Pre-SysNES2: Beta-testing and Submission

And here I thought that my specialisation in m production was a potential weakness. This is a very good way to shore that up, my weakness in f and v and my high consumption will put that into demand, my large amounts of m produced gives a slight boost to that but others will likely demand it, everyone else seems to have bonus's elsewhere thus my trade routes might be specially productive....

Trade routes to you might be specially productive, no assurance that you'll end up in control of them after all.

Q. If you inhabit an entire system with no foreign input (excepting foreign commercial agents/analysts) is there an automatic bonus? or do you simply have the opportunity of developing the trade into something you have total control over?

The total system is used to calculate the trade, if you're alone in there then it obviously is just your stuff being used for trade.

@Matt: no because it was a bad idea and took a lot of work.
 
Economics2: The Big One (4.5 mb)

Note: this primarily designed for my use, so I won't get too into the details of its operation, this release is for you to play around with and get a feel for the effects.

Though your policies and modifications data is included, only an example society (Exampleciv) is actually added at this time. Your specific pages will have some hard coded stuff.

As always you should ONLY modify the cell in GREY, any white cell is probably doing something
Dark Grey - freely modifable
Light Grey - freely modifable here, light grey indicates stuff that will be iteratively updated over time in the actual game
Light Blue - information cells, no functions are drawn from these values

Economics2 contains the following sheets

WORLDS - the region database, very important for society sheet calculations
TW - A datasheet, not for users
HAB_CALC - the hab_calculator, can read off the worlds database or you can input region traits directly. Used to derive cost of habitation.
TECHS - database of current techs, s invested and tech modifiers. Techs are also displayed at the top of the society sheet. Unlike sysnes I won't be posting this each update, instead you'll be wanting to look at the society specific sheets. To explain the research focus modifiers - techs you haven't been focusing on (those in the bottom quartiles of your tech levels) will suffer from institutional inertia and will recieve a research penality. In essense this is like the 'inflexible' trait but milder. Various traits influence the inertia. Leaving one field behind to tech upwards does have costs as well as advantages, and it will hopefully drive trade for techs you might lack. Tech costs are exponetial
POLICY - this is where the social choices are made and your innate and modification values are tied together. In the top left corner is the fields for adding social choices. Also acts as the parameters weighting database
MODIFICATIONS - this is the sheet for where the high tech modifications to your society (and adaption to environments is placed). At the top is the check field for possessing them, below is their effect on traits (some will also have hard coded special values). At the bottom is the level of stress each causes.
MODIFICATIONS_DESCRIPTION - the description and costing for the various modifications. Note some are society wide whilst others are applied to just a world or region. Note that if a modification is not continous, you have to pay the cost for each new population in the world/society.
SUMMARIES - this page summaries a number of stress, upkeep, and trait modifier functions. It also has the root fields for the civ names.
ARMY_UPKEEP, FLEET_UPKEEP, MERCHANT_UPKEEP, SPECIALIST_UPKEEP - these four pages are where the properties and positions of all your stuff is being tracked and where I will store all the data values.
GROWTH - THis is where the magic happens, and the next year values are generated from the current ones. by setting th field at the top to the appropriate society sheet, movement and pop growth is generated (after which the new values get copy pasted back to the society sheet). The only other user inputs are the amount of stuff you're leaving to the private sector this turn (which drives development) and a special boom/bust modifier for when I'm adding in external economic events.
WV - this sheet is how the GROWTH sheet generates world values. If you have adaptions to a specific region, along the bottom here is where you indicate them.
PMV, TMV - engineering sheets for use in growth and talent generation. Their large size is one of the things that slows the sheet down.
BUILDINGUPKEEP - a database for the various upkeeps and modifiers buildings have. You can find the base movement values of buildings here. Also is the root for the building names.
TRADESUM - This is where trade is calculated. interplanetary trade for involved societies is generated automatically from the society sheets. Intersteller trade routes are added at the bottom. Stars they pass through need to be added manually
TR_REF, TR_E, TR_M, TR_V, TR_N, TR_PLR, & T_F - engineering sheets used to calculate trade (their roll is to sum all the regions in a system, looking in all the sociey sheets.

