Project: Supercomputer ResearchRolls*: Time (2) Cost (5)
Not one to be content with small steps, the council again prepares plans for a project that will truly revolutionize. They intend to create true, sentient artificial intelligence. The plan is to use the supercomputer intended for the cerebral enhancer, but as that particular computer has not been built yet that will have to become part of this project first. To make a sentient creature requires an understanding of sentience. The immediate proposed method is to acquire inconsequential people and more or less burn their brains out tracking what happens when certain parts of the brain are stimulated. Normal researchers have attempted similar, but with safe levels of stimulation the reactions are almost imperceptible and often difficult understand. This is again similar to the work for the cerebral enhancer, but one is intended to improve while the other attempts to understand and re-create. While a lot of the hardware is expensive, it's not the kind of expensive that leaves a mark on a millionaires budget. Most of the cost goes to bribes and favors to get your hands on what is currently classified equipment reserved for "National Defense". It will take a good amount of time to decode literal brains worth of information (and they must be scanned, sequenced and analysed one at a time since the raw data is literal orders of magnitude greater than the processed data) but Brian is confident that the project will be successful by the end. Even he has to admit that he is curious as to what this artificial intelligence might be like at the end.
Supercomputer Research and the Cerebral Enhancer use much of the same equipment. Whichever project is completed first will take 1 turn off the remaining time for the other project. Once complete, the project will provide you with a unique character that does not take up council capacity, among other effects.
Project Cost: 6 favors and 3 million $ per turn of work
Project Time: 3 turns of work to complete
*Initial rolls for the project are always unmodified. Modifiers affect the second set of rolls. (effect, price, bugs.)
Deployment phase
During the deployment phase, each character you control can take one (1) action. There are a number of different actions they can take.
Research:Assign a character to one of you projects, if you have the money and favors available to fund it.
Recruitment:Assign a character to recruit another hero or villain to your group, up to your current maximum. You can spend renown to modify the recruitment roll. 100 renown is a 1.0 modifier. (An unmodified roll) You can spend as much or as little as you like, but you cannot roll something outside of the 1-6 range.
Movement:Move a character to another area on the map. They cannot perform other actions during this time. Unless special measures have been taken (ie. research or a project) a character cannot be intercepted or otherwise engaged during travel.
Engagement:Send a character to influence the city they are currently in. If no plan is specified, they will take generic actions. Robbing banks or stopping muggers, depending on your side. It will produce about an even ration of $ and influence.
You can also create a specific plan for your characters engagement that will effect the outcome. There are no generic presets to these. You can do whatever you scheme up. For example, a terror bombing may produce no real money, but a lot of influence. You could also take on bigger targets. Instead of stopping muggers, you might try to break up an organized crime ring. This will see you facing a number of weak generic enemies, and might be dangerous for a lone or inexperienced character, but will provide greater rewards than generic action.
Battles occur when heroes and villains attempt to engage in the same city during the same turn. If either side has uninjured characters after the battle they will still attempt to carry out the original plan. (provided the character is not uninjured because of a retreat) If you were attempting a high value target, the little mooks will usually show up during the battle, so a lone surviving rookie will always succeed on a mission after a battle.