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Now that With A Purpose is out the door, what's next on the VBAM slate? Are we going to see new or updated sourcebooks, from perhaps Tyrel's Escalation Wars universe? I know Full Thrust and Colonial Battlefleet tie-ins have been announced, along with War Fleet, but was wondering if anything else is in the oven or is the focus on first getting those other three out the door.

Ooops looking in the wrong forum. Maybe the Companion's next
Feel free to nuke this thread

Companion is the next major project. I'm finishing up the last two chapters (Exploration and NPE) to integrate changes and make final adjustments before we can release it. I'm still not 100% happy with what is written there, which is why I'm running a bit behind.

After the Companion is done, I am going to shift priority to these rule books:

• Lost in a Sea of Stars: A follow-up book to the Companion that will include a raft of mysterious encounters and a number of other rules (like Contagions) that were not fully developed during 1E and can stand some updating.
• Atlas of Nearby Stars: This book was left in limbo once the decision was made to move most of its rules over to the Companion. It is going to be restructured into a smaller release that focuses on near-Earth campaigns, including pre-generated stats for nearby systems out to about 20ly of Sol. This book is more about grinding out jump destination tables and stats than anything else at this point. I almost had it ready for release last year, but then it got delayed.
• First Contact: The custom alien empire rules with governments and traits, internal politics, civil wars, and other advanced diplomacy options. Kind of a catch-all, but focusing mainly on the alien traits. Expect a few extra empires to be included with this book similar to the Menagerie, probably another six sample empires IIRC.
• Engineering Manual: New special unit abilities, plus rules for things like Planetkillers. An expanded selection of planetary and orbital infrastructure are going to be moved to this book as it ended up being more appropriate, and because the Companion has gotten too big to really accommodate them. I also have some alternate tech tree rules and a random force list creator slated for this book.
• Those Who Serve: Outstanding leaders and crews go in this book. Artwork is done, most of the rules written, although there are going to be some tweaks needed based on Companion changes. I am currently thinking that content from the "Resistance" book, namely the revised Underworld Empires rules, may end up in this book to fill it out.

Those are the "active" projects that I have been working on as I've been developing the Companion, and you can probably expect to see them released in more or less that order.

I have also begun updating the Empire Rising source book to revise the setting towards the direction I want to take it in the future, which will necessitate some rewriting and making the setting more thrilling. I'm also revisiting my Bintari/K'Thonn setting from the Babylon 5 Wars days and getting that ready for a scenario book release.

Outside of these two settings, Geoff and Jeremy Stano are working on a Nexus universe supplement for VBAM which is coming along nicely. Jay intends to eventually get the Boltian/Kuissian setting updated, too, and extend the timeline, but that project hasn't been worked on since he started on Full Thrust.

Our development pace has been a bit slow since we have two main development "teams". Jay is leading one working on Full Thrust and War Fleet, while my "team" has been concentrating on VBAM 2E. I am going to have a bit of a slowdown in a month when I move back to Wyoming, but on the plus side I'll be working remote and will be gaining 2 hours per day after eliminating the commute, so after about a month of renovation work I should finally be back to something like my old development commitment.

By the end of this month I'll be ready do a final review and create art for the Companion, for an August release if all goes well. The rest of the books are going to take a bit longer to finish up, but I'm fairly confident that at least one of them will make it out later this year. Possibly more, if we can churn through the backlog.

I can't speak for Jay's progress, but at the current rate I think GZG Edition should be in a playtest-ready state within 3 months, but unless he can find local game groups that are willing to do some really intensive testing it will probably take him 6 months to organize, run, and complete an online playtest. Based on the experience getting With a Purpose out the door, I'd expect another 2 months after Jay is "done" with the book to go through and do a final editing pass and get it ready for release. That's mainly because I'm pedantic and force organizational changes and harass him about rules that I don't think are compatible with the released 2E rules. That's more an artifact of developing in parallel during the long 2E gestation than anything else, but we're probably going to run into it here or there until we both get back in sync.

To finish out this long post, there are two current rules that are halting my progress on the Companion. I might as well throw them out there for discussion:

• With the default exploration campaign rules, when an uncharted system is explored should the jump lane position of any unexplored lanes connecting to the system be resolved immediately or should the jump lane position remain hidden until the lanes are explored?
• For NPEs, can we safely get rid of the AIX values and instead replace them with a set of diplomatic modifiers for breaking, declaring, and treaty acceptance? Or are players too invested in AIX to let it die?

For the first point, it comes down to a matter of usability for the expanded exploration rules. I may end up rewriting the chapter to avoid the problem entirely, but I'd prefer not to for obvious reason.

