lol you guys need to tone down the technology researching bit. think if you were making a plug-in; would it be a cheat plug or a well balanced, game enriching plug? pretend the physics involved in the EVO weapons are "real" physics; you cant just triple the range and damage of your weapons! what was up with that liquid metal outer shield thing? how? justify that please. the way to make that game better would be more cloak and dagger polotical stuff. throw in the espionage and the underhanded dealings with the enemy....wheres the intrigue in guess what i made the armor on all of my ships twice as thick and now automatically jam all missles that try to hit me. i didnt read all 10 or whatever pages but everything i skimmed was just out therre...you need more moderators. it looks like a lot of fun but i fear the emalghia are going to develope another warship upgrade that turns the fighters into igazra knockoffs but with twice the shields. eventually you have to laf off the tech and get back to the elbow grease battle in the trenches. technology ended the war for the japanese but even that was after we all but destroyed them. you should be using aggressive strategy, well planned operations, diplomacy, accurate inteligence.... not i have a dynamic floating mine field and if you come through it my blaze cannons automatically mulch you. we all know we would just chuck ordinance at the mine field until it was gone and took who was behind it with it.

The webstory is not intended to be like a plug-in. We do not allow superweapons without some form of counter, and the 'liquid metalic supershield' thing is what is classified a "Fluff", or more rather as a description explaining why something works the way it does. Strategy is key, but in web-battles the player with superior firepower always wins unless it is outnumbered. As such competing factions must constantly develop better weapons to stay ahead of their enemies. This is known as an arms race. And btw, I've got more up my FLF sleeve than hyperquartz crystals and fuzzes. I've got big plans and big tactics--ones I want to use.

Hmm... am I allowed to agree with the overall point of someone who insults my tech ideas? Well, I do. In most webstories (GoS included) technology gets incredibly hard to follow and takes up more effort than writing. However, part of the fun for most of the players is coming up with interesting ideas that they can make into game applications. It is fun to create something new and imaginative and try to explain how it works. Unfortunately for people like me the most fun is in the writing and the diplomacy; a focus on designing technology and building fleets takes away from my time to write characters and situations.

i guess im kind of a roleplaying pureist....and an a-hole, i know that i was just struck by these things the hardest. it went far beyond arms race and ended up looking kind of like people pulling stuff out of their arses and gaining unfair advantages. as for only being able to win battles with superior numbers or fantastic weaponry....hooey! youre cultivating your own geopoliticus child. having staked out a meager territory, you cling to it fiercly. compromising in only the most dire of circumstances; you shouldnt abandon whole worlds and your people like that one guy did. back to the point (dont really have one), if there is no other way to win battles than just pile up all your ships and jump through there systems like it was a risk board. besides, logistically speaking would it even be possible to retrofit any meaningful number of ships with the latest gear? you would have to deactivate all of those ships fly them to a shipyard and upgrade....they would be worth more in the field. i suppose whats going on is you guys are just having fun and i need to grow up. fluff is all good. its what gives roleplaying its depth (im master of the obvious i guess), and its flavor. i was considering trying to get involved, but frankly, keeping track of everyone elses madness looked too tireing....i shouldnt be so hard on people but i dont want to deal with these elaborate mine setups and and other silly tactical knit-picking crap people were pulling. some of you guys sound pretty smart and reasonable. im glad you see where im coming from paranoid; i wouldnt mind roleplaying with more poeple like yourself. sorry for any potentially insulting comments.

As for the abandoning of planets that was staying in character, the Azdgari are portrayed as a very mobile race that don't put any real significance on stable basses. That meant that if one of their less valuable systems were attacked they could just pack up and move out without caring much.

As for the logistics of outfitting, it really depends on the facilities and number of ships in service. Just about all the modifications that have been done in the story are unfeasible.

It really is confusing, I'm still not sure what is going on in the technology department, but on the other hand it is fairly relaxed and most people are enjoying themselves as they go along. I think that is the important part.

Oh, and no offense was taken, don't worry. Feel free to continue any criticism you want.

Hey, at least in this story I have yet to see any Protoss rip-off super-races from beyond the Crescent, or ships that can blaze their own hyperlanes between any reasonably close systems. I consider that a definite bonus.

Am I "that one guy"? The worlds I abandoned were single bases with populations in the region of about one hundred, with early warning systems and pre-written background explaining that they expected to be abandoned at any time. I wasn't too keen on taking up the Azdgari at first because of their iffy geography -- exactly this reason -- which is why I wrote descriptions of the status of all my colonies beforehand, including population estimates. I didn't abandon an entire planet of people, I evacuated 100-ish non-civilians.

