VBAM 2E Playtest Files (Was: Any Updates?)

[SLea]

What is boils down to is that offering chance replaces Xenophobia, breaking chance replaces Integrity, and declaring chance replaces Aggressiveness. The range of values for each also effectively changes from the 1-100 range under AIX to 1-10. This gives less variance overall, but it makes each percentile difference more important.

Right - now I understand better how the new system works. All the same, the advantage of the AIX stats was that they could be used for other functions outside of the diplomacy system, such as the use of AG for morale checks in combat. Can I propose a solution? Retain the AIX stats, and then just divide them by 10 to give the offering, breaking, and declaring chances as you've described them. That way your new concept for the diplomacy system remains intact, and so does the potential for the use of the AIX stats for other purposes.

On the subject of diplomacy in general, a while ago and on another thread, I mentioned an idea for a possible modification to the way tribute treaties work, to a resounding lack of comment/interest. I'll mention it again now, as the idea still seems to me to have some merit. Basically, it seem a bit restrictive that the only thing that can be offered/demanded is EPs. I think in theory that this could be expanded to allow the use as 'tribute' of almost anything that the system quantifies - food, tech points etc. If 2E includes something like the 1E rules for enslavement of census, especially unpleasant races could even demand (or even offer), the use of population as forced labour. What (if anything) do you think?

[Tyrel Lohr]

Here's the update to the system generation rules, and pretty close to final form minus final changes to the colony and facilities rules:

VBAM 2E - Star System rules (2012-01-24)

VBAM 2E - Jump Lanes

I would appreciate player feedback on these rules. I have to finish up the strategic resource and system terrain tables at the end and, in the case of strategic resources, realign them based on the final colony and facilities rules. I hope to work on that tonight after in between getting playtest turn orders resolved and sent out.

@SLea: Keeping the original AIX values would only be feasible if Integrity was turned into Deceit so that the ascending/descending scales would align with one another. As it stands, you can still infer all of the same personality characteristics from the new system, with the exception that the range of values of decidedly narrower than before. There is still a chance that the original 1E NPE rules may end up getting used in 2E instead of new ones if these newer ones don't pan out. I am also getting to the point I just want to get this project done, so it may become a case of jump using the basic NPE rules and just filling in the gaps.

The tribute treaty was an attempt to offer a strict, mechanical way of translating tribute into relationship bonuses. You can offer or accept whatever the player wants to give you, but trying to find a way to quantify the value of that is the problem. I'll take a look at the situation when I get to that chapter in this final rewrite.

=====

On that note, my plan right now is to finish the System rules, move on to Jump Lanes, Colonies, and Facilities, and get those four chapters completely finished and out there for review. Then I'll move on to the Empires and Diplomacy and finish those (one way or another) ... basically force through whatever changes are necessary, revert to old rules if the new ones still aren't working, and try to make as much headway as possible in controllable chunks.

UPDATE: Instead of getting turns out like I had planned, I ended up polishing off the jump lanes chapter. Most of it is material that we've all seen before, but the organization is slightly different and I added a rules entry for "Contested Movement" that covers the hiccups that can occur when fast units make multiple FTL jumps per turn. In a nut shell, you get to roll detection in each system you visit, and after each jump you can decide to cancel your remaining movement. For example, if your invasion fleet is moving into enemy space and stumble upon a new colony that you didn't know about before, you might choose to cancel your movement so that you'll be in that system during the Encounters Phase.

On the other side of the coin, if you move into a system that contains an enemy fleet that's the same size or bigger than your own (by construction cost), your opponent has the option of cancelling your remaining movement and forcing you to remain in the system during the Encounters Phase.

The reason for this rule (and I'm hoping it bears into the rules, I've fought this long enough that I'm not sure it's worded right) is to create a happy medium between players not being able to move multiple jumps into enemy or neutral AND address the issue of a single enemy courier boat stopping your entire armada, both of which have been problems in previous iterations of the rules.

