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

[darbycmcd]

I think they look really good. They seem much more focused. I really like the 'Detection' and 'Surprise' interaction. i think that opens up some interesting game possibilities. You could have sensor platforms which give bonus to a side, but could be vulnerable to sabatoge missions... it is great.

it is a small thing but i also really like the integrated example in the system section.

i like the way maintenence is calculated on mass rather than cost. it will make high tech fleets relatively smaller than low tech, which is a good thing i think. it is clever and has nice game consequences.

i am curious about why you decided to drop intra-empire commerce? i don't have an opinion on it, but i am just curious.

anyway, this really seems like a big step forward. thanks for sharing it.

[Tyrel Lohr]

I think they look really good. They seem much more focused. I really like the 'Detection' and 'Surprise' interaction. i think that opens up some interesting game possibilities. You could have sensor platforms which give bonus to a side, but could be vulnerable to sabatoge missions... it is great.

I know the Surprise/Readiness issue was a sticking point for you in the previous draft, and that is something that Jay and I sat down to try and hammer out some solutions to. The current version of the rules seems to make more sense in this regards, as you roll for detection to see how well you can detect each other and then that in turn influences the actual surprise modifiers.

Walking through the Federation Admiral rules from that point, Jay and I were able to figure out a way to make his surprise and advantages system work with 2E -- and they seem to work very well. The best change there is that rolling poorly for surprise doesn't necessarily mean the battle is going to be a complete washout. The die roll modifiers only affect the first turn of combat when they're present, and moving all of that to the advantages seems to work better. The advantages do need to be solidified and their prices locked down, but it is a good step forward.

i like the way maintenence is calculated on mass rather than cost. it will make high tech fleets relatively smaller than low tech, which is a good thing i think. it is clever and has nice game consequences.

This was the best way I could find to handicap the more advanced empires and keep them from completely dominating a game. They can still build the units cheaper, but the extra maintenance cost prevents them from fielding quite as many at one time or concentrating them into a single force as easily.

As a solo player, part of the upshot from this is that any random high tech power that you come across (Minbari, Dominion, Shivans, etc.) hopefully won't have a strong enough economy to completely overwhelm you with ships, but their units will be decidedly better than anything a less advanced empire can throw at it.

i am curious about why you decided to drop intra-empire commerce? i don't have an opinion on it, but i am just curious.

Talking with Jay, it appears that his original intention was that you couldn't trade with your own colonies, but at some point in 1E development that floodgate was opened (for good or ill). After some additional deliberations, and looking at rules options, it appeared that it made more sense to restrict commerce to foreign colonies but widen the net to make it easier to actually conduct trade at those colonies.

Mechanically, another advantage to going this route was that it gave Census more to do, and more importantly gives players a reason to establish high Census colonies along the borders to manage its trade operations.

Credit goes to Stephen Rider for the core of the new commerce rules. He contributed these after the last round of internal playtesting when I roped him in to test out some of the new rules.


The goal for this weekend is to finish the diplomacy rule update. Then I'll move on and get the military chapter finished, including finalizing the special abilities and figuring out if there are any other important ones I've missed.

One thing of note: while it isn't made clear in the current draft, some playtesting has made us decide to set the Carrier ability to a cost of 1 MU and allow 1 Carrier to base 1 CC of flights. This means that a 5 Carrier unit can carry anywhere from 5 EP of flights to 25 EP of flights, which is a wide variance, but actual combat tests seemed to indicate that it wasn't as unbalanced as I originally thought. If maxed out on "heavy fighters", a pure carrier force versus a pure cruiser force ended up being pretty evenly matched. The larger the battle the more it favored the cruisers.

The biggest impact that fighters seem to have on the rules is that it forces an opponent to split their PD fire between formation level increases and anti-fighter fire. The lack of defensive fire available for formation improvements makes the opponent's ships easier to damage, but fighters usually pretty easy to destroy and/or don't have that much firepower compared to a cruiser.

The strategic implications of carrier warfare also means that while small battles against carriers can be very deadly, the carrier force has to get replacement fighters from somewhere; this isn't 1E where fighters could magically teleport to the carriers that are within supply range. This means that the carrier force must either constantly be moving itself back to a colony to pick up new fighters or else rely on transports or other carriers to ferry the fighters to the front lines.

