Here is an example of how to use Rube's understanding of how time combined with reality functions to improve the nature of what is occurring during Deadlock's “moment of time containing reality”, that innocent looking “time bar” that you see after you push the “End Turn” button. Like all computer games, Deadlock does a terrible job with missiles. So this will focus on missiles. Also, there aren't a lot of opportunities for SVC's impluses to do much with the guns in this game.
In BSG the ships move very slowly in relation to the rate of fire of their guns, and they don't appear to have any long-charging “heavy weapons” other than missiles. This makes the guns very bland, with very little dynamic too them. It is like the ships only have secondary weapons, and no primary weapons. This also makes maneuver far less relevant, because there is no reason to need to point at the enemy ships every once in a while to shoot the “big guns”. With all secondaries, and by BSG canon, Deadlock's guns “seem right”. But it doesn't work as well as a game as a design for ships where the ships are moving much faster in relation to their rate of fire. That induces a far more maneuver based fight based on attacking when armed, and evading while rearming. Because of this, “Baby Rube” doesn't impact the guns all that much within this BSG canon universe. These kinds of guns should generally just continuous fire when in range, which doesn't leave much room to “plan their future”.
Still, to be more realistic, some of these weapons seem to be “machine guns” that are not beam weapons and would have limited ammunition. The ones that aren't pure energy weapons wouldn't continuous fire the moment they enter maximum range and keep firing the way they do in computer games because they would quickly run themselves out of ammunition. They would only actually fire when they were in “effective range” and when they had a good shot, to conserve ammunition. So they wouldn't all just continuously fire at all times whenever they are withing their maximum range. The “treadmill of time” I described in the previous post could be used to have the guns firing only when they “have a good shot”. Even so, as I said before, the ships in BSG move very slowly compared to the rate of fire of their weapons, so this doesn't have as large of an large impact that it does in SFB due to the combat environment being enforced by BSG canon.
Missiles in Deadlock, on the other hand, can be vastly enhanced by the “Baby Rube” I have described for Deadlock. Deadlock currently has your usual “computer game missiles”. They aren't anything like actual missiles. I'll leave electronic warfare out of this, or this will become 10 pages, and just use point defense as a single example. Like pretty much all computer games, there is no point defense in Deadlock and missiles never miss (they are also a “mindless chain on follow pursuit”). Missiles “missing” is intimately related to electronic warfare, so I'll skip that. All the ships should have point defense weapons covering all, or most, firing arcs. They might also have counter measures. The missiles should have very limited fuel/range. If you fire missiles at a ship running away from you at high speed, the missiles wouldn't have the fuel/range to even catch it. If you fire missiles as you are “crossing their T”, in other words when they are moving directly towards you, that is the best situation and achieves the highest rate of closure. There needs to be a dynamic to all this, instead of missiles just being the all powerful wonder weapon that they usually are in computer games.
If you assume a “standard missile attack” is 6 missiles, the point defenses should generally be able to bring down 2-to-5 incoming missiles depending on how well they do. Vipers and Cylon fighters should always try to shoot at any enemy missiles that pass within their range, but it is a low percentage shot. The point defenses are a lot more accurate in shooting down missiles than the fighters are. Now use SVC's 60 impulse version of Deadlock's “treadmill of time” I've created for it here. Use your predictive mechanics, SVC's impulses, Avalon Hill's concept of “assembling the battle”, and the few strings of Rube that I am holding all this together with, to “choreograph” how this is all going to work out over the course of Deadlock's “time bar”. In Deadlock when the player is setting movement plots they are “planning the future”. That known future allows your own predictive mechanics, through SVC's impulses, to “plan the future” of everything else that will occur around that movement plot and literally choreograph this battle into something that looks very realistic.
If you think this through more, now lets forget this is BSG and say the ships also have counter measures, electronic warfare, and tractor beams. So with all that it can probably defeat all 6 missiles, requiring coordinated missile attacks to overwhelm the defenses and actually hit a target. A single ship firing a volley of missiles is just a waste of missiles. And this is all simple to do, and to very precisely choreograph to have a very “realistic” feel too it, within this “Baby Rube” I have described for Deadlock (which in this case is almost entirely simply SVC's impulse chart). Each impulse has a sequence of play of everything that can happen during that impulse, in the order that it happens. Predictive mechanics are simple in the format of Deadlock, you know what the relationship of every object on the map will be in relation too each other during every impulse before it all happens. Anything that happens like point defense weapons firing, using a counter measure, electronic warfare, or a tractor beam to just grab and hold a missile, will happen during a specific sub-phase of a specific impulse. And you know this all ahead of time because even the simple “baby proto-Rube” of Deadlock “knows the future”.
So now the “AI” (or “automated rules”) can “plan the future” situationally, to choreograph (or “assemble”) the battle. For example, if the player tells two different ships to fire missiles at a single target both ships won't just fire missiles at the same time. The “AI” would determine, based on the known movement plots of the firing ships and target, when each ship needed to launch the missiles for them to arrive at the target at the same time. And then that would be made to happen through the impulses with their embedded sequence of play. And now you can imagine a captain saying “Wait for it... One more second... Fire!” in this battle when only one of the ships launch at the beginning of Deadlock's “time bar turn”, and the closer one delays until the timing will be right. Baby Rube “planning the future” to make Deadlock appear to be “more realistic”. “It's a Kind of Magic”;-)
Missiles are just a single, very simple, example of where this whole Deadlock thing winds up going after 40 years of refinement. This “treadmill of time” can handle literally anything that you want to put into it. As for missiles in computer games in general, this is actually only the tip of the iceberg of making “realistic missiles”, but by BSG canon these humans dislike and mistrust computers. So these very simple missiles and no EW environment seems appropriate in this game. In my own PDU universe there are over a dozen different EW abilities that might affect missiles in some way, counter measures, and something similar to a tractor beam that can be used to hold missiles until they can be shot down or run out of fuel. Missiles in computer games have always been really, really badly done.
This isn't Rube. This is “1st grade Rube” speeding along the evolution of BSG: Deadlock, because I am literally from 40 years in Deadlock's future. We already did this, this all exists already. It's not an "idea" and I am not guessing, this has already existed for 40 years. This is the very beginning of using Steve Cole's impulses in a different way, not the end of it. This is a first baby step, just a few strands of Rube tied around SVC's “second generation” impulses. But it's also the most detail that I've ever explained any of Rube's individual components, this is a much less sophisticated version of Rube's cardio-vascular system.
