Yes please. I love unconventional(read: physics-ignoring) Arms Race games.
Hold my beer.
I've got this 4x Arms Race I've been cooking up. Don't have a map yet, but I think all the rules are there.
Maybe. There have been a couple revisions.
Galactic Race
The 4x arms race game no one asked for, with all the complexity no one wanted.
General Play LoopThese rules are adapted from a couple different arms race games, with enough new twists that they're worth reading again even if you've played all the arms race games.
This arms race plays out over 3 phases: The design and project maintenance phase, the revision phase, and the production, deployment and tactics phase. In the absence of other modifiers, each team gains 5 dice to use at the start of every year. Every year, each team will cycle through the three phases in order, spending dice and resources to capture worlds and advance their cause.
At the start of each year designs and project maintenance is handled. Members of each team may propose designs. Everyone is allowed to vote for a design. During this same time, players of each team propose resource allocation plans for various pre-existing projects. These are voted on in the same way as designs. You can vote for any number of projects so long as there are enough dice for everything you're voting for to be done simultaneously. You cannot vote for the same design or spending more than once. It is not possible to directly vote against a design, but it is possible to vote for meta-goals such as 'no design' or 'only 1 design'. The design (if any) with the most votes gets rendered into a new project and the progress for the funded existing projects moves ahead at the end of this stage. Any created prototypes or finished projects are described.
After designs and projects have been worked out, then the players move on to revisions. Revision are cheap, but best suited to address problems with improvements to existing desings. For example, if you finished a ship based beam laser last round, you can try a revision to make a pulsed version or to fix an overheating issue. However, one could not immediately turn around and revise infantry laser weapons from a ship based beam laser. Do not make the mistake of thinking that smaller is less complex. Revisions to improve a technology beyond the original design will face diminishing returns quickly, but correcting bugs in the original design does not count against that soft limit.
Any dice not spent on revisions/designs/projects are saved back for the next round. Each team can bank a total of 5 dice, giving them a maximum of 10 dice to spend at any one time.
After revisions comes the production, deployment, and tactics phase. During deployment you can set and modify standing movement orders to your ships, sending them to various locations to do ship things. A ship's range is determined by its engines, but its movement will be halted by enemy activity. Ships can be ordered to only engage under certain conditions, but Captains may have imperfect information depending on sensors and a variety of other factors. In the event of engagement, ships will do their best to carry out whatever tactic they have assigned. For soldiers on the ground, orders are of three major flavors: Advance, hold the line, and retreat. Advance tactics attempt to take ground, but are liable to be costly. Holding the line is better to keep from losing ground against a stronger attack force, but will never gain territory. Retreating voluntarily gives up ground, attempting to spare lives and equipment for the defenders when possible. The last part, construction orders, is about allocating production points and/or resources to actually build new weapons/ships/regiments. Each player gets a single vote for each of these three types of commands, with the same rules as voting for revisions and designs applying.
Combat in SpaceCombat in space will not be realistic. Realistic space combat is... a pain. If you've played SoTS or Starsector, that's more the feel I'm aiming for. If you haven't, think more of Star Trek naval combat, though with the distances being a bit longer. At the start of the game, each ship can be outfitted with a single tactic, and command ships can have an additional tactic. In ship-to-ship combat, vessels will attempt to carry out their assigned tactic to the best of their ability- with one exception. If the tactic in the command ship's bonus slot would be better than what the fleet member is currently using, they can switch to that one freely. For instance, if a fleet vessel's primary tactic is to attempt to hit-and-run enemy vessels, but the enemy suddenly presents a faster and more maneuverable ship, their tactic breaks down. However, if the command vessel has a defensive tactic in reserve, the day may yet be saved. Superior officers, discipline, communication, and training, will still pay off and improve any tactic- and you may be able to expand the number of tactics that a ship can hold or that a command vessel can hotswap.
One important note, if the command vessel is destroyed, the ability to hotswap tactics is naturally lost.
