I think part of the problem, even if we're straying a little bit off topic, is that the market for overly complex space combat games is niche. I liked Star Fleet Battles back in the day, but ugh, that was a lot of rules. Multiple books with entries like Rule 2.1.35 and Rule 5.2.45. I don't have the patience for a game like that, and I can't imagine a game without a license to help draw folks in would fare better.

The first Interplay PC game was actually a pretty decent adaptation, at least at the ship to ship combat, even if it's campaign was utterly lackluster and the AI was just meh. The multiplayer was quite fun however. And even it had lots of elements that probably could've been dropped and/or simplified. Granted the later games in that PC series took it too far, and simplified things too much IMHO.

Wow. Obviously I can't reply to all of this specifically. First, I don't have anywhere near the attitude you are all perceiving. Like one of you even said "until you release your first game anyway". Meaning that once I had some experience, then it wouldn't come off that way. Well... I've been doing this for at least a decade longer than most of you. I was among the very first group of modern game designers that invented the process by which you make games. I have already been involved with MANY published games, one of the second only to D&D in it's stature in the history of games. I don't have an attitude, other than that which may be coming out DEFENSIVELY. The problem there, as it has always been, is that you treat me as if I am a 15-year-old with a dream of someday making games. You talk down too me as if I am a child with a dream, and you are an established and experience expert. Do you think Sid Meier, Steve Meretzky, Will Wright... take your pick. What do you think their "attitude" would be like if they came to our industry and were talked down to in the same way... for 20 years! How do you think they might react, and would the be justified in their reaction? I am literally one of your founding fathers, all credit to SVC for that of course and I was merely there. But I was there. And listen to how you talk down too me... only because you have forgotten us and don't know who we were too you. But still, it is what I have had to deal with for 20 years now.

As I had said, I AM making a board game "prototype". Many of you have suggested that in your posts, which I had just said last night after JBAdams told me that is an acceptable prototype. It's going to take a while because I have a few issues with doing that. As I said, I am in the middle of changing the first space ship game to work with Crippled Rube so that I can be certain that game can be made without incident. In need a game first to try the "2-way communication" method that will make for a significant improvement. I am also in the middle of a disaster, I am being forced out of pretty much the only city I have ever lived in and still have no idea where I am going or what I will do when I get there. I only have 5 months left before I must leave Denver and still have no idea what where I am going or what I will do when I get there. I've lived in Amarillo and Boston briefly, but otherwise have spent my entire life in Denver. Legalizing marijuana has made everyone in the country want to move here, and rent/housing has literally tripled in the last few years. Denver has gone from one of the most affordable cities in the nation, to one of the most expensive and it is not possible for me to live here anymore. There is no "ghetto" in Denver, and there is literally not a single place in the entire Denver Metro Area that I can afford to live now. The parking lot outside is filled with Cadillac's and BMW's now, and when my lease runs out, that is it. I have to leave this city. So I first have to write all the notes to myself about how the first ship game functions now in that design doc.

Then I can drop everything else I had been doing within the PDU, and go back to game #1, the Cold War game, and just make it as a prototype board game. I've made lots of those before, that's easy, and JBAdams says its a valid plan. It's the only valid plan I've got, so I am going with it. But I have to deal with figuring out where in America I will even be living. My "safety valve" (a game design term I use:-) is my father's retirement ranch outside of Walsenburg, CO. He will let me live in one of the guest houses (two trailer homes, his house is nice) on his ranch. But the ranch is about 40 minutes away from even Walsenburg, and with my medical problems I am very restricted in what work I can do. So if I do that, it really means I am retiring to the ranch as well. I won't be able to find a job there, and will just be isolated out on the ranch in my little trailer house box. I would much rather be able to work to have somewhere to go and something to do, and live at least near a city. The ranch really is far away from everything, that we the whole point of it. I also then need to rip the things about the cold war game that can only exist as a computer game out a copy of the current design doc to start a board game version, and one of those things is going to be very time consuming to remove. I never had any idea that it would ever be made as a board game because it is not financially feasible to do that... and one of the "computer game only" elements has woven itself throughout the entire game. That is going to take a couple weeks to remove and undo all by itself before I can even get started.

