Author Topic: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)  (Read 3040 times)

lordorm

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Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« on: 25 September 2017, 14:59:07 »
Hi!

I am about to start a new campaign with my group where they will be running a small periphery noblehouse at the edge of the map in 3025, my question is this.
How do i handle research? (as in researching new versions of equipment, ranging from bandages to mechs and their parts).

currently using campaign operations together with ATOW and the companion, i have made a excel sheet to handle the budget and military as well as intel.

I cant really figure out a good way to handle research (if they want to throw money down that black hole)
Also i considered trade deals to just give them bonuses on availability tests.

I know this might not be canon, but we love Btech and its lore and universe, we just want to do something of our own in it using the tools at our hands.

Also, how would you handle a upgrade of the planets rating? Ie building Factories and mines to upgrade the industrial level, schools for technology?

Regards
Jimmi

Daryk

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #1 on: 25 September 2017, 17:34:47 »
Getting up to TL D shouldn't be too much trouble (even if it's expensive), but anything beyond that is going to draw Holy Shroud attention.

Basically, I'd let them upgrade their industrial capacity, but strangely find their technological research "inexplicably" stalled at TL D.  Key scientists and engineers dying in "perfectly normal" accidents, etc.

worktroll

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #2 on: 25 September 2017, 18:18:20 »
You could play with the ISaW rules in IO, plus the Tech & Research rules in 2nd SW.

Decide on the major/minor/other worlds in your 'cluster', which gives you an RP income. Work out the high-level maintenance for your military units, to determine your surplus. That's what you've got for building new military forces, intelligence ops, and research.

May be a little too coarse-grained in terms of "can I build a better assault rifle", but would cover "can I build Clan ERPPCs".

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lordorm

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #3 on: 26 September 2017, 02:55:13 »
rules in 2nd SW? (what book is this?)

when it comes to money i have that sorted in a big budget calculator that got made by working with the rules in ATOW companion.

Yeh i wont let them get too high in tech level, but i would like to figure out HOW to make them upgrade to that level, as in how would you do it?

Would you let them spend x amount of Cbills annually and have a dice throw? or would you have a fixed percentage that goes up until they actually have the technology?

You have to consider that the tech cant be too advanced unless they have people to handle it, wich means schools and education...

(Tech just doesnt happen:))

Daryk

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #4 on: 26 September 2017, 07:16:39 »
First, I'd make them buy a large order of the item in question (at least 100 units), and then either negotiate a licensing agreement for local production (the order demonstrating the demand that would justify such an agreement), or put them through years (say, 2d6 at several million C-bills per year) of reverse engineering followed by infringement law suits (say, another 2d6 years at twice the cost of the actual research).  They're not so much reverse engineering the item as the manufacturing process, then having to defend it in court.  Factories are extremely expensive to build (hundreds of millions), even without a licensing agreement.  They're also expensive to operate, especially as they'll have to hire technicians from off world.

As far as the negotiation for an agreement, the manufacturer is going to have someone with at least 9 levels of skill, and every Margin of Success over the PCs will drive the cost of the agreement up.  Political machinations could help, or hurt.  I assume they're after weapons technology, so the Successor State they're next to is going to have an opinion too.

guardiandashi

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #5 on: 26 September 2017, 14:44:05 »
when we did it, essentially you first had to build a "lab" then the labs generated RP (Research points) RP could then be assigned to general research, and come up with random tech, or work on researching specific technologies (more expensive)
essentially we were using something kind of like the R&D module inspired by MoO2 (Master of Orion) or similar computer games.
we also had it so you could build focused labs, and more general labs such as:
general lab, researches anything but kind of expensive and doesn't generate a lot of RP
weapons lab, can only research weapons
energy weapons lab only researches energy and hybrid energy weapons
energy weapon laser lab can only research laser energy weapons.
etc.

now when researching you couldn't typically direct research into specific "new" technologies they had to be "random" developments the only exception being stuff you know exists you just don't know how it works, for instance if you can build lasers but not ppc's you could direct your labs to work on ppc tech, rather than just hoping you get it randomly.

when upgrading technology we had a lot of "incremental" upgrade options that could be developed which usually worked in single digit percentages which may or may not show obvious improvements at first.

as an example, researching weapons you could get a weight reduction improvement, a crit spaces improvement, a range improvement, accuracy improvements, heat generated improvements, and damage done improvements.