Again, in both cases, take a look at the rules, test them for logical issues, and I'll get working on the rest of the stuff that I have in the hopper. Next up on the rules side is Colonies. The chapter's mostly finished already, just needing a bit of final work to come to a final decision on a few rules changes.

[countercheck]

For contested movement, consider permitting the defender to attempt to block a fleet of any size. Should the attacker press on regardless, he must leave behind a covering force equal to or greater than 1/2 the construction cost of the blocking force. This allows small defending fleets to threaten large attacking fleets, and force them to leave behind screening forces, but permits the screening force to be smaller than the blocking force. So, if a construction cost 20 fleet is making transit through a system garrisoned by a Cost 10 cruiser division, if it doesn't want to stop to beat up on the cruisers, it is forced to leave behind a Cost 5 destroyer screen, which is probably going to get mauled, or something bigger, which involves significantly splitting the fleet.

This system has the advantage of forcing a difficult decision on the attacker: do I leave the minimum screening force and press on, splitting my fleet and inviting defeat in detail, or do I keep my fleet together and stop to swat the garrison, and risk losing my offensive momentum. As is, there is no way a garrison will be able to block stop any but the weakest probes, since it would be foolish to attack any target without having local superiority.



Another option is to permit the blocking player to generate one Intercept scenario. If you WANT to intercept with that single courier boat... be my guest! This would also handle the problem of FTL 2 units that jump in, make a detect roll, and jump back where they started. Sure, you get to jump in, scout, and jump out, but the defenders get to try to blast you as you go. On the other hand, it calls for this combat to be resolved before the rest of the combats can happen, so it might slow things down.


Are you planning on treating Monitors and Stations differently?

[Tyrel Lohr]

For contested movement, consider permitting the defender to attempt to block a fleet of any size. (SNIP)

That's a good idea. I would be tempted to even make it a 1:1 parity in that case, so that the player from your example would have to leave at least 10 cost of ships to match the enemy's 10 EP of cruisers. That has the advantage of breaking the fleet up into groups while still deferring encounter resolution until the Encounters Phase. I'll give that a shot and incorporate it into the next rules update.

Speaking of rules updates, I have the Supply chapter nearly rewritten. Finishing up blockades today. I had to finish covering that before I could go back to work on Colonies.

Are you planning on treating Monitors and Stations differently?

The difference between the two is basic in the standard rules, and a bit more nuanced if you're playing using advanced multi-planet system rules. Under the standard rules, the difference is that stations pay less to maintain but can't be moved at all while monitors rely on jump gates to move from one system to another. Not all settings will use jump gates, but they are being included in the rules as a facility type that you can build in systems so that non-FTL ships can move from one system to another. This allows Babylon 5 style settings to work like they should, but players can easily home rule them away if they don't want them.

There's also going to be a jump relay facility included in the book which is a larger, more powerful jump gate that is shamelessly stolen from another intellectual property. The jump relay's schtick is that it allows you to move units between relays that are located within X jumps of each other, where X is the number of jump lanes connecting to the unit's current system. For example, a jump relay built in a system with 6 jump lanes could move units to any other system with a jump relay that is located within 6 jumps, but that's the units' only movement for that turn, and a system has to have a jump gate present before it can build a jump relay.

In multi-planetary systems, the non-FTL monitors also have the advantage of being able to move from one planet to another and between orbital zones. They become more important in this type of setting because more combat action is liable to be occurring at the orbital and planetary level, and being able to travel between the four orbital zones will be pretty important, especially because the larger monitors will have a pretty good advantage over FTL-capable ships at least at the lower tech levels.

[countercheck]

I suggested half the cost to prevent masses of specialized freighters, scouts and other utility craft from drawing off an equal value of combat vessels. There's no reason you need a 5 C$ warship to fend off a 5 C$ freighter. It also lets that rear-guard be sacrificial, which is kind of interesting too. Defense in depth is necessary, because they might be willing to sacrifice a chunk of their fleet to blow through to your core worlds.

