Shared Worlds

[brennanhawkwood]

I have recently acquired VBAM and am in the process of reading through the rules and working on some ideas for campaigns to inflict on a couple of friends.

One of the ideas is that of an exploration game where all the players start from the same homeworld. I was wondering if this can work under the VBAM rules and if so how would people suggest implementing it.

The basic idea is the classic multiple powers on a world independently engage in space exploration and colonization leading to eventual conflict between them. The concept is very similar to the setting in 2300AD.

[Gareth_Perkins]

I was pondering something similar as it happens - with the Empires starting as the US, EU, Japan, China, etc

The VBAM: JC rules does something like this on Mars, splitting the planets CC between the two martian factions - and it looks like VBAM 2e might make this a bit simpler to arbitrate,

So I would treat Earth as a special case - assign CC to each player according to your needs (with a total CC equal to the Earths total CC), perhaps with a fixed +1 census per six months representing the overcrowding and rush to colonise,

Things might work more simply if the Earth (or even all of the Sol system) is a no-combat zone (UN peacekeepers are a common trope for establishing this sort of thing, though espionage should occur in excess!), but this isn't technically necessary (though it does create an excellent meeting point between factions),

Personally I was thinking of using the Admiral level system generation - but that's pretty much to taste,

It may also be a good idea to ensure that there are plenty of jump lanes leading out from Earth,

[Charles Lewis]

one of our 2E internal playtest games was based on that exact premise. The thing to keep in mind is that Carrying Capacity also applies to other limits, like Productivity; hence a reason to get off-planet ASAP.

The one thing you have to be careful of in such a scenario is someone forgoing exploration, building up the ground troops and taking over the rest of the planet.

[Tyrel Lohr]

As other people have already mentioned, it would be fairly simple to divide a planet's Carrying Capacity up between multiple factions at the start of the game and go from there. A 12 Carrying Capacity homeworld can accommodate 3 players fairly easily (4 Capacity each), though if you have any more players you will likely want to increase the homeworld's Carrying Capacity to allow that. You could go down to 3 Capacity per player on the homeworld to eke out a fourth player position, but that gets dicey in 1E as you have to have a good order colony with 3 Census and 3 Productivity to provide supply to your units. 4 Capacity gives you a little leeway in that regards -- you can lose 1 Census or 1 Productivity without instantly losing your supply point.

Of course, one way around that dilemma, too, is to just have each empire's Imperial Capital act as a free supply point, then the empires can be of any size and still be able to feed supply out to their other colonies and units without any hassles. If you do this, you could probably fit empires into 2-3 Capacity without too many problems.

-Tyrel