I had a house that developed engine crits (size) improvements, an engine output improvement, weight improvements etc.  many of which were specific to specific types of engines, for instance XL engines that allowed their extra crits to be redistributed into the center torso instead of all in the side torsos, another improvement that reduced the number of additional engine crits required, and another that increased the engine efficiency called for simplicity the "PB engine series"  when we stopped a PB engine topped out at ~10% additional power and could be built as a standard or XL engine.  for example a 300 xl would function as a 330 engine for construction purposes but still weighs the normal amount for a 300, and only needed a 3 ton gyro.

sorry just got to rambling .

lordorm

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #6 on: 26 September 2017, 15:42:52 »
I am most intrigued in this idea Guardiandasi,

How do you set a value to the different items though? would that be based of their Cbills price or how would you do it? i was thinking something like perhaps cbills value / 10 for one rp point (so say a mech worth 10 000 Cbills would be 1 000 000 RP ) and each RP is worth x amount in cbills, say 2 000 000 Cbills, (get my drift?) so then i can make a schedule whenever they will get things researched, with an added modifier of a scientist that does a dicethrow to check his skills vs rp.


idea weenie

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #7 on: 26 September 2017, 22:41:04 »
One thing that should be a guideline is C-Bill cost per ton of item, as a reflection of relative complexity.

For example, IIRC standard Mech armor is 10,000 C-Bills per ton, while a PPC is 200,000 C-Bills for a 7 ton weapon.  A PPC is ~28,571 C-Bills per ton.

My preference would be buying Research points initially equal to cost per ton/100, then you buy more research points, and roll a D100 under the second set of research points.

So researching Mech Armor might need 100 Research points initially, then you purchase 5-10 Research points per turn, and roll a D100 at the end of each turn.  If you roll under the second total, you succeed on that project.  So if you had bought a total of 120 RPs for the Mech armor project (because you are tired of using Commercial Armor), you have a 20% chance at the end of that turn to succeed.

Researching PPCs means you need to buy 285 Research points initially, then buy the remaining 100 to try to succeed.  There would be the fun option of rolling 100, where the project simply failed and the PC cannot restart the project without additional data (i.e. ally provides full specs, data copy from a neutral, espionage, stealing a PPC, or just getting shot by one).  Different types of additional data give bonus RP for restarting the project.


The other option would be tying Research point cost to the weapon cost per ton. Assuming RP cost is equal to item cost/ton divided by 100, that means each Armor Research Point is 100 MC-Bills, while each PPC Research point is 285 MC-Bills.


For scientists, you might even have it where scientists need a certain skill level before they can even contribute.  Schools can train better scientists, but are the trainees worth it?

guardiandashi

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #8 on: 27 September 2017, 00:03:46 »
I am most intrigued in this idea Guardiandasi,

How do you set a value to the different items though? would that be based of their Cbills price or how would you do it? i was thinking something like perhaps cbills value / 10 for one rp point (so say a mech worth 10 000 Cbills would be 1 000 000 RP ) and each RP is worth x amount in cbills, say 2 000 000 Cbills, (get my drift?) so then i can make a schedule whenever they will get things researched, with an added modifier of a scientist that does a dicethrow to check his skills vs rp.
I'm not sure if we ever really did set actual values for research costs
With that said I want to say a general lab cost 100m credits to build and around 10 million per year to actually use it. (Either that or it was a billion credits to build)
We mostly used the lab costs x to fund each year, during your upkeep phase you rolled percentile and had say a 5% chance of them coming up with something and then you rolled on tables and or subtitles to see what it actually was.
If they failed the check you got a small bonus to that lab the next year actually developing something until they succeeded then it reset back to the base percent

Specialty labs tended to cost more than general labs to build, but also had a bit better success rates in their specific field, you also as I remember had to have researched the base tech before you could build specialist labs to focus on that technology

lordorm

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #9 on: 27 September 2017, 09:43:04 »
One thing that should be a guideline is C-Bill cost per ton of item, as a reflection of relative complexity.

For example, IIRC standard Mech armor is 10,000 C-Bills per ton, while a PPC is 200,000 C-Bills for a 7 ton weapon.  A PPC is ~28,571 C-Bills per ton.

My preference would be buying Research points initially equal to cost per ton/100, then you buy more research points, and roll a D100 under the second set of research points.

