Curious about the business tactic used here...

[darbycmcd]

Virtus, my issue is this... how long did it take you to write that message? Not too long. And what is your potential economic gain from the product? Nothing. When they ask for help, and it seems like the help is.. well, helpful, I don't get why there can't be a similar time expenditure. Like I said I just don't get it. I did spend some time reviewing materials, as was requested. I don't know that it is really ready for playtest but I did run some sample system generation, notional empires, sample fleets, that sort of thing. The discussion that has come out of other players input I thought was quite productive. It goes to making a better product, ie more money.

But in the end you are right, I am probably getting too negative and that is counter-productive. It is their business and not mine so I will sign off on this topic. And I do appologize if I have become too heavy handed in my criticism, it is sort of cliche but it does come from my hope for and belief in the potential of the product.

[Emiricol]

I'm moving (yet again) in a week but after that, I would love to help playtest. Can't GM, I don't have *that* kind of time, but I could play... hint hint... ;D

[Vandervecken]

Had anyone heard from Tyrel these last 3 weeks since X-Mas. He has a history of not checking the web, but with his December 2nd message in this post stating that he'd try harder, I'm worried that he or a loved one may have become sick, injured, or worse. I'll keep hoping that he's franticly doing some last minute tests with HIS crew, but if anyone can verify, I'll feel a lot better.

[Tyrel Lohr]

I've spent the last three weeks crushed under work emergencies and a sinus infection that had me on the couch for a week and a half. The combination murdered my post-holiday schedule (again). Later tonight I'll post in the other thread about what I have accomplished in the interim. I have managed to make some progress the last week.

[Vandervecken]

Glad to hear from ya. My wife also had a nasty 3 week sinus infection too; guess what I'm coming down with since we got together <blush> when she was feeling better. And just in time for the first Polar air mass to get to Minnesnowta this year. Oh well, hope you can make up some lost time in this next month.

[Tyrel Lohr]

I'm hoping to make up for lost time. It really sucks to spend that much time on the couch. The sinus pain would start out okay in the morning most of the time and then ramp up to the point that by 5 pm I would be retreating to the couch to try and rest. There for the first week I was sure one of my teeth had abscessed, because that was the kind of pain I was feeling. It wasn't until I went to the dentist and got a full x-ray that they found that it was a sinus infection and not an abscess.

I think the damn thing is finally starting to drain, and I'm on my last day of antibiotics, so here's to hoping that it can go away!

[Vandervecken]

I hope Tyrel has been soooo ... busy, with 2E that he hasn't had time to give us a quick update. I also hope he hasn't got a relapse of his nasty sinus infection.

But I certainly hope that he hasn't gotten sick of working on his baby (VBAM). I know that when I was doing the 9th rewrite of my own rules, there just came a point where I'd rather Play a MMO or read a few books than 'get back to work' which is why I never got published. Tyrel has been working on this for a while and I'm gonna understand why some weeks make more progress than others. Still, I hope he can give us a quick recap each week for those of us who are looking forward to 2E, even if it is to say "Still alive and making progress".

[Charles Lewis]

I'm in the midst of my second solo playtest of what should prove to be the final iteration AND he has shared with Jay and I the first two chapters that have gone into layout. The pieces are all coming together. I think you all will be pumped when we're able to share some of what is coming.

[mwaschak]

I was just reviewing the new layout Tyrel put out there yesterday and very pleased with how things are progressing. There are still some small decisions to be made about style choices and the like but it looks like this project is really coming together.

One thing to remember is that the whole second edition product line depends on a well developed 2E campaign book. So everything from the VBAM: Historical Campaigns to the five main supplemental books (the Engineering Manual, Those Who Serve, etc....) to how we design a Kuissian Pacification Cruiser all depend on us having the core book right.

