5
No effect. d1 will be un-disabled after your next movement.
r4-7 thrust A.
Firing on d4-5, range is 1, ΔV is 1 for -1 total.
d4 is currently D1. r4/r5 fire on it at 2:1 -1.
d5 is currently D2. r6/r7 reduce power and fire on it at 1:1 -1.
@discobot roll 2d6
Wow. That sets my plans for a while. At this point I’m only in this game at EyeZee’s sufferance, so I think I’m going to concede.
d4 takes a further D4; d5 is unaffected.
d1 picks up D+E from Callisto’s gravity.
But actually if MrTim is going to concede, I’ll happily take a second place because there’s no way I’m going to beat EyeZee. (I can probably get one more fleet purchase before the truce expires, but so can he.)
EyeZee 252.4
RogerBW 193.9
MrTim 115.9
denisbloodnok 92.4
Lordof1 25That’s ok by me if it’s ok by all - with thanks and apologies for being so piratical. It felt like an eat or be eaten kind of game pretty early on.
In a bit of analysis, the idea of the robot mine defenses seems really inefficient. I can’t think of a reason one wouldn’t want to use 2 packets to permanently guard a mine rather than robot defenses. 2 packets costs 10 less MCr, are actually mobile, and could harvest or if desired. What is the downside - capture?
Good game.
Actually, one packet has the same combat strength 2 as the robot guard, at 1/5 the price.
Ah, I suppose they have a specific bonus effect - they “prevent anyone other than the owner from removing stockpiled ore”, presumably meaning you have to destroy or at least disable them before taking ore. But I can’t see that being important very often, because you wouldn’t let a packet sit there shooting at you without shooting back a bit.
PM grapples didn’t seem like a good bet either. I liked the look of them in the early game when I was doing a lot of prospecting, but by the time I could think about affording them I had more important things to spend MCr40 on. If shards didn’t explode but remained in place to be grabbed later that might work better.
I agree on that - or even if one exploded, perhaps roll a a d3 for total remaining shards in the hex. That makes an unmined shard hex an even bigger navigation hazard than an asteroid hex.
I agree also that even 1 packet is arguably better than robot guards - my point was that 2 seemed incontrovertibly better because they had twice the firepower/defense for less total cost.
Right, now about this damage sequencing thing. (See referenced message.) As I see it the options are that you lose a D:
- 2018 RAW: at the end of your own turn (meaning counterattacks are less effective than attacks because you effectively get a D back immediately).
- Roger’s mod, which I think is also 1982 RAW: at the end of the corresponding player-phase N turns after it was inflicted (meaning a ship loses an extra counterattack opportunity).
I prefer a third way: At the end of your own turn, but not the turn you received the damage. That preserves the power of counterattack, and doesn’t require you to track who’s turn it was when you were damaged.
I certainly think EyeZee deserved to win, being first to recognise and act on the need to transition to packets and the potential to spawn them in front of someone else’s arriving transport, something I’d blithely dismissed.
I think the scenario is a bit unsatisfactory. There’s a large luck element in the initial prospecting - Roger’s twin mines near Ceres, say, are very convenient - but more importantly I guess if we were going to play it again, everyone would start with a packet (because if you start with a transport on top of someone with a packet you just lost; if you start with a transport in the boonies you’ve got to schlep in to the belt somewhere there isn’t someone with a packet; if you start with two transports in different boonies that doesn’t help much because you only got one mine).
But if everyone starts with a packet, there’s a good chance the opening turns consist of someone capturing someone else’s packet, and now one player has lost and another, with two packets, has probably won.
I suggest (if it were played again) that there might be no law in the Belt but there is law in the detection radius of bases, giving some detection to Ceres and Clandestine. This would also reduce the use of the (extremely effective) strategy of popping up new ships somewhere inconvenient.
I also found the granularity of the movement system more frustrating with only 10 fuel. Going somewhere at speed 1 and stopping “ought” to take only 2 fuel, but the extra it can demand matters a lot more with 10 fuel than on those warships with 20. The granularity’s less obvious at high speeds where courses can be adjusted in fine increments, but it’s exactly those high speeds these 10 fuel ships can’t hit. As in the alien scenario, I needed to remember it’s never too early to start plotting the whole of a journey.
I’ll say!
I agree completely. No-combat zones within detection radii would be a good rule. To some degree it would make midgame a game of packets staking out perimeters, but if you could run that blockade into the detection range, you could avoid destruction or capture.
10 fuel is definitely tough with a hex based game. Almost impossible to visit 2 locations between refueling unless you want to go very slow.
Which I think is the point, but I was finding 10 to be incredibly unforgiving once I started taking damage. Even 12 would have made a huge difference to my chances.
Regarding damage: to be sure I’m understanding it, is this basically “remove one damage at the end of your own turn, but if you are damaged only because of a counterattack you took in this turn, don’t”?
EyeZee’s victory in spite of terrible prospecting luck suggests that prospecting luck isn’t vitally important. Even so, I have a perverse thought of doing this with a draw deck - say, each player gets six cards of which one says “ore”, and they draw one each time they prospect, so exactly one in six will be a strike.
Agreed on the granularity being annoying - having my mines on the hexrow above Ceres, rather than the same one, made it cost an extra fuel to get to them, and that doesn’t really model anything like a physical reality.
Making all the bases viable as sale sites (probably Mars at 2, Terra at 3, the northern group at 2.5 or thereabouts, maybe Mercury/Venus at 3.5), is tempting in that it would cut down on blockading and encourage more actual mining, but blockading may be regarded as important.
There is of course a positive feedback effect in long scenarios: more money means more ships means more mining and more beating up of the enemy. That is not in itself a bad thing, but for me the more interesting part of a game is the uncertain part where I can still lose, not the part where I’m crushing my enemies and there’s nothing they can do about it.
I’m sorry to say it but I think the scenario design is the weakest part of Triplanetary.
I’d state it differently: “If you take damage on your own turn, you can’t start recovering from that damage on that turn’s recovery phase.”
This would apply to counterattack, asteroid damage, mines, etc.
Also, if you had, say, D1 left from a previous attack and drifted at speed into an asteroid field during your turn, receiving another D1, you could recover from the attack damage, but not the asteroid damage (though you really wouldn’t have have to keep track of it like that).
I like the draw deck idea. It would even out the early game. It’s 100% true that my poor prospecting luck is what turned me into an aggressor in this game, though.
I think additional points of sale would be interesting - as might automated patrols of ‘police’ -maybe frigates -through the belt and between planets.
I would have thought there’d be more of a wealth of Triplanetary scenarios developed over the years, but I don’t see too many. To some degree, the game feels more like the strategic over-layer of a solar system campaign game, where the tactical combat could be resolved at finer granularity like Full Thrust or ESCOM. Though, Triplanetary has its ‘advanced combat’ as well, which is a little more granular. I used that, and a division between strategic and tactical scale in my adaptation of Triplanetary to the universe of The Expanse - which is still untested.
Oh, yes, the damage too. If you plot a minimum-time transit you arrive with a dry tank, but then even a D1 sends you flying off into the wilderness.