Well since you asked for feedback and ideas, here you go!
Disclaimer: Anything I post here, or anywhere else, can freely be used by anybody, anywhere, for any purposes without any compenstation to or mention of myself.
I don't remember ever seeing electronic warfare playing a part in any battle, strategic or tactical, so unless I'm just totally loosing my memory (please enlighten me) I really can't see how that would add to the game much and would just add a rule people may end up avoiding.
Looking forward to the updated solar system construction, I have an app I wrote that uses the old explorer corps rules, it'll be nice to program that update ;)
Economy/Infrastructure. I'm not really looking forward to the economy rules, I thought they were a way to restrict/enhance factions too much in the ISIF rules posted in CO. They really didn't add to the game much, but if they are more scalable without fixed limits they would be a nice optional rule. I *really* think that money shouldn't be an issue, ever. Instead planets produce a # of raw materials (type irrelevant), and factories need X number of raw materials per 1K BV output or some such. This way the populations just don't matter, your restrictions on production are how many resources you can get from your systems and how many factories you have. This also explains what ties up the civilian jumpship I mention later.
Factions. It'd be really neat if each faction had some advantages/disadvantages. Nothing significant, perhaps Davion is a bit better without a strategic commander, Liao works better when combining units, etc. Something to give each faction some flavor would be a cool thing. Thought with 50+ factions it would have to be either really extensive, or simplified into quirks or something.
Communications/Intelligence. The ISIF rules in in CO were really good on this. Some fixed limits may be necessary (perhaps based on training facilities or something), but those rules were really a step in the right direction and I hope to see them further enhanced. Communications are rough though, on one hand you can give rules on using the HPGs for communications, but on the other hand you can't really make people write orders down in advance or you also need a ref. It would be a neat optional rule to have say 10-20 different commands you can give to units, and then just write them on a piece of paper or something in order. This way if communications are "lost" they would fall back to the orders previously given. This would make communications essential if you want your units to be versatile, and would really show why the 4th SW was so successful for Davion as Hanse gave individual commanders quite a bit of leeway.
Personalities/Nobility. These rules in ISIF were ok, but I think would need extended a bit. Aside from just LD, also give a couple other factors, kinda like succession wars did. Perhaps each has a Leadership, Strategy, Tactics, and Administration, which worked ok. Some leaders are great leaders, but not so great soldiers, others may be great on the battlefield, but horrible when commanding it, etc. Also, the list was never very complete, each region needs its leaders, each faction, and a few additional ones. I'd avoid leaders on specific military units however, unless ya'll are willing to list all 500+ mech regiments in a dozen different eras ;) Leaders could be abstracted as well. You'd have a faction leader, randomly determined from a d6 roll, and each major region gets a leader, from another roll, etc. This way its different every game, sometimes you'll have better leaders in different locations, etc. Loyalty was neat, but I think it should be more abstracted to make playable. Some units for example would only be loyal to their regional commanders, and if that commander was bribed, those units would in turn act differently. There is a lot of fluff to support that (Syrtis Fusiliers, Skye Rangers, etc). Also, to avoid needing hundreds of players, just have a bribe force a loyalty check, if that check fails have a dozen or so random events (like going after the Wolf's Dragoons with all your forces). This way you don't get excessive with factions and who is loyal to who.
Space Travel. Woohoo! This should really be pretty simple tho. 1 week to recharge your jump drives (sure its more or less, but do you really want to list all 3000 systems?), 1 more week to transit to/from the planet. I really can't see having any more detail on this, *unless* there are plans for a map or showing detail on all 3000 systems, then I'd definately welcome it and would be happy to program a computer to do it for you :) When it comes to JS/DS though, this is weird. The original numbers of 2500 JS and 25000 DS worked well if you discounted fasanomics, which I think IO *has* to address somehow. If you use the updated numbers in SO, JS simply become to commonplace that moving a regiment is like hailing a cab in NYC when your in a suit and holding up a wad of $100s. The old numbers however actually did work really well. 2500 jumpships, 5 houses, roughly 400 per house (plus periphery & corporate). Half those are civilian, so make it down to 200. Treat them in small groups of 3-6 that carry 10-15 dropships, and you have a number of about 50 jumpship "factors" per house. You can take more, but you would loose the economy for the region you took them from. The same sort of thing with Dropships, 25000, groups of "10-15", half civilian, roughly 300 "factors" per house. As 1 jumpship factor carries 1 dropship factor, you simply can't move everything all the time. TIkonov would have been taken with 25 JS and 25 DS factors (roughly 50% of the Davion JS's). Group DS's into assault, mech transport, aerospace, cargo, etc flotillas. They can easily be abstracted by house (5 assault dropship points available, pay 5 RP per turn to use or something), or tracked individually.
