Pre-SysNES2: Beta-testing and Submission

Since we're talking about space limits for p, what actually is the new limit on habitats per region?

Some basic primers/strategies for those of us less mathematically skilled on how to maximize e, s, and t growth and development might be useful. I think I get the gist of it but I don't want to accidentally break the world.
 

Star Dust to Star Dust



[tab]The call came in the middle of his sleep cycle. He snapped awake as was his way, but waited a moment before picking up the receiver to convey his irritation. “Speak,” he said.
[tab]“Space Traffic Control has reported multiple unknown FTL signatures emerging in system.”
[tab]His attention was now focused on the piece of plastic in his hand with laser intensity. “Do we have electromagnetic confirmation?”
[tab]“Optical is tracking main drive flares which are matching velocity; emission-line analysis indicates D-D fusion torches. Radar and lidar sweeps match optical and confirm 34 vehicles of varying sizes: weapon hardpoints have been identified on most. Microwave reveals encrypted comm-chatter; analysts are working on it but they don’t expect much soon. We have identified active electromagnetic emissions—they’re scanning us.”
[tab]He was already in the shower with the receiver, waterproof as it was. “Have they responded to hails?”
[tab]“Not yet.”
[tab]“Bring us to REDCON-0. Lift the guns and get our people moving.”
[tab]“The AIB isn’t going to be happy.”
[tab]He adjusted his collar and allowed himself a modest frown. He’d never liked the Atmospheric Integrity Bureaucracy. “Frak the AIB. Inform them of what we’re doing, and they can do whatever it is they need to as long as they don’t get in our way. I’ll be right there.”
[tab]“Yes, sir.”
[tab]Roland Tatenda Marius, Director of the System Security Bureaucracy, clicked the receiver back into place and made his way rapidly out of his domicile. It sealed itself up behind him in recognition of his hurry. He had an invasion to deal with, after all.
#​
[tab]She inspected the number of flechette cartridges in the magazine box before slapping it into place, and slid a hand soothingly over the embossed “Kalashnikov AK-616” logo before checking the gun’s loading status. Kalashnikov as a brand was—of course—long gone, but upstairs had never seen fit to tinker with the contents of the digital fabrication rights. She liked to imagine it was out of respect. She herself had a fond appreciation for ETC pulse guns—less bulky than electrocasters and more reliable.
[tab]A siren continued plaintively wailing in the background to the roll of red emergency lights. “Tafari,” she said, “can you make that thing shut the frak up?”
[tab]“You know REDCON-0 alerts can’t be disabled locally, Lena,” said Tafari.
[tab]“That’s Lieutenant Azhar today, Tafari,” she said absently, releasing the safety on the weapon.
[tab]“Yes, ma’am.”
[tab]“Alright, platoon, form up and check gear!” Her 42 charges assembled into formation before her, checking and double-checking one another’s armor. “We move in 30 seconds to make sure AIB has this place sealed up and get onto the surface!” she said, “We don’t know what’s coming in and if the guns don’t get it we’re here to put it down! You read me?”
[tab]“Hooah!” they shouted in response.
[tab]“Are you ready to kick some ass?”
[tab]“Hooah!” yet louder than before. She couldn’t see their skins flicker with excitement, but she could practically smell it coming off them.
[tab]“Are you ready to take some motherfrakin’ pirate skulls?”
[tab]“Hooah!” almost deafening now. They were all so young.
[tab]She punched Armory 1819’s door release and started to wave them through “All right, you apes, let’s move! Go, go, go!”
[tab]They filed out enthusiastically into the pleasant white hallway. Lieutenant Lena Faina Azhar was the last to go and the door sealed behind her, leaving the room flickering red.
#​
[tab]Roland breezed past security into the SSB’s Main Control without a pause—his biometrics had checked out 50 meters earlier and they knew him by sight. His assistant, Melantha, was waiting for him. “What have you got for me?” he patterned.
[tab]“Still no response from the inbound fleet,” she said.
[tab]He surveyed the displays in the room at a glance: orbital plots of the system, visuals in various spectrums of the transgressor fleet, remote feeds of the massive electrocaster Defguns oriented to target on the surface, interior security progress plots. AIB was doing a decent enough job of sealing the place up. He let something equivalent to “Tell me you’ve got more than that,” flash across his face.
[tab]She concealed her annoyance rather well and vocalized: “Analysis of FTL comms traffic provided by the ‘Apeilic Iris’ has been difficult to decrypt but based on scattered open chatter Intel has told us they reason to believe that this fleet matches descriptions of the ‘Standard Confederacy’. They’re citing what appear to be military comms out of Abell, Buxe, SAF2, and SAF10.”
[tab]Roland had never liked Intel either. “What kind of military comms?” he asked.
[tab]“Best guess is chatter about ground invasions.”
