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I've been building a Kingmaker in space and I'm wondering how it should look. What are some ideas you've been kicking around for how Colonizing would function as a game mechanic?
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I've also been thinking about this. There are of course mechanics from Kingmaker I could repurpose but I don't know if that's ideal, because you get weird scale effects when the players' kingdom might include one huge planet with hundreds of settlements, planet with a single settlement, one highly significant space station, and mining drones in ten adjacent star systems..
Getting the right "camera zoom" for each of those is a bit tricky. I want to avoid the situation where expanding the kingdom increases the amount of bookkeeping too much.
My initial thoughts are to adjust that is a sort of "Fable III" Mechanic where you have to build up a single region for some sort of plot reason. Thereby focusing your camera on a certain location.
I kind of imagine that you want to go abstract. Each settlement and each station and mining outpost all have a cost to establish, an upkeep or a profit, and some benefit. A network of smaller settlements should be able to be merged into a single number as you zoom out.
So, you can have a super profitable single world, but your PCs are establishing podunk gas giant mining stations, piece by piece with the view into turning the multiple lesser things into one big thing.
Basically, when you're done with a location, you summarize and zoom out from it.
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FYI, Legendary Games makes a product called Star Empires for Starfinder. It's essentially their adaptation of PF1's Kingdom-building to Starfinder with modifications. It has an entire chapter dedicated to colonies.
I haven't had an opportunity yet to put it into practice, so I can't provide any 1st-hand experience with it but while I might not go the Empire/Kingdom-building route in my campaign, I definitely thought the Colony system would be of use.
Colony-specific topics include founding a colony, terrain generation, colony generation, creating a colony, etc.
It also has rules for mass combat. Overall, the book intrigued the hell out of me and even if I don't embrace all of the rules, I intend to mine it for ideas.
I've been building a Kingmaker in space and I'm wondering how it should look. What are some ideas you've been kicking around for how Colonizing would function as a game mechanic?
Have you looked at the game Star Without Number? It has some amazing tools for that sort of concept. But however you make it work, I would very interested because I want that for Starfinder so bad.
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I've been off and on reading Stars Without Number, it's definitely valuable as a GM toolbox because it's got a lot of world generation tools. I dunno if any of the supplements also deal with holdings. The company making it (Sine Nomine) is famous for putting a lot of system-neutral GM tools in their game lines.
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I'm thinking I might also take some ideas from Egypt: Old Kingdom, a very elegant computer game about building the Old Kingdom of Egypt. It's got a very clever game design that I think could be used to get a kingmaker feel without burying the players in bookkeeping.
In short, you start with a few workers somewhere in the Memphis region and start building a settlement. You make contact with some other small tribes and assimilate or conquer them, and build your first city. At a certain critical mass, the overworld map opens up to you and you can start branching out to nearby areas for settlement. However, those outlying areas are handled at a higher level of abstraction than your capital region. You continue building stuff (lots of monuments and tombs) in your capital, while exploring the overworld map and negotiating or conquering your way to take over other cities. But the other cities are just a single point on the overworld map, they don't get local area maps of their own.
I think a similar idea could be used in Starfinder: you go into detail about the setup of your capital colony and what kind of buildings you place there, while handling other colonies at a higher level of abstraction. Outer colonies produce more than individual buildings in your capital, but not nearly as much as your capital as a whole. This can be justified because the colonies have running costs themselves, and shipping stuff all the way to your capital isn't as direct and efficient as local production.
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I might also take ideas from the Stellaris computer game, which has an economy system with a couple of resource types - energy, minerals, and food as basic goods; and special alloys, gases and crystals and some other things as higher tier resources, and then some more resources representing political/social/scientific capital. All in all I think about 10 resource types, and different areas in your empire consume or produce different amounts, creating a reason for trade between areas instead of each being (boringly) self-sufficient. This sort of thing could motivate the players to expand into an asteroid belt where special metals are to be found, for example.
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I've been off and on reading Stars Without Number, it's definitely valuable as a GM toolbox because it's got a lot of world generation tools. I dunno if any of the supplements also deal with holdings. The company making it (Sine Nomine) is famous for putting a lot of system-neutral GM tools in their game lines.
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I'm thinking I might also take some ideas from Egypt: Old Kingdom, a very elegant computer game about building the Old Kingdom of Egypt. It's got a very clever game design that I think could be used to get a kingmaker feel without burying the players in bookkeeping.
In short, you start with a few workers somewhere in the Memphis region and start building a settlement. You make contact with some other small tribes and assimilate or conquer them, and build your first city. At a certain critical mass, the overworld map opens up to you and you can start branching out to nearby areas for settlement. However, those outlying areas are handled at a higher level of abstraction than your capital region. You continue building stuff (lots of monuments and tombs) in your capital, while exploring the overworld map and negotiating or conquering your way to take over other cities. But the other cities are just a single point on the overworld map, they don't get local area maps of their own.
I think a similar idea could be used in Starfinder: you go into detail about the setup of your capital colony and what kind of buildings you place there, while handling other colonies at a higher level of abstraction. Outer colonies produce more than individual buildings in your capital, but not nearly as much as your capital as a whole. This can be justified because the colonies have running costs themselves, and shipping stuff all the way to your capital isn't as direct and efficient as local production.
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I might also take ideas from the Stellaris computer game, which has an economy system with a couple of resource types - energy, minerals, and food as basic goods; and special alloys, gases and crystals...
The SWN supplement Suns of Gold has a whole section om colonies and economic holdings with detailed trade rules and is designed to be system agnostic. There is also the faction syst in the core rulebook that allows to track the various factions in a campaign. I owm all the sourcebooks because I loved the system, but getting into starfinder I realized I loved the setting and artwork more.
FYI, Legendary Games makes a product called Star Empires for Starfinder. It's essentially their adaptation of PF1's Kingdom-building to Starfinder with modifications. It has an entire chapter dedicated to colonies.
I haven't had an opportunity yet to put it into practice, so I can't provide any 1st-hand experience with it but while I might not go the Empire/Kingdom-building route in my campaign, I definitely thought the Colony system would be of use.
Colony-specific topics include founding a colony, terrain generation, colony generation, creating a colony, etc.
It also has rules for mass combat. Overall, the book intrigued the hell out of me and even if I don't embrace all of the rules, I intend to mine it for ideas.
Can't wait for my books to get here! Took part in their Kickstarter and recent events has really put that behind schedule. Looks like they are coming very soon though, depending on the game system you picked out.