Official Second Edition Public Playtest Thread

[duxdarius]

Why does atmospheric use up soooo! much mass? 40% kinda crazy should be more like 10 or 20%

[duxdarius]

this section seems very hard to figure out what you are talking about

[Tyrel Lohr]

You're probably referring to the Campaign Units chapter, that I was in the middle or rewriting before tax seasons and end of the month hit the last time around. I was in the middle of moving much of the content to the individual unit type sections (as evidenced by some of the work in the front half of the chapter that contradicts information later in the chapter).

If you are talking about the tech chapter, Atmospheric's cost is meant to keep large units from always being equipped with it. At TL 0 it costs an arm and a leg, but after two or three tech levels it becomes almost affordable. The ability does allow ships to be built without shipyards, however, which makes it a pretty potent trait.

-Tyrel

[duxdarius]

Allowing units to be built on planet is still not worth 40% of the total mass. And using one of our starting empires as a guide and maxing out it’s Tech Infrastructure and starting with 8 Census, it’s going to take 108/9mo+119/10mo+129/11mo+140/12mo+151/13mo=647 tech points and 55 months to get to a reasonable size, 20% of mass. And the benefit is I get to build the ship on a planet? And loose 20% of its available mass? For the same cost, maintenance and build time as any other unit. I could spend 5 ESP at creation on this of course but with as many techs as we need to develop and as many other demands as there are spending 8% of your startup just so you don’t have to spend on shipyards is foolish.

If I put those same tech points into shipyard, then each shipyard will cost 20 EP. You need 10 for the maximum ship size. Even for one of our starting empires that would be more than manageable in the first 10 turns. And, each shipyard increases your production capacity on the planet, meaning you can turn out more units that are better than the fellow building on the ground.

If the starting size for Atmo was 20%, then for all of that expenditure you’d at least be down to 10% of the ship and you would have some chance at being competitive. You save the cost of the shipyards, 200 EP and 3 EP maintenance, but on a 20 cost unit you’re paying .86 maintenance, or 9 EP for 200 EP worth, and .86 EP worth of that is dead space. So the guy with the shipyards is earning 6 EP more a turn, or it takes 33 turns to recoup the difference. And, he can add 2 more shipyards without increasing the maintenance cost, further increasing his productivity.

Simply put, putting Atmospheric on a ship a 40% is a losing proposition. Putting it on at 20% is a losing proposition as well but it’s closer to becoming viable.

--Mav

[ahayford]

In real life, the design requirements for a ship intended to enter/escape planetary gravity, let alone aerodynamic requirements for flying in atmosphere are immense. In fact, the more massive a ship got, the more of its mass would need to be dedicated to reaching escape velocity and not being torn apart by drag forces and high speed. The advantages of building ships in space are huge. 40% doesn't seem that crazy from a purely realistic standpoint. Game balance wise, I don't know enough about the rules to comment.

Now, a ship could potentially be built planetside in pieces and put into orbit using rockets, mass drivers, space elevators, etc. However, someone would have to assemble them in space. Expensive, but possible in a pinch w/o a permanent orbital assembly platform. However, thats a lot of trips to space for your ship assembly personel.

[murtalianconfederacy]

I wouldn't worry too much about that, Nys. It's been our experience that the vast majority (95%+) of the non-solo games are played via email and usually utilize a spreadsheet to track an empire's assets and orders. By the time 2E is released, I am confident that we'll have a nifty little unit builder spreadsheet that is fully functional and will take the math out of unit design. Also, this is actually a simpler process than designing Starmada ships, which after the crossover book came out many groups used for ship design.

Please bear in mind that VBAM is not really intended to be played by a group sitting around a table (though that has been done successfully by some groups) and is not a board game in the traditional sense.

A while ago, but was reading through the thread and decided to comment.

I play with pen and paper, and even though I have a laptop I prefer to continue playing with pen and paper. Therefore, I'll be using a calculator, and I would like it if I didn't have to go running to the computer each time I needed to do some maths.

