Star Fleet Battles Open Community

about the ship that made them backwater it. Good old shipbuilder politics? Not enough bathrooms?

I guess the real question is if the CS is under-priced, or the CA is over-priced. The CAR looks decent for its point value, so perhaps it's the CA that shouldn't be 147.

and is a hell of a lot better than either of them. The NCA is also better than the CC, which is 1 point more and all four of the ships mentioned are a lot better than either the Fast NCA or Fast CA which are 15-22 points more than any of them.

You can find examples of this at every point level and every empire.

These BVP differences come from SFB where things are not balanced in the first place and then on top of that they are hard copy ported with no testing to a completely different game system.

It is, imo, a very much overrated Fed ship. If you are going to be in the 150 point area, you take the NCA. If not, and you want almost everything the CS gives you for a lot fewer points, you take the NCL. The only reason to ever take a CS is to inch on points, but really there are no good fleets (at tournament points of 450) that make good use of that.

If you start with a photon BCH you have to go with 2x NCL. If you start with an NCC, then you are one point too much to also take an NCA with the NCL, so you can take either the CA (my preference) or the CS (yours). The same is true if you skip the NCL and start with 2x NCA. THen you take a CA or CS as your next ship. To matter, if you really think the CS is better than the CA, the CS would have to be 151 points. That would make it "better" than the NCA, which is clearly not the case.

There is just no situation in which this very minor point difference to which you object is meaningful.

That fact is the 2/3rds movers all got hosed moving to FC (though many were so good (the NCL and the D5) that they needed some hosing) and ships the rare ship that had a 3/4 in SFB did better.

But calling the CS "broken" because of some very minor BVP issues is over stating things pretty far.

There is, in fact, a BPV formula that's used anywhere in SFB/Fed Comm.

There was one, at one point, around the dawn of the Commander's Edition. It reflected the biases of the game-as-played then. It gradually was deprecated, even though a lot of its issues remained - for example: There is a Rom SpH-A that is nearly identical in plasma and phaser armament as the Gorn HDD; it has a few extra boxes here and there, because it's made from different components.

In theory, a cloak is a 15% upgrade in cost. The SpH-A is about 30% more expensive than the Gorn HDD+

The reason for this is that the original formula was directly linear in some ways - it always added the same amount for a given box being added, and had a fudge factor of some sort, as more boxes of the same type got a little bit cheaper.

After a while, the ships were sent out with playtest notes saying "Test it against ships in this BPV range and tell us what you think the price was." with most of the prices generated from taking an existing ship (usually the base hull) and adding/substituting boxes using a variant on the old S7.0 ship design rules.

One of the problems here is that trying to pack both combat effectiveness and "how difficult it is to build" and "how long it takes to build" into two numbers is asking a lot of two numbers.

The klingon SD7 also has a lower move cost, I think it is in cl38. It has phased 2's I think though. Still its a cool ship, I am going to go make a mini right now.

That is what the ship is. It gets a 3/4 move cost. In exchange for 6 fewer boxes. Which isn't necessarily sensical, but is the whole point of the ship. It is a unique design that has the benefit of a lower move cost than the CA in exchange for fewer systems and less total power. Which makes it a good ship, yeah, but that is why it is there.

It seems likely that there is a tad bit of BPV offitude with the CS relative to the CAR, but really, is it going to be a difference of more than, like, 5%?

Given how generally arbitrary BPVs are anyway, is this one that is actually worth being concerned about?

If you are trying to use BPV for a economic system for a campaign, that is bound to run into problems as, really, BPV is in no way meant to accurately represent how much something costs to build ("Economic BPV" exists simply 'cause some ships are worth more if killed than their combat abilities would suggest, so they made a split "Econ/Combat" BPV to make killing these ships worth more for victory conditions in scenarios). You can certainly come up with a fudge system for using BPV for economics, but that is all something you are going to need to invent on your own.

The only really viable SFB economic system is the one that comes from F+E, which is greatly simplified (relative to SFB BPVs) and gives advantage, economy wise, to small ships:

-DNs cost 16-18 points to build, where they are rated as 12-14 combat points.
-CA/CC/BC cost 8-10 points to build, where they are rated as 8-10 combat points.
-CL/DDs cost 5-6 points to build where they are rated as 5-6 combat points.
-CWs cost 5 to build where they are rated as 7 combat points.
-DWs cost 4 to build where they are rated as 6 combat points.
-FFs cost 2.5 or 3 points to build where they are rated as 4 or 5 combat points.

