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// Today’s shift was really enjoyable. The mission was interesting and engaged with the storyline, if not particularly complicated or difficult. It gives a little more headspace to appreciate the texture of things rather than the tightly focused adrenaline tunnel of some of the big engagements. I really appreciated the little touch of roleplay around the probe preparation. It was also extremely involving that last week’s mission involved a specific NPC. Didn’t need any background on him, but knowing it was a real person made recovering Ensign Riley much more important.
The sims were also a little out of the ordinary, the first one was fairly insane on numbers and probably just as well it crashed when it did, but involving. Did the division have comms officers dedicated to traffic control and ordnance management?
The Hjorden assistance sim when our poor helmsman’s console kept melting under him was also engaging because it had a storyline and when we were stranded with the lifepods, the whole division coming to the rescue was really heartwarming, even though it was only a sim.
The last one with the limited sensor range and dense nebula was huge fun as science officer aboard Lancer. Thanks.
It was also nice to see some active and effective intership cooperation, at least, from where I was sitting.
So thanks to everyone involved in all he various aspects of that. I don’t want it to be exactly the same every week, but this was a really good mix of elements and pace.
It felt like a good shift last night. He Hjorden sim was for a change of pace and so I could have anothrr go at GMing. I know people like the action, so I went pretty full on, in contrast to the mission before which wss fairly quiet.
On the first sim, Croove on the Raven was managing the ordnance and allies as we had a full crew and I was directing him to. It didn’t seem like many responded to orders though, and those that we saved did their usual ‘mine clearing’ trick. I’d like to work more with comms officers on effective use of ships. I know it is possible to create small ‘combat groups’ of ships and then use them effectively against enemy formations. I might GM as part of a comms training exercise or something to demonstrate my ideas.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback! We have a growing team of GMs and some great opportunities for RP.
//I’d be interested to find out what makes NPC ships respond or not. It doesn’t seem to be just distance.
A comms training exercise would be fascinating.
// The simulation with the insane numbers was totally my fault. I started noticing that a lot of the siege sims we were running at level 10 were going extremely fast (less than 15 minutes), so last week I kicked it up to level 11, which worked quite well on a siege map. But trying to mix things up a bit, I selected the border war, and I was in shock about how many ships were generated.
Although, this brings up an interesting point. I’m curious if the fleet finds it more interesting to have more regular ships (non-boosted), or fewer boosted ships. I think having more ships forces us to think quickly to respond to multiple incoming fleets. However, I think stronger enemies forces us to think more tactically to defend ourselves more. I’d be interested to hear some feedback on the types of sims (non-GM controlled) that everyone likes. We definitely seem to be able to handle level 11 simulations, so I think it’s just a matter of tuning the settings a bit at that level.
Also, I like Mundy’s suggestion about having more allies to work with in the simulations. The last couple I increased it from “lots” to “many” to give us a few extras to work with. I think it adds some interesting alternative missions and tasks to do.
The use of NPC ships as battlegroups in missions would be really interesting from a coordination standpoint. I remember somewhere someone mentioned having a dedicated comms officer to coordinate NPC ship orders, and I think having that officer separate from normal scicomms operations, probably on the flagship, could be really useful. Especially since we do have a few experienced Comms officers like Mundy who would be perfectly capable of it.
My next thought is should NPC ships be their own battlegroups, overseen by the NPC Command officer (the dedicated comms officer) or should a couple of NPC ships be assigned to each main ship? Having NPC battlegroups would make it easier for one officer to coordinate them, while assigning one or two ships to each main ship would be more the responsibility of each ship’s comms officer. That would make it more difficult for the comms officer to get surrenders and even more difficult to do science stuff if the comms officer was also on science.
Anyways, that’s just me brain dumping.
Either would be interesting, and it could be worth trying both arrangements to find out how they work. It would definitely be something to try with crews of six per bridge, because splitting one’s attention with Science at that point could lead to serious gaps in information for Helm and Tactical.
What worries me about having NPCs assigned to each ship is that it’s all to easy to give orders to the wrong ship. Meaning that coordination could be all too quickly scattered to the stellar winds.
Having a single Comms officer commanding the NPCs would be be a lot safer. The feel would be very different too, since the role is more tactical than the moment-to-moment shenanigans that happen on a standard bridge.
I was looking for a way to keep a comms officer busy since I find it hard to cover both Sci and Com effectively.
Totally agreed that a single Comms officer needs to manage all traffic in a sector, or at least all armed escorts.
And since local tin cans move so slowly, it is important not to attack their target before they get there, so it also makes sense for the Comms officer to be on the effective flag vessel, where they can coordinate with the fleet commander.
As we’ve been running so long, it is interesting to see this come up… its not thr first time. Its a shame because we did work out a really effective system with some brilliant comms officers. Wolfe Silver was an officer who I worked with to sort all this coordinate. In the past we’ve experimented with teams of comms officers working together to a single designated comms officer sorting all ships.
I would love to get back to doing this again as we really got it pinned down in the past. The best way was having a full crew of six on the flag ship and having the comms officer dedicated to organising the NPCs. The key is making sure other comms officers don’t interact with NPCs as that can really derail plans. Of course, it means the flag ship needs a full crew for it to work.
In terms of using NPC ships too, there are plenty of strategies which I’d be happy to go through e.g. use grouped combat vessels, fine manourving and positioning of ships (including how to get them to hold position), protecting non-combat allies, selecting targets for combat allies (i.e. not getting them wiped out).
That sounds brilliant, I’d love to learn my way through that. At the moment I mostly find NPC vessels frustrating because they won’t do as they’re told… what’s the secret?
Ha,there have been updates since then. The worst bit has to be the missions that interfere during a solo/coop game. In the Sandbox, this shouldn’t be a problem.
@mundy the Voice doesn’t work for NPC vessels? 😉
Glad you enjoyed the last sim. I certainly enjoyed the rest of the shift back in engineering too.
It takes a while to learn that side of things, so if you, or anyone else, has any suggestions, I’m all ears!
I will happily chew your ear off on that topic sometime, but I suspect there are more learned treatises out there. Have you looked at the advanced training in the library?
An Engineering advanced training isn’t in the library yet, but if you’re interested in learning more, here’s a draft I drew up awhile ago.
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