Star Wars scenario... no, seriously!

[Boco]

In my experience, it's just like MGE: uses diplomat slot in @UNITS regardless of role.

[Alinestra Covelia]

What is this ship? I just realized I have it in my units file and it looks cool and all, but I have no idea what it is.

[typhoon]

Looks like a Republic Gunship from Attack of the Clones

[Alinestra Covelia]

Ahhh, Attack of the Clones... the only one of the movies that I have not actually seen yet. I'll have to make sure I get round to it after taking a shower and maybe retiring from the workforce at age 80.

[Arthedain]

A gunship, yes. From the Clone Wars. Which would probably make up for the greatest SW scen of them all IMHO.

[Alinestra Covelia]

We're getting closer. I'm almost done with Describe.txt and Rules.txt - I will spend more time tweaking the stats. At the moment, I'm going to have to get a type of cycle going on, where:

Land units defend very well against airplanes.

Land units defend so-so against ships.

Land units defend not so well against other land units (probably with marine capability).


Airplanes attack ships fairly well.

Ships generally cannot attack airplanes, so they have to carry their own airplanes to defend themselves with.

Some airplanes are purely there to defend against others. These fighter planes will NOT have the typical Civ2 "Attack multiple times in one turn" power. Even the fighter planes will only be able to attack once per turn.

Ship-to-ship battles are possible but you're more likely to see airplane-to-ship battles.

One conceptual problem I'm running into is the relevance of seapower. If you can get a cheap ground unit transport ship, plus a cheap air unit transport ship, then why not just make loads of those? Why bother building an Imperial Star Destroyer (strong, expensive, carries loads of fighters) when you could build several Nebulon B Frigates (somewhat weaker, carries fewer fighters)?

I still have to think this out.

The Rebels will not have the clearly tiered starfighter progression that the Imperials have. Their X Wing, A Wing, and B Wing will have different mission profiles and different utility. The Y Wings will arguably go obsolete however once they discover the B Wing.

The Empire has the Missile Gunboat and it's going to be seriously kickass, but very expensive.

I'm still ironing out the numbers. I can say at this early point that the scenario will feature numerous bilingual inconsistencies (UK English vs. US English, thanks to the gestalt nature of its creator) as well as a fair bit of juvenile humor in the supporting texts (would you expect any different?).

[Alinestra Covelia]

Another thing I was thinking about:

Planetary shields. These would obviously be Coastal Defenses.

But the planets in Star Wars didn't just build and forget the planetary shields. They had to actively switch them on when battle was iminent, and switch them off when the coast was clear, because the shields cost so much to maintain.

I was wondering if it would be possible to put a hideously high maintenance cost on Planetary Shields, say 16 to 160 gold per turn or something, with a relatively low build cost - say about 60 shields. That way, you could rushbuild shields when the enemy's ships appeared, and the shields would go online the next turn, doubling your defences against ship bombardments. However, this would drain your economy so you'd need to deal with this judiciously - rather than just shieldproofing all your planets.

Also, this would explain why Admiral Ozzel's exit from hyperspeeds too close to the planet was so disastrous. If he'd ended the fleet's movement turn just beyond the planet's two-square visibility radius, the planet would have had no reasons at all to raise their shields. He could then have attacked next turn with ships at almost-full movement, with no shields. Instead, Vader realized the shields meant that the defenders would have 100% bonus to defense against bombardment, so he decided to send AT-ATs instead.

Clever Darth Vader! You can see he plays Civ2...

(Bugger. I just realized that this would screw up another game mechanic. I had hoped to use Elok's idea of "setting" some cities to coastal and others to non coastal, to simulate how some planets are arbitrarily unsuitable for shipbuilding... this would also rob those poor planets of any hope of an orbital defense shield. Blast.)

So what do you all think? Is this workable? How would the AI handle it?

[our_man]

I believe civcity can disable the building of coastal units while still allowing coastal improvements to be created. Not 100% positive, so check it.

[Arthedain]

That is 100% correct our_man. So it could work after all Alinestra.

