Good, I'm ok with making judgement calls but just wanted to make sure I hadn't done anything too crazy.The process you went through for creating the new emerging empire looks right, Will. There is a bit of manipulation that you have to do to get things right, and it's really up to the player/CM to decide which systems to explore and where to place them on the map, or how to handle dead ends like the one you ran into in Van Maanen.
Based on my experiences with the Terrans I would have said that 3 food/census was ok, but seeing the bind the Geidi Empire is in I'm thinking that 2 food/census does make more sense. BIO is still rarer than Raw so it makes BIO 3+ planets valuable.It's nice to see that the Geidi Empire does have two systems that are capable of producing some food. I really think we'll need to roll back to 2 food per Census (versus 3 food per Census) to allow for faster population growth to relieve the population bottlenecks that we've run into in the current batch of playtest games.
Ok, must have missed that.The rules say to take the highest AG of the two and divide by 4, rounding down, to find the percentage chance of a first contact war occurring.
Whew, that makes things easier! I will go with this system. The one question I have is that when the Geidi jumped into The Vortex they have 'seen' the Jump Lane the Terrans had explored. Should they have 'known' there was another alien power out there at that point?For the sake of player sanity, every jump lane that is explored is explored for everyone.
Whoa, I had calculated this very wrong. I see the chances for war were much less than I thought. I will keep the current Bran/Geidi war but I'll make sure to use the right calculation in the future!The Geidians chance of declaring war is calculated by taking its AG - Relationship and then multiplying the result by 10% (round to nearest). This gives them (55 - (-5)) x 10% = 6% chance per turn of declaring war. Once the war is declared, however, the scope of the conflict is limited by its effective relationship (this really needs a better name), which at the current level is -10.
Argh, I could look at changing it back if it doesn't foul things up too badly....Bah, I thought I had trimmed that out. It is in fact Utilized Industry x 5 right now (though I really want another system resource to govern that).
I have some other thoughts on this topic I'll post in the system stats thread. The basic idea is that I like using the industrial capacity for supply (not maintenance), and supply depots just 'extend' this supply capability to over jump lanes.The supply limit is on a system-by-system basis for cases where you have units operating outside of the supply range of a supply depot. Therefore a system that has 25 industrial capacity (5 Utilized Industry x 5) could maintain up to 25 CC of military units even if there isn't a friendly supply depot nearby to keep them in supply. It patches a problem with how supply used to work and allows colonies that are outside of your supply lines to still resupply units using their own industrial capacity.
Something along these lines would work I think. I think 5 EP per die roll mod makes more sense in this case, or maybe 5 EP + 1/jump EP. I'll try a system along these lines in the future. This also can brings up another rules question; can you run diplomatic missions if you don't have communications? For damaging relations this makes sense, but maybe not for improving relations.Okay, this is some good situational testing and is brining up things that I hadn't considered. Specifically, the contested system stipulation needs to be removed, at least for the damage relations mission.
-Will