Colonization. Woohoo again! I have no idea what would be in this part, but it would have to have some limits to avoid players colonizing those other 110,000 systems in the inner sphere. I'd recommend just sucking up resources that normally would be used for production of units and JS/DS for a duration. This way its simply hard to do, not impossible, but probably only going to occur in really long games. The game shouldn't be about colonization IMO.
Random Encounters. Pirates, plagues, viruses, tratiors, meteors, some planet that apparently once per 1000 years has a "noah's ark event", etc, etc... a few pages and a couple hundred of these could be a real element to throw into a game, perhaps some of the bad things could be avoided if adequate resources (JS/DS/Materials) were applied to prevent it.
Though it wasn't mentioned, I *REALLY* think there needs to be a way to model how war declines technology. In my own models and math, my ideas led me to use "technical groups". These groups are only created at "technical schools", and are needed to run every factory, repair stuff, build things, etc. A certain number may be necessary to fix a mech regiment, another much higher number to run a factory, a MUCH higher number to run a warship facility, etc. This way when you start loosing tech groups (which can be attacked, or even schools lost) you have to sacrifice the warships first, then the jumpships, then the dropships, etc. Its a way to show how that warship bombarding the NAIS *reduced* the ability for Davion to build everything, especially warships. Its a way to see direct results from excessive war. If you want to keep your units fixed and fighting, you can't be off building tons of new stuff.
Misc. What about buildling fortifications, creating bases, building research facilities/science academies/pilot training school/etc, caching equipment (don't want to give your elite regiments old crap, and you don't have enough schools training mechwarriors to outfit a new regiment with their old stuff, so cache it).
Planetary Assault. Since so far all the rules have scaled from 1 person (ATOW) up to lances (BF), I really think this should be kept. Instead of having abstract planetary assault values simply use a BV ratio and something like capital damage. Lets say you have a company of 1500 BV mechs, thats 18000 BV, lets say there is 2000 BV per "strength point", so that heavy/assault company has a strength of 9. A light company may be closer to 3, while the best mech company possible would be closer to 18. These are direct BV conversions, as in PA nothing else really matters (well except speed, but that is taken into account in the BV). Now, when you want to scale up to battalion strength, simply divided BV by 6,000 as those units are 3x as large. This way you can easily convert between the 2 scales, and better yet, have a company vs battalion battle like so often happens. In that case, every damage point the battalion does against the company is x3, while it takes 3 points of damage from the company to do 1 damage to the battalion. A single piece of paper could easily hold dozens of regiments depending on the amount of other detail (fatigue, morale, quality, movement, tech base, RP, artillery, aerospace, etc). Most battalions would simply have a type (mech) and strength (#). Some may have an artillery value like #/#, indicating a strength that could be used to a certain range, or aerospace value indicating that unit can be used in space too. If a full map is being produced, changing systems so they have icons to denote things like vacuum, can help show how mechs are so much more useful, as they can operate there without reduction, while a tank unit (even a fusion one) may have serious reductions in capabilities (or just take 2x or 3x the damage) if they can be used at all. This makes mechs worth it, and without having *something* to make mechs so much more useful nobody will really notice if its a mech regiment, tank regiment, or whatever aside from its strength. Techncial groups (mentioned above) get rated by the # of repair points they can do.
I *highly* recommend units be rated on the amount of supply it takes to do an "attack", or suffer a penalty. This means you need supplies handy for sustained operations. Some units may have higher attacks, but need higher supplies to use them, and if unsupplied they fall down to lesser values than those that need minimal supplies. 1 supply point may be say 1000 tons, and be enough to supply a company for a month, or something like that. This way you can haul around supplies where necessary, and in big wars, you have to be careful not to run out in critical operations.
