Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

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Tyrel Lohr
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Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Okay, reading through the forum posts that I have missed out on the last few weeks, I have a series of ideas that I am going to throw against the figurative wall to see what people think about them. Consider this an idea experiment that reviews old and new ideas that have come up in relation to 2E.

The first idea I would like to throw out there is an extension of another idea that I've been working with (which I'll discuss later), but goes back to how the system and colony stats are being handled currently in 2E. I started jabbing things with a stick again and want to get people's thoughts on this alternative:

System Stats: Carrying Capacity, RAW, Biosphere
Colony Stats: Census, Morale, Productivity, Shipyards, Tech, Intel

The above eliminates two system statistics (Orbital and Science) and one colony statistic (Agriculture). Colonies would then end up with the following outputs:
  • Economic Capacity: Census x RAW; this is the amount of income the colony generates each turn
  • Agriculture Capacity: Census x (BIO - 2); this is the amount of food the colony generates. Colonies with negative agriculture capacities are net importers and require food. Handling it like this removes agriculture cost, so you would just total the agriculture capacities of your colonies to see if how much of a gain you realized.
  • Production Capacity: Census x Productivity; this is the maximum construction cost of units that can be under construction at a colony. This is a recursion to 1E where there was an overall build limit and not a per turn purchase limit.
  • Shipyard Capacity: Census x Shipyards; this is the maximum construction cost of starships that can be under construction at a colony. The maximum construction cost of all units is still limited by production capacity, shipyard capacity just limits how much of that can be non-atmospheric starships. An alternative formula is Productivity x Shipyards, but this would allow a colony to be used as a ship repair and construction site even if it doesn't have any Census... which I don't think is a good idea.
  • Tech Capacity: Census x Tech; this is the maximum number of tech points that can be purchased at the colony each turn.
  • Intel Capacity: Census x Intel; this is the maximum number of intel points that can be purchased at the colony each turn.
I used a version of this in a previous build of the campaign rules, but other recent alterations I have considered has made me take a step back and look at this previous solution. There are a few things that I prefer with this option. The first is that it eliminates the "Utilized Infrastructure" rules. You just take one stat times another one to determine a capacity value. The other thing that it does is make it possible for a colony to have more infrastructure than Census and still be able to use it. So a 3 Census, 6 Productivity colony would have a production capacity of 18 instead of 9.

The biggest change here is that the maximum values for each ends up effectively doubled, but this isn't as large of a problem as you might consider as one of the other changes I am still eying (morseo now that I am looking at possible changes to the construction system as part of the final overhaul of the encounters and CSCR system). The costs for tech and intel missions can also be adjusted to take into effect the higher capacities.

Probably the only thing I really don't like about this proposition is that economic and agriculture output ends up being tied to Census instead of separate infrastructure values. The loss of Agriculture as an infrastructure value is the only one I truly lament, but I think I could live without it if it came to that.

Again, this is just being thrown out for discussion to see if it works or not, and if it is any better option than the one already in the 2E draft.

What brought this up was my look at certain planned changes to the unit construction rules and how they relate to the rest of the rules. Specifically, I have found Command Rating to be something of a game balance issue as of late, and while addressing that I started incorporating other errata and suggestions. I'll make a post about those in this thread later tonight.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by countercheck »

Productivity gets a bit nerfed. And I find it odd that agricultural output increases with the size of the population. Productivity represents efficiency and automation, yes? Then wouldn't it make sense for agricultural output to = Productivity x (Bio -2, minimum 0), possibly capped at Bio^2. This way, your largest population centres don't become your breadbaskets... you need to explore new, fertile worlds, invest heavily in infrastructure, and artificially keep the populations down to feed your empire.

The Shipyard x Productivity problem could be avoided if it's a subset of the Census x Productivity equation. Total EPs spendable in a system =Census x Productivity. The amount of THOSE that can be spent on non-atmospheric construction is Productivity x Shipyards. If you have no Census, your Census x Productivity will be 0, so even if you have giant, productive shipyards, you aren't allowed to spend any EPs in system.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by Chyll »

This is an interesting thought experiment...


The breakdown of System and Colony Attributes/Stats makes sense.
I had to read it through twice, but I think because the use of the word capacity was throwing me off after that. At work (manufacturing environment) I am used to capacity meaning the potential that could be produced, rather than the actual production level. Capacity is correctly applied in that context with Production and Shipyard, but I was crossed up with Economic and Agriculture initially. So, it may be neither here nor there, but I'd come up with different labels for Economic and Ag (output?).

