FT: Stellar Conquest Campaign

At 09:17 AM 11/14/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Well guys,
>
>Here's what I'm thinking of doing.  I'm going to be using Stellar
>Conquest as campaign system.

Good idea!  I used it the same way for Starfire a number of years ago. 
I
believe I used a conversion rate of about 1:10 for the economics.

>Every fourth turn has a production phase.

You can easily change that if seems more appropriate.  I had an economic
phase every turn and it worked fine, but that's more in keeping with
Starfire.  YMMV.  Every third turn would also work, giving you
"quarterly"
economics phases and monthly combat phases.

I also ditched the game's tech tree in favor of Starfire's.  Any
thoughts
on how to handle it for Full Thrust?

>Ship maintence per turn is going to be the NPV/12.  From one
>economic phase to the next, the maintence cost will be 1/3 the
>cost of the ship. 

Or 100% of cost annually.  Might be a trifle steep.

>All hulls include one months endurance built in.  Each mass of
>cargo can carry 10 economic points for all purposes, including
>supply.  

Very reasonable.  What about colonists?  Since populations are counted
in
the millions, that's a whole lot of cargo ships.  One problem you're
going
to run into is that you may find the cost of colony ships
unrealistically
low compared to FT ship costs.	IIRC, a colony can essentially
"bootstrap"
itself by building enough ships in one economic turn to transport all of
their people.

In some of the computer adaptations of these basic rules, they allow
colonists to be turned into troops which were used to conquer enemy
planets.  Any thoughts along those lines or do you plan to stick to the
old
"surrender to any warship" rule?

>Any comments, suggestion, or insults???

Sounds good.  Couple of questions/comments/suggestions from my
experiences:  

How are you handling FTL, both in and out of Nebulae?  Any combat in
deep
space?	Will you be using nebulae rules for fights in a nebulae?

I built in a construction delay for ships (buy now, build, get later)
which
meant that it was possible to raid enemy construction facilities and try
to
knock out ships before they could be completed.

Occasionally, the defender could also use a partially finished ship in
the
defense.  You might do sort of a "reverse threshold" system for this; if
using you stick to the economics every four turns model, then you could
have a partially completed ship with a proportional number of damage
boxes
and roll thresholds prior to the battle to see what systems are online.

I note that missile bases cost about half what a ship of similar
firepower
would.	That might be a good thing to keep.  Or you might have them be
non-FTL defense ships.

I also found it useful to determine how much collateral damage weapons
fire
at a planet will do.  Something like "X number of points of damage to
destroy 1 million colonists" would be useful.  For Starfire, I think I
used
10 (or was it 100?) points of damage per million colonists.  You might
also
just limit it to certain weapons like missiles and ortillery.

Any thoughts on how to handle planetary shields?  Those tend to force
the
game to a conclusion in the original, but that may not be something you
want in a campaign game.

Sounds good!  I'm looking forward to hearing more.

Jeff