Level Zero ForumsHistorical Kickstarter page (Successfully funded on Kickstarter March 30th, 225% over its original $16,000 goal.) -
Read descriptions of the mechanics straight from the CEO's mouth here!Steam Greenlight PageBacker Prototype Release: June 2013 (
Video here)
Full release: Q1 2014
Welcome to the year 2043. Humanity has bridged the gap between man and machine, pulling us into an age beyond the reach of conventional law. Megacorporations now govern their own territories within nations, and the benefits of the corporate lifestyle are enjoyed by the "bitizens". In Net Gain, the player takes on the role of a corporate broker, hired by a powerful conglomerate to sabotage their competitors by any means. You’re in charge of investigating targets, planning missions, assembling teams, and leading the operation to success. All in a world that’s rapidly changing every day…
Net Gain is a window and text-based corporate espionage sim. You, the Broker, have been hired by your corporation and are responsible for plotting and running schemes against rival corporations and their assets, from the ground up. To me it's what would happen if Uplink by Introversion Software and Liberal Crime Squad did the nasty and had a baby.
The game takes place in two distinct phases, although they occur in the same game space. The first is planning, where you send operatives out to collect intelligence on different potential targets. Targets like new scientific research, new technology, valuable personnel, owned natural resources, entire businesses or vulnerabilities that can be exploited for an advantage.
As you build up intel on target, you can "spend" it on formulating plots to undertake against them. You get a list of potential Plots based on several factors, like what kind of target it is, what skills your operatives are good at and other things. Targets are usually surrounded by at least several layers of security. These might be anything from the security of the sector the target is located in, to the physical security around it, to the digital security that blocks it off. Each ring of security will have to have an associated Plot so it can be safely bypassed.
The second phase begins when you've defined your Plots and now want to execute them. You select operatives, who you have retained the services of after recruiting them from a pool of applicants, who have skills relevant to the Plot at hand. When you execute a Plot, the game compares the stats of the operative and makes some rolls, and they'll succeed or fail. Occasionally, however, random events will occur, requiring you the Broker to decide how the Operative proceeds. A guard might be close to blowing their cover, for example, or the operative might be falling for the target they're supposed to be seducing. Your operative might have uncovered some sensitive data during a hack and wants to know if they should risk going for it. Or things might have gone tits up, and you need to decide how your Operatives should escape.
Your Operatives' success or failure also depends on the challenge at hand, their relevant skills and equipment and their available Resources. An Operative's Resources are represented as a pool, which is an abstraction of the guns, armor, gadgets and even cybernetics they use. Equipped gear makes it so they can spend this Resource pool when challenges come up during plots, allowing them guaranteed success OR a fighting chance against stiff odds provided they have the right gear for the challenge. These Resource pools get refilled from your corporate slush fund, i.e. your war chest. If plots go wrong, they may change into new plots, where your Operatives need to escape during car chases or being hunted by kill teams, where you'll have to decide their method of survival.
If your plots succeed, your corp's stock will increase, you'll see news items show up in the ticker about your recent actions and an increase in your funding. Succeed enough, and eventually you'll get access to the War Room, a command center where you can hire support staff to enhance your operations, increasing the effectiveness and rate of Intel collection, better logistics and better training facilities for your Operatives. You'll even be able to recruit Operatives to act as middle management, imparting bonuses to your plots.
Fail, and you'll see your Operatives killed or wounded and demoralized, your resources squandered, and your corp's Power in the Market go down, reducing the Budget you can work with. Fail enough, and you'll generate
Heat. There may be Heat on your intended target, making future Plots harder to pull off. There may be Heat on the Operative, which could leads to Plots against them. Or there could be Heat on you and/or your corp! Its Reputation might suffer or it may become the target of new Plots. You may even become the target of Plots yourself, as competitors track down who is responsible for plotting against them, or rival brokers decide it's time you were liquidated! You can choose to go into hiding, shutting down your operations until the Heat cools down, but that means you'll have to claw your way back up the corporate ladder once again!
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Operatives could be considered the third leg of the game. They're whole characters unto themselves, with many features that make them unique individuals. They come in two flavors, regular Operatives and Specialists, who are highly trained in one or more fields. All Operatives have Names and Aliases, Nationalities, Avatars, Profiles, Stats, Skills, Traits, Resources, Contacts, Circles and Loyalties.
- Their Name. They might also start with an alias that's been earned by the Circles they're part of. You will also be able to assign them code names.
- Their Avatar is what they look like and roughly reflects their personality and lifestyle.
- Their Nationality is what part of the world they hail from. Everyone comes from somewhere, and Net Gain Operatives come from everywhere: Africa, The Far East, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. Not sure if there are any from Antarctica.