As for NPEs, the reason why I'm looking to jettison AIX is because I have developed a solution to the "too many NPE diplomacy rolls" that works gracefully using a single relationship stat (Tension) but breaks down if the player has to start calculating AIX-based modifiers. Right now you roll a diplomatic shift and only have to make another roll if a critical diplomatic shift is rolled, and then you're looking at two more die rolls MAX to figure out what happens next. In other words, gone are the days of making separate hostilities and treaty checks every turn for every relationship.

Other than these two things, I have a few notes and examples in the Advanced FTL chapter to finish up, but otherwise the book is ready to be edited and then put into InDesign.

-Tyrel

For the first, I'm kinda erring on the "have to explore them yourself", despite my personal preference being the former option (yeah, I'm being a contrarian for the sake of it--I haven't had my morning cup of coffee yet...). But, in all seriousness, I think it makes more sense to have to explore the lane than go "ooh, this system also connects to Alpha Centauri, Lalande and Sirius! Lucky for us, then, eh?". Maybe, if the 'unexplored' lane connects to a system you already own, give a positive modifier due to picking up familiar EM emissions or something.../shrugs (MUST. HAVE. COFFEE.)

For the second, if space is available and it doesn't screw things up too bad, move the AIX rules to First Contact and have the 'basic' NPE rules use Tension, or if there's simply no room, maybe a mini-supplement focusing just on the AIX rules. My reasons are mainly down to the 'adding complexity' angle. If players want to do a more 'detailed' campaign, then they can slot the AIX rules in. If they just want to use Tension, then that's all well and good. I must admit it'll feel unusual to not use AIX (I mean, I used them throughout most, if not all, of my campaigns), but then again it'll feel unusual to design ships for campaigns without having to open up my S:X and VBAM:SX books as well...

[just in case you haven't noticed, this post was written by someone suffering withdrawal symptoms from coffee ]

How does Colonial Battlefleet fit into everything? I take it would be on Jay's list given your plate seems rather full.

Here's some coffee, Murtalian!



But that is the direction I was leaning. In my own games I always have the lane destinations remain hidden until the lane is explored, but this is fiddlier than just rolling for lane destinations when the system is explored, which is the scenario that you are describing. I may leave the hidden method as an optional rule, but otherwise use the simpler method as the standard rule.

If we do go with that solution, I think you're idea of giving a bonus to exploration rolls when you already know about or control one of the other systems might make sense. To keep it simple I'd probably make control a requirement, as then you can look at the map and say "I own that system that the unexplored lane connects to, so I get a +1 bonus!" And maybe it is +1 per system you control at both ends, so if for some reason you end up controlling both systems it would be a +2 bonus. That would let you "fill in" lanes like that more easily.

Once I get that particular element nailed down I can finish up examples and work through the rest of the exploration campaign chapter. I have the New Empires almost done and then the new Emerging Empires has to be adjusted based on recent changes. Basically you'll have two options with new empires: either fully generate them with New Empires, or partially generate them and then slowly reveal them as the game goes on using Emerging Empires. I had them both fleshed out at one point, but then the rules shifted just enough to require a rewrite.

I'm still considering putting diplomatic action modifiers in for the NPEs to replace AIX, or doing a very simple Master of Orion-esque trait system that gives fixed modifiers (that was the original idea a few versions back). At this point I'm leaning towards giving a +-25 diplomatic modifier to breaking, declaring, and treaty acceptance and leaving the rest for First Contact, too.

@PaulB: Colonial Battlefleet is currently on Jay's list, but I don't think he's had enough time this past year to do much with it. I know he has an outline started, but I haven't heard of anything going on there. If I get my main tranche of products finished I'll probably have to grab it and spend a few weekends to knock out a conversion document to the point that it can be playtested from that starting point. The tech conversion seemed pretty straightforward from what I saw, and then it's just a point of converting the unit stats across and giving them some standard ground forces (which I'm going to have for another project anyway, so it's not a big deal).

Thanks for that, Tyrel, I feel much better now...

Good to hear you got so much in the pipeline. Though I can't imagine juggling six projects at once. Or Jay doing three-four projects at once right now. Hard enough for me to focus on one

My goal for 2E, and why it has been in development hell for so long, was to keep all of the different elements in alignment and prevent as much of the rules from flying away in crazy directions as I could. This meant consolidating things to a point that modifiers made sense, were generally consistent, and that as few things broke the system in odd ways as possible.

Obviously, complex systems being what they are, you can't ever achieve that with 100% accuracy, but so far I think the system is more or less holding together as I'd hoped. There are a lot of really neat ideas I had back when I started on this project that I've since had to abandon because they run counter to the "keep it simple, stupid" mantra, but that has just forced me to find other ways to achieve similar outcomes.

