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Here is a partial list of what is being changed.

Trade- This will go to more of the SW sim model. Trade is just a function of the size and openness of your economy. You either get it or you don't based on your overall access to markets.

Ship Maint.- This is now a function of the combat power of the ship rather than the mass. A blended system was getting complicated and this gets us close enough to people paying for capability.

Ship Scrapping- Ships now have a scrap value, not much but its there.

Ship building- These expenses are now cut in two. One is the cost to build which is driven by combat power and years the line has operated. The other is the material cost which is still driven by mass. This will create a situation where building scads of smaller ships is no longer the most efficient manner to do things, since each ship also has a fixed cost for warp drive components. Where before building 10 of the 350kt destroyers almost always yielded more combat power than building one heavy battlecruiser that cost equation will be flipped a bit and bigger ships will be more efficient at turning cost into combat power, while little ships are more efficient at turning mass into combat power.

R&D- Speed is now a function of xC rather than warp, so a bit more work for the players. But this will get people paying a fixed cost for fixed rate of speed increase, rather than a fixed cost for a speed chart that increases exponentially. I will incorporate FC into ship classification somehow so you have to use it.

Refit Rules- These rules will be changed to have a cost for refitting ships. They will work as follows.

Cost to Refit = (Desired Combat Rating-Current Rating)*(Combat Rating Increase/Original Combat rating)

This will have the effect of making things exponentially more expensive when you more than double the rating of an existing ship, which I think is realistic. In truth there is only so much capacity for improvement in a given design. This should reduce drastically the rate at which a power can recapitalize its fleet.

Cloaks- Gone/no longer effective. This is a pure game management decision. It is simply too hard to work with cloaked ships.

Border fleets- You will have the 11 fleets you can use but you can now designate a fleet as a border fleet. This will spread those ships evenly across that border. Note this is not an effective defense against a major attack but is an effective trip wire, plus is necessary to secure your borders from basic nonsense like pirates and other such things. Unless the player provides a more detailed plan the ships will just spread equally across the border and probably wont' be able to stop any determined thrust. To figure the time it would take to re-constitute those ships into one fleet just figure the travel time to the concentration point you select (mid-point or somewhere in front or behind) for both ends of the line. Whatever number is the greatest is how long it takes to assemble that border guard into a concentrated fleet ready for action. This should solve a lot of basic problems that came from people not really securing their borders.

Common Market- I am trying, no promises, to create a common market where one can buy or sell things like Anti-Matter and Ore. This should expand economic options.

Economic growth revamping- I am going to redo that model if I can into something different than the invest here to get X return model.

Empire goals- There will be some level of a goal system to measure how satisfied your people are with you. The basic working model in my head goes like this.

Critical Goals- Things that are likely related to holding onto at least the status of your empire as it exist at the outset. Failure here means election losses or coups are likely to rectify the situation.
Regular Goals- Things like controlling 50% of the systems in a disputed area of space, basically things that if you achieve your popularity goes up and that if you fail at it drops.
Grand Goals- Things like the Klingons having a grand goal of occupying Romulus, or the Romulans Eart or the Federation to see a majority of the galaxy under democratic government. Goals that if you reach them you are basically above questioning as a leader and once hit you can do what you want for a good while.

This is really a way for your people/power structure to communicate with you. You can look to influence these goals by making speeches and accomplishing other things that might diminish or change the path of things for your empire. The goal is really to give things a bit more structure. The Ferengi will know they have to trade. There will be inherent tension between certain powers because they have competing goals in a region that are not resolvable diplomatically (ie we can't just split the baby every time and have the folks back home be happy). Some/many of these can be player driven but some will be race driven. The GM and player can discuss them at the outset and as they change but everyone will have some goals in every category.

Additional Changes

Weapons facing has been removed on ships. It was a pain in the ass for me to manage and did not really add much to battles in my view. You can still get a bonus for flank or rear attacks however.

The impact of torps at closer ranges will be further reduced to encourage more beam weapons and more balanced ships and fleets.

BTW, this is open for input from anyone. Will produce a formal rules set once the sheet is done.

What about exploration? Will there be any advantage in designing and building a pure science ship over just sending all of your outdated crap out to explore?