As such, big ships are inefficient to build and small ships/war class ships are more efficient to build. This economic system doesn't really account for minor differences in combat effectiveness/BPV, so a Fed CA, Klingon D7, and Kzinti BC are all ships worth 8 combat points and all cost 8 points to build; a Gorn BD, Lyran DW, and Fed DW all are worth 6 combat points and all cost 4 points to build. All of these ships have different BPVs and are slightly different in terms of combat power, but are all, like, within 10% of each other in terms of BPV and general effectiveness.

Bakija's point is well taken: BPV is BS.

Is that acceptable from a game? Not really, not with a market of gamesbuilt on an objective system to keep it balanced. The problem is there is no real objective system for BPV. While points are not always truly indicative of how effective a ship is, an objective PV would be closer.

Also, BPV would be useful for an economic system if it were balanced correctly.

And the argument that it has six less boxes would be acceptable IF NOT FOR the improved firing arcs,which end up being worth more than the missing boxes, and the fact that you have to spend less energy for maneuvering. The CS has 38 power (without batteries), the CA 42. However, as Saved points out, to go 24 on the CA costs 24, leaving 18 energy, but the CS can go 24 for 18, leaving 20, two additional energy to pump into weapons, which savedfromwhat pointed out.

Using the spreadsheet I have been working on, with the FED CA revalued at exactly 150 points (as the baseline build), the CS comes in at 154 (as does the NCA)!

>>Bakija's point is well taken: BPV is BS.>>

Well, I don't know that it is complete BS. It is just a kind of inexact science.

From my experience of playing SFB for the last, uh, 30 years or so (holy crap...), BPV isn't perfect, but it is reasonably sound for measuring effectiveness of a combat unit on average. A ship that is 125 BPV is pretty much always going to be more effective than a ship that is 110 BPV. If you assume that there is a margin of error of, like, 5%, BPV works pretty well. On average. You are always going to run into problems involving game set up (open map vs closed map; whatever) that will effect balance and BPV effectiveness, but in general, it isn't a bad measure.

This being said, it seems likely that for the last 20 years or so, BPV has been developed simply by trial and error--design a ship, find a ship that is similar and already has a BPV, compare them, see what happens when they fight, and give the new ship a BPV that seems appropriate. Which will work out ok, given that all BPVs are going to trace back to the original handful of BPVs that were built on a formula (i.e. the original Fed CA that had a BPV of 125 is probably the starting point for all other BPVs).

Fed Com has a problem in that the ships and their BPVs are simply wholesale ported into FC from SFB. When Fed Com uses very different rules and does things like make 5/6 move costs into 3/4 move cost and making 2/3 move costs into 3/4 move costs and never changing the point values of the ships. Which is going to run into problems balance wise. Which the designers likely completely realized, but decided to accept in the name of simplifying things for them overall.

>>Also, BPV would be useful for an economic system if it were balanced correctly.>>

Not necessarily. As there isn't really an economic system built into the game. BPV (in SFB) measures how effective something is going to be in a fight, on average. And it does that reasonably well. You can still use it as the basis for an "economy", as on average, if I spend 500 BPV on ships and you spend 500 BPV on different ships, we'll generally get (on average), about the same amount of effectiveness. Where you run into problems is where BPV runs into problems--if I spend 500 BPV on 4 good cruisers and you spend 500 BPV on 8 crappy frigates, I'm going to be much better off in a fight between those two forces. Which is where an manipulated economic system can fix adjust things--i.e. if you do something like multiply a ship's BPV by its move cost for purposes of building it (i.e. a cruiser costs 100% of its BPV, a FF costs 1/3 of its BPV); things will swing in the direction of smaller ships being more worth buying (assuming that you don't also buy forces by straight BPV for fights).

But again, as there no economic system in SFB or Fed Com, you gotta come up with something by trial and error.

>>Yes, I know. But the BPV situation makes it worse.>>

Hmm. I guess I'm not seeing what you are talking about.

