Overview of changes from v2 in Fanstorm

After the last post there were a certain portion of the Facebook fraternity (yes, they're all guys) who started trolling me and my post/blog. Now I don't mind healthy discussion, but when things start to get nasty, personal or just dull with people asking the same thing that you really don't have to justify, it's trolling. These ranged from people arguing that v1.5 was the best version ever and saying v2 was awful (yeah, really!), to unrelenting demands for evidence to be shown on my claims.

I guess this is inevitable, and I've set myself up for it by putting supposedly "controversial" statements into the public domain, but it still feels unpleasant. It made me think whether I should continue, or whether just to leave FA to v3 and walk away.

But guess what? This is a personal blog, it's my opinions, thoughts and feelings, and I don't HAVE to substantiate my claims beyond getting people to look at things themselves. Do I have evidence to support my claims? Yes. Is all of it in a format I could share? No - because some of it is in personal emails from Neil, some of it is from my former privileged access within Spartan which is not publicly available, and despite my lack of faith in Neil and his company's direction - and my vocal opposition to the things he's doing - I'm not Julian Assange!

So if my writings make you angry, if you don't believe my claims - that's fine. Don't read my blog, don't read my Facebook posts, just carry on - if all is good and I'm an annoying fly buzzing around, you have nothing to worry about, do you? If you think I've got "sour grapes" or am just grinding a personal grudge, then leave me to it - how can it affect you? When TheoryMachine release Fanstorm, don't even look at it - how can it be of interest? Here's a thought - you're probably not the demographic I want to support anyway.

In any case, I am going to continue, so like it or lump it!

The people I DO want to support are those I've always wanted to support, those invested in the Firestorm universe as it developed from v2 release. Those who have bought into that (sometimes in a large way) and have felt let down and disappointed by unfulfilled promises. Those who crave more depth and background in their FA universe that works with the prior background and timelines (such as they are) and flesh out the technologies and structures therein. People who like the structure and playstyle of FA in v2, but want those tweaks made to make the game flow better than it did before, without losing the complexity of the game.

FA is a relatively "chunky" wargame - it's got lots of stuff in it. It's like 40k in that regard, rather than X-Wing. It SHOULD be a 90-120 (maybe 180) minute game, not a 30-60 minute game. That's what Fanstorm is aiming to do - preserve (or actually increase) the tactical depth of the game, whilst making elements identified by the bulk of the community and metas faster or flowing more easily.

So what does this mean? What changes were the FFG looking at and how does that affect Fanstorm - in short, what is due to change in Fanstorm, what will it give you? 

