Kusanoki Chronicles

  After several weapon test combats we return to the original combat to show how different things can be when upgrades impact things. The Red Ship - The Starter Broadsword lost the combat quite badly last time (and in a real fight would be lucky to escape). Since then her commanding officer, no doubt smarting under the embarrassment, has heavily reconfigured the ship. The most obvious problem was that losing a single AI Combat Navigator was enough to put the ship into efficiency difficulties which enforces four corrective options - Do nothing, it was luck that the AI Combat Navigator was hit so losing space to up crew factors wastes combat potential - Add more AI Combat Navigators for redundancy. - Add more Crew for redundancy - Reduce weaponry/items requiring crew factors - Increase officer leadership The last would be a mistake in a warship but it is listed as it 'is' an option and the first depends on your own attitude to risk. Crew are the safest response mainly ...

The weak sun was hot on Sumiko's skin as she dried off after some winter swimming. The shock to the system took some getting used to but was invigorating more than not. She indicated with her hands and the administrator waiting by the door eyes politely averted entered the center of the room and bowed politely. '33% angle', she considered internally. I must be doing all right. "When I was swimming I saw something unusual. Our project to re-seed the oceans with fish - when is the next stage due?" "A few more weeks Lady Kasanoki." "Good, send a message to the MOH ambassador. Allowing it goes well we will want to be prepared to start purchases for the next stage.", she started to comb her hair before continuing, "Next our new system Varitang. Defences are in in good shape, too good a shape really. Normally outposts have just enough troops to detect thievery a lot of these outposts in system are more protected than the ancient earth Fort Knox…...

Our next weapon test involves our original two ships which have gone away, re-equipped and then armed themselves with a single weapon so we can see how it is working. Starter Broadsword - In the last battle this warship lost due to basically losing crew points and thus efficiency. It was not inaccurate though so the owning player has upped its armour to Mark II (increasing the armour depth from 80 to 100 allowing it to block a mean average of 50 damage versus the Mark I 40. The shields did not do much so they removed them entirely to make more space for weapons. Note that this means the actual ship's initial defence against laser weaponry is worse than before as the extra armour depth (+10) does not entirely replace the lost shield depth (-13). The shields were lost so quickly though that by round three this has switched and the ship would perform better. Since its opponent was so heavily shielded last time the owner has decided to arm itself with a Nova Cannon Mark I which is des...

So far in our mini-war of a lightly armed scout versus our heavily shielded exploration vessel we have not seen much to alarm the exploration vessel. Both ships though have changed it up slightly. The Exploration vessel has upgraded from the single photon scatter gun to a single Photon Gun Mark IV just cause what appears to be shining a torch at the enemy has done nothing at all. The scout this time has decided to fire torpedo's instead of missiles. The Attacking Ship We should briefly look at how the turn report shows the new weapon  SPACE WEAPONS                                                                | |                                                            ...

No system is perfect and there are some minor and less minor tweaks that can be made to the game engine to make the game even more enjoyable for players and especially to assist new players in getting more heavily involved in this side of the game. This will be a longish post but for those less interested in rambling verbiage I shall highlight the specific suggestions in red so peeps who want to come move straight to the suggestions and their reasons. Current Situation  Serious combat in game is hard mainly because of the effort involved and the ramifications. The effort is partly game engine and partly players the ramifications are all player caused. One of the biggest player caused issues is an unwillingness to fight unless you have a huge pre-ponderance of force. This leads to a lot of alliances and shifting tactical situations which is actually a good thing. What isn't is the automatic increase in threat that can happen. Let me provide an example. Affiliation A sends its 20 war...

This ship was obviously hit be a lot of anti-matter missiles  Next in our series of tests of the battle system we will look at possibly the most popular ship killer in game with Missiles. We won't be looking at the dreaded anti-matter missiles as I don’t have any. Or even high mark missiles for that matter. Our two test subjects will be the same two ships as last time. I am not sure if the shielded exploration vessel even noticed the attack in the last post so it is still aimlessly wandering around doing science stuff. The scout ship though has re-armed and gotten rid of all the light photon guns equipping instead with a  single missile launcher, Magazines and ammo. In practice no warship carries a single tiny weapon like this and you will see ships with 100-200 missile launchers all trying to overwhelm the point defence of a defending ship. In this case the defending ship does not even have point defence (plus we want to see what the weapon 'does' not what it does if it ge...

The last blog post covered a full days battle with two relatively crap warships hammering each other. For the next series of posts we are going to get more nuanced which has the plus side of me not blowing up quite so much of my own expensively acquired gear in the process. My  two warships used in the last engagement are refitting post battle so to continue the test I have temporarily changed my starter exploration vessel and scout ship into ships at least capable of fighting. They both have normal/heavy hulls and some armour so I made one (without even a naval officer) have lots of shields and the other will endeavour to attack with a single weapon. Considering the amount of defences it is unlikely to do much if anything to the attacked ship but will allow us to ascertain how the defences cope with different weapon types. This test will cover two of the weakest combat ship weapons in the game - the Light Photon Gun Mark IV and a Photon Scatter Gum The Attacking Ship This is basic...