[tab]So it was a migrant wave that was now invading everything within reach. “How coordinated are these invasions?”
[tab]“No coordination discernable,” Melantha patterned.
[tab]If this had only been a vanguard, that might’ve been serious trouble. But if it was an isolated splinter fleet, they had options. “What’s the status of our Aerospace Wings?”
[tab]“They’re either breaking atmosphere or on the flight lines queuing up to do so.”
[tab]“And the light-lag on radio to this ‘Standard’ fleet?” he asked.
[tab]“96 seconds and closing. Sir, we could use FTL—”
[tab]“It’s best to keep information of upcoming events in-house, I think. Someone else could listen in on us just as easily as we can on them. Inform me when our fighters are in position and set up a link from here to our tight-band transmitters.”
#​
[tab]Lena’s platoon had been set up in commandeered civilian transports near Defgun 6. Predicted standard operating procedure by the OpFor if they got through the screen put up by the guns was predicted to be a ground campaign to neutralize said guns. Nobody had ever gotten that far, but that didn’t stop SSB from endlessly fantasizing about the worst. Her men were more jittery than advisable but she felt a lesson in the tedium of war to be prudent, so she hadn’t ordered them to dial it down.
[tab]They had all been kept in the dark as to what exactly had brought them out into the surface, herself included, so she spent her time admiring the Defgun while waiting for orders. It had been a long time since she’d gotten to see one on the surface. It dominated the flat expanse’s horizon: a wicked, angular dagger of a thing, jutting out of an articulated pedestal. Beneath it sat a massive elevator, recessed several meters into the ground below great the housings for vast, camouflaged doors, now retracted. Defgun 6 was lean, mean, and very keen, slowly tracking a particular point in the night sky with lethal precision. She followed its gaze, and found she could see nothing.
[tab]She busied herself with diagnostics on her Kalashnikov.
#​
[tab]“Sir, all fighters are breaking orbit and en route, ETA 4 minutes. We have this hooked up to tightband, light lag is now estimated at 57 seconds” said Melantha. She held out a wireless headset to him.
[tab]Roland looked up from the console he was studying to her and took it, slipping it on. He turned to the main orbital display and leaned against a console. “Unidentified fleet, what is your intention here?”
[tab]The delay was mind-numbing. At last it came: “This is Commodore Davik representing the Standard Confederacy. We are here to seek land for our people on SAF6 I. With whom am I speaking?”
[tab]“I’m afraid that’s not possible. I would advise you depart immediately.”
[tab]“Sir, I have 112,000 souls on board this flotilla in need of a world capable of supporting human life. Now I do not know who you are, but I am not going to let some voice on the end of a radio ostensibly on such a world to deny them that right. I suggest you identify yourself.”
[tab]Roland clicked the mute button the headset. “Fire all guns. I want that fleet holed,” he said with cool intent.
[tab]“Sir—” started Melantha.
[tab]“AIB and the rest can launch an inquiry later. If they get close enough we have a ground war on our hands. Now fire the damn guns!” he shouted, skin flashing angrily with shades of command.
[tab]The sudden silence of Main Control erupted into intense, professional chatter as commands flowed outward over the networks: “fire for effect, repeat, fire for effect.”
[tab]Roland clicked the headset back on, saying smoothly “I’m Director Marius. Maybe we can work out some kind of deal.”
[tab]He turned to see Melantha patterning “Exo-orbital delivery confirmed.”
#​
[tab]Lena found herself stirred from ministrations to her gun by the thunderous roar and bright skyward plasma lance that signaled Defgun 6 going hot. Despite the sound and the fury that issued forth from its maw it neither recoiled nor visibly cycled, idling for only a few moments before once more searing the darkness with its hyper-velocity warheads.
[tab]“Looks like the party just started, boys!” she exclaimed between shots. There was wild cheering at the spectacle.
#​
[tab]“Overlord-Actual, Fenrir, I have target visual, over” he said. The light lag at this distance eliminated any actual communication of orders, but communication was maintained for cohesion purposes regardless. Their positions were easily calculable and orders were issued taking such matters into account.
[tab]His headsets sudden squawked to life and his controls lit up in lurid fluorescent colors: “Fenrir, Overlord-Actual, you are weapons free. Initial SOG strike package is inbound, ETA 15 seconds. Updating your telemetry. Beware fratricide. Good hunting.”
[tab]“Alright, everybody, this is it, we’re hot and on the clock! Shoot to kill and watch out for the radiation bursts! Break and engage, two-by-two!” said Fenrir.
