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
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?