So, the prototype board game IS the plan, and you guys, JB Adams in the end, have given me exactly what I was asking for. A plan for trying this again that is a valid plan in your eyes, so that is exactly what I am going to do. Again, thank you very much. I can now be confident that my effort is not a waste of time to begin with and, even if it doesn't work, at least it was an acceptable idea from your perspective that had not been a complete waste of time.

You all know the original Romulan ship from the TOS episode Balance of Terror, the "submarine movie" episode. And you remember it's very powerful weapon, that traveled relatively slowly and "loses power with range". This is a "6th grade level math"-type space combat ACM question... Is this weapon balanced in a general sense, or is there a fatal flaw that must be corrected to avoid a serious game killing balance issue?

before i became a game developer, i was an aerospace and defense engineer. when you start to look at star trek from a technical combat point of view, you quickly discover that generous amount of literary freedom were exercised when it came to things like visual and weapon ranges. one of the real challenges of writing a Star Trek style capital ship space combat flight sim is resolving these inconsistencies into believable combat mechanics. well - that and getting the AI autopilot to fly to a precise point, when it can turn at perhaps 5 degrees per second, but can fly at about 1000x the speed of light- its all about not overshooting the target - without having to creep up on it.

If you used to go to the conventions I wouldn't be surprised if we had met before, Norman. The cloaking device (my Romulan-ness showing) is our favorite example of this. The primary concept behind the cloaking device in SFB is "The cloaking device is not a magic carpet ride into firing position." It doesn't actually make you invisible, it is the most extreme form of Electronic Warfare. And this is MORE realistic and MORE ACCURATE TO STAR TREK than Star Trek because, in Star Trek, every time they encounter a cloaked ship they act as if it is the first time they have ever seen cloaking device before. And in almost every episode with a cloaked ship they discover a whole new way to detect cloaked ships all over again. So we consider our cloak to be accurate to Star Trek... even though Star Trek attempts to say the opposite, but fails, and winds up actually agree with us without realizing it:-)

Star Trek doesn't have a whole lot of WMDs

Sure it does - photon torpedoes have explosive yields in the megatons, if not higher. The Romulans use nukes and that plasma weapon in "Balance of Terror." Then there's the ships themselves. Warp-capable starships run on matter/anti-matter and carry enough antimatter to explode plenty well if it all went up at once - AND they can travel faster than light (warp) and at relativistic speeds (impulse). I imagine the USS Enterprise could probably sterilize the surface of an Earth-like planet if it really wanted to, even if only by crashing into it as a pure kinetic impactor. Failing that, one could probably build a "planet cracker" ship that was nothing but a lead bullet with a warp drive attached to it.

In SFB, anyway, that torpedo in Balance of Terror is a "Type-R Plasma torpedo". It is one of the most powerful weapons in the Star Fleet Universe. Few ships have it, and those that do always pay a great price in their design one way or anther for having it. It would be roughly the equivalent, I would say without SVC approving it so it isn't actually officially (but the Romulans are mine:-), to about a 100 megaton nuclear detonation. A fully overload Photon Torpedo would, by my unofficial guess here, be equivalent to about a 20 megaton nuclear detonation. The shields these ships have are powered by Anti Matter reactors, the shields are therefore very powerful.

Well... I've been doing this for at least a decade longer than most of you. I was among the very first group of modern game designers that invented the process by which you make games. I have already been involved with MANY published games, one of the second only to D&D in it's stature in the history of games.

So I'm not clear, is the game done or not?

Are you polishing the game or the design?

If you DO have something to show, then let's show it.

If you only have ideas on papers (20 years worth of ideas) then that must be quite a lengthy and convoluted document to read. Because K.I.S.S. tends to win every argument, I'd be surprised anyone would have the patience of reading this document to begin with. Most likely, you need to find a better medium to communicate your ideas than a GDD.

So I'm not clear, is the game done or not?

Are you polishing the game or the design?

If you DO have something to show, then let's show it.

