Anybody Still Have the UMT?

[Erik L]

I skimmed through a lot of the posts (especially the mega-wall ones ).

One thing I'm doing with the re-write of Astra Imperia is in the area of taxes on colonies. Populations are categorized by size, these being Outpost, Small Colony, Colony, Large Colony, Small Core, Core, Large Core, Very Large Core. With each one is an associated tax modifier. Outpost to Large Colony all have varying degrees of negative tax modifiers. This modifier is applied to the base tax rate (which could result in a negative number). This means that an Outpost with a -50% modifier will usually end up costing money until it has grown to a sufficient size.

You might look at something similar for Cosmic if you've not done so already.

[crucis]

I skimmed through a lot of the posts (especially the mega-wall ones

One thing I'm doing with the re-write of Astra Imperia is in the area of taxes on colonies. Populations are categorized by size, these being Outpost, Small Colony, Colony, Large Colony, Small Core, Core, Large Core, Very Large Core. With each one is an associated tax modifier. Outpost to Large Colony all have varying degrees of negative tax modifiers. This modifier is applied to the base tax rate (which could result in a negative number). This means that an Outpost with a -50% modifier will usually end up costing money until it has grown to a sufficient size.

You might look at something similar for Cosmic if you've not done so already.

Erik, a problem here that I see is that income from all populations in Starfire is considered come from taxes in the first place, since this money is the money that's usable by the government, not the total wealth production of the entire planet.

That being said, if outposts were intended to be drains on the Imperial government, then perhaps they should actually have negative "incomes".  But if that were the case, it would seem like there'd be little reason to create an outpost on any world where the population was to be capped at Outpost in the first place.  (Of course, I mentioned this as a possibility for Desolate and Extreme populations in a previous post...)  About the only reasons to accept such an OP would be a) on a habitable world that may grow to a larger, more profitable level, or b) to emplace a "listening post" OP on some outer system moon, where a minor negative income could be seen as a "maintenance cost" for the listening post.  But unless the minimum size at which positive returns on smaller populations was sufficiently high, I could easily see players just dumping a sufficient number of colonists on a habitable world and jump right over the colony's negative income phase.  

BTW, don't consider this as negative criticism.   I'm trying to think the ideas thru as I type...

As I said, for worlds with sufficiently large pop capacities (i.e. above the tipping point for turning a negative income smaller population into a positive income larger population), this idea would only seem to serve to encourage players to dump a large group of colonists on the world.... if they could afford it.

As for worlds with lower pop caps, such as Desolates and Extremes, if for example, the tipping point was between Outpost and Colony (i.e. OP's negative income, COL's positive income), it would seem to make Extreme OP's all but useless, except for the possibility of listening posts...  which, BTW, may not be a "bad thing"...

[procyon]

One thing our group has done to slow population growth (as I agree, growth tends to be what ends the game),  has been to declare that non-habs don't grow (the habitats are only built to support so many.  If you are going to raise a family, you go home on one of those Qv CFN FT's - why else are they coming out to a colony.  Mining ops are seldom touist attractions).  The other has been to cap the max size of an emplaced colony at Settlement.  Once you place 180 PTU, you have to wait on natural growth.  In the game that got away from us, they would push right on through the 2PTU per PU stage and colonize a planet to Med.  Then it would generate the 10PTU for each PU of growth and it became the next big colonization center on the frontier.  You only lost 6 PU income on the planet to gain 60 PU on a moon.  Good trade.  
   When we capped it at 180PU, the Small pop had to trade 30PU to put 60PU on a moon.  Not quite so good.  Especially if it put the small pop back to settlement - in that we also limited natural growth to colonies with a minimum of 180PU unless it was the homeworld - to allow LEL's to grow if they were tiny (In a hostile or harsh enviroment, you are still probably living in a habitat with limited ability to support a population - particularly ST's.  Pregnancy under constant 2G's would probably be fatal for both mom and babe).  You could allow benigns natural growth below 180PU and not make a large difference.  With 10 turn growth at 10% (we go slower, but most probably won't want to), it will still take 20 turns for your Small Pop to reach a size that can colonize a moon fully without shutting itself down or dropping to the 1:1 level where you are just spending money to shift population without increasing your income.  
   The one thing we plan to try in the next game (whenever that happens, may be years yet), was that if you limit the max emplaced colony size to 180, and growth only can increase it from there, then you can also reduce the PU:PTU conversion rate as the players won't be able to use it to push pops up bigger with colonization.  If Med only traded PU to PTU at a 5:1 rate, colonizing a moon would cost twice the income potential of the planet.  Dropping the higher pops to lower rates will also slow their ability to colonize in the first place.
   As for the pools of PU for moons, don't like it so much.  I want to know where to attack and defend if they have pops.  If they are just a bonus to income due to mining ops on them, then that isn't such an issue.  Simply say that if the system becomes contested, you lose the bonus.  The miners are dead/won't leave port until the threat is resolved.  The bonus might even be contingent upon requiring a patrol force in the system (perhaps with required tractors, etc) ala the Coast Guard or they won't set up shop in that system.  Will force empires to spread out fleets (realistic, the civy's like protection), and the maintenance will eat into the income to slow growth.  The bigger the bonus from AB/moons, the more HS in 'Coast Guard' ships required.  Use the patrol rules that give a mix size 3 lower than your largest ship with certain required systems on board (T/Ic engines/Bsa/etc) will keep players from using it as a chance to build front line BC's to rescue stranded miners.
   Sorry if this rambles, I'm on break and trying to type quickly.

[crucis]

One thing our group has done to slow population growth (as I agree, growth tends to be what ends the game),  has been to declare that non-habs don't grow (the habitats are only built to support so many.  If you are going to raise a family, you go home on one of those Qv CFN FT's - why else are they coming out to a colony.  Mining ops are seldom touist attractions).  The other has been to cap the max size of an emplaced colony at Settlement.  Once you place 180 PTU, you have to wait on natural growth.  In the game that got away from us, they would push right on through the 2PTU per PU stage and colonize a planet to Med.  Then it would generate the 10PTU for each PU of growth and it became the next big colonization center on the frontier.  You only lost 6 PU income on the planet to gain 60 PU on a moon.  Good trade.  
   When we capped it at 180PU, the Small pop had to trade 30PU to put 60PU on a moon.  Not quite so good.  Especially if it put the small pop back to settlement - in that we also limited natural growth to colonies with a minimum of 180PU unless it was the homeworld - to allow LEL's to grow if they were tiny (In a hostile or harsh environment, you are still probably living in a habitat with limited ability to support a population - particularly ST's.  Pregnancy under constant 2G's would probably be fatal for both mom and babe).  You could allow benigns natural growth below 180PU and not make a large difference.  With 10 turn growth at 10% (we go slower, but most probably won't want to), it will still take 20 turns for your Small Pop to reach a size that can colonize a moon fully without shutting itself down or dropping to the 1:1 level where you are just spending money to shift population without increasing your income.  

