60 Years in Space

2000+ pages of hard sci-fi space sim crunch · By half-a.press

Add to collection

game Community Devlog

60 Years in Space community

Conflicting Claims... in game, at least

A topic by Cliffypancake18 created 61 days ago Views: 190 Replies: 21

Viewing posts 1 to 3

Cliffypancake1861 days ago

The Crewed Rules page 41 Missions section states "First, roll for the mission goal, then the destination. Place a claim counter matching the mission control BSU on the destination site if no claim counter or busted (black) counter is present." However, multiple other books reference needing to prospect claims before you can place them- as is such with the board game- such as the Prospecting operation on page 296 of This Space Intentionally. I'd assume that the claim-talk in the Crewed Rules is something that would be disregarded while using This Space Intentionally, but it doesn't say that anywhere. Clarification on this would be greatly appreciated.

half-a.pressDeveloper61 days ago

You only place claims for Earthside missions, which are missions for delivering refineries to existing claims from low Earth orbit. You can get missions other ways, in which case you don't place the claim token. You can also get claims appearing on the map in a variety of ways that don't require prospecting: for instance, every space encounter you have may end up placing a claim on a location.

This Space Intentionally allows you to make claims "the hard way" -- which you need to do if you're not originating in LEO. I should probably state that Earthside missions are only available in the Upported era and later.

half-a.pressDeveloper61 days ago

I'll clarify this in the next update - LEO is only mentioned on the Crew Actions table and should be in the main text as well.

Cliffypancake1860 days ago

Ah okay, thank you! I guess it does make sense that you wouldn't want to be able to completely botch a site on your first mission at the very least lol.

half-a.pressDeveloper60 days ago

Yep. Baseline starts are intended for players who want to experience the game without that kind of safety net.

Cliffypancake1859 days ago

After spending 2 hours creating a character? No thank you LOL. While here though, I did have another smaller question: if a missions is overridden by another mission (most commonly gaining a political mission), is said original mission gone for good? Can you have multiple missions at once? In a similar vein, it would be cool to see most (if not all) missions be timed-missions so that your incentive to get places quickly goes beyond 'I just want to do as much as I can before the last era', which from what I've read/seen is the only real time incentive other than interceptions. I'd imagine determining time would be similar to determining modifiers for rolled destinations.

half-a.pressDeveloper59 days ago

You’re free to have multiple missions if you want, but many of them are cargo delivery and you can’t carry that much cargo and be fuel efficient. There’s also already timers on many missions because encounters will place counters that will stop you from completing the mission yourself. See the Common destination rule in the Encounters chapter.

Cliffypancake1858 days ago

I'll take a look, thanks for the response!

Cliffypancake1855 days ago (2 edits)

Back with more questions (is there an official discord? that might be good for people with questions, though I guess im not sure how much use it would get).

1. I'm reading through building my first base (Venus Aerostat-Xity, painful lol) with the current purpose of building a factory so I can factory refuel my rocket and get back home- and other commodities for long term. I have encountered a problem though in the fact that I'm not sure what would be considered a Factory for the purposes of factory refueling operations- or if I'd even really need one. A-Base D-Landing has 'Factory' as a building function, but under that definition I could technically use a Room-level factory to refuel a 1500 tonne rocket which doesn't make much sense (unless it does? I haven't exactly ran the numbers. But if that was the case, wouldn't larger scale factories make it take less than a year?). Blue-counter Industrial functions perform "fuel liquefication to allow rockets on the card to be refueled using water tanks (WT) created by the crew" which seems like the second half of a puzzle given I can't seem to find where water tanks would be created on-site. I'm aware this could all be avoided by simply staying at the Site scale and doing an Industrialization operation, but where's the fun in that?

2. Building buildings at the facility scale with only 1 person gives 3 penalty to the building action. However, there doesn't seem to be any rolls involved for building bases that I could find. Clarification would be appreciated.

