VBAM 2E hit a juncture earlier this year where I had to take a very close look at it and decide where it was headed. The rules version that I had originally envisioned was an all-in-one omnibus that would have consolidated most of the 1E campaign rules into a revised edition that would put all of the rules in one place for easy reference. The reality of the situation, however, is that the rules became too unwieldy in that form and gave players information overload. It got to the point that the rules were becoming extremely overwhelming with too many details being thrown at players.
The last four months have been spent trying to pare the 2E Campaign Guide back down to a more sensible size. Most of the advanced and optional rules will be moved to the 2E Companion so that the main Campaign Guide can focus on the core campaign system rules.
In this wave of edits I ended up having to find final solutions to several existing problems from 1E and the previous 2E versions. The first was establishing extra consistency for how system statistics interacted with colony outputs. Prior to this point you had a mishmash of ways of figuring colony capacities, with some multiplying a colony stat by a system stat and others instead multiplying by colony stats. It was a mess. Now things are standardized so that you take a utilized colony statistic times a system statistic. Here are the main colony capacities:
Economic Capacity: Utilized Productivity x RAW
Production Capacity: Utilized Productivity x RAW
Shipyard Capacity: Utilized Shipyards x RAW
Agriculture Capacity: Utilized Agriculture x Biosphere
Tech Capacity: Utilized Tech x Science
Intel Capacity: Utilized Intel x Jump Lanes
As you can see, Science and Jump Lanes are new system statistics. Jump Lanes is just the number of jump lanes connecting to the system, but Science is an entirely new statistic that describes how suitable a system is for conducting scientific research. Admittedly it isn’t perfect to have Science as its own statistic, but it plays to the sci-fi tropes and — more importantly — it makes sure that each infrastructure type ties back to a system statistic for purposes of measuring its effectiveness.
The tech leveling and unit design rules have also been reverted to an earlier version. Negative tech levels have been removed from the game (low tech powers will be treated in a fashion similar to 1E, and be included in the Companion), and each tech level now gives you a flat +10% mass unit increase. This makes calculating the number of mass units available when designing new units easier, and it also allows the tech level scale to be extended more easily. A TL 40 empire (+400% mass bonus) can build ships that are 5x as powerful as built by a TL 0 power. In the previous 2E draft the TL 40 power would be close to the 8x strength level.
I have finally arrived at an intel solution that I am mostly happy with. Intel has been a huge sticking point from 1E onwards, and I’ve tested several different options with varying degrees of success. The current model is that players use colonial intel capacity to purchase intel points (1 intel point costs 1 economic point, as before). These intel points are then spent to initiate intel missions. An intel mission’s cost is equal to 10 times its mission difficulty, so a 2 difficulty mission costs 20 intel points to start. The number of campaign turns it takes for a mission to be completed is equal to the distance between the source and target colonies. Utilized Intel is assigned to a mission to determine its chances of success. Mission success chance is calculated by taking the total utilized Intel assigned to the mission divided by the sum of the mission’s difficulty and the amount of utilized Intel in the target system (this is defensive intel).
Adding a time delay to intel missions makes it so that players have to plan out their actions more, and any utilized Intel assigned to one mission is unavailable until the mission is completed. Intel points are still in the mix as the currency used to pay for intel missions. I had debated removing intel points altogether, but I think it is better to keep them around so that special empire or species abilities can continue to manipulate them separately from a player’s money supply. Forcing players to buy intel points for later use also adds another resource that has to be managed into the mix.
Rules discussions in January also spurred a final change to how population growth is achieved in 2E. The current rules base the number of population points an empire earns each turn from its colonies to the amount of excess agriculture points it produces. Empires with plentiful food supplies will therefore experience more population growth than those that can barely feed all of their Census. As with Science this change is more of a game mechanic issue than anything else, but I like it because it makes population growth easier to track while at the same time giving players a reason to compete for high Biosphere systems.
Speaking of system competition, it is important to point out that the system statistics now include Carrying Capacity, RAW, Biosphere, Science, and Jump Lanes. Three of these existed in 1E, although Jump Lanes was not considered a system statistic until now. RAW remains the most important system resource, but Biosphere is now needed for population growth, Science for tech research, and Jump Lanes for intelligence gathering and trade. Even if a system has a bad RAW value, it might possess an abundance of one or more of the other statistics which make it worth colonizing.
One other significant structural change to the 2E rules is a reversal back to the 1E layout of having the bulk of the rules laid out in an order that follow the sequence of play for a campaign turn. Rules that don’t relate directly to the sequence of play, such as rules for star systems, colonies, and empires, are presented in their own chapters, but most of the rules appear in the third chapter, much as in 1E. I resisted doing this for the longest time so that all of the rules of a certain type could be consolidated, but this style does make it easier for the players to logically step through a campaign turn in order with all of the relevant rules provided in the correct order.
What I am currently doing is doing another pass through the old draft documents to see if there are any rules leftover that need converted into the current version of the rules or copied and pasted into the Companion document for resolution in that supplement. Once I have isolated and saved all important rule stubs I am going to finish off the draft document, send it around to the usual suspects, and then do some final testing before getting the book finished and out the door.
The end result of the changes to the book is that the Campaign Guide itself will have about the same amount of rules as the original version, but with updated rules that will hopefully add a bit more strategic depth and fix many of the problems encountered by players in 1E. The advanced rules (i.e., the ones I actually enjoy writing) will then be moved to secondary products to make the book flow better. I am not done pruning yet, and there is a good chance that more of the diplomacy rules will get cut back or that some intel missions that need more testing might be deferred to a later book.
With the content cuts, the Campaign Guide is currently sitting at about 90 pages before adding in scenarios and map generation text. The CSCR also needs a final update to reflect recent changes, but that might actually end up reducing page count as some simplifications are implemented. The final book should end up being around the 120-130 page size of the original 1E book. There is going to be less interior art this time around, however, so it should be more content dense than before.
The one spot of bright news is that we do have cover artwork completed for the first four books — the bad news is that we have to get the 2E rules done first before we can get these published.
