Human Republic Playtest Thread

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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Europe, Stop Voting Now!

Okay, so this isn't the Eurovision Song Contest, but Gareth did manage to break the deadlock before I got back from my shopping trip today, so the Industrialist/Free Trade Alliance coalition government has narrowly succeeded in taking control of government. Tomorrow morning I'll start work on the next turn, working off of the notes that the two parties' representatives have submitted to this point.

The competing parties will need to try and gather support and see if they can't take control of the government at the end of this year. The ruling coalition is very tenuous, so all it would take is for one of the other factions to court one of the two coalition members in order to form a new minority government.

We currently have 7 senators in the following factions (number in parenthesis is the actual number of senate seats/votes each faction has as of the end of this year):

Industrialist Party (17): BLHarrison, mavikfelna
Free Trade Alliance (17): Charlie Lewis, Gareth_Perkins
Technocratic Party (17): virtutis.umbra, murtalianconfederacy
Military Party (8): mwaschak
Independents (1): Iron Sky

From what I remember of the agenda that was proposed by the ruling coalition, it looks like we are going to be colonizing and reinforcing Archer, then establishing a trade route into the system. Meanwhile, our intel assets will be beefed up to eliminate the pirate influence in Terra Nova and excess economic points spent to improve Agriculture at our home system.
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by Iron Sky »

[Senator]I think party affiliation forces members to march lock-step following the party line, fostering inflexibility and dogmatic rather than pragmatic thinking. As a practical, independent Senator, then, I have the ability to view our empire's goals, strengths, and weaknesses with an objectivity others might not be capable of emulating.

I believe or current needs must remain balanced. Over-focus on one party's particular objectives could leave us critically weakened in another area.

Shipping our excess "undesirable" population of to that hell-hole named Archer under whatever guise seems unadvised - a scheme to lower unemployment numbers to make the current government's reports look better in the public eyes if you ask me.

With the amount of military personal we have out charting the jumplanes, I do not doubt that a superior system will soon be found whose immediate colonization would further our ends more than planting undesirables on Archer.

Technological advance is key, I believe we should enact the proposed "TL2 Initiative" as soon as possible before the necessity of also improving other colonies' infrastructure is necessary while also pursuing the military's codenamed "Angel" program to eliminate the pirates. The government bandies about terms like "acceptable losses" and "minor economic interference" without thinking of the merchants who are dying under pirate guns in our own system![/Senator]

I've been following VBAM 2E pretty much since it was announced and lurking until now. I'm highly impressed with how simple yet elegant the new rules seem to be and am looking forward to wrangling my buddies and roommates into a game once it's released.
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

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Senator Iron Sky wrote:I think party affiliation forces members to march lock-step following the party line, fostering inflexibility and dogmatic rather than pragmatic thinking. As a practical, independent Senator, then, I have the ability to view our empire's goals, strengths, and weaknesses with an objectivity others might not be capable of emulating.
On this particular topic, the players should feel free to create and name their own, new political factions and recruit members in preparation for the next election. I created the other archetypes just to get the ball rolling, and I am genuinely interested in what kinds of factions emerge dynamically in this campaign.

I also went in and made Iron Sky our one Independent senator. So in the event that we end up with a tie for anything, he'll be our tie breaker :)
I've been following VBAM 2E pretty much since it was announced and lurking until now. I'm highly impressed with how simple yet elegant the new rules seem to be and am looking forward to wrangling my buddies and roommates into a game once it's released.
I'm glad to hear that things are looking good from the outside looking in. As a designer, it is often too easy to get married to design concepts that really don't add anything to the game or are carried forward by force of inertia more than anything else. In retrospect, earlier 2E drafts were simply awful because they drifted into the direction of "too much information." Once I started cutting to the bone and jettisoning elements that were not really necessary (or, in more than one case, designing as solutions to fix problems that could be solved more by simply removing the problem rules in the first place) we finally got back on track.

The current state of the rules, which should be released in some form next weekend, hew closer to the 1E concept that some previous versions of 2E did. But what we end up with is a nice distilled version of all of the rules. And I won't admit I got there by myself; a lot of the regulars here had a hand in it. Gareth in particular has been quite effective in beating me over the head with an idea stick and pointing out issues and, even if I don't use his solutions, it points me towards different ways to approach a problem.