So researching Mech Armor might need 100 Research points initially, then you purchase 5-10 Research points per turn, and roll a D100 at the end of each turn.  If you roll under the second total, you succeed on that project.  So if you had bought a total of 120 RPs for the Mech armor project (because you are tired of using Commercial Armor), you have a 20% chance at the end of that turn to succeed.

Researching PPCs means you need to buy 285 Research points initially, then buy the remaining 100 to try to succeed.  There would be the fun option of rolling 100, where the project simply failed and the PC cannot restart the project without additional data (i.e. ally provides full specs, data copy from a neutral, espionage, stealing a PPC, or just getting shot by one).  Different types of additional data give bonus RP for restarting the project.


The other option would be tying Research point cost to the weapon cost per ton. Assuming RP cost is equal to item cost/ton divided by 100, that means each Armor Research Point is 100 MC-Bills, while each PPC Research point is 285 MC-Bills.


For scientists, you might even have it where scientists need a certain skill level before they can even contribute.  Schools can train better scientists, but are the trainees worth it?

This.. this is what im gonna use :)
Thank you!

I just have to figure out costs for the buildings and annual operating costs and such..

(i think im slowly turning my game of a time of war into some sort of excel based rpg with alot of tabs..)

lordorm

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #10 on: 27 September 2017, 10:13:37 »
Ok, so i figured something like this for building costs.

Lab 100 million to build, 10 million annually to keep it running
special lab 150 mill to build, 15 mill to keep it running
university 50 mill to build, 5 mill to keep running
general school 25 mill to build, 2.5 mill to keep running

RP gained.
Lab 1 rp / year
special lab 1.5 rp / year (for that type, ie mech, vehicular, energy and so on)
university 0.5 rp / year
general school 0.25 rp / year.

How does that sound?


guardiandashi

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #11 on: 27 September 2017, 14:39:08 »
as far as the labs we had:
general
mech
aerospace
vehicle
engine
internal structure
armor
weapons
sensors
heat sinks
myomer
jump jets
naval equivalents
etc.

basically anything that can be used, had an lab that could improve it "somehow"
as another example, battlemech internal structure:
the base rules have internal structure (for mechs) allowing for 2.0 armor per point of armor (with a 50% bonus for the head) as the maximum armor.
the "house" I ran for a while developed "advanced armoring" that got the armor limit up to 2.66 points of armor per point of internal so a location that has 10 internal could now support up to 26 armor instaid of the normal 20, and heads could support 12 ... until they got the head location to have 4 internal instead of 3.
another upgrade gave them 1 "hidden" crit in each location, which for simplicity sake, had to put something that normally can't be damaged there such as endosteel or armor criticals, IE its normally just a roll again effect.

if anyone wanted I could document "some" of the tech examples that that house had, like "quad str myomer", triple heat sinks, FC, (ferro carbide) FFC(Ferro-Fibrous Carbide armor) enhanced LRM's etc. 
most of their tech was arguably "broken" compared to normal battletech, in some ways it would be like something from star trek the next generation, going up against something from the kirk era.

Daryk

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #12 on: 27 September 2017, 18:15:24 »
If you're going to tier your buildings anyway, I'd require them to start with a "General" school (or several) before they could build a University, one or more Universities to support a lab, and at least one lab to support a "Special Lab".

lordorm

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #13 on: 29 September 2017, 11:39:40 »
If you're going to tier your buildings anyway, I'd require them to start with a "General" school (or several) before they could build a University, one or more Universities to support a lab, and at least one lab to support a "Special Lab".

Yes, thats what i did.

did something similar for building, and used BP. to simulate costs of material, workforce, technology and such. (very basic and rudamentary)

Also made a rule that to build something that you needed different sizes of factories, IE a small surface factory with a BP of 2.5 can not build anything that has over 25BP. due to size constraints and no way of handling the resources and such efficiently.

But instead i made it possible to use smaller factories as satellite construction yards around say a Heavy industry to build structures and ship to the Heavy for assembly and use their size for the actual construction.

I think i might be overthinking this alot... i now have a excel spreadsheet with about 6 pages... for different things....

It´s all in Swedish though so i suppose no one except me will ever have any use of it (fairly few Btech nerds in sweden what i have found sofar)


Daryk

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #14 on: 29 September 2017, 20:18:38 »
Sounds good... And don't underestimate the power of Google Translate... :)

Revanche

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #15 on: 30 September 2017, 09:03:22 »
Lordorm, just to throw this in there: my sig line below has the extensive rules for factories (building and operating) I developed (with a team of interested fans) over years and completed 5 years ago. As well as a lot of other aspects, it discusses the cost in developing the blueprints for a specific product (be it 'Mech, vee, rifle, pill or refined fuel).

