Phoenix Rising - Rationale and Musings

So those of you following the Facebook group will have seen that I've renamed the game I'm working on to "Phoenix Rising". It follows from a couple of comments made on some discussions, and I had a think about it and thought, "You know what, they're right, time to rename to something actually chosen!". I like Phoenix Rising because it symbolises the struggles of the broken parts of the human empire, reflecting the old FSA lore, and the Novus Populi symbol also kind of looks like a heavily stylised bird...so yeah...Phoenix Rising it is.

Now I've also been working with a sculptor to produce new models for the game, and I started off by "filling in" some of the blanks in the prior catalogue, as these were a "no risk" option. You'll have seen both renders and prints of them on Facebook again, I hope. Next is the NPN themselves - one of the main protagonists of the game. I wanted sculpts that would sit alongside existing models without looking odd, but also be my own visual style. I hope you like what's been done so far.

I've also been working on overhauling the rules. Working from scratch on such a complex project is tough, especially when you're busy at work with two product launches in the continuing pandemic, but one of the things I have to lean on (and I don't want to lose in my game) is the sound statistical bedrock of what went before. This means I can tweak (or in some cases completely change) mechanics whilst not totally breaking the game.

Another thing I always wanted to do was to link the models much more visually with their game stats. It never made sense in game that these models had the same HP

That's just one example - there are many more. That's because there was a fundamental disconnect between model creation and stat generation - models were made to be cool with a general remit of what was wanted (by Neil), and then the stats were created to fit the remit in a balanced way with the game....it should ideally be the other way round, creating a model that fits the pre-determined, balanced stats which fit the areas in the game needed. 

This was most starkly revealed to be coming unstuck with the taskforce reinforcement boxes towards the end of Spartan's demise, with various "light" versions of models which, while showcasing some of the improvements in multi-part model making and casting spartan had achieved, were put in the area of the rules which had the least room in terms of design space. Here's a graph just to illustrate what I mean, with ship mass (x axis) plotted against Hull Points.

You can see there is a rough correlation, but it's just that, and it really starts to fall apart when you start to focus on individual areas - look at the spread in mass of 10 Hull Point ships - there is a three fold difference between the smallest and the largest which is hard to reconcile visually in game (at least for pedants like me!). Now you could say "Oh well, different races have different ways of doing things", but the inconsistencies aren't restricted to the broad picture, but within races too - here's the same graph with only Aquan ships;

Again, you can see a 4 HP ship which is smaller than a 2HP ship and a 5HP ship, 6HP ships significantly smaller than 5HP ships and 9HP ship smaller than a 7HP. That doesn't really make much sense and doesn't even take into account the "old" sculpts either, which were generally smaller than the more recent Spartan designs.

As I've been looking at this since v1 of the game, now seems an ideal point to implement this adjustment, and it has some interesting effects on factions that make thematic sense. It also leads to some adjustments in stats to make things more predictable and balanced. In fact, when you look at it across the spectrum of models, it actually leads to some fairly indicative racial traits that provide additional flavour to factions. Here's a plot of all FSA ships with HP adjusted by mass;

Now of course the exact distribution here can be tweaked, but broadly speaking the levels are set to change the minimum number of ships possible - so in short, most things stay the same, some change. One of the most notable areas is at the bottom, where a number of smalls drop from 2Hp to 1HP. Whilst some might balk at that change, it actually helps with a couple of aspects in SG FSA, those of the complexity of dealing with calculations for squadrons with high numbers of small ships with some damaged ships, and that of "zombie ship syndrome"...in smalls this is usually due to damaged and reduced squadrons becoming ineffective. Reducing a lot to 1HP wonders makes them die faster, but will also be reflected in their points cost - more on that in the future.

Going back to this example;

This now means that the small corvette has 1HP, whereas the large Frigate has 3HP, which "feels" more in line with the models.