I should have a turn update out later tonight. Right now I am working on combining the bombardment rules back into the current draft, then it's off to the Construction chapter to get that ready to go. The goal is to have a mostly-playable playtest version of the rules available next Sunday so that everyone can start ripping things apart and generating final feedback before I finalize or blend together the remaining rules and start on layout.
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by Iron Sky »

I'll stay independent until it gets close to the next year, then I might join or form a new faction. :)

I have the distinction of never having played 1E and knowing almost nothing about it, so I'm seeing 2E pretty much fresh. I have no attachment to how things were done in 1E, just how things are going to be in 2E.

Since last night when I found this thread, I've been going back and re-reading the .pdfs you've released so far since I haven't read them since last year sometime. I'm re-amazed by how many neat concepts there are in the combat section: Scenarios, Intensity Costs, Readiness, Formation Levels, almost all of it I look at it and think "yeah, that's how you should do this".

With the FOW detection uncertainty, I was wondering why there's no chance for "false positives", I.E., believing there's more enemy ships than in actuality rather than less(say an extra 2 to 4 d10 to each rating).

In a related note, Is there a more proper place for rules commentary?

I dig the slow exploration stuff too, was one of my favorite part of 4x games and it always seems too short - heck, most of the Star Treks are about exploring and the Federation is huge!

I'm looking forward to next Sunday now!
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

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Iron Sky wrote:Since last night when I found this thread, I've been going back and re-reading the .pdfs you've released so far since I haven't read them since last year sometime. I'm re-amazed by how many neat concepts there are in the combat section: Scenarios, Intensity Costs, Readiness, Formation Levels, almost all of it I look at it and think "yeah, that's how you should do this".
You've probably already noticed some distinct deviations from the previously released 2E drafts. The core concepts are all the same, but I have been striving to simplify and disambiguate rules wherever and however I can. The revised system statistics are probably one of the biggest changes, especially the introduction of the Orbital system stat to go along with Shipyards. It was bugging me that every other infrastructure type ended up having an accompanying system stat and that one didn't.

The scenario setup rules are a derivative of what Jay created for the Federation Admiralty game, ran back through a pure VBAM filter. The 2E rules have gone a step further than what Jay originally envisioned with those rules, with bombardment and both space and ground combat combined into the same set of intensity rules. So far they have worked quite well, and having a limited pool of intensity in each encounter makes it more likely that players could end up fighting multi-turn battles over a single star system.
With the FOW detection uncertainty, I was wondering why there's no chance for "false positives", I.E., believing there's more enemy ships than in actuality rather than less(say an extra 2 to 4 d10 to each rating).
I think I had some rules written that let you do that, but I ended up having to scrap them at some point... but I can't remember now why that was. I think it had to do with making it work with both CM moderated and CM-less campaigns, or some other issue. I'll try to address the issue when I finalize the encounter and detection rules prior to next week.
In a related note, Is there a more proper place for rules commentary?


Looking through the recent threads, this looks like probably the best option for now: http://forums.vbamgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=478 - but posting questions to this thread works, too.
I dig the slow exploration stuff too, was one of my favorite part of 4x games and it always seems too short - heck, most of the Star Treks are about exploring and the Federation is huge!
The original VBAM rules were intended as a supplement to the Babylon 5 Wars game, and the exploration rules I wrote followed that lead. Exploration is slow and potentially very deadly (moreso in 1E than 2E; in 1E you could lose your entire scout force based on a bad roll of the dice), but that helps to keep players from exploring the entire map in the first year of play. Of course, my solo games are run with randomly generated maps that grow as fast as the players explore, so that is rarely a problem.

The biggest advantage of slow exploration, IMO, is that it allows the player to keep pushing the frontier back as the game goes on, but not at a rate where exploration of new territories is likely to have an impact on an empire's strategic movement options during a single conflict. There are outliers, like when you stumble upon a new species on a different border during a war or manage to find that one lucky jump route into the enemy's back territories... but those kinds of events are rare exceptions to the rule.