Unless given instruction otherwise, combat vessels will attempt to engage until they face a clear defeat, at which point they'll prime emergency FTL and attempt to bug out. This will, however, damage the power systems of the surviving vessels, and potentially cause cascading failures and even the destruction damaged ships. Non-Combat vessels, massively outclassed combat vessels, or vessels ordered not to engage, will attempt to create distance at sublight speed before making an FTL jump when forced into a combat encounter.
After a battle, if there are any ships capable of towing, derelicts from destroyed vessels can be hauled back by whichever side gained area control. Such derelicts can be scrapped for resources and a look at the operational parameters of surviving equipment.
Planetary CombatPlanetary combat is split into two parts, planetary bombardment and landings.
Planetary bombardment serves two purposes. First, it can allow attackers to 'soften up' strategic ground targets in order for later landing forces to have an easier time actually invading. Second, it can be used to inflict quick economic damage on an adversary without actually needing to spend the resources on a full-on invasion fleet of transports. At start, you have two flavors of bombardment: soft target bombardment and hard target bombardment. Hard target bombardment attempts to hit military installations and defensive infrastructure, reducing their efficacy, and potentially reducing the army value of a planet. If there are no defensive armies and a planet's defense grid is destroyed, the resistance to capture the world will be minimal- assuming that the other nation hasn't done hijinx to the contrary.
While that sounds nice, Hard targets, true to their name, are usually hardened against bombardment. In some cases you may find yourself in a position where you don't have time, resources, or firepower to start hammering down defenses so you can send in an invasion force. Still, if you can manage to get a fleet around an enemy planet, you want to try and deal damage. That's where soft-target bombardment is helpful. True to its name, it attempts to hit soft targets of your opponent's economic infrastructure- farms, research labs, mines, etc. Destroying these not only reduces the amount of resources they get per turn, but forces them to spend money rebuilding. Of course, in an ideal world you'd like to capture a planet with most of the soft targets intact so you don't have to rebuild them yourself (see Planets and Planetary infrastructure), but war doesn't always allow for ideal worlds.
You may be able to spend designs and revisions to improve the efficacy of or prioritize certain targets with orbital bombardment.
Planetary landings require transports filled with troops. Landing regiments then face pushback against defense forces, directly engaging ground forces in a bid to conquer strategic reasons. Importantly, basic ground troops do not inflict damage to infrastructure. They target enemy troops and attempt to capture strategic areas to control the planet, and thus any surviving infrastructure is turned over to attackers. Ground attacks do not utilize tactics. Regiments of troops are assumed to include a mix of basic units- infantry, armor, artillery, etc. However, certain units, such has high-power mech, elite psychic infantry, unspeakable eldritch horrors the size of small mountains, may be manufactured and shipped separately from basic regiments. Basically, if it's very expensive to build/train, it'll be its own special unit, not part of a standard invasion regiment.
If the attackers are doing well and overwhelming the defenders, they'll begin to gain dominion over the planet. Dominion is represented as x/4, much like territory in a standard arms race game, and represents how close you are to being able to control the important parts of the planet. 4/4 Dominion doesn't necessarily mean that you own and actively patrol every inch of territory, it just means that you're free to rain fire and death on anyone who wants to question whether you own any particular piece of territory.
It should be noted that while certain special units, such as a massive abomination or a temporally unstable supersoldier may be able to devastate armies on their own, there's nothing like thousands of boots to actually take ground and root out the enemy.
Definitions and Resources
Dice in this arms race will have a result from 1 to 6, but will have a bell-shaped instead of a uniform distribution. Behind the scenes, this is accomplished by rolling 1d4+2d2-2. For designs, efficacy, bugs, and cost are rolled separately. Revisions merely work on a single roll, but use the same distribution. What follows is a rough breakdown of the different rolls for prototypes.
Result 1: [6.25% Chance] Design are known for their SNAFU operation (if any), severe bugs run wild, or costs are through the roof.
Result 2: [18.75% Chance] Design function well below expected parameters, but kinda work. There is at least one severe bug, and likely a couple little ones. Costs are much higher than expected.
Result 3: [25% Chance] Design functions, perhaps with room for improvement. One severe or multiple minor bugs. Costs are a bit higher would be desired.
Result 4: [25% Chance] Design functions, meeting or slightly exceeding expect. No severe bugs, at least one minor bug. Costs are within expected parameters.