-Jay

[virtutis.umbra]

I will never forgive you guys if you get the Kuissian Pacification Cruiser design wrong. :-\

[Tyrel Lohr]

Just to throw in an update, now that corporate and personal taxes are done I'm free to get back to work on things. The last week I've spent prepping the rules to be dropped back into InDesign for final editing, revision, and layout. What this has entailed is taking the rules as written in Word, exporting them out, and then placing them into an InDesign template I have been tinkering off and on with for the past 4 months. This is allowing me to get a feel for what the final presentation and organization of the book should look like. Specifically, it has allowed me to see where content might need to be moved, shortened, or expanded to fit the confines of the final product. Last night I imported all but the last few chapters into the book to see how they would look within the context of the other changes that I've made. So far, so good. The largest organizational change is that I'm combining Empires and Diplomacy as a single chapter. The Military chapter will also likely end up being combined to include all of the additional warfare rules (encounters, bombardment, CSCR, etc.), too, though I'm still debating that a bit and need to see what it does to the Table of Contents. I've really been using the TOC as a guide as the way things are presented now it's very easy to look up where a particular rule heading is and find a page number. I've also been removing rule numbering on any heading below H3 and have successfully eliminated all of the H5 and deeper heading styles that were previously in the rules.

The Star Systems chapter is completely laid out with the exception of art to pad out the chapter length. I thought I had it completely filled yesterday before I realized that I had a H2 that didn't have any subordinate items, which made me realize I was missing a few entries (that's the kinds of things I've been running into). That'll be fixed tonight. I added an extra system terrain and broke out the nebulae again into emission, reflection, variable, dark, and maser types. I'd been debating this for awhile but finally decided it was better to do that now than worry about instituting them later.

Strategic resources have also been slightly realigned from the previous draft to accommodate for the rules I added that allows a player to transfer the strategic resource's benefits from their system of origin to any other system that can trace a trade route to it. This can be a friendly system, at which point the bonus goes to your own colony, or you can sell rights to the resource to a trade partner that can trace supply to the system. Instead of providing a +100% bonus to infrastructure these resources now provide a +50% bonus to a specific colony focus, like industrial capacity or commerce range. These effects are cumulative between multiple resources. This adjustment keeps a player from quite as easily breaking the game by moving tons of strategic resources to its home system.

I've tweaked some of the jump lane movement rules a bit, but nothing major. The largest change from previous drafts was adding two changes to the concealed movement rules. Empires now receive a bonus to their Scout value equal to a system's utilized Intel when an enemy force moves into their system and attempts concealed movement. An empire's Scout value is also halved (round down) when attempting to detect concealed fleets in systems that contain a nebula. The formula for concealed movement remains the same: Friendly Stealth / (Friendly Command Cost + Enemy Scout), and every mobile unit in the fleet must have Stealth > 0 to attempt concealed movement in the first place. This does mean that a fleet of 12 Frigates, each with Stealth 1, would have a 12 / 12 = 100% chance of performing concealed movement. But if they moved into a system with 5 Utilized Intel, their chance drops to 12 / 17 = 71%. That's still good, but not as good as before. Add a few Scouts to the system and the chance drops enough to make the concealed movement a bit trickier. I may have to end up adjusting the formula a bit if it ends up being too powerful, probably by doubling the Command Cost modifier in the denominator.

While I still need to test it, I'm looking at changing the commerce value calculation to be equal to the average of the system's resource values times its utilized Economy stat. A 12/6/6 homeworld ends up with a base modifier of 8, time the system's utilized Economy. A homeworld with 6 Economy utilized would then have a commerce value of 6 x 8 = 48, which would earn empires that trade there 4.8 EP per turn. Right now it is just at Economy^2, essentially, which was a regression to a simpler method -- but I prefer having the system resources influence the commercial value of a system.

The Facilities chapter has been welded onto the end of the Colonies chapter as part of the reorg. After talking with Charlie and Jay and looking at our options, I decided to make a few changes to how they work. The first is that facilities now cost 100 EP instead of 50 EP, but they cost nothing to maintain. Construction time for a facility is 10 turns plus 2 turns per jump it is away from the builder's nearest capital. Facilities can only be destroyed by bombardment, but they can now be crippled by both intel and bombardment. Crippled facilities don't provide any benefits, but they can be quickly repaired to bring them back online. This fixes a problem with the previous rules where it was too easy for an enemy to blow up the shipyards at an enemy homeworld and force them to lose all of the starships they had under construction there. Now destroying shipyards or any other facility will require moving a force into the system that is powerful enough to hit the facility twice -- once to cripple it, and a second time to destroy it.