I'm very sympathetic with the idea of having a max size on population produced strictly by colonization.  As you point out, it's not too difficult to push colonization right on up to the upper limit of Small before letting natural growth take over and kick the population right into the Medium bracket.  I'm not yet sure what the proper "max colonization size" should be.... Small or Settlement.

As for no growth on non-habitables, I agree.  In Ultra, it states that non-habs are basically mining facilities and the PU's ... the workers are basically contract employees...

As for Medium pops colonizing a moon by giving up 6 PU for 60 PTU... I'm not too worried about that.  It's only a single moon.  And 6 PU on a Medium is still a fairly significant chunk of PU (about 1% of a Medium's PU at 600 PU, meaning 1 month's growth...)  At least the Medium is actually having to give up something to get something.  The real problem start kicking in at the Large level, when free PTU's start kicking in at very significant numbers (117 PTU for a min size Large up to about 1500 for a max size Large), plus each PU converts to 70 PTU.  It wouldn't be so bad without the free PTU's, if the player was forced to give up PU to get PTU's.  But those free PTU's from Large and Very Large pop really feed the colonization fires!

   The one thing we plan to try in the next game (whenever that happens, may be years yet), was that if you limit the max emplaced colony size to 180, and growth only can increase it from there, then you can also reduce the PU:PTU conversion rate as the players won't be able to use it to push pops up bigger with colonization.  If Med only traded PU to PTU at a 5:1 rate, colonizing a moon would cost twice the income potential of the planet.  Dropping the higher pops to lower rates will also slow their ability to colonize in the first place.

Procyon, the "problem" with reducing the PU/PTU conversion factor (CF) is that that CF is what determines the number of PTU's on the planet ... and the number of PTU's on the planet describe the planet's actual population.  Here are the rough values for planetary populations at the upper end of each bracket:

OP   1M
Col   3M
Settlement  9M
Small    40M
Medium 290M
Large ~3.8B
VLg: ~28.8B

These numbers are based on Ultra's pop brackets and CF's.  They're a little different in SM#2.  Still, the key thing is from OP to Small, each size is very roughly about 3 larger than the previous size, and from Small to VLg each size is very roughly about 10 times larger than the previous size.

If you were to reduce the CF's in half, you would be effectively reducing the populations of the planets whose CF's you reduced.... considerably.  And while there's certainly some wiggle room in defining the population brackets, I'm not so sure that I'd say that you could call a world with 165 M people a max size Medium population.


OTOH, in one of the economic models I'm looking at, I don't have any conversion factor.  There would be a max size pop that could be produced with colonists (maybe Small, maybe Settlement).  And major populations would be able to produce a number of colonists per month, based on a (to be determined) percentage of their current PU total. The numbers of colonists would be significant but not seemingly unlimited.

   As for the pools of PU for moons, don't like it so much.  I want to know where to attack and defend if they have pops.  If they are just a bonus to income due to mining ops on them, then that isn't such an issue.  Simply say that if the system becomes contested, you lose the bonus.  The miners are dead/won't leave port until the threat is resolved.  The bonus might even be contingent upon requiring a patrol force in the system (perhaps with required tractors, etc) ala the Coast Guard or they won't set up shop in that system.  Will force empires to spread out fleets (realistic, the civy's like protection), and the maintenance will eat into the income to slow growth.  The bigger the bonus from AB/moons, the more HS in 'Coast Guard' ships required.  Use the patrol rules that give a mix size 3 lower than your largest ship with certain required systems on board (T/Ic engines/Bsa/etc) will keep players from using it as a chance to build front line BC's to rescue stranded miners.

Procyon, the rules for Desolate and Extreme pools would include rules for where the PU's reside.  I've envisioned 3 possibilities...

A) The simplest, though perhaps least realistic ... spread the PU's evenly amongst the worlds in the pool.

B) The "inside-out" model: Fill the innermost moon of the innermost planet in the pool first, then move to the next moon of that planet, and so on.  This model reduces the number of worlds that need defending by filling up worlds and not simply spreading the PU's evenly.

C) Player's Choice: The player writes out a set of orders for describing which worlds get filled up in what order.  In general, if the player is focusing on trying to place a "sensor outpost" around every planet first, the order might be something like "Fill up the outermost moon of the outermost planet, then move to the next outermost planet and fill its outermost moon, and so on. Then after all planets with moons have one OP/Col, start using the inside-out method to place any remaining PU's."


Also note that these pools could easily include Desolate and Extreme planets as well, since they have the same colonization costs.  Furthermore, the moons (and planets?) would not have individual mineral values.  The pool itself would have a single pool-wide mineral value that would be applied to the pool's income.  Also, since the pool's mineral value would really represent an averaged mineral wealth for the pool, the mineral value distribution would look different than for individual bodies, and would have much less deviation from the average value of 100%.

The big upside to pools is that you'd only need 2 pools per star system (well, just the ones with planets, of course)... a Desolate pool and an Extreme pool.  And this would greatly cut down on the number of economic records for the star system.

I should note that I've look at writing rules for such pools and it's really rather simple.  The most involved section would be the rules covering placement of PU's in the pool on the moons (and planets?) in the pool.  But remember that you only need to do this placement when an enemy enters the system.  Otherwise, all you need is some placement orders that are basically contingency orders that may never be used.


As for the "bonus to income" idea, there are some ... issues ... in the concept.

1. To get the bonus, you have to have a planetary population whose income can be modified by that bonus.

2. For the bonus to even reach said planetary population, you need to have the in-system CFN in place, which means (by my current CFN rules) you need a minimum of 200 PU's in the system.  And since the moons and AB's aren't going to be contributing any PU's to that total, all of those PU's will have to be on planets...  So, you'd better have either a T/ST or a O2 planet or two to get enough PU's to trigger the in-system CFN so that you can get the bonus...  