[mavikfelna]

In real life, the design requirements for a ship intended to enter/escape planetary gravity, let alone aerodynamic requirements for flying in atmosphere are immense. In fact, the more massive a ship got, the more of its mass would need to be dedicated to reaching escape velocity and not being torn apart by drag forces and high speed. The advantages of building ships in space are huge. 40% doesn't seem that crazy from a purely realistic standpoint. Game balance wise, I don't know enough about the rules to comment.

Now, a ship could potentially be built planetside in pieces and put into orbit using rockets, mass drivers, space elevators, etc. However, someone would have to assemble them in space. Expensive, but possible in a pinch w/o a permanent orbital assembly platform. However, thats a lot of trips to space for your ship assembly personel.

Any ship rated for space combat, ie has a defense of 1 or greater, would be capable to surviving in an atmosphere provided it was undamaged and not a dispersed structure, ala Discovery from 2001, A Space Oddessy. Particularly if the structure was ovoid or spheroid, like n overlord dropship from Battletech.

Allowing such a unit to actually land will require equipment equal to 1~5% of it's mass, depending on your structural capabilities, and aerodynamics will greatly improve it's handling characteristics and functional capabilities.

Most of the reason for this is the fact that the structural forces that make a unit good at resisting battle damage are also useful for resisting structural stresses like atmosphere. Some additions may be needed to some craft but a suitable application of thrust will over come most difficulties.

My suggestion would be to drop Atmospheric to 10% but also require any unit have a defense rating of their SIZ or greater to use it.

The only reason the design requirements we have now are so troublesome is because we don't good thrust to mass ratios. Hybrid plasma rockets and other advancements we should see in the next decade should bring those requirements way down. This would be why the requirement for Atmospheric is Engines.

--Mav

[jygro]

Exciting! I'll definitely have to look over the new material, but I liked what I skimmed over.

-Bren

[Charles Lewis]

A while ago, but was reading through the thread and decided to comment.

I play with pen and paper, and even though I have a laptop I prefer to continue playing with pen and paper. Therefore, I'll be using a calculator, and I would like it if I didn't have to go running to the computer each time I needed to do some maths.

Fear not! One aspect of the current frenzy of edits and rewrites is simplifying several of the formulas involved.

[Tyrel Lohr]

My suggestion would be to drop Atmospheric to 10% but also require any unit have a defense rating of their SIZ or greater to use it.

Now, that was a good explanation of the problem and a good solution to it all rolled up into one. The cost of Atmospheric is going to go down (and will be modified to be more like Engine cost), but I do like the idea that a ship should have to have Defense + Engine > SIZ in order to actually make use of the ability. That would prevent crippled Atmospheric warships from participating in ground battles or being repaired at planetary shipyards as attempting atmospheric reentry would destroy it.

-Tyrel

[Tyrel Lohr]

I can’t believe that is been nearly a month since the last project update. Sorry for the delay, guys; time is just flying by way too fast on this end, and sometimes it is frustrating that I don’t has as much substantial progress to report than I would like.

The last month has been spent continuing the process of combing through the current VBAM 2E draft and seeing what final changes need to be made to the rules, either for game balance or completeness reasons or because of space concerns. After doing some judicious cutting we are currently sitting at around 160-170 pages without the CSCR/CGCR, scenarios, or complete introductory chapters in place. Final page count for the 2E Campaign Guide is likely to be around 200 pages, or about 80 pages longer than the original Campaign Guide.


The following is an overview of some of the changes made to the rules in the past few weeks:

Campaign Maps – This chapter is almost finished, barring the completion of the Sector Map integrated example and a final formatting and example for the System Map section. I also want to do an integrated example of map conversion, though that topic might get moved to another book in order to save space, and because it is a topic that probably deserves a bit more depth than a 2-3 page overview can provide.

Stars Systems & Planets – These are now two separate chapters. Star Systems contains the rules for star systems and other system-level stats, such as Piracy and Commerce (Trade Value), while Planets contains the rules for planet statistics and other planet-level oddities. The only interface between the system generation and planet generation rules occurs when a player has to generate planet stats for the planets in a new star system. However, for Commander Campaigns, this will actually be rendered moot by the addition of special RAW, Biosphere, and Moons tables in the system generation section (Carrying Capacity is derived from the number of planets rolled, so it doesn’t need its own table).