3. Regarding the venus aerostat, I place the 9 Of Diamonds at the complex scale. When I zoom into that card, do I still create a structured map via the Crewed Rules, even though there really shouldn't be much there? I'm aware that my character isn't the first to be here, so it doesn't exactly not make sense, but I thought I'd ask just in case. Also regarding the structured map, I couldn't find anywhere as to what happens if you try to expand beyond the maps borders, for- for example- bootstrapping. The structured map fills up a majority of the map, so it doesn't leave much to build off of. Finally regarding the aerostat specifically, it says they must be bilaterally structured, but via the structured map rules, thats not always entirely possible.

4. The mission plan list in This Space Intentionally confuses me a little bit in terms of when what happens. I've been resolving it where they trigger at the start of every year (which I assume is correct), with the planning phase happening before the players can do anything. Once it gets to the execution phase, I get a bit confused. The interception/combat ops part makes sense, but movement and operations are where it gets weird. It reads like it assumes that the players will never go to a timescale 'below' 1 year turns, therefore assuming the only real action they can do is HF map movement and Operation actions. Although this is obviously not the case as smaller timescales exist. So where within the mission plan are players allowed to actually do stuff? And at these smaller time scales, do you always start on January 1st of the year? Does HF map movement take up any amount of time of the year? What if you start an operation midway through a year? Can you even? Just seems like the mission plan structure conflicts with the rest of the game.

half-a.pressDeveloper39 days ago

Wow sorry completely missed this reply. Let me have a read and get back to you.

half-a.pressDeveloper39 days ago (2 edits)

> A-Base D-Landing has 'Factory' as a building function, but under that definition I could technically use a Room-level factory to refuel a 1500 tonne rocket

Looks like I need to clarify the entry: a Factory building function (and 3D printer function) only acts like a factory cube for operations at the Complex and larger scale (that's what I mean by factory printer). At smaller scales, it acts like a 3D printer -- at the Room scale a workshop printer, and a freighter printer at the Facility scale, but it allows you to manufacture stuff (like wire and fabric) instead of printing objects.

> I can't seem to find where water tanks would be created on-site

Either using the Refueling rules in the Site Actions chapter, or the Employment subsection under the Migration & Trade section in the Encounters chapter in the Crewed Rules.

This is actually quite a bit more complicated than it looks like and has a lot of abstractions that I really want to write up as an entire "economics of colonies" essay at some point. Essentially, while the crew administers the site, they don't own all the proceeds from it: usually because they're working for a Mission Control, but maybe also because the site has its own independent economic activity. So the amount of water tanks they get from factory refueling because they helped build the factory is actually a reflection of the value of their labour, and not the actual amount of water that the factory can produce. However, for anything that contributes to the site, the "taps open" as it were and the full output of the site can be directed to it. That's why refineries, printers and factory buildings scale up their output as the map scale increases for the purposes of making other buildings, but the amount of water that the crew gets from a factory does not.

> When I zoom into that card, do I still create a structured map via the Crewed Rules

Yes. Whether this is a structured map actually depends on the site population (see the Civil Maps chapter of A Facility with Words) but for the purposes of zooming into a card this doesn't matter that much and I still don't think I have the way this works right in AFwW. The idea with a structure map is it is sometimes the interesting "slice" of a larger map and so is the default map type for many things, instead of being a complete map of the site at that scale.

For aerostats, I would recommend creating a floor plan when you zoom in rather than a structured map as floor plans should be symmetric. I should probably write that down somewhere in the rules...

Mixing maps that you create and build is going to be supported better in the next update of (A)-Base (D)-Landing, where you'll have the ability to infiltrate existing colonies. But generally once you've placed a card, you shouldn't really have to zoom into it to build on the zoomed in card as far as I can tell, because you've done the hard work of printing it, and upgrading it should be easier than trying to zoom in to do the same. I had thought I'd said that you can't build beyond the edges of the map but it looks like I missed that.

