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Author Topic: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe  (Read 11626 times)

E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #120 on: September 18, 2022, 09:46:08 am »

I agree there's little point in continuing, though I'd point out at this point I was raising a Corps a turn. It wasn't sustainable, certainly, and I didn't have the machinery to put them all in heavy battledress, but about 10 turns too late I put my recruitment on a proper wartime footing and finally fixed my earlier problems where I was running out of recruits every turn. I also should have set up a seperate SHQ in Gapwhite 2 turns earlier than I did - if I'd've even done it the turn before my final one, it would have made capturing the city a bloody affair instead of an easy mop-up operation overrunning exhausted and depleted units.

I also do wonder how quad-laser tanks would have fared on offense against your big infantry formations, but it was too little, too late at this point. Probably my best bet would have been making low-armor nuke RPG units that I could crank out en mass, but even then I'd sold off too much of my rad reserves for that to be sustainable either. The credit disparity from water sales hurt me more than I appreciated in the end.

There's a lot of things I could say, but for now I'll post my AAR and map gif. The AAR started out as a narrative and quickly degenerated into notes that could be turned into a narrative but never were. Even so, it's 8.3k words so I'll post a pastebin link for it.


The history of the rise and fall of the Republic of Ferrohead:
https://pastebin.com/rYhaVFNC
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #121 on: September 18, 2022, 10:04:48 am »

What did you use for the gif? I had tried some first-found online services, but they don't like more than 100MB of data, and I didn't feel like resizing every image first.
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E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #122 on: September 18, 2022, 10:11:22 am »

I did a batch-resize in IrfanView to cut the size of all of them in half, then a batch-convert to make them all into gifs, and that turned 136 maps into 26.6mb, which the first search result I saw (ezgif.com) handled admirably and further reduced to ~12mb with some lossy gif optimization.
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E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #123 on: September 18, 2022, 01:07:42 pm »

A few general notes:
  • Overall, your pre-game concern that one of us would lose from uneven minor regime distribution was valid. You just plain had more and easier access to expansion than I did. I'm not sure there's really any good way to fix this short of having an extremely flat planet that's totally covered with minors or any other sort of planet that basically has no minors.
  • Broadly, I feel comfortable in saying that I did better with the fiddly bureaucratic peacetime stuff, but you did better with the wartime stuff - and your bigger economy canceled most of my efficiency edge.
  • To the degree that it didn't, I made a few catastrophic mistakes that set me back dramatically. I mentioned the rebellion card I played turn 35-ish that set back my expansion 10 turns. Striving harder for peace early on would have also helped; my closest neighbor was not initially extremely hostile but quickly went to war after a few choices that made them mad. Also, around turn 66 I sold off too much of my food-on-hand and as a result over the next 2 turns 12-20k soldiers (though admittedly probably 2/3s were militia) starved to death. I'm not sure my military morale ever entirely recovered from that, but in any case the strain of replacing those losses right before you crossed into my territory was unquestionably devastating.
  • I should have started researching laser rifles on turn 62 when I first discovered them. Delaying that in favor of fiddly high-tech military advances that I didn't have the heavy industry to exploit was a huge mistake, albeit an extremely thematic one. Broadly, my preference for smaller numbers of advanced troops and slow realization that I needed to counter mass with mass was devastating, though my smaller economy and recruitment pool would have kept me from every truly reaching parity with you.
  • I did a lot less scavenging than you. Not sure that really made a big difference one way or the other, not least b/c I had fewer ruins to scavenge.
  • I've been playing on Easier Logistics for too long, and it really showed. I'm used to logistics networks being a minor concern, and while I mostly kept things under control there were a few large problems that arose due to overestimating my logistics network, including most significantly when I did a recruitment stratagem in my largest city that could have kept you from breaking out of the mountains, but instead I ended the game with ~25k recruits in that zone's inventory because they couldn't get to my SHQ in a reasonable amount of time.
  • Applied tech is hugely important, but also painfully random. I didn't get key infantry refinement tech until it was too late to make a real difference. Your applied tech was easily enough to make your Fist bonuses decisive against my higher-tech troops until your base tech caught up.
  • IDK how you managed to do as well as you did with that terrible Supreme Command Council director you had. Yours looked at least as bad as the one I started with, and I spent the first 2-3 turns getting rid of mine... and I was still starved for PP the whole game despite a high Democracy profile. Not getting rid of my Econ director was also a big mistake; had I gotten Heavy Industry sooner, the additional Heavy Battledress units that would have translated to would have made a very large impact. Having said that, the RNG would have likely been different and I'd probably not have gotten HBd...
  • A big reason I did better with diplomacy than you appears to have been my wonkish insistence on converting protectorates into client states. That reduces the opposition roll for them to join from 3d100 + X to 2d100+X, which is a huge difference.