Finally we have the meat:
EXAMPLECIV - this is an example society with a small presence in sol and the mighty Test system. Each player society will have a sheet like this, and NPCs will be bundled onto similar sheets. The most important thing to get right with this sheet is the reference to other sheets in economics2. You need to point to the right column in POLICY and the right row in TECHS, and the right row reference for regions in WORLDS. Once thats done, its merely an issue of ticking off the buildings present to generate the societies economic statistics. You can mess around with the light grey fields, these are the ones that get copy-pasted from the GROWTH sheet with each years iteration. Trade goods are at the bottom.

Couple of important things to note
- without some form of power your e production is very anemic, however you get diminishing returns on population e with additional power (not so with factories though).
- People are pretty unlikely to move to a base or space frame until some habitation buildings are put up (or the world value is really high)

Feel free to mess around with any of the grey cells - I encourage finding bugs and broken weightings with experimentation!
 
Sorry, brainfart. I keep assuming improved production :P

Are there any specific names for rare resources for inputs? Are the tech costs Big? They seem big...

On the Tradesum page, Tradecheck indicates if Race X are involved in trade, or their total level of trade in the system? Further in the Intersystem trade section what does the 0.5 number indicate?

Usually I would chase all this down, but its taking a loooong time for the spreadsheet to recalc everything :|

EDIT: Oh, and is vacuum training meant to have an affect on Medium Radiation in the WV sheet?
 
:p

Probably, haven't thought of many yet.
They do get large.
Involved in trade
This trade value goes 50% to one and 50% to the other, if there were three planets the value would be split further.
Yeah it does that, the trade ones especially take a while.
Training? Vacuum cybernetics provides slight rad proofing yes.

Sorry, brainfart. I keep assuming improved production :P

Are there any specific names for rare resources for inputs? Are the tech costs Big? They seem big...

On the Tradesum page, Tradecheck indicates if Race X are involved in trade, or their total level of trade in the system? Further in the Intersystem trade section what does the 0.5 number indicate?

Usually I would chase all this down, but its taking a loooong time for the spreadsheet to recalc everything :|

EDIT: Oh, and is vacuum training meant to have an affect on Medium Radiation in the WV sheet?
 
:p

Probably, haven't thought of many yet.
They do get large.
Involved in trade
This trade value goes 50% to one and 50% to the other, if there were three planets the value would be split further.
Yeah it does that, the trade ones especially take a while.
Training? Vacuum cybernetics provides slight rad proofing yes.

Is there any direct input of trade income from the trade page to the society page?
How does merchant tonnage correspond to cargo bays and to trade?

Vacuum cybernetics has no influence on Med Rad on the VW page, thats where it would show up correct?

Do the modification immunities only correspond to growth or does it also affect construction of habitats?

Still suffering an info overload...
 
No, because you can decide which of your stock exchanges controls which market share, so the level of alteration would be equivalent to just copying and pasting anyway.

1 Tonnage = 1 cargo bay slot, I dunno how that is confusing. You deploy your merchant tonnage to make trade routes, and the biggest tonnage gives advantages.

Will change then.

It affects the building costs of accommodation buildings.

Quit whinging, you said you wanted me to release this. Though its very large there are only 5 (and maybe 1 more) relevant pages too look at.

Is there any direct input of trade income from the trade page to the society page?
How does merchant tonnage correspond to cargo bays and to trade?

Vacuum cybernetics has no influence on Med Rad on the VW page, thats where it would show up correct?

Do the modification immunities only correspond to growth or does it also affect construction of habitats?

Still suffering an info overload...
 