1. Making movement faster/easier. I've already described this in prior blogs.Someone has commented that "Firestorm doesn't need templates" - well, true, it doesn't NEED them. So why did we look at this as a solution? Well, they have been playtested worldwide with a number of groups, and most like them....there's a couple of reasons for that I believe. 
1. It makes predicting movement easier, because a template shows where you'll end up (roughly) before you move the model, and "rewinding" ship movement is a time-killer. This means you can see where movement will leave you touching other stuff before starting - this is really important in the later stages of the game (or "the knife fight"). 
2. It makes movement easier whilst preserving the "feel" of existing FA movement (since you're still describing a polygon of the same radius. In fact, I'd argue that the movement feels more like space combat movement than v2.0, because it's more fluid on the tabletop.
2. Adjusting SRS. This is a hugely controversial topic, and one solution is unlikely to satisfy everyone's personal likes in this regard. The route we talked about most was to remove PD from bombers entirely, keeping their potency but making them very vulnerable to Interceptor cover. Interceptors are "attached" to squadrons for PD support, preventing wholesale PD wall spamming. They can also be "attached" to large tokens to provide protection on attack runs. Fighters now become more useful because they do a little of both roles, a bit less well. So you can run in two squadrons of Bombers on a target, but if the opposing player can get Fighters or Interceptors there, they're going to get mauled. This makes SRS collaborative, and not just a plain binary choice between Bombers or Interceptors. There are reasons for taking the other SRS types too (more below)
3. Firing Options. Linking is a bugbear of some (not all) players of FA. It can get a bit complex at times with squadrons of partly damaged ships with multiple linking weapons...what dice do you roll? We tossed this around a lot, and the best way seemed to be to have a second stat for every weapon showing their linking values, and then just subtract all damage from the linked pool before rolling. This makes calculation faster, and also opens up some design space where some weapons are better than others at linking. We also looked at other options, like Targeted Strikes, which are hardly used in FA v2.0. Moving to a Heavy Dice mechanic for them, together with a redesign of the TS table increases their potency without making them indispensable. Overwatch was also introduced to add another tactical option without any real increase in complexity - we determined it would probably be little used, but situationally it would be important to have, so why not?
4. Fleet Building. This was one of the highlight innovation successes of v2, but it was restrictive in some ways - releasing new ship types for a race caused issues if it didn't already have it in there, and it was possible to build some effective spam lists. Fanstorm approaches this by using a more fluid definition of Tier level based on a ships value. This provides much more design flexibility and actually allows much more balanced but creative list building, with no extensive calculations.
5. The Aquans. This is really about points balancing and adjustment. Because SRS can be spammed easily by the Aquans (and the Relthoza), and the Aquans have lots of arcs of fire, and are quite forgiving to play they're often seen as "easy mode", especially by new players. This is an issue because perception is reality, but actually is addressed a lot by a variable threshold fleet building tool and some overall recosting. The Aquans should be a highly efficient, highly technological race but without the reserves to field masses of top-tier stuff, which the current rules allow. What they have is very points-efficient, but they have to grow their ship hulls, meaning they should be (from a fluff perspective), a bottom-heavy race. What plays at the moment is the exact opposite. These unintended effects occur in a few races, but its actually very simple to rebalance that without nerfing the hell out of anyone.
6. Command & Control. We saw an opportunity to have a more structured C&C function than the FTB/TAC card/Admiral interaction in existing FA, to add some tactical depth to this and other elements. As such, we introduced Command Allocation Dice - a pool generated at the start of a turn and used for various effects - re-rolls of disorder and repair checks, overwatch fire, TAC cards, Admiral special abilities and Cyberdefence. As they're dice it's easy to track, since when you roll it it's gone - and everyone has lots of dice in FA to use in this regard. It also adds flavour to races such as the Directorate, who wear down the CAD pool, but also allows the opposing player to be more tactical with their cyberdefence, rather than the "Dindrenzi are immune, Sorylians are very vulnerable" result that using FTB had in v2
7. Terrain. Some Terrain needed tweaks, and interactions with terrain clarified in some areas (e.g. the ghost ship/station). The main issue with terrain was how much to put down and how - a more structured way to build your gaming tables is presented.
8. Cyberwarfare. You either love it or hate it, and it feels either OP or worthless - in effect down to a table where 33% of the time you generated a Hazard marker. These are now tweaked to make them more appealing and consistent, without making them direct weapons
9. Mines. Although I never really had an issue with v2 mines, some people did - especially in where they come in the order of play, specifically making "drive by" minings that are indefensible a thing. Making Mines regular indirect weapons solves this to a large extent...drive by minings put the mining ship equally at risk....
10. Damage, Degradation & Repair. The double degradation method with HP and CP affecting AD was complex for new players, and didn't add much to the game. We got rid of CP affecting AD, and instead had it affect repair instead, which seems much more logical and interesting.
11. Streamlining MARs. There are a lot of MARs in FA, and not all of them are extensively used or particularly useful, so an examination or those and making them either more useful or getting rid of them entirely seemed like a good idea. Also, MARs that required iterative dice rolls (like Torpedo Spook - which force re-rolls) were looked at to see if the feel/effect of the MAR could be preserved whilst reducing the time to resolve it. So in the case of Torpedo Spook, halving the defensive PD successes of a target is a faster (and more consistent) way of reducing the effectiveness of PD than re-rolling those same dice. Additional dice-rolling steps where they don't add much to the overall experience is always a preferable route.

Now is this going to be universally loved? Probably not - but the beauty of Fanstorm is that if people adopt it and think things should be changed, we can look at them and do what the community wants - or provide solid reasons why we think that would alter other aspects of the game.

Anyway, let me know if you think this sounds interesting, and it's worth TheoryMachine finishing the ruleset - we don't want to just waste our time on something no one wants, after all.