There's probably some more stuff I could say, but I've forgotten it...
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #124 on: September 18, 2022, 02:16:26 pm »

Good old IrfanView. Each time I get a new system I neglect to install it, but it inevitably proves invaluable.

I did not keep notes as I played, mostly because I had no good idea on how to organise it sensibly. But here's at least my progress with some annotations:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Here's some random observations from looking at both our save files:

It looks like I had a good couple thousand+ headway in industrial capacity, even accounting for the two cities you've lost. It meant I >could< sacrifice some thousands to build the road through the mostly low, but extensive mountains. The late city gains must have hurt you here.

The infantry designs on my side, apart from being somewhat better structurally (much better in case of machineguns - I rolled 123 right off the bat), must have enjoyed the linear techs since much earlier. I went for applied science earlier, and with better budget than I normally would, because the rng gave me the sensei card from the fate pack, and the guy was too good to leave idling. Hence the high unit stats all around.

You seem to have sunk quite a bit of BPs into staff council tasks that I completely ignored. I only founded that council sometime during the final dozen turns or so, and was using them almost purely for stratagems - since I had enough to go around, each turn I'd start by giving my troops attack stratagems, and end it by switching them all to defence.
I don't know, it's possible customising formations and operationalising new ones could have paid off in the long run, but - as with everything else - time proved not to be on your side.

My cabinet was super happy all the time, yours less so. It's the first game I saw them this elated, too. This must have relatively drained some BPs from your council tasks.

I found artillery to be mostly useless unless massed - individual battalions or even a couple did not seem to do much of any damage. This seems to apply to your rockets/missiles too.
But a couple divisions of 300mm howitzers targetting a single hex were enough to punch through even your high-tech, entrenched defences. They were doing the main job in making my breakthroughs. I wonder how it would look like had you invested in numerous counter batteries rather than the battledress infantry.

The planes you've built were effective, but IMO easily countered. Sure, good flak guns are expensive as hell (1000 industry and metal per battalion here), but I only ever needed a few to cover all crucial points. And the shit fighters I built seem to have started to make short work of your better planes. Again, it looks like numbers matter a lot here - 30 planes = meh, 90 = death.

It also looks like I was churning out new SHQs much, much more rapidly. If I'm seeing this right, your final save has 4 brigades (maybe another 4 were lost in the sieges?). I had 20-ish. Around 15 when the fighting started, I think. This focus on manpower would explain the headstart with conquests. Certainly with land area.
What was your bottleneck here? Food, maybe? (I wonder how much the food bonus from meritocracy bootstrapped my army - I never once >had< to build a farm to feed the troops during the game).

The constant offensives were draining my fuel reserves something fierce. This final-turn assault alone resulted in -6k after production. At this rate I'd be looking at the bottom of the barrel in maybe three-four turns. Maybe a bit longer with extra oil drills. You holding the line for that much longer could have resulted in me losing the initiative for the foreseeable future.


And of course the water bonanza did not hurt me (but I don't think it mattered that much in the end).