Usually I would chase all this down, but its taking a loooong time for the spreadsheet to recalc everything :|

My excel crashed initially. On restart there's still a noticable 2-3 second lag for every calculation. Even if nearly everything is automated, the lag of inputting what's left is going take awhile. Excel's UI is a bit of a hassle at this point as well. Fairly sure you aren't a machine Dis. :(

Edit: I can understand why social stress goes to 400/infinite when pop exceeds habitat space, but why does it also do so when pop simply equals/fills all the available hab space?
 
My excel crashed initially. On restart there's still a noticable 2-3 second lag for every calculation. Even if nearly everything is automated, the lag of inputting what's left is going take awhile.

Are you guys not using excel 2010 or later? There is some pretty serious optimization with later excels.

Since people are complaining here is a Lightweight Version of the economy calc, 1/8th the size and should be running a lot faster. However this one can only handle a max of TEN filled regions per society page.

Excel's UI is a bit of a hassle at this point as well. Fairly sure you aren't a machine Dis. :(

Whats the problem? You have cells, you put values into them? Job done.
 
Edit: I can understand why social stress goes to 400/infinite when pop exceeds habitat space, but why does it also do so when pop simply equals/fills all the available hab space?

It goes to 410 because that's the crowding stress of having a full habitat. It remains at 410 when population exceeds space because that is not meant to occur, and negative values of room-pop hit the ceiling of possible values. That 410 is just for the default crowding stress modifier - the Seffesians get a mere 9 stress for a overfull city.
 
Right, so I seem unable to write 2-3 paragraphs that would cap off my background story. Here’s a quick dirty humor-stripped summary then, better than nothing, even though it’s likely too late by now:
Spoiler :

Values: Wealth, Power
Traits:
4 – Superior Genetics X 2
1 – Start with Republic
1 – +1 to Construction at start and 4% reduced cost to Construction
1 – Start with Pellet Fusion Core refined

Would also take an “Easily influenceable government” trait if it were available for 0, or with “Open” if it were available for -1.

Assumed techs:
Spoiler :

Biotech 3 / Computation 2 / Construction 4 / Energy 3 / Materials 2 / Math 2 / Social 2 / Propulsion 2 / Weapons 1


Very large ship full of rich partying college students from the University of Maximegalon (name borrowed from Douglas Adams) (the ship is named Mary Jane of course). Superior Genetics x 2 comes from their families being rich enough to afford it. Cliché freak inter-stellar drive accident lands them very far from home and destroys a good chunk of the ship. Inter-planetary drives soon to fail, so the ship technicians (educated resourceful folk in contrast to most of the students) decide their only option is to crash-land on a nearby habitable planet.

Much of the rest of Mary Jane gets rendered useless at this point. Inertial dampeners survive and keep the passengers alive, computer system is still mostly accessible for the time being and holds a vast store of useful information, some back-up power cores (Pellet Fusion Cores) survive, food stores partially survive and are powered by the back-up power cores, and finally the local cell-phone or such network temporarily survives so the ~20 million passengers can communicate and organize themselves.

Technicians announce the situation, manage to keep panic levels workable (I assume 2X Superior Genetics would also help with the panic levels a bit). After a short while the students, being young, privileged, and in college, decide they want to form a democratic capitalistic utopia. The charismatic person who first got this suggestion started (Bob) instantly gets elected leader and he nominates some members of his fraternity (Delta Kappa Epsilon) to draft a constitution and some others for public office. Delta Kappa Epsilon members go on to dominate politics up to the present day.
Technicians remind students of the dire situation, Bob is level-headed enough to get right on their side. Technicians are promised honorary titles in the new government, Bob uses his charisma to get people to listen to technicians.

Slowly, people get organized and start building. The habitat sections of the ship are still intact, so housing is fine at first. The first priority is getting a modern farm up. Power comes from the surviving PFCs, knowledge comes from the computer system which is gradually degrading. The next priority is getting more fuel for the PFCs because reserves are running low. The simplest solution is to redirect part of the flow from a nearby river and set up some electrolysis. Hydrogen with very trace amounts of deuterium isn’t the best fuel, but it’s good enough.