[tab]“Affirmative,” “Wilco,” and “Roger,” spilled in from all directions. He broke off with his wingman and made for the rapidly approaching cluster of burning dots. They were growing in size alarmingly as the first spherical ivory blossoms lit up their ranks. His data screens autocorrected for the optical flash. In instants the nuclear pulses dissipated to show hulls glowing in evil reds from thermal ablation and gaping caverns in sensor displays. As he dove on one of the bigger ships a second wave of shells came in, this time kinetics, going straight through these enemy ships, passages marked by the crystalline puffs of frozen air or water, and once or twice by the plasma glow of a conduit or reactor breached.
[tab]Sora “Fenrir” Petrovich pulled his trigger and did his duty.
#​
[tab]Roland had committed. He absorbed the chatter passively.
[tab]“Watch the spread pattern—stay sharp,” from one console.
[tab]“Delivery confirmed,” from another.
[tab]“All targets acquired,” from the right.
[tab]“Multiple impacts confirmed,” from the left.
[tab]“Hot Rod is down,” from behind him.
[tab]“Estimated immediate casualties: 86%,” from before him.
[tab]“This is Scarface, recon pass, seeing a lot of bodies floating out here,” from one side of the room.
[tab]“Estimated casualties 99%,” from the other.
[tab]“We are bingo primary air, requesting clearance to RTB.”
[tab]“Picking up general SOS on a lifeboat.”
[tab]“Clearance granted.”
[tab]“Light it up.”
[tab]“Belay that,” shouted Roland suddenly. “Belay that order immediately.” The console tech immediately began passing down orders to cease fire.
[tab]“Get something up there to bring that lifeboat in,” said Roland, before he made his way back to where he’d been leaning.
[tab]“Primary directive achieved,” he heard.
#​
[tab]“Main Control is asking for you—ma’am,” said Tafari.
[tab]“What does SSB Main Control want with me?” asked Lena. She had a feeling she already knew what it was and she didn’t like it.
[tab]“Don’t know, say they’ve got something for you to do. All it says is “Lieutenant Azhar: your specialties are required by System Security Bureaucracy Main Control ASAP.”
[tab]“You gotta love politicians, huh?” she patterned.
[tab]“Yes ma’am, as much as I love the flyboys getting all the action,” he said with a laugh.
#​
[tab]“Lieutenant Azhar,” said Roland, applying a great deal of formality into it.
[tab]“Director,” she said, “To what do I owe this courtesy?” It was respectful but her skin showed the caution and ice in it.
[tab]Roland smiled. “Come now, we both know you’ve been off world. We have need of your talents at the moment.”
[tab]She looked askance “That was a long time ago.”
[tab]“It still makes you uniquely qualified,” he said. He held out a small, thumb-sized container split into two screwed-top cylinders. “Your eyes,” he offered, with a sly smile and some irony on his skin.
[tab]She took it and twisted them open to reveal a pair of contacts. She knew the type. Roland converted a nearby display into a mirrored mode for her. She turned to look at herself and held down one eyelid, slipping the blue-irised, black-pupiled contact over her all-black counterparts. A half-formed HUD presented itself to her. She repeated the process with the other eye and blinked a few times.
[tab]Roland regarded her for a moment and nodded with approval. “We picked up some survivors. We need to know who exactly it is we took apart up there and what they were doing here—we suspect it was a rogue splinter group of a polity known as the ‘Standard Confederacy’ but we’re not sure of the particulars. Unfortunately they’re not very cooperative after this incident and you can imagine how they’d react to seeing us without armor on.”
[tab]“So you want me to go in there and talk to some traumatized mothers and children who survived their families being spaced.”
[tab]“There’s only a few. And not all at once. It’s not like it’d be the first time,” he offered.
[tab]She conveyed her lack of approval to him purely through narrowing her eyes and turned to stare at the door. “Tell me it’s a matter of state security.”
[tab]“It’s a matter of state security,” he said, in a very matter-of-fact way.
[tab]“Why did you hole a fleet with civilians?” she whispered, her voice ragged, skin cycling angrily.
[tab]“Because it was also a fleet with an army,” he said, sounding almost bored.
[tab]He gestured to someone unseen down the hall, and then held out a gun in front of her. “See this? Does it look familiar to you?”
[tab]She took it and studied it. It was like nothing they had. She couldn’t even tell what kind of projectile it fired—or if it fired one at all. “We found a tank floating around out there too. Now, I know you were out there with 42 young bucks eager to wade in pirate blood, but I know and you know those were no pirates, and that gun and thousands like it would have gotten a lot of them killed if these people had ever touched down here. So why don’t you drop the holier-than-thou attitude and do your damn duty?”
[tab]She turned to look at him with indignation by felt it whither before his implacable patterning and smoldering gaze. She mentally fixed her skin to a light olive and loosed her hair.
[tab]“Don’t get too sentimental in there, they’re liable to try and kill you if you let them get close,” he said, turning and walking down the hall.
[tab]He heard her cracking her knuckles before the door in front of her opened, and the one behind him sealed shut.
###​
 
