Era 4 unit changes

[george moromisato]

This thread is about changes to unit stats or the introduction of new units to the game--basically anything that can be changed without touching any code. Please make your suggestions as a response and let's discuss.

My hope is that we reach (rough) consensus pretty quickly and start a new game ("Era 4 Alpha") with these changes.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

First, I'd love to reach consensus on any balance changes to the units. For example, there has been some talk about increasing the power or attrition limit (half-life) of low-tech defenses. If we can agree on those (even roughly) then I would like to implement those on the server and start a new game. This would allow you all to test out the changes early in development. This will be the "Era 4 Alpha" game.

We can reuse the same Google doc that we did last time. I will just need to go through this at some point tomorrow to verify it against the wiki (which I populated from the github source, so the values there should be up to date).

On units I want defer to people who have been playing more actively, since they have a better sense of what is working and what needs work right now.

that said, my stances right now are:

• I do not like the idea of increasing the halfLife of ANY planetary defenses, because this will result in many ex-imperial planets that have totally impenetrable defenses for a long time after secession/abdication. New players should get a chance to capture independent planets and that requires independent planets to not remain impenetrable fortresses for a long time after they leave empire. However, I guess there could be a separate mechanism to increase unit attrition on independent worlds if this would negatively impact PvP combat.
• ships that use missiles can have targeting issues when they are attacking defender ship wings. If the targeting system gets fixed, missile units will become stronger when used offensively.
• in my opinion, low-tech ships should have very low cost and short halfLifes, so that they are fast to build up but total maintained fleet strength is lower than if the empire was building higher-tech units.
• starfrigates need some point of distinction, I suggest count:3 for attacks while further weakening individual attack strength. This would make them a defensive unit that is highly effective against all classes of jumpships.

A question for George: is changing labor/resource costs for units an option?

[george moromisato]

A question for George: is changing labor/resource costs for units an option?

Sure--that can be controlled from the core library files. But I want to be cautious about changing both the combat values and the labor/resource cost since they are correlated. That is, we usually want to compare units in terms of strength/cost. And you can change that ratio just by changing the strength while leaving cost constant.

Once you start to change cost too, it gets harder to predict how the change will affect balance.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Can those who have used both Sirius and Minotaur comment on their respective performances?

[--Imperator--]

Yes. Minotaur = good, Sirius = bad.

The Imperium had a fleet of 25M Minotaurs at the time of its abdication, and I used them almost exclusively in every Era 3 conflict up till then (about 4-5 conflicts all up, maybe more what with my warmongering and all)

I think gunships might be the new meta from Eldritch deathball, seeing as they bypass beacons and are reasonably powerful against starship defenses with R=15 (can first-strike most planetary defenses, now doesn't that sound familiar?) and A=64. Even powerful if a Helion ball is sent as cannon fodder. They also make good defenders. The only drawbacks are the slower-than-jumpship speed and lack of missile defense, so an appropriately sized jumpcruiser fleet or massed hypersonics can put a dent in their numbers. The slow speed means that once a player has committed to an all-in invasion there's no turning back and retreating the fleet which will take 24 hours to arrive back at the capital. Of course, wars are so hilariously skewed in favor of the attacker already (defections, unit loss) that this isn't much of a factor.

The Sirius is almost terrible in comparison: lower range, damage, speed and to top it all off, they can't be produced past the TL7 cutoff, meaning one can make MORE high-tech gunships than low-tech ones with the same world.

Overall, I do think they could be nerfed a little bit, despite how much I enjoyed using them all through Era 3.

It also reflects problems with deathballing/doomstacking/whatever in the game itself though, and players tend to clump every single ship into one massive fleet to minimize casualties when attacking.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Imperator, if high-tech starship speeds are 2x low-tech speeds while keeping other stuff constant the low-tech ships will be basically garbage.