Result 5: [18.75% Chance] Design works very well, exceeding expected parameters. No more than a single minor bug, if any. Costs are considerable lower than expected.
Result 6: [6.25% Chance] Design works incredibly well, with some kind of added benefit. No bugs to report. Costs are trivial.
These results are generally independent of the difficulty of the project, which is reflected in the time it takes to actually complete a project (see Designs and Projects, below), and bonuses or penalties will usually only be applied as credits warrant.
Designs, Projects, and Revisions
Designs are the bread and butter of any arms race, the actual document that details a new technology, and require a minimum of three dice to roll efficacy, cost, and bugs.
In this arms race, designs immediately result in a prototype model that accurately depicts what the finished product will be like. However, you will not immediately be able to manufacture this new technology until you've completed the requisite research. This requisite research is referred to as the Project, and is a general reflection of how much time and expense needs to be invested before your empire is able to make a particular piece of technology viable for widespread deployment. If you choose to deploy the prototype, either because you're satisfied with the design or because you're in desperate need of an edge, you cannot rebuild it after it's destroyed/lost. Large objects, like heavy weapons or ships, get a single prototype. Small objects, like infantry weapons, get enough to outfit a single regiment.
Every project has both a duration and a cost. The duration is a number, usually between 3 and 50 that determines how many man-hours of engineering it takes to make a particular design deployable. The cost factor determines how many resources need to be diverted to actually make any progress at all. A project header for an ambitious new ship generator looks something like this,
Hastur ξ-Phase Generator: 12/32 | 100 Metal + 150 Transplutonic + 40 Synthetic | Rushed 0 times | 300 metal, 450 transplutonic, 120 Synthetic invested
Name, followed by current progress/total needed, then how much each die of progress costs, the number of times the project has been rushed, and the total resources that have been currently invested.
Every round, during the design phase, a team can elect to spend any number of their dice on progressing projects. For each die they spend on a project, they have to pay that project's resource cost. So if you elect to spend 2 die on the above, you have to spend 200 metal, 300 transplutonic, and 80 synthetic. For every die you spend resources on, you can also elect to rush the project. This gives you an extra die that adds to project progress normally, but has a 50% chance to add a bug to the project, or worsen an existing bug. It's not as bad as getting a -1 on your bug roll, but it can add up.
A project can be canceled at any time, and its resources re-allocated. When a project is canceled, the team gets 50% of the invested resources back at the end of the next turn, and a number of die equal to the project's current progress divided by six and rounded down.
Revisions
Revisions are as standard in Arms Race games. They cost only one die, but they limited returns. Importantly, revisions are improvements and modifications to existing technology and/or tactics. If you find yourself wondering whether something should be a revision or a new design, ask yourself whether it uses the same frame, and whether the addition is a technology by itself.
Some situations are tricky, and if you overreach you might get a crappy version of what you wanted and a none-too-subtle hint that you should spend a design somewhere. If you ask me, I might feel nice enough to clarify in the early game, but don't count on that.
A special use of revisions is the creation of production patterns, which enable fully outfitted regiments or completed ships to be built from production points instead of raw resources.
Shipbuilding Essentials
While your starting tech will be freeform, there's a few mechanical details in common with all ships. All ships are designed as hulls, with three key feature shared across all designs: the number of hardpoints, the mission capacity, and the ship class. Hardpoints determine the max number (and max size) of the guns you can stack on, mission capacity is for every other component you want to shove into the ship, and ship class determines how much command cost a vessel requires. One important extra feature that all ships should have, but may not be included intrinsically, is a generator.
Hardpoints places to permanently mount guns/missiles/etc to ships. While you might later be able to come up with disposable missile systems and similar temporary augments, hardpoints are the currency of a ship's primary weapons. Hardpoints are divided, generally, into small, medium, and large mounts. Though one can later imagine a need for specialized classifications for Torpedo bays, fixed beam assemblies, and similar devices, their exact mounting type will be decided on creation. Most weapons that can be mounted to a small can be double mounted to a medium, or triple mounted to a large, a process which multiplies all the costs of the weapon, but also enables it to scale when needed. This process can also be used to double mount a medium weapon into a large slot. Hardpoints have a position, which can be critically important to their function in combat and the tactics that can be executed with them.