It does not discuss technology development, and I've gotten some good ideas for such an annex to those rules from this thread. idea weenie, your post reminded me a lot of the technology rules used in Victory By Any Means, but your method fits BT far better. I think, when combined with guardiandashi's research labs, there is a real good base for a ruleset.
« Last Edit: 30 September 2017, 09:09:20 by Revanche »

guardiandashi

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #16 on: 30 September 2017, 15:15:44 »
I know for actual construction we did something similar for factories IE there were basic factories then you could build additional "lines" for a reduced cost, and have the lines either be for additional production or for subassembly production but changing required retooling.

example
building a mech factory costs X use 1billion cbills and produces up to 100million worth of battlemechs /year you can add onto said factory for another 100 million, which would increase the production, and say that it is either an additional production line thus increasing production of the same mech chassis, or other chassis. or the "addon could be making sub assemblies such as engines, armor weapons etc, which can have the advantage of both feeding the primary factory, and or feeding your other factories, and your spares meaning that repairs and refits are easier.

I do remember that the most addons a factory could have was 10, before you had to build a new "core" factory but the 10 addons would boost the overall production significantly.

I remember someone else had a pretty solid "factory" system that they posted a while back.

lordorm

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #17 on: 07 October 2017, 10:44:34 »
Lordorm, just to throw this in there: my sig line below has the extensive rules for factories (building and operating) I developed (with a team of interested fans) over years and completed 5 years ago. As well as a lot of other aspects, it discusses the cost in developing the blueprints for a specific product (be it 'Mech, vee, rifle, pill or refined fuel).

It does not discuss technology development, and I've gotten some good ideas for such an annex to those rules from this thread. idea weenie, your post reminded me a lot of the technology rules used in Victory By Any Means, but your method fits BT far better. I think, when combined with guardiandashi's research labs, there is a real good base for a ruleset.

Yep, definitly using this =) thank you a million, im gonna move over the things to my excel spreadsheet though, specially the cost calculators for your factories to make it faster.

And i put the following when it comes to research, you have to have 4 normal schools (0.25BP) to be able to support one University (1BP)
And you need 4 universities to support one lab (4BP), and you need two labs to support one special lab (8BP)

The logical thinking i did here was that to be able to sustain a university with people you need a good base from basic school, and to get enough smart scientists to fill up one lab, you need 4 universities. and you need two labs to get enough ppl to specialize into one particular field.. This also makes it impossible for the player to just build special labs right of the bat.. making them have to tier to get to the better stuff.

Revanche

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #18 on: 12 October 2017, 09:06:53 »
Yep, definitly using this =) thank you a million, im gonna move over the things to my excel spreadsheet though, specially the cost calculators for your factories to make it faster.

I'm glad you find it useful. And moving it over to spreadsheet is almost a given; the rules can be complicated. idea weenie has suggested some changes and additions [shown in the industry rules' forum] which I'll be incorporating into the next release. He also posted his own spreadsheet on that forum.

Quote
And i put the following when it comes to research, you have to have 4 normal schools (0.25BP) to be able to support one University (1BP)
And you need 4 universities to support one lab (4BP), and you need two labs to support one special lab (8BP)

The logical thinking i did here was that to be able to sustain a university with people you need a good base from basic school, and to get enough smart scientists to fill up one lab, you need 4 universities. and you need two labs to get enough ppl to specialize into one particular field.. This also makes it impossible for the player to just build special labs right of the bat.. making them have to tier to get to the better stuff.

I like your education tree. I was a bit uncertain about the multiple universities needed to support a lab, but you sold me on the cross from general to special labs.
« Last Edit: 12 October 2017, 09:17:27 by Revanche »

Col Toda

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Re: Handle research and trade, (noble / house level of play)
« Reply #19 on: 16 October 2017, 04:29:19 »
Find an underdeveloped niche a exploit it aggressively . Check out Blue Bolt and the armoured exoskeletons in the vehicle annex . I made a periphery Corporation that had factories in Port Krin . Combat and support vehicle trade . Had prototypes scratch built in Solaris VII and should they work well enough produce them . Fill a niche trade for most everything else . It is the fastest way to uplift a planet .