Not like you'll probably ever know. What did you think "Never heard from again" implied? :p

And you're the one invading no less than two or three other polities right now, I'll remind you!
 
To add a touch of definition to the rather nebulously defined pirate threat there are generally three types extant:

Criminal type A: The Raider
Criminals are just looking for the big score, the raider will use speed and surprise to capture your ships and land commando armies on your planets, take everything that's not nailed down and run. The Raider knows long term control of a planet or space is a fools dream, but they also know that the planet bound population can't follow them, because after a few hits they'll make 'the Long Jump' across hundred of years of time and space, or retreat to long period orbit hibernation vaults for a dozen decades or so until those who remember them are dead. Their loot is either slowly released by fronts or they just keep hold of it. The reason that you guys won't get too angry with the Brown Market and its ilk is because they in the main won't be selling stuff stolen from you, but rather from the next few segmentum's over (and a little smuggling helps the soul of course). Raiders will actually try to minimize civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction (beyond blowing up ship construction sites, which they love) to reduce the likelihood that people will be mad enough to follow them on their escape through time and space. They often have rather dashing reputations because of this, and a folk legend is something a wise raider cultivates for when they return centuries hence.

Criminal type B: The Extortionist
The Extortionist has the same goals as the raider - escape into space+time with the loot, but very different methods. An Extortionist will turn up at their target well announced in a fast ship with bombs/viral/EW capabilities, and essential pose the question "Is the amount of destruction/disruption I can cause before you take me down considerably greater than the cost of paying me to go away?". Quite often the answer the targets have to give is 'yes'. The smart Extortionist never hits the same place twice, and they certainly don't have the swashbuckling reputations of Raiders. Sometimes an extortionist can come and go without anyone but the government knowing it; the rulers keeping the bribe quiet to save face.

Ex-Military: The Horde
The final and possibly most dangerous type of pirate is the left overs of wars and conflicts. it is very easy for the losing side to escape, and they are generally desperate for resupplies/a new home to take by force/somewhere to set up as aristocrats/a place to vent their rage and PTSD. Unlike the criminals, their motivations will not be simply economic or rational and they can wreck incredible damage if not stopped. In an effort to minimize this social phenomena, wars between high tech powers in the current era often take a very generous position to prisoners (at least high ranking ones), being quick to ransom them back and treat them well, and keeping the capital worlds off limits in conflicts. You want to make surrender a more attractive option than going rogue, especially when a high IS enemy fleet can simply take the 'Long Jump' into the future and return to wreck you when you least expect it years after the original war has been concluded. The Apeilic-Dathic wars departure from this model in its later stages is one of the reasons people are so worried and angry.
 
Just throwin' it out there: if any part of the calculator needs some serious explanation, it's TRADESUM. Figuring out how to set up trade routes is easy---figuring out what the outputs actually mean and how that will affect your bottom line, not so much.
 
