Starfire Design Forum

I'm probably too lenient because if you are using a breakthrough to change a critical or hazardous you are already not making best use of your breakthrough. I would allow it to affect any project within 3EL. A breakthrough that makes it easier when you actually get there.

If you increase colonization costs you make it better to take control of NPRs instead of colonizing. This was 3rd editions problem because colonization ROI made it stupid to do. It was far better to explore and find NPRs and control them. If the problem is number of ships then focus on manipulating ...

In ultra any unsuccessful breakthrough can convert a critical or hazardous project. There doesn't seem to be a requirement for this project to be active. This is the same in the Solar rules that I have.

You literally have to have no SL or Tech Item projects that weren't started this month, for this to happen. You had that happen? Yep. For the tech item part, though, it's really tough to have an independent tech item project running in the first 4 months, since all your items are fully researched t...

I definitely track when events happen but as for when a survey finishes up close to the end of a month it helps to enforce all players to have SOP orders that indicate where the survey fleet will go next. As people have mentioned until the empire gets really large it doesn't take too long to relay a...

Good call on explaining that one out a bit. From the anecdotal WP tracework I've done (I haven't automated any sort of graph tracer, so this has been limited to small sample sizes that I work by hand), Solar-style linking appears to get players access to more systems more quickly, because only one ...

The tech diagrams would be much more complex than Civilization which is basically a set of parallel technology items. ULTRA trees are much harder to display graphically. The closest thing to help create a visual record would be a spreadsheet with tech level down the side and systems across. this wou...

I wish I had the time to play or run a game. Maybe after a few of my kids go to college.

As someone who started a game with the GSF rules and switched to ULTRA when the errors of GSF were fixed by ULTRA, I recommend starting with ULTRA as Solar is still in Beta and making changes in the middle of a game wasn't fun at all. Continuing in GSF wasn't really an option as the tech progression...

I play mostly multiplayer games in limited universes (60 or less systems per player) Games I ran 2001-2005 First GSF campaign ended when J'Rill just got too big to deal with and players either banded together to fight it or die. Turn 72 2010 Alpha Omega game got to turn 10 or so and my computer was ...