I agree census seems to be popping up too much in tying to the various values.. in fact it implies that all of the census is contributing to all of the activities. Which is what helped me as I wrestled with why Ag felt off to me, and then I read countercheck's post. I think he is on the right track there. Population doesn't drive agricultural output. In fact, most modern aggrarian societies (which I would expect to apply similarly to interstellar societies) are pretty low labor operations. Frankly, this is true with industry now, as well, in a lot of regards.

Yet, still, as long as agriculture is in the mix... my gut tells me there needs to be a balance. Some of my population will be farming, some will be producing industrial goods, and some services.

For example, I give you the colony of Theoretica:
Capacity: 8
RAW: 4
Biosphere: 3

Census: 4
Morale: 4
Productivity: 4

If it is Census x (Bio-2), I would have 4x(3-2) or 4 Agriculture (enough to feed the colony, as I recall). But doesn't that also imply that 100% of my census was devoted to agricultural efforts?

It seems odd that I would then be able to credit my full census into Economic ouput, and then again with Production and Shipyards. The counter argument would be that using census in this way models a natural split within the population to the various activites - but the end result is just you want large worlds filled with people.


At a guess, it may be too fiddly to assign census to the different sides of the ledger but the ideal may be just that, and I'm gonna run with it for a second:

Census is divided amongst Farmers and Laborers.

Ag Output, instead, is Farmers X Bio
Econ Output is Laborers x RAW

If Theoretica had 1 farmer and 3 laborers:
Ag: 3
Economic: 12

It would need to import 1 Ag to keep fed, or go to 2/2 on census assignment and export 2 food and have economy of only 6.

You could get crazy and have production be economic x productivity, or have to assign some of the pouplation to tech, or intel, or... but ick.



While I've likely gone astray, countercheck also hinted at this with:
countercheck wrote:The Shipyard x Productivity problem could be avoided if it's a subset of the Census x Productivity equation. Total EPs spendable in a system =Census x Productivity. The amount of THOSE that can be spent on non-atmospheric construction is Productivity x Shipyards. If you have no Census, your Census x Productivity will be 0, so even if you have giant, productive shipyards, you aren't allowed to spend any EPs in system.
====

In the end, your proposal would work, Tyrel, and appears pretty clean/easy to manage in play. Though it feels a little forced to me. I think with some minor adjustments the same effect could be achieved.

(I've probably look at it more than I should at the moment, though, given I have a real life production versus capacity versus transit time issue to get back to.)
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by virtutis.umbra »

Agriculture Capacity: Census x (BIO - 2); this is the amount of food the colony generates. Colonies with negative agriculture capacities are net importers and require food. Handling it like this removes agriculture cost, so you would just total the agriculture capacities of your colonies to see if how much of a gain you realized.
This is really very clever.
If it is Census x (Bio-2), I would have 4x(3-2) or 4 Agriculture (enough to feed the colony, as I recall). But doesn't that also imply that 100% of my census was devoted to agricultural efforts?
Chyll, I think some of the implications of this are getting lost in the shuffle: the reason it's calculated as Census x (BIO -2) is that the proposed Agricultural statistic represents food surplus, after feeding the colony population - feeding the locals is what the first 2 points of BIO do, and that's why those first two points are discounted from the surplus calculation. So, a system with BIO 2 has exactly enough of a biosphere to support its denizens, but not enough to generate a meaningful surplus for the imperial granaries; a system with BIO 1 needs support from external farm worlds to survive. So, you only "spend" food to support colonies with a negative Ag Capacity figure. Systems that are at break-even or better never "cost" any food because their self-sufficiency is baked into the calculation.

EDIT:

... but what if you leave the Ag Capacity calculation as (Census x BIO) and instead change the range of possible BIO statistics, so that it goes from -2 to 4? Then BIO=0 indicates a barely-subsistence-level biosphere... and -2 represents an absolutely barren system, while BIO=4 indicates enormous agricultural potential. I dunno. Maybe negative system stats are a bad idea though.
Last edited by virtutis.umbra on Wed Oct 12, 2011 6:44 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by virtutis.umbra »

It seems like what you're suggesting, Tyrel, is that each unit of Census represents quanta of population sufficient to support a fairly wide range of agricultural and industrial activities at a given level: i.e. 1 Census is always engaging in agriculture and economic activity, even if there's no other infrastructure in the system; it counts as 1 for both activities, without having to "split" efforts, so 1 Census equals e.g. # farmers AND $ economic workers, or more simply 1 Census = X colonists capable of generating #+$ output through mixed activity.