Tsukiyumi wrote:What about exploration? Will there be any advantage in designing and building a pure science ship over just sending all of your outdated crap out to explore?

Good question, let me think about that one. Exploration was never really much in the sim but it needs to be more important, on that I agree.

Economic Changes

There are now two levels on which you can customize your society. The macro-level is the government type area. This is familiar to most so I won't go back over it. The second is the individual policies of your government. This includes things such as trade policy, free speech policy, education policy, economic investment policy and the like. You make simply pull down decisions and this dictates how your society grows economically as well as impacting your growth population wise. Many of these won't move in the manner you might thing, and none do all good things. More economically open societies are going to be more open to short 2 to 4 year downturns in their economy simply because of the way markets work. An isolated command economy might avoid these small downturns but is at greater risk of less frequent but more intense collapse of service type situation as we saw in the USSR and other such economic models.

You won't have to negotiate trade any longer either. It will all be on independent traders but the volume of imports you get will be dictated by your tariff policies and the overall size of your economy.

On the same note more open societies are open to more unrest on minor issues. People may get pissed about an economic policy change or a war or so on if you have a free media and highly educated populace. Conversely if you have a nation of dullards and you own the media and all the property they are unlikely to trouble you much regarding minor crap, though you are more likely to see a fullscale uprising if you go way wrong as they don't have a productive way to express themselves. For the players this is 5 pull down tabs at the moment and a cell to input tariff rate.

There are also going to be resource markets to even things out a bit in that field. You will always be able to buy or sell and unlimited amount of ore or anti-matter on the open market. However the price you can get for it will vary based on the overall supply vs demand in the universe at that time. There is a model for this that will encompass the various powers in the sim and should react to things like supply losses and increased demand in time of war as well as large construction projects like major star-bases and large fleet buildups.

Ok, I think I am about done with the new sheet. I plan to close it all up tonight and hopefully transpose the starting conditions for each empire over. Then I have to take the information in creates and dump it into the global economic model I have. Once I can give thing a quick check I will send some sheets out to a few players for a quick double check on their parts and then we can finalize who is playing where.

The economic model expanded over the weekend, though for the player this will be 7 input tabs that let you customize how your economy works. It lets you decide who is going to own and run things within your empire. This has different effects in various areas from population growth to GDP growth to trade capacity to internal resource usage. This will increase the variety of ways you interact with your people and the economy.

Globally the system will automatically allocate trade based on player inputs. You can still make specific deals to sell this for that and so on. But you will also have access to a universal resource system and global trade market unless you are under and effective blockade. Additionally the system will, if your policies allow for it, turn your excess industrial and shipyard capacity into goods sold on the open markets. This is at a cost of using anti-matter and ore for producing the goods.

Your GDP's will be higher, but the game will also now assess you a cost for internal needs and basic security based on player inputs. Additionally resources demands should be significantly greater as you now will need them as inputs into your basic economy.

Almost all of this will go on behind the wall for the player. Once you set your policies you actually never need to view the economics sheet again to complete a given turn. It will just keep plugging away without input. There will actually be less inputs for the player as much of the trade function has gone away. You will see different numbers in largely the same places on the resource sheet.

So for the player not much is different. The engine behind things has changed fundamentally though and will function quite differently than the previous model.

Shipyard Changes

The economics behind your shipyards will change in this version. Each shipyard is still limited by the tonnage it can build but the tonnage being built will be calculated differently. Previously the system calaculated a number for the finished tons of starship. This did not really accurately reflect the increased labor necessary on new ships. Now you will pay for the totally tonnage under construction on all lines at all times.

This comes into play heavily on new ship types as they are very inefficient to build until you get them squared away. For example building 2 Sovereign class ships per year in year 1 of production at a yard will necessitate 35,000 KT's of labor be done due to production inefficiencies. Essentially you are doing what companies like Boeing have had to do with the 787. Extra workers who should be working on ships 3-10 are diverted into getting the two done for this year until all the kinks are ironed out. As you move down the production cycle by year 5 you only need 7,000 KT's of labor to get the same work done as production is far more efficient.

This will necessitate better planning on when to replace certain ship lines. No matter how much money one has laying around bringing a new, big and powerful ship into service in numbers will take some time under this change.