- Their Profile is basically their profession. It defines what skills they start with, what skills they'll prefer to learn, what kind of gear they'll gravitate toward and their reactions to some kinds of random events.
- Their Traits are a collection of personality tweaks that can have good, neutral or negative consequences in different situations. They modify tests, affect which plots the Operative recommends, can impact their loyalty shifts, how they deal with other Operatives, potential responses to events and even what events happen to them. Some examples from the Kickstarter page.
- Cheerful operatives do better on social tests and form connections to other operatives faster than most... unless the other operative has the trait Depressed, Curmudgeon, or the like... then the constant barrage of happiness just gets on their nerves!
- Addict operatives are less than ideal... while normally functioning people, they do tend to enjoy their vices on their time off. this can be a problem if you suddenly call them onto a mission, or if they’re assigned to a continuing operation, as they’ll perform worse on the job. If you check on them while they’re at home, you’ll probably notice the place is a bit of a mess, and they don’t tend to have a lot of money on hand.
- Bloody operatives certainly have their uses, getting large bonuses in assassination plots, firefights, and weapon skill challenges... but they’re also much more likely to start the firefight! if a plot goes wrong with a Bloody operative, the chances of sneaking away quietly drop significantly as the safety comes off.
- Orthodox operatives are great, getting a small bonus for one test per plot... as long as you planned for it. The minute you go off script, the Orthodox operative loses their cool, doing worse at almost everything! They’re great for stable operations and support, but not the kind of person suited to a more risky mission.
Their
Skills are broken up into schools and then specific skills within that school. So Firearms is a School while Longarms is a skill within the Firearms school. Having skill in a whole school gives you bonuses to skill attempts within that school, so just knowing something about guns helps you use a gun you're not familiar with a little bit better. When not running plots or looking for intelligence, Operatives will train their skills and get better at them.
Their
Stats provide basic elements like health, as well as raw and unpredictable bonuses to the skills they link to. They also determine some other core character mechanics.
- Body is the operative’s core physical ability. It’s used in feats of strength, to determine the maximum amount of gear they can carry, cybernetics they can install, and as the amount of wounds they can take before going down.
- Agility is the operative’s speed, balance, and dexterity. It’s used for precision and reflex, determining the maximum amount of gear an operative can carry without being encumbered, and is used to “soak” attacks in combat, as they throw themselves into cover or hit the ground.
- Acuity is the operative’s intelligence and mental sharpness, used in a wide variety of skills. It also helps operatives in developing their skills, and acts as a sort of “health” for hackers when faced with a difficult barrier on the net.
- Integrity is the operative’s mental fortitude. It isn't used for many skills, but “soaks” the damage from a variety of non-physical attacks, such as intimidation, net barriers, social sparring, negotiations, morale loss from injuries, and so on.
- Personality is the operative’s sociability, how genial and easy to talk to they are... and how good they are at twisting words to their advantage! Used as the basis for social skills, and as a sort of “health” when engaged in a social conflict over contract terms, interrogations, seduction, or more!
Their
Resources are broken up into sub-parts. The Resource Value, Gear, Cybernetics, Salary, and Property.
- The Resource Value is the pool an Operative spends from to use gear during missions to beat challenges they might have otherwise failed. It's an abstraction of things like bullets, body armor, cars and all the stuff they use to execute plots. You budget resources for your Operatives, that they can use when you send them out on missions. This is important because you're ultimately spending your money to ensure their success.
- Gear is what allows an Operative to spend resources on tests. Operatives will spend some of their cash on acquiring new gear, and they can also be assigned gear in some instances. Gear is broken up into three sub-types.
- School Gear lets you spend resources on any school based-test. I.e., screw up a Firearms challenge, spend resources to maybe succeed at it.
- Skill Gear lets you spend resources on specific skill tests. So a sniper rifle lets you spend resources on Longarms challenges, but not shotgun challenges.
- Perk Gear provides boosts to a stat, skill or other thing in specific instances. Body armor for example might bump your body stat, but only for the purposes of soaking damage.
- Cybernetics are permanent upgrades to the character, gear that can't be swapped out. Not a lot has been said about them, other than to buy them for the things the op will do the most often. I suppose it's like equipment that can't be lost and so, if you have a scout, a cybernetic eye that lets him do well on perception tests is a smart buy.
- Salary is what you pay the Operative in every budget cycle, which they use to pay for their property and lifestyle. They collect a portion of it in a small personal slush fund as well, to buy new gear for themselves.
- Property is an Operative's assets and liabilities. Their home, furnishings, appliances, toys, gadgets and what not. The more an Operative gets paid, the more they're likely to spend their money on things like this. You can check on your operatives and see that their lifestyle choices often reflect their personality traits.