Those are the highlights of what has been accomplished in the last two weeks since my last report. I hope to spend an hour or two a night on this for the foreseeable future, and longer on the weekends, to try and get things ready for release. As Jay intimated above, this is a very important product and we have to make sure all of our ducks are in a row because we're going to be married to this edition of the rules for another 4-6 years and want to make sure it can do everything we want it to do without substantial revision down the road. On my end, this has meant reworking the rules in such a way that I can be sure that the new editions of the Companion and Menagerie will work with the rules and offer enough meaningful decisions and game play options to remain viable and interesting additions to the campaign system.

I'll post more this week as I get more content finished.

Oh, one more thing, and something that players out there could playtest and report back to me on (tyrellohr at gmail.com)... Charlie and I have been going back and forth on the system loyalty checks and discussing better ways to do things. Here's a possible replacement for the existing rule that I would like some feedback on:

1) An empire totals its Census during the Morale Phase and rolls 1 system loyalty check for every 10 Census. Empires with less than 10 Census instead roll a D10 against their Census and only have to make a loyalty check if the die result is less than or equal to their total Census.

2) To resolve a system loyalty check, randomly select a colony and roll a D10. The system loses 1 Morale on 4 or less or gains 1 Morale on 8 or better. A result of 5-7 is no effect. A colony can only be subjected to a single loyalty check per turn.

3) Modifiers continue to be applied to the system loyalty checks, and these remain largely the same as in the most recent drafts. Examples include +1 for being a capital, +1 if the total CC of friendly ground forces is >= Census (min 1 CC), etc. Modifiers would also be applied for morale state, with -1 for Unrest and -2 for Rebellion.

The merits behind this modified rule is that it reduces the number of loyalty checks that the player has to make every turn and further condenses the conditional modifiers to being less severe or time consuming to figure, which was a problem in previous iterations of the rules. Your average empire will only need to make 1-2 loyalty checks per turn, and a fully garrisoned home system is going to have a pretty low chance of losing Morale. Most colonies will have a 40% chance of losing Morale from a check if they don't have enough ground forces garrisoning them, but with the ground forces it goes down to 30%. The chance of gaining Morale is still very good (30% and 40%, respectively), which should balance that out.

Please give this a test run in one of your games or using data from a previous game and let me know how it works out. If it looks like it will work, I'll adopt a similar system for piracy that uses the number of systems in an empire's sphere of influence in place of Census to calculate the number of piracy checks an empire has to perform each turn.

UPDATE: Virtutis pointed out that Census obviously made more sense for the loyalty check roll than Morale. Good catch! Updated the rules accordingly.

[Vandervecken]

Thanks all for the updates.

Some fools think that 2012 is the year that the world will end; but I think 2012 is the year Empires (in Space) will begin ! With 'Starfire - Solar' and 'Starmada - Nova' already out and Victory by any Means - 2E out soon, the universe is ripe for the taking !

[Tyrel Lohr]

Some fools think that 2012 is the year that the world will end; but I think 2012 is the year Empires (in Space) will begin ! With 'Starfire - Solar' and 'Starmada - Nova' already out and Victory by any Means - 2E out soon, the universe is ripe for the taking !

We shall crush them with our combined armadas!

A quick follow up from last night: I did a bit more editing and reordering of content, nothing too major. Mostly it was the slow, monotonous grind of applying styles to tables in InDesign. It's slow going, but it's program. I'm also looking at possibly moving the system loyalty and piracy checks back to the "Playing the Game" chapter that walks through the sequence of play. I'm not entirely sold on the idea yet, but I'm thinking that it might more sense to have those there than buried in the Morale and Piracy rules. I have to see how things evolve as to which direction makes more sense.

Also, here's the adjusted list of system loyalty check modifiers that I've got in the book now:

• The colony is in a state of unrest (-1)
• The colony is in a state of rebellion (-2)
• The colony is under martial law (-2)
• The colony is an imperial or sector capital (+1)
• The colony’s owner doesn’t have an imperial capital (-1)
• The system contains a friendly luxury restort (+1)
• This is a conquered colony (-1)
• The system is blockaded (-1)
• The system lost one or more Census this turn (-3)
• The system’s owner lost a core world this turn (-1)
• The system’s owner captured or liberated a core world this turn (+1)
• The system is outside the zone of control of a friendly capital (-1)
• The colony’s empire is experiencing a civil war (-1)
• A friendly colony located within one jump of this system is in rebellion (-1)
• The total Command Cost of friendly ground forces deployed to the system is greater than or equal to its Census (+1)
• The total Command Cost of enemy ground forces deployed to the system is greater than or equal to its Census (-1)
• The total Police value possessed by friendly ground forces deployed to the system is greater than or equal to its Census (+1)
• The total Command Cost of pirate forces in the system is greater than or equal to its Census (-1)
• The system sustained bombardment this turn (-1)
• The system suffered a WMD attack this turn (-1)