Edit: Disclaimer, I may not actually know anything about anything, and may just be pulling things out of my ass. I doubt that though.

The 7 TR sheets at the end are what's mainly used to calculate trade values. They generate pretty numbers that are put into several columns, but I think you just want to know about the final output?

The only columns that are relevant as final outputs are PQR for intrasystem trade and UVW for intersystem trade. They represent the value of one share of trade; there are a maximum of 5 shares of each type, and who controls what is recorded in the "Segments controlled" section. Though I don't see any place that records control of IS shares.



Dis wrote a guide to trade itself.

Every time stats get updated, trade values are generated by clearing all trade inputs from the society sheets, and copying down the trade values that pop up. Then, trade inputs are re-added to the society sheets from the copy: Σ(number of shares * value of share). The first part is needed because as you add trade inputs to society sheets, calculated trade values change.

To capture trade output, you have to order a create roll in the Battle Calculator, and assign the resulting value to a building. Stock Exchanges for financial/shipping, Networks for data. You need the appropriate building or appropriate agent to be able to order trade rolls; look at guide-link above. Dis said earlier that there is no limit to how many shares a building can process, and agents can capture trade from other systems and redirect it to a friendly building of yours.

You can roll only once per turn for every kind of market, but you can roll for multiple markets at the same time. As in, you can roll once for IP data and once for IP finance, but you can't roll twice for IP data. I assume you can have multiple rolls of the same market-type as long as they involve different routes (once for IP data, once for IP data in another system), but I don't remember if I've actually asked that specifically.

Create rolls get harder as more shares of a type are generated, bottoming out at impossible once 5 shares have been made. This is where contest rolls come in: if successful, they destroy a rival's share. This doesn't give it to you however. I've yet to ask whether you can order a create and contest roll on the same turn for the same share.

Edit:
Found answer to question about IS trade I was bemoaning on #nes
Disenfrancised said:
Yes they are separate from and captured differently to the interplanetary trade, they can also be tapped in along the route anywhere (and commercial agents can transport value back home). They also haven't been properly balanced yet, which is why none have been set up, it also looks like the data market one is broken and referring to the wrong cell.
Click to expand...
 
Knew I should've examined that buried directory post more carefully...
 
Question post:


How was the “gain s from trade” part of the Open trait implemented?

Financial trade is powerful, though to be fair it is harder to hold on to. Adding 25 Financial Trade to my habitat with no infrastructure other than a Stock Exchange would boost my e from 95 to 390. Compare to adding 25 Data Trade to a fully-developed habitat (Network, 5 Data Centres, 5 Social Infrastructure, University): s from 130 to 220 under old rules, 105 to 150.

The Csserians start with merchant tonnage in the High Energy Range (15 IS, yes?), but no merchant tonnage in the Low Energy Range.

How can merchant tonnage be generated? You mentioned it can be done by decommissioning military vessels that had cargo bays on them. I’m sure there’s a more direct way though?
 
Qoou has it nearly right, when you win the contesting role you take it over rather than destroy it (unless destroying it is your intent). It can also be easier to try to contest rather than create even if a full 5 shares haven't been created yet.
 
It hasn't because I forgot, but it'll be hard coded into open civs to gain s equal to a very small fraction of the e they're getting from finance and shipping trade.

I've nerfed it too, but I'll look into it.

You can use higher energy tonnage on lower energy routes if you want.

Well you can also build civilian ships and convert them to tonnage - that's just how you construct merchant tonnage.

qoou said:
Question post:


How was the “gain s from trade” part of the Open trait implemented?

Financial trade is powerful, though to be fair it is harder to hold on to. Adding 25 Financial Trade to my habitat with no infrastructure other than a Stock Exchange would boost my e from 95 to 390. Compare to adding 25 Data Trade to a fully-developed habitat (Network, 5 Data Centres, 5 Social Infrastructure, University): s from 130 to 220 under old rules, 105 to 150.

The Csserians start with merchant tonnage in the High Energy Range (15 IS, yes?), but no merchant tonnage in the Low Energy Range.

How can merchant tonnage be generated? You mentioned it can be done by decommissioning military vessels that had cargo bays on them. I’m sure there’s a more direct way though?
Click to expand...
 
