How would you handle info propagation in a tabletop game where the board represents an entire solar system? Ships would be moving at fairly high c fractions, and light's going to take, say, half a dozen hours to reach between starting positions.
The closer the ships get the more lethal the timing becomes. While ships would have a much more current idea of the other ship's position, they also have less time to react to it.
I've been thinking about stuff like SW:Armada's command stack, but this is something with significantly more advance planning, which makes hidden-dial stuff seem clunky due to the amounts needed.
Probably limited to 1 ship per player but potentially more than 2 players. Having one person flying multiple ships breaks the information control since one ship could be acting on information it hasn't received yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6LiVJkwyA
>>48095777
maybe a card based system, each turn a player adds a card that indicates an action they've taken but face down - time lag is indicated by how many cards are placed face down before the players can turn over the first cards they recieved.
Maneuvers would be fairly simple things like "accelerate" "decelerate", "turn towards/away" and attacks like "fire laser" (which would be nullified by the other playing having done an accelerate/decelerate or turn command between the one player putting down the attack card and the other player picking it up) "fire missile" (which would require an initial "firing" card to be handed over, then a number of turns later a "hit" card being added to the pile when the missile will have been able to cross the gap between the two ships and which can be countered by various "defensive" measures like chaff/countermeasure devices or point defense systems, various missiles of various "strength" need more or less defensive measures to neutralise them, but at the cost of maybe not being able to do a maneuver that would nullify a laser attack)
might need each player to keep their own personal battle maps of what they're been told and what they've done (which would be easier in an electronic format obviously).
>>48098971
Cards, yeah, cards get the feel I think. Something like:
>players play a number of cards equivalent to 'delay' (which is just a range-band check for the sake of abstraction)
>players simultaneously reveal the oldest card and execute it ("this happened 9 hours ago")
What happens when the delay changes? Players would have to be able to react to that by changing future cards, but essentially none of those cards have actually happened /from the other player's POV/ until a card has executed. I jump to 'return all cards and play a number equal to new delay', but doesn't that
Lasers are the primary weapon (since they're the only thing that consistently moves faster than ships). Missiles are more for taking out things like space stations that move on predictable tracks (I say move, but to a pair of ships at .5 to .9 lightspeed they're effectively stationary and don't need a way to be moved).
cont.
>>48100331
Fuck, my brain isn't handling lasers. The info (card) that they've fired AND the beam are going to be arriving at the same time, so it's impossible to react TO the laser, only pre-empt it because the ship firing is firing at a target position X hours old.
I think 'Fire Laser' would have to be "Fire Laser: last known target position plus X V/vector change". You'd have to play laser cards equivalent to the current delay (but somehow not display these to opponent since they won't know it's fired until the beam closes?)
point-defense is kinda useless against lasers, and if you shatter a high-v missile it's just going to keep coming as flak.
Chaff is weird but good. Essentially it 'fakes' a ship pattern but doesn't actually change V or vector, just keeps moving in the vector it's launched (with a rough v approximation based on how much is imparted from the ship). Chaff has a range where it can be distinguished as chaff and not a ship, but a good player should be able to figure it out earlier than that if they can figure out the ship they're facing (depending on the ship, turn rates and velocity change rates are going to vary a bit, so if they figure out what ship they're facing and the chaff pulls something that ship can't, that's pretty much an immediate indicator what's chaff pattern and what's ship).
You may want to consider having a physical mat with different areas for each turn, so people put down a card facedown in the area for that turn and then keep track of when it will become visible.
Each player would have to handle that themselves, so depending on how much you trust the players you may have to add a rule for "if you don't announce it on time it doesn't happen."
>>48104026
I'm thinking about a hex mat for easy system-object setup (ships ignore the genes, though they /could/ be used for laser targeting), having defined card areas on the edges is easy enough.
It shouldn't need a huge area, maybe 3'x3' mat with the center 2x2 as playing area, so 4-player max which dovetails nicely with my current faction-count.
Card layout would mainly just be a row, with the order of placement determining reveal, so player trust isn't really an issue (although some things like repair actions aren't going to show up in a ship's pattern obviously and so won't get revealed, but neither will lasers until they reach so there's a bit of intentional blindness there).
In a basic 2-player scenario both ships will be dropping into the system from jump, with the exact turn being 'bid' by cards, which allows a ship that jumps in early some time to get the lay of the system, but the ship that jumps in after gets to see the first ship's pattern for those few turns.
>>48105119
*hexes, not genes, damned phone
Having lasers target a grid coord and resolve however many turns ahead is as simple as having sets of A-Z/0-26 tokens that go facedown on the laser cards. Plus side, they can pull triple-duty on the V/vector change cards, which makes it hard to guess a card just because tokens.
>>48105119
>although some things like repair actions aren't going to show up in a ship's pattern obviously and so won't get revealed
How are you going to handle that? If someone spends their turn doing something, the other players are going to want to know about it (at least eventually).
>ships ignore the hexes, though they /could/ be used for laser targeting
How are you going to handle ship movement if not by hexes? I can think of a few possible ways to do it but if you're going to have a hex grid present anyway none of the ones I can think of are better than just using the grid.
>Card layout would mainly just be a row
If you aren't doing this already, consider making it so that the spaces for the action cards explicitly wrap around, so that people don't need to shift all their cards over to the side every X turns, they can just start placing new cards on the left end when they run out of space on the right.