What the Firestorm....??

We're starting to get rules snippets from SG now about v3 of Firestorm Armada....and for me, this does not bode well. Let's have a look at a few of these;

1. Cloaks

Cloaks have been significantly reduced in value - models shooting at a cloaked model now use HEavy (blue) dice rather than Exploding (red) dice. Now I'm certainly not against introduction of the Red-Blue-Black dice mechanics in FA - they would fit well in certain areas, and it's a change myself and the FFG suggested, so it's nice to see some things come through.

Cloaks, however, are not one area that I believe this is a good thing. This essentially nerfs cloaks to the same as in PF, and it makes them sh*t. I always advocated that PF and FA stats should align as far as possible (something that did not happen), and that FA lore should over-rule PF lore, as it came first and was established. This also did not happen - and we have giant space dino-eldars kitted out with nose-rings and howdahs...just stooopid.

The Relthoza being masters of nano-tech and stealth doesn't come through when you're reducing the effectiveness of a cloak by a massive amount - Exploding dice normally have a hit probability overall of 0.8 per die, whereas on a cloaked model in FA v2 you halve your AD, making the probability approximately 0.4 (it's actually slightly lower on a macro level since you round down in FA) - so your attacks are half as effective, i.e. 50%.

Non-exploding "heavy" die have a hit probability of 0.67%, which means they're 83.75% as effective as exploding dice - or a 16.67% reduction in effectiveness. So Cloaks went from being 50% effective at reducing incoming fire to 16.67% effective. Wow - that seems utter garbage.

2. Movement

So it seems we're going down the Halo route of pivots for FA. This is personally something I don't like, but of course it remains to be seen how it pans out. I'm not against pivots as a mechanic, I just think it alters the "feel" of Firestorm, so I think it shouldn't be there. It's a rather imprecise tool too, since you're using the model's own base, you move it without putting a marker for where the edge was and you could open up the possibility for arguments....not something I've ever relished. With the "drift" mechanic (which sounds just like an unnecessarily rebranded minimum move/turn limit), you're also going to encounter the same issues with movement that FA v2 has when it comes to the knife fight - which was one area the FFG looked specifically at resolving.

3. Fleet Building

OMG - going back to %age MFV values? Are you F*cking kidding me? The %age system is easy to say, but a b*stard to use daya to day, and VERY open to abuse. It's also difficult to introduce new ships because if you get the points wrong, it can be impossible to field them in some games. In short, there are more min-max options that are difficult to spot if they are legal or not, and test - since balance is all about testing, this isn't going to allow much time for that, so I don't expect v3 to be balanced in any sensible sense of the word.

4. Weapons

So there are some good things here - one is that they're using a suggestion by the FFG (even if they don't admit it or credit us) about how to deal with linking easily, and that is to have 2 values for weapons - one to use for being the focus fire (or lead) ship, and one for if you're joining in...makes on the fly maths easier.

They've renamed the range bands, which is just stupid and unnecessary. Point Blank? In a starship combat game? Come on! <sigh> Also, the "WARs" (Weapon Assigned Rules) now replace coherence effects (which again seems unnecessary), and some are direct ports from those that already don't really work in Planetfall, so I'm not a fan. Kinetic Weapons are going to be hellish in this edition, now the Dindrenzi don't have to worry about fixed arcs and their weapons f*ck shields. Sorylians get a kick in the teeth since it seems scatter weapons now only work in RB1 (not going to use the stupid name for that!).

Overall

In short, what we seem to be seeing is a wholesale copy/paste from Planetfall with some small concessions to prior FA....but not many. Thsi si feeling a lot like the clusterfuck that v1.5 was, but in a much, much larger way at a time when FA and Spartan can't afford to do this. I don't see this winning over existing players who want a bit of a fatser game or attracting people from other wargames. All it seems to be doing is aligning PF & FA closer together in ways that don't make any sense, and actually detract from former strengths of the game.

Let's face it, if you like FA now, this is unlikely to float your boat, because too many things have been messed with, seemingly arbitrarily. I swear to god if the next change is that Fleet Guides are announced as ORBATS I'm going to have to physically hurt someone!