Regarding the size of the Federation, there are mechanisms in VBAM (1E and 2E both) that make it so that empires can hit a sort of equilibrium where if they get too much bigger they won't have the resources necessary to keep everything running smoothly. In 1E the problem tended to be pirates, as you ended up with enough undefended systems that a single strong raider band could cause massive economic disruptions that would derail your economy and cause your other plans to completely derail. 2E has a few more issues, the main one I have run into is food production (if you don't produce enough food you literally can't buy any more population points), but piracy and paying for all of your anti-piracy patrols to keep systems patrolled is also a problem. Morale can also be an issue now that you have per-turn morale checks. I had one playtest where I think I spent a year trying to fight my home system's Morale to keep my head above water because of a series of bad rolls. A one-world power is much more prone to going under from those kinds of effects, which is both good and bad. It makes the one-system minors more volatile, but it also does give a benefit to the larger empires that can afford to fuel the propaganda machine.

Another issue that I have run through a few number crunching exercises is what happens when an empire goes on a conquering spree and absorbs a number of lower tech colonies. The costs of their own tech advances increase because of all the extra colonies and Census that they've conquered, and there is a significant economic cost to modernize all of these colonies if the player wants to actually be able to build or repair his more advanced units there. Imagine a situation where you have to retreat your dreadnought fleet back five jumps just to find a colony that can repair them because all of the colony worlds on the border (some quite large, with high Census and infrastructure values) simply don't have the technological base to complete those repairs!

An empire like the Federation is likely to run into these sorts of problems, especially with the number of other powers that is has unified with over the course of the game to get to that point. Strong from a raw economic perspective, but with only a few major industrial worlds capable of producing war material at its overall tech level. Conquering the Federation's older home systems becomes a very good strategy -- well, capture them or just bring enough Bombardment units in to unleash a storm of weapons of mass destruction against them. Uncontested, a bombarding force could probably get 1-2 full rounds of bombardment against the system, enough to really weaken it -- but probably not outright destroy it unless they had dozens if not at least a hundred ships present.
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

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Year 2, Turn 1
After a hard fought election cycle, the Industrialist and Free Trade Alliance factions have succeeded in taking control of the Republic Senate for at least the next solar year. Members of these two parties were voted into office on the promise of extra-solar colonization, infrastructure development, and a strong anti-piracy agenda.

The first order of business for the Senate is issuing a charter for the Archer colony to a band of corporate interests (and Industrialist patrons). This charter gives these corporations license to colonize and begin exploiting the Archer system, with generous amounts of government funding added to sweeten the deal. It will take a few months to get the deal fully hammered out (i.e., have enough economic points to actually pay for colonization), but until then we are going to save up our money so that we can make the purchase.

One item that we can finance this turn is the purchase of some more intel points to get our intel point total up to the level that we can be guaranteed success on our Sabotage: Anti-Piracy mission. We've got 10 IP right now, and that's half of what's needed, so we'll go ahead and spend 10 EP to buy the other 10 IP.

As an aside, after finishing the conversion of the bombardment missions (which work similar to intel missions, but using bombardment points instead of intel points) I started thinking that it would be more appropriate for the intel missions' difficult values to be variable based on the system's statistic as that is how bombardment missions work. Right now our Anti-Piracy mission has a flat difficulty of 2, but it could just as easily be 1 + Piracy / 2. This would make it incredibly difficult to remove Piracy from well-entrenched systems using intel, but very easy for systems that have only a little Piracy. The opposing Sabotage: Piracy would have the same difficulty, meaning that someone that was trying to spread piracy would run into the opposite problem: very easy to increase Piracy in systems that have little or none, but much harder to max it out once it hit a certain level of equilibrium.

It is also important to note that after some testing I settled on the following method for resolving intel missions: you assign intel points to the mission, and the missions takes X turns to complete, where X is the distance between the source and destination system. The maximum number of missions a colony can run is equal to its utilized Intel. When a mission is complete you take the number of intel points assigned to it divided by 10 times the mission's difficulty to calculate the percentage chance of success. Example: A player assigned 10 IP to a Sabotage: Anti-Piracy mission in their home system (sound familiar?). The range is 0, so it is completed in a single turn. The chance of success is 10 / (10 x 2) = 50%. We roll 98, which is a (massive) failure.

Okay, enough distractions, on to the actual turn.

Turn Orders: +10 intel points (-10 EP)

Movement Phase: Scout Forces 2, 3, 4, and 5 are currently exploring. Scout Force 1 is still at Terra Nova awaiting repairs. I opted not to send it out this turn because it is crippled, and I'm not repairing it until we have the money to colonize Archer. Scout Force 2 is getting very close to exploring a jump lane now (+4 to its rolls, including its Scout bonus).