However, there will be some systems, particularly for Red and Red Dwarf systems where it's entirely possible (and will happen fairly often) that you won't have ANY T/ST/O2 planets.  You might not have any planets at all in the Rocky Zone.  And in that case, you wouldn't have any explicit population to tied the bonus to, and you wouldn't have enough PU's in the system to trigger the in-system CFN.  Thus, you effectively are blocked from colonizing the system's moons, unless there's an exception.

3. On the flipside.... what if you have multiple T/ST's in the system?  What will happen is that each of those planets will get this moons/AB bonus...  Of course, this is already true with the AB bonus, but it would become an even larger bonus with the moons included in the mix.  But one has to ask .... exactly why should the presence of a second or third or more planets effectively increase the output of the mines on a moon (with the moon's "output" being measured by the # of MC the bonus produces)?  Of course, this is an abstraction, and like all abstractions, it will have its limits.


4. Then there's the issue of what happens to the miners on those rocks.  As you suggest, the mere presence of an enemy fleet in the system could cut off the planet(s) in the system from the bonus.  In fact, this is pretty much already covered by the in-system CFN rules as they relate to the existing asteroid belt bonus.   But how do the intel rules interface with this concept?  That is, if an enemy has a fleet in the system, can it claim to have conquered any of those mining moons so that it can use the intel rules to interrogate the moon's population for data?

5. What about the innate sensors that come with populations?  Do all moons now automatically have innate sensors once the "moon bonus" is activated by the presence of the in-system CFN?  Or are there no innate sensors at all for these very abstracted populations?  Allowing all moons to magically have innate sensors the instant that the bonus comes into existence seems too "magical" to me.  The no sensors approach seems better to me, since at least you'd have to pay to build some sensor BS's.  However, then you'd have to track all those listening post BS's you build, so have you really reduced the level of paperwork?  (perhaps to some degree...)



As I said above, this is an abstraction, and like all abstractions, it will have its limits.    It's also amusing to me that in the feedback that I've gotten on this topic, it's pretty evenly split between pools and the bonus.

Sorry if this rambles, I'm on break and trying to type quickly.

Not a problem, procyon.  I loved the feedback.

[procyon]

A pool with a method to track the populations seems fine to me, but the abstract method for AB pops drives the players mad as they have no idea where to defend (and as SM I have no way of saying where an attack shoud be) unless they declare which hex, etc, has the OP and then track all of them.

 Don't think any of my players would want the equal amounts everywhere pool method, as it makes it to hard to defend.  They would probably take the inside out method to concentrate the area they need to cover.  We usually track planet movement so they seldom park by a WP anyway.  If they are worried about the WP they stake it out.

As for the bonus % issue - no T/ST, multiple T/ST, etc, you could always just drop the % bonus.  Pops are pops and empty isn't.  Exploitation by mining is just assumed in the pops income.  That would also slow the income growth to a degree.  AB still could have a healthy pop level to make them valuable, just do away with the bonus if you use the pools.  I can see where the bonus comes from, but question its value in having to track it.

As for sensor outposts, if folks want to spread out there pops, to each their own.  For my players with OP/COL using sensores - it has just usually amounted to the pop having advanced warning they were about to be invaded/nuked.  Made little difference from the distress call from the pop.

Sounds like you have some awesome ideas.  Keep it up.

[crucis]

A pool with a method to track the populations seems fine to me, but the abstract method for AB pops drives the players mad as they have no idea where to defend (and as SM I have no way of saying where an attack should be) unless they declare which hex, etc, has the OP and then track all of them.

 Don't think any of my players would want the equal amounts everywhere pool method, as it makes it to hard to defend.  They would probably take the inside out method to concentrate the area they need to cover.  We usually track planet movement so they seldom park by a WP anyway.  If they are worried about the WP they stake it out.

As for the bonus % issue - no T/ST, multiple T/ST, etc, you could always just drop the % bonus.  Pops are pops and empty isn't.  Exploitation by mining is just assumed in the pops income.  That would also slow the income growth to a degree.  AB still could have a healthy pop level to make them valuable, just do away with the bonus if you use the pools.  I can see where the bonus comes from, but question its value in having to track it.

As for sensor outposts, if folks want to spread out there pops, to each their own.  For my players with OP/COL using sensors - it has just usually amounted to the pop having advanced warning they were about to be invaded/nuked.  Made little difference from the distress call from the pop.

Sounds like you have some awesome ideas.  Keep it up.

First, thanks for the feedback.  It really does help.

I actually have a third idea for dealing with the situation, though I don't think that it's as popular.  (I think that I mentioned it before...)  And that would be to make populations in the Gas and Ice zones essentially unprofitable or simply ban them.  BUT at the same time, increase the population levels of Type O2 (aka Type B) planets and moons in the Rocky Zone to make up for the population loss in the Gas and Ice zones.  This would mean that there'd be fewer bodies to track, but retain the benefits of discrete body colonization (i.e. knowing specifically where your PU's are).  There would be a few more economic records to track in this model vs. the 2 pools idea, depending on how many Type O2/B bodies happened to exist in any given system, vs. the 2 pools = 2 economic records.  But, again, you'd know exactly where the populations were, whereas in the pools model, you have to worry about some sort of placement orders.



Speaking of Ultra's pooled asteroid belts, if that's what you're saying drives your players mad... well, you could apply a version of the fill'em up from inside-out placement strategy to AB's...  But rather from the inside out, maybe try something like this... assuming that the bodies are orbiting the primary just like all of the other planets, create a "pseudo-planet" in the AB.  This pseudo-planet doesn't exist except as a marker for strategic hex #1 of the belt.  And this pseudo-planet "marker" would orbit at the same rate as real planets.  Then what you could do is fill up the equivalent of 2 OP's in that system hex, and then moving clockwise (or counter-clockwise, if that floats your boat), fill up the next system hex with 2 OP's worth of population, and so on until you've wrapped all around the belt.

Frankly, asteroid belts are a bit of a pain, in this regard, and even the above idea isn't all that simple.  Oh, you really don't have to track much more than the "pseudo-planet" (aka sH#1 of the belt), but it'd still require you to divide up your X PU of AB population into 40 PU increments and start placing them around the belt.  Of course, you really only have to do this when the system is invaded, so it's not really like you have to track all of the individual populations.  It just gives you a way to



I had/have an idea for dealing with AB's in a much different manner, though I tend to doubt that it would be well received.  I call it the "planetoid" method.  In the planetoid method, an asteroid belt is only assumed to have 1d10 (roll at system generation) "planetoids" in the belt... "planetoids" being dwarf planet-like bodies similar to Ceres and Vesta in our own asteroid belt.  These planetoids would then be the only places where you could actually colonize.  There'd only be 1-10 of them in any one belt, so it's not like there'd be that many to track.  Planetoids might be allowed to "have" larger populations than would seem justifiable compared to moons, on the theory that you're really colonizing some nearby rocks as well (but also just to get some more PU's in the belt)....  Of course, with the potential of moving to a moon pool type of model, discrete planetoids are a bit contrary to that direction since it creates more economic records rather than fewer.  (It also likely means that there might be a lower population capacity in the belt than currently is the case...)

Anyways, this is always going to be a concern when you start coming up with ideas to increase simplicity thru abstraction...  When you pool populations for tracking and economic, you reduce the ability to know where each of those populations actually reside, and you end up having to come up with somewhat iffy procedures for placing them.  So, you often end up having to ask yourself what's more important, simplifying the tracking of economics and populations, or knowing exactly where those populations are all the time.  It's very, very difficult to find any sort of balance...  And the more abstract you get on the tracking of economics, the more difficult it is on the flipside of knowing where those populations really are (case in point ... the use of a percentage bonus for moon populations ... very abstract and no way to know how many PU's reside where since there are no such PU's).

To be honest, this is why I sort of have a fondness for the idea of no Gas zone or Ice Zone colonization but increasing Rocky Zone Type O2 (aka Type B) planet and moon populations.  It strikes a balance between knowing where the populations are without hacky placement orders.  And it reduces the number of economic records considerably, though not as much as only 2 moon pool records.  The down side for some people is that they couldn't accept the idea of not being able to colonize in the gas or ice zone, even if it was explained as a method of game simplification.  (It is worth noting that Ice Zone moons couldn't be colonized in 2nd edition, for whatever it's worth...) Another downside is that no gas zone or ice zone colonization would probably rule out colonizing gas or ice zone asteroid belts as well, and that's where the majority of AB's reside...


Frankly, there are no easy answers on this... Some people seem to prefer one direction, while others prefer another.  Oh well.   :wink:

[procyon]

Reallistically speaking, I like the idea of only O2 planet colonization and moons in the rocky zones idea.  Most moons orbitting our outer planets would toast any colonists with their radition.  It would be about as easy to colonize Venus as it would any large moon around Jupiter - with the possible exception of Callisto.

As for the discreet pops in the AB's, we already do a version of that by just totaling the number of OP's, turning it into a (roughly) equal number of O2 moons, and spreading them out through the AB (ala Ceres, Hygiea, Vestia, etc.)  Our problem with AB pools is that the players like to drop troops on pops to shut down their income, and knowing where they are going in an AB is a problem - let alone how to run the combats.  Do you really have to take on the whole belt, or just one OP?  How quick can you move through a belt? Does dropping troops on one OP shut down the entire belts income or just that single OP?  Way to many questions and arguements....

It has come up several times in binaries or red dwarf systems where the only thing worth colonizing was the ABs, and they would want an OP or two so that another race wouldn't come in and claim the system.  The players have contested this type of system and like to drop troops to shut down the income/conquer the pops. (It has also happened to them several times. The simple mention of a system they named Thor will inspire a large number of tales about battles that raged back and forth through that particular system.)  Granted tracking the dwarf planets in an AB is a little bit of a chore, but the 'dwarf planet' solution was the only one that quelled most of the arguements.
I don't think my players would grumble much if they just didn't have to worry about it anymore.

For my opinion, I like the no colonization past the rocky zone - but retaining discreet pops there.  It cuts down the records, and would help (just a little) slow the economic expansion - but still allow them to know where there folks were at.  We would probably just ignore the outer moons (a bunch of planets with moons you will never use just eats up a lot of paper space - some systems branch out into several pages just to track all the moons that will never have colonies on them) and consider each gas or ice planet to have a limited AB equal to the size of the current magnetosphere (ala nebulas) where sensor ranges were reduced by all the moons/radiation belts/magnetic belts - as if they were in an asteroid belt.  The outer planets would just become one line of terrain instead of a list four to six lines long of the planet and its moons.

As for losing the colonization in AB's in the gas/ice zone, some will fret.  Personnally I find the idea of colonies on rocks that small with generally wild rotations/tiny escape velocities a little hard to accept.  Mining yes, but 'colonies' seems a little hard for me to accept.  1-10 dwarf planets to colonize would help to offset the loss of the gas planet moons if folks wanted them, but it looks like our little Sol might have hundreds of those little dwarfs drifting around out past Neptune.  Just ignoring them all is fine with me.

[crucis]

Reallistically speaking, I like the idea of only O2 planet colonization and moons in the rocky zones idea.  Most moons orbitting our outer planets would toast any colonists with their radiation.  It would be about as easy to colonize Venus as it would any large moon around Jupiter - with the possible exception of Callisto.

As for the discreet pops in the AB's, we already do a version of that by just totaling the number of OP's, turning it into a (roughly) equal number of O2 moons, and spreading them out through the AB (ala Ceres, Hygiea, Vestia, etc.)  Our problem with AB pools is that the players like to drop troops on pops to shut down their income, and knowing where they are going in an AB is a problem - let alone how to run the combats.  Do you really have to take on the whole belt, or just one OP?  How quick can you move through a belt? Does dropping troops on one OP shut down the entire belts income or just that single OP?  Way to many questions and arguments....

Yeah, those are definitely some of the issues with population pools.  AB's are even worse in that regard than would be a pool of moons.  At least with a moon pool, the number of bodies within the pool is known and relatively limited.

It has come up several times in binaries or red dwarf systems where the only thing worth colonizing was the ABs, and they would want an OP or two so that another race wouldn't come in and claim the system.  The players have contested this type of system and like to drop troops to shut down the income/conquer the pops. (It has also happened to them several times. The simple mention of a system they named Thor will inspire a large number of tales about battles that raged back and forth through that particular system.)  Granted tracking the dwarf planets in an AB is a little bit of a chore, but the 'dwarf planet' solution was the only one that quelled most of the arguments. I don't think my players would grumble much if they just didn't have to worry about it anymore.