I have gone back to having individual RAW, Carrying Capacity, Biosphere, and Moon tables for each planet type. This was done after trying to organize the planet generation section of the rules into a more user-friendly format. The presence of 8 modifiers for every table looked bad in book form, and was getting pretty tedious to maneuver through reading the book. This did allow me to do some extra customization to the charts, however, and I think the results are worth it.

Asteroid Belts are back by popular demand, and Exotic Worlds and Dwarf Planets are gone. The former was added because people really liked seeing them as their own entities in star systems, while the latter planetary objects were removed because they weren’t unique or interesting enough to be worth including in the core book. They also caused problems on the planet type tables, so it was just simpler to get rid of them. They might come back some day, but that remains to be seen.

Shipyards - As Charlie has already mentioned on the forums, a new solution has been found to the shipyard issues that Cliff Frick and his playtesters brought to our attention. We have had some issues during earlier VBAM 2E development and playtest in regards to shipyards, mainly stemming from the quandary of how to implement them in Second Edition. We could go with the 1E approach, where players have to build enormous, costly shipyard complexes, or we could go with a smaller, more modular approach where players build multiple shipyards and combine their effects to build ever larger and/or more expensive starships.

The new solution that we are going to be using in 2E to deal with shipyards is to turn them into a form of colony infrastructure called (coincidentally) Shipyards. Each colony will then have a shipyard output equal to its Shipyards x Productivity. This tells you how many shipyard points the colony has available to purchase and build new space combat units. A colony’s production output (Productivity x Census) then determines how many ground combat units the colony can build. These are treated as separate pools and, as with the Extended Construction Rules from 1E, these totals represent the maximum Construction Cost of units that can simultaneously be under construction at a colony on any given campaign turn.

Example: A colony with 2 Census, 5 Productivity, and 3 Shipyards would have a production output of 10 and a shipyard output of 15. It could build 5 @ 2 EP ground units using the production output, then use the shipyard output to build 1 @ 10 EP cruiser and 2 @ 2 EP frigates and still have 1 shipyard point to spare. Those production and shipyard points would be tied up until their respective units are completed, however, which prevents a colony from spamming out new combat units every turn.

This new shipyard rule will not provide an limitations on the maximum size of units that can be built there; the limit will be moved back to be solely tied to shipyard output, similar to how construction capacity was the limit in 1E.

Governments - The government rules have been removed from the book and will be moved to a future release. More than likely, they will find a home in the 2E Companion. The rules worked, but the descriptions took up 10 pages. I feel the descriptions are valuable for giving players an idea for what each type of government might represent in-game, so rather than trimming them to the bone they will just appear in a later supplement.

Empires - Speaking of the government rules, the Empire chapter is being rewritten to a degree to better incorporate some of the rules that operate at the empire level. There will be a separate section that lists all of the available empire “pools”, making that easier to navigate and know what your empire should be tracking. The AIX values are also being integrated into Empires under the heading of Culture. Economic rules are now in this chapter, including the rules for purchasing trade links. This decision was made because economics is an empire-level issue, and it made more sense to discuss Commerce in this section. There is a good argument to be made to move trade link rules to the Star Systems chapter, but right now I think we are going to try it in Empires to see how that works out.

The Wartime Economies and Fatigue rules have also been removed from the Campaign Guide. After further review I decided that they seemed out of place in the Campaign Guide and were “heavier” than new players should have to deal with. They will reappear in the Companion.

Empire, Colony, and Unit Tech Levels – 2E will now carry over the original empire tech level rules to the colony and unit level, too. Empires will research empire tech levels that define the maximum tech level that they can then upgrade their colonies to. A colony’s tech level will determine its economic modifier, as well as the maximum tech level of units it can build. For example, an Interstellar empire could upgrade its colonies to at most an Interstellar colony tech level, and a colony at an Interstellar tech level could only build units whose tech level is equal to or less than Interstellar; e.g., they could not build Ancient craft!

This change plugs a hole in the original empire tech level rules that allowed a high tech empire to invade a low tech power and immediately treat those low tech colonies as if they, too, were high tech. Tech point expenditures are now required to upgrade these colony worlds and make them more productive. It is also possible for an empire to backslide to a poorer empire tech level should it lose control of its higher-tech colonies.