I am weighing three philosophical approaches that can be taken when rebalancing (HT=high tech, LT=low tech):

1. No changes to unit cost. HT is distinguished from LT mostly by secondary abilities: higher speed, (slightly) higher halfLife, higher AoE, higher pointDef, higher deltaV, higher range on missile-equipped ships. Armor and attackValue of LT ships get boosted to within 66-75% of HT ships. Net outcome: Difference between LT and HT ships is mostly noticeable in countering situations- e.g., Eldritch has much better survivability against jumpcruisers because it has higher pointDefense, but an Eldritch vs Stinger fight is more evenly matched than currently. I favor this approach, since it is most friendly to new players while allowing old empires to succeed by mastery of tactical combat rather than sheer buildup. If we make foundation TLs take longer to uplift planets, that would encourage more use of low-tech ships except in extremely old empires that manage to stay untouched by war.
2. No changes to unit cost. HT ships remain distinguished by significantly higher armor and attack, but low-tech ships get very similar secondary abilities to HT ones - LT starships/ramjets can travel in fleets with HT ones without slowing the fleet down. LT and HT equivalents have similar missileStrength and pointDef. Net outcome: Difference between LT and HT ships is mostly noticeable in matched combat- e.g., in an Eldritch vs Stinger fight the Stingers lose badly, but Eldritch is only a sightly better counter to jumpcruisers than Stinger (unless the Eldritch wing is also attacking the jumpcruisers, in which case the higher damage will make a difference).
3. Change unit costs. LT per-unit and per-component labor cost is lower. HT is distinguished from LT by substantially higher cost and significantly longer halfLife. HT ships can potentially be better in every respect, depending on where we put their cost and halfLife. Yards building low-tech ships build up forces faster but plateau sooner. Long-term I think this is the best approach, but it requires some calculus to find appropriate cost and halfLife points.

I have given cases 1 and 2 their own pages on the excel.

I agree that deathstacking is a real problem. Things that could help:

• Higher attrition when fleets are in motion (this will be barely noticeable for jumpships, but significantly affect starships), at a foreign world, or when unit count is greater than some fraction of planetary population. You can bring fleets together for a joint strike but they can't all live in a deathstack indefinitely without penalty. Forcing deathstacks to split up while not in use will make them defeatable-in-detail; to deter this, players will have to maintain more redoubt planets with strong capships or planetary defenses which means less labor going to build gunships. Do this for ground units too, no dumping 100% of infantry on the capital without some sort of penalty (maybe planets have finite barracks capacity?). High attrition while in motion will create a stronger incentive to station starships on command bases / fortresses when waging expeditionary combat if they eventually get implemented, because the construction will serve as a shield against attrition while moving units around the galaxy.
• Changing the timetable for ground combat could help, if planetary conquest takes a cycle to complete players will have to commit either space or ground forces to a planet for a while before it flips or they won't be able to secure their victory. Rolling over planets with a deathstack won't be enough.
• A more fragmented map that has more nebular barriers to gunship consolidation.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Another unit property we could play around with that could have a substantial effects on unit balance is unitsPerCell. I think this interacts with area-of-effect damage (not positive about this, though). I believe that if you increase a unit's unitsPerCell, AoE weapons will deal more damage per shot against wings of this unit. So if for example we increased the unitsPerCell of Eldritches, starfrigates will kill more per combat round (because they have area of effect) but gunships will not (since they do not have AoE except the Cerberus, which I think should lose it since it's not a normal gunship trait). But I am not positive that this is true, it's just a guess.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Maybe instead of changing many attributes of defenses, we should increase their raw materials resource cost while decreasing their on-planet labor cost. This means that players can build a lot more defenses on important worlds by putting more labor into the structure, provided that they have strong supply planets. Building massive defenses everywhere just by jacking up labor allocation is not viable; the economy still needs to be able to provide the raw materials and defenses will compete with ships for these.

I have added a table in the Excel about this.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Clarification request about game mechanics:

• Do unit roles affect unit behavior in combat? For example, is jumptransport combat behavior (blocked from targeting other units) determined by role or by, e.g., canLand?
• For space units, is there a mechanical effect for unitsPerCell or does this only affect tactical visualization? Is there an interaction with AoE?
• For ground units, what are the mechanical effects of attack.range, attack.area and defense.minArea?
• Is attack.count fully implemented? E.g. if a Defiant had count:3 would it perform 3 direct attacks per combat cycle?
• Would the point defense ability on basic infantry actually work against a (hypothetical) missile-equipped ground unit?
• What does elementCount do, if anything?
• Do weaponDamageAdj and weaponRangeAdj (seen in nebulas) only affect space units, or do they affect ground units as well? Can these effects also be a property of a worldClass, designation, improvement or unit or are the restricted to regions? Are there other unimplemented properties like 'defenseArmorAdj' or 'ftlAdj'?
• What are the mechanics of createsResourcesOnGameCreate? How many are created?
• Are ground units rigidly tied to transports at the time that they are loaded, or is cargo abstracted at a fleet level? For example, if I load infantry into reliants and exotroops into warphants and then merge the fleets, will units and resources always remain in the transport type they were loaded into or could they get split up?
• canLand and cargoSpace distinguish transports from other units. How would the game handle a hypothetical unit with cargoSpace but not canLand? How about a unit with canLand but not cargoSpace?
• Combat is basically a free-for-all. Is there a long-term design goal to have units support one another in some way (e.g. combat ships defend transports, ships with point defense protect ships without, etc.)?

[george moromisato]

Q: Do unit roles affect unit behavior in combat? For example, is jumptransport combat behavior (blocked from targeting other units) determined by role or by, e.g., canLand?
Unit behavior is generally determined by unit capabilities. For example, to determine combat behavior we check whether a unit can carry cargo or not. If it can carry cargo, then it does not try to attack targets. If a unit is carrying ground troops, then it tries to land. We could make the behavior more sophisticated in the future. E.g., perhaps a heavily-armed transport would both attack units and land troops.

Q: For space units, is there a mechanical effect for unitsPerCell or does this only affect tactical visualization? Is there an interaction with AoE?
In combat mode, a group is split up into "cells", where each cell has a certain number of units. The cells are positioned in real space (on a 2D plane). When we resolve combat, we calculate hits from one cell to another. Area of effect weapons can affect multiple cells (based on real positions on the 2D plane). If you pack more units into one cell, then there is greater chance that they will be hit.

Q: For ground units, what are the mechanical effects of attack.range, attack.area and defense.minArea?
Ground units do not use range or area of effect, unfortunately. The engine currently only supports direct attacks (not missile attacks).

Q: Is attack.count fully implemented? E.g. if a Defiant had count:3 would it perform 3 direct attacks per combat cycle?
It is implemented as a multiplier. That is, 5 ship with 3 attacks is equivalent to 15 ships with 1 attack. In practice, there isn't a tactical difference from just increasing weapon damage.

Q: Would the point defense ability on basic infantry actually work against a (hypothetical) missile-equipped ground unit?
This is not yet implemented. We don't currently support missiles on ground forces. I think ground combat in general has a lot of potential for expansion, though I'm not sure how to do it without increasing complexity.

Q: What does elementCount do, if anything?
Nothing currently. It is just for flavor text, etc.

Q: Do weaponDamageAdj and weaponRangeAdj (seen in nebulas) only affect space units, or do they affect ground units as well?
I don't believe either of these are currently implemented, but they should be. They won't affect ground units until we change ground combat.

Q: Can these effects also be a property of a worldClass, designation, improvement or unit or are the restricted to regions? Are there other unimplemented properties like 'defenseArmorAdj' or 'ftlAdj'?
Not yet implemented, but yes, I think it would make sense to do that. For example, you can imagine worlds with EM fields or something that could affect certain classes of weapons. Or even defenses built on a world that affect weapons. But this is not yet implemented.

Q: What are the mechanics of createsResourcesOnGameCreate? How many are created?
When the game is created, we create units for this industry to reach the attrition limit (as if it had been producing units forever).

Q: Are ground units rigidly tied to transports at the time that they are loaded, or is cargo abstracted at a fleet level? For example, if I load infantry into reliants and exotroops into warphants and then merge the fleets, will units and resources always remain in the transport type they were loaded into or could they get split up?
No, they are abstracted at the fleet level. Otherwise, we would need new UI to let the player load ship--I think that will end up being too complicated (too much micromanagement) for not a lot of gain. If necessary we could have the engine try to do the right thing when loading (i.e., put expensive troops in expensive transports--or something).