If you only have ideas on papers (20 years worth of ideas) then that must be quite a lengthy and convoluted document to read. Because K.I.S.S. tends to win every argument, I'd be surprised anyone would have the patience of reading this document to begin with. Most likely, you need to find a better medium to communicate your ideas than a GDD.

Four of the game design documents, the original trilogy and the prequel Cold War game are in advanced states of completion. Designing what was originally 6, and evolved up to 12, games at a time is a tricky prospect. I am "JMSing" these games, like he did through is "SFU timeline bible" (JMS was an SFB player, that's why we got B5 and you didn't... stick tongue out at you:-). So the beginning of my story knows the end of my story, so I can do those B5-like story things... to my meager abilities compared to JMS, anyway. The core rock of the story, the WWII geo-politcal defining for the next century, event in my universe is Pirate Dawn and the game that comes right after it. So Pirate Dawn had to be taken to completion. Pirate Dawn has been finished and ready to go since 1999. The other 3 "core games", the original "four game trilogy" are all only 6-8 weeks for completion and have been for many years. All games other than Pirate Dawn, including the original ones, have always been "intentionally left open" so they can continue to freely evolve with the "JMS my story knows the future" thing. So I have always been essentially 4 games ahead of the dev team if I were to actually make them. The sixth game is also at a high level of completion (the first ship game). It is the original end story, where the universe could still optionally end. Past game #6 all of those games are in a "notes stage", mostly notes generated from the design or story of other games. However the last game is, again, in an advanced stage... becuase I need to know the end of the story before I can even start with the beginning of it:-)

Hey, Norman... I remember SimTrek now. I just went to look at that, I played that. So you would know a name from your own computer game history that many reading this have probably never heard before. Because, clearly, he was a major influence on SimTrek:-)

I loved Wizardry so much! Tilthowait!!! I was almost the best game of it's day... But in the earliest days of the computer game industry, if you like space ship/sci-fi games anyway, nobody could hold a candle to Dr. Trevor Sorensen. Both of his games are STILL classic masterpieces. He may not have been the first to do "Begin", but he definitely did it the best by far. And Krellan Commander was a masterpiece... for the few of us who were actually able to even figure out to play that genius's ultimate achievement!

I throw Dr. Sorensen in with hobbyist industry guys... Most of you have forgotten Trevor Sorensen as well. But Norman sure hasn't:-)

Ugh. This is, again, pretty much going nowhere. As always with Pirate_Lord/Kavik Kang it devolves quickly from a thread about a game design idea to a thread merely used by a guy to vent his frustration about an industry that doesn't give him the recognition he (thinks) he naturally deserves, and with his life in general. I'm sure tabletop games were a very strong influence for computer games, as I'm also sure they're mostly distinct industries at this point and one is possible to be interested in the latter and not the former(and vice versa). I sure have very rarely played tabletop games, but have played hundreds of computer games for 25 years now. So...whatever. I'm gonna go play me some new Deus Ex now :P

There's literally no way at this point to engage in useful discussion about the *ideas* themselves, because you will take whatever we say as a starting point to vent again about how you are one of our "forefathers", you started all this, we don't recognize you as our superior, as we should, etc etc etc. You literally cannot stop repeating this ad nauseam and get on with the meat of the discussion, which is about the game design idea you have, of which we literally know nothing about as of yet. Just so you know, someone that feels the need to repeat his credentials and namedrop with every other sentence just comes off as very insecure about the whole thing, and has the opposite effect of what you (probably) expect. I personally give up from the effort to make you drop everything else that's irrelevant to game design and just talk about your ideas as equal-to-equals. It just ain't gonna happen with you.

I'm *only* saying all this because, even if you ever get people to work for you and your game, you're gonna drive them mad with your constant need to be validated at every turn.

But good luck with the prototype anyway, it's very good that you finally decided to work on something concrete, though I do find it strange it took you this long and someone else's advice to figure out that you really should be working with the things you're already good at. :)

Sure it does - photon torpedoes have explosive yields in the megatons, if not higher.

those are WMDs by our defintion based on 20th century technology. WMDs in Star Trek would be more like this:

the Doomsday Machine from the original series.

This sucker eats entire planets in one gulp! hows that for mass destruction? <g>