> The mission plan list in This Space Intentionally confuses me a little bit

It is only intended for year long turns. At smaller scales, spacecraft are essentially stationary on the HF map for the entire turn length -- although they will move if you get into trouble (and have to resolve a year long turn as a result) but only once per year. I'll have to clarify that. Operations are also year long and will "resolve" with trouble, but also that could be potentially be abusable in ways I haven't thought of. I've experimented with ways of subdividing operations and events into month long turns, and it plays ok but just adds complexity for not much pay off.

Hope that all helps and apologies for missing this.

Cliffypancake1838 days ago

First of all thank you for all the in depth replies! A lot of stuff is cleared up but I have a couple small things:

> But generally once you've placed a card, you shouldn't really have to zoom into it to build on the zoomed in card as far as I can tell

The landing site goes from the rocket token to a card at the complex scale if there is a factory or colony present. I must've read it as just changing it to a card no matter what, so that was on me. A structure shouldn't have been created.

> Operations are also year long and will "resolve" with trouble

So a couple things with this whole paragraph: So basically, at smaller scales, triggering Trouble makes you resolve the Mission Plan, including an operations? If the trouble triggers in June 2055, does the resolution end in June 2056, or January 1st 2056? Same question if I purposefully go to year-scale and decide to do an operation.

This leads into my final point. Trouble occurs from rolling for actions, however rolling for actions at any scale except Yearly seems pretty rare from what I've seen/played. Things like the base building actions reference penalties for a lack of workers which seem to infer rolls but I couldn't find anything more on what would be rolled? I could just be missing something in the Crewed Rules?

Anyways thank you again for replying to my tsunami of questions!

half-a.pressDeveloper38 days ago (1 edit)

Trouble is intended to allow you to trigger things that only otherwise happen at a longer time scale than the one you’re working at. In the current update, that doesn’t explicitly include year long operations and moves, but there’s no exception made for them either (there is one for 3D printing).

The operation and move resolves when you make the trouble roll that results in the year long action. You make the decision what you’re going to do and where you’re moving and the total sequence resolves instantaneously. For operations it is assumed you started a year ago. For movement — well. What is completely abstracted away in the High Frontier rules is the fact you actually decided where you were going at the point you launched the rocket; and map movement is just a convenience that allows you to plot out this movement over the time it actually takes rather than pre calculate the entire path. It’s really not clear that’s how the game works until you start to look under the hood.

As for how often you should roll; you should do it for any action which consumes resources that are not easy to replace (top of page 23 in the Crewed Rules). This includes any actions that happen at a time scale where you’re using up oxygen or power without a good way of replacing these (eg you’re not carrying enough solar panels to last a full day/night cycle).

For base construction, this should be any action that is long enough to trigger an event that puts your population at risk. This is normally annually but might be every week if the base is starving.

However you’re correct in noting that if you’re working at a small enough a time scale, you never have to roll, which means you never trigger trouble and therefore never use up resources. I don’t have a solution I’m happy with here yet — I need to force a minimum number of rolls per turn at these smaller scales but I don’t have a clean way of doing so.

half-a.pressDeveloper38 days ago (1 edit)

It’s entirely possible that the correct answer is just you have to roll for every action.

View more in thread

Cliffypancake1837 days ago

It makes sense that you roll, but roll what? Crewed Rules says 3d6 for ability and 2d6 for skill, but does the required skill/ability entirely depend on what the player thinks fits the best? I'm not entirely against that seeing how there's so many different actions the game offers, but I guess this leads into the response I posted to your recent action post.

View more in thread

half-a.pressDeveloper61 days ago

Remember that the conceit of Sixty Years in Space is "you're not the first"; and so that a lot of the organic growth of claims, factories and colonies in the solar system is happening around you. You're not even the only crew working for your Mission Control - in fact if there were spoiler tags, I'd be able to say more.

Log in to reply Join the discussion. Log in or create a free itch.io account to continue.