Another aspect of the 1 EP fighter vs 5 EP fighter both fitting in 1 Carrier slot is that the more expensive flight is going to take 3 turns to build, whereas a 1-2 EP flight only requires 1 turn to build. When it comes down to filling fighter bays in a hurry it might become a necessity to rely on the cheaper flights.

[virtutis.umbra]

I didn't want to pollute the December playtest thread with this, but I started inputting the starting TL0 designs you listed there into the unit construction spreadsheet you so-kindly provided... I noticed the Heavy Atmospheric Fighter doesn't auto-calculate to the same stats as what you provided, vis:

Code: Select all

Heavy Atmospheric Fighter
C$ 3, M$ 1, BT 2, TL 0 Flight
DV 2, AS 1, PD 1, CR 1, CC 1
Atmospheric

Spreadsheet-Mediated Hvy Atm. Ftr.
C$ 3, M$ 2, BT 2, TL 0 Flight
DV 2, AS 1, PD 1, CR 2, CC 1
Atmospheric

... CR and M$ end up one point higher each the way the sheet calculates them. Did you just offset those two to make the heavy fighter more fighter-y? Or is there a design mechanic I'm missing beyond p.63?

Code: Select all

CR = C$ / 2 (round up)
CC = C$ / 5 (round up)

[Tyrel Lohr]

Ah, yes, well... that would be called I didn't transfer the information over correctly from the spreadsheet when I was drawing up the stat blocks. I was copying and pasting and got a bit carried away. I'll go fix that.

Also, on a related topic, the decision was made to leave flights with command factors so that they could be used as task force flagships and be included independently in a task force without their carriers present. This will be spelled out when I finish the military chapter and finish nailing down the fighter rules firmly to the wall.

This allows the rules to replicate campaign settings like Wing Commander or Babylon 5 where a player might not want to send the carrier itself out to fight a battle, and would prefer to perform an interception with their fighters instead. This would be especially true of a situation where an enemy is trying to hunt down your carrier and you don't want to make it available for the scenario. If the enemy has enough advantage he can still force the issue and include the carrier, but otherwise he can evade and use fighters to keep the enemy away.

[virtutis.umbra]

Hey it's cool man The rest all look great. And the concept of CR > 1 flight units that can command task groups for Wing Commander-style fighter missions sounds SWEET. I like the notion that flights are, design-wise, just 'small starships.' For instance they're cheaper to make Atmospheric precisely because they're smaller, and that's trivially baked into the rules without the need for a 'fighters are special' concept. And you could run yet further with the Wing Commander concept and put together an advanced "leader's fighter" with Command/Jammer/EW capabilities to bring useful auxiliary capabilities to bear without needing to drag the carrier along.

I wonder if there WOULD be room for some starship/flight modification that allows a ship to forgo CR in favor of, say, additional MU or something like that... for cases where you want the heavy fighter or bomber, but the extra CR isn't any use to your particular tactical doctrine.

Strike
-1 CR; +1 MU. Cannot be taken if it would reduce CR to zero or less.

[Tyrel Lohr]

Elite officers are perfect for the Wing Commander-style settings, too, because a lot of the special features/functions that you would want out of the fighters could be achieved with your ace pilots. Combine that with things like the Raptors from BSG that are basically command flights and you can have a pretty interesting mix of flight units.

Allowing a unit to forgo CR in exchange for a MU boost is an interesting idea, though and one that isn't too breakable on quick inspection. My biggest concern would be the min/max possibility of taking your fighters or gunboats and cranking CR to 0 and using the points to make them incredibly powerful.

A fairer ability might be a special ability called Civilian that would halve your CR (round down) and effectively increase your construction cost by X% for purposes of calculating available MU. It would be something you'd might do if you wanted to design some civilian-grade hardware, but not something you would do as a matter of course.

[nimrodd]

What is the max Tech Points that can be purchased each turn? The only place I can find a reference to the max is on page 10, and it says "Utilized Tech times Science", which is no longer used AFAIK.

Should it now be Utilized Productivity x Tech?

[nimrodd]

Intel Missions: On page 41, in the second column, the 4th full paragraph, it states:

To determine a mission's chance of success, take the number of intel points assigned to the mission and divide it by 10 times the total of the mission's difficulty level (round fractions down). This difficulty level is increased by 5 per point of Intel infrastructure in the target system. The result is the mission's percentage chance of success.

