With CR being one of the main features (perhaps the main feature) of the 0.6a release, it makes sense to revisit it after seeing how it’s played out so far.

(If you haven’t been keeping up with the details: CR (“combat readiness”) is a percentage rating each ship has that’s reduced each time it’s deployed into combat and governs how effective it is, and whether it can be deployed at all. Recovering CR costs time and supplies, thus rewarding the player for winning with fewer ships. That’s not the only reason for CR’s existence, but there’s a whole blog post devoted to it, so I won’t talk about it here.)

Overall, I think CR accomplished its intended goals, but that doesn’t mean that it’s perfect and can’t be improved. One of its effects in the current form is that ships go from “pretty much working fine” to “can’t even deploy this rust bucket anymore” awfully quickly, without much of a transition period. For reference, right now a ship below 10% CR can’t be deployed at all, while a ship below 20% CR suffers weapon and engine malfunctions. In theory that should be the aforementioned transition period, but in practice deployment costs are high enough that it can get skipped altogether.

With that in mind, the changes:

Ships have their deployment costs and CR recovery rates halved.
This means the supply cost per deployment and the recovery time remain the same, but more consecutive deployments are possible.

Malfunctions start at 40% CR, critical malfunctions start at 20%
This is all about extending the transition period between “working fine” and “not working at all”. A ship in average shape has roughly the same number of deployments as before until it runs into malfunctions, but now it’s possible to continue deploying the ship well beyond that.

Just what are critical malfunctions, you ask? Conceptually, it’s a chance for things to go very, very badly wrong. For example, a power junction failing catastrophically, ammo exploding inside a magazine, an engine containment field failing, that sort of thing. In game terms, it’s a chance for weapons and engines to go offline for the duration of the battle, and cause major hull damage in the process. Simply deploying a ship at low CR will cause some of these, an continued use in battle has a chance to cause even more.

Say goodbye to the starboard-side Heavy Blaster and some engines; and that’s just the beginning!

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In a previous post, I’d talked about combat readiness. One of the benefits of that system is that it makes it easy for other mechanics to tie into it, whether they’re in the combat or the campaign layer. I’d like to talk about what’s more or less an overhaul of the various fleet management mechanics, both fixing some long-standing issues and streamlining the approach without oversimplifying it. First, though, a brief recap of how things currently work.

The player character has a “fleet points” stat that determines the maximum size of their fleet.  (So do the AI fleet commanders, but never mind that for the moment.) The fleet has a cargo, fuel, and personnel capacity, based on the stats of the ships in it.

These are all soft caps – you can go over them, but doing so costs extra supplies every day, and there’s a risk of accidents when any of these is exceeded by too much.

Overall, this works well; there’s no reason to throw out the system and start from scratch. I’d actually started writing out the issues with the current system, but since it does work fairly well, it’s hard to build a compelling case against it. So instead, let me outline the new approach, and point out how it’s better.

Logistics
The general idea is to replace fleet points with something based on supply consumption, and since supply consumption already plays a role in other places, it can all be rolled together to clean things up. Enter the new stat, “logistics”. It’s a measure of how many units of supplies per day your character can manage to distribute efficiently. So, supply consumption up that limit is fine, but going above it introduces penalties.

The things that consume supplies are:

• Ship maintenance – ships have a new stats that indicates how many supplies per day they require for maintenance. More on that later.
• Crew and marines; marines consume more to reflect the cost of keeping those armored suits in good repair
• Ship repairs
• Combat readiness (“CR”) recovery
• Being over-capacity in fuel, cargo, or personnel – a fixed supply cost per unit

The daily supply expenditure on all of that is added up, and together with the logistics stat, is used to produce a logistics rating (“LR”), which is a percentage value. Use up to the logistics value results in an LR of 100%, and it goes to 0% when supply use double the logistics value. For example, if your logistics stat is 50, and you’re using 75 supplies per day, the LR is 50%.

LR has the following effects:

• When below 100%, reduces the maximum combat readiness of all the ships in the fleet by up to 50% (at 0% LR)
• When at 0% for more than a day, there’s a chance of an accident happening (note that simply being way over capacity in something is not enough to cause one now)

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