Their
Loyalties, Contacts and Circles are all kind of inter-related.
- An Operative's Loyalty is a value that is split between all the Circles they are a part of. You don't know, initially, what their specific loyalty values are, you just know who their top and bottom loyalties are. By observing them while they're at HQ, by some events or by spying on them through plots you can discover what their actual loyalty values are. Operative loyalty is constantly shifting, reacting to changes in the game. When things, good or bad, happen to them, their Circles or their Contacts, their loyalty values shift to reflect these changes.
- An Operative's Circles are the groups they originally hail from. It might a collective of hackers, mercenaries, rogue spies or former Corporate Operatives. Every faction, including your own corporation, is considered a Circle. Your Broker has a reputation with each of the Circles, and they're who you recruit new Operatives from. Treat the Circles well, and you can recruit better Operatives. Piss them off (by killing their people killed, by hitting targets they have relationships with, ect...) and you may lose the ability to hire from them.
- An Operative's Contacts are who they know within a Circle. When an Operative joins you, you become their Contact to the Circle of your Corporation. Within a Circle's loyalty value, Contacts get a Loyalty value as well. The better you, or another Contact, treats the Operative, the more they will feel their loyalty is owed to the Contact rather than the Circle. Operatives you run can end up with each other as contacts. Great for company morale. Bad when someone dies.
- Loyalty Explained: When they get injured on a mission, when they fall in love with a Mark during a Plot, when you run a mission against one of their Circles (which might even be an opposing corporation) their loyalty to these things change. A new loyalty to a seduced Mark, for example, cuts into the available loyalty they have left for everyone else (including you.) If they're hurt on a mission against a corporation they include in their circle, their loyalty to you might plummet while their loyalty to the opposing corp might skyrocket. At an even keel, simply keeping your Operatives paid and unhurt will keep them loyal. If more extreme measures are needed to ensure loyalty, you can Bond an Operative, locking their loyalty to a fixed level. Changes and happenings will cause this bonded loyalty to flex, eventually returning to its default level. Unless you push the Operative too hard, in which case the bond breaks.
Lastly, there's
Mobile Ops, the last stretch goal for the Kickstarter. It comes in two parts.
- In game, Mobile Ops will increase the amount of stuff available for your Operatives to do "off the clock" and the amount of ways you the Broker can interact with them. Operatives will be able to interact with each other (forming Contacts), do work with their Circles (increasing their loyalty to them), go into Deep Cover (a sort of extended Plot that takes your Op out of circulation for a while but leads to intel and such), or moonlight doing other jobs. It will also offer you more managerial control, like setting policies on what kind of work they can do autonomously, offering pay raises or pay cuts, and new events like Operatives asking you to help them with something, offering to go in on an "off the books job" or you offering company retreats to increase their loyalty.
- Out of game, there will be several standalone applications that link up with the game. First will be the Canon Generators, applications that can be used to generate new agents, industries, corporations and more for quick insertion straight into the game. These will be ported to mobile phone devices, and include a small portion of the in-game mechanics, offered for free. Mobile Ops users will be able to generate Operatives and other content, and do some limited things available in the full game, like send them on minor missions and side stuff.
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Alongside Operatives, Corporations, Companies and Assets are all considered characters of a sort too. They have their own stats, specialties and traits. Taken together, they are the engine that drives the game economy in Net Gain. In terms of a hierarchy, Assets are at the bottom. They are owned by Companies. Many Companies, in turn, are owned by Corporations. Assets and Companies are what Corporations seek to deny each other in the shadow war, either by acquiring them or destroying them.
Corporations are run by executives, have a business HQ, reputations in the business world, have a Power rating, operating budgets and do business in certain markets.
- Executives have traits that guide the corp. Much like character traits, they impact how the corp behaves and operates. Such traits might guide the corp to aggressively respond to threats, only invest in tested markets, focus on steady growth, invest generously in its field operations, or the reverse of all of those.
- The Corporate Headquarters will visually reflect the fortunes of the corp. As your corp grows more powerful its buildings will increase in size and its corporate logo will spread to neighboring buildings.
- Each corporation has a Reputation with other corps and the public in general. In regards to other corps, it generally reflects the depth of their hostility toward each other. While sometimes corps do have positive relationships with one another, even agreeing to cooperation pacts, usually they're hostile based on being in the same competing markets or a history of raiding each other. Reputation with the outside world tends to shift based on the methods the corp (and you) use to achieve your ends. Go too far and the public may rally against your corp and how it does business. As a Broker, some plots may be to repair your corp's Reputation or damage someone else's.