Technology - Technology in general is getting a major face lift and simplification from the previously published draft. We are adopting the Macro/Micro tech advance system from the Starmada Edition book, and instead of tracking tech levels for each technology an empire will instead track its tech level in one of six core macro technologies (Structural, Propulsion, Electronics, Weapons, Basing, and Support). The maximum level that you can increase each of these technologies to is based on your current empire tech level. This eliminates the need for empire tech levels to have arbitrary tech requirements of their own, and allows a simple cap to be put in place.

The tech level and miniaturization system has been changed so that tech levels now range from 0 – 18 (instead of 0 – 10), and each macro tech level provides a +5% miniaturization bonus. This means that an empire with Weapons TL 12 would pay only 40% (100% – 12 x 5% = 40%) of the listed mass costs for all Weapons equipment purchases when designing new campaign units. This is a simpler formula that drastically reduces the number of calculations that must be made during unit design.

Complementing these macro technologies are the micro technologies, which are the individual techs that an empire can unlock and use. The micro technology research will be a matrix affair like in Starmada Edition, with the player selecting 5 technologies to research and randomly receiving one of them. This element of uncertainty will keep micro technology advances from being too predictable.

The costs for tech advances is also going to be simplified, moving back to being based on an empire’s GDP instead of other factors. Tests proved that the 1E method was a better solution overall. We still have to playtest actual costs, but it is looking like all tech advances, regardless of type, will cost 1 x GDP tech points to purchase. However, macro advances might have their costs increased to 2 x GDP instead should the tech advancement rate turn out to be too fast. With six macros to research plus empire tech level upgrades, however, I have a feeling that probably won’t be a concern.

The technologies themselves now have empire tech level prerequisites; you don’t have to worry about researching X technology to unlock Y. This was deemed a better solution that the nascent tech tree approach that we offered earlier. Tech availability has also been pulled from this book; all techs in this book should be considered Common.

Campaign Units – We should have something substantive to report on this next week. Needless to say, we are rolling back to a much simpler iteration. All of the same design rules will apply, but we are moving to a Construction Cost-centric model with only three options per unit type (Light, Medium, Heavy) that are then used to determine how many mass points are available to make purchases with or what SIZ-based modifier is applied. Generally speaking, SIZ is being kicked back to being a derived statistic that is mostly important for determining cargo requirements. More on this as it develops.

As for a timeline for development, at this point I have about given up trying to estimate when things are going to be done. As soon as I think we are getting close I either run into another bug that needs nailed down, or I come up with a better solution to the problem that then requires some internal discussion to provide a “sanity check” to see if the idea was actually a good one or it it was only the effects of late night development psychosis that made it seem like a good idea at the time.

If I had to float an actual release date out there again, I would say Q2 2010; it will be out in time for Origins in June, one way or another. The agonizingly annoying thing about this stage of the game’s development is that almost all of the rules are in place, but the fine tuning, pruning, and editing is what slows everything down to a crawl. We’ve cut probably 30-40 pages of content already from the Campaign Guide, whether because it was extraneous and didn’t add anything to the game or because it was an optional rule that only acted to muddy the waters and cause confusion.

The current draft of the 2E Campaign Guide is showing great progress, however. The changes of the last weeks has made a lot of gameplay elements easier to understand and implement compared to previous rule revisions. While it is difficult to make any promises when I don’t know what my work schedule is going to look like in the next week, I will do my best to put together and publish a new public beta draft this weekend that will demonstrate where we’re at and get any final feedback from players prior to us wrapping up the book. The final step in assembling the Campaign Guide will be taking the CSCR Alpha rules and notes that we have compiled on them and blending them into the final book. After that it will be a case of doing final editing, examples, and handouts — then the book will be done.

If you have playtested the CSCR Alpha rules and haven’t sent me any reports, comments, etc., please do so. I would appreciate as much feedback on those as possible. Also, just to make it clear, any playtest reports that might have been passed on to Jay I won’t have seen, so you might want to send a copy on to me (given the fact that I am the one writing this book and all!).