Mission capacity is how much space inside the ship there is for ammunition storage, shield generators, hyperdrive relies, ritual chambers, internal organs, crew, etc. Most everything that you'd like to stick inside a ship requires a certain amount of dedicated space. Every weapon and subsystem you have requires space, and some space is spoken for from the outside. In general, a ship absolutely needs to reserve space for three things: Its weapons, its generator, and its engines and FTL system. Space beyond that can go into frills, spinning rims, and the tech that turns a ship into something more advanced that a cardboard box in space.
A vessel's class determines how will command vessels can keep track of and utilize it in combat, as reflected by a command cost (See the Fleet Cap definition below). This arms race breaks things into 7 big classes of ship, where each class of ship is about three times larger than the class before it. In order of size and command cost, the classes are Corvette (1), Frigate (3), Destroyer (6), Cruiser (12), Battleship (24), Dreadnought (48), and Leviathan (96). If you're wondering what class a ship will be when you design, just ask me and I'll take a look. In general, corvettes are all small mount, a frigate might mount a couple medium mounts, a destroyer might mount a single large weapon, a cruiser operates a good mix of mounts with multiple larges, a battleship pushes the envelope towards an all large gun layout, a dreadnought can mount massive cannons with ease with room to spare for systems, and a Leviathan does whatever the fuck you want.
A ship's generator could be a psionic savant, the beating heart that pumps blood through a bioship, or a nuclear fission reactor, but -whatever the form- its purpose is to run power to every system on board. In addition to the mission capacity of a ship, you'll be fighting against the energy rating of a ship's generator. A ship can't use more energy at any one time than the generator produces, although captains will intelligently deactivate non-essential or irrelevant systems depending on the circumstance. For instance, a cloaked ship whose cloak proves ineffective against enemy sensors, or that can't fight and cloak at the same time, will deactivate that system in order to turn on other systems- such as weapons, shields, and engines.
The Fleet Cap: Each fleet has a cap, determined by its command vessel. This rating is an abstraction of a commander's skill, the suite of tools available on the command ship, the obedience of subordinate officers, the ease of relaying commands, etc. Each vessel has 'command cost', which represents how easily it can be accounted for and manipulated by a commanding officer. When in combat, a fleet can only actively field a total number of ships whose sum total of command cost does not exceed the fleet's cap. Any vessels beyond that will be kept in reserves to replace losses. If there is no command vessel, the fleet cap is 15. You may deploy any vessel alone, even if its command cost exceeds 15.
Deploying multiple command vessels at the same time does not increase the fleet cap, although any command vessels in reserves will automatically be pulled to the front if the primary command vessel is disabled or otherwise rendered unable to command.
Landing Force Essentials
Each ground regiment is a fighting force of infantry, assumed to have internal logistical support and some light transport capability. Everything else that regiment needs must be provided through attachments- secondary buys that improves the option available to a regiment. Armor support, naval ships, artillery, advanced weapons- all of these are provided through the miracle of attachments.
Each attachment is a separate budget item, and is generally tightly focused. Designing a new type of heavy tank or monstrous xenomorph is likely to generate something analogous to a heavy armor attachment. An advanced weapons package with technology much more powerful and expense than can be produced for the rank and file is likely an elite troop attachment. In general, augments of the same type do not stack up- but the most ideal type for the situation will be used. For instance, if a division is given three different air superiority attachments, they'll use the best mix of of fighters to defend themselves, but still won't be as strong as three separate divisions each with one of the three air superiority attachments.
Resources: Instead of certain bovine systems, we run off TOMES, Transplutonics, Organics, metals, energetics, and synthetics. These are used to pay for various research projects, and can be used to pay for ships and equipment beyond production limits.
Transplutonics: Tranplutonics are refined and exotic heavy elements, of great variety and use in industrial and scientific application, and often key components of high-energy systems.
Organics: A wide category of carbon based molecules, used in biotech, polymers, solvents, and a wide variety of other applications.
Metals: Copper, iron, tungsten, whole nine yards. Most basic metallic elements are covered under the domain of 'metals'.