It looks like you have already increased the difficulty levels by 10, so the underlined items above should be removed, at least from the way I understand the 2 examples on this page.

[nimrodd]

It looks like the maximum Intel Points you can purchase in one turn is equal to your total Tech Infrastructure, per page 10. Is this correct?

This is the only infrastructure that is not multiplied by anything else, correct?

[Tyrel Lohr]

What is the max Tech Points that can be purchased each turn? The only place I can find a reference to the max is on page 10, and it says "Utilized Tech times Science", which is no longer used AFAIK.

Should it now be Utilized Productivity x Tech?

Crap, I copied and pasted that text in there without double checking to see if they still had rule references in them. I'm going to rewrite those and get them fixed. The Colonies chapter contains the correct information on all of these. Namely, the maximum number of tech points you can purchase is Tech x Census, and the maximum number of intel points you can purchase is equal to Intel x Census.

The population point information here is also wrong. Population points earned is equal to excess food production, and the cost of colonization and population increases is a flat 50 PP.

It looks like you have already increased the difficulty levels by 10, so the underlined items above should be removed, at least from the way I understand the 2 examples on this page.

I'd removed this from the diplomatic missions text but missed it here. This is now fixed.


Sheets for the first turn have been sent to nimrodd and virtutis.umbra.

[nimrodd]

Again on page 10, it looks like you left the old calculation in Population Point.

An empire automatically earns a number of population points each turn equal to 10% of its unused agriculture capacity (round up). These points are generated and placed into the power’s population pool during the Agriculture Phase.

This contradicts page 47, which says that leftover Agriculture Points are traded in at 1-for-1 for Population Points.

[nimrodd]

I was just looking for the Assault ability to see what it does, but it is not listed in the Special Abilities section any more, although it is still referenced in the CSCR section, as well as being on your spreadsheet at a cost of 1 mass unit.

I was looking to see what it does as far as starship go, meaning how many units does 1 Assault value transport? 1 C$ of unit, 1 CC of unit or 1 unit?

For Ground Troops, I see in the Ground Combat section (p77) that it gives troops +1 to both AS & PD during Invasions.

[Tyrel Lohr]

As you pointed out in the other thread, the text from page 10 is a copy-and-paste error with bad data that I need to go in and update to reflect the current rules. I had forgotten that I had put rules mechanics into the resource descriptions, and I think what I'll do is just remove the specifics from those rules and leave things fairly generic with rules references to the applicable chapters later in the book.

As for Assault, it and many of the other special abilities are still being written as I finish readjusting their effects. Right now the answer to the question is that non-ground forces with Assault can carry 1 CC of troops per point of Assault value, while the ground forces get the +1 AS/PD bonus in Invasion Scenarios. I am debating on further restricting the carrying to starships and starbases only, or else increasing the cost of the ability for flights as otherwise it becomes too easy for a player to turn a carrier into a giant troop hauler by basing nothing bout 2-3 Assault / 1 CC flights.

Before the latest revisions, the Carrier, Cargo, and Assault abilities used construction cost instead of command cost for basing limits, but this was changed for two reasons. It made large units prohibitively burdensome to transport, and the concentration of force for smaller units made them most effective combat option. At the same time, I didn't want to vastly increase the mass cost of these abilities because then it became very hard to build a carrier or transport that could carry anything. Carriers in particular were susceptible because of this, owing to the fact that flights are still pretty fragile (they don't benefit from formation bonuses) and are easily destroyed, so you need to be able to carry enough of them to make up for combat losses.

[nimrodd]

Carriers in particular were susceptible because of this, owing to the fact that flights are still pretty fragile (they don't benefit from formation bonuses) and are easily destroyed, so you need to be able to carry enough of them to make up for combat losses.

On page 85, under Point Defense Phase: Anti-Fighter Fire:

Anti-Fighter Fire
One of the primary uses of Point Defense is to engage and eliminate enemy flights. The number of PD points required to score 1 damage against an enemy flight is equal to its formation level.
// Anti-Fighter units get +1 PD for purposes of AF fire.

This appears to imply that flights can benefit from formation levels.

[Tyrel Lohr]

I'll get that fixed tonight.

Playtest Update: I worked until 7 PM last night and then crashed, so I didn't get anything done on 2E at all. I hope to get done with work by 5 PM today, so I should have a few hours to work on things tonight. That means getting turn files out and fixing some of the issues that Jimmy has pointed out in the rules.