To Boldly Go, which could well be the very first thing we research after unlocking the base doctrine. Forward Defense will likely increase our Event Rate Long before Fleet in Being does.
And it's true that Forward Defense has a second technology in Independent Captains that both increases border sector events and decreases home sector events. But you know, if we think it's a bad idea we don't even have to research it. Independent Captains isn't a prerequisite for anything else, so we can leave it on the shelf and not decrease home sector events at all.