Energetics: Useful light elements and their respective molecules, usually desiring to be in either a more gaseous or a more exploded form than their stable configurations.
Synthetics: Synthetic elements and molecules that desire to decay unless kept under tight containment. Difficult to create, harder to contain, and essential for advanced technology.
Planets and Planetary Infrastructure
Every star represents a single potentially habitable planet. Each planet has one value for size and five values for resources, as well as accessibility ratings. The value for the resource is the theoretical max the planet could produce per turn, given ideal infrastructure. The accessibility rating represents your present ability to access it- if you controlled the planet yourself. Thus, a basic planet's readout, without infrastructure, looks something like:
Size: 3
Transplutonics: 1800 | 10% | 180/turn
Organics: 6500 | 10% | 650/turn
Metals: 5000 | 20% | 1000/turn
Energetics: 3600 | 20% | 720/turn
Synthetics: 150 | 0% | 0/turn
After infrastructure is added on, the readout changes to reflect the bonuses from various technologies. At start, everyone has the ability to bring the accessibility up by 25% with various technologies. Homeworlds start with 50% across the board, to represent the ideal 25% basic extraction rate with the best attached starting facilities. The exception is synthetics, which starts at 25%, since you can't natively extract synthetics. So the world above, with partial infrastructure, looks like:
Size: 3
Transplutonics: 1800 | 10% + 20% (High-Energy Processing facilities IV) | 440/turn
Organics: 6500 | 10% + 10% (Modular Farms II) | 650/turn
Metals: 5000 | 20% + 15% (Mining Station III)| 1750/turn
Energetics: 3600 | 20% | 720/turn
Synthetics: 150 | 0% + 25% (Elemental Synthesis Facility V) | 37/turn
The cost of infrastructure is modified by the size of the planet, which in turn modifies how much of a given resource a planet is likely to have. Aside from resource extraction infrastructure, there's also defensive infrastructure, which is designed to let the planet help during combat in certain ways. Defense stations, GtS missile silos, orbital fighter bays, planetary shields, etc, are all examples of defensive infrastructure. During planetary bombardment, there's a chance, based on the combined firepower of the attacking fleet and how good they are at actually hitting the surface, for damage to be done to surface facilities. If a facility is damaged, its rank is dropped by one.
If a player captures a planet that retains intact civilian facilities that they already understand, they can use them at half efficacy. If they can already build such facilities themselves, they can bring them up to full production for a quarter of the facility's normal cost. If they don't understand a facility, they can attempt to spend revisions, or designs if they think its warranted, to gain understanding.
Production: Each nation has a certain amount of dedicated war production, which is a pool from which complete vessels, combat squads, and equipment can be purchased from using production plans. Production plans, created through revisions, are a bill that contains every aspect of a ship, from hull to gun, and costs a specific number of production points- determined at the time the revision roll is made. Every turn you get to decided how your points are allocated, and partial builds are allowed. That is, if a production plan costs more production points than you currently have, it will be partially completed and will automatically pull points next round. Regiments, complete with all attachments, can also be constructed from the production point pool.
Production points are gained from planets, based on size, and modified by relevant infrastructure.
Setting Modifiers
Soft-Serve Science: You want your reactor to run off the power of a forsaken psionic child channeling the energy of a dark star God? Sounds great, just give me a write-up. This isn't a hard science game- this is a game where one could conceivably get away with SPEHSS MAHRENS and SPEHSS MAGICKS, not one where I'm going to nag you over perfectly reasonable details of science and 'but reality doesn't do that'. I'm not going to make you write a paper on the exact physics that justify an waveforce shield or a mantra powered Buddhism laser- but you do need to beware the golden rule of the universe: 'Shit ain't Free'. Everything, no matter how advanced, has a price.
Begin at your Beginnings: This game will have a special opening phase, seven turns in length. During this period, the final phase of each turn is skipped- so there is no production, deployment and tactics. Instead, you are given ten dice per turn, and you will be asked to create the designs for most of your starting tech.
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Topic: Arms Race/Design Bureau Hub/General OOC (Got a Discord Channel now) (Read 110890 times)