Let's take First Contact as an example, because I'm going through that book now. There were a lot of "trap" trait options in that book that had minimal effects, or that were so situational that they really didn't have much of an effect on the game. I'm trying to eliminate as many of those as possible, and moving some of them to a "Rare/Special" traits category so that they exist for the settings that need them but otherwise isolates them from the random generation pool.

I'm also eliminating the rule that traits can be purchased multiple times for cumulative effect. Now all traits are just purchased once, and give their stated effects. This makes it easier to keep track of what traits do and what effects they have on the game.

Another shift has been to restrict the traits to +-3 points in value. This makes it easier to decide how much a should "cost," however, it also forces me to evaluate if the trait is offering enough value at that cost point, too. If the answer is no, then the trait needs to be adjusted accordingly -- or removed entirely if the trait is already a +-1 point trait and there doesn't appear to be an easy way to balance it.

Now, originally, I thought the 2E custom empire rules were going to have all of these different orders of life, and radically different rules. But much like the expanded system generation rules from the Companion, I've hewed towards a more basic approach to the rules to make things more consistent and playable while still maintaining some flavor. So the orders of life now exist as traits, but otherwise the rules assume that most aliens are going to be roughly human-like -- in much the same way that expanded star systems assume that better systems have an improved chance of Earth-like worlds.

Things are slowly coming together, and I'll try to finish everything off while I'm on vacation at the end of this month. That should at least give me the opportunity to review all of the rules in hard copy one last time before I start committing them to InDesign upon my return.

These changes all sound great - really looking forward to them. I finished up my Margravate With A Purpose campaign (though I got lazy about exporting the battle reports to PDF) and am looking forward to trying an exploration campaign. My work gets a lot slower in July and August (teaching) so I intend to use the time to play a campaign all the way through with pretty exports to post here.

Are the campaign and exploration rules similar enough that if I start under the old Campaign Moderator's Companion, exporting it to the 2E companion won't be too much trouble? I want to take advantage of my slow work period, but I also want to use the new rules....

The rules are close enough that you can start with the 1E rules and then transition to 2E once they are finalized and released. The biggest quality of life and improvements that would require some transitions are:

Exploration Campaigns

• Use a hex grid as the basis for your map, but instead of doing the 1E Companion sector map have one system in each hex and designate one hex as the "hub" of the map (this can be your homeworld). Then when you are rolling for jump lane positions you can just use that to determine same ring, one ring down, or one ring up. I am going to finish making those changes to our draft this weekend.
• Use the exploration rules from the 2E CG, as I think those end up being a bit fairer overall, or at least make exploration run a bit quicker.

Non-Player Empires (NPEs)

• Relationship is going to become Tension, effectively flipping the range band. There is going to be some fiddliness to get the numbers just right in a conversion, but 100 - Relationship should about give you a working Tension value. The biggest conceptual change is that with Tension there is no "we like each other" point but rather it descends from being "I'm willing to deal with you" to "I hate your guts and want to kill you"
• AIX won't exist in its current form in 2E. I tried to make it work, but a pure conversion was breaking the otherwise streamlined NPE diplomacy rules. Instead, you're going to have analogs in the form of breaking, declaring, and treaty modifiers. This is basically AIX under a different name. These modifiers are going to give you a +-25 modifier to the related action. For example, if a NPE has a +20% declaration modifier then it is going to have a better chance of declaring war in situations where it decides to roll for an attempt. Converting AIX to the these modifiers should be about as simple as taking the AIX value - 50 and dividing by 2, rounding fractions.
• While AIX won't really exist in its current form, it can be approximated by taking the new (Modifier + 25) x 4. Alternatively, and a much simpler way of doing this, would be to take 50 + Modifier and using that as the equivalent. So that +20% modifier would be like a 70 AIX. Not wholly representative, but it's pretty close.

I think the modifiers should end up filling the gap left behind by AIX, albeit not as easily as before. The reason WHY they are going away is because I found a way to use a combination of diplomatic shifts and Tension to drastically reduce the number of rolls that are required to maintain NPE diplomacy each turn. This is to the point that you are going to make one diplomatic shift per relationship per turn, and then only have to make hostilities or treaty checks on a critical diplomatic shift. Gone are the crazy formulas for chances because everything is based off of Tension. And the NPEs are now beholden to the same diplomatic action rules as players, with the slight caveat that their base chance of breaking/declaring is based on Tension (plus their modifiers, obviously).

But converting over to 2E shouldn't be a problem, and the only thing you'd be missing out right away are the new system anomalies that are being added to the Companion, but even those can be converted pretty easy where the 1E analogs still exist.