Please prevent cheating

[Coconutheads]

Well I was bitten by the bug from the original posting in this thread, IE during transfer of ships between fleets all the fuel disappeared. I sent an email to Pete to get the fuel back, but as usual no response.

 

So I will complain here, and see if PETE is reading the board, since he is NOT reading the three now EMAILS I sent him.

 

Three emails? Gee, I always get a polite response after one email. Perhaps it's your breath?

 

 

Good to know the GM plays favorites.

 

Geeze Gary, got a persecution complex?

 

Maybe your (and all PA members) money sucks when compared to other people's (and groups) money? Maybe that is why Pete singles you (and PA) out to pick on, yeah that's it!

[Lord Deependra]

Alright. I have had a big e-mail from Russ on this (in fact, the biggest e-mail I have ever had from either Pete or him) and have had a long think about things and I am going to continue to keep playing. The game has many silly and unrealistic features, as do all games. Come to think of it, so does real life, but that's another story :-)

 

1) Transferring population between empires.

My rationale for doing this was thus:-

When a Japanese company wants to build cars in Australia, they don't ship out all the factory components and thousands of Japanae workers. They source everything in Australia and just bring their expertise. In other words, they establish a pop group with a transportation centre. Australia transfers in Construction Materials and population to build the Industrial Complexes. Each turn, Australia transfers in raw materials and the Japanese transfer back finished MK III Cars. The silly part in Supernova is the workers are re-classified as Japanese while they work in the factories. Does this matter? I don't really think so.

 

2) Transferring captured population back to your homeworld

The rules allow it and people have done it. In hindsight, would I have designed the game this way? I don't think so. But that's the way Pete designed the game. He could have made it keep the population separate, but he would have had to leave out some other feature of the game. If I stubbornly choose not to transfer captured population home, I will eventually be overrun by someone who has.

 

3) Divisions

There are many unrealistic feature of divisions. The idea that troops fighting hundreds of light years away on an alien world are instantly better equippped when a scientist back home invents a new sort of tank is absurd. Realistically, you should have to upgrade the division in some way to gain the advantage. Pete designed the game around space combat, with ground combat secondary. Perhaps a different way would have been to build divisions in the same way as ships ie a DUD order to design a division with a chosen type "Imperial Army Armour" and include components like "Light Tank". You then build your "Tiger Tank Divisions". When you research a new ground tech, you then design a new type of ground division to use that tech. Then you manage divisions the same way as ships so they cannot be transferred between empires.

 

However, Pete chose a simpler, more abstract system for ground combat. One aspect of this is divisions are stockpile items and can be transferred like any other stockpile item. That's the way the game works.

 

If Player A trusts Player B enough to hand over Player A's troops to Player B and risk having Player B conquer his home world from under him, then kudos on Player A's diplomatic skills. Or perhaps that should be kudos to Player B, who is soon to gain another home world :-)

 

Personally, I have only transferred a handful of divisions between empires and, by chance, always from a ground pounder to a brain blob, and I don't plan to do any heavy transferring of troops around. However, the rules as they stand allow it and I reserve the right to use this if I see the need. If Pete chooses to change the rules in the future, I would have no problem with that.

 

4) Multiple Empires

This also raises the issue of people running multiple empires and having them work with each other. When I received back my first start-up, I thought the game was really cool, but that there wasn't much to do each turn. I have since learned the error of my ways:-). Anyway, after a few turns, I started a second empire to give me something to do and to correct a few mistakes I made on my first start-up. Those empires have since met and for all intents and purposes, I am treating them as a single empire. Is this cheating? I think it would be foolish of me not have my empires work together. After all, I am working with everyone else on my borders. And I have played PBMs before where each player was limited to a single position and it was an open secret that some players would start up positions "run" by their parents, or pets or plants.

 

 

The main problem as I see it is not so much that "silly" things can happen in the game, but more that not everyone knows what these "silly" things are. For example, I only recently found out that you can transfer characters to any system you have surveyed. I have been carefully ferrying characters aound by fleet for along time now.

 

I propose everyone goes over their turns and comes up with a list of tricks and odd things you can do that are not necessary obvious from the rules. I am not talking about the uses of technologies, which is a hard-earned secret, but things like how exactly the AC order works, or how to transfer population.

[WKE235]

Alright. If Obama can walk around claiming a government run option is needed to compete with hundreds of insurance companies, and this one extra competitor will drive prices down without costing tax payers money or driving other firms out of business .... well .... even with strange rules or gaps, this game makes MORE sense than reality.

[Lord Deependra]

Alright. If Obama can walk around claiming a government run option is needed to compete with hundreds of insurance companies, and this one extra competitor will drive prices down without costing tax payers money or driving other firms out of business .... well .... even with strange rules or gaps, this game makes MORE sense than reality.

 

Oooh, inflammatory!

I'll just say that most industrialised nations (Australia included) have universal public health care and private health funds and it generally works. Of course, every nation has different traditions and philosophies and every system has grown organically to best suit. And any significant change to any system will cause a certain amount of chaos and confusion and some loss, hopefully all in the short term.

 

Good luck with it!

[Sakarissa]

Thanks for posting Russ's email. It had a lot of good information in it. I really like the idea of designing my own divisions with specific techs. Would need to include an option to decommission a division (recoup the ingredients like scrapping a starship) and rebuild them as a better division. They have to turn in their old gear and get the new gear. The scrapping and rebuilding would represent the time needed to familiarize themselves with the new toys and how to work them best through training and wargames. If we had gone this route, I would agree that divisions shouldn't be tradeable. Just make an agreement to pay your mercenaries for the job you want them to do. Hopefully both sides keep their words. Just like in real life.