The big question to me, however, is how on earth are they going to balance all these changes before release? The answer? I don't think they're going to even really try. I think they're going to do a Planetfall v1 and release and change on the fly until it seems to be ok-ish. The problem there being that took over a year for PF v1, and by the time they'd done it they'd lost interest in the game ad abandoned it for...well, until now, actually. The issue with FA at this point is that PF was a new, exciting game with lots of models and it was ground combat and...ohh, new shiney! etc. FA is not that, and it's lost a huge amount of its playerbase. Where are they going to get balancing feedback from? The existing beta-group plus a few more people? How well is that going to work?

Now there is a good outcome here - it's strengthened my resolve to finish Fanstorm! 

Fanstorm Armada - Developing the Game

Spartan are working on FA v3.0 right now, and I could be wrong, but I'm not liking the sound of what I'm hearing in terms of rumours and rumblings. Derek Sinclair, the rules designer who's primarily worked on DW, Planetfall and latterly Halo, is getting in on FA. I can't say this gives me a rosy feel inside. Derek was not involved in the development of the v1 FA, nor v2.0. I don't know about v1.5, but that was a clusterf*ck of copy/paste errors from DW v2 which was written at the same time.

Planetfall for me was a catalogue of how NOT to develop a game, with it evolving faster than The Thing on steroids in front of your eyes. I believe in a living rulebook, but not one where what I buy is invalid by the time it hits the shelves, or by the time the ink has finished drying on the 48 pages of PDF downloads that came out with alarming regularity - to say nothing of the shocking lack of proof reading, leading to more errors and re-writes than most Hollywood C-list films. Halo was much better produced, but I subscribe that this is down to 343s involvement, and not so much Spartan's change of spots. I find HFB a bit bland and far too dominated by boarding and Spartans, but that's understandable because of the Halo franchise - it's still not what I want to see come into FA.

"OK Alex" I hear you say "So you don't like what's happening at SG. So what? Are you just going to sit on your behind and moan about it? You're so negative....blah de blah de blah..." (ok, maybe not that last bit, but I wanted to cover myself!)

Well, I haven't been idle in this regard. Myself and a set of designers from across the world (now named "TheoryMachine") have embarked upon the project of Fanstorm Armada, to continue where the FFG left off, and continue the development of FA in a direction that preserves what we love about the game, strengthens those elements and tones down the ones we don't. As we're not a company and aren't in this to make money, suggestions and alterations from the community are more than welcome, and everything we suggest will be published for free distribution. We don't want to infringe upon what SG is doing, and we're not going after any IP, we're just fans of the game making suggestions about how to make FA a better game.

In a prior post, I mentioned movement. This is one of the largest chunks of time in FA - understanding that FA is a game of strategic and tactical manoeuvring is one of the greatest understandings that any player can discover about the game, and as such it should be preserved in the greater part, but speeded up. I discussed how to do this before, and mentioned some templates. Here is a PDF of those that forum member Ryjak made;

FA Movement Templates PDF

That's great, but we all want better gaming aids, right? As I have a 3D printer, this was something I figured I could cook up, so 15 minutes on Tinkercad and I produced the STL file. Printed at 0.2mm with 15% infill took just under an hour, and here are the finished articles;

They could do with a bit of tweaking on the print settings, and I might cut the longer ones down to 3" as well, to make them easier to get into tight spots (which is one of the issues with the SG 45 degree template). Here they are in use - I've set up a common situation in FA - the knife fight. In this example, the Dindrenzi Dreadnought really doesn't want to be so close, but it's decided to go for it. 

It has a 2" Turn Limit, so we use the Turn Rate 3 template.

So you can see two advantages of this method here straight away - firstly, the template is narrow enough for you to get it into tight spaces - you'll see that in the other pictures too. Secondly, you get an immediate idea of what is possible - where the model is going to end up, which reduces moving and then "backing up", which is one of the big slow-downs in many games. This also has a secondary thought-process speed-up, since you're concentrating more on actions rather than logistics of movement.

So we've moved, and can nicely line up the two Ba'kash cruisers in our dual rail cannon sights. Now let's look at the Ba'kash move (assuming they survive!)

