At this point, I have participated in and observed enough invasions/skirmishes with these numbers games to have become completely averse to any hard system. With the exception of fleeting-style battles, I don't see there ever being a viable system for combat. When you involve PVP, all order goes out the window. It's an irreparable mess. These systems are good for the armchair admiral/general, but my advice from here on is to avoid trying to incorporate it into any large-scale combat threads. I've noticed that as we become more technical with these battle formats, we lose contact with our characters. Personally, it has become more of a chore to me than an opportunity to express a character's personality and story.
My two cents? Writers need to focus on the souls of the soldiers and not the stats. If we are really here to improve our literary skills, the intense concentration on map dynamics/weapon stats is a distraction. There needs to be a flow and not rigid mechanics. I try to avoid most PVP as it is because of stats syndrome. What are the things we create in the factory for? With the exception of machines that a PC character is actually going to use themselves (as in, having their hands at the controls), everything is pretty much just a fancy plot device.
Yes. The factory is for plot devices.
I, too, am guilty of submitting base weapons or stuff that could have just been left to canon sources and contributing to the garbage dump that is the factory. But that is where I had my revelation a few months ago. The culture of one-upping is ridiculous.
One submission I have made has caused a lot of angst, and that is everyone's most recent favorite, the HEPF-1 Saint. Why did I make it? Did I feel like I had a right to nuke players out of existence in one go? Was this so I could maliciously eliminate characters I don't like? No. It was a plot device to defeat a plague of Sith dinosaurs that may or may not have been legitimate plot devices in themselves. (My opinion on that matters little.) It was also an invention of mine that I put work into (which is quite important to note, since I hate writing dev threads) because I enjoy sci-fi and wartime technology and wanted to see what I could do by reaching for the stars... and yet emphasizing a simplicity that is effective and impossible to refute. (This sort of weaponry is very real.)
Why make tech? Because it's fun, I guess. But, at this point,
Be flexible when you give hits, and be generous when you take hits. Screw those stats. Stop acting like your imaginary object is the penultimate imaginary object and play some flaws for once.
That's all I can say anymore. Otherwise, everything has infallibly turned into tournaments of kicking dust.
My two cents? Writers need to focus on the souls of the soldiers and not the stats. If we are really here to improve our literary skills, the intense concentration on map dynamics/weapon stats is a distraction. There needs to be a flow and not rigid mechanics. I try to avoid most PVP as it is because of stats syndrome. What are the things we create in the factory for? With the exception of machines that a PC character is actually going to use themselves (as in, having their hands at the controls), everything is pretty much just a fancy plot device.
Yes. The factory is for plot devices.
I, too, am guilty of submitting base weapons or stuff that could have just been left to canon sources and contributing to the garbage dump that is the factory. But that is where I had my revelation a few months ago. The culture of one-upping is ridiculous.
One submission I have made has caused a lot of angst, and that is everyone's most recent favorite, the HEPF-1 Saint. Why did I make it? Did I feel like I had a right to nuke players out of existence in one go? Was this so I could maliciously eliminate characters I don't like? No. It was a plot device to defeat a plague of Sith dinosaurs that may or may not have been legitimate plot devices in themselves. (My opinion on that matters little.) It was also an invention of mine that I put work into (which is quite important to note, since I hate writing dev threads) because I enjoy sci-fi and wartime technology and wanted to see what I could do by reaching for the stars... and yet emphasizing a simplicity that is effective and impossible to refute. (This sort of weaponry is very real.)
Why make tech? Because it's fun, I guess. But, at this point,
Be flexible when you give hits, and be generous when you take hits. Screw those stats. Stop acting like your imaginary object is the penultimate imaginary object and play some flaws for once.
That's all I can say anymore. Otherwise, everything has infallibly turned into tournaments of kicking dust.
