Compendium Galactica
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 9:03 pm
How it Works
Each person who chooses to play Galactic Compendium needs to create a race. That race can look like anything the player chooses, be it human (up to and including various humanoid races... whether they just look like humans with funny noses or humas with a paper plate stapled to their forehead and painted green) or blob, reptilian, robotic, whatever. But one question to keep in mind is this : "If the average member of my race fought a human, mano a mano, would it win?" If the answer is a definate yes, you probably need to scale it down.
Remember, other than rudimentary interplanetary travel (the ability for one craft to travel from the orbit of one planet into the orbit of another planet), anything that would be beyond the realm of possibility for a human will be considered an advantage. And advantages will cost you. More on that later.
All you need to tell me, via PM or email, is the name of your race (or your KW name if you create a new account), what they're like, and where they are. You will also need to tell me if you're claiming any advantages (up to two), and if you are, what your corresponding disadvantages are. There will be a whole other section devoted to advantages and disadvantages later, so don't worry.
After that, you need to post in the GC thread the name of your race and whatever information you want known about them. It could be as simple as "one of the many races of the galaxy" or a ten page entry. It's up to you. If you choose to misrepresent the real nature, history, or whatever of your race, that's fine, so long as you let me know this is intentional.
Your Ship
For most players, this is your ticket into the game. This is how you got the attention of the Galactic Compendium staff. You're now a player in galactic events. Sadly, you're just starting out. You only have one of these ships, and it's no Millenium Falcon. It can be as big as a planetoid or as small as a Dodge van. Heck, it could be a Dodge van so long as you found a reasonable way to explain it. The most important thing about it is that it's capable of taking at least one person from one planet to another. It also cannot (yet) exceed the speed of light. For most, this probably means restricting travel to within your own system.
Some things you might want to keep in mind about your ship - life support systems (how many people it can sustain and for how long), shields and durability, weapons, sensors, and communcations.
And if you can't find it on an aircraft carrier, you can't have it without it being an advantage.
Advantages and Disadvantages
What's the fun of being an alien if you're no better than the average human? Well, the answer is advantages. You can choose one or two specific areas or ways in which your race excells, be it physiologically, technologically, or whatever. You can't choose to, say, be able to blow up planets with your mind, but you can choose something like an FTL drive (faster than light) or psychic powers. Anything that would make you significantly better off than humans would be an advantage.
That's the good news. The bad news is that for every advantage your race has, they have to have an equal or greater disadvantage. Some possible disadvantages would be physical weakness, low population, warring factions among your people, and so forth. It would be best to choose a disadvantage that goes with your advantage in some way. 'They're blind, but they have better hearing to make up for it,' 'They live for two hundred years, but they can only have one child every thirty years,' or 'their ships can travel at twice the speed of light, but it takes them a year to recharge the hyperdrive,' as some examples.
Getting to Know Your Galaxy
The game will be played on a 50 x 50 graph, which will have an x axis and a y axis, the coordinates given accordingly. So if the coordinates given are (5, -2), that will be five colums to the right of the center, and and two columns down. There will be no zeros, since the coordinates are actually the whole block of a graph rather than the intersecting points.
A large part of this game will be exploration, so you will be responsible for maintaining your own maps. I strongly recommend using graph paper or finding some other similar way to keep track of it. There will be no publicly available map. Of course, you may choose to share what you know with eachother, but I would personally advise against it. But more on that later.
Each player's ship will be at first be able to travel to any adjacent coordinate in one turn. If you were looking at it like a map, that would be one square to the north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. If you work on developing more advanced propulsion, the distance you can move in one turn will increase.
Also, with basic sensors, you will be able to see one square adjacent to your current location, though not with as much detail as if you were actually there. For instance, you might see that there was a binary star system to the north (along the positive y axis), but if you were there, you'd be actually able to tell how many of the planets were inhabitied, what resources the planets had, etc. The more advanced your ship's sensors (or your planet's observational capabilities, and so forth), the farther you can see and with greater detail.
Playing the Game
Compendium Galactica will be mainly a game of challenges and rewards. On every turn, a player will be given a challenge to overcome. Overcoming the challenge will bring its reward, and how the player chooses to overcome the challenge largely determines how they advance in the game.
There will be time left over for each player to do other things (like working on negating their disadvantages, advancing their society, conquering the galaxy, and so forth), but handling the challenges should be primary.
Galactic Influence
Each player will start with the Galactic Influence of 1. That means there's basically one thing you can make your people do - build a planetary defense system, colonize an uninhabited planet, and so forth. Though the number of things you can ask people to do is unlimited, the number of things you can make them do with GI is not.
A player gains galactic influence in several ways. You can increase your population, claim systems, govern other civilizations (with brute force or benignly), or explore the galaxy (probably the hardest route, considering how much you have to map out to increase your GI).
A couple things to consider, though. Increases, in GI and thinkgs like propulsion level, are generally exponential and not incremental. So you'd have to double your population to increase your GI by 1, quadruple it to increase it by 3, etc. And there are limits, which require a certain balance. For example, you may control ten systems, but if you barely have enough population for one, you will likely not gain the GI you would otherwise.
Game Mechanics
Players will submit their moves NLT Sunday, midnight (eastern standard time) on the weekends in which Pantheon moves are not due.
The moves will be sent to compendium.galactica at g mail, the results being sent to the address the moves were sent from unless otherwise specified.