For my opinion, I like the no colonization past the rocky zone - but retaining discreet pops there.  It cuts down the records, and would help (just a little) slow the economic expansion - but still allow them to know where there folks were at.  

I'm not sure if it would "slow economic expansion" as it'd be my intention to increase the population capacities of rocky zone Type B/mB's to compensate for the lost pop capacities in the Gas/Ice zones.  Of course, without any growth, those populations aren't "expanding" on their own...

... We would probably just ignore the outer moons (a bunch of planets with moons you will never use just eats up a lot of paper space - some systems branch out into several pages just to track all the moons that will never have colonies on them) and consider each gas or ice planet to have a limited AB equal to the size of the current magnetosphere (ala nebulas) where sensor ranges were reduced by all the moons/radiation belts/magnetic belts - as if they were in an asteroid belt.  The outer planets would just become one line of terrain instead of a list four to six lines long of the planet and its moons.

As for losing the colonization in AB's in the gas/ice zone, some will fret.  Personally I find the idea of colonies on rocks that small with generally wild rotations/tiny escape velocities a little hard to accept.  Mining yes, but 'colonies' seems a little hard for me to accept.  1-10 dwarf planets to colonize would help to offset the loss of the gas planet moons if folks wanted them, but it looks like our little Sol might have hundreds of those little dwarfs drifting around out past Neptune.  Just ignoring them all is fine with me.

Yes, the kuiper belt may have many dozens or more dwarf planets, but there may be a substantial difference between those and the once in the Mars-Jupiter AB.  The dwarf planets in the Asteroid Belt are almost certainly highly rocky bodies, whereas the dwarf planets out in the Kuiper Belt are probably some combination of rock and "ices" (i.e. frozen elements that we'd normally think of as gases).  This is a reason why AB's in the Rocky or Gas zones should be more valuable than Ice zone AB's...

The Dwarf Planet (or "planetoid") solution is compromise solution.  The thing about these dwarf planets is that in my research on moons and dwarf planets for Cosmic, the smallest moons that fit into my standard definition of "moon" is actually larger than the largest Dwarf planet in Sol's asteroid belt, i.e. Ceres.  I define "moons" as being moons with a radius of 500 km or more (ignoring those that are smaller... if you don't ignore the smaller moons, you'd end up with many, many dozens of more "moons" orbiting the Gas and Ice zone planets).  OTOH, Ceres, the largest dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, only has a radius that just under 500 km... which should realistically rather limit its population capacity.  However, if such a "dwarf planet" concept for AB's is to be a viable alternative, those dwarves need to have a half decent capacity (better than just OP), so it becomes necessary to suspend disbelief to some degree ... after all, limiting an AB to only 1-10 OP's when they previously had 5 OP's per sH or about 2 OP's per sH (the Ultra equivalent).  

As for ignoring them or not... I tend to prefer internally consistent solutions ... so if colonization of moons in the gas and ice zone wasn't possible, my internally consistent solution would require that asteroid belts in those zones also not be colonizable.  (Sol's AB is in the Rocky Zone and hence colonizable in this model.  And IIRC, Sol's AB probably has only around 3-4 dwarf planets in its AB... don't remember exactly.)


So, yeah, I suppose that some will "fret", but I suppose that if the AB bonus is retained, it does help soften the blow ... though I do tend to think that the ABB for an Ice Zone AB should be less (5%) than a rocky or gas zone AB (10%), since it will have a lower rock content (thus, poorer in heavy metals) and a much higher "ices" content.

[miketr]

One thing that might be helpful is to consider how does the economic / population explosion occur?

In games that I have run / played in the following pattern has been followed.

Home System, break off a PU a turn and get hundreds of PTU.  Dump colonies on O1 / O2 worlds such that they grow to max size in two years; don't care how many PTU I don't use.  I keep doing this till I find a useful T or ST world out system to colonize.

Once find useful colonies out system crash use emplacement colonization such that next turn ending in 0 the world will grow to a medium.  What I do then is strip off extra PU and convert them to PTU and colonize a bunch of O1/O2 bodies in the new system, again such that they grow to max size in two years.  Out home system I am more careful to make sure that I don't waste any PTU.

This process is repeated across space as the empire expands out.

Normally the investment ratio between colonization and IU is 3 to 1, some players refuse to invest in IU as long as there as places to put PTU.  After all PTU can grow in time while IU never do.  

I would suggest the following options are possible to reduce the rate of expansion.

1) Slow growth rate.
2) Limit colonization locations.
3) Limit colonization rate.

We have talked about so far are options 1 and 2.  What I suggest for 3 is the following.

Currently you can get hundreds of PTU on big worlds and 18 PTU on a medium by breaking off a single PU.  Limit colonization only to bonus PTU or heavily reconstruct the PU to PTU conversion table or both.  As it is right the bonus PTU almost don't matter unless you have a maxed out Very Large Population world.  Odds are if you have a maxed out world at Very Large Pop anything within easy range has already been colonized anyways.  So just the PU to PTU conversion, limited by freighter fleet or cash on hand matters.

You could also increase the amount H and Q it takes to transport PTU restricting the number of out system colonies you can place.  Still this will just slow things down.  

So what I would do is just out right eliminate the high end PU to PTU conversions and limit colonization to bonus PTU.  Increasing the amount of bonus PTU available.  This would I think put a rather large break on colonization.

Michael

[crucis]

One thing that might be helpful is to consider how does the economic / population explosion occur?

In games that I have run / played in the following pattern has been followed.

Home System, break off a PU a turn and get hundreds of PTU.  Dump colonies on O1 / O2 worlds such that they grow to max size in two years; don't care how many PTU I don't use.  I keep doing this till I find a useful T or ST world out system to colonize.

Once find useful colonies out system crash use emplacement colonization such that next turn ending in 0 the world will grow to a medium.  What I do then is strip off extra PU and convert them to PTU and colonize a bunch of O1/O2 bodies in the new system, again such that they grow to max size in two years.  Out home system I am more careful to make sure that I don't waste any PTU.

This process is repeated across space as the empire expands out.

Yes, this is the pattern.  But the process (3e or 4e) really, really shifts into overdrive once your non-homeworld T/ST populations reach the Large level.  Of course, in SM#2, this is only Benigns, since Harsh and Hostiles are limited to Medium and Settlement in size.  But in Ultra, B, Ha's and Ho's can all reach Large in size as the EL's increase and the EL-based population caps increase.  As you point out further down  (and as I pointed out in an earlier post), Large (and later Very Larges) populations have much higher CF's that produce many more PTU's per PU exchanged.  And it only gets worse in 4e, where you can get 2% of a larger world's PTU total as free colonist PTUs.  For a Large or Very Large, this can be a huge number of free PTU's for colonization... so huge that you rarely ever would need to "strip off" any PU's to exchange for PTU's.  

Normally the investment ratio between colonization and IU is 3 to 1, some players refuse to invest in IU as long as there as places to put PTU.  After all PTU can grow in time while IU never do.  

Yes, this is accurate ... i.e. preferring colonization over investing in IU's, and I'm rather certain that that was the design intention.

I would suggest the following options are possible to reduce the rate of expansion.

1) Slow growth rate.
2) Limit colonization locations.
3) Limit colonization rate.

We have talked about so far are options 1 and 2.  What I suggest for 3 is the following.

Currently you can get hundreds of PTU on big worlds and 18 PTU on a medium by breaking off a single PU.  Limit colonization only to bonus PTU or heavily reconstruct the PU to PTU conversion table or both.  As it is right the bonus PTU almost don't matter unless you have a maxed out Very Large Population world.  Odds are if you have a maxed out world at Very Large Pop anything within easy range has already been colonized anyways.  So just the PU to PTU conversion, limited by freighter fleet or cash on hand matters.

You could also increase the amount H and Q it takes to transport PTU restricting the number of out system colonies you can place.  Still this will just slow things down.  

So what I would do is just out right eliminate the high end PU to PTU conversions and limit colonization to bonus PTU.  Increasing the amount of bonus PTU available.  This would I think put a rather large break on colonization.

Michael

First of all, thank you for the response, Michael.

Let me tell you that I actually am looking at all of this stuff already.  I'm fully aware of the role that high CF's play on economic explosivity.... I wrote a rather involved post on it a week or 2 ago.  The core problem is the combination of PU based growth (rather than PTU based growth) and the high CFs for Large populations.  The problem with PU based growth is that it actually accelerates the underlying population (PTU) growth as PU total increase, due to the increasingly large CF's.  Medium pops aren't exactly going to be too large a problem, but once growth pushes a colonial population (i.e. not the home world) to the Large level, you start being able to produce LOTS of PTU's much closer to the frontier, and thus reduce colonial shipping costs.   And that's the key explosivity factor, IMHO... the point at which an empire starts being able to produce a massive second waves of colonists sourcing from worlds closer to the frontier and not from the homeworld, since that reduces shipping costs considerably.  The longer you can force an empire to have its homeworld be the primary source of large groups of colonists, longer you delay the onset of economic explosivity.  And when colonists have to source from the HW and colonization shipping costs are increasing, it also creates an increasing drain on the economy to force heavy colonization due to those increased shipping costs.


As for the high level PU/PTU conversion factors (CF), I actually don't intend to do anything with those ... for a reason.  I don't intent to use the PU/PTU system as it currently is.   I intend to make some significant changes to it, to simplify it and reduce the number of colonists to useful but reasonable levels.



Let me hit on those 3 points for a moment...

1) Slow growth rate.
2) Limit colonization locations.
3) Limit colonization rate.

#1) On slowing the growth rate, there's no doubt in my mind that the SM#2 growth rates were rather ... aggressive.  I won't be using growth rates anywhere near this high. My intention is to use lower growth rates, though the exact numbers have yet to be fixed.




#2) This is a two part point...

From one perspective, this can be about bookkeeping simplification, which has been discussed considerably before this...

Then there's the more involved question of reducing the numbers of T/ST planets, since they are really the economic engines of any empire.  The problem here is that there are two competing arguments.  

Argument One is that if you decrease the number of T/ST's, you increase the effects of exploration luck.  If the number of T/ST's is reduced, then the effect of finding one T/ST is enhanced.

However, there actually are some ways that this can be mitigated.  For example, replace a totally random sysgen model with a model that used sector templates that were pre-generated to attempt even out the numbers of White, Yellow, and Orange stars (the high chance of T/ST-bearing stars), or even go further and pregen it to the degree that you know how many T/ST's are in each sector.  (This would be a rather large hassle, though it could be done.)  

But, if one uses the standard random exploration model, there's no doubt that fewer T/ST's means that exploration luck is increased.  The thing is that this is a HUGE issue for some people and a non-issue for other people.  Cralis has told me that he's had some groups of players refuse to play unless the galaxies were pregenerated to be completely balanced in terms of #'s of T/ST's.  


Crucis

[procyon]

On the subject of more accurate star type distribution (at least for our end of the universe), my group already uses it to a degree with red dwarfs being the most prominent star type.  Slight grumbling when we changed, but not bad.

As for the density of T/ST, that is always going to be tough.  In a game with an SM, it isn't so much of an issue as long as the SM doesn't play favorites.  (I will never be able to let my 6 year old girl play.  She has my number when it comes to getting her way.)  The random issue is a problem because of what it is.  Random.  It will (almost) never come out even or fair.  The only competitive game I played in was many, many years ago and the solution we decided on was that in every six systems you would find one T and one ST.  Not necessarily in the same system.  If you rolled up at T in the first, you only got O2's or an ST  til you rolled out number 7.  If you hadn't found one by 6, it automatically had one.  We would either reroll or create an anomoly to make it work.  The ST was thrown in so that folks playing the ST races didn't end up shorted.  They had the same chances as everyone else essentially.

Change the # of T/ST per number of systems to suit your style, and away you go.  Worked ok for us and solved alot of the griping.  Wasn't perfect, but nothing will be.

[crucis]

On the subject of more accurate star type distribution (at least for our end of the universe), my group already uses it to a degree with red dwarfs being the most prominent star type.  Slight grumbling when we changed, but not bad.

FYI, here's an approximation of what the percentages would look like if real life star distribution percentages were used:

Blue Giant: 5%
White: 3%
Yellow: 8%
Orange: 13%
Red 36%
Red Dwarf 30%
White Dwarf: 3%
Red Giant: 2%

Note that I left the BG, WD, and RG %'s unchanged, and only adjusted the types between White and RD.  Further note that the Star Types "Red" and "Red Dwarf" comprise the spectral classes that are generally associated with what are commonly called "Red Dwarf" stars... so I roughly split the remaining percentage points between those two, somewhat favoring the larger Red type over the smaller RD type.  