- The corporation's Power is the sum of its everything: its value, its infrastructure, its institutional knowledge, its resources, its logistics...everything a corp does ultimately feeds its Power value.
- The corporation's Budget is directly related to its Power. Its Budget is really your Budget, the monthly allotment of money it can afford to spend on its Brokers, to pay for their Operatives and their Resources. The more powerful your corp becomes through your actions, the more of a Budget you get to work with. Any excess money that comes in goes into the Slush Fund, off-the-books resources you can use at your discretion.
- The corporation's Markets are the business Markets they choose to compete in. Their stake in each Market affects the value of the Assets and Companies within that Market. A Corporation with high stakes in the Med Tech Market, who acquires the hottest new Neural Surgery Laser Scalpels Asset, stands to make a fortune. The value of the things in the Markets they participate in directly impacts the corp's Power rating.
Companies make up the building blocks of a corp. The type of Companies and their chosen Industries determine what Markets the corp. tries to compete in. As new Companies in different Industries are acquired or lost by the corp, it may affect which Markets they want to participate in. Companies can be bought, sold, merged or obliterated according to the needs of the corp. When your corp wants to make a move against a rival corp, attacking an entire company they own can deal a devastating blow to their Power. Companies own Assets, have Infrastructure, Security, a Company Value and belong to an Industry.
- The Company's Industry determines what kind of Assets they produce. A company in the Weapons Industry might produce a new High Efficiency Laser, for example. The Industry, in turn, determines what kind of Market the Company operates in. The Weapons Industry would be a part of the Weapons Market. Different Industries perform and behave differently, some slow but consistent, while others are erratic, going for the "next big thing."
- The Company's Infrastructure determines how many Assets they can have at one time and provides additional levels of Security. It also determines the Company's operating cost.
- The Company's Assets are what ultimately determines its worth. They might be things the Company makes, research it's doing, the highly trained staff that works there or other things. Assets are in a way their own characters and are covered below.
- The Company's Security is what protects it from Operatives, both yours and your opponents. The better the Security, the more Plots you have to run against the Company to acquire or sabotage its Assets, and the harder those Plots will be. There are often several layers of Security, and the bigger a company is, the larger and more elaborate these security zones are, ranging from security through the whole district, to the network security, to the physical security that surrounds the immediate holdings.
- The Company's Value is the difference between the cost of its Infrastructure versus the value of its Assets. A company's Value is constantly shifting, as once valuable Assets deteriorate in the face of new advances or stiffer competition, and new, highly valuable Assets are developed. When the Value of a company no longer supports its Infrastructure, it's probably time to sell or merge it.
Assets are the core building block of the game economy. They're created and owned by Companies, which are in turn owned by Corporations. Every week, Assets contribute some of their Value to the Corporation's Power rating and in turn their Value rating declines. No Asset is valuable forever and so Companies are always developing new Assets. That said, different Assets decay at different rates. Assets based on fads and trends will decay faster, while more useful Assets like natural resources will deplete slower. A few examples of Assets:
Everything as diverse as the latest commlink, fashion trends, rare mineral deposit claims, environment mapping "slip" virtual reality, cunning lobbyists, platoons of private military contractors, clever ad campaigns, the hottest gadgets, popular celebrities, sophisticated androids...
While most Assets are used simply for their impact on a corp's Power rating, some provide additional or non-economic benefits liked enhanced Security or better Gear for your Operatives to use. Assets have two traits of concern to Brokers, their Type and Stage.
- The Asset's Type is what form it takes. It might be a person, a natural resource, a product or a tv show. Type is the biggest determinate of what kinds of Plots can be run against the Asset. A person could be coerced, seduced or kidnapped, for example.
- The Asset's Stage is where in its life cycle it is, and also impacts what kinds of Plots can be used. For example, Microbiology Tech in the research Stage could be stolen or destroyed, while the same tech in the "Production" stage could be sabotaged.
There will be no real
End Game, according to the developer. Net Gain is intended to be played as an open-ended Sim much like Dwarf Fortress. That said, there are indications there will be some story elements or plot involved. Or at least plot characters.
Again, you can read all of this straight from the developer on the Kickstarter page's updates. I've probably missed something. What I love most about this project is the real commitment to deep, interactive systems where there's trade offs and consequences for everything. Be sure to give a listen to some of the excellent music linked on the Kickstarter page as well, it really sets the mood for the game.
The developer has said this is a game he wants to stay with the game for a long, long time, well beyond what he's already talked about during the Kickstarter campaign. If you're lover of sims, futuristic dystopia, scheming and plotting, then please have your ID Badge ready, and welcome to the Corp.[/list]
Author
Topic: Net Gain: Corporate Espionage in 2043. Development probably abandoned. (Read 62713 times)