Piracy Phase: '7' rolled, no change.

Morale Phase: '7' rolled, no change.

Agriculture Phase: +1 PP

Economic Phase: 57 EP (starting) + 36 EP (colony) + 3 EP (commerce) - 10 (purchases) - 3 (maintenance) = 83 EP

Economic Pool: 83
Population Pool: 11
Tech Pool: 16
Intel Pool: 20


Year 2, Turn 2
We've got the 70 EP for the Archer colonization, so we are going to go ahead and do that this turn. There's enough economic points leftover for us to initiate repairs of the Pandora in Scout Force 1, too, so that we can get that job started. This also the turn that we conduct our intel mission to eliminate the point of Piracy at Terra Nova.

Turn Orders: Colonize Archer (-70 EP), Repair Pandora in SF1 (-7 EP, 2 turns), Sabotage: Anti-Piracy, Terra Nova to Terra Nova (-20 IP, 1 turn)

Intel Phase: Our Sabotage: Anti-Piracy mission has a 100% chance of success, and we roll a '62'. The mission succeeds, so Terra Nova's Piracy value is reduced back to zero. Our home system is back to having a +1 morale check bonus.

Movement Phase: Ha, ha, ha! Just as the first colonists were landing their colony craft on the surface of Archer to found Beckett Base One, new arrives from the captain commanding Scout Force 5 that her ship had entered a strange new system called Carthage. Here's the survey report:

6 Carrying Capacity, 4 RAW, 1 Orbital, 6 Biosphere, 5 Science, 4 Jump Lanes

Needless to say, this system blows Archer completely out of the water. Carthage has a slightly lower Carrying Capacity, but both its RAW and Jump Lanes are good and its Biosphere and Science are exceptional. The system's only failing is its abysmal Orbital value, but that just means the system isn't going to be very good for shipbuilding. But that is an acceptable trade off for a system that is simply teeming with life and amazing things to study.

Piracy Phase: '9' rolled, no effect.

Morale Phase: '12' rolled. This gives Terra Nova a +1 Morale bonus, a nice gift for getting rid of those blasted pirates. If Archer had been colonized by this point it, too, would have received a +1 Morale bonus, but it doesn't get laid down until later in the turn.

Agriculture Phase: +1 PP.

Construction Phase: Mundane items should go first, so the Pandora starts repairs. It will take 2 Construction Phases to complete, and this is its first. Next turn it will complete repairs.

Now, for the colonization of Archer. Colonization is probably going to occur in this phase (just makes more sense), at least I am going to assume so from here on out (and clarify in the rules). Anyway, we now have a 0 Census colony on Archer. All new colonies start with a Morale value equal to half their system's Carrying Capacity (rounded up). Archer has 7 Carrying Capacity, and that gives us a starting Morale of 4. All infrastructure stats are 0 because the system is newly-colonized. Our current empire tech level is TL 1, and this same tech level is assigned to Archer.

Archer is now colonized. It's Census of 0 means that its maximum utilized infrastructure level is also 0. This means the colony is just too small to actually do anything. The few thousand people that are sitting on the planet are just barely getting by, and in fact their population is small enough that they don't even count against our food production because their agriculture cost is also 0.

Economic Phase: 83 EP (starting) + 36 EP (colony) + 4 EP (commerce) - 77 (purchases) - 3 (maintenance) = 43 EP

Economic Pool: 43
Population Pool: 12
Tech Pool: 16
Intel Pool: 0

Image

It is probably a good time to discuss the implications of what happened this turn. First of all, the discovery of Carthage is huge - that can't be emphasized enough. Carthage's 6 Biosphere is probably the most important aspect of the find, as a Census operating Agriculture there can produce enough food to feed 6 Census at our empire's other colonies. Every 2 Census on the planet also can produce enough food to provide us with an additional +1 PP per turn. The system is located on the other opposite side of Terra Nova, the result of a random roll to see which jump lane was going to be explored. Only one of Carthage's other four jump lanes connects to a system that Terra Nova has a jump lane to. On one hand this means that the system will offer us access to some new areas of the map that we might not otherwise be able to get to. On the other, it also makes the system harder to protect as right now it looks like we might have to build up military defenses in both Archer and Carthage.