Also note that the term "blue giant" in Starfire is a bit of a misnomer.  True "blue giants" should really be "blue supergiants".  But if "blue giant" here is just referring to main sequence stars of the O, B, A, and F0-F5 spectral classes, then its percentage should be really be more like 1% ... with the F0-F5's making up about half of that...

As for the density of T/ST, that is always going to be tough.  In a game with an SM, it isn't so much of an issue as long as the SM doesn't play favorites.  (I will never be able to let my 6 year old girl play.  She has my number when it comes to getting her way.)  The random issue is a problem because of what it is.  Random.  It will (almost) never come out even or fair.  The only competitive game I played in was many, many years ago and the solution we decided on was that in every six systems you would find one T and one ST.  Not necessarily in the same system.  If you rolled up at T in the first, you only got O2's or an ST  til you rolled out number 7.  If you hadn't found one by 6, it automatically had one.  We would either reroll or create an anomoly to make it work.  The ST was thrown in so that folks playing the ST races didn't end up shorted.  They had the same chances as everyone else essentially.

Change the # of T/ST per number of systems to suit your style, and away you go.  Worked ok for us and solved alot of the griping.  Wasn't perfect, but nothing will be.

I most certainly agree... The problem is that randomness is just that ... random.  So you are left with either using something like sector templates, pre-genning the game galaxy and manually editing it, or using something like you've done above.

[miketr]

It has been my experience that the games work better when the GM makes heavy use of pre-generation.  

Looking at exploration luck as a side issue from the economic explosion.

One thought is to borrow an idea from Steve's Aurora and allow terraforming of worlds.  What you do is increase the range of worlds between O2 and T.  What we have currently is T (HI 1 to 10) and O2. Currently O2 covers things like the empty rocks in hard vacuum such as the Moon and Mars.  Possibly also the V type worlds for Venus.  Allow players to be able to terraform worlds just make it stupidly expensive.  So what we do when worlds are found is do a generation based upon the following factors.

#1) Distance from primary in terms of the liquid water zone for the star
#2) Mass of body
#3) You consult a table with the above data, perhaps another roll and you get your world type.  

Maybe you have a world of perfect mass but its on the outer edge of the liquid water zone so is harsh frozen world most of the time.  Maybe the worlds mass is questionable and so its atmosphere is to thin. So you erect massive atmospheric transformers to alter the planets environment.

From a realistic point of view for many worlds just doing Genetic Engineering of the colonists might make more sense.  The time scale would be huge but we have it currently very possible to go from zero to multi-billion population worlds.  The positive is its classic science fiction so it doesn't take much of a suspension of disbelief.      

In the long term people who have really bad luck could hope to be able to do something about their situation short of war.

Michael

[crucis]

It has been my experience that the games work better when the GM makes heavy use of pre-generation.  

Not that I've seen it personally, but I tend to agree with you on this, Michael.  pre-generation allows the GM to make some tweaks to even things out.  I also tend to think that this is more of an issue earlier in the game when finding a single T/ST can have a proportionally larger impact than later in the game after everyone's found a number of T/ST's.

Looking at exploration luck as a side issue from the economic explosion.

One thought is to borrow an idea from Steve's Aurora and allow terraforming of worlds.  What you do is increase the range of worlds between O2 and T.  What we have currently is T (HI 1 to 10) and O2. Currently O2 covers things like the empty rocks in hard vacuum such as the Moon and Mars.  Possibly also the V type worlds for Venus.  Allow players to be able to terraform worlds just make it stupidly expensive.  So what we do when worlds are found is do a generation based upon the following factors.

#1) Distance from primary in terms of the liquid water zone for the star
#2) Mass of body
#3) You consult a table with the above data, perhaps another roll and you get your world type.  

Maybe you have a world of perfect mass but its on the outer edge of the liquid water zone so is harsh frozen world most of the time.  Maybe the worlds mass is questionable and so its atmosphere is to thin. So you erect massive atmospheric transformers to alter the planets environment.

From a realistic point of view for many worlds just doing Genetic Engineering of the colonists might make more sense.  The time scale would be huge but we have it currently very possible to go from zero to multi-billion population worlds.  The positive is its classic science fiction so it doesn't take much of a suspension of disbelief.      

In the long term people who have really bad luck could hope to be able to do something about their situation short of war.

Michael

This is actually a VERY interesting idea.  

I know that some would probably think that true terraforming might be beyond the capabilities or timeframe of the game.  However, in a game where there's already a time compression, and other items requiring suspension of disbelief ... it may not be the worst possible idea to allow for terraforming.  It seems that the key should be that TF-ing probably ought to be sufficiently expensive that it's a bad investment when other options exist, but not so expensive that it's simply not a reasonable option.


There are also some related points here that you didn't bring up ... exactly...

I think that there's some room for questioning what happens if a Type V planet that's close to the inner edge of the Liquid Water Zone (LWZ) (On a side note ... this gets confusing at times, as there are at least 4 different terms used here ... "biosphere, ecosphere, liquid water zone, and habitable zone" are 4 that I've seen used.  I prefer the latter two.).  Let me explain...

There seems to be some reasonable justification to believe that a big reason that Venus is the way it is because it lacks a magnetosphere.  Without a magsphere, lighter molecules (including oxygen molecules) get stripped away by the solar winds, leaving heavier molecules, thus creating the deadly, super-dense CO2 atmosphere that Venus possesses.  And it's very likely that a huge reason that Venus lacks a magsphere is because it's nearly tidelocked to the Sun, since it had a rotational period (i.e. day) that's equal to a little over 240 Earth-days.  That is, Venus turns VERY slowly.  But what if Venus had a mutually tidelocked moon that dragged the planet into rotating much more quickly?  Would that have prevented the core from cooling and allowed the planet's magsphere to remain active.... and thus prevented the stripping away of the planet's lighter atmospheric gasses.... and possibly allowed the planet to be far, far less deadly and possibly something on the order of a "warm desolate" (if it was close to the inner edge of the LWZ).