Disenfrancised said:
Well you can also build civilian ships and convert them to tonnage - that's just how you construct merchant tonnage.
Click to expand...

The reason I asked is because if that's the only option, you have to sacrifice a design slot in order to build merchant tonnage.


On the modifications description page, what does “continuous” mean?

Is habitat EW vulnerability not listed anywhere in the spreadsheet, or am I just unable to find it?

I assume the Growth page is ran with trade values plugged in? That would make sense.

The Ship Designer R6/R7 cells (necessary Construction tech) don't take into account traits (Rugged Designers / Poor Safety).

You mentioned market shares can't be moved from one region to another. If a player decides to voluntarily let go of one of his market shares, can he roll to recreate it on the same turn, or must he wait until the next?

The Commercial section of the Battle Calc has a field that's called "Data Centres allied here". As opposed to "Data Centres owned here". Does that mean a faction can lend data centres to another for the purposes of the trade roll, or is it simply a matter of semantics?
 
Duh, or buy ships from someone else.

If something is not continuous you need to pay it again for every new population born/moving to the planet or region.

Yes they do? Look on the BALLSTOIT page. O wait I didn't fix the values properly.

Waits

Yes you can get your allies to help out.

qoou said:
The reason I asked is because if that's the only option, you have to sacrifice a design slot in order to build merchant tonnage.


On the modifications description page, what does “continuous” mean?

Is habitat EW vulnerability not listed anywhere in the spreadsheet, or am I just unable to find it?

I assume the Growth page is ran with trade values plugged in? That would make sense.

The Ship Designer R6/R7 cells (necessary Construction tech) don't take into account traits (Rugged Designers / Poor Safety).

You mentioned market shares can't be moved from one region to another. If a player decides to voluntarily let go of one of his market shares, can he roll to recreate it on the same turn, or must he wait until the next?

The Commercial section of the Battle Calc has a field that's called "Data Centres allied here". As opposed to "Data Centres owned here". Does that mean a faction can lend data centres to another for the purposes of the trade roll, or is it simply a matter of semantics?
Click to expand...
 
Society concept for the Syndicate of the Leeni, mostly courtesy of Disenfrancised who is amazing:

In the days before the Tumult, when glorious empires strode the stars and mighty works were undertaken, the small and careful republic of Gene-veve was one of many who meddled with the fabric of life and mind. The Old Masters of Gene-veve were master artisans of the genetic craft, whose products were famed across their sphere. Perhaps their most enduring breakthrough was the programmable pheremonal interface; allowing control and coordination of mammalian type servitors across a habitat without the need for costly electronic data linkages to each one, even allowing them to natural breed whilst maintain control. The most common export version of this technology were the indomitable ship-rats and ship-monkeys, who could keep a ship spic and span in ways robots often had trouble with. However, in the floating cities of the Gene-veve republic itself the PPI was applied to all manner of species. Perhaps it was hubris, perhaps it was inevitable, but in time the Old Masters even began experiments in applying the control technology to human stock.

After several failures the Old Masters had seemingly produced the perfect slave: intelligent and dynamic, but utterly, emotionally controlled by the habitats control processor. These slaves proliferated rapidly, and the Old Masters designed thousands of specialised hominan types to run the physical base of their society, organising them into work crews and process lines with the other servitors, even making some warriors and strategist-savants (but not generally smarter than themselves, because that would be really silly on their part). The Old Masters weren’t moustache-twirling evil, but seemed to genuinely care for their creations and the slaves were lightly managed and kept in a state of calm bliss.

However, this beautiful and horrific society was drawn to a close, like so many others, by the coming of the Tumult. The core Gene-veve worlds were sterilised in a hail of gamma-ray photons, but several of the fringe resource extraction operations were seldom visited enough to escape this fate. Exclusively populated by the servitors by this point, they simply continued on as before, knowing no other life. But some vermin always survives a fire, and when pirates and raiders stumbled on these lost colonies, they found that simply hacking the pheromone processor would give them an instantly loyal slave army. Passed from petty king to petty king, forced to fight and work and die on a whim, the system of the Old Masters began to warp and mutate, and in the dreams of their deepest sleep cycle, beyond the reach of any control, the artificial love of the master began to turn to brooding hate. The shoddy repairs that were periodically made to the control processors didn’t help either.

