@davisn456
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Well, we’re currently in Eastern Daylight time until the first Sunday in November, then we switch to Eastern Standard time. So right now, we’re UTC -0400, so we’re 4 hours behind UTC. After November 5, we’ll be UTC -0500, so 5 hours behind.
Don’t you just love the time zones….
If you’re interested in joining, you can join our Facebook group – we post reminders for events there. We also have a Steam group as well. Here’s a link to my Steam profile so you can find me – you can drop me a message there and I can send you links to everything.
Yes, we meet every Sunday at 5pm Eastern Time.
Check out our new intro:
And here’s the playlist with all of our mission footage so far:
Space Engineers focuses more on the building aspect, and has a much larger mod selection for devices, whereas Empyrion’s focus has been more on PVE and PVP functionality. Space Engineers is much farther along in development, so they’ve added the PVE and PVP functionality since then, but the two definitely have different flavors.
FYI – Quinn, Parra, Vaj were Helm, Comms, and Engineering, and I (Verok) was Captain. (I hope I didn’t miss anyone.) That mission was so much fun, and I think they really did like ours the most, it was the first one posted on their Youtube channel.
I think Nhaima has had a little bit of a chance to see a few instances of RP on the Horizon. What tends to happen for us is after an event occurs within the storyline (like the recent Caltron incursion), we begin this speculative brainstorming process on what just happened, where did they come from, why did this happen, etc. The last one is where we came up with this idea that the Caltrons were using their propulsion method to directly damage our infrastructure, which was a new tactic. This fit in amazingly well with some RP that was happening apparently simultaneously on the Sabre, where they connected a recent discovery of an artifact to the Caltron incursion. The two totally independent RP moments just happened so organically it was really pretty amazing.
For us, though, there needs to be a catalyst to get this started. Sometimes it’s a mission event, sometimes it’s sparked from some of our “filler” RP (like the stuff that happens in transit that was mentioned earlier). The good ones seem to be triggered by in-game events though. Those are the ones we have the most fun with.
I also think that within a crew, it’s good to know who’s into the RP and who isn’t, because if you don’t know that, then prompting someone to respond to an RP conversation is difficult, especially if it catches someone off guard.
As far as player archetypes, I really don’t know where I fit in. I see some tactician characteristics, maybe a bit of the storyteller as well, and quite a bit of the Casual Gamer. I don’t see myself as an overly formal commanding officer, and have never really had a strong character background (I really never bothered to create a background, actually). I do follow the communications protocols, and use the combat orders/language, and play along with the RP dialogue as much as I can.
Really, these sorts of things have to be worked out within a ship’s core crew, the regular players, and then try to bring the floaters into the groove when they join a crew. Some may bite, others may not.
I found an interesting article, with some other archetypes that overlap a bit with the original list Nhaima posted. I think the key statement here is the art of finding the balance between what they call “crunch and fluff”. See the paragraphs under “System and Social Intelligence”. I think it’s pretty interesting. http://www.cardboardrepublic.com/articles/up-on-a-soapbox/the-archetypes-applied-to-roleplaying-games
Wow, if this could work with having marines as a finite resource that can be tracked like that, this could be an amazing game mechanic. Since we’re RP’ing it now, making it more official makes it a great addition. Plus, it’s one more function we could make useful on the comms station.
I will confess that I wasn’t in the best of moods when I read the posts, which no doubt added some perceived tone that wasn’t there. So, I also apologize for reacting stronger than I should have.
I definitely think that as far as tactical doctrine is concerned, the outlined procedure is worthy of adding to our library.
In addition to working out tactics for large-scale invasions, securing bases, etc., I was thinking that another interwoven tactic related to crew development would be to talk to officers (probably helm first) about the idea of honing skills related to reactionary tactics. I think we do a good job planning out our approach, but learning to deal with instinctual reactions, like how quickly do you retreat once your shields fail, how do you plan your escape vector, etc. would be a good thing to really work on. New officers especially would benefit from this.
I started working with my helm officer some time ago to stop him from automatically taking evasive maneuvers once we started taking damage. Our manuals even reference the fact that helm officers are encouraged to “take initiative” when it comes to this sort of thing. But sometimes that can interfere with tactic implementation. I try to use the commands, “Prepare for evasive action.” as well as “Stay in there!”, especially when in close range combat. As my helm officer will probably agree, it’s tough to force yourself to do that, but since a captain would tend to know how far a ship can be pushed before things start to get really bad, it turns into developing a level of trust between the captain and especially the helm officer. To me, I think this is an interesting process to develop, especially when it comes to gaining a trust level as well as a good communications process between key positions. Thoughts on that one?
The sim we did during the last shift was purposefully created with a few situations in mind to test how we did. There were no black holes or minefields to fall back on, and the stations couldn’t defend themselves. Also, I don’t think any ships had dedicated comms officers, which added a bit more strain on crews.
One if the biggest things we ran into was that fleets were losing interest in us before we could circle around to to return to the first of the group we achieved tango with. We used the tactics described by Nhaima at the beginning, but it failed quickly because of the number of enemy ships and bases we tried to handle.
I was ordering strafing runs with Viper frequently to keep the enemy fleets interested in us, but by the time we would get back to the first in the group (we initially had 4 enemy fleets), it was making a run for the base already. Not having much working space between the fleets and the base to begin with, they were able to overwhelm us fairly quickly.
Ultimately, when I knew that there was not much of a chance to defend the outer bases, I chose a base that seemed to have the largest buffer zone around it, and withdrew the fleet to start pushing enemies back from those bases.
I think Nhaima’s description of how to deal with one of those scenarios is quite accurate, but only in an ideal situation. When numbers, the environment of the sector, and time are all working against you, that’s when sacrifices have to be made. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have sacrificed some of those outer bases earlier on and concentrated on saving the bases more in the center of the map.
Blaze – your absence will definitely have a huge impact on the crew of the Viper, and I will definitely miss your excellent skill and contributions to my crew and the entire division. I hope you find some time to join us periodically. There will always be a seat open!
Are we recommending everyone download the missing Longbow pirate ship file along with the updated vesseldata? I’m not sure it’s necessary, unless you’ve already incorporated that into the TSN Mod. It might be safer that way, so we don’t risk having different vesseldata files floating around.
DS9 used river names for their runabouts. I think picking a theme like that would be interesting. It at least narrows down the possible list anyway. TNG and the other series (except for Delta Flyer) used famous scientist names mostly – Galileo, El Baz, Copernicus, Fermi, Goddard, Hawking, etc.
The current Facebook page was created by Brenner, and I’m not sure who has admin access to it. What we need is a Facebook group for people to actually join and allow posts from multiple people.
We definitely missed you at the last shift. Hopefully things will settle down for you pretty quickly. Moving and starting a new job like that is definitely stressful.
