Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Race design quandary
| Race design quandary |
Sat, 28 October 2006 20:45  |
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 craebild |
 | Lieutenant |
Messages: 568
Registered: December 2003
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark | |
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I am working on optimizing a race for a game I am to take part in. Since the other players might also read this thread, I cannot give too much information on my race, but i believe I can give enough for others to offer their advice.
The race has IFE, and my quandary is whether to take NRSE or CE. The game will be in a medium dense universe, without galaxy clumping, with 12-14 players
With NRSE I get the IS10 engine at propulsion 11, but the only ramscoop I get is the FM.
With CE I get the other ramscoop engines, including the GS which gives warp 9 for free and is safe at warp 10, and I get better mine settings (more mines operated, not better efficiency), but with CE, my ships fail to travel 10% of the time if the speed is over warp 6 (which it will often be), and I do not get the IS10 engine. I will also pay less for my engines, of course, but that is a minor point in that regard.
My question is, of course, what would you choose, and why ?
Any advice will be welcome.
Med venlig hilsen / Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Christian Ræbild / Christian Raebild
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Sat, 28 October 2006 23:38  |
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If I have to choose one of them, I choose NRSE. I will only take CE in exceptional circumstances, and even then I'll agonise over it. Its simply too much hassle not having ships go where you want them. Instead of thinking of it as 10% of the time your engines fail, think of it as a random 10% of your moving ships are going to fail each turn.
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Sun, 29 October 2006 12:15 |
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I have a love/hate relationship with CE. I keep saying 'never again' with regards to CE... But I still do seem to take it a lot. I've used it in about half of all my online games. I guess that makes me a bit of an 'expert' at managing CE.
It certainly adds significanctly to the MM burden, but managed correctly and played prudently you can avoid any disasters, and IMHO the general (small) loss of speed is potentially offset by it's benefits.
First, being aware of and dealing with the negatives:
Your logistics will be slower. It's actually not as bad as losing 10% of movement rate though, as you can optimise your ship paths to make sure they travel at warp 6 as often as possible. For example if you have to travel 117ly, then (fuel permitting) you would fly for 1 year at w9 and 1 year at w6, instead of 2 years at w8.
Another simple thing is to place the warp 6 section(s) of the path at the end of the route. If you can do this, then you will KNOW the year before it arrives, that it will indeed arrive. Essentially this shifts the uncertainty away from the critical end point of the trip. This is also a handy trick for colony fleets where you may wish want to split the coloniser off from population freighters in the final year of travel, and also for warfleets.
If you have a large and urgent shipment of material, then split it up to improve the chances of at least part of the shipment arriving promptly.
Tactically, you pretty much lose the option to have multiple fleets hit a world at warp9/10. You pretty much have to either have the fleets meet up the year before, or close to 36ly (which often you'd do anyway, if you aren't crash sweeping minefields.) There *is* a bit of a fiddle you can do regarding targetting your own fleets to make combat 'conditional' on the largest fleet arriving, but there *may* be a bit of a trap in that method, that I need to test (again, as I forgot the result...) throughly before I can recommend using it.
The advantages:
+1 prop. Combine this with IFE and you've got +2 prop. The fuel mizer comes are prop 2... Not having to research prop at all is nice at the start of the game, especially for races that have low disposible incomes in the early game.
Half cost engines... Not to be underestimated if you have NRSE. The normal warp 9 and warp 10 engines are very expensive. Ramscoop races won't get so much out of this though, as their engines are fairly cheap already. The 50% engine saving also adds up in all the cheap ships too - the FM is 5 resources cheaper right from the start. It all adds up.
I just had a quick look at an old game at 2450, and the savings on battleships using w9 engines were around 10-15% depending on the specific design. On cruisers the saving was 20% to 25%! Chaff was about 10% cheaper. Even large freighters using the FM were about 9% cheaper. Newer LFs using the w9 engine were over 27% cheaper(!) And this is with the w9 engine - the interspace-10 has an even larger saving. Those sorts of numbers get me interested, when I think about what I could buy with all those saved resources  If you think you can manage your fleets well enough to avoid taking significant fleet casualties due to the loss in flexibility (i.e. more % than you are saving,) then this looks very nice.
Then you tell me I get a big pile of free RW points with that *as well* ?!
EDIT: stepped through the same game to nubians. Saving was still over 11% on AMP nubs and 7% on ARM nubs when using interspace-10. For nubians, the mineral saving was also comparable to the resource saving (I didn't check for the other designs.)
[Updated on: Sun, 29 October 2006 12:37] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Sun, 29 October 2006 15:19 |
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It's probably also worth mentioning that CE is not so good if you rely on stacked shields a lot (e.g. if you tend to take RS). One of the common tactics to deal with CE is to split your warfleets up so that you can be fairly sure the majority will be there at the battle. Splitting up your fleets dramatically reduces the shield stacking.
A similar effect happens with whole-ship-kills. Ships die when a salvo from a single slot of a single stack (not ship) is more than the remaining armour of ships in the target stack. Bigger stacks are more therefore likely to kill ships.
If you don't get a whole ship kill, the damage is spread evenly over all the ships in the target stack. The damage done to the target token is the same, overall, as if there were ship kills.