Then, if we add some Productivity and Shipyards to the system, those colonists are still generating #+$ through mixed activity, even though some of them are being rerouted to building ships and fighters and ground units. (Actually if Productivity is =|< Economic Cap. then this is sensible: some of the EP that would otherwise be surplus are now being 'spent' here instead, so that could be visualized as a 1-for-1 change in worker utilization; but once system Productivity is actually higher than system economic output then this doesn't precisely hold.)

But I actually don't have a problem with this, and I think it makes sense that Census (which is a fairly fuzzy and abstract concept anyway rather than being pegged to a specific numerical value) can be "stretched" between activities with greater efficiency when more infrastructure is applied to a system. That follows from economies of scale and some pretty basic assumptions of space-age technological innovation.

For instance, one could handwave thusly: adding Productivity to a world explicitly increases the ability to build war machines, but implicity it also allows further mechanization of the agricultural system which frees up more workers from the population to come work in the war-machine and agricultural-machine factories. Likewise in other sectors of the colony's economy: as infrastructure increases, individual productive activities get less labor-intensive.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by darbycmcd »

To amplify what Virtutis says, Census should not be the limiting factor (especially as it represents an exponential scale) but how about cap also limiting the sum total of productive "infrastructure facilities" that can work simultaniously on a planet, which is sort of standard for at least computer 4x games. so say a planet had cap 6, it could have some combination of ag, industry, (i would think maybe add mining) up to 6. this would give the comparative advantage for some planets that some people want and sort of makes sense. you can't really max all those things out at one time in one place. it seems like people like specialized worlds and this would help do that.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Census in VBAM has always been a pretty nebulous concept, more a measure of overall population levels rather than specific population numbers. I do like breaking apart each of a colony's outputs and tying them to their own infrastructure, but at the same time we have some outputs that are harder to quantify in a consistent manner -- and consistency is one of the most important things you can achieve with rules like this, as it reduces confusion and makes things run so much smoother.

Darby makes a good sideways reference to another golden calf in the VBAM rules -- Productivity. At one point I had completely removed Productivity from the rules, but then reintroduced it in the last major update after I went back to using the utilized infrastructure rules. An option that I haven't explored but might be worth discussing is splitting Productivity into Mining and Industry. Mining would be used to convert RAW into economic points while Industry would convert RAW into production capacity. That would make it so that economic generation and industrial production would be two separate investments.

There is also a good argument that Shipyards might be better off removed as a colony infrastructure type and converted back to being some sort of a special improvement like it was in 1E. I converted them into an infrastructure type in 2E to simplify tracking them, but in the end I have had to do some rules gymnastics to keep them working like I intended to. If shipyards become an improvement instead of infrastructure, they could cost 10 EP each and allow 1 CC of starships to be built in the system. The shipyards would then be destroyable by an enemy attack outside of bombardment.

I don't really like having the Census be separated between work fields. I know that a lot of games do that, MOO2 being the first example that comes to mind, but the end result is very artificial, especially with how easy it is to just move your colonists over from one one activity to another.

Now, one could have the total amount of infrastructure at a colony be equal to a system's Carrying Capacity. That would have a similar effect of forcing the player to decide how to balance a colony's infrastructure. So a 6 Capacity colony could only have 6 Infrastructure total. Infrastructure costs would likely need to be increased to a flat 100 EP to make that really viable, but that is fine when combined with the idea of using Census x Infrastructure for most of the stats.

Under this revised concept, you would end up with this:
  • Mining: RAW x Mining = economic output
  • Industry: Census x Industry = production capacity
  • Agriculture: BIO x Agriculture = agriculture output
  • Tech: Census x Tech = tech capacity
  • Intel: Census x Intel = intel capacity
Shipyards then become a 10 EP colony improvement that allows you to build/repair 1 CC of starships. So a colony with 10 SY could have 10 CC of starships under construction at one time.

The loss of Productivity leaves supply range without a focus, but I would say that Industry would be the obvious placeholder for that.

As a practical example of the above, let's assume we had a planet with 8 CAP, 3 RAW, and 2 BIO. We establish a colony on this planet and start moving people there. With flat population costs, it would probably cost us 200 population points to put 2 Census in the system. We can have a total of 8 infrastructure in the system, and as players we'd have to plan our colony's economy. The RAW is pretty good, so we'd want some Mining there to extract the RAW and earn us some money. However, we also want to be able to build something, so we'd have to put Industry in, too. The BIO is nice, but not so nice that we can't live without it. If we could only afford 5 infrastructure, we might go with a balance of 2 Mining, 2 Industry, and 1 Agriculture, just to play it safe. That would give us a colony that generates 6 EP per turn, has a production capacity of 4 (pretty low), and generates a total of 2 agriculture points (while consuming 4).

