Large fleet scouting?

[Davin]

Here's another proposed rules change for discussion...

At the moment, there's no restriction on how big of a fleet you can
have in SCOUT mode. Potentially (if no one is patrolling), you could
scout in a 1000-SSD fleet worth of battleships and nobody would
notice. Since scouting relies on hiding in the outlying system, it
seems to me that there should only be a limited amount of space in
which to hide. If you start trying to hide a dozen battleships behind
pebbles, somebody's bound to notice.

So I'd like to solicit suggestions as to how to make this more
reasonable. For instance, we could set a limit on how many SSD can be
effectively scouted into a system at one time. Or we could simply
start dropping percentage chances to hide as the SSD goes up. Or we
might give colonies and production centers their own separate percent
chances to notice a scout (in addition to any ships that may be
patrolling). What other suggestions can you come up with?

Please note that I'm not trying to make small scouts findable. What
I'm trying to do is prevent large ships and fleets from scouting with
impunity. Don't you agree that we some limitations here?

Who has ideas about how we might best accomplish something like this?

[Genny White]

Well, let's look at "reality" here. Is a colony in the "real world"
going to have some kind of ground-based radar or scanning going on?
We can't look up and see the Space Station going by unless we know
exactly when and where to look, and know that the moving speck is
actually a vessel up there. And it's fairly close to Earth, relative
to where a scouting fleet would be out on the fringes. I don't think
we COULD "see" a scouted-in fleet from the ground. So, unless we have
something up there watching (i.e. a vessel on Patrol) then no, we
couldn't detect even the huge fleet. That being said, within the
parameters of the game we can STATE that a colony will have some
limited detecting ability for anything over xxx SSD. I would vote
that a PC or HW have much-increased chances. And I think even a
patrolling scout vessel that's out there and actively looking should
be able to "see" a 1000 SSD fleet so should have a much better chance
of catching it if it's over a certain size. The question that
remains, if we implement these ideas, is what size is the trigger for
being an elephant trying to hide behind a tree. Perhaps a sliding
scale - up x% for every x SSD. Back to you guys for discussion. Just my $.02.

Genny

p.s. <GASP> Yes, she did respond to an e-mail on the forum!

[Davin Church]

Woohoo!

In the "real world" we don't have spaceships flying around all over
the place, or else we probably would be scanning the heavens for
intruders... especially if we knew there were other systems out there
just waiting to attack us. So yes, I'd think that colonies (and
certainly PCs) would be likely to have a defensive telescope survey set up.

What other thoughts does everyone have?

Davin

[Robert White]

Seems to me that the easiest and most cost-effective 'real' way to watch your own system for scouts would be precisely the way we already do... put something out there looking for it.  I think if the chance to find a scouted ship was dependant on SSD, rather than a just flat per-ship check, it might balance out this issue a bit... If I throw a thousand flies into a system on scout, there are probably a thousand pebbles to be hiding behind.  If I throw in 50 battleships, there's only so many planets and moons in a system, I'd think, before you start casting a shadow, so to speak.  A 20 SSD ship is alot easier to spot than a 1 SSD ship, no matter how many of them there are out there... or so it would seem to me.

[Davin]

Yeah, Robert... I think that tying the percent chance of being caught
to the SSD of the scout sounds like the most reasonable thing to do to
me. And I think that also giving PCs & colonies their own small base
percentage chance to add to the scout penalties will make that work in
unpatrolled systems (such as new colonies), so you're not forced to
put a patrol in every star you own.

If we do that, the next step would be to figure out what kind of
failure percentages to apply to larger ships, probably by SSD. Of
course, a 1 SSD ship should be free of penalties, and probably 2 SSD
is fine, too. But what about a 5 SSD ship? Or 10? Where do we draw
the line for the largest ship that we consider to be freely-scouting?
Then we move to the high end... what kind of failure percentage
should we assign to each of the largest (30 SSD) battleships? This
will give us a range to build a formula for scouting failures.

I haven't got too many comments back from other people on this subject
and I'd hate to implement something that upsets players. Perhaps some
other players might contribute their thoughts so they can be involved
in the decision-making?

[Robert White]

I'd think tying the penalty cutoff points to the engine-size cutoff points might be a good idea; this would carry the added benefit of allowing 'stealth technology' to improve as your ship's tech goes up, allowing a (slightly) larger ship to pass undetected (or to attempt to do so with fewer penalties).

[Davin]

Yes, I was thinking that tech-adjustments would be the way to go. If
I can get a formula figured out for tech 1, I should be able to adapt
it for other tech levels.

We might consider a linear penalty, where each SSD above "scout size"
gives you something like a +3% chance of failure (so a 30 SSD
battleship would almost never be able to scout successfully). But
that means that a 10 SSD destroyer would have about a 1/4 chance of
getting caught, too.

If a linear approach seems to put middle-sized things in the wrong
bucket, then we can move to an exponential approach, where a 30 SSD
ship might have a 100% chance of getting caught but a 10 SDD ship
might only have a 10% chance of failure, or something along those
lines.

I'm still wondering about having lots of big ships in system, though.
That would seem to me to need some adjustments for multiple big ships
running out of places to hide. (And "hiding" isn't really what
they're doing exactly anyway, as they still have to be visible enough
to see what's going on in-system themselves.)

[Hobbit]

I also think that a successful scout should be base on the ship/fleet
scouting and on in-system ships in either patrol or sentry mode. I
may not see that tiny 1 SSD ship, but unless I'm completely blind I
should be able to see the 1000 SSD fleet. I think tech level should
also be considered. (Think about the Romulan cloaking device.) The
higher the tech level the greater the increased chance.
f

[Davin]

So what kind of percentage penalties would you give large ships or
large fleets? How much easier (numerically speaking) should they be
to spot than a lone scout ship?