[BLHarrison]

The following is an overview of some of the changes made to the rules in the past few weeks:

The tech level and miniaturization system has been changed so that tech levels now range from 0 – 18 (instead of 0 – 10), and each macro tech level provides a +5% miniaturization bonus. This means that an empire with Weapons TL 12 would pay only 40% (100% – 12 x 5% = 40%) of the listed mass costs for all Weapons equipment purchases when designing new campaign units. This is a simpler formula that drastically reduces the number of calculations that must be made during unit design.

Do you plan on changing any of the base mass costs? I was doing a comparison between the older version and the new percentage version. Under the older verison LV4 weapons (and anything else with base 50 value) cost 58 mass units for 2 factors. Under the percent version the same two factors cost 80 mass units. I experimented on the spreadsheet I use and to get approximatly the same value weapons would have to be at 35 mass units (and then they would be two mu less at 56 mu)

Just asking in order to guess who much I'm going to have to revise my already created units.

[Emiricol]

We still have to playtest actual costs, but it is looking like all tech advances, regardless of type, will cost 1 x GDP tech points to purchase. However, macro advances might have their costs increased to 2 x GDP instead should the tech advancement rate turn out to be too fast. With six macros to research plus empire tech level upgrades, however, I have a feeling that probably won’t be a concern.

So at 20% GDP invested in tech monthly, how long would it take under the current iteration of the 2E rules to progress from new INT1 to maximum tech levels?

The new solution that we are going to be using in 2E to deal with shipyards is to turn them into a form of colony infrastructure called (coincidentally) Shipyards. Each colony will then have a shipyard output equal to its Shipyards x Productivity.

This is really outstanding. There's no reason a small industrial colony should be unable to build smaller ships locally, just because a shipyard would be too expensive or risky for that system. And it scales. I wish I'd thought of this

My suggestion would be to drop Atmospheric to 10% but also require any unit have a defense rating of their SIZ or greater to use it.

Now, that was a good explanation of the problem and a good solution to it all rolled up into one. The cost of Atmospheric is going to go down (and will be modified to be more like Engine cost), but I do like the idea that a ship should have to have Defense + Engine > SIZ in order to actually make use of the ability. That would prevent crippled Atmospheric warships from participating in ground battles or being repaired at planetary shipyards as attempting atmospheric reentry would destroy it.

-Tyrel

Interesting. And would not be too hard to program into the spreadsheet to maybe highlight damaged Atmo units that can't land due to that.

[Tyrel Lohr]

Sorry for the late reply, Emiricol; I am not sure how I missed this message before!

So at 20% GDP invested in tech monthly, how long would it take under the current iteration of the 2E rules to progress from new INT1 to maximum tech levels?

The tech rules have morphed considerably since this question was originally posted, but now tech levels for the main tech fields are divorced from the ETL rules themselves. This was done so that a player wouldn't have to worry about arbitrary tech level caps and was just generally easier to apply modifier to.

That being said, the best concept I currently have on the table for ETL advancement is to track the number of total tech points your empire has earned and have a new ETL reached when you reach a specific threshold -- either a fixed threshold or a variable target based on a combination of Census/Colonies.

The option I am liking most right now is to have a player have an ETL Tech Progress track that is added to each time you purchase a tech advancement. Each tech advance would get you 1D10+TL progress on this track. This element of chance makes it a bit more random for determining when an empire will advance to the next ETL. The downside is that it still arbitrarily links tech levels to ETL advancement, but I think it might be a necessary evil -- otherwise players will have to save up tech points just to purchase the next ETL advance, which leaves them with too many unspent tech points sitting around.

(All this also reinforces the point that the ETL rules really should be shifted to the Companion, both because they could benefit from some extra tweaking and because they unnecessarily complicate the rules for players that just want to have Interstellar empires battle it out).

This is really outstanding. There's no reason a small industrial colony should be unable to build smaller ships locally, just because a shipyard would be too expensive or risky for that system. And it scales. I wish I'd thought of this

It is really one of the better solutions that have come out of this whole development process. Shipyards x Productivity = total Construction Cost of units that can be purchased there each turn.

-Tyrel

[Bandit]

It is really one of the better solutions that have come out of this whole development process. Shipyards x Productivity = total Construction Cost of units that can be purchased there each turn.

Wait, does this mean that ships are produced "instantly" now?