My story has some more explanations and a couple of funny anecdotes here, but eventually they manage to get a self-sufficient city up. With proper maintenance impossible, the computer systems on the ship keep degrading. The technicians manage to copy a large amount of information before the system goes off-line, with much of the information being in the field of Construction.

They also make contact with the native inhabitants of the planet, a group of hiders that have de-evolved into a pre-industrial society and into light blue sclerae (idea taken from Dune, but also quite possible in reality from what I understand). The natives are mainly absorbed into the Maximegalonians; Superior Genetics X 2 ensures that inter-bred children have few native characteristics.


And now to the more current things. The current time is slightly more than 100 years after the initial crash.


Most people live in the main city, Hellon, and its suburbs, though other cities are starting to grow in size/prominence. Thus most of the population lives in the same region, with other regions having only small Maximegalonian presences. There are some small groups of unassimilated natives in the main region, though the larger ones live in the other regions.

Hellon is no longer situated near the ship, having moved to a more favorable location a long time ago. Mary Jane now lies half-buried and abandoned; there is a fence around it, but there’s little left to scavenge anyway. The computer system died a long time ago and no one knows if any information can still be recovered from it.

There are a few social classes entrenched into the system. The descendants of Delta Kappa Epsilon, as mentioned earlier, make up the vast majority of elected officials and are generally more wealthy than most. Any citizen can technically be voted into office, sure, but people have so far been content with letting the DKE handle the government; it’s easier to bribe a senator than to be elected one yourself, and there’s small campaign barriers (tax, education level) that serve to keep most crazies/idealists out.

The “technician” class, made up of the highly educated, has been traditionally respected and still is. “Technician in X” is an actual title, above the title of “Doctor of X”. It takes a lot of talent, time, dedication, and a fair amount of either money or luck to become a technician, so numbers are kept fairly low. Unlike in the DKE class, nepotism plays a very small role here. Once a person becomes a technician though, they are guaranteed large research funds and their opinions are highly valued. The technician class maintains a degree of organization and collaboration through conferences and correspondence, and is the source of many technological innovations.

At the lowest end are the natives. Though many were assimilated and other refused to join the Maximegalonian society, a few remain in Hellon. They generally represent the poorest of the poor. Any natives that manage to advance up into the middle class typically marry Maximegalonians, their children thus coming out Maximegalonian. These natives are typically also disenfranchised due to small voting barriers.

In-between are the rest of Maximegalonians. Most belong to what is typically referred to as the middle class. A few are as poor as the natives, a few are richer than the DKE. For the most part though, Maximegalonians mainly concern themselves with advancing through the social ranks by accumulating wealth and power.


As mentioned, there are also many natives who had refused to join the Maximegalonians, most of these living outside the main region. They have all become aggressive towards the idea of cohabitation with the Maximegalonians. The natives outside the main region are still open to trade and communication with the Maximegalonians, though they have little they can actually trade. The natives in the main region however violently resist any attempts at contact, and as such the government has not even bothered to sign protection treaties with them. Conflict between settlers and natives has thus been slowly increasing, though the technologically inferior natives have little chance of winning.


Technologically, the Maximegalonians have so far mainly been building on what they recovered from the computer systems of the Mary Jane. There has been no need for advanced weapons until about a decade ago, when the Maximegalonians re-established interplanetary travel, hence the lack of research in that field. Early on there was a strong emphasis on survival and rebuilding. Though that’s mostly petered out by now, the Maximegalonians remain advanced in Biotech and Construction. Recently the technician class redesigned the interstellar Burst Drive, and a bare-bones inter-stellar raft has been commissioned.

Over the last decade, New Maximegalon has built a tiny fleet of interplanetary fighters as a token defense against space pirates. As with nearly everything else on New Maximegalon, the fighters are powered by the refined Pellet Fusion Cores that were one of the few things recoverable from the Mary Jane. Speaking of the Mary Jane, there is hope among some that information can yet be recovered from its ruins, though the prospects seem slim.

