Ohey, on the topic of Arms Races, what do people think of an Interplanetary Arms Race?
One system, 2 colonies, and 7 planets between them in 3 lines. (Lane 2 only has 2 planets as well as the only non-colony habitable planet).
The background is that Earth sent sleeper colony ships to a system a fairly small amount of years before the game starts. Both sides, representing one of the two colonies, start with the exact same things and same terrain. There's a lore reason for this - both colonies were part of the same expedition and haven't had time to develop a unique technology set or culture.
So people just start out with a crappy unarmored space suit, expensive interplanetary transport craft, crappier pistol, and an expensive large radio beacon for interplanetary communication that they can't even bring to new planets. And some also crappy Kevlar armor, but that's extremely expensive and only limited to habitable planets. (So either the one planet in Lane 2 or the colonies themselves).
I've changed a few mechanics from the regular Arms Race "ruleset":
- Less abstraction of military assets - Each colony has 5 "units" very roughly representing a battalion and accompanying support+logistic structures. Units can be sent to different planets.
- Different Expense system - When rolling for expense (designs roll for Effectiveness, Expense, and Bugs like in Wands Race + probably other games too), you just get a d5 plus some modifiers based on what you're trying to do. The end expense level is the number of Units that can be equipped with that design. So if your Death Ray has an Expense Level of 2, only 2 units can have it equipped. The actual distribution in a single equipped Unit is just "reasonable". If you give a unit tanks, they're going to have a detachment of tanks in their Unit; not everyone gets a tank. Etc.
- Transport - In addition to lanes (weird for taking place in a solar system, but whatever), equipment (designs) and Units must be transported via interplanetary craft. Spacecraft have a CU level representing their total cargo capacity. Units weigh 2 CU, Resources weigh 3 CU, and designs have variable CU costs.
Research Points - Instead of separate Design/Revision phases, there's one "Research Phase" in which each Colony gets 100 Research Points. A Design costs 75 RP and a Revision 25 RP. Research points can be saved between turns up to a total of 200. In the Strategy phase people can also choose to spend 10 RP to give a Unit some special orders.
And as far as I know, the entire thing's ready for posting. To be 100% honest, I'm not sure if I can completely handle the commitment but worst case scenario I'll either hand it off or people won't be interested anyways. I mostly wanted to get some feedback to the systems before I posted it.
So; thoughts?
EDIT: Changed Research Points. It's frankly a bit too gimmick-y for the complexity it adds.
(@Ocean: See the Warhammer 40k orcs.)