All of our intel points are now gone, too, after paying for the Piracy decrease in Terra Nova. Unlike 1E empires don't have to pay maintenance on their intel points. This makes it more economical for players to build up ready reserves of points in case they need them. I would feel safer if we had about 20-30 IP available at any given time, just so we could react to Piracy as it happens or gather information on one alien species.

Speaking of aliens, I did make an empire activation check for Carthage. Luckily that check failed. I stumbled upon a very easy way to calculate the chance of a system containing a new alien species: Carrying Capacity x Biosphere. A minor success indicates the system is another empire's colony, while a major success (less than half target) means it's the power's home system. There was a 36% chance of Carthage being inhabited, but I rolled '62' and dodged that bullet.

This is probably a stupid question, but do our esteemed leaders want to press forward with purchasing Census at Archer or would you rather we save our population points for what I expect to be an inevitable colony in Carthage? Any other changes to our plans?
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by mavikfelna »

As much as I would like to get the trade point setup in Archer, I think Carthage needs immediate attention.

This is going to kill our tech advance costs, but I'm happy to wait on that. When we're finally ready to start moving on this, we'll need to upgrade the home system to TL1 unless we get some shipbuilding infrastructure built in new colonies.

I say we work on building up Carthage to 4 census as soon as possible and concentrate on agriculture and production there. We need to get a trade point active as well.

All of this is going to be very expensive and time consuming. I propose that we start putting 5 points a month into intel to make sure we something for the inevitable pirate attack. Also build up a squadron of bases with fighters in Carthage and then in Archer, though this is of lower priority until we're ready to build trade in those systems.

--Mav
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by Iron Sky »

[Senator]A little over two months ago I said these very words on the Senate floor:

"With the amount of military personal we have out charting the jumplanes, I do not doubt that a superior system will soon be found whose immediate colonization would further our ends more than planting undesirables on Archer."

While I applaud the governments elimination of the pirates, as do all our people, Archer has turned out to be a significant waste of time and treasure. I believe establishing and building up a presence on Carthage should be our highest priority, along with continued investment in "Angel" to keep any future pirates from harassing our people.

After Carthage has been established and is being built up, we should resume technological investment to give us whatever edge we can glean in the case of hostile contact with another empire.[/Senator]

Whenever the playtest stuff is available, I'll probably do one of these too. I wrote several pages-long AARs for MOO3 before I realized the AI was completely worthless and gave up on the game, looking forward to busting some out for VBAM.
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by murtalianconfederacy »

[Senator]I second the senator from Iron Sky. I had envisioned such a course of action could happen, and counselled caution, but we were voted down on it in favour of this government's unseemly haste in establishing a new colony anywhere, even a colony that offers little to no material benefits. Now, as soon as we do, we find a much better system that, if the government had waited but a month, could have been our new, second colony.

I do agree that we need to colonise this system, however, but it will vastly impede on our economy, which could have been working towards the vital technological increases and the improved military infrastructure that is so badly needed for the Republic[/Senator]

Basically, playing it as a politician should. BLHarrison, mavikfelna, Charlie and Gareth, expect lots more political sniping as we continue to veer away from the true course the Republic should take...:P
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by mwaschak »

murtalianconfederacy wrote: Basically, playing it as a politician should. BLHarrison, mavikfelna, Charlie and Gareth, expect lots more political sniping as we continue to veer away from the true course the Republic should take...:P
I look forward to it :) .

[Senator]
Well here we are with a massive opportunity before us. We should be comforted that Archer was not the best to be found so close to home, and yet maybe it is time to pause, collect ourselves, and prepare for the worst. Carthage sits very near to deep space and several routes which could lead to trouble. While I applaud the courage of those senators who wish to forge ahead we need to make the Republic strong before we do so again.

The Military Party will support those who wish to shore up our defenses, invest in new technology, and see that Carthage becomes a strong member of our star network.

[/Senator]
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by Charles Lewis »

[Senator] As expected, our colleagues amongst the loyal opposition are quick to make decisions with hindsight. Had they the votes to begin with, they could've gotten their way; instead they are left with sour grapes.

In the end, expansion is what will fuel our economy and ultimately provide the resources for all our projects. The new information coming in about Carthage shows it to be a excellent opportunity for growth. As such, I endorse plans to shift our expansion efforts in that direction, and in due time, expand Archer sufficiently to make it a proper target for commercial trade.