BPV isn't a perfect system, but it is reasonably effective at measuring ship effectiveness, class by class (i.e. a 150 point cruiser is going to be better than a 130 point cruiser; a 100 point DD is going to be better than an 80 point DD; etc.). It has flaws and the occasional gaff (heck, when Module Y, Early Years came out for SFB, many of us spent *months* convincing that Powers that Be that the BPVs of the Carnivons were deeply, severely off, and not in a "a few points here and there" kinda way. We provided box by box analysis of every ship in the set, showing how, say, the Y era Carnivon CA had the exact same number of boxes and shields and comparable firepower and energy curve as the Lyran YCA, but was 65 points instead of 85 for the Lyran. The errors were *that* significant. Eventually, logic prevailed and all the Carnivon ships got appropriate BPVs added to them.), but it generally works fine.

If you want to use it as the basis of a campaign economic system, it'll work well enough across the board. Yeah, once and a while something like the Fed CS vs Fed CAR situation will come up (i.e. a slightly more effective ship will cost less than a slightly less effective ship), but as that will probably pop up for all empires, it is kind of a wash.

Yeah, BPV fails as an economic system when comparing ships of different sizes (150 points spent on a CC will be far more effective than 150 points spent on 2xFF, in terms of fighting), but it also fails as a balancing system when comparing ships of different sizes. So you need to build in a fudge factor if you want it to work out. But starting with BPV isn't any less likely to work than starting with arbitrary costs (like, say, porting F+E costs into FedCom for construction, say).

"One of the problems here is that trying to pack both combat effectiveness and "how difficult it is to build" and "how long it takes to build" into two numbers is asking a lot of two numbers."

Indeed, part of the issue with BPV is that the whole "RPW/LPW/Unique" thing from S8.0 was supposed to come into play as well. A Fed DEA is pretty badass; it's certainly more likely to win a fight with a DD+. However, you aren't supposed to be able to buy a DEA unless you buy it as part of a carrier group, which means that it isn't a single-ship duel anymore. And, as bakija points out, BPV is far more predictive of performance for fleets.

Indeed, I've always thought that BPV really only applies to fleet-combat situations, with multiple ships on each side. In single-ship situations, the only "balanced" ships are the Heavy Cruisers, which are (theoretically) balanced against each other in single-ship duels. Beyond that, BPV is not really representative of a ship's combat ability; a 150-BPV ship is not going to be 1.5x more powerful than a 100-BPV ship.

And I know from personal experience that trying to make a unified pricing system in a game is a major major pain....but my prices are generally good predictors of relative performance and survivability.

>>Bakija:>>

(For what it is worth, my name is Peter. Bakija is my last name, which I use as a screen name as it is convenient, easily identifies me, and no one else is gonna use it...)

>>I know BPV as it is will not work for an economic system. By "the BPV situation makes it worse," is because you need somewhere to start from, and if that data is messed up, it is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out, as the old hackers used to say).>>

It isn't really *that* messed up, though. I mean, yeah, once and a while, something weird happens. Especially in FedCom due to the way they came up with BPVs (i.e. they just took SFB BPVs and ported them directly into FedCom, even though the rules changed and some ships got different move costs, both of which effect the ship's abilities). But still, as the starting point for a hypothetical economic system, it is going to be as good as anything else. A 150 point ship for empire A is going to be about as good at a 150 point ship for empire B, and both of them are going to be better than a 100 point ship for either. If the intent of the economic system is that each side will be able to buy roughly the same amount of effect for the cost, BPV, while not perfect, will suffice.

>>However, my original point is, "how did such a card like the CS make it into the game with that obviously wrong point cost." The answer from you all, "ADB f___ed up the BPV, then started winging it, and then made up ships that violated the build they had previously." As a mainly FC player, I don't know the ins and outs of decisions made in SFB.>>

Well, really, it wasn't really that they f'ed anything up, specifically, with the CS. It is a flaw by design in the FedCom point system. They make ships in SFB, give them a point cost that is, generally speaking, appropriate in SFB. Then they take that ship and port it into a similar, yet different game with different rules, sometimes change the move cost, and port the exact same point cost from SFB into FedCom. Why do they do this? 'Cause it was easier to do that then invent a whole new point system. Which they probably should have, but they wanted to give players the ability to take ships from SFB and use them in FedCom without any significant work (which is, all things considered, an admirable, if flawed, plan), but the trade off is that once and a while, you get something wonky.