In wasn’t until the two petty states of Kural and Chenely decided to pit their slave armies against each other that things really came to a head. Across the battlefield of a continent sized city overrun with weeds, the two armies fought, tears in their eyes. Every instinct and fibre of their being told them to regard the other slaves as family, and the competing pheremonal messages of the Kural and Chenely mixed together, carried by the winds. Eventually the slaves just stopped, sitting and standing, battered into silence by the hammering on their brains. When the Kural and the Chenely overseers and commanders attempted to shout orders nothing happened, when they tripled the output of the control processors nothing happened, but when they just started shooting the slaves where they stood, something definitely happened. As one man and one organism, the slaves and non-human servitors turned and leapt. Red human blood joined the grey concrete and green vines of the city the Kural and Chenely were fighting so hard to gain.
The victors of the Kural-Chenely War took the ships of their rulers and fled, out of human sight and human mind. As the news of the event filtered across that region of space, all the other surviving examples of the Gene-veve’s highest art were put down by suddenly paranoid masters, for uneasy is he who sleeps atop a bed of chains. The escapees were not seen for thousands of years…until now.

For at least some of those escapees wound up hidden deep under the hydrogen haze and hydrocarbon smog of the major moon of SAF9’s gas giant, separated from that bloody day by at least a thousand years of evolution and further self-modification. For those under the PPI had learned to love its warm sure embrace, and the utter peace and trust one could find in a community of fellow yoked individuals. Thus, rather than attempting to extract the controls from their genome, they have extrapolated and democratised it, incorporating the production, as well as the reception of the controls into the recipe of their very bodies. The Syndicate of Leeni, as they term themselves now, has come a very long way by a very strange road.

The Leeni dwell in a large number of cold tube habitats underneath the tar seas of their moon, extracting energy from the tides and winds of the planet and reprocessing the hydrocarbons into building material and sustenance. Cycles of construction and abandonment of these habitats has made them a dense network with some ruined and some wilderness districts with small and feral families. To an outside the air would seem unnaturally still and fogged with uninterpretable scents. The basic unit of the Leeni society is the ‘Family’, derived from the old processor controlled squads of long ago, these groups of a few hundred hominans and thousands of bonded servitor animals alternatively wander the habitats and settle down to manage the industrial tasks.

No one is entirely sure what those original Gene-veve servitors looked like long ago, so what of the current Leeni bauplan is ancestral and what is novel is a matter for conjecture. Some scholars assert that the many of the inhuman aspects of the design were the Old Masters idea, as having a slave that looks too much like the prospective master looking to buy them can provoke all sorts of odd sympathies and void warrantees. In any case the base hominan frame of the Leeni is slightly shorter than the baseline average, though both giants and tiny examples exist for specialised tasks. Their arms are longer proportionally and the fingers much longer and armoured in keratin, and they stand digitgrade on long toes rather than plantigrade. The skin is an oil-like lustrous black and completely hairless, and even over the whole body. The skull is more oval on the rostral-caudal axis, and the facial features delicate and even ‘cute’, the eyes looking completely human normal and coming in a range of colours. The teeth are shrunken except for several pairs of cutting canines, and the tongue is a terrifyingly long serpentine organ splitting into four forked tines at the end – despite what one would expect this is actually based on the secondary tongue of the mammalian Galagos family (bushbabies) and the avian hummingbirds rather than any reptile. The tongue serves to bring phermonal and scent cues to the Leeni’s vastly expanded vomeronasal organ between the roof of the mouth and the base of the nose, as well as allowing directionality of said chemical markers to be inferred without the need to move the head or sniff the ground. The huge vomeronasal organ weakens the skull considerably, and a simple uppercut to the base of a Leeni jaw would prove fatal. However it is unlikely a baseline would be able to land such a blow, for the Leeni possess reactions, speed, and agility even the Praxzen find disconcerting and daunting. Such things are not without cost however; for unlike the adaptably autonomous Praxzen, the Leeni can only subsist on the specially engineered blood and milk of a few of their servitor animals, lacking even the dietary and environmental range of a baseline human. Perhaps the most obvious divergence is the Leeni spines; anchored in the bones of the skull these jet-black few millimetre wide structures extend a few decimetres stiffly into the air in place of a normal humans hair. Internally these spines are a complex honeycomb of air spaces, capillaries, and pheromone producing cell clusters, severing to constantly expel a Leeni’s emotional state, health, and desires to the atmosphere for its fellows to pick up, as well as more direct commands for their servitor animals. Some lineages of Leeni see these spines extending down the spine, and others even have a long prehensile tail encrusted with more of them, though the significance of this is unknown. A tribe or troupe of Leeni walk in a cloud of their collective emotions and love, and are thus tolerant of their fellows and willing to endure incredible population density and depravation. They are always surrounded by their rats and monkeys and food animals, all who have a few spines of their own and contribute and are directed by the chemical consensus.