Supporting PDF material. This would be *awesome* to see all 3000 systems mapped out, heck I already have code that could do it in <1 minute, so I know its possible ;) It would also be awesome to see a huge map, with only 1-2 systems per hex (hopefully 1), with some small details around the world (vacuum, water rich, food rich, raw materials, etc), though this is a pretty big task (computers again do it in minutes, but those values need defined and based on canon, which is FAR more time intensive). It would be cool to see all factories in all eras, what/how much they output (1 assault 3025 mech line per week, 1 infantry platoon per week, 2 heavy omnimech 3050 mech line per week, etc). It'd be cool to see all the units as well, though this could simply be broken down into units (Each unit has an entry for each era, like Size/Strength/Quality/Morale/Leadership/Tech/?/?/?)) but again, without a computer that'd be intensive too.
I'd love to see this game become a counter/map based game, but doing my own metrics means that even with a 10 LY per hex scale, your talking about a map 6' across (not including clans) and filled full of thousands of counters. Federation and Empire by StarfleetGames does this, and its a great game, and I have tens of thousands of counters for it, but I kidna think that is probably out of scope a bit.... but would love to be wrong :)
Scaling will be nice, I kinda mentioned it above, I think it should be pretty seemless. Sure, you can fight regiment on regiment, but if you throw a battalion or company in there it should be able to still interact the same (Black Widow Company did often). One could use a rule of '3s' or something to do this. Strategic battleforce is a company/trinary, or about 10 to 30 elements. PA is a battalion/cluster, or about 24 to 90 or so units, ISIF regiments, etc... If SBF is a scale of 1, PA is 3, and ISIF 9. A SBF company strength 6 vs a ISIF regiment strength 54 may get lucky and do 1 hit for every 6 hits it takes, based on leadership, tactics, etc. This way a unit like the black widow company, when playing with particular tactics, may have a chance to do a couple hits against that regiment and escape, instead of just ignoring companies at battalion+ level, or ignoring whole battalions at ISIF level. Many times units are deployed in battalion sizes, so battalions and regiments interacting is a *must* IMO. Again, just use a BV scale. This makes it really easy to detemine the strength of your unit. Give a few other things, like if half the company or more has ECM/AEP denote it, if units have fuel limitations denote their PA range before needing supply, if a tracked unit is amphibious denote it, etc. Basically the conversion between all 3 scales should be like a page of text, be simply, and easily allow people to fight battles in all kinds of situations, even those where one side is greatly outnumbered.
Some other notes:
- Fixing units with lesser quality troops lowers their XP, gaining XP increases quality, pretty hard to do except in long games
- SIL can convert easily enough:
--Technological Sophisitication. Only higher tech planets can build higher tech units or have science schools.
--Industrial Development: Only higher numbers can have factories that produce stuff, and the higher the number the higher its capability of producing raw materials for production
--Raw Material Dependence: If any, it has no material output. If really low, its the # of JS factors required to support this world (if no JS, planet can succeed)
--Industrial Output: Mirrors the number of raw materials it creates, also the # of JS tied up in getting those materials where they need to be.
--Agricultural Dependence: Again, # of JS necessary to keep colony from dropping morale in its region.
- Some planetary attributes:
--Vacuum or no atmosphere: Mechs function normally, vehicles require * to denote fusion power to function, but take x2 damage,
--Extreme Temps/Gravity (high or low): All units gain/loose a bit of effectiveness, infantry may be unusuable unless they have XCT
- If system details are supplied, the transit days from Z/N points, the transit days from non-standard points, and perhaps some number to denote how complicated (# of stars?) or fast (higher orbit #s?) a pirate point can be
I'd be more than happy to give up any programming skills to help with any of the mundane tasks on this for no compensation, in fact I'm nearly ready to release a new version of my cartographer that is beginning to support much of the functionality a book like this would have (system/unit generators, map of IS at any scale, etc).
Oh, and there is the old thread where something like this was asked that may have some great ideas here as well:
http://www.classicbattletech.com/forumarchive/index.php?PHPSESSID=c4f1515d8c499048b54ffde62565f5e0&topic=57726.0;all
