Over the last few days, Tyrel and I have been having a conversation regarding nomadic races. I came up with a few ideas to allow nomadic races into a campaign, and Tyrel came up with ways to refine it, and we've both decided to give you an idea of what we've got, to see if any of you have any ideas...
So, what do you think? I've included the relevant parts of the emails to allow you to see where we startedI said:
The Fabrication Bay is just like a medical bay, and has no value in a
purely tactical game. But one Fabrication Bay is not enough--for use in
VBAM campaigns, you require 10 Fabrication Bays to achieve one level of
Fabrication. Fabrication (10) enables one level of Productivity to be
used.
Tyrel said:
Would it be worth combining the Fabrication ability with the existing Mobile
Construction ability and creating a new, consolidated Construction ability?
Then you could have one construction capacity equal to Construction rating,
and maybe limit the number of dock spaces to DV divided by 2 (round up)? The
old Mobile Construction maximum should still be included somehow, so that
the nomadic/mobile Construction units can't build enormous starships all by
themselves. It would probably be sufficient to just say they can't build a
unit that costs more than their Construction rating.
Given those states, a Construction (10) unit with DV 7 could spend up to 10
EP on units, and would have a total of 4 dock spaces available. So it could
build some 2 EP corvettes/gunboats each turn, or a whole horde of fighters.
I said:
The Ore Extraction Unit is a catchall term for mining shuttles, processors
and the like. It takes up 100 SUs and has no value in a S:X game.
Tyrel said:
Extraction is probably a better term than the "Remote Mining" I had bandied
around in my mind. One-word or easily abbreviated names work best for these
abilities.
As for how it works, would it be best to say that 10 Extraction rating would
be equal to 1 Productivity? I think you would almost want to handle
fractional Productivity from Extraction units though, too, so that a handful
of surviving Extraction units could still pull resources out of a high RAW
planet.
My changes above shift the Productivity to Extraction units, and then leave
the Fabrication/Construction units to do the actual building.
I am worried that the Extraction efficiency may need to be increased to 5:1
for Extraction rating to Productivity provided in order to make it cost
effective. An average set of Extraction units should be able to pull enough
income from a RAW 2 world to cover their maintenance cost plus 1 EP extra to
pay towards upkeep or construction of other units. 5:1 works better for that
than 10:1. At 5:1, you could have 5 frigate-sized mining ships with a 1/6
maintenance cost pulling in 2 EP from the planet.
The next problem is whether nomadic income, or income from Extraction units
otherwise, should ever be halved during Peacetime. I don't think it should
be halved for nomads, as they need all of the income they can get. For
non-nomads, though, you don't want them to abuse the rules to be able to
effectively get full production simply by putting cheap mining units
everywhere.
A possible solution to that problem would be to require 1 Census per
Productivity point provided by Extraction units. Most normal powers wouldn't
bother with building ships with enough Passenger rating to move Census, or
want to jeopardize them by ferrying them around aboard ships. That would
effectively limit the use to true nomads. It would also make nomad
populations very valuable.
I said:
Now that sounds like a good idea, and would allow many vessels with the
capacity to place one Extraction unit onboard to utilise the RAW and
generate EPs.
Tyrel said:
That's the idea. That way you could have small remote mining ships, the type
of which might be owned by a small independent mining firm; or you could
have the enormous "world strippers" of the nomadic fleets that have the
Extraction potential to act as a Productivity point all on their own.
I said:
That was my intention when conceiving of a single ship like the ship in
the novel Unto Leviathan, which was a massive colony ship. But I like the
idea. So what do you think? Good idea or not?
Tyrel said:
I think the concept is sound, and after thinking about it some more I think
the perfect balance is 5 Extraction = 1 Productivity, with a max equal to
system Carrying Capacity. You just need 1 Census in the system to utilize
that Productivity in order to generate the income to then spend aboard
Construction vessels to make purchases.
Under those rules, a single large "mothership" unit could carry Census,
Construction and Extraction equipment and be more or less self-sustaining.