But anyway, for the most part, I do agree. Some of the technologies I've developed have been to keep in line with the other Strands - we got ourselves into a nasty little arms race and if I hadn't upgraded certain things, there would have been no keeping up with the Igadzra who developed far more powerful weapons quickly. I would like to add that thought has gone into all my research projects, and while stuff like the hypercube technology is technobabble, it's technobabble with seriously considered physics that actually matters.

That said, I don't know if you noticed, but the Strands at least cancelled all that annoying research for ourselves alone. We came to an agreement to scratch it for a while completely. That didn't really become evident because right after we did that, everything died due to Ipvicus' complete disappearance. But we discussed it and our reasons were exactly what you're talking about -- it was just going too far. I suggested it to Carnotaur and Ipvicus, because I felt that if this continued any longer it was just going to get unreasonable.

As for strategy and intrigue, I'm really sorry, I had stuff planned. Ipvicus' disappearance ruined a potentially interesting strategic situation amongst the Strands, and it went on for so long that the Igadzra built up a frontier that the Azdgari would've raided before it set itself up. The freeze has screwed things up quite badly in terms of strategy. I had some manoeuvres around the corner that would've had some people very, very surprised. As well as some plot developments (planned with the other Strand players and the Emalgha) that would've been pioneering in the realm of EVO-based webstories. Council stuff.

Oh, and you mentioned superior numbers in winning fights, and since I'm the most guilty of that (as Azdgari player), allow me to present a case for you. Every battle I've fought in, before the Zidagar offensive, I've outnumbered my opponents massively. Why? Because I won a strategic exchange. If you look into the situations more closely, you'll see it's not just a case of "I send more ships so you die" -- Outpost Apert was sacrificed to gain a strategic advantage over the Igadzra, an advantage that allowed me to win in both Mark and Notil with insignificant losses. The Battle of Elder was a strategic disaster for the Igadzra. They should have known that you can't advance your border like that. The position they put themselves in, I could send my entire navy, destroy them, and be back to defend my border before a message got to their headquarters. They advanced too quickly and had no means of scrambling my intel.

So really, I think perhaps you should read some bits over - it seems to me that it's been a little more involved than that. As I was saying though, it would have become more interesting, but a lot of it's messed up. The period immediately after the Zidagar offensive against me, the Igadzra and the Miranu could potentially have seen a series of half a dozen or so manoeuvres that placed the Azdgari in the strongest position in the Crescent and crippled both other Strands beyond repair. Sadly, due to the freeze, this can't work. Ah well, would've been much more fun to read.

As for diplomacy, I was about to open diplomatic relations with the Emalgha in which I would use them and abuse them, give them shield technology which was faulty etc. I was doing something similar to the ST, giving them a "communicator" that would send me sensor readings of all activity in their space. I was also trying to make amends with the Miranu with the Raigar Azdgari's valiant offer of aid... Diplomacy seems pretty good in this story. Especially the ST story, thanks to Paranoid.

And accurate intel, well... sighs I came so close. So very close to having insane intel across the entire galaxy -- a deal with the Emalgha for the hyperspace telescope, the SIN "communicators" in Paranoid's hands that would have showed me who he was spying on, and he was going to spy on the Miranu and UE... ah well. Believe me, accurate intel was going to become very, very important.

I would like to state in defense of myself that the technologies that I developed were neither groundbreaking nor technobabble, and my ship upgrades were not insane. I kept careful track of cost for the ship upgrades so that things would come out even(like in the case of my South Tip Warship upgrade) or come out so that refitting and production would cost more(like my South Tip Fighter). About the only research I really did was a nuclear armament program, and given these ships use fusion reactors, a nuclear warhead ain't so difficult.

I think when we restart tech might oughta be frozen where it is.

Perhaps not where it is. I think we need to fix some of the glaring gaps in power that have arisen, and then freeze technology.

Admiral Benden, on May 3 2005, 10:39 PM, said:

Perhaps not where it is. I think we need to fix some of the glaring gaps in power that have arisen, and then freeze technology.
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Aye, perhaps not where it is now that I think about it. We just don't need to get much more refugingdiculastic than we already are.

Aye, I'm thinking that slightly nerfing the things that are overpowered and slightly buffing the things that are underpowered until they arrive at equilibrium. Better solution than just buffs all around, and better than just nerfs all around.