[Vandervecken]

I'll second what countercheck said. At least 1/2 sounds great to me, It leaves some interesting choices. You can have (per the example) 1/4 th your forces all the way up to the whole fleet stay and deal with the defenders force. How much you choose may depend on what type of fight you are looking for and just how much you want to bypass that defender's speedbump. The fact that I have a choice like that is just cool; and different situations may compel me to make a hard choice or two to further the empire, eh ??

[Tyrel Lohr]

Done and done. I just added the rule to the contested movement rules, setting the stop limit at 1/2 of the defender's total construction cost of space combat units. As a player I'm not sure I would ever feel safe leaving more than 1x there, just so I would have an even fight, but I could see someone really wanting to push through to an enemy home system to try and wreak havoc even at the possibility of losing the rest of their fleet.

This also makes starbases an even better defense proposition as you can maintain twice as many of them for the same cost as starships. For example, to throw some numbers out there, you could maintain 24 EP of starbases instead of 12 EP starships in a system. That forces the enemy to leave behind 12 EP of ships rather than 6 EP. The starbases can also only be attacked via Defensive scenarios, which further favor the defender.

There is an argument that starbases shouldn't affect fleet movement, but as a game mechanic I think I prefer starbases acting like speed bumps because it gives players another reason to build them. Having a wide net that includes all space combat units is also easier from a rules perspective as otherwise you would have to limit it to starships and flights, and then you split hairs and start debating whether or not flights based at starbases or fighter garrisons should count, etc. Basically too many contradictions to be worth the effort 85% of the time.

Anyway, here's the newest VBAM files to review:

Star System
Jump Lanes
System Loyalty
Facilities
Supply

Next up is Colonies, unless I get sidelined and do the Piracy and Commerce rules first. Or find one of the other chapters that is short and almost finished. But Colonies is my main focus.

[darbycmcd]

Ok, a little late but just wanted to offer something on the contested movement. Would you consider changing the pin requirement (it is basically like Fed and Empire's mechanic, right..) to just a straight ship count, as in 1/2 the defenders ships. the issue is that construction cost very closely tracks combat power, and because of then the information about construction cost would have to be given to a player to write orders that use pinning, that information becomes actionable intel. basically, i think there are 3 ways to handle move orders. if they are somewhat complex with contingency orders (move along the axis A to B unless A requires more than 50% fleet stay in system) then probably not a big issue. but if the GM stops movement and asks a player what they want to do with a new situation (ok, you enter system A and cannot continue along ordered path without X number of Cons points staying behind) then it is a big deal to know how powerful the opposing fleet is. and if the GM just stops the fleet for the turn with something unexpected (oops there are baddies in system A, end movement) then you don't have contested movement at all. and is the knowledge of construction value symetrical? so if i am defender, and the attacker gets to know my cons cost in a system, do I get to know his? an invading fleet comes into the system, and i have only 3 little ships to pin with, but now i know how powerful the invading fleet is, not just the part that is pinned in-system....
anyway, not a huge point but something to think about....

[Tyrel Lohr]

Good points there, darby. I was approaching the issue more from a CM perspective rather than from that of players in a CM-less. You're right that pegging it to construction cost gives up information to the players that they really shouldn't know in a blind scenario (though without a CM the information normally would be public to some degree). I would be wary of using the actual number of ships as the basis for contesting movement, however, as that would incentivize players to build tons of little 1 EP "chaff" ships to tie up enemy fleets along shortest-distance attack corridors simply to prevent them from advancing more than one jump per turn.

A more involved solution would be something like this:

An empire's forces move into a new system. Both that power and the defender make detection rolls to see what they detect. If the intruder doesn't detect any enemy units it will automatically proceed to the next system unless contested. If the defender doesn't detect the intruder then it can't contest the movement.