[Alinestra Covelia]

God DAMN but I hate Kevin J Anderson. I'm sorry to keep on at this but the more I write this scenario the more I'm reminded of the Star Wars Expanded Universe and the crap he wrote for it. (Including one series where he tries pathetically to write about Captain Pellaeon, everybody's favorite Zahn support character... Jesus wept.)

It's even worse that you go online and every website you see there's rabid fanboys and/or editors with a stake who are reviewing his books with glowing terms. When even theforce.net gives his books the same rating they gave Zahn's excellent Thrawn trilogy, you start to wonder about whether this whole "cosmic justice" thing is even working anymore.

Well, I'm going to put something in this scenario that will help stick an intruding thumb on the karmic scales. Time to help set the balance straight...

[Sarsstock]

Its amazing to see the pasionate views and opinions Star Wars can bring out of people. Having never read anything by Kevin J Anderson, especially his Star Wars material I can't say I know his work first hand but I'll definatly take your word for it.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Brief update. I decided to go back and try to optimize the tech tree - free up more slots to allow the other civs to have something of a tech dimension. That proved to be fairly hard work (involving lots of post it notes and a dry erase board) but now I'm done.

The core tech tree is a little tighter, the Imperials still have a vast and sprawling tech tree, the Rebs have a tech tree about half that size, and I think I'm going to make abbreviated tech trees about two or three tiers deep.

So far:
Core tech tree (six tiers deep, about 3 to 4 per tier, plus a lone 7th tier tech).
Imp tech tree (about 7 tiers deep, about 2 per tier).
Rebel tech tree (about 5 tiers deep, about 2 per tier).
Neutral, OR, and Separatists share a tech tree and unit progression. Separatists get extra ground and starfighter units that the other two don't. (Combat droids.)
Hutt and Extragalactics don't emphasize research much, but will need to do some in order to get spacefaring vehicles. They have a small tech tree of maybe only 4 techs or so.

Distribution of happiness improvements:

The Empire gets Temples, Mysticism, and the Oracle, so that's their happiness fix. The Oracle stops working if Palpatine dies. Total of 4 happies.

The Rebels don't need Cathedrals, since they get Michelangelo's and Bach's. Anybody know how Bach's works, specifically? What counts as a continent? Also, the Rebels will have Theology and Communism, both techs that affect Cathedrals. Do you know whether these techs affect the Wonder's power? Total of roughly 6 happies.

OR and Neutrals build Cathedrals with no bonus. They do get theology, so Cathedrals help a fair bit. Total of 5 happies.

The Hutt, Separatists, and Extragalactics build Colosseums plus Electronics tech, for a total of 4 happies.

That's about it for now. I'm going on a week-long cruise with the family so I probably won't post anything for a while yet. But hopefully during my jobless summertime, we'll see a product yet!

[N35t0r]

IIRC, you can ignore all that 'continent' stuff in the wonder descriptions. They affect all your cities, irregardless of where they are.


[edit:]
Actually, that was in MGE... I don't know if it was 'fixed' in ToT, and I don't know how it affects multiple maps.

[Patine]

Although I haven't yet read and digested everything on this thread yet, I think the idea of some good Star Wars scens is a great one; there were a few early on, but none for a while. I'll post again when I have read this thread through and know how to respond. Here's some Sith lightning to you, Allie!

[Alinestra Covelia]

Ahhh, yes. I was wondering how long any Star Wars thread could exist before our pal Patine showed up!

The limitations of this scenario are that it will be extremely easy to win as a single player. The computer AI does not deal well with ship movement, and furthermore the role of starfighters will probably puzzle it.

(At current playtesting it seems that ship to ship battle is not particularly prevalent. It's much easier to carry a load of starfighters and spew them out to form a perimeter at the end of each turn at sea.)

I'm going to make almost all ships have a trireme sinkage chance, with only the really big capital ships immune. This will make the Empire's starships considerably more powerful (Grand Admiral Thrawn negates the chance of losing your ships at sea). Also, the tech tree has been carefully worked so everybody can research the two techs that halve the chance of being lost at sea. (I think they were Seafaring and Navigation?)

Either way, I'm going to make the scenario for the galaxy sized conflict, and then if I have time I might scale it down for smaller things like the Thrawn/Zaarin campaign.