The above example illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of the system. Under such a system no one colony is going to be a singular powerhouse, but colonies with high Census values are going to be extremely valuable because they can best leverage a system's limited infrastructure. The CAP limitation does pose a problem with Productivity split two ways, however, as forcing the player to invest in both separately will make it all but impossible to build large warships. Consider that a 12 CAP homeworld would rarely have more than 4 Industry, so it would max out at 48 production capacity. That colony could build at most a 48 EP starship... granted, that is basically an Executor super star destroyer, but it is still about 2/3 the normal 1E build limits. A more realistic mix for a homeworld under this concept would be 3 Mining, 3 Industry, 4 Agriculture, 1 Tech, 1 Intel, which would only generate 18 income, 36 production capacity, 24 agriculture output (consuming 24), 12 tech capacity, and 12 intel capacity.

If Mining and Industry are recombined to Productivity, we instead get are likely to see something like 5 Productivity, 4 Agriculture, 2 Tech, 1 Intel, providing 30 income, 60 production, 24 agriculture, 24 tech, and 12 intel. The agriculture issue could itself be addressed by reducing Census consumption back to 1 AP per turn and adjusting the BIO system table to have a minimum value of 0 instead of 1. Increasing Census costs to flat 100 population points would allow excess food to be banked as a straight value and not as 10% of the remainder.

I think I have blathered long enough on this topic, but I am really glad that it came up. I am really liking where the concept looks to be heading. The controlled values also offer side benefits in that they make it easier to tie in things like the intel sabotage missions.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by countercheck »

If you head in this direction, there's no reason not to make Trade a stat, where each level of Trade returns,say, 2% of the economic value of all surrounding connected systems.

Alternately, the Trade value of a system could be Census x Trade, capped at 10% of the value of all connected systems.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by Chyll »

virtutis.umbra wrote:Chyll, I think some of the implications of this are getting lost in the shuffle: the reason it's calculated as Census x (BIO -2) is that the proposed Agricultural statistic represents food surplus, after feeding the colony population - feeding the locals is what the first 2 points of BIO do, and that's why those first two points are discounted from the surplus calculation. So, a system with BIO 2 has exactly enough of a biosphere to support its denizens, but not enough to generate a meaningful surplus for the imperial granaries; a system with BIO 1 needs support from external farm worlds to survive. So, you only "spend" food to support colonies with a negative Ag Capacity figure. Systems that are at break-even or better never "cost" any food because their self-sufficiency is baked into the calculation.
Ah ha! :idea:

virtutis.umbra, you have filled in exactly the factual gap I had in my approaching the discussion.
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by Vandervecken »

It has been almost 3 weeks since we've had a post in Second Edition. Any last minute things you want to bounce off us as you make your final preparations ??? We are always here to help !
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by virtutis.umbra »

Seconded! Tantalize us... I burn with curiosity!
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Re: Thought Experiments: Playing with the Rules

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Sorry for being so quiet. I've been updating the rules and running some internal playtests to bounce concepts back and forth, but I have to admit to losing some additional productivity time because of Skyrim's release.

A new draft has been posted in the other thread. There are some substantial changes to the rules, including the change to make infrastructure tied to Carrying Capacity and Census, and cap the total infrastructure in a system instead of capping it by type. For example, a system with 10 Carrying Capacity and 3 Census can now support a maximum of 13 infrastructure. Players have to decide how to split the infrastructure between Productivity, Shipyards, Agriculture, Tech, and Intel. For some systems the choice is easier than others, but you end up with some colonies where you really have to stop and think about your priorities for a colony.

A good example of this is a system with 6 Capacity, 4 RAW, and 4 Biosphere. This is a good concentration of resources. Depending on what your empire's current predicament, you might decide to devote most of your infrastructure to harvesting those resources, splitting between Productivity and Agriculture as needed. But what if this colony is in a strategic location and you really want to be able to build or repair ships there? The you'll have to devote some space to Shipyards. Some Intel infrastructure might not be bad, either, so you can conduct intel missions from the colony. You can put 6 infrastructure at the colony before increasing its Census. For a colony like this it means you'll probably want to start increasing its Census sooner rather than later so you can keep building additional infrastructure there.

On the flip side, consider a system with 4 Capacity, 1 RAW, and 0 Biosphere. What a dump! But it might still be worthwhile as a listening post (Intel), or you could put a Census on the planet and build a large number of research labs (Tech) so that you can use it as a research outpost to generate tech points. This frees up infrastructure slots in other more resource rich systems.
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