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Wednesday, September 08, 2010

A Game Design Observation: Look at the Whole

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

One of those other little things about game design.

You cannot simply add something to the game because you thought of it. An example (and this is not in any way meant as disrespectful to the proposers, it is intended only as an example) is the recent proposal of a planetary defense photon-armed fighter.

The rules for photon fighters are pretty well established in the game system, so it is not hard to say "so many damage points, so much speed, so and so dogfight rating, and etc.". Everyone knows how that works (well, if they play with fighters). And the game system already covers what you need to do about arming the fighters.

However, while the game system covers what you need to do to arm the fighters, you still have to look at the systems to do so. Photon torpedoes cannot be armed by the fighters themselves, the base (or carrier) has to arm them and then deck crews load them onto the fighter. All well and good, right? Not quite. First, photons require warp energy to arm, and second they require a minimum of two points of warp energy on each of two consecutive turns.

That becomes the problem.

In order to have your photon-armed fighters you need to have energy to arm the photons. Your typical fighter ground base has only one or two points of power. Even if you convert the cargo entirely to power (allowed on fighter bases that operate fighters armed only with direct-fire weapons), that only gives your base (with its twelve photon-armed fighters) six points of power (and generally means your fighters will not have drones, not even type-VIs, because you have given up the cargo storage for them to have the power). Enough (if the base does nothing else requiring power) to arm just three fighters every two turns. And the base has things it wants to do (like power its shields, or have power to lend ECCM or ECM to the fighters).

So you have to find other sources of power, and it all has to be "warp" power (well, at least the power you will use to arm the photons does), which means attaching the base to a power grid, but the only bases that NORMALLY have warp power are small ground based defense photon stations, and they need their power for their own weapons.

Alternatively, you have to design a special base that is larger and has the power to meet the demands of the fighters.

The point to all this is that you cannot simply propose a fighter armed with a photon torpedo for planetary defense. You have to consider the forest, not just the tree. (Or as I would say, the logistics needed to support the fighter.)

Operationally, if the fighter stays in the atmosphere, and there is no EW fighter at all (so that you can have all twelve armed with photons), that means they all need to always have EW pods (and you want to invest in a few spares for crippled fighters that drop them and are repaired). Because if they do not, well the fighters have two points of ECCM, and the base has no power to lend them (see previous comments about the base's power situation), and they need to have at least four points of ECCM (so that typically an attacking ship will only have a one shift against the photons), because the atmosphere will have both direct effect on the warheads of the photons (25 percent reduction) and electronic warfare effect (the target gains one point of ECM which means it can pretty much always guarantee a one shift when the photons fire).

So, when you propose something, consider why it has not existed before (the above pretty much tells you why there are no A-10s on Federation Planetary Defense Fighter Ground Bases). You should think of everything that goes into operating the system (in this case the fighter) you want to add. There may be more "costs" associated with it than you first thought.