Here the Ba'kash cruiser turn (using the Turn Rate 2 marker) would cause problems with model placement, and not be good for a port broadside shot, so instead the model moves 1" forewards...

and we can see now that a turn will clear the model nicely, and set us up for a nice broadside of drive-by boarding assault...

One more inch of turn...

...and we're aligned.

With 4" moved, there's plenty left to cruise alongside, probably setting the scene for a rear-arc shot next turn!

I hope you can see that this is pretty liberating for FA in a couple of ways, yet preserves a VERY important part of the game, since movement is a central and critical part of Firestorm's feel. Given that Spartan Derek isn't even considering movement mechanics yet, I'll be adopting this movement system and then moving onto other areas first - after all, you don't build a house and THEN work on the foundations, do you?

Fanstorm Armada - Battlelog part 2

Now the last entry dealt with the easy to fix parts of battlelog, which brings us to (3) - making ships reflect accurately on the BL. Now this one is harder, since the BL categories of "Tier 1" are very broad - a dreadnought is waaay more BL efficient than a Battlecruiser, despite being double the points. Carriers are also inefficient from a BL perspective, and so it goes on....

Now those of you who have followed my contributions to the SG community or this blog for a long time will know that I'm a numbers guy. I always have been analytical, even when I was playing with model soldiers as a kid I thought that there should be a better way of knowing who got shot than my whim, and when I got started in wargaming at around 11 I was dissatisfied with the mechanics presented to me, and started researching armour penetration characteristics for different guns and so on. It's something that's contributed heavily to my present position in business.

Back in v1 of Firestorm there was a very cool custom ship creation mechanic, which disappeared in v1.5, and which I thought I could recreate and make much "fairer" (it was possible to game the old one to create point-efficient "monsters"). As part of that I went into a deep analysis of the game, elements of which I used in the FFG, like the FA probability calculator, which handles probabilities of DR & CR with various AD by overlaying probability curves - so you don't just get a raw number, but the whole vulnerability curve, which you can compare with others...great for ship design! (I'll share that one with everyone at some point).

The upshot of this is that I created a huge (like 50mb or so at last look) Excel sheet to analyse every single ship in the game - it's effectiveness vs every other ship in the game and its vulnerability to every other ship in the game, incorporating SRS, boarding, range and so on. From this you could determine an "effectiveness index", and on examining this it looks very much like what you'd create from a straw poll of the community using the ships, which shows its broadly in the right direction. It is assumptive, of course, but it's assumptive in a standardised way, thus reproducible and adjustable across the board, making it relatively future proof.

Now the next part if this is to create some standard "slots" of BL based on the current BL ranges - currently you have BL alterations from 1 to 11 (+7 on one side and -4 on the other). This seems a bit restrictive given that Dreadnoughts and Battlecruisers are in the same space, so let's extend that to 15 (the reason will become apparent below). Now we can assign every ship a BL value based on its arbitrarily scaled effectiveness, which should make much more sense.

That by itself solves some of the value issues, but how this is applied needs to be looked at too. Let's get rid of the whole "half strength" bit, because it doesn't really mean anything and its awkward in game, so toss it. Now, for Tier 3s let's just say you get their BL value when the whole squadron is destroyed - an easy to remember point in the game and fluff-justifiable. Tier 3s are now more attractive from the viewpoint that it's now actually quite difficult to gain BL from them - large squadrons with the last one performing FSE deny your opponent BL.

Now this won't work for Tier 2s, which are a more solid investment from a fleet perspective, and yielding BL on the full squadron would result in bloodbaths with FSE and no BL. So let's award BL for them being destroyed (again, an easy point to remember - destroy a capital ship, gain BL), plus a bonus for destroying the squadron - yet again an easy "stop point" to adjust BL.

Tier 1s can be handled in different ways, and actually should be, because this adds design flexibility and granularity in differing ships - you can treat a Battleship and a Dreadnought differently from a Carrier or Battlecruiser. For the latter, we can use exactly the same methodology as for Tier 2s, with the Tier 2 contributing it's BL as an accompaniment (more on that below - hold those thoughts!). For the larger Capital ships, 1Bl per HP is a good stand-in, plus a bonus for destroying the ship and/or squadron. This BL loss should not be applied until after the game ends, or the ship is destroyed/captured/escapes, however - that stops Tier 1s being sniped for BL, but still means you can lose a battle at the end because the other player managed to maul but not quite kill your Tier 1s.

