Star Wars Mod - II (Sci-Fi Xover Mod)

Val · #1 November 25th, 2001, 07:24 PM

Sounds like balance is going to be the toughest issue. A group of us are working on a B5 Mod right now, and it would probably save us all some time if we head towards your goal of a fully balanced system. We have a list of quite a few weapon techs and some non-weapon techs. I'll try to toss it all in an Excel sheet on Monday/Tuesday so you can compare ranges and damage.

Suicide Junkie · #2 November 25th, 2001, 07:40 PM

quote:
What you are proposing is huge. Your right, balance would be an issue, but that issue can simply be solved by stating that ALL tech have simular levels. IE, phasers would be as powerful as Lasers, but would have an extra accuracy or range. Lasers would have lower component cost. Things such as this.

I would really prefer to make them be different racial ages.

IE. Low tech start gives you the bare minimum for B5 tech. Behind Earth-at-the-beginning-of-series tech. Research gets you up to Vorlon-ey tech, then you develop shields and move into a StarTrek type tech tree. At the top end of that, it merges smoothly with a StarWars type tech.

You start at B5 tech, when you have one planet & a colony. As you grow to include many starsystems, you move slowly into TrekTech, and by the time you can control a large portion of the galaxy, you will have StarWars tech.

It seems pretty natural to me.

As a bonus, you could add a required tech "Trek", and "SW". Then by disallowing the tech in the game setup, you'd have a TrekMod or B5 mod.

Val · #3 November 25th, 2001, 08:25 PM

The different racial ages idea is good, and would make for a much more balanced system.

But I think (and I may be wrong) that the idea is to see how the different races square off against each other. Yes?

Andr�s · #4 November 25th, 2001, 09:30 PM

quote:
But I think (and I may be wrong) that the idea is to see how the different races square off against each other. Yes?

I agree with you Val.
What I want are the races portrayed as faithfully as possible going against each other.
I think it’s something many people wants to see and when done will attract new players to se4.
suicide_junkie your idea sounds interesting, but it’s not what we want to do.
Are you implying that ST technology is more advanced to B5’s, and that SW’s is superior to ST’s? That could be true in some tech areas, but not in others.
But your point is good and I see it as a potential problem. In each of the mentioned sci-fi universes some races are portrayed as advanced and powerful while others are weaker and relatively unimportant. Making all of them be faithful interpretations, and also balanced will be difficult.

Suicide Junkie · #5 November 26th, 2001, 06:06 PM

quote:quote:
Do SW ships even have shields? They're certainly very vulnerable to fighter attacks..and I can't imagine a shield that could stop incoming kinetic energy weapons (slug throwers) yet let fighters through.

Well, in the X-Wing games, cap ships are vulnerable to fighters because it makes the game more fun, but in the movies, fighters can't do squat to a cap ship unless its shields are already down and, even then they can only make pinpoint strikes against exposed targets. I'm not saying fighters are worthless, mind you, after all, once the bridge shields went on the Executor, and a-wing took it out and sent the ship careening into the Death Star. So in response, fighters never got through cap ship shields, they were already down before the fighters started making runs.

Suicide Junkie · #6 November 26th, 2001, 11:25 PM

quote:
Disadvantages are weaker shields, weak ground troops, and no fighters what-so-ever (probably because you can't put a warp core on a ship the size of an x-wing ). Can't speak for B5, as I know nothing about it.

Actually, trek does have fighters, they are shielded, they do go FTL, and they don't have full size M/ARCs.
Shuttlecraft are light fighters.
Just look at the dominion war (DS9).
There, they have the runabouts with torpedo launchers (medium fighter)
And the military designed-to-be-a-fighter fighters. (large fighter)

You don't actually need a Matter/Antimatter reactor (aka warpcore) to run warp drive, but it requires less fuel and is more compact (size:energy output) than the comparable Fusion reactors. Most ships don't carry enough fusion reactors to move at a decent warpspeed.
Shuttles only go warp 2 or so since they have smaller powerplants.

IMO, Trek vs Wars fighters would suffer worse than the capital ships.
Wars fighters are somewhat stronger than Trek fighters, and the Trek fighters can't use FTL attacks effectively on moving targets.
(I believe that the only chance Trek ships have against Wars capital ships would be "Warp Strafing", where they launch torpedoes at FTL speeds, and the enemy can't see them until they've gone past)

jimbob · #7 November 27th, 2001, 12:13 AM

Well, here's my .026 (Cdn$)

It appears that balance play is going to be a problem... at least initially. However, it seems to me that each of the sci-fi realms is looking at 'empires' at different stages of development. By putting the realms together we need to have a "multi-era" view.

Bab 5 - initial era (growing). Several hyper advanced aliens do have better tech, but not by much. Only a few of the empires have peaked, the rest are still 'coming into their own.'

Star Trek - intermediate era (vigorous). Rising empires are in great conflict due to tremendous growth. The tech levels are starting to peak, but the empires have not become static... yet.

Star Wars - late era (decay). The great republic/empire has peaked in maturation, has become static, and has started into decay.

So what? Well, I think that the relative strength or weakness that appears to be a problem is actually due to us comparing empires that are mostly at tech level 2 to empires mostly at tech level 10. We simply need to "fill in" the lost eras for each genre.

i.e.
Bab 5 - add the more powerful top end techs for when they reach the middle to end game. Maybe they should never get shields, but that's okay, really strong hulls and armor can be developed.

Star Trek - develop more fully the early techs (lucky for us, Enterprise should help) and the extremely late techs. Races from this realm will have the advantage of highly manouverable capital ships (special: dilithium crystals), their weakness will be the absolute lack of fighters (except perhaps the dominion)and relatively slow non-combat speed.

Star Wars - develop more fully the very early techs. I don't think that the SW techs are really all that advanced, I think that much of the 'late era' stuff we see in the SW movies is due to specialized development of a few key technology branches. That is to say, their movement rates are extremely high, but their combat movement is not nearly as high as the Star Trek ships. They have developed excellent fighters, but personally I don't think the turbo-lasers are nearly as powerful as say photon torpedoes and phasers(IMHO). The only time we see missles fired is from fighters at incredibly short range (that is, they have no capital ship missles).

Finally, I think it is important to critically define the ships by relative size, not by the names given to them by the genre. The Star'Destroyers' are late empire ships... they are 1400+ metres in length which is slightly bigger than the Enterprise from Next Gen (intermediate era). Both should be defined as 'battle cruisers' because of their absolute size... this lets players compare apples to apples.

-jimbob