Any questions, comments, or suggestions can be posted in the CG: Comments thread. Anything else posted here will be considered an official entry into the Compendium.
Each person who chooses to play Galactic Compendium needs to create a race. That race can look like anything the player chooses, be it human (up to and including various humanoid races... whether they just look like humans with funny noses or humas with a paper plate stapled to their forehead and painted green) or blob, reptilian, robotic, whatever. But one question to keep in mind is this : "If the average member of my race fought a human, mano a mano, would it win?" If the answer is a definate yes, you probably need to scale it down.
Remember, other than rudimentary interplanetary travel (the ability for one craft to travel from the orbit of one planet into the orbit of another planet), anything that would be beyond the realm of possibility for a human will be considered an advantage. And advantages will cost you. More on that later.
All you need to tell me, via PM or email, is the name of your race (or your KW name if you create a new account), what they're like, and where they are. You will also need to tell me if you're claiming any advantages (up to two), and if you are, what your corresponding disadvantages are. There will be a whole other section devoted to advantages and disadvantages later, so don't worry.
After that, you need to post in the GC thread the name of your race and whatever information you want known about them. It could be as simple as "one of the many races of the galaxy" or a ten page entry. It's up to you. If you choose to misrepresent the real nature, history, or whatever of your race, that's fine, so long as you let me know this is intentional.
Your Ship
For most players, this is your ticket into the game. This is how you got the attention of the Galactic Compendium staff. You're now a player in galactic events. Sadly, you're just starting out. You only have one of these ships, and it's no Millenium Falcon. It can be as big as a planetoid or as small as a Dodge van. Heck, it could be a Dodge van so long as you found a reasonable way to explain it. The most important thing about it is that it's capable of taking at least one person from one planet to another. It also cannot (yet) exceed the speed of light. For most, this probably means restricting travel to within your own system.
Some things you might want to keep in mind about your ship - life support systems (how many people it can sustain and for how long), shields and durability, weapons, sensors, and communcations.
And if you can't find it on an aircraft carrier, you can't have it without it being an advantage.
Advantages and Disadvantages
What's the fun of being an alien if you're no better than the average human? Well, the answer is advantages. You can choose one or two specific areas or ways in which your race excells, be it physiologically, technologically, or whatever. You can't choose to, say, be able to blow up planets with your mind, but you can choose something like an FTL drive (faster than light) or psychic powers. Anything that would make you significantly better off than humans would be an advantage.
That's the good news. The bad news is that for every advantage your race has, they have to have an equal or greater disadvantage. Some possible disadvantages would be physical weakness, low population, warring factions among your people, and so forth. It would be best to choose a disadvantage that goes with your advantage in some way. 'They're blind, but they have better hearing to make up for it,' 'They live for two hundred years, but they can only have one child every thirty years,' or 'their ships can travel at twice the speed of light, but it takes them a year to recharge the hyperdrive,' as some examples.
Getting to Know Your Galaxy
The game will be played on a 50 x 50 graph, which will have an x axis and a y axis, the coordinates given accordingly. So if the coordinates given are (5, -2), that will be five colums to the right of the center, and and two columns down. There will be no zeros, since the coordinates are actually the whole block of a graph rather than the intersecting points.
A large part of this game will be exploration, so you will be responsible for maintaining your own maps. I strongly recommend using graph paper or finding some other similar way to keep track of it. There will be no publicly available map. Of course, you may choose to share what you know with eachother, but I would personally advise against it. But more on that later.
Each player's ship will be at first be able to travel to any adjacent coordinate in one turn. If you were looking at it like a map, that would be one square to the north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. If you work on developing more advanced propulsion, the distance you can move in one turn will increase.
Also, with basic sensors, you will be able to see one square adjacent to your current location, though not with as much detail as if you were actually there. For instance, you might see that there was a binary star system to the north (along the positive y axis), but if you were there, you'd be actually able to tell how many of the planets were inhabitied, what resources the planets had, etc. The more advanced your ship's sensors (or your planet's observational capabilities, and so forth), the farther you can see and with greater detail.
Playing the Game
Compendium Galactica will be mainly a game of challenges and rewards. On every turn, a player will be given a challenge to overcome. Overcoming the challenge will bring its reward, and how the player chooses to overcome the challenge largely determines how they advance in the game.
There will be time left over for each player to do other things (like working on negating their disadvantages, advancing their society, conquering the galaxy, and so forth), but handling the challenges should be primary.
Galactic Influence
Each player will start with the Galactic Influence of 1. That means there's basically one thing you can make your people do - build a planetary defense system, colonize an uninhabited planet, and so forth. Though the number of things you can ask people to do is unlimited, the number of things you can make them do with GI is not.
A player gains galactic influence in several ways. You can increase your population, claim systems, govern other civilizations (with brute force or benignly), or explore the galaxy (probably the hardest route, considering how much you have to map out to increase your GI).
A couple things to consider, though. Increases, in GI and thinkgs like propulsion level, are generally exponential and not incremental. So you'd have to double your population to increase your GI by 1, quadruple it to increase it by 3, etc. And there are limits, which require a certain balance. For example, you may control ten systems, but if you barely have enough population for one, you will likely not gain the GI you would otherwise.
Game Mechanics
Players will submit their moves NLT Sunday, midnight (eastern standard time) on the weekends in which Pantheon moves are not due.
The moