Human vs Human (Solo Playstyle)

[Froggiest1982 (OP)]

What is your preferred setting Human vs Human?

I have tried many:

2 Races on same or different Planet
7 Races on Same Planet
6 Races on Same Planet
4 Races on Same Planet and 2 on Other Planets
4 Races on Different Planets

I am now trying 4 Races in 4 different systems.

Cannot really pick a preferred setting so far.

The most interesting because of the development is the setting I am trying now but it took time to get some action going between setup and actually finally meeting somebody.

[Erik L]

Biggest thing with HvH in my opinion is that there are no discreet turns. And since you only look at one race's event log, you'd need a SM to adjudicate things. Unless you plan on shipping around the database.

[Froggiest1982 (OP)]

I've been playing mostly solo 

Should have added that!

[Garfunkel]

I've done 2 and 3, 5 and 6, and 10 factions starting on Earth. Never tried different starting planets though.

[Jorgen_CAB]

For me it probably is just important that I simply decide which faction is the main focus... the rest are basically NPRs managed by me. It is really time consuming to come up with good and innovative naming conventions and ground force structures for five or more additional human controlled factions and no matter what you do you will always be biased toward one faction and you might as well just decide which one that is going to be at the start of a campaign.

I almost always play with some sort of Earth start with multi faction starts and it can range from three to about seven total factions of various strengths and sizes.

For me at least I just focus my main attention to one faction and use the other to support the campaign... does not mean that my main faction are necessarily the strongest or the one that will be the strongest in the end either.

I usually find an odd number of 3,5 or seven to work best... but anything above 5 probably does not matter if there is an odd or even amount of factions. At least I find that I want to have factions that differ from each other in some fundamental ways... and I don't just mean about weapon technology research priority but political and economical differences and strategies... that makes for more interesting and asymmetrical conflicts more fun.

You also can invite some friends to do some political decisions with your "support" factions to introduce some unknown facts from yourself.

[Erik L]

In VBAurora, I've done multi player race starts solo. And yes, you start to favor one over the others. At least I did

[Garfunkel]

2 was easy to manage because obviously it's just A and B. 3 wasn't much harder but that was definitely a campaign where it was one main faction and the other two were supporting ones, there to act as foils and so on.

Both 5 and 6 games were actually me being the GM for multiplayer campaigns. On one hand it was easy because the players would come up with all the names and themes and would write RP snippets about the games. On the other hand, it was really difficult to keep all players well informed at all times since we couldn't pass the DB around. Both campaigns ended before we even left Sol because of issues but also the players fighting each other.

And now I have the C# 1890 campaign with 10 factions. It definitely requires a certain amount of standardization - like all the ground formations are similar, as are naming conventions and I don't bother with much narrative about individuals because keeping track of them would be a nightmare.