Q: canLand and cargoSpace distinguish transports from other units. How would the game handle a hypothetical unit with cargoSpace but not canLand? How about a unit with canLand but not cargoSpace?
It should work. A unit with cargoSpace but not canLand would behave as a transport in space (don't attack targets), but won't try to land. If we did this, we would want to change the loading algorithm so that ground-troops don't get placed in these kinds of transports. For canLand but not cargoSpace, the unit would land if directed (generally only if the player orders it). I would like to, eventually, add units that can support ground troops (such as fighter squadrons).

Q: Combat is basically a free-for-all. Is there a long-term design goal to have units support one another in some way (e.g. combat ships defend transports, ships with point defense protect ships without, etc.)?
Yes, absolutely! Adding a "defend" order would help with that. It's a little tricky to write the AI for that, though, because we need to take orbital dynamics into consideration. If a group tries to defend another by getting below it, it will orbit faster and eventually separate from the other group. We'd have to do more sophisticated orbit planning. But conceptually, that is definitely the direction I'm thinking about.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Q: For space units, is there a mechanical effect for unitsPerCell or does this only affect tactical visualization? Is there an interaction with AoE?
In combat mode, a group is split up into "cells", where each cell has a certain number of units. The cells are positioned in real space (on a 2D plane). When we resolve combat, we calculate hits from one cell to another. Area of effect weapons can affect multiple cells (based on real positions on the 2D plane). If you pack more units into one cell, then there is greater chance that they will be hit.

My understanding is that each hit has a chance of destroying one unit per combat round, and that this chance is determined by the interaction of armor and attackValue. Can a hit from any weapon ever destroy more than one unit in a single cell when it hits? Or is it just a chance of destroying one unit/hit for each cell affected by the strike (normally one, potentially more with AoE)?

Q: Is attack.count fully implemented? E.g. if a Defiant had count:3 would it perform 3 direct attacks per combat cycle?
It is implemented as a multiplier. That is, 5 ship with 3 attacks is equivalent to 15 ships with 1 attack. In practice, there isn't a tactical difference from just increasing weapon damage.

I guess this ties into my first question, doesn't having more individual attacks mean more chances to destroy units? Can the attacks directed at different cells? Or is that not how it works after all? When we changed Partisans in Era 3 I believe that we increased attack count because we believed that would give it a better chance of destroying more unitsper strike (Partisans do not have AoE), but if there is no tactical difference then the change was pointless.

Q: Would the point defense ability on basic infantry actually work against a (hypothetical) missile-equipped ground unit?
This is not yet implemented. We don't currently support missiles on ground forces. I think ground combat in general has a lot of potential for expansion, though I'm not sure how to do it without increasing complexity.

My suggestion is to combine the current mechanics with civil war mechanics so that combat has two phases.

Q: What are the mechanics of createsResourcesOnGameCreate? How many are created?
When the game is created, we create units for this industry to reach the attrition limit (as if it had been producing units forever).

Good to know. This is why screwing with planetary defense halfLife, cost or strength is challenging: making them better in any way makes the pregenerated independent planets really hard for new players to capture. This was already seen in Era 3 where buffing defenses resulted in there being not very many worlds that players could conquer with their starting fleets. A stopgap solution would be to lower independent planets' labor allocation to defenses at lower TLs, or to start players with more units. That said, the perceived "weakness" of planetary defenses in the current meta may just reflect low player count and super old empires; together that means a small subset of players have been able to field absurdly huge numbers of ships at various points in time.

Q: Are ground units rigidly tied to transports at the time that they are loaded, or is cargo abstracted at a fleet level? For example, if I load infantry into reliants and exotroops into warphants and then merge the fleets, will units and resources always remain in the transport type they were loaded into or could they get split up?
No, they are abstracted at the fleet level. Otherwise, we would need new UI to let the player load ship--I think that will end up being too complicated (too much micromanagement) for not a lot of gain. If necessary we could have the engine try to do the right thing when loading (i.e., put expensive troops in expensive transports--or something).

Q: canLand and cargoSpace distinguish transports from other units. How would the game handle a hypothetical unit with cargoSpace but not canLand? How about a unit with canLand but not cargoSpace?
It should work. A unit with cargoSpace but not canLand would behave as a transport in space (don't attack targets), but won't try to land. If we did this, we would want to change the loading algorithm so that ground-troops don't get placed in these kinds of transports. For canLand but not cargoSpace, the unit would land if directed (generally only if the player orders it). I would like to, eventually, add units that can support ground troops (such as fighter squadrons).

