Rethinking the economics; a new model

There have been two competing schools of thought about economics in this campaign. One school takes the view that the system should be uncomplicated, the other that it should be more detailed and force people into more realistic decisions.

In considering how to reconcile these two notions, I've been picking back and forth through the numbers, trying to find a simpler method of billing for maintenance which will still place players under pressure to keep trade routes open and compete for limited resources.

I flirted with the idea of giving every planet a dice roll, so as to make income variable each turn. Since every player would have half a dozen planets to begin with, a D6 roll should have averaged out over the Empire, but with a bit of uncertainty which I thought would be interesting. Looking at this made me look again at the numbers for maintenance, and it suddenly hit me that I was going round in circles.

From the beginning the idea was to set income levels within empires so as to make it testing to maintain a fleet without taking the risk of attacking something potentially profitable. This is, of course, completely circular and mad, since I was setting the income on the basis of the size of the fleet I wanted. There's nothing wrong with that, except that it made the entire process of calculation and billing pretty much redundant.

So I'm now presenting for you to consider a much simpler model. I'll need to do some banging around with the detail, but the concept is simple enough;

Every planet will have a support rating; it will be able to support a set number of credits worth of ship. That support rating can be applied either to ships in the system or to the fleet, but it's only available to the fleet when the planet itself has a working link to the rest of the empire.

There will be a higher support rating which will apply when the planet is trading with another world. Every world will have a primary resource type. Trade bonuses can only be obtained by trade with a world which is both in another empire and has a different primary resource. Primary resources will also make it easier to build things, in ways which I haven't got round to thinking out yet.

Surpluses can be banked; if you have planetary support capacity greater than your fleet, it can be added to your account for later use for either construction or repair.

This leaves the question of construction and repair. Repair is easy enough - at the moment I figure to add an extra support cost equivalent for each row of hull boxes with damage; so if you've got damage in the first row the support cost doubles, and so on. Construction; I figure that construction ought to cost between five and ten times the support cost. 10 seems punitive, 5 not much more than the cost of major repairs. However, whatever base number we settle on, I would expect to vary that so that it gets cheaper to build ships if you have easy access to resources.

The idea behind all of this is to cut the amount of book-keeping down. The very crude approach to repairs means that it's no longer necessary to add up the price of everything that got shot up or to worry about combat repairs. However, the need for some kind of banking of money means that we can't get away from some form of turn based accounting. This is a pity - I really wanted to come up with a system where you simply compared the size of your fleet with the size of your empire at the end of the turn and counted as out of supply if you didn't have enough money.

Finally, I still want to stick with endurance penalties. As an outline, ships will be able to operate without support vessels for a limited number of turns. The rough and ready formula will be divide 800 by the points cost of the ship to get the number of turns it can work without either returning to friendly space or being accompanied by an auxiliary with a cargo capacity equivalent to the mass of its weapons and fighters (you could get sticky and add something about refuelling, but I'm going to start from the position that they're WARships, and that penalising them on the basis of weapon fit will hit everything else as well). Each auxiliary cargo equivalent will save the vessel(s) supported from having to make one return to friendly space. (it is entirely foreseeable that players could choose to rotate auxiliaries back and forth and since that kind of convoy protection makes for an interesting game, it's something I'd encourage). The idea here is to put a stopper on using nothing but super ships without having to write weird rules to increase their actual cost. I can probably come up with some handwaving rationalisation for the notion that a small ship can somehow get by for longer without supply than a big ship, but it would just be a specious rationalisation for the real thought, so I'm not going to bother and I recommend that you don't try using "but in real life" logic on this one. Tell me another way to get the same overall feel, and I will listen to that. The objective of the endurance rule is to make it very easy to send out small patrols of light ships and much harder to send out large task forces of very heavy ships. That's a desired outcome for the kind of campaign I want to try to run; if everyone finds that unbearable, then I'm wrong in my outlook and the field is wide open to someone else to run a different campaign more to everyone's liking.

As always, feedback is welcome.