The discordThantro threadMondragon threadThe year is 1983. Thantro and Mondragon had always been at each others’ throats. But at least it had been aboveboard. The two companies had grown together and been rivals since the beginning, so a little corporate espionage was expected. But the discovery of magic threw things into overdrive. Everyone is desperate to be the best, even at the cost of tearing down other rising stars. Whoever wins will have an entire world of possibilities. The board has assigned you to the squad of top scientists and tacticians running the technological development and tactical decisions behind outracing the other side.
This is an arms race based around the idea of large scale corporate espionage with advanced technology and magic. As this is my first time running an arms race, please bear with me if I make mistakes.
Turns:
The game is played in turns, which are broken up into phases. During each turn you will design new technology, revise it, and assign your agents. Each turn represents one month of the year.
The Design Phase is your biggest phase, where you design a new technology. Simply write a proposal, or vote on an existing one- you only get one design each phase. When voting please use a votebox. The design with the most votes will be attempted. Then you will see the results of your design, based on a die roll and a difficulty which I assign (see difficulty, below).
The Revision Phase is your opportunity to fix problems or make changes to your existing designs. This works like the design phase, but the changes you can make are smaller (see difficulty, below). You can also attempt to reverse-engineer enemy designs, if you successfully capture their technology intact.
The Strategy Phase is where you decide which agents perform which missions, and recruit new agents. A list of available missions will be provided to vote from. You can do more than one, although splitting up your squads excessively actively harms your mission successfulness.
The Battle Phase is when you wait to see your Battle Report. A summary of each mission you attempt to complete will be written, explaining what happens and how your new technology affected the outcome. Once the battle report is posted, the turn is over and the next one begins.
Simultaneous with the Battle Report is a small scale mission between player characters! Each side can create a team of four players to duke it out, RTD style, using their developed technology to complete special missions.
Each side will be able to request a new item from their corporation at the start of each turn, up to five times. Each requested item must have a real world equivalent that comes before 1980-1990, and a link would be handy.
Most pieces of equipment have a resource cost, expressed in supply. The two corporations own a large portion of the planet and you have access to almost all necessary materials, but there is a cash cost to acquire said materials. For examples see starting equipment, below. While most things will cost just cash, some materials may not even exist outside of your lab in sufficient quantities, or at all. If something is big, or uses rare metals, you may have to manufacture some of the materials yourself. For example, exotic matter is not available on the market, and must be produced on your own. Costs represent what is needed to supply one agent.
Your corporation has limited resources, and will only supply so many items. The starting supply amount is 100 supply. This is also listed in your Equipment section in each battle report. You can gain cash by performing certain missions, using a design to convince the corporation to pay you more, or by investing unspent cash into low risk investment schemes. By doing well in missions your corporation’s income will increase, and thus your funding. Global events can also alter company income, and thus how much they will supply. Some technologies are Complex, being new and difficult to manufacture, and designs featuring them become one level more expensive. Consider expenses when planning your designs!
There are also special resources. Higher level technological designs such as bionic soldiers may require special components you have to manufacture yourself, such as living metal. You may be able to cut out special resources when revising, or specifying so in the design, but it will weaken the effectiveness of whatever needs said material. Manufacturing said material can be done in a design or a revision, but a revision will likely not allow for enough time to make a big enough manufacturing line for the material. Upon successfully designing something that requires a special material, the completed design will come with a production line large enough to build and maintain a single unit of the item.
Magic expense:
Magical spells run on a slightly modified difficulty/cost system. There are six levels of spell difficulty:
Trivial: Thaumic potential 1
Easy: TP 2
Simple: TP 3
Difficult: TP 4
Very difficult: TP 5
Nigh impossible: TP 6
On average, ⅙ of your forces will be at each of the 6 TP levels. This assumes each soldier has the baseline thaumic potential, unmodified by things like cybernetic limbs.
Each agent can only learn one spell each turn, and the number of differing spells in combat that they can use is equal to the number of missions they have survived, plus 1.
