Quite honestly, it was a ton of work. I spent 6-12 hours on each round between inputting data, calculating results, writing and planning the next round. It could be streamlined but that’s going to take some time and focus… both of which I’m lacking right now.
Here are some of the basics if you’re developing something…
Shopping Missions
The shopping missions were pretty straight forward, roll some dice for events and pay accordingly. Did your sand fish get worms? Bummer.
All the cases where things are “based on” a stat were generally weighted by the community. If most people had 15-20 EN then I’d probably use a range of 10-25 or something like that. If someone was way ahead or behind the curve, I’d let them be an outlier.
Smuggling Missions
In retrospect, I should have lumped all the commodity/smuggling missions into a category with the shopping missions. Moving sand fish and high protein algae isn’t much different than oranges or crystal.
Ship to Ship Combat
It wasn’t perfect but it worked.
Damage Multiplier = iferror(sign(C14+10)*(log(abs(C14+10),10)),0)+1
Where C14 is the difference between FP of ship A and SH of ship B.
I used a log to smooth out the damage extremes. I didn’t want the gap between big ships and little ships to be too giant.
Engineering Adjustment =max(min((E14*.5),5),-5)
Where E14 is EN. This gives a ship a little boost if they have better engineering but has a cap.
Luck - Then a lot of complicated stuff happens with luck, basically a 5% chance of a critical strike adjusted based on the difference in LK between the two ships. The damage of critical strikes varied a bit too.
Damage =max((B1915+D19)+max((.6C14),0)+((B19*15+D19)*I19),0)
B19 is Damage multiplier. D19 is EN bonus. C14 is Fire Power/Shields Difference
Then I would add a small percentage of random +/- damage to avoid stale results. DAMAGE * (.8+rand()*.4)
The damage would be subtracted from the ship’s hull points and then I’d continue running these rounds/volleys until one ship was destroyed. Some ships died after 2-3 rounds, one battle lasted 15 rounds.
Multiple Ship Combat
I would clump the ship stats together and go through a similar process to determine the damage. My system didn’t scale very well for large ships so I’d usually use the combat system to determine the outcome of combat and a threshold for damage. Then I’d divide that damage amongst the ships and determine who they attacked.
All very straight forward, yeah? I’d be happy to share the spreadsheets with you but I really don’t think it’s going to be very decipherable.
Part of why I’m not ready to do this again right away is that it was entirely experimental and incredibly messy and I need to spend some time evaluating and improving my system… system isn’t even the right word. I need to create a system. What I was working from was more like a brew of primordial spreadsheet ooze and story glop.