All in all, it does look like you were caught fighting maybe a dozen turns before you were ready. That such a small delay in catching up can have such large consequences raises questions on how to best balance these matches. I'm thinking, more than two players might be necessary for a balanced game so that diplomacy acts as an equaliser (but then again, that'd be a slooow PBEM).


  • Overall, your pre-game concern that one of us would lose from uneven minor regime distribution was valid. You just plain had more and easier access to expansion than I did. I'm not sure there's really any good way to fix this short of having an extremely flat planet that's totally covered with minors or any other sort of planet that basically has no minors.
I don't know, maybe keeping majors around would have worked better? In that they are a bit harder to take in stride.
  • IDK how you managed to do as well as you did with that terrible Supreme Command Council director you had. Yours looked at least as bad as the one I started with, and I spent the first 2-3 turns getting rid of mine... and I was still starved for PP the whole game despite a high Democracy profile. Not getting rid of my Econ director was also a big mistake; had I gotten Heavy Industry sooner, the additional Heavy Battledress units that would have translated to would have made a very large impact. Having said that, the RNG would have likely been different and I'd probably not have gotten HBd...
I... have completely forgotten how terribad he is. And I was struggling with low PP until the late game. Not least because of me wasting those on unification attempts. Had I realised he's to blame I'd fire him on the spot. I even had a CapV administrator from some scrap card idling as an advisor. And there I was praying for the democracy bonuses to finally trigger for half of the game. Doh.

And I think I didn't want to play propose client because of what I saw as a high chance of critical failure lowering relations and making the whole thing even harder to achieve. And as you may be able to see in the gif, the previous two joined me so quickly that my expectations of success were high. Alas.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2022, 02:21:22 pm by Il Palazzo »
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E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #125 on: September 18, 2022, 03:09:30 pm »

It feels counterintuitive, but you're probably right majors would help. They'd both war with minors (thus preventing diplomatic absorption) and be more of than a speedbump as far as conquest goes. Capturing their capitals intact would be much more of a boon than random minor zones, but you'd also have to sink a lot more resources into doing so.

A big reason I had fewer OHQ was just b/c I relied very heavily on militia to fight minors and marauders. That ultimately was a mistake; the additional level of bonuses from the OHQ CDR would have likely made a significant difference even w/o considering postures. To a certain degree, this was b/c I fell into a trap where constantly replenishing lost troops felt like I wasn't draining my civilian economy b/c I wasn't deploying 5k troops all at once, but I'd've been better off doing so. I put enough effort into replenishing militia forces with modern troops that they could fight effectively, but their leadership was always sub-par.

Another place I suffered was not getting any Mind profiles early on. Given my bureaucratic focus, that hurt me a lot - even the 18FP (!) I spent on Science Outposts gave me little more research bonus than what the first level of Mind would have, and I didn't backfill and get that until... turn 50, maybe? I can't remember for sure, but it was late. I also wasted about 10 turns early on researching a useless civvie tech so as to avoid risking later getting it from a free tech card, but I'd've been better served by letting those points go to discovery and possibly getting Heavy Industry sooner.

And yes, my cabinet hated me. For much of the game I struggled with my Word score or from refusing faction demands to avoid hurting my Word score, and those two factors reduced my popularity repeatedly. There also was just a lot of discord in my cabinet WRT profiles. I ended up going deep into Heart to try to keep people happy, and they still weren't happy. Looking at reports, I also appear to have had a lot of cult problems in this regard; one of them (Mystic?) was regularly harassing leaders with high Egoism scores and that resulted in a lot of lost relation.

You're right about how much I was hurt by industrial lagging, though how much that was hurting me was lost on me first by my struggles to get enough metal and machines, and then once we started fighting by my recruitment shortfall. My lack of industry was also a big reason why I ended the game with a bunch of protectorates/clients to my west but no connection to them - indeed, that was a big reason it took me as long as it did to unify with my southern holdings.