Complex as a result of a poor roll or overreaching when designing a new spell means that the difficulty level is pushed up one.
Any equipment that survives the mission will persist to the next turn with a maintenance cost of ¼ its full cost. Captured enemy equipment can be sold.
A short list of some of the less rare mission types:
Escort/assassinate high profile employee
Hack/guard vault
Sabotage/guard factory
Steal/guard technology
Steal employee identity/hunt impostors
And sometimes, very rarely, a team will have the option to assassinate the other corporation's Executive officer, giving the targeted side the option to guard the XO. This mission has no limit on how many agents can be assigned.
Only two missions per side per turn will be available, ignoring special player run missions and global events. Up to three squads can be assigned to a given mission, excluding global events. One squad can be assigned to assist player team. Every 5 turns will be a single player run mission.
When one side is given access to a mission, the other side gains access to the counter mission.
At the start of the game, each team must choose whether to start with an advantage in technology or magic. The first will grant you two extra initial designs with a +1 to design rolls as long as they pertain to technology, and the second will grant you two extra initial designs with a +1 to design rolls as long as they pertain to magic.
You must also choose the initial players who will represent your side in the player missions at this time, so I can generate their characters. Characters will be mostly identical, with slight variation in different stats. Feel free to tell me which stat you wish your character to have prioritized. (See the RTD rule section)
You may also choose a gender and provide a description/name for your character, but keep it real. These guys are professional agents, not PancakeMixer9000.
It is important to note that going magic and cybernetic at the same time is not completely compatible. No one is sure why, but magical strength is proportional to amount of intact fleshy body.
Armor quality is determined both by thickness, material, and quality. Shoddy armor may fall apart after blocking a few hits, while high quality may work one level above the average using that material and thickness. Different materials change the weight, kinetic absortion, shear strength, etc. The armor thicknesses are nonexistent, thin, light, substantial, heavy, very heavy, and extreme. Each level above nonexistent adds +1 to the armor value of a unit, modified by quality and material, and each level increases the base weight of the armor. Encumberment from armor can also be affected by poor bug rolls, to the point where an unaided agent cannot even move. At extreme level of armor the baseline encumberment will make an agent 40% as agile as they are unarmored, assuming all other armor modifiers are baseline. Encumberment heavily affects the RTD portion of the battle report.
As this Arms Race takes place completely on land, as long as you guys don’t somehow trigger an all out war between the three megacountries on the planet, there will be no air/sea forces.
The following difficulties apply to both Designs and Revisions, (henceforth just "Designs" for brevity) but revisions will usually be about one step more difficult than designs in addition to being limited in scope. For example, making a whole new design for a simple rifle in a new caliber would probably be Trivial, but Easy as a revision. Simple revisions are still perfectly capable of being trivial. Difficulty is mainly judged by two factors: What the best similar example of a technology you have built is, and how long ago you built it. It's usually easy to make incrementally better designs, and the longer your factories build something, the better your engineering bureau grows to understand it. The three main countries are completely behind the Corporation’s cutting edge science team, and as such difficulty is not heavily modified by what the rest of the world has.
In addition to having "bugs" as a result of a poor die roll, some designs will simply have inherent drawbacks. For example, if you build a bomber with no top-facing guns, it will always be vulnerable to attack from above, or if you specify a tank design with lots of armor, a big gun, and a small engine, no die result is going to cause it to go fast. The consequence of bugs also depends on the nature of the design, a radio with severe bugs might just stop working and be hard to fix, but an aircraft with severe bugs will probably result in dead pilots. If a design makes simple advances in multiple areas, a poor result might only advance in some of those areas, where other areas suffer bugs or do not advance.
Keep in mind that, as with all things in this game, design results are subject to a lot of subjectivity.