Q: Combat is basically a free-for-all. Is there a long-term design goal to have units support one another in some way (e.g. combat ships defend transports, ships with point defense protect ships without, etc.)?
Yes, absolutely! Adding a "defend" order would help with that. It's a little tricky to write the AI for that, though, because we need to take orbital dynamics into consideration. If a group tries to defend another by getting below it, it will orbit faster and eventually separate from the other group. We'd have to do more sophisticated orbit planning. But conceptually, that is definitely the direction I'm thinking about.

These are all great to know, thanks.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

If we can propose new units to the game, I think citadels need a more credible ground defense unit that they can allocate some labor to building. Basic infantry's cost is too heavily weighted towards labor rather than resources; we need a unit whose cost is mostly in resources (so that a small labor allocation goes a long way) and which does not supplant the need for existing infantry types. Since citadels already have a trade route to jumpship yards, consider:

Code: Select all

ResourceType core.heavyMech
    {
    category: groundUnit
    name: "heavy mech squadron" // or whatever sounds cool

    mass: 500.0 // make it be too massive for offensive use to be practical, so that it is not a substitute for armored/exotroops
    isCargo: true
    halfLife: 5.0
    elementCount: 1000

    attack: { name:"guided missile" damage:10 type:direct range:0.0 area:0.1 } // missiles are not implemented for ground units
    defense: { armor:40 minArea:10.0 }

        production: {
        workUnits: 800.0 // it seems 'cheap' but its resource cost is quite high, you will ruin your economy if you try to build a lot
        inputs: (
            { type:core.lightMissileLauncher amount:2.0 }
            { type:core.hexacarbide amount:50.0}
            )
        minTechLevel: 7
        }
    }

// Change citadel complex to build heavy mech

Trait core.citadelComplex {
    name: "citadel complex"
    category: industry
    role: citadelIndustry

        production: (
            core.infantry
            core.heavyMech
            core.jumpmissilePartisan
            )

    defaultAlloc: { alloc:max }
    designationOnly: true
    workingConditions: 7
    }

[--Imperator--]

Imperator, if high-tech starship speeds are 2x low-tech speeds while keeping other stuff constant the low-tech ships will be basically garbage.

I suggested 1 ly/min for starships and 2 ly/min for ramjets, regardless of tech level. The low-tech Defiance and high-tech Gorgos will have the same FTL speed (well, not FTL, it equals lightspeed). Ramjets will have 2x lightpseed as they were traditionally faster than starships anyway. I agree with lowering gunship speed to 4 ly/min or even 5 (see the comment on the spreadsheet)

Funny thought (about the lore, not meta): since starships travel so slowly, if we're plotting a course for them around the map that takes 24 hours (real time), in-game time is over 1 year (or one "cycle", however long that is) With the usual distances involved in Anacreon, I just realised that the crew of those ships would be long dead before actually arriving at their destination, unless those starships were generation arkships or something.

I suppose it helps that the time units for a "cycle" are not clearly defined anywhere, but its presumably a long period of time, like 1 year. Just another funny quirk with the in-game numbers, like the population of a world rising from 1 billion to over 10 billion in a year or two.

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Sorry Imperator, I must not have read it carefully. You did put the low-tech and high-tech units at the same speed

My real concern is that by radically increasing capship speed, players lose the opportunity to see and respond to an impending capship attack. At 0.2 LY/cycle players have 21 hours to respond from the point that a starship fleet enters a capital's control radius to the point that it can attack the capital. This means as long as people are logging in roughly once a day they can be assured that they will not come back to find that an unstoppable starcruiser deathstack has destroyed their capital without them having had a chance to prepare for it (reassign defenders, fire citadel missiles, etc.) True, ramjets arr already in this speed category, but nebulas are more fragmented than open space so the number of potential attackers and attack directions is lower.

With jumpships, you can now be certain that you will not lose a capital overnight to an unexpected jump ship attack if you understand beacon mechanics (it would still be better if there was a delay before beacons started working, since all planets in enemy control radius must be treated as beacons right now).