I think the water made more of a difference than might be clear from your POV; it wasn't so much what it let you have as what its absence (and also how much cheaper my sell point seems to have been than yours) caused me to give up to stay solvent. I sold off a lot of stuff I'd rather have not sold, especially food (see the above discussion of mass starvation) but also my nuclear reserves. Had I had more of those, Id've probably fielded A LOT more nuke RPG units in the last few turns - the reason you saw as few of those as you did despite them being fairly effective was mostly a lack of rads.

I'm not sure counterbatteries would have helped much. Your attack bonuses made your artillery brutal while mine was fairly lackluster, although IIRC I had a pretty good structural design for them.

On the subject of structural designs, you definitely seemed to have more luck with that. I spent a lot of time redesigning common models in hopes of getting something passable, and often settling for something in the 90s as the best I could get. I will say that my mechanized artillery design was striking; Improvised Explosive Artillery may be the single worst unit design I've ever rolled...
« Last Edit: September 18, 2022, 03:12:59 pm by E. Albright »
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #126 on: September 18, 2022, 04:01:35 pm »

Oh, I did waste some BP myself unsuccessfully (re)designing a few models. Including mech artillery. But machineguns, and light tanks I started with were excellent.

I'm not sure counterbatteries would have helped much. Your attack bonuses made your artillery brutal while mine was fairly lackluster, although IIRC I had a pretty good structural design for them.
It is my strong perception that it's not the design or bonuses that mattered here, but numbers. It seems to me that the effectiveness of art doesn't scale linearly. IMO there is a breakaway point somewhere around 20 or 30 units, after which you go from softening a few troops, to obliterating all defences. In this view, the counterbatteries that you did have fared poorly because there were pretty much always <5 of them.
Similarly, I believe your planes would cause much more havoc if you invested into one big stack rather than splitting them among different roles.
However, this is but a gut feeling. Needs more testing.


As for the majors - the issue with those is, of course, that they can make the starts >extremely< imbalanced.
The best route of action would be to somehow (is this doable?) have a third party preview the maps so that an approximately equal placement can be found.


What do you think about the starting options we had here? E.g. would you rather we picked higher tech? Lower?
Myself, I liked the tech, but I'm inclined to upping it to 3 zones and 2 armies per zone - maybe that would help equalise the opportunities better.
Also, smaller map for duels like this? Larger? Etc.
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E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #127 on: September 18, 2022, 04:30:52 pm »

FWIW, when I sent in a few large stacks of aircraft they fared poorly, and they were also very taxing on my industrial base. I also made the mistake of going primarily for hard bombers rather than soft. If we'd've kept going, though, the retrograde shorter-range propeller missile-and-rocket wing I had in my capital might have been able to do something, but I'm honestly skeptical. My machines would have been better spent on battledress.

Honestly, I liked the size - it gave us a chance to get to some late tech before we started fighting. We could probably do 3 zones, and 2 per zone would be more forgiving. I also agree with the tech - starting at 5 removes a lot of the randomness, but it also makes minors feel like pushovers.

I think it could work for a third party observer, but it'd be rough - early on, I'd've said my start was as good as yours though definitely wasn't. The main red flag would've been the lake blocking access to half of my frontiers, I suppose - your lake did a better job of letting you skirt it or go over isthmuses to get to the other side. Just bumping things up to three zones would reduce the proportional disparity of access to a couple more zones.

Another thing that might help is taking Survival Stress. That'd mean there would be more but smaller regimes. This could also backfire, though, because there's always the possibility of one person ending up next to farmers & raiders, but the other next to the same chunk of population but in the form of slavers & nomads. I suppose this risk is just as present with more, larger regimes though.
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EuchreJack

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #128 on: September 18, 2022, 06:32:14 pm »

I've heard it mentioned on the Shadow Empire forums that artillery/bombers are basically like dumping resources on your enemy. Theory, both are only sustainable if you exceed your for in resources. What was your actual experience with these?

Surprised that I didn't hear either of you discuss tanks. In my solo games, Tanks are King. I've seen arguments that APCs might be better, but I think tanks are overall more versatile.

How did you two organize your playthrough?