It really should be the defender contesting the movement, and at that point is where there would need to be a partial reveal of the actual force strength to see how much construction cost (tonnage, essentially) the intruder would have to leave behind to cover its retreat from the system. This really could be made into a two-part situation with the defender revealing X C$ of units to interdict the intruding fleet, and then the intruder has to do a 1:1 or 1:2 match (whatever ratio ends up making logical sense) or else have their movement end.

The above modification works better for games with a fog of war enforced, as it is up to the players themselves to reveal definite force sizes to the enemy. A defender could for example have 90 EP of ships in a system but choose to only contest movement with 15 EP of them. In that case, I would still think a 1:1 ratio would work best with the intruder being forced to put up 15 EP of its own forces to cover its movement on out of the system. It becomes a game of bluff if the detection rolls weren't kind to one side or the other then.

[virtutis.umbra]

That's a cool approach; it also provides the option of the defending player offering up a comparatively weak intercepting force to slice off a relatively small portion of the attacking force, but then in the subsequent combat phase committing additional units to favor the outcome of the battle in that system; vs. the potential to reveal their full strength and divert a greater portion of the enemy fleet...

[countercheck]

How about, for the simple version, we use Command Cost. That bridges the gap between numbers and cost, and it'll be more along the lines of 'You detect five cruiser sized vessels... you have to deploy at least two cruisers and a destroyer to keep them off your back." It's also the kind of info that would be available.

I also like the detection idea, but it seems like an awful lot of work.

For starbases, I was wondering, if you have locations within a star system, would you have the jump points be locations? In that case, forts deployed at jump points and ships deployed to the High Guard could draw enemy units off, but maybe not orbital forts and planet based fighters.

[Iron Sky]

Alternately, you could make a new ship system: Interdiction Field. Have them prevent further movement of X number or X total Command Cost (or whatever) of enemy ships.

That would also introduce a second new module like an Interdiction Runner that allows a ship to ignore interdiction, just make it really expensive/bulky so it would be prohibitive to put them on your whole fleet.

[countercheck]

You could just lump that in under Fast, too.

[Tyrel Lohr]

It's time for another quick update!

I've made some good progress on finishing up the rules, but have taken a few side adventures to test out unit abilities and unit design as part of stress testing that portion of the rules. I have also more or less finalized the intel mechanics and now just need to finish compressing the intel mission list into a digestable length that gets to the point without being too verbose.

Another change that I implemented based on further testing and some comments off of this forum is to make the loyalty and piracy checks D20 rolls instead of D100 (percentile) rolls. I was already incrementing most everything by 5% intervals, anyways, and after taking another look at the rules it did seem like it would make more sense to head in that direction. It's another die type that we never really used in 1E, but I think we should still be safe.

Here's some more random updates and thoughts:

• I am considering punting the strategic resources to the Companion to save on space and reduce the complexity of the base rules. Strategic resources are something that would be nice to have, but I think I want extra time to balance them, and they seem like they could be confusing to new players.
• I spent most of the last weekend fighting with the carrier rules trying to find a good way to balance the Carrier ability specifically and flights in general. The solution I am currently testing is to have all flights have a Command Cost of 1 regardless of size/cost, Carrier cost 3 MU a piece and hold 1 CC of flights, and the largest flight that a carrier can carry be limited by its own Command Cost. For example, a 3 CC starship with 6 Carrier would be able to hold up to 6 flights that each cost 3 EP or less. This helps to limit the size of flights that a player can field and ties the fielding of larger flights to larger carriers.
  
