It has been over a month since the last update, and the rules have undergone some major alterations and revisions since then. I had started a new blog post about them last week, but never got around to actually posting it — which is for the best, because I spent this last weekend editing printed out versions of chapters 5 through 9 and making some decisions on what rules are going to stay in 2E and which are going to be going away.

• First up on the chopping block is the major/minor failure/success campaign check system. After additional playtesting I have come to the conclusion that the effects granted by the system are not worth the hassle involved. Campaign checks are going back to a simple binary pass/fail mechanic which should make them easier to resolve. Campaign checks will still be resolved on a D100 roll; this holdover is maintained because it meshes better with some of our other rules and statistics. Degree of success/failure will still sometimes have an effect on a check, but this will be on a case-by-case basis. For example, the workaround for intel mission detection I came up with last week was to go back to Jay’s original detection rules from 1E where a mission is detected if the roll is less than half or greater than twice the target number. This works better than having to make a separate, arbitrary detection roll.
• Speaking of Intel, both intel and diplomacy are receiving an overhaul insofar as the tracking of intel and diplomacy points are concerned. In previous 2E rules drafts these resources had to be used on the same turn that they were generated, which forced the player to “use them or lose them.” However, this was inconsistent with the rest of the campaign rules where campaign resources cannot be spent on the same turn they are earned but are instead “banked” into empire pools so that the player can spend them on future turns. Now, intel and diplomacy points will be placed into an empire’s Intel and Diplomacy Pools, respectively, so that players can build a reserve of these resources.
• Defensive Intel has been restructured to provide a blanket penalty to all intel missions launched against the defended power. While a large empire with enough intel points available can spend enough of them each turn to make it extremely difficult for an opponent to successfully conduct successful intel missions against it, this constant outlay of intel points will restrict the empire’s ability to conduct intel missions of its own.
• Considering diplomacy, I am considering the current Relationship system — which is more or less the same as that from the 1E Companion — so that it has a neutral balancing point of 0 rather than 50. I still have to review the situation and see if that is viable or not, but I think logically it makes more sense for true neutrality to be pegged to 0. This would allow positive Relationship values to reflect good relations and negative Relationship values to demonstrate deteriorating relations.
• The tech system continues to be an elusive beast, and it is probably the part of this project that has eaten up more time an energy than anything else relating to Second Edition. The original goal was to have a broad set of controlling technologies (the equivalent of the macro technologies found in the Starmada Edition) with a group of subordinate micro technologies. Each “macro technology” increase would provide the player with a miniaturization bonus for all associated micro technologies during unit design, which means that the cost to add weapons to units would be lower for those empires with high Weapons tech levels.

  The problem with this is game balance and effect. Early miniaturization formulas were overly complicated and had tech costs that were disproportionate to their benefit. We also had played around with researching tech levels on a per-micro improvement basis, which ended up being a bookkeeping nightmare and a real imposition when it came time to actually trying to build a new unit. The next step was to simplify by just assigning tech levels to the six main equipment types (Structural, Propulsion, Electronics, Weapons, Basing, Support). This worked fairly well, but we still had issues with miniaturization formulas.

  I left the tech rules to simmer while I went back to edit and review other portions of the rules. The biggest problem that I personally have with the current direction that the tech rules are going is that they seem to be overly complicated for what they are aiming to do. While I like the concept of having separate tech levels for each of the six macro technologies, as this allows an empire to clearly specialize in one area of technology or another, another part of me remembers my own early VBAM campaigns where all I cared about was getting a bit of a stat bonus as my “Tech Year” improved. This kind of simple tech advancement can be achieved by increasing a unit’s maximum mass based on your empire’s tech level rather than worrying about miniaturizing equipment technologies. The downside is that all empires would have equal costs for all six equipment types, but the upshot is that unit design becomes extremely simple and the cost of all equipment technologies would not vary.

  I plan on testing some of the simplified methods and seeing what works best. There is a good chance that the simplest solution will be the one used in the 2E Campaign Guide, with more advanced options being pushed back to a future campaign supplement.

• The system generation option rules are going to be rewritten this week to reorganize them along new lines. The predefined system generation options from 1E (Commander, Captain, Commodore, Admiral) will still exist as archetypes, but they are no longer going to be overtly referred to within the rules. Instead, each of the individual system generation options will be broken out and defined so that players and CMs can choose the exact set of individual options they want to use in their campaigns. Originally I had intended to keep the old 1E system alive, but in editing and revising the system and planet generation rules it became apparent that the better solution is to directly reference the specific system generation options so that it is clear which steps are to be carried out for your campaign depending on the rules used in your campaign. For example, a campaign that uses the Detailed Star Data sysgen option would have to roll for spectral type, luminosity class, etc. during system generation, but a campaign that doesn’t use this sysgen option would skip this step.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 9:13 am and is filed under General, News & Events, Playtesting, Upcoming Game Status, VBAM Campaign System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.