Designs are generated using two sets of 2d4. One for effectiveness, and one for cost. 8 would equal perfect, no bugs, very cheap and a bonus difficulty reduction for you next design in this area of technology, 7 would be slight overachieving, no bugs, and cheap, 6 would be reaching the goal set in the design no bugs unless already listed in design, and unmodified expense level, 5 would be fairly effective, with a small bug or slightly more expensive than predicted, 4 would be underperforming but serviceable, with a moderate bug or rather more expensive than base, 3 would be basically useless until revised, with a huge bug, or very big cost increase and ineffectivenesss, 2 is failure, but still grants knowledge in the field of study. Anything less than a two is a complete waste of time.
Difficulty levels are as follows:
Trivial
Easy
Simple
Difficult
Very difficult
Nigh impossible
Each level above simple adds a -1 to the cost and effectiveness rolls, and each level below simple adds 1 to both rolls. This can be further modified based on my best judgement.
Each corporation has a “Stability” meter. You can see yours as complete whole numbers, and the enemies’ to the closest ten. (I.E. 90%, 80%)
Completing a mission successfully, depending on what it is, will either increase or decrease your corporation’s stability by 3-7%. Global events can also affect this, and at 50% stability special missions become available for the purpose of hunting informants in your own corporation and things like that, for the purpose of increasing stability.
Stability will increase passively by 1% per turn, as well.
When stability drops below 25%, your corporation can begin infiltrating theirs. Infiltration will appear as a mission, and requires new infiltration technologies to successfully fake IDs and the like to get employed at said company. For every squad of agents that has successfully infiltrated the enemy, the “infiltration” meter will increase by 1%. Infiltrated squads can be recalled at a chance of failure, and the aforementioned informant hunting missions will also have a chance to capture or kill your infiltrated agents.
If either corporation hits 0% stability, the other wins. If either successfully infiltrates the other, that corporation wins. If you guys somehow manage to start WW3, nobody wins. Unless you have antinuke/radiation defenses and an underground bunker in which case, eh. Maybe.
EU and ammo can safely be ignored when equipping non player characters.
Weapons:
Foal N5B2 Carbine Rifle: 884m/sec muzzle velocity. Fully automatic. 700 RPM. Effective up to 500m. 5.56x45mm cartridge. 2 EU unloaded, 3 EU loaded. 6 supply. 30 round clip size. 30 rounds 1 EU. Can pierce 12mm of steel at 600m.
Foal N2822 Semi-Automatic Service Pistol: 253m/sec muzzle velocity. Semi automatic. Typical range 25m, effective to 40m. 0.45 ACP cartridge. 1 EU unloaded, 2 EU loaded. 3 supply. 7 round clip size. 32 rounds 1 EU. Cannot pierce substantial armor without repeated shots.
Combat knife: A small knife capable of piercing limited armor. 1 AP. 1 supply.
Armor and equipment:
Kevlar vest: Light protection of torso, shoulders, and upper legs. Gray. 3 EU. 2 supply.
Combat suit: Thin bodywide protection. Black. 1 EU. 1 supply.
Encrypted radio: 100 meter broadcast radius. Static gets rather bad at max range. Encrypted to prevent enemy intercepting, although use signals that agents are in the area to anyone listening. 1 EU. 2 supply per pair.
Smoke grenades: Can form a cloud of smoke roughly 10 meters in diameter that reduces anyone inside to vague shadows. 1 EU for 3. 1 supply for 3.
Flashbangs: Likely stun and disorient anyone caught within the 3 meter blast radius. Anyone outside of that gets a reduced effect. 1 EU for 3. 1
supply for 3.
Forced entry kit: Lockpicks, acid and other assorted gear for breaking in. 4 EU. 5 supply.
Bomb/trap defusal kit: A series of items useful for defusing bombs. 4 EU. 6 supply.
Breaching charge: A small but powerful localized detonation meant for creating man sized hole in walls with a thickness of less than 15 centimeters. Ineffective against anything stronger than brick. 2 EU. 4 supply.
Much of this is still a work in progress, which is fine
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Topic: Deniable Assets Race-Core thread (Read 2847 times)