  There is one exception to the above. The Launch Bay ability, in addition to aiding launch/land, would increase a carrier's basing limit so that it could base more expensive flights. If the carrier from the previous example had 3 Launch Bays, it would be able to go up to 3 EP over its normal Construction Cost basing limits. That would allow the carrier to base a single 6 EP flight or three 4 EP flights. I'm currently looking at costing this version of Launch Bay at 2 MU.
• Relating to carrier warfare, I have successfully tested a tweak to the CSCR so that the Carrier Phase is moved to the front of the combat round and is the point in the round where task forces roll to see how many flights they can activate (launch) or deactivate (land) that round. You total the task force's Carrier and Launch Bay values, multiply by D6, then divide by 10 (round to nearest) to see how many flights the player can launch or land.
• I am about half finished with the Colony chapter rewrite. I've been bouncing from there back and forth to the other areas of the rules as I find concepts that either need written out or expanded elsewhere in the rules. The back half of that chapter is largely finished, and I just have to finish writing the descriptions for the population and infrastructure statistics. That involves deciding how much of the rules to include with those descriptions and how much to move to other sections of the rules where they might make more sense. Right now I'm leaning towards including them all in the Colonies chapter so that you can flip to that chapter and quickly figure out what each of them does.
• I've changed Stealth and Scout so that they don't impact the detection roll itself but rather apply modifiers to Surprise rolls based on the amount of Stealth / Scout in each task force. This helps me control the two abilities a bit more and makes the detection rolls in an encounter a bit more straightforward.
• Relating to Stealth, I need to add a concealed movement option to the Jump Lane Movement section that gives fleets where all mobile units have Stealth >= CC the ability to move silently through a system as long as their total Stealth value is >= their CC + Enemy Scout value in the system. For example, I have 10 x 2 Stealth, 1 CC cloaked frigates in a fleet. This gives the fleet 20 Stealth and 10 CC. An enemy would need 11 Scout value in a system to have any real chance of detecting this fleet. This would be realized by assigned a very heavy negative modifier to fleet detection (-6), almost guaranteeing that the fleet will go undetected. This makes it possible for a player to play a Romulan force with heavily cloaked ships that can move around more or less at will without worrying about being detected unless the opponent has significant Scout value available to watch for them.

My current plan is to re-PDF and post the chapters that I have finished in the next few days for review, and try to integrate the remaining changes based off of reviews here. Based on current project progress, I expect to be able to start layout on finished chapters within about two weeks. I have the internal layout of the 2E books designed and ready to go and it's just a case of dropping the finished text in and formatting it in InDesign.

As a quick overview, here's a rundown of the current table of contents and a note about where we are on each of them:

Introduction - already have this written from a previous draft, just need to edit it to make sure there aren't any contradictions.

Getting Started - Have the rules for starting forces completed. The Empires chapter has been eliminated and will be included as a section in this chapter instead. Campaign map rules from previous drafts will be shortened and included here.

Star Systems - 95% complete. Making the decision to include or exclude strategic resources from the CG.

Jump Lanes - 90% complete. Have to make sure that the proposed edits to contested movement have been integrated and then add an entry for concealed movement.

Colonies - 40% complete. Rules for population and infrastructure are in place, and conquered colonies just needs one more proof. Deciding how much detail to go into on each colony statistic, balancing between providing too much information or just bare facts. With the elimination of the Empires chapter, the rules for imperial capitals will move here.

Facilities - 100% complete. This chapter is complete. I may remove luxury resorts from the book, but probably not. Added asteroid forts and planetary shields. Changed the facility rules so that facilities aren't automatically destroyed by enemy fleets. A player must use bombardment or intel missions to remove them. Undestroyed facilities are captured when a system is captured.

System Loyalty - 100% complete. I moved the civil war rules to the Companion, as to do them justice would require a good 10 pages, and I would rather use that space in another book where they would be more appropriate.

Commerce - 80% complete. The rules are finished, but it seems a bit sparse. I want to make a final test on this to make sure nothing breaks.

Piracy - 60% complete. Piracy checks have been moved to a D20 roll, pirate forces do appear in a system and do commerce raiding in a hybrid call back to 1E. I have to finish pulling the rules for the black market forward to provide a basic framework for pirate operations. I also need to update the rules for pirate ascension so that players will have guidelines for handling pirate forces invading or establishing colonies and becoming empires in their own right. That almost goes beyond the scope of piracy in the main book, and I'm still a bit leery about including them here.

