suggestion box - CW edition

[ixnay]

I don't mean this as any sort of personal offense to anyone, but if you need an error checker, then create one. I'm not a programmer, so I couldn't pursue it that way, but I ended up creating a spreadsheet in excel to verify my production resource needs, including PRO and AUT/USK. I also have one to verify adequate CNW and TPT capacity. Sure, it takes a while to enter the data, and for some reason, I haven't been able to get the resource needs exact, but it puts me in the ballpark.

I am on the fence. I see the fog-of-war stuff. It should be relatively straightforward to check ones orders. And player errors are made in just about every PBM game I have ever heard of. But if, in this case, the player is prone to such errors that they don't want to play, then it's not good. Maybe SOME of the error-checking suggestions could be implemented, or maybe we should just share some good spreadsheet tools.

1 - 1 one week turn around would knock me out of the game due to my amount of time commuting.
2 - I had this feeling too. I don't regret my start, but certainly see ways to improve it in hindsight. I'd love another test game.
3 - They do seem to be going up much faster than in the previous playtest game, but I don't know about going exponential.
4 - Challenging enough without adding that in. Interesting idea, but we're not creating a simulation. Also, as FCT TLs go up, groups may get smaller just due to a lack of need to so much output.
5 - Colonizing is already slow enough. Don't want to make it slower.
6 - Heavily disagree here. If anything, hydroponic farms are a form of LFS, as they add oxygen and humidity to the environment. Again, this isn't meant to be a simulator. If I were to suggest anything, it would be the opposite - eliminate FOOD and FRM and the 5-turn cache. But, that would be changing the basic game mechanics, which I disagree with doing, so I don't suggest it. FOOD and CNGD do serve as the driver for malcontents and rebels, police and SAGs, and I haven't thought of a better way to do that.
7 - there is. You could use STR-2 instead of LTS/SLS, and you could pack your ship with FOOD.
8 - fighters can exist, but the combat formulae don't permit them to be effective.
9 - It's a great game, do we need to change it?

1 - wouldn't want anyone to drop the game!

2 - the main problem with restarting would be for those people who are actually happy with their positions. we have all invested hours into this game, so it might suck for them to restart. anyone else want to chime in here?

3 - the high tech expansion might be mitigated by the fact that upgrading from Energy Weapon 59 to Energy Weapon 60 doesn't significantly upgrade performance (36000 damage up from 34810 damage - 3.4% bump), while costing 59M research.

4 - I could have sworn that in some earlier version of EC factory groups did get a quantity discount. Anyway, this wouldn't add much complexity -- it would just add incentive to dedicate production lines, and cost to retool.

5 - I hear you. But expounding on this, instead of making ship hulls take longer to build, what about making different products take different lengths of time to build? For instance, Consumer Goods could be produced in one turn, while hyper engines could require 8 turns. This would probably cause so much recoding as to be impossible, but I thought I'd throw it out there. Another option -- what about making ship hulls static, once built? So that it's expensive or impossible to expand or shrink a ship?

6 - Farms presumably include livestock, which causes pollution. And everything needs clean water, which can be considered part of LFS. As for removing food/farming from the game, sure, that's possible. Basically you could abstract away all the needs of your population, and just have to pay maybe a maintenance cost in terms of "resource points" to maintain ship/colonies, population, etc. But that might just make this game like most other space empire games, and diminish the awesome supply-chain planning and tactile sci-fi feel of CW.

7 - Yes. You can simulate armor by using STUN and FOOD. To me, that's a hack. I'd rather see an armor option. With tech levels.

8 - Fighters? The size and scope of production goods that go into a space-drive, a weapons rack, life support, etc, looks more like corvettes or gunboats than fighters. Plus the whole food thing. I just always like using fighters in other games, and think it would add a new weapons platform dimension to the two we have (beams and missiles).

9 - I will concede that we don't need to make CW more like other games. So no, we don't necessarily need cloaking devices. But each new game seems to have a few new items or rules-tweaks, so it's worth brainstorming. Beamers and Robot Probes have added to the game, in my humble opinion, and they are new.