So this all sound really complex, right? Well, it's actually easily represented by a number with three other numbers - one for the BL per HP, one for the BL per ship, and one for the BL per squadron - like so;

Retribution 15 (1-2-1)

This means the Retribution is worth 1BL point for every Hull Point you manage to take off it, plus two for destroying the ship, and one for destroying the squadron. How does a cruiser look?

Isonade 7 (0-1-3)

Tsunami 11 (0-2-3)

So our standard cruiser squadron can vary in BL cost from 5 to 7. You get a BL for every ship you kill, and 3 for taking down the entire squadron. heavy cruisers are worth 2 each, but still an extra three for the squadron.

This format gives a lot of design flexibility - so for a start an accompaniment is easily dealt with, since it contributes its individual ship BL...this would be 1 or 2 for most capital ships, and is 0 for Tier 3s. Adding in a heavy cruiser automatically ups the BL cost here, since they're worth 2 points instead of 1, so it neatly gets around any questions of "What is this ship worth in BL in this situation?".

I talked about Battlecruisers and carriers, so let's have a look;

Ares 7 (0-4-3)

The Ares is worth 4 by itself, but you only get that when its destroyed...hey, now carriers look like a better BL choice, don't they? But wait, taking a carrier by itself means that when its destroyed its worth 7 - of course you can mitigate that by adding a cruiser like a Hermes 4 (0-1-1), which would bring the total BL value to 8, but you can avoid half of that if you got the cruiser out after the carrier was destroyed.

Amentum 7 (0-2-3)

Now Battlecruisers are worth less by themselves, but still sit in a higher BL value "bracket", which helps with fleet building, which I'll address in my next Fanstorm blog posting.

The other thing this does is cement the dialog used in game, since you'll probably need to ask the BL value of ships/squadrons as you destroy them - this shouldn't slow down play, since you should have all of that information right to hand (the intent would always be that the BL cost goes into the ship entry.

Here's the current list, have a look over it and see what you think! Always happy to receive feedbacl and discuss in more detail :-)

Complete BL Value list (wip)

Enjoy!

Fanstorm Armada - Battlelog Part 1

Well December is already more than a week old, and Christmas is rushing up to us with the speed of a Dindrenzi rail cannon shot, so I thought I'd better get onto the old keyboard and splurge some more of my thinking of Fanstorm Armada. This time I'm going to look at Battlelog, which was one of my favourite innovations for Firestorm v2.

Now over the past couple of years as the game has evolved, players have gotten used to the system and new ships have been released, some weaknesses have been exposed in the BL system - not inherent flaws, more design weaknesses that didn't take account of tournament hardened players or future releases. Let me lay some of these out there;

1. Working out who is winning can be somewhat confusing, and requires knowledge of the other players battlelog. Now this does create a dialogue (a good thing), but especially in tournament settings it could cause conflict (is your BL really at +8? I thought it should be +5 etc). This is compounded by some effects applying both a positive BL adjustment to one player and a negative to the other.
2. In some games you get "topping out" of one players BL, meaning additional positive effects don't count - making them pointless...not really the intent or reflective of where the game is at. this can act to create more draws or minor victories even when one side is clearly winning by any other measure.
3. Some ships are not worth their BL investment. This is most easily demonstrated with a couple of examples
• Tier 3 ships are easy BL - 1 point for halving a squadron (usually just 2 ships). 2 points for wiping them out. Easy money, as Tier 3s are not too much of an issue to pop.
• Battlecruisers in a Patrol Fleet are a liability - lighter on points than a battleship, but a massive BL swing if destroyed...which is easier than taking down most other Tier 1s. Carriers also have this issue to some degree.
4. Sometimes in the heat of battle it's difficult to remember to apply certain BL events - most usually reducing a squadron to half, a really unsatisfactory point since there are few other negatives associated with this - it's not a really pivotal point that draws attention.