I imagine that with 3+ players, the key would be to set aside one day a week to push out turns, rather than playing one turn every few days. I have generally found that each turn tends to flow into the next, and it would be downright painful to be constantly trying to remember what my concerns from last turn that I need to be working on to reach a goal in a future turn.

E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #129 on: September 18, 2022, 08:00:27 pm »

Tanks were less king than they often are b/c the brief war we fought involved a great deal of fighting in mountains and then forests. Tanks played a strong role the last few turns, but the decisive thrusts were largely large blocks of infantry. Well, I suppose the northern chokepoint was tanks gradually pushing back tanks. The best tanks they had were heavies (hence above discussions of running low on fuel) and the best I had were assault guns (which meant that once the heavies came into play, my tanks got pushed back despite being nominally harder to kill).

Our game organization was very haphazard. I generated a world to the specs we'd agreed on, and then generated another one with PBEM options on b/c I'd accidentally done the first as hotseat. Then we just threw turns back and forth as soon as we did them. We were only doing one or fewer turns per day for the last few; for the most part, we'd get several in.

Focus isn't as hard to retain as you think; normally you've got a few areas of interest where your fronts are, and relatively few cities where things can be happening. Additionally, there's A LOT of reports generated that can point you towards what you should be checking.
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #130 on: September 19, 2022, 04:21:30 am »

I'd sometimes forget about a thing or two I was going to do by the time the next turn rolled out. But then again, I do that between turns even in SP. Keeping notes would likely completely alleviate this.

As for tanks, I always prefer infantry for its low logistical demands and ability to form defensive lines on the cheap. Tanks tend to be made for specific purposes rather than as a mainstay. In this game I had relatively numerous light tank battalions, because I rolled a good structural design. So they semi-replaced buggies in their role.
I had a few battalions of assault guns and maybe two or three heavies. The heavies were made specifically to counter EA's assault guns since the 60mm guns on the light tanks couldn't dent them.
There were also two(?) infantry divisions with APC's to help with breakthroughs. The extra oomph is always handy, but here they would die often to EA's quality infantry so they saw limited action. The very difficult terrain wasn't especially conductive to manoeuvre combat anyway.
I'd probably invest in something more substantial once my underfunded staff council operationalised a tank army or a mechanized one. But on the other hand, I'd be out of fuel by then.

It's always a surprise to me how relatively few armoured units can guzzle so much fuel. Most of the active designs had fuel efficiency too. If I hadn't found myself with some 40-50k stocked before the hostilities started I'd be much limited in my ability to push through.



I was wondering, EA - given how your one attack on my not-really-essential infrastructure made a good amount of damage - whether you bombing the truck station I built on the eastern slopes of the mountains (and maybe Highmount too) would not entirely cripple all of my forces by starving them of supplies.
Although, as with everything else, you'd probably need more time to organise such long-range bombing raids. In any case, it seems like strategic bombing might be very powerful if one lets themselves get caught with their AA pants down.
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E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #131 on: September 19, 2022, 11:46:38 am »


My assault guns were monsters. They were also the only significantly above-average armored vehicle I designed all game (next best two were 105 Heavy Tanks and my second take on APCs), and they were one of the few who didn't start out in the low 90s or below and require multiple redesigns to be even close to average. They also suffered from the same lack of refinement as the rest of my armies - RNG did not like my Applied Science director.

I really did want to bomb out your supply lines, and given what hell I played on my own logistics immediately before your line hit mine, I should have had it fresh in my mind. Your truck stations were just outside the range of my bombers, though, and my thinking was too rigid to build a forward airbase or redesign the bombers to eek out a few more hexes range. The other problem my air forces suffered was very thematic - our love affair with technology meant that as soon as we could build rockets, we basically forgot low-tech soft attack options even existed, and built almost nothing but hard attack options that fared poorly against your massed infantry in rough terrain. But if I had tweaked my designs, built a forward airbase, and waited until I had massed bomber wings to launch an attack, I probably could have done heavy logistic damage. Instead, I waffled and tried to do everything at once w/o going all-in on anything except technologically-derived hubris.
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #132 on: September 19, 2022, 12:34:54 pm »