Why do you want ship kills, if the damage is the same? Because dead ships don't shoot back.
In summary - one stack of 40 ships is better than four stacks of 10 ships, and CE encourages you to split your fleets.
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Sun, 29 October 2006 16:44 |
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Yeah, if you find yourself splitting fleets (other than chaff/bombers/freighters) as CE then you are in trouble, unless you have overwhelming force already. Essentially CE helps turn your fleets into 'lumbering beasts' - they cannot dance quite so well, but they should be significantly larger, all else being equal...
The key to defense with CE is prediction. You need to be smart to possible threats. The key to offense with CE is focused strength.
My thoughts on PRT for CE races, in order:
SD - Awfull: you need those yo-yo's working well
HE - Very bad: as you rarely get to use stargates
PP - Quite bad: as those carefully timed surprise packet/fleet attacks will not synchronise 10% of the time
SS - Depends: quite bad if you want to be able to dance, SS is usually played in a 'fighting clever' fashion; Quite good if you want to play a brute force + surprise style instead (i.e. escaping afterwards isn't important) as CE would help enable this expensive PRT pay for a larger fleet.
AR - So-so: if you need to evacuate in a hurry, you can expect to lose an additional 10% of the population. Of course you'd lose 5% per year travel anyway, so in context perhaps not so much of a problem. Note that AR freighters only lose pop to space travel if the fleet actually moves, engine failures do not result in population loss.
WM - So-so: Cheaper fleets is very nice with WM, however with a race probably planning constant warfare you probably want to be free of the planing hassles.
CA - Quite good: no specific drawback. Cheaper fleets combines nicely with strong economy.
JOAT - Very good: good scanning helps the prediction aspect. Cheaper fleets combines nicely with strong economy.
IS - Very good: by putting 1 or 2 years less pop on each fleet, your pop continues to grow even if the freighters don't arrive on time.
IT - Great: CE sits very well with IT stargate use, reducing the logistics drawback dramatically. I think most people would be at least tempted by CE when making IT races...
[Updated on: Sun, 29 October 2006 16:50] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Sun, 29 October 2006 17:06 |
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Oh, I just realised I never actually answered the original question....
In general I take CE about 50% of the time.
When I take CE I have always also taken NRSE. With CE I have always taken prop expensive (exploiting fact that I will get to start with the FM,) so I don't want the temptation of researching all the way to prop16, even if it would result in a warp 10 engine that costs only 10 resources...
When I do not take CE, I sometimes take NRSE. Not taking NRSE results in similar savings per ship as CE, once you hit warp9/10, but -CE -NRSE is also nowhere near so kind in race wizard points as +CE +NRSE and you'll need to research a bit further in prop to get the same speeds 
LRTs as approximate ratio of games played
-CE -NRSE = 25%
+CE -NRSE = 0%
+CE +NRSE = 50% (a couple of these games I also skipped IFE, making early logistics a challenge, haha...)
-CE +NRSE = 25%
Not quite the either/or answer you were looking for, but I think I've given you the tools to evaluate the different options instead, or at least to agonise over the decision for days, in true Stars! fashion
Don't take CE unless you like and have time for micromanagement.
[Updated on: Sun, 29 October 2006 17:14] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Tue, 31 October 2006 19:41 |
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| c64k |
 | Petty Officer 3rd Class |
Messages: 42
Registered: March 2006
Location: .us | |
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Having tried both CE-only and NRSE-only, I have to go with CE (this is as an AR) because with good MM, CE and be managed. Splitting fleets to hedge your bets and optimizing ship orders can help mitigate the effect of CE.
NRSE, on the other hand, was painful. Fuel is not an issue with NRSE (back in the days of Stars! 2.0, the finite fuel made NRSE very painful fuel-wise, but in 2.5+, fuel is no longer a major concern), but the cost is. The only decent engines that you get for most of the game is the IS-10 and its warp-9 sibling. Both engines are very heavy (bad for overgating and movement points), and both engines are extraordinarily expensive. To make matters worse, there is a huge 12-level gap between P11 and P23 that you have to cross before getting lighter and cheaper engines. Since many players except maybe IT take prop expensive, that's a gap that some may never cross before the endgame. I ended up using the fuel mizer for half my ships because of the high cost of the IS-10.
CE+NRSE might actually be a good combination, though, as CE really helps with the NRSE cost problem, and being able to fly at warp 10 fairly early on will make optimizing CE flightplans easier (as there are now more distances that you can break a warp 6 segment out of).
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Tue, 31 October 2006 20:06 |
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| craebild |
| Lieutenant |
Messages: 568
Registered: December 2003
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark | |
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I appreciate your replies, and I have decided which way I am going to go in that regard now. Your comments and opinions have been a good help for me to make my decision.
Since 3 of the 5 peoplo who have replied to this thread are also playing in the game I am to play in, you can surely understand why I am not telling you what my decision is.
[Updated on: Tue, 31 October 2006 20:07]
Med venlig hilsen / Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Christian Ræbild / Christian Raebild
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| Re: Race design quandary |
Tue, 31 October 2006 20:50 |
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I can highly recommend stopping your visable fleets 10% of the time, just to keep us guessing in the game
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