Post date: Apr 13, 2019 11:49:46 PM
Happy almost-2-weeks-past-April-Fool's-Day-in-whatever-part-of-the-world-you-live-in everyone! The 2055 Turn has officially begun! The new budget files and history section for 2055 have been posted to the website. The deadline for submitting your written orders for the 2055 Turn is May 6 , 2019 at 1200 UTC. As always, if you have questions or are unsure about something then write to me at kelvinsoice@hotmail.com. [For the new players: Send me your trial set of orders well ahead of time and we can go through them and sort out any problems you might have. Note that most of the really interesting action of the turn, e.g. combat and most player-to-player interactions occur some time after the budget and written orders have been submitted, after the May 6th deadline.]
Everybody, welcome Mike Henry, he will be our new player for the UK and Japan. He was very enthusiastic to take the UK last Turn but someone else spoke up first, so now it is his turn.
I had to again delay the game so I could put in a fantastic amount of time updating the game to make sure I do not have to continue delaying the game because I had to continue to put in a fantastic amount of time actually running the game. Someday, eventually, we will get to the point where we go through a Turn and I do not find it necessary to completely rebuild the spreadsheets. That was not this Turn, and certainly not next Turn either, but eventually, I hope, I dream. Of the recent changes, the most notable is that even more things are now done within Google Office, and there is likely more to come in the following turns. This locks us even tighter than before into the Google ecosystem, but the lure of the ability to seamlessly share data between files and people was just too powerful to resist. You guys have no idea how much of my time is taken up with the shuttling and checking of information from one place to another. Noticeable changes on the spreadsheets:
-The Settlement ID number for each Settlement has changed, I was hoping to avoid this but for internal reasons there was just no way around it.
-An overhaul of the upkeeps. Namely that the upkeep for Tech has been split into Economic + Military + Size of the Settlement+Environmental cost, and all of the upkeeps have been re-balanced. We are trying to overcome the vestiges of a time when all of our upkeeps were completely tied the world as it was in 2010 and move towards things which are responsive to the events in the game. One thing which I now see is that there is no good description anywhere about exactly what these upkeeps are and how they are affected; please just hold off on asking the questions, for now these things are too much in flux for me to give a good answer.
-Outposts have been removed, they do not contribute to the production of anything so they have no place on our budget spreadsheets.
Onto bonus Response PAs. [For the new players, this is the closest we get to some kind of victory conditions in this game, this is where the GM hands out bonus Response PApoints as a reward for good play in the previous turn]
Liam gets 1 bonus PApoint. For being so helpful with the game.
Laurent gets 2 bonus PApoints. For his excellent role-playing.
Sergey gets 3 bonus PApoints. For the amazing amount of deal making and role-playing that he has done.
As you might have noticed, I have updated the published rules to version 20190401, we will be using these rules for at least this turn. See section 11.1 for a summary of the changes to the rules since the previous turn. I have also updated the Spaceship Designer Spreadsheet to match the latest rules. I still hope to significantly increase the pace of the game for the next Turns and I am heartened by fact that last Turn *merely* took us 6 months, we have not had such a short turn-around since the beginning of the game when turn-around was so quick just because the rules back then did not have the capacity to give the players options, so we all did almost nothing. While there have been a number of changes to the game to fix definite errors, the real reason behind almost every change is been to make the game easier for the GM to manage. I think you will find that the game will run a lot faster when the GM does not approach each session of working on the game with '<stares glumly at the screen>' and '<takes deep breath>'. After so much work, it is gratifying to note that both the number and importance of the rule changes continues to decline; of course, we have never yet had a real test of large sections of the game. I can only image what is going to happen when someone finally builds an extra-solar colony and then a war is fought over it using the detailed combat rules!
Let the games begin!,
K