Oh, and a large chunk of the Maximegalonians kind of worship a giant cargo bay full of alcohol that was lost during the inter-stellar drive accident.





My initial reaction to armies is that fleet superiority seems to trump them early-game. 2-3 cluster bombs are cheap enough to be thrown on a bare-bones ship as an afterthought and will roll high enough to kill a chunk of pop every turn. Sure it won't kill your actual armies, but there's no point in having your armies survive if all your pop die. And at that point I’d imagine it’s better to negotiate a surrender than watch your pop keep dropping.

There usually isn’t clear fleet superiority for one side or the other though, and armies are certainly useful then.
Spoiler Ghosts :

Ghost Commando Unit

1 Manpower

Commando Training I

Drop Pods

Senses I
Sensors I

________

25e / 2m / 2v / 0a / 0t / 19s / 1p
Upkeep: 4e / 3s

HP: 10 / Size: 2 / Int: 3
Detect: 3 / Stealth: 13
Actions: 4 / Att: 5 / Def: 5

MVal: 25 / Operating Time: Indefinite / EW: NO/0 / EWV: 0

Drop 2-3 of these onto a developed world and you’ve got yourself a decent bargaining chip that doesn’t tie up part of your fleet. Once they earn guerilla status they get a nice boost in effectiveness.

Spoiler Goliaths :

Goliath Orbital Defense Unit

1 Manpower

Commlinks

Aerospace Training II

Power Core
Comm & Tech
Networked I

5 SODs

________

109e / 22m / 37v / 0a / 0t / 36s / 1p
Upkeep: 15e / 2m / 7v / 2s

HP: 10 / Size: 7 / Int: 4
Detect: 6 / Stealth: 0
Actions: 3 / Att: 8 / Def: 6

MVal: 25 / Operating Time: 2 Turns / EW: NO/5 / EWV: 65

Orbital attacks #: 12
Particle Damage: 20


This concept is based on the fact that my reading of the combat rules is correct. From what I understand, ship combat goes Abilities -> LR Weapons -> Manuevering/Engaging / CR Weapons. Planetary instances are defined as CR instances, thus SODs should be able to fire on dropships before the dropships get a chance to drop anything. Needless to say, Goliaths will die quickly if anything does actually get dropped on top of them.

Otherwise, they should take out a good chunk of dropships; even if there’s more ships than they can kill, Goliaths are still cost-effective. Fairly useless in atmospheres, even if the particle weaponry is replaced with missiles, but they’re somewhat nifty to have on resource-rich moons, or if armies can be placed in orbital habitats.




Here’s a ship I made for fun. Can 1-hit and survive the Apeilic Iris battleship (Salamander) using almost only low-tech components. Constr 9 and Mat 8 are the only high techs needed.
Spoiler Salamander-Killer :

Salamander-Killer Sniper

1 Charm Drive
22 Deuterium Drives (refined)

51 Metal Capacitors (refined)

Command Deck
Command Staff

304 Computer Module (refined)
1 Secret Element from row 85
Commlinks
Scanners
1 Jammers

84 Radiators (refined)

25 Linear Catapults (refined) (25-COUPLED)
Barrel Casings III

1 Pebble Net

________

1097e / 1301m / 665v / 0a / 4t / 274s

Size: 888 / Mass: 788 / HP: 877
IS: 4 / IP: 1 (752 Slave Charm Mass)

Surplus Power: 2 / Heat: 6

Int: 144 / Dodge: -100 / Avoid: 63 / Armour: -426 / Shield: 0

#Catapult: 1 / Catapult TD: 8900

EW attacks: YES / EW score: 345 / EW vulnerability: 749
Boarding: NO / -172

Int to fleet: 6
Jamming: 2 / 2


Which makes me think that initiative may start being out of balance at higher techs. It takes 18 int for a ship to be able to hit my Salamander-killer at close-range for example. Those 18-int close-range particle ships would easily be intercepted by high-IP fighters a tiny fraction of their cost while another chunk of exposed computers shoots them down with unavoidable missiles. Removing or extending the dodge floor would make things better, unless it’s at -100 for a purpose.

