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[Armok]

Make it more clear that it's soft scifi, not a terribly failed attempt at hard scifi.

[Virex]

Hmm, I'll add a note to the OP


Besides that, I've been working on the rules for ship-to-ship combat:

Spoiler: Ship data sheet (click to show/hide)

(In case you're wondering, ships are semi-sentient. It's a useful side-effect of the emergent complexity in their neural circuits which makes communicating with and controlling them a lot easier. It also makes then vulnerable to telepathy, but the alternatives are too slow and outdated to control all of the systems found on a modern ship)


Ships-to-ship combat functions similar to normal combat, with some caveats:
Each crew member rolls and factors as normal, but splits the resulting factors in two pools. One pool is for personal actions such as repairs or mind hacking and the other pools are combined to form the ship's pool. From this pool, the following actions can be taken:


-Fire weapons. The success chance depends on the weapon's accuracy, the ship's sensor and neural systems and the distance. As always, the defense has to be broken before damage is dealt. Some weapons have a cap on how often they can be fired or on the minimum factor needed to fire them, so a balanced weapons load-out is advisable.
-Aim weapons at a specific part of an enemy ship, causing them to hit that if they break defense
-Engage in defensive maneuvers, temporally increasing defense.
-Move towards or away from enemy ships.
-Activate the stealth systems, which temporally makes the ship invisible to enemies but drains stealth power every round. Success chance depends on the used factor, the stealth level used, distance to the enemy and their sensors. (Stealth in Wild Strain is based upon the use of optic cloaking and cooling with Phase change materials to suppress thermal emission, meaning it can only be kept active for a short spell of time. Hence the need to regenerate the stealth system after use.)


Besides these base actions,  some ships have auxiliary systems that enable for special actions. Those can include Psy systems to fry the brains of enemy mind hackers, mine layers, expendable boosters and countermeasures against enemy weapons.


The success of most actions depend on the stats and equipment of the ships and some skills of crew members give bonuses to ship performances (I'll start filling in numbers soon, when I've mapped the main components of the game). These skills are generally not cumulative though.


Boarding is a part of ship-to-ship combat about which I'm a bit on the fence. Should it even be there? Combat usually takes place over long ranges, so getting close may be difficult unless you have an excellent stealth system (or an excellent team of mindhackers). On the other hand it's pretty damn cool to take the fight to the enemy directly. I was thinking that it could be initiated by using special boarding equipment (possibly short-range teleporters or boarding pods) when close to the enemy ship, at which point normal combat would be possible in addition to ship to ship combat (other ships are still out there, presumably firing on you and most actions go via a mind-to-mind interface with the ship anyway). So characters would have to divide their time between shipside combat and ship-to-ship combat.

[Armok]

I'd say boarding a ship if it's not fully cooperative would be pretty much impossible, but on-ship combat is still useful in case of things like mutiny, pretending to be a ship with a legitimate reason to dock, or just having REALLY good mindhackers.

[Virex]

I'd say boarding a ship if it's not fully cooperative would be pretty much impossible, but on-ship combat is still useful in case of things like mutiny, pretending to be a ship with a legitimate reason to dock, or just having REALLY good mindhackers.

You just gave me the mental image of two mindhackers playing Quake with the enemy crew members

[Jopax]

One question, the Swarm is an artificial hive created to stop combat, what exactly is it though, are the members humanoids, insects, something with robotic parts, or something completely different.

Depending how you flesh it out (heh) it could become a great part of a different number of missions (or whatever you would call sessions with a single storyline) that would include dealing with the Swarm itself.

[Virex]

I'll get a rough description of the swarm up tomorrow. In the mean time, I've done some thinking about the heath system and having both blood and resistance feels kind of redundant, since they fill the same technical niche as a resource for implants. I've decided to lump them together in a stat called stamina.
Further more, having 3 stats that regenerate each round could get confusing rather quick, as people would forget about the regeneration and it's also a lot of bookkeeping. I've therefor ditched the automatic regeneration. Instead there will be abilities that regenerate them, which should make it easier to keep track of everything.
I've also removed the ammo tab from the weapons section, as I'd like to keep the amount of weapons with limited ammo down to some special things, again to avoid the amount of bookkeeping from exploding.
The reasoning behind these changes is that I'd prefer the system to be as slim and unobtrusive as possible. The more variables one has to keep track off, the less time one has for role-playing. I also felt they didn't provide enough fun factor to warrant the additional complexity. I'll be writing up a summary of what I have so far soon so people can see if there are other things that don't sound as fun as intended. I would however like some input from you guys on this, to see if I'm not stripping too much out of the system. Does having to reload and manage your ammo add enough immersion and tactics to the game to warrant the added complexity for example?

[Virex]

Right, after a little hiatus it's time to pick this up again.


On the swarm
The swarm, being one of the first large-scale genetic engineering projects was largely based on the social insects of Old Earth, mainly ants and bees. Their bodies still retain a short segmented shape, which we would describe as that of a bumblebee. The largest part of the Swarm consists of Spaceborne monitors, combat capable crafts and mining crafts, which are generally up to a hundred meters long. Those that interact with humans, such as foot soldiers, the Envoys and Commandos retain the bumblebee shape, generally with 4 legs for walking and two modified legs acting as arms. Although the Swarm has been able to reverse-engineer legs for locomotion, it has not been able to design flight-capable members. As such, they rely entirely on orbital vessels for long-range transport and fire support.
Unlike humans, members of the Swarm do not have a single brain. Instead, they have nervous cortexes spread throughout their bodies. This makes them relatively slow-witted, but also bestows them with significantly faster reflexes than humans and it makes them a lot harder to kill. In addition, those that are put into combat situations have a bulletproof exoskeleton to make them more resilient.
Because the Swarm was never designed to do original research, it's social structure has progressed little since it's inception. The members of the Swarm in the vicinity of Earth are controlled directly by the swarm's central intelligence and as such have little in the way of independent thoughts. Similarly, smaller detachments at Mercury, Venus, Mars and near Jupiter are controlled directly by specially appointed swarm members. These "viceroys" as they are often called by humans appear to have a far-reaching mandate to operate independently, although they still answer to the central intelligence. With the higher intelligence of the Swarm being based largely on that of humans, these Viceroys and the Central Intelligence often reacts in ways similar to that of a human, but one should not be mistaken. Having a near-instantaneous control over millions of subjects and genetically coded to preserve the peace, a Viceroy is not human at all and can react in ways that may, at first, seem completely indecipherable. Although Viceroys directly report to the central Intelligence, they are not bound to agree with each other, which at times has led to frictions, especially between the Viceroy of Mars and the Viceroy of Mercury.
Serving under the Viceroys are the Envoys and Commandos, who also posses intelligence similar to a human and usually have a limited mandate to operate independently and command Swarm forces in the vicinity. They answer to the Viceroys or the Central Intelligence and form the lowest rank of the Swarm hierarchy.


Human Politics
The concept of nation-states has, with the destruction of Old Earth, largely faded into memory. As most planets were and are still largely unsettled, the sudden disappearance of the central governments caused the colonies to fall apart into what's comparable to city-states. The closest things to proper states are the corporations, which when the central governments fell away quickly consolidated their control over the colonies they had set up, effectively making them corporatocracies. There are some groups of colonies holding on to the old country names on Mars, of which the most notable are the Israelite, Ukrainian and Chinese colonies, all three of which hold an area roughly equal to modern-day Switzerland and have about 2 to 3 million inhabitants. (For the record, the total amount of humans alive estimated at 300 to 500 million)


Edit: For those wondering, Earth looks and feels like a combination of This (warning, nu-metal), Chernobyl and Australia.