Starfire Design Forum

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 ...

One idea I had that might work is to double the maintenance of any war ship and base that doesn't have tech equal or above the empire's current EL. Probably even better if you double the maintenance for each level of SL below the current empire's EL. Forces players to either upgrade or mothball old ...

Why the fear of messing with EL? Cue manical laughter… You have no idea. EL balances so many things and is the core of the game. Every once in a while I go back to all the emails from when GSF was in development and look at what was trying to be balanced just to get a centering on what was being bu...

For solo games, how you adjust growth has little matter. In multiplayer games, when you lower growth you are increasing the value of conquering populations and increasing the value of friendly relationships with NPRs. In a slow growth game, the K rules should increase the cost of the bonuses to comm...