And sure, this won’t make any difference for most of the game, but I’m assuming that by the end we’ll have Constr 10.



Oh, and Commlinks have said they boost "Computers" in their description for a few versions now.
 
@qoou

On the society concept
a) Its a bit more farcical in tone than light levity I generally go for, pretty heavy handed with the jokes too.
b) Being a foreigner, my cultural bases do not extend to finding the ins and outs of the American fraternity system at all amusing. Comedy options live or die by their actual humour. Unlike most straight copy-pastes of earth culture, I don't see how this would make them act in any way interesting or novel.
c) The technical description both don't square with the setting or make much sense - a 20 million strong student interstellar party boat? Inertial Dampeners? A ship that big landing? Fashioning an industrial base to support 20 million overnight?
d) The society you described is pretty obviously Hierarchic rather than Republican.
e) I pick the component based on your background (and thus pick one which is actually non-obsoleting) you don't get to choose and then torture the background to fit.

On the army:
Ship and ground combat are separate, the SODs don't fire during the ship combat phase, but instead damage orbiting ships during ground combat. Also 15e upkeep is pretty damn steep. Their SODs would not be of use in orbital habitats.

On the navy-army effectiveness thing:
Yes, but cluster bombing populated areas for no good reason will put you in everyones bad books, and a big enough badboy rating gets your own capital turned to lava.

On the Salamander-Killer
I like how you say its low tech when your using a component you don't know the requirements of :suspicious:. Its also of limited deployment thanks to needing metal capacitors. It also doesn't work very well since the Salamander has a 100% chance of achieving tactical surprise (appearing a 0.9+ c will do that), and will annihilate any number of these sniper rifles in its free surprise turn. Finally who said the Salamander and other high tech vessels were meant to be invincible? Its a patrol battlecruiser that doesn't even top out in all the tech fields.
 
No, because you can decide which of your stock exchanges controls which market share, so the level of alteration would be equivalent to just copying and pasting anyway.

1 Tonnage = 1 cargo bay slot, I dunno how that is confusing. You deploy your merchant tonnage to make trade routes, and the biggest tonnage gives advantages.

Will change then.

It affects the building costs of accommodation buildings.

Quit whinging, you said you wanted me to release this. Though its very large there are only 5 (and maybe 1 more) relevant pages too look at.

Cool, sheet works much quicker on my newer work computer (with 2010...)
 
So if I understand the intrasystem trade rules correctly, there are 15 slots for trade (all types collectively?), each of the trade levels probably takes up a different number of slots (1,2,3,5,8 or something?), this then is proportional to some percentage of the trade in the system (SHIPPING MARKET SEGMENT VALUE, FINANCE MARKET SEGMENT VALUE, DATA MARKET SEGMENT VALUE) which you gain as e. Works the same with Intersystem trade except that is strongly biased to correcting missing products (i.e. trade with a system that requires v with a system with an excess of v is worth a lot, trade between two self-sufficient systems is not great).
 
So if I understand the intrasystem trade rules correctly, there are 15 slots for trade (all types collectively?), each of the trade levels probably takes up a different number of slots (1,2,3,5,8 or something?), this then is proportional to some percentage of the trade in the system (SHIPPING MARKET SEGMENT VALUE, FINANCE MARKET SEGMENT VALUE, DATA MARKET SEGMENT VALUE) which you gain as e. Works the same with Intersystem trade except that is strongly biased to correcting missing products (i.e. trade with a system that requires v with a system with an excess of v is worth a lot, trade between two self-sufficient systems is not great).

What? There are 5 possible shares of each type of market, each which provides a trade value per system indicated in the TRADESUM PAGE.

These values are then transferred to the society sheet to work out the e and s profits from these trades. Who said anything about different numbers of slots or that other stuff?
 
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