 

Sakarissa

The Circle

[Lord Deependra]

Thanks for posting Russ's email. It had a lot of good information in it. I really like the idea of designing my own divisions with specific techs. Would need to include an option to decommission a division (recoup the ingredients like scrapping a starship) and rebuild them as a better division. They have to turn in their old gear and get the new gear. The scrapping and rebuilding would represent the time needed to familiarize themselves with the new toys and how to work them best through training and wargames. If we had gone this route, I would agree that divisions shouldn't be tradeable. Just make an agreement to pay your mercenaries for the job you want them to do. Hopefully both sides keep their words. Just like in real life.

 

Sakarissa

The Circle

 

 

Oops, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that was his e-mail. That post was my personal opinion after reading his e-mail and re-considering things. Philosphically, it is largely based on what Russ told me, but the details, including the the idea of designing divisions like ships, are my ideas.

 

I have also thought about how you could keep population separate. Have each pop group have a race flag which tells it the race to which any divisions or population belong. Use that race to determine any attrition or combat values involving that pop group and armies in the pop group. When you transfer divisions or population to a fleet, add the same flag to the fleet. When you transfer population or divisions to a pop group, check to make sure the race flags match. If they don't, reject the transfer. And a new pop group has no race flag so you can transfer in any population. And if you transfer all the population and divisions out a pop group, the race flag is set back to null.

 

Results:- You can bring home captured population and put them in a new pop group and they will keep the same race. Any divisions will keep the same race in which they were built. If a brain blob captures a ground pounder world, he would be able to build ground pounder troops and if you transfer population or troops to another empire, they would keep the same characteristics.

[Sakarissa]

Thank you for clarifying about the source of information. Your ideas are sound and I like them. The bad thing is we won't see any of them with the current version of SN. RTG won't make code changes of that magnitude during the game. Just another reason to reboot. Yes, yes, I know a lot of players don't want to until RTG makes us. That will happen sooner or later. My suggestion is to use the current player base, which is quite vocal about rules changes and exploits, to sound out ideas and rules for the next version of SN.

 

I also want to expand a little on your idea of designing troop divisions. We could design them as ships are now with scrapping rules for upgrading them. That's one way and it has some merit. However, we need to look at the ingredients of making divisions. I agree with the troopers and soldiers concept and don't want to mess with that. What about food concentrates? The issue here is that a lot of homeworlds don't have all 4 resource yields necessary to make the concentrates. If a division needs food concentrates for it's initial creation, then make sure every homeworld has at least a 1 (or some other minimum) yield for all four yields. It avoids "Hey, what is this grains stuff we need to put into our rations? Have you heard of it? No? It must be some sort of weird government conspiracy against us!!"

 

Another thing is Steel. Stuff like EW units needing electronics and so on works for me. Steel is kinda generic and may not fully describe what it is being used for. Since we have to build Weapons for our divisions, instead of Steel we can replace it with Armor (like body armor) since most ground units have some sort of protection that they wear. This would, of course, add one more order to the process if we have Steel as the ingredient. Could also make 3 Iron = 1 Armor instead and the orders come out even.

 

One other method of upgrading troops is an upgrade order. This would avoid the SCRAP/BI issued for all our divisions. We could charge an upgrade cost in Gear. Gear could consist of 1 Electronic, 1 Weapon, and 1 Steel (or Armor if we went with that idea). Let's say 10,000 gear per division when the upgrade order is given. The upgrade order would be based on each army. This method is kludgy and now that I think about it the ship design method would probably work better.

 

What are some other things about ground combat that are bugging people? We might not be able to get these ideas into the current version but it could be incorporated into the next.

 

Sakarissa

The Circle

[Lord Deependra]

I have to admit I am rather conflicted. While I would like to play "Supernova III: Third Times the Charm" some day, I also don't want the current game to ever end.

[rfouasnon]

Hate to tell you , but one day it will

[Lord Deependra]

Hate to tell you , but one day it will

 

True. But it will take months before I can conquer everybody

[rfouasnon]

Hehe , good luck on that one....

[Highwayman]

Well hey all this is that evil emperor that is running the KROVIKANS. see i just got out of prison and the way i feel about this cryin and drama shit is this ........ This is a computer program and the only thing that I can do is what the program will allow me to do. so that is how my world works. So this is to you triangle, circle, and you too colony dude prepare to feel the wrath of the KROVIKANS and quit snitchin...... that is what i am and i will have fun takin your homeworlds.

[Mahdi]

Well hey all this is that evil emperor that is running the KROVIKANS. see i just got out of prison and the way i feel about this cryin and drama shit is this ........ This is a computer program and the only thing that I can do is what the program will allow me to do. so that is how my world works. So this is to you triangle, circle, and you too colony dude prepare to feel the wrath of the KROVIKANS and quit snitchin...... that is what i am and i will have fun takin your homeworlds.

To quote a movie "that's bold talk for a one eyed fat man"

 

Good luck

[rfouasnon]

Good luck in your endeavors

[cestvel]

Well, well, you will see what Pete thinks about cheating But it only shows how your character is ... You should inform yourself with whom you are messing around