The one I'm shaky on is the luxury resort modifier. I'm tempted to give it a different effect such as being able to re-roll a loyalty check in the system instead, or giving an extra +1 Morale any time the system gains Morale. What I'm most worried about is players just building luxury resorts everywhere just for the bonus, which I see as being a very likely exploit. Any input as to what you think would be a better potential modifier for luxury resorts?

On a related topic, here are my notes for how piracy checks would conform to a similar standard:

Piracy Table (1D10)
3 or less: Pirate Attack
4-6: Economic Loss
7 or more: No Effect

In this setup you end up with two effects from piracy instead of just one. The first is a pirate attack, which is the conventional way that VBAM has handled pirates since 1E. Just in this case what I'm looking at is instead of rolling on a separate table you instead takes 1D6 x Average Resources in the affected system. If your home system has 12 Capacity, 6 RAW, and 6 BIO, then you'd be looking at 1D6 x 8 EP or pirates forming as the result of a successful pirate attack. That's a significant number of units, but then the system is very resource rich and probably would attract a lot of unsavory activity.

The Economic Loss result demonstrates a loss of economic points as the result of piracy in a system, but doesn't place any actual pirate forces in the system. Again, you take 1D6 times the average of the system's resources to find out how many economic points you lost from the event this turn. This can be brutal when it hits a high value system, but it might still end up cheaper in the long run than if a similar cost of pirate units showed up in the system and you had to replace combat losses.

There's a possibility that the economic loss result might be a bit too severe, at which point changing to a D3 instead of D6 might work better, but overall the losses should be manageable and not a huge proportion of a system's overall income. Losing 24 EP at a home system would definitely hurt, but it's a one time expense that isn't going to happen with much frequency. A single system empire will only have a 10% chance per turn of requiring a piracy check, and empires with larger spheres of influence have a very good chance that one of their other systems is going to be the one affected by piracy.

As always I appreciate any thoughts or insights any of you might have as I work on getting this thing finished up.

[Iron Sky]

I would think Luxury Resorts would mostly be a financial thing - mechanical representations of the tourism industry. You could have them give EPs each turn based on the system's current Morale modifiers and the number of jump lanes connecting to it and add that to the systems Commerce rating. You might also limit that to systems with no hostile forces and/or pirate presence. If you have low enough Morale, they could end up costing you EP which might serve as a deterrent to putting them everywhere.

[virtutis.umbra]

If the intent of Luxury Resorts is to generate better System Loyalty outcomes, then it makes sense that they ought to have a high enough Maintenance Cost to be preferable only in important systems - if they're too cheap then they will indeed be built everywhere - but cost must also be low enough to be cheaper than just buying Intel Points and throwing Propaganda / Counter-Insurgency / whatever Morale-boosting missions at the problem, or no one will bother. Making it mechanically different from a simple Morale bonus isn't a bad idea:

I think a Luxury Resort installation that generates revenue for the empire is an interesting idea, but now we're looking at two different intended effects: a way for the government to spend money to affect citizen happiness vs a way for the government to make money by eliciting citizen consumption.

If those are both cool things that we want in the core game then they need to be named differently from one another rather than conflated. I sort of feel as if the second concept is covered by the idea of commerce and trade, though, since that already generates revenue for the empire on the basis, presumably, of delivering goods and services to places that demand them. Maybe a "Luxury Resort" that improves tax revenues is just a form of a space/ground station with the Trade ability?

In any case, since Iron Sky's observation underscores how "Luxury" has the double meaning of taxable goods and recreational activity maybe you don't want to call a Loyalty-affecting installation a "Luxury Resort" necessarily.

You could go with Imperial Resort (skinned, as appropriate to the particular empire's flavor, to Pleasure Dome or Gladiatorial Murderball Arena or Ministry of Public Happiness or National Public Radio Headquarters or ...). Whatever it's called, it improves the results of system loyalty checks for a fixed maintenance cost.