How are you going to handle range, incidentally? If two ships are pretty close together then they should probably reveal their actions to each other after a much shorter delay than if they're on opposite sides of the map, but if you're allowing for the possibility of more than two players someone could be far away while the other two are right next to each other.
>>48105643
>How are you going to handle range, incidentally
It just occurred to me that you could theoretically have something where the two really close players get to see each others' cards a turn or two before they're flipped, though that's not a super elegant mechanic.
In any event I'm going to bed. If your thread is still here in the morning I'll probably have something new to say by then.
>>48098971
The lag via cards makes most sense if both players are commanders in some place equidistant from the two ships. Which is a bit weird.
And it definitely doesn't work for any more than one ship aside.
>>48100429
>high c missiles
If you have warships at .5-.9c you have the power sources for powerful enough lasers to vapourise missiles. Heat dissipation is a problem, since there's not really any way better tech can help that.
I like the idea of ejectible coolants a la Mass Effect 1.
>>48107700
>The lag via cards makes most sense if both players are commanders in some place equidistant from the two ships. Which is a bit weird.
that'd only be true if the number of cards that are placed faced down before the other player could turn them over was kept constant throughout the game - if two players both turn towards each other and accelerate the lag would reduce and in turn so would the number of cards that are face - once both become aware of the mutual acceleration towards each other both players would be allowed to turn over the next card without a proper "turn" happening and continue with the lag reduced by one card.
Similarly, if both accelerate away from each other, they both place their next action down but neither is allowed to flip over a card before the next full turn happens and the game continues with the additional card worth of lag.
The only other way of doing "fog of war" like this is to have a referee ala Krieg!, who keeps track of each player's actions on a master map, and then informs players what they're currently able to see on the individual players' maps.
>>48105643
>How are you going to handle that? If someone spends their turn doing something, the other players are going to want to know about it (at least eventually).
Hidden actions remain facedown (which is info that other players can be aware of), even if a ship appears to do nothing certain things can be assumed. Considering that games take place over fairly short timeframes, repair capacity is limited and varies from ship to ship (this can be represented by how many of a given card each ship's deck has. Action cards get discarded after revealed use, representing capacitor drain, how many crew the ship can spare for repair attempts, etc). Repair is limited as fuck under acceleration and vector changes anyway
>How are you going to handle ship movement if not by hexes? I can think of a few possible ways to do it but if you're going to have a hex grid present anyway none of the ones I can think of are better than just using the grid.
Round bases for ships, with concave-end templates. Each base works like a simple protractor.
>If you aren't doing this already, consider making it so that the spaces for the action cards explicitly wrap around, so that people don't need to shift all their cards over to the side every X turns, they can just start placing new cards on the left end when they run out of space on the right.
Wraparound sounds good. I've been thinking about actions as a separate row from movement, since movement /always/ happens unless a ship brakes entirely (which is generally not smart).
>How are you going to handle range, incidentally? If two ships are pretty close together then they should probably reveal their actions to each other after a much shorter delay than if they're on opposite sides of the map, but if you're allowing for the possibility of more than two players someone could be far away while the other two are right next to each other.
Simple ruler. Number of cards played changes with delay. More than 2 ships gets a bit tricky
cont.
>>48107700
>I like the idea of ejectible coolants a la Mass Effect 1.
Minor nitpick, but the ejectible ones were ME 2 and 3, if you're referring to the thermal clips your handheld weapons use. Though, OP, something like that could work pretty well, depending on your overall design (this ship carries X spare heatsinks / coolant barrels / whatever and can eject one and replace it to massively drop temperature, but after using all those up you have to wait for things to cool down the old fashioned way).
You could probably also make missiles that travel at pretty high fractions of c, or that get kinda close to the enemy ship and fire off a bunch of little missiles that spiral or some shit. There are ways of getting missiles past laser defenses, and OP just needs to pick one (or handwave it, depending on how far he plans on going into the science).
>>48112154
>More than 2 ships gets a bit tricky
Yeah. You could have a referee like that other anon says, or you could let players whose ships are close together see facedown cards the other has placed a few turns early. Both are workable, but neither is very elegant.
>>48112154
Fuck, it'd almost be simpler to have a Battleship-style set for each player and no table.
>>48107700
See >>48111354
>If you have warships at .5-.9c you have the power sources for powerful enough lasers to vapourise missiles. Heat dissipation is a problem, since there's not really any way better tech can help that.
Missiles are more for 'stationary' targets anyway. I'm actually not sure how heat gets handled in this setting, it may have to be abstracted out.
>>48111354
Yep, scaling delay directly to reactions-possible eliminates out-of-ship experiences~
Once it gets into referees and such my way of thinking is that it might as well be a videogame, referee is relatively boring.
Unless maybe they play the system's stations/etc but then they're locked into the info control just as much as the captains and wouldn't effectively be able to referee.
>>48112500
Missiles go pretty fast (they're adding ship v to their own), they're just not as fast as lasers.
Most of this stuff is a mechanical abstraction of C.J. Cherryh's Union-Alliance setting, which oddly doesn't really deal with heat at all (the books are almost entirely first-person so anything a POV character's not aware of is just not there).