That means gunships have become the "my enemy loses while AFK" unit of choice right now. But starcruisers are much, much more cost efffective than gunships, and a gunship ball will at least take some casualties from starcruisers and aSats/hypersonics during each attack; a huge capship fleet is practically immune to most passive defense strategies if it can pick its targets. Once capship movement speed is within the same order of magnitude as gunships, I worry that to play the game and survive, players will have to be logging in 6 times a day including in the middle of the night.

That said, it is not impossible and 0.2 LY is a verly awkward speed. I think that at a minimum we would want to see citadel autofire against starship-speed fleets if they were made faster.

[TheBugKing]

A major problem that we have failed to address is that we are able to cycle through the tech tree too quickly--this is causing a cascading affect throughout the game. An experienced player only needs about 4 - 5 days to get to Post Industrial. A lot of us tend to go straight for 9 and 10 without thinking twice about the other levels. It causes a host of issues for us(i.e. redundancy of crappy low tech units) and for the supernewbs who haven't played before(i.e. they go straight to T10 and can't figure what to do to undo it, then abdicate). Each Era is lasting for roughly an entire year, so it makes no sense to be able to travel to the top of the tech tree with just 5 worlds(food, trill, hex, chrom, home).


Simple Solution: (a big difference in game play, implementation: easy)

To solve this issue, we should increase the length of time required to go through each tech level: maybe a 2 weeks or longer for each tech level and 3 weeks or longer from 9 -> 10. (the suggestions of details are merely for example).
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Complicated Solution: (an shift in our gaming experience and the way we interact while playing the game, implementation: difficult?)

Also, (but as a separate extension) to further encourage the importance of territory and potentially huge dynamic shifts, each tech level can have a minimum world limit. i.e. If someone would like to move up from tech 8 to tech 9, they must have at least 500 worlds in addition to the >2 weeks that it takes to build that tech. Not only would this solution give all of the units more purpose, but it would also serve to slow down empire growth. A complicated penalty to create would be that if the empire falls below that world limit threshold their tech level goes down, even though the structure remains. When the number of worlds were obtained again, the tech level would come back. This ?may? be similar to the way the SC's give us access to giving commands to the various worlds when they are activated.

A lot of you may immediately say this will favor only old empires. It does. However, there is a major incentive to split up the large fleets for defending all of those worlds. If you can't build Undines and Gorgos and Megathere because a coalition is occupying your empire( The Galaxy vs Hegemony ), THEN YOU WILL BE DEFEATED in time simply by attrition. If you build only starfleets you will be defeated because your empire will shed tech levels as your empire gets eaten by the smaller players.

Another way to implement this is that while it may take 3 weeks to build a T8 structure, it takes 6 weeks to build the T9, then 9 weeks to build T10. This does not solve all of our issues though, the system would not allow one to impose a penalty without becoming very complicated, and we would still be able to build murderballs with no way to curb that empire.

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I think that Tech Limits (I will call this) will give more intuitive structure to the game given how we play it and how long term it is.

So far there seems to be several classes of players: The Long Term Empire (Medium and steady, reaching all equilibrium within a given unit type for creation and attrition), The Emperor (The largest empires), More Bang for My Buck/One hit wonders (Explosive empires that grow very rapidly and then collapse suddenly or fade away), Oneworlders and SUPERnewbz (we all know them, they never leave there homeplanet and then disappear, leaving us to wonder in awe at their memorialized names of xxxpawz, deezcupcakes, asl;dkfja, etc.; then the 1 - 10 world empires that become locked at T10). There are more I have noticed, but I don't want to take the time to name them all...
At any rate Tech Limits will give a more even game play for all of the different style types and playing skills.

• It will foster a game style that matches game length

• It will inhibit rapidly rising and undefeatable empires

• It will create meaning for territory and low tech units without changing low tech units(they still need to be changed though)

• It will give small empires an avenue for waging war against the large empires

• It will give a enormous incentive for empires to defend their worlds, whereby causing the break up of the super armadas(or at least giving them a huge drawback, ie the sacrifice of your tech levels in the case of a counterattack that you don't try to defend)
  
  The single biggest drawback all of our changes is that the slow start at the beginning of the game may be too slow for the SUPERnewbz. But I think WT,D0 would be able to work those details into The Guide easily enough.
  
  If I need to move this to a different forum, just let me know.