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Sorry for the absence guys. We were without power at work all day tuesday, and have a stack of shit to make up for PLUS regular daily work. But I've made arrangement so things don't get held up.

Orders in.

Wow, 20 firing... thats new

Huh?

Well, this was a lot of fun for a while, before the GM decided to use a player's absence to start a bunch of crap, hand out tech, and further wank out an already uberwank race.

Would love to have fought a fair battle at some point, but when the enemy can suddenly fire across the map with tech they shouldn't have in the first place, and new super iso-mega phase cloaks that my phase cloak detectors couldn't, well, detect...

I'm out. Consider it official. I've got more important things to do with my real life.

It was... fun.

The range on torpedoes has been 1 million KM from the outset. Hexs are 50,000 KM.

And no one handed out tech.

BigJKU316 wrote:Huh?

I thought you couldn't fire the same turn you drop cloak?

Cloaks were dropped as the battle was joined so those ships were uncloaked from the outset but cloaked on approach.

Ah.

Ok, to address a host of points before this gets nuts.

1. The Taiidan being wanked out. They might be now but they were not intended to be. What they were designed to be was a dominion analog, minus the wormhole. They did not start all that strong. They started the sim with specific set capabilities. Their fleet was set at about 70% of what Starfleet had and about the same percentage of the peak Klingon fleet. They had no quantum torps, no cloaks and were supposed to be a bit strange. Where I guess I screwed up is that I did not anticipate anyone would make peace with people who conquered the Ferengi and surgically altered them and who blasted a few billion Klingons into goo. Their production was set to allow them to replinish fairly rapidly, to make it a challenge for everyone, but their overall production was set and still is well below what either of the major alliances is capable of (about equal with the Coalition and slightly short of the ISA as consituted at the start of the war). I designed them to be part of an ongoing war that would run to the end of the sim as a sort of fun ending for everyone where everyone would get to use their fleets and fight.

2. Using Mark's absence to start a bunch of crap. Well that situation sucked for everyone. Mark was gone but we were in the middle of a war where he had just destroyed a whole race. If I had elected to fight to the death then there would have been nothing left for him to come back to. If I did nothing they would have collapsed economically. I took a guess and did the best I could with it. Apologies to those I offended.

3. Firing across the map with weapons they should not have. The Ferengi had and sold quantum torpedoes to numerous races. The Taiidan conquered the Ferengi. I made them wait a few years before they could refit ships with those weapons to simulate having to produce them in such large numbers. Considering at other times powers have just picked up weapons and been allowed to fire them two days later I thought this was pretty restrictive. Ships have always been able to fire 1 million KM on the map which is 20 hexes of 50,000 KM each. The map is deisgned to resolve battles quickly so no one is ever really out of range.

4. Dealing with cloaked ships of all types has been pure hell and I will NEVER do it again. I have to debate with people if they can be seen at Warp 6 or with this advanced cloak or that detector. It just sucks. No matter what I do someone ends up pissed off. In this case the Taiidan blew apart the border sensors of the CU and moved in. They arrived at the shipyard 2 days after Breen forces did, with both running in at high warp. I gave both powers intel I felt was appropriate given the situation but again, it is quite possible to screw it up. In my view cloak detectors work great on borders but far less well when you are underway, particularly at high warp. It was a call I have to make and I made it.

5. Again, all I can say for myself is I have done the best I can to be fair and open with people. But this subject matter has me very worn down. Consider things to be on hold for an extended period.

I could say a lot about this, most of which would likely get me banned but the one thing I can safely say is that what happened to Mark was his own damn fault. He responded to losing a city by launching ten planet killers at each inhabited world in Ferengi space. There's no possible way a weapon with a 1,000 ton anti-matter warhead could be used tactically. He didn't bother to do any recon first as practically every world he hit had nothing more than a few hundred thousand Taiidan militia on them to keep the peace. Big was left in a situation where most of the obvious routes would have left Mark with nothing to come back to so he scrambled to save some semblance of Mark's nation.

Why don't we just take a break for a while and see what happens. We've got a lot of people dealing with personal RL things and the Sim in wartime is just another stress.

Wow....I just made a long post, got logged out, then it said it posted, now nothing

Let's try again.

A bunch of people got upset with me, so lets talk about it directly. I'm playing the Cardassians. An arrogrand, paranoid people by nature. Now, lets look at it in game terms. THIS IS AN RP GAME AS MUCH AS A TACTICAL SIMULATION!!!

We have a civillian president in a time of invasion.

Said invaders blatently attack the civillian population, reminding everyone of the near eradication of the Cardassian people as a whole during the end of the Dominion War. The administration and military leaders were all alive during that holocost and easily see it happening again.

Cardassia's allies in the ISA ordered a retreat of ships that were at the first planet being attacked abandoning the civillian population.

The ISA said "we'll try and reclain your lost territory" thus conveying to Cardassia that they'd try it as long as the cost wasn't to high, and the ISA would be willing to permanantly "lose" Cardassian territory, as if it didn't mean much.

Cardassia saw the ISA put up a greater struggle to defend a rivals world than one of it's own members.

Cardassias fleet was smashed.

Cardassia had these awesome long range weapons that could have destroyed the enemies means to make war. (Now, my mistake was in the power of these things. I'd given orders to target certain things, and I ASSUMED the yield would be adjusted to destroy the target, not annalate the worlds. I never intended that, but I wasn't very clear in my orders, so....)

-----

Now, lets address some other things. While I was gone, Big made some decisions on my behalf that as a player I never would have made, and had a history of not doing. I wouldn't have ever agreed to merc out my fleet, engage in piracy against races I'd been trying to negotiate peace with inspite of pressure from the outside. I would not have signed a treaty or formed an alliance with a power that invaded and attacked civillians (not for a while anyway). But I haven't complained. I wasn't here, and Big acted on my behalf so I'm trying to deal with the result, and make my race MY race again.

Big, I do feel for you and the trouble your having with cloaking tech, but I've made several suggestions to you and Staplic to simplify it and nobody has really paid much attention to me. I'll try again with this new idea.

Cloaking tech is upgraded constantly, as well as sensors. We rate them.

If you've developed a level 3 cloaking device, and your enemy has level 2 sensors, you've got a tiny chance to be spotted. The greater discrepency in level, the greater the odds of success or failure.

As it stands now, cloaking devices are nearly useless except to hide an enemy force. You can't use cloak/strike/cloak attacks that we've seen over and over again by the Klingons and Romulans. You can't for shit sneak up on an enemy during combat.

The rules need an overhaul.

Now, there are some things that need to be worked out in the game.

On one occasion a GM shared something with another player out of turn, allowing them to respond to it before it actually happened. Now, people are human, but before people get upset and start crying bias, let's discuss this before the SIM falls apart.