Agents Of Empire/Mechanics III

Overview

Here's what's new in part 3 of the game. If not mentioned, everything from the old mechanics, mechanics update and economics pages are still in effect.

Trade/Diplomacy Merger

Trade and Diplomacy, as House skills, are getting merged together.

Region Cost Changes

All regions now cost 20/level, except mining regions, which stay at 10/level.

Victory!

Victory is at hand at last! See the victory page for how to win the game.

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Not Actually Going In

The following changes aren't actually going to happen this game, but I wanted to record them for posterity or something.

Research Regions

Research institutions are the only buildings left, so get rid of them; regions can now be devoted to research instead, and produce a certain number of research points/turn which can be spent on stuff (like mining regions).

Specifically, research regions cost 20 mc/rank to build, and produce 3 research points/rank (or 4/2 points per rank for Houses with Good/Bad research). Points can be spend on analysis, research, theorizing, etc. Costs are as follows:

• Base cost: 1-13 points, based on complexity of target thing.
  • The target of a 1-point discovery is something that is not cheap, not widely applicable, not large-scale and not (long duration or repeatable).
  • Removing a 'not' costs 1 additional point; changing a 'not' to a 'very' costs 2.
• Relevance multiplier: The base cost is multiplied by a number based on the similarity to existing discoveries (x1.0 - x4.0)
  • Repeating a previous discovery is x1.0 (creating another news broadcast, cracking another instance of the same code)
  • Something very similar to a previous discovery is x1.5
  • Something that expands on a previous discovery is x2.0
  • Something that is in a different but related field to a previous discovery is x2.5
  • Something that is in an unrelated field entirely is x4.0
• Analysis multiplier: If analyzing an existing item, rather than researching a new one, the cost is divided by 5 (round down)

Pricing/Component Revamp

A total rebuild of the economics system, to make prices match up with effort, and let people have different playstyles (you could just mine, or just buy raw materials from other people and refine them, or just buy refined materials and build items, etc). Anyway, it goes like this:

• Mining: you can sell raw materials to the imperial market for 1 mega-credit and buy them from there for 1.05 mega-credits.
• Refining: you buy three units of raw materials (for 3.15 mega-credits) or obtain them some other way, and create a component; components for rank 1-4 items can be sold for a markup of x~1.15, x~1.20, x~1.25, x~1.30 respectively, or 3.60, 3.75, 3.90, 4.10.
• Construction: items have a rank 1-4 and a scale. Scale 1 is explorers, military ground units, and useful devices; scale 2 is diplomats and air military units; scale 3 is cargo ships; scale 4 is military ships. Luxury goods can be built at any scale. An item of rank R and scale S requires R*S rank-R components to build, and can be sold at a markup of 1.05, 1.15, 1.25, 1.35 for rank 1-4, plus 0.05 * the scale. So for a scale-1 item, ranks 1-4 can be sold to the market for 3.96, 9, 15.21, 22.96.

This isn't perfect -- the numbers are a little fuzzy on the one hand, and not round enough on the other. Also, there should be a cut for the store between refining and construction. But it does correctly price things in a relative way, so there's a cut for people at every stage in the process and it's never better to (say) sell components directly than to make them into something else and sell that something else, except for the time/factory investment.

House skill aptitudes at the factory level are I think reflected by letting them use fewer components to build, or maybe their factories can build more components. Similarly people with good industry might be able to refine four components a turn instead of three.

Regions are built with items/components: raising a mining region from rank R-1 to rank R requires a useful device of rank R-1 (so a mining region of rank I can be built for free, although maybe you have to allocate some colonists to it or something), raising a refining or factory region requires a useful device of rank R (a factory region also requires 3 rank-R components), and a mercantile region requires a luxury good of rank R. This creates a bootstrapping problem, which is fine -- you either have to buy the useful device for your useful device factory from the market, or else maybe a PC can work with a region to let it create stuff at +1 rank for the turn.

I'm not sure how mega-credits fit into this -- possibly there's just some exchange rate where you can spend like 4+R mega-credits to build a rank-R component, or maybe that is actually sloppy and you should have to always buy the components on the market.