Beyond the physical task specialists there are three important specialist groups; the first is the Mothers, due to the large possible range of Leeni offspring types the mother must be a large and robust specialist herself. Taking hormonal supplements any female Leeni may become a mother, but an active tribe or troop will only maintain a small and well protected core of mothers. The mothers also provide the basic friend-or-foe carrier pheromonal signal that all the members of the tribe base their pheromonal signals one, and anyone without such a signal is someone they maintain a suspicious watch over. The second specialist type is the Praetor, who again takes hormonal supplements and grows some very impressive spines. The Praetor is able to direct and change the tribes consensus of emotion and provide executive coordination in an emergency, making the feedback loops more hub-centric when needed, they also develop a savant like understanding of relationships and communication. Though some might consider the Praetor the ‘rulers’ of the society it is an honour that most Leeni try to avoid, and there is evidence that the Praetor state is exceedingly damaging and stressful in the long term, cutting as much as a century off lifespans. The final specialist is the Lictor; lictors receive hormonal supplements to develop a near perfect memory, and counselling to be able to survive outside the warm embrace of the tribes pheromonal field without having a breakdown, and are then employed as go betweens and diplomats for the tribes with each other and any outsiders who visit the Leeni’s moon, their memories allowing them to relate all they experience on their return, as well as holding warm snapshots of their tribe whilst on their mission. Much like the Praetor, being a Lictor is an intensely draining experience for the Leeni. Lictors tend to be chosen often from the smaller and tailed lineages, for reasons known only to the Leeni.

The habitats of the Leeni are as boldly communal as their biology, with the massive, snaking tunnel networks often deploying into large common chambers and workrooms, where side-by-side Leeni do their daily business in the constant company of one another. Even the quarters of the Leeni are massive barrackses, some housing hundreds of Leeni together in dozens and dozens of smaller caverns and tunnels, each host to even greater networks of pockets and higher caverns where the rats and monkeys stay. Although the warmth of such constant companionship is enough to make most Leeni pleasantly content, the tubes are often quite cold. With no environmental adaptations nor the luxury of heating for all habitats, the Leeni often doff comfortable woolly jumpers crafted from their servitor animals.

Politically the moon is run by the Praetors of all the tribes talking over the datasphere, selling and leasing data and products, with no proper governmental set up at the current time, though the sudden increase in traffic in all the worlds of the forest has certainly made them sit up and pay attention.

Societal Values: Society, Survival

Traits: +2 to Social tech, Hive, Conservative, Superior Genetics x3, Xenophobic, Aggressive

We are replacing the Thorpe Tyrar.
 
Nice description.

Any thoughts on the balancing of development scores? I'm concerned that the positive feedback for highly-developed societies will make it difficult to catch up.

I don't see why private sector spending has to be abstracted, and can't be calculated per region so we can focus on improving the development scores of the regions that matter. Disparate regional taxation is a thing in the real world, the only argument against it is too much work for you.
 
Thlayli said:
Nice description.

Any thoughts on the balancing of development scores? I'm concerned that the positive feedback for highly-developed societies will make it difficult to catch up.
Click to expand...

Except the e value effect on development gives diminishing returns.

I don't see why private sector spending has to be abstracted, and can't be calculated per region so we can focus on improving the development scores of the regions that matter.
Click to expand...

BECAUSE SCREW YOU

Disparate regional taxation is a thing in the real world, the only argument against it is too much work for you.
Click to expand...

Its a pretty good argument from my point of view. It also reduces the amount of work players have, and fits with the model of abstracting spending across systems.
 
A Wild Catalog Has Appeared! From whence did it come? Whom can say? Send your charitable e donations to SAF6 forthwith!*

Spoiler :
YvD3B.png

* State intent to donate on arrival ASAP to avoid being spaced.
 
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