Creating Robotic Census

[pmferguson25]

I am a big fan of Battlestar Galactica, or at least was until shortly after the middle of the second season. And I have always thought that it would be really cool if an organic race in VBAM could build robotic census.

It seems to hold some excellent story & campaign opportunities. And it would be especially useful for exploration campaigns: an organic empire would expand faster than it otherwise could, and if the universe is a lonely place with few sentient races, the player will have an great imaginary friend to play with (read: a robot rebellion to put down ).

Also, in a multi-player exploration campaign, it would be interesting to find out if the rebellious robot children of different races would band together or not.

It would also be interesting if robots in one faction were treated as equals, or even superiors, by their creators. How would such an empire relate to empires facing a robot rebellion? Or empires which manage to keep robots enslaved?

Of course, why would a player would create robots when he or she knows they might rebel?

1) The first answer is that it is a fun thing to do. I imagine many players play the game not to win or loose in any sense, but just to see how an exciting story plays out.

2) The second answer is that there could be a rule for such campaigns which says that the first census at a colony must be robotic. After all, who wants to go to an empty, nasty planet to build an infrastructure for billions of "people"? Not the meatbags, thats for sure.

3) Robots have to come from somewhere. Why not give them an exciting origin story in the full light of history?

Has anyone else suggested an idea like this before?

Thanks,

pmferguson25

Off Topic PS: As to reason 3 for why a player would build robots, I know that there are plenty of robots with obscure origins. For example, ones who through off their creators' yoke long ago, whose creators went extinct long ago, and in my opinion the most interesting one: robots who evolved from replicators and didn't achieve sentience until they were separated from their "creators" by light years and millennia).

Also, there was a comic book I read where humans on Earth, foresaw nuclear war and prepared by going into suspended animation and building a bunch of robots who would redevelop industry and agriculture.

The plan worked great, except the robots' memories were wiped by the nuclear EMP an couldn't remember why they were rebuilding. A human finally woke up and bit into a plant. The robots loved the plants they cared for and couldn't understand why someone would kill an innocent plant. So the robots killed all the humans.

[Tyrel Lohr]

Robotic Census is something I think we will be tackling in the Engineering Manual. As you said, it would be a very neat idea to allow empires to "design" and build a Robotic population to supplement their own. There are several settings that have done this. You mention Battlestar Galactica, but the one that I look to more for inspiration is the old DOS game Alien Legacy. In that game, humans built Robots to serve as automated workers to perform dangerous jobs and they acted as another "resource" to be produced and spent, IIRC. More importantly, you could actually find abandoned robots here and there that were left behind by a missing colony.

In VBAM terms, Robotic Census would serve as the flipside of Cloned Census. Robotic Census would be more expensive to build and would have to be maintained (more than likely), but they can be built very quickly. Cloning meanwhile would have a little bit lower costs and requires no long-term maintenance, but it would take longer to grow them. Something along those lines is what I have planned, anyway.

As with with VBAM 2E technologies, your tech level in each discipline would determine how good your empire was at it, either by reducing costs or increasing the number of units that could be cloned.

Tying the Menagerie rules in with the concept, too, the Robotic Census you build could be assigned their own traits based on your Robotics tech level. A TL 0 Robotics will give you Robotic Census without any species design points to spend, but a TL 3 Robotics level might give you 3 to spend... or something along those lines. That way an empire would have its own special type of Robotic Census running around.

In the Menagerie 2E, too, racial benefits will be generally applied on a colony-by-colony basis, so if you have a majority Robotic Census population at a colony, then that Census type would define some of your costs and abilities at the colony. This is meant to make colonial populations a bit more important and interesting.

-Tyrel