Commerce Value & Raiding Chance

[Tyrel Lohr]

Relating to Gareth's topic on Q-Ships, I thought I would post my idea for a way to simplify raiding chances to a degree.

The first concept to put forward is that of the Commerce Value. This is equal to the total output of all colonies in a system, including any modifiers from Trade resources or Starports. This value is added to the Base Raiding Chance, which would probably be about 10.

For example, Sol has a total output of 60 so, if your static modifier was 10, it would have a Raiding Chance of 70%.

Each civilian fleet in a system would increase this value by 5%. If we had 5 civilian fleets in the system, the Base Raiding Chance would increase to 95%.

Then you would add in modifiers for you military forces in the system. Presently, I have had this be equal to the construction cost of the mobile units in the system. So if you had 60 EP of ships and fighters in the system, then the raiding chance would reduce to 10%.

Units with the Police ability would subtract an additional percent per point of Police Rating.

The minimum Raiding Chance is 1%.

So far this rule has worked good in my campaigns. It is easy to figure and keep track of, for one thing, and doesn't require all the goofy lookup factors that the existing raiding chance rules suffer from.