The recent success by the Intelligence Service against piracy underscores that value, and they should continue to be well supported and funded so that we may continue to rely on them.
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by BLHarrison »

mavikfelna wrote: I say we work on building up Carthage to 4 census as soon as possible and concentrate on agriculture and production there. We need to get a trade point active as well.

All of this is going to be very expensive and time consuming. I propose that we start putting 5 points a month into intel to make sure we something for the inevitable pirate attack. Also build up a squadron of bases with fighters in Carthage and then in Archer, though this is of lower priority until we're ready to build trade in those systems.

--Mav
I agree with the above, with a few additions
1. At some point get a census on Archer in order build infrastructure. This is of lower priority than getting Carthage more population, but we should utilize what we got.
2. The best way to utilize Archer at this time appears to be as a ship yard. I advise we do so, just so we don't have all our eggs in one basket.
3. 5 points a month in intell appears resonable at this time, however during some months we might have to accept lower amounts to achive other goals. But we should put _something_ in intell every month just to be sure.
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by virtutis.umbra »

BLHarrison wrote: 3. 5 points a month in intell appears resonable at this time, however during some months we might have to accept lower amounts to achive other goals. But we should put _something_ in intell every month just to be sure.

Code: Select all

The Senator from Cascadia:
If we're talking about a regular monthly budget for Republic funds to operate essential departments, we would be sorely remiss in not valuing some minimal investment in technological progress equally with an operating budget for counter-piracy and other intelligence activities.

I propose a measure with the following clauses:
  • The Senate commits to allocate a baseline 5 teracredits per month each to Research and Intelligence.
  • The Senate can and should allocate additional unused budget to either or both Research and Intelligence as needed for a particular month's operations, with no requirement for matching between departments.
  • Through any Senator's motion carried by simple majority, the Senate may temporarily deallocate credits from these budgets only on a 1-for-1 basis (e.g. decreasing both Research and Intelligence from 5 to 4 for July).
  • These allocations are "pure growth" funds, independent of any Research- or Intelligence-related maintenance and/or implementation costs, which cannot be drawn from these baseline investment allocations but must come from the Republic General Fund or another budget source.
I move that we vote on this measure immediately. Do I have a second?
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by Gareth_Perkins »

Tyrel Lohr wrote: As an aside, after finishing the conversion of the bombardment missions (which work similar to intel missions, but using bombardment points instead of intel points) I started thinking that it would be more appropriate for the intel missions' difficult values to be variable based on the system's statistic as that is how bombardment missions work. Right now our Anti-Piracy mission has a flat difficulty of 2, but it could just as easily be 1 + Piracy / 2. This would make it incredibly difficult to remove Piracy from well-entrenched systems using intel, but very easy for systems that have only a little Piracy. The opposing Sabotage: Piracy would have the same difficulty, meaning that someone that was trying to spread piracy would run into the opposite problem: very easy to increase Piracy in systems that have little or none, but much harder to max it out once it hit a certain level of equilibrium.
I'd actually expect it to work kind of the other way around,

In systems where piracy abounds, nailing a few of the pirates should be easy (you can't miss a pirate if you fire a blaster rifle in a hive of scum and villainy!)

Whilst, eradicating that last single remaining point should be really tough (this kind of links into how police budgets work in the real world - you can usually afford to police the big 'public' crimes, but policing smaller crimes is much less cost-effective as they require huge amounts on manpower to suppress effectively).

This might give players some incentive to live with a low level of piracy simply because it isn't worth the trouble to sort it out (loss of a few EPs every turn vs the massive policing cost of eradicating them)... Which might also help in the future if you do re-introduce underworld empires...

Of course, the real hive of scum and villainy should be generating piracy points so fast that using Intel to suppress them will take major effort too (or sending in the troops, martial law, etc...). So really Intel will only really work in the middle ground whilst piracy is manageable - too low or too high either makes the target numbers too high, or eradicates PP that quickly re-spawn.
Gareth Lazelle
mavikfelna
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Re: Human Republic Playtest Thread

Post by mavikfelna »

Gareth_Perkins wrote: I'd actually expect it to work kind of the other way around,
Whilst I would agree that the real world works that way, I prefer the simple mechanic here. Essentially, it represents hitting the big stuff until it turns into the small stuff that's not worth going after. There's always a little bit of piracy but when it gets small enough it can't impact the greater economy.

The current method also encourages opposing nations to take little bites through intel wars which can be fun.

--Mav
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