I have not included this possibility in Cosmic's sysgen rules ... at least yet, mostly because it gets a little complicated... but such a world might be a possible candidate for terra-forming.  I doubt that it could ever really be Benign or Harsh.... but it might be possible for it to be a form of Hostile.  OTOH, even if you dumped a large number of icy comets onto the planet for a water supply, it may also be that not being in the LWZ could simply prevent the planet from retaining any of that water in liquid form, thus preventing it from ever really being able to make the leap from being a "warm desolate" to a habitable "hostile".  I don't know...



On the flip side.... larger Mass 2 or 3 Type B (O2) planets.  One reason why Mars doesn't have a significant atmosphere is that it has no magnetosphere.  Now a major reason for this is that smaller planets, such as Mars, have a much more difficult time retaining a magsphere over the eons than larger planets, such as Earth.  Then there's also some question about whether the presence of a large moon (such as the Moon) helps in this regard by producing increased tidal stresses on the planet that help to keep a planet retain sufficient volcanic activity to assist in retaining its magsphere.  (Such a moon wouldn't need to be mutually tide locked. It'd only need to exist, since the issue is the presence of tidal stresses, not the use of the mutual TL-ing to drag the planet into rotating.)  The key thing here is that if such a planet is able to retain a magnetosphere, it might then retain a reasonably dense atmosphere, since the magsphere would prevent the solar winds from stripping the atmosphere away as it has with Mars.

So, if such a M2/3 Type B planet were to exist (think of it as a "cool desolate", rather than a traditional "cold desolate"), this could be a candidate for TF-ing.... though it would probably need to be close to the outer edge of the LWZ.  Of course, such a world probably wouldn't lack for water.  It's likely that it would have plenty of water locked up as ice, though with some volcanic activity, it may be possible that there were some bodies of liquid water under the ice near warmer volcanically active regions.  The question here relative to TF-ing would seem to be whether terraforming could overcome the fact that the planet still really wasn't in the LWZ.   Also, the atmosphere on such a world may not be particularly life-supporting.  Without any liquid water and without any plants (assuming that they're not possible in such a cold environment) to produce a lot more oxygen thru photosynthesis, the native atmosphere may not be life supporting.  So, what could terraforming do to overcome its location just outside the LWZ?  And even if you could miraculously make a lot of oxygen appear in the atmosphere, what could be done to prevent any open water from simply refreezing, since the planet's average temps are likely to be below freezing, due to its location.


Wow.  I seem to have argued myself against TF-ing.... I guess that I'm left wondering what terraforming could do to overcome the immutable fact of these two orbital locations.  That is, if you're not in the LWZ, you're not going to have any liquid water... at least any liquid water that's out in the open.  On the "warm desolate" non-Venus, the water would want to turn into vapor.  And on the "cool desolate", water would want to freeze.  It seems to me that what needs to happen for a planet to attain any semblance of being "habitable" would be to overcome these tendencies, so that water would want to remain in a liquid state.  But I'm hard pressed to see how one overcomes "location, location, location".  

Side note: even aside from these concerns, I could see such "warm desolate" non-V and "cool desolate" non-B planets could have different planetary types.  But would a "cool desolate" really be all that different from a traditional "cold desolate" to not still be a "Desolate" world?  Of course, in the case of a "warm desolate" non-V, the shift from a Deadly Type V to a "warm desolate" non-V would be an environmental change that would allow some colonization to occur, though probably as a "desolate".

It's also worth noting that these sorts of scenarios wouldn't be terribly common in Starfire, for a specific reason.  The sysgen process in Starfire is simplified to the point that orbits are based on even 1 LM increments.  This tends to mitigate against these sort of narrow special scenarios, since the black body temperatures that would be necessary for such scenarios to be viable do not always occur for every orbit that's "the first orbit inward from the inner edge of the LWZ" (or next orbit outward from the outer edge of the LWZ).  Many times, that orbit just happens to be well outside of the temp range that could arguable support such a special scenario world...  though I do happen to know what orbits are required by star type for such situations....  They're usually orbits that are within 1 LM of the inner/outer edge of the LWZ, though in the case of White Stars, that "zone" is a bit wider, due to the LWZ's much greater distance from the star.

I seem to have argued myself out of thinking that terraforming is possible, if only because I don't see how terraforming can overcome a planet's basic blackbody temperature due to its distance from the star.  Even if many other factors can be mitigated, such as having a magsphere thus allowing for a decent atmosphere to be retained, and using terraforming to add water and oxygen to the planet, I don't know how you overcome the planet's location ... the amount of heat received from the star due to its distance from said star.  

Regardless, it's still an interesting topic ... and a possible way to deal with a lack of T/ST's ... if a half decent justification could be produced to counter these distance issues.

[procyon]

Terraforming is a neat, but probably complicated idea.  If simplified, it probably doesn't required much more of a suspension of 'reality' than everyone having reactionless drives capable of relativistic speeds and conversion of matter to energy.  
Is it worth the effort to put together for the game, I don't know.  I like to write the stories, not the rules.

 As for body location and habitability, that actually is a lot more mutable than what some might think.  If you popped into Sol system through a warp point a sufficient amount of time ago, Mars would have had a magnetosphere, slightly denser atmosphere, and liquid water on it.  I don't think there are many people left who will argue whether Mars used to hold liquid water, its just a question of how much and when.  Depending on the time frame, Venus might be much closer to habitable than what we currently see.  Earth has managed a much longer habitable period, but as you say, location, location, location.

Tempature could be moderated with liberation of CO2 from most rocks on a planet/moon, is opaque to IR light so it absorbs heat well (as is methane and several other gases), and would in sufficient quantity would allow for plant/bacterial life if temperatures were adequate.  I'm sure 'super science' could come up with equally useful compounds that weren't as toxic as high concentration CO2 would be.  

Protection from ionizing radiation would be the problem, as would be the soil of most planets without an atmosphere.  Radiation isn't going to care about CO2, and sterile plants would be poor at repopulating themselves.  Soil exposed to this same radiation will form compounds that are peroxides and would be a great anticeptic in and of themselves.  Not impossible to overcome, just tedious and most likely expensive.

Is terraforming worth it in a game where you can just survey and jump to the next system?  I don't know... that is a hard one.  If T's got rare (devious SM thoughts at work for a future game if this became an option)  and terraforming was competative with multi month colonization transport, maybe.  With the current availability of T's, and the ease of looking for more, I just don't see it getting used unless it was cheaper than looking for one, which would only increase the number of habitables and speed of the economic spiral.

Unless T's got rare, I just don't see terraforming (increasing the number of T's) helping the game.