Agriculture - 100% complete. Based on the final system generation rules, I bumped the food cost for Census to 3 food. This isn't quite as clean as 2 food per Census, but at 3 food per Census an average system will be able to grow just enough food to feed itself. Homeworlds with 5 Biosphere and 6 utilized Agriculture would produce 30 food and consume 18, leaving 12 food leftover per turn. This is enough excess food to support 4 Census elsewhere. It is likely that the systems that these Census live in will be able to produce some food themselves. If a homeworld has 6 Biosphere instead, the excess is increased to 18 food per turn or enough to support 6 Census at off-world colonies.

Technology - 50% complete. The rules for pre-interstellar powers are done and the tech advancement rules have worked out fine in all of my tests, but I still need to finish writing up the rest of the rules in the chapter and making sure that none of the old stuff from previous drafts leaks into the final version of the rules.

Military - 40% complete. Fought this chapter this weekend, still hung up on flights and trying to get them to work within the scope of the game. I think I've decided on the option for those and can now finish the remainder of the rules. Special abilities need to be finalized and their costs updated based on recent changes. Construction rules are ready to be finalized now that shipyards as facilities has shook out after testing. A few updates to maintenance activation rules to reflect field repair rules.

Supply - 85% complete. I have one section about cut off regions being treated as blockaded colonies that I have to finish rewriting and this will be done.

Intelligence - 80% complete. The rules for intel operations are done, just need to go through the missions and rewrite/balance to completion. More importantly, I need to decide which missions to save and which to discard as I think I threw in more than is necessary during my last internal playtest.

Diplomacy - 70% complete. After reviewing the direction the rules have been headed, what we'll see in this chapter is a retention of the +-100 relationship system and then each treaty / declaration tied to a relationship breakpoint that has to be reached for a player to offer, sign, or declare. I've been strongly tempted to remove the relationship system entirely, but I think it's important to help minimize the effect of metagaming by controlling what treaties two powers can enter into.

Encounters - 90% complete. I'm finalizing some rule modifications and testing scenario balance, otherwise this chapter is finished. I also have two introductory paragraphs to write, too, but those are pretty minor additions.

Bombardment - 100% compete. Barring any problems, this chapter is done. Added a rule entry for planetary defenses, a special case currently restricted to two facility types (planetary guns, planetary shields) that are activated during the Bombardment Phase. I think minefields will probably fall into this category when they appear in one of the future books.

CSCR - 65% complete. I have to write some more background text and flesh out the combat round sequence. However, most of the actual content is complete or nearly complete. Another few nights of work on this and it'll be done. I'm currently testing changes with some sample fleets designed to break the rules to see what happens.

Scenarios - 20% complete. I'm waiting to work on this until the other rules are finished, because I can be writing scenarios while the rest of the rules are being picked apart.

Non-Player Empires - 50% complete. The rules themselves are more or less finished and just need another round of testing, but we're still debating on whether or not to include them in the Campaign Guide or Companion, mainly due to space concerns. If the CG ends up overly long we'll probably have to hold the NPE rules back. I might be able to strip them down to the diplomatic engine, however, and still get them to fit without problem, as upon further review it looks like most of the thornier sections of those rules are actually tied to empire activation rather than the NPEs themselves. Empire activation would still be nice to have, however... and I'll see what I can do to compress that and maybe include it in the appendices.


That should give you an idea where everything is at. I'll be finishing up the remaining chapters and get them out for review as soon as I can.

[Vandervecken]

As always, thanks for the update.

I was hoping to see a few more 100% completes on your list, but I am glad that you are making good progress. 2012 will be a good year for making space empires at multiple levels of complexity with VBAM, Starmada, and Solar Starfire (Just out), as well as a few other indie-games too. Oh, and another SFB version as well, it seems.

Try to update weekly, even if it is just to say "I'm still alive and plugging away". Always glad to here about Stress Testing and searching for internal inconsistancies ... It will be worth the extra times if a year after you publish, my erratta for VBAM 2E is rather small. Thanks for your hard work.