Now obviously (3) is the biggest thing here, since it fundamentally affects how people build their fleets, leaving some ships in the "little used" category, because if used then they can be exploited by other players. This is often shown in minimisation of Tier 3s in many fleets, where their utility for points is also on the low side.

So battlelog is a third element that needs consideration when building a fleet - essentially what players do (those interested in building effective tournament lists, at least) is look at utility (subjective to the player) vs cost vs BL impact before using a ship in their fleet.

So how can we address this issue in a constructive way that solves some of the other minor weaknesses in the BL?

Well (1) & (2) are easy to address - you use a single battlelog for a game - the winner is determined by comparison of battlelog in any case, and it rarely impacts the game in any meaningful manner during the course of play, so why not just get rid of one? A centrally placed BL allows easy understanding of where the game is, and no ambiguity. You still have a dialogue - potentially more so - and it's harder to "forget" events since you're both essentially the gatekeepers of the log. This also eliminates "topping out" since that will indicate a crushing victory and opposing fleet shunt-out (if its not already destroyed!). This helps with (4), but it doesn't solve it entirely - better to address that one separately, which I'll do in Part 2.

Fanstorm Armada - Background technology...Weapons & Shields

Hello again to another post on background for Fanstorm Armada. This time I'm going to be talking about technology, since that underpins a lot of the writing as well as game effects that are used in any game. I started this waaaay before I became involved with Spartan games, and I kept it bubbling ever since. It really came out of wanting to create a better ship customisation tool than existed in v1 at the time, and then disappeared in v1.5 (which was a shame since it fostered a lot of community involvement, creativity and discussion).

The first part of this was weapons technology, since that is a pivotal part of the game. Although there were small hints as to the technologies involved, like Dindrenzi using railguns, Aquans using lasers and the dirty Terrans using nukes...those dirty, dirty terrans....This is a bit like saying the US military uses missiles, ships and aircraft in its military - it's not really engaging. So I started looking at weapon development by looking at my ship construction, and I derived this from the physical models and the stats at the time.

A prime example are the mass-drivers on the Terran Battleships and Dreadnoughts - there are two of these, so its possible to reverse engineer the stats of a single one assuming that weapons "link" internally in the same way they do if ships in a squadron do. This makes sense, since multiple weapons on a single ship do anyway (think broadsides and turrets or multiple broadsides and so on). As it happens, this works out quite nicely for the terran main weapons - not quite so well elsewhere because it wasn't thought of in the model design phase - models are designed on the "rule of cool" rather than hard stats, though when I was in the FFG Chris (the model designer) did usually get the stats before finalising designs so that they aligned - something which i also think is important...model stats should reflect how the model looks.

Now the document I present to you is a WIP which I shelved because of other commitments and the likelihood of it ever being officially implemented...now of course I am free from such strictures so I can let you all see this little view on my mindset and I will update it to make it relevant to the current/future rules (Fanstorm v1). So here it is, my views on weapon development in the FA universe, part 1 v1;

Weapons in FA

Next a few musings on shields, since that's another underpinning technology of several races. This is a bit harder to make seem "real" since the underlying principles are, of course, much more fiction than science. Still, putting something down on paper seemed like a good idea

Shields in FA

Another area that is hugely overlooked, yet pivotal, in FA is the concept of the Foldspace drive. Why is this so important? Well, the workings of this drive determine the size and nature of the conflict in the FA universe, since this will determine how communication works, what the combat radius of a ship is, tactics employed etc. This also has to mesh with things like in-game mechanics of Fold-Space entry, Fold-space escape and battle-shunts. It also has to explain why the Terrans abandoned their wormhole network, which seems like a pretty big deal - instantly travelling from one system to another vs spending time in foldspace...

I posted on the Spartan Games community about this as Spartan Alex, but as "my thoughts" rather than canon, since it wasn't an official Spartan announcement. I haven't yet collected these together in a conherent document, but it quite neatly deals with most of the above issues (it being incredibly laborious and random to get any official sanction on anything). This also explains the existence, size and shape of Fathom's Reach and the Storm Zone, and the border zone between the Zenian League and the Kurak Alliance. It was also essential for developing my narrative for the ongoing direction of FA, which would incorporate the Leviathan class ship - so more on that in another blog post :-)

Fanstorm Armada v1 - Military Organisations

Now if you have the Zenian and Kurak Alliance fleet books, these contain the most background on the individual Core races yet produced by Spartan. While solid, theres still a lot of gaps here. The book mentions some military structures and such, but although there are some good specifics, I felt this really needed fully fleshing out to create a coherent framework for further work. Here's what I did.