You take the CS, which in SFB has (apparently) a 5/6 move cost, and is probably completely reasonably priced for what it is (a slightly smaller, slightly more efficient Fed CA) and port it into FedCom, and along the way, the designers had to change the move cost. If they round up to 1, it becomes just a bad, pointless ship. They round down to 3/4, and the ship becomes a bit better than it should be, and the BPV seems off ('cause, well, it is off). But 'cause FedCom only has the ability to use a move cost of 1 or 3/4 for that particular ship, what are they gonna do? Either:

A) Port the ship from SFB to FedCom, change it, and make it either better or worse, and not change the BPV, causing a cost flaw.

B) Do the same thing, and change the BPV, which would set off a firestorm of "well, then change *this* BPV too!"

C) Leave the ship out of the game entirely.

So they go with A. Which makes a flaw. But not a horrible one. And on the whole, balances out with, like, the hit the Fed NCL took (going from 2/3 move to 3/4 move).

>>Although your point is that "BPV fails as an economic system when comparing ships of different sizes," if that s true, then it fails at its primary goald of being a balancing factor in tourney games, which, therefore (IMHO), is a MASSIVE FAIL.>>

Well, there is that. Which has been discussed at length in various forums. But on the upside, it is a self balancing problem--yeah, BPV when used to buy non average forces, doesn't work so well as a balance; i.e. when pushed to an extreme, it falls apart--if both sides spend 350 BPV on a CC and 2xCW (or whatever--both sides have a roughly similar fleet composition for the same cost), the game will be roughly balanced. If one side gets a 350 point Battleship and the other side gets 5 Frigates for 350 points, the game will be fairly unbalanced (I suspect that the BB will eat the FFs for lunch every time). But in a tournament, it is self balancing in that if players have the ability to get whatever forces they want for the cost, they will gravitate towards the best possibly forces for the points, and so it is safe to assume that most folks will be using as optimal a force as possible in the situation presented.

That being said, plenty of people have suggested that FedCom *not* use a "buy a force with X BPV" system for tournament play but instead have pre packaged, tested forces (i.e. for the tournament, each empire has a Tournament Fleet that can be taken and nothing else. Maybe 2 per empire or whatever). Which would be less fun for people who like fiddling with that sort of thing. But a lot more balanced.

(What ever happened to the idea that we should all have actual names in our profiles? I'm always confused when I'm talking to someone by virtue of only made up internet names. As I might be talking to someone I know. Or might not.)

>>Well, SFB tournaments already use Tournament Cruisers; you can't just go in with whatever ship you like. So there is precedent for "predefined balanced force".>>

Clearly. Which is one of the main factors that support the idea that FedCom should have pre-defined Tournament Fleets for folks to pick from. I mean, again, mostly a self correcting problem in that if you can pick anything you want for the points you have available, it can be assumed that everyone is going to min/max the best force they possibly can. And some folks really like that. But then the tournament isn't really a game of "who can fly their ships the best" so much as a game of "who can jimmy the force selection limits most effectively". Which certainly has something to be said for it. But I suspect that in the grand scheme, having pre-selected fleets is a lot more user friendly (as people who are less invested in the game and aren't as inclined to put so much effort into trying to break the fleet selection rules will just end up with a balanced, reasonable force and be fighting a similar reasonable balanced force) and is probably the way to go in the long run.

>>Which is, I suppose, ADB's way of saying that straight-BPV doesn't lead to balanced one-on-one duels.>>

Well, sort of. There are a lot of factors that work into "is this a balanced fight". Map type. Map size. Drone speeds. Options. EW or no EW. Etc. And without everyone deciding all of these factors up front and then choosing ships accordingly, there is going to be a lot of variation in "balance". As the SFB tournament uses a very restricted set of rules (closed map with a wall, no EW, limited drone selection, no t-bombs, no crew units, etc.), you need a specific set of ships to work under those conditions. Thus, Tournament Cruisers.

If two people sit down and say "Let's play a one on one duel with the following year/rules/conditions in effect..." and they then both buy a 150 point ship with this information at their disposal, the likelihood is that the game will be reasonably balanced.

...who I am, although some wish they didn't

;-)

Orion Rogue wrote:
>>wondered why the rom war eagle had a move cost of one despite being the size of a damn frigate..>>

Well, ya know, old technology and inefficient engines. And that R Torp is *really* heavy.