I'm going to be honest, the way you phrased that made it sound like you thought the need for an app was a bad thing.
To me, you were giving a very strong impression that you've basically dismissed the idea of using such things (different strategic ideas or NPC game mechanics) for balance. In part because you keep pushing the same ideas about changing the combat rules themselves for balance. I'm rethinking that in light of what you write below, to be fair.
Sorry. When a debate starts getting into multiple tangents and line-by-line replies, I find it hard to keep everything coherent with my own line-by-line replies. Plus I try very hard to break down arguments into its components and avoid conflating them with each other (like what I was doing with the grant/subsidy thing), and from my bad experience of high school debate a long time ago, I have an aversion to the practice of throwing a mass of arguments to "win". Honestly, I should stop trying to respond line-by-line when it gets so unwieldy, because it just makes things confusing.
I don't think he said that he's planning to do this. I think he said he'd have to do this, but doesn't want to.
That's not the impression I got, but we'll see. Or won't see, if he actually uses a new system and we don't get to see combat logs for it yet. As I noted before, with the changes he's musing about, we probably wouldn't see the difference in results in just a handful of engagements.
Honestly, the niche of larger ships against smaller ones is simple: one on one engagements, or two-on-two or something like that.
Yes, on average the fleet of smaller ships will outnumber a fleet of larger ones. But there is still a lot of room for encounters where one of our explorers mops the floor with one or two enemy escorts (or more, in the extreme limiting cases like Klingon Birds-of-Prey). I bet that in wartime the border sector event tables would have all kinds of outcomes like "randomly selected one of your ships fights randomly selected enemy ship due to an encounter on patrol."
Well yes, there is a niche for large ships outside of direct combat mechanics. We did talk extensively about what they could be and how they could vary between factions and tech and so forth.
But I was noting that this provides another subtle - and very subtle at that - niche directly within the combat engine for less high combat ships vs more lower combat ships (besides the more probable attrition of the lower combat ships). Even better, it's an
emergent property of the rules, and not some new rule that adds
complexity complicatedness.
I really like that the proposed change makes battles more intuitive to visualize without necessarily changing the results noticeably. Higher combat ships are modeled as actually doing more damage per hit, rather than indirectly via higher hit rate at the fleet level. edit: And there is that side benefit of the potential of reducing combat log verbosity by effectively decreasing the number of combat turns.
Back when I thought there would be both combat-based damage and the same combat-based fleet hit % mechanics, my
prior analysis showed the potential for some counter-intuitive combat behavior, or at least how overpowered the combat stat becomes. With combat-based damage
replacing combat-based fleet hit %, this is no longer the case. The combat stat will have about the same importance as it did before. And the addition of any ship to the fleet, even of a C1 Oberth to a C6 Excelsior, should always help overall damage in the long run, albeit at the risk of attrition. Sure, we could get unlucky and have that Oberth get randomly selected multiple times in a row, but as we take the number of combat turns to the limit, it will average to the same results that we'd get from a rounds + initiative combat system (where each "round", each ship of the fleet gets to trade shots as long as they aren't struck down first), which in turn also averages to about the same results of the current combat-based fleet hit % system.
It also lays the groundwork for further ship-level flexibility down the line, for both faction-specific and tech-specific combat mechanics. For example, shield burn-through, which is probably going to be ship-specific (as in requires new refits and designs), would now be handled in a very intuitive fashion, rather than some attempt to compute some fleet-level shield burn-through %.
I do have one particular worry about this change though: what is going to be the equivalent of the 1.15 exponent that's used for fleet hit % in the new proposed system? That function served to slightly amplify differences between fleet strengths, which serves to increase the decisiveness of battles. Not sure if that's even a good thing for the game, but it's really up to the game designer to decide how decisive battles should be.
So, on another topic, is there any desire to increase the number of research teams we have over the next few years? We have a number of T3 techs that are sitting idle, or will be soon as earlier techs finish, and it would be nice to use our research points on working on the xp of a new team, rather than the relatively more expensive 'wrap up' boosts we started last year. Of course, the later option is still very useful, but I'd rather see the broader approach continue to grow.
IMO, until we get "10 / 60 Type-14 Duotronic Mainframe (Data Analysis Center III) (-0.5 RP required to activate Tech Team (7.5))" and more overall RP income, not really. We're already at risk of not having sufficient RP to activate all our teams next research phase.
Silly replies below:
Notably, though, this is precisely why we have the court-martial. To go over Mbeki's actions in exhaustive detail, to glean every tiny bit of information we can possibly glean from what happened, to figure out if this was something many of our other captains could have handled, or if it was something none of them could have handled.
Maybe Straak or Thuir would have run additional scans- but maybe the aliens who built the weapons on this tomb world had them so well sensor-stealthed that even explorer sensors would have found nothing, since there was nothing there to find. Maybe Nash (and more to the point, Bazeck) could have kept the shields up through the first salvo from the planetary particle guns... but that doesn't do much good if the guns get to fire several salvoes before Miracht (or Enterprise) gets out of range.
Maybe this was just the trap that would have gotten ANY ship we now have that sailed into range. Just plain too big a set of weapons for us to withstand, hidden too well for our current sensor generation to detect. A deadfall that was inevitably going to land on someone. Unless that ship simply stayed out of range entirely, which would have been a violation of Starfleet standing orders.
This tells me that we should SCIENCE this, and what better way to SCIENCE than to meticulously duplicate the exact same scenario with another "unlucky" EC ship like the
Courageous?
The Borg get all the bonuses. All of them. You can't ally with anyone though. Also you're a relentless force of nature made up of cyberzombies.
Every time a Borg wins a battle, it gains +1 to all stats from assimilation.
[Thinks about playing the Kazon]
Could be worse. Could be Pakleds.
Headcanon: This is the main reason we have the Prime Directive. To avoid shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to uplift such species
So all this really proves is that the Kazon are the least special species in the galaxy.
On the contrary, this makes them most special species in the galaxy. In the special Olympics sense :lol