These are early drafts I completed of these structures - I am working on refining and updating these, especially the Directorate and Relthoza, In any case, I hope you enjoy them and they help you build the universe into your games and more for the future. Also, we're recording the next episode of The Hub Systems Podcast tonight, so expect Episode 28 before the weekend!

Military Organisations in Firestorm Armada

Fanstorm Armada v1 - Background

I've done a lot of work in Firestorm in the past, and that produced directly for SG was only a very small part of that. I'm also fortunate in having a network of people across the globe to critique my work and provide alternative ideas and suggestions to refine that work. Rather than let all of those hours go to waste, I'll be posting up my thoughts, background and developments here for the community to share.

Before I get to mechanics and rules, the big area I (and many of you out there) have felt is lacking in Firestorm Armada is background. Now approaching this requires more than just sending a whole bunch of freelance writers off to get some stories together, or even asking an active community for content. Why? Let's have a look...

Freelancers tend to do one of two things - they either write to a tight brief with good guidelines, or they're given freedom to write what they like with much looser reigns. One of the first things I started working on, therefore, was a set of writer guidelines to shape the universe. This is important because there are basics of technologies that will affect the whole shape of how the universe is written about. Let's use an example to illustrate this.

Have you ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer? It was a huge hit in the 90s and a lot of it still stands up as good, silly, fantasy fun. However, it was written at a time where mobile phones were not omnipresent, and many of the plot lines would simple be answered by having one. A modern equivalent would be written from a different perspective and would follow a different line just because of that one simple difference in communications technology.

It's the same with a game like FA and its background. SG have never been that interested in the technological background of their universe, which then makes it problematic to shape the universe coherently, which means any freelance or fan based content will vary on approach and not produce a cohesive, immersive universe. This doesn't matter for some, but it does matter for most gamers, who tend to be of a similar detail-oriented ilk within their hobby sphere.

Communications is one example - is it possible to contact a planet from another planet? Is it possible to contact a ship in FSD? Can a ship in fold-space be detected? What is fold-space? All of these basics affect any story written in or for the universe, so its important to nail this stuff down.

Another facet of this are the various races in FA - what is their background? Where did they evolve, and how? Evolution shapes the way creatures act hugely, and much more than we recognise. Our "fight or flight" mechanism comes from our evolution, the propensity for males to have better spatial awareness than females comes from the evolutionary branch of it being selected for as males went out to hunt...every aspect and nuance of our underlying behavioural mechanisms has come from our evolution from single-celled organisms, shaped by the changing environment and evolutionary pressures of millions of years.

Even where we have humans in the Firestorm universe, we have different interpretations of the seven or so human factions (Terran, Dindrenzi, Directorate, Hawker, Works Raptor, OSO and RSN). Are the Dindrenzi space nazis or not? Is that the role of the RSN? What is life like in the Directorate? The unanswered questions are almost infinite.

This is also highlighted in game instances, like the so called "Fleet Admiral". Now Admiral is a very high rank in a navy, and really this doesn't make much sense in a background and real-world sense, but this is just an in-game reference. Even so, when trying to put in the invasion "Commanders", it puts you as a designer in a corner, so one of the things I looked at before giving titles to these Commanders was to create a full military structure for all of the core six races, and place the Commanders logically within them. This provides consistency both now and in the future. Unfortunately the recent posts by SG have ignored this, introducing the rank of "Pioneer-Marshall" and "Monitor-Commander" - which sound cool but don't actually sit with any prior background.

As such I will be presenting the work I've done independently as a Fan-derived version of Spartan's universe, and nothing within it is meant to challenge any of SGs licences or IP, but merely to provide an alternate and fully fleshed-out background - let's call it an alternative interpretation - of their game. I hope you enjoy it, and I'm always open to feedback and discussion on any aspect. if people have better or cooler things to add, then I'll add them.