See, I went with 50 mm shittier armour for mine, for half the hitpoints (but also cheaper). However +52% conventional gun linear tech and cluster bombs meant it had twice the oomph against infantry.
Such was the hubris of the ersatz Galactic Republic - they had plenty shiny techs on paper, but it was the League of Hoboken they were so ready to patronise who had the real tech advantage. #applied_love #engineering>science

In all seriousness, I feel we both paid too much attention to the structural design. The difference between, say, 90 and 110 ain't that big in practice, while redesigning eats up valuable time.

I imagine that with 3+ players, the key would be to set aside one day a week to push out turns, rather than playing one turn every few days.
Remembering the Emperor of the Fading suns PBEMs, those games generally went at a pace of a turn per day, maybe two days later on (right? or am I misremembering?), and it was ok. And that's accounting for the constant diplomacy in the metagame.
Here we had more like 3 per day on average, and we finished in less than a month. I suspect it wouldn't be so bad to go normally, maybe even with 5 players, if they all went in prepared for a few months of play. The pace we had was actually too rapid, imo, as it ate up a lot of my free time.
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EuchreJack

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #133 on: September 19, 2022, 05:12:13 pm »

I imagine that with 3+ players, the key would be to set aside one day a week to push out turns, rather than playing one turn every few days.
Remembering the Emperor of the Fading suns PBEMs, those games generally went at a pace of a turn per day, maybe two days later on (right? or am I misremembering?), and it was ok. And that's accounting for the constant diplomacy in the metagame.
Here we had more like 3 per day on average, and we finished in less than a month. I suspect it wouldn't be so bad to go normally, maybe even with 5 players, if they all went in prepared for a few months of play. The pace we had was actually too rapid, imo, as it ate up a lot of my free time.

You forget how we started by playing the first 5 turns on the same day. At least the ones(?) that I was in.

E. Albright

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Re: Shadow Empire - Galactic Republic vs League of Hoboken - AARs and shit, maybe
« Reply #134 on: September 19, 2022, 05:14:20 pm »

In all seriousness, I feel we both paid too much attention to the structural design. The difference between, say, 90 and 110 ain't that big in practice, while redesigning eats up valuable time.

IDK the exact relationship but structural design impacts other design elements too - engine/weapon/armor are described in the design log as "based on base design modified for struct. design". My first and only attempt at Mechanized Artillery is a good example; it had an initial BD of 94 (80th percentile of initial BD) but its 76 SD left it with 54 ED, 63 WD, and 77 AD. Its 180mm gun had the same attack value as my initial dragged artillery's 105mm gun (plus, yes, -30% move modifier on a 555 weight vehicle w/an 800 power engine). I went back into one of the final saves and re-designed it - first changing nothing, then modernizing. The iterated version is not terribly impressive (bad rolls for design improvements are always possible) and at this point a 4th iteration is as expensive as a new base model (480pts in either case, but iterating off the new one will be 120pts):



Doing a redesign may not only give you a better high-end model, but it may give you a better model than the intermediate one you'd get by using and refining the crappier one. The main question becomes whether you'd be better off using something else to fill that tactical role while you do a redesign, or if there's no better alternative. Forex, my initial light tank was so bad (SD 86, BD 85, ED 60, WD 71, AD 86... all of which ended up with crappy combat stats and a -60% move modifier) that just to usefully field test that design I'd have to iterate on the initial unit b/c it wasn't combat-ready as out-of-the-box.

(Ofc, again, RNG can make or break you in either case.)

You forget how we started by playing the first 5 turns on the same day. At least the ones(?) that I was in.

We did 8 and 7 in the first and second 24h periods of this game. Though again, only 2 players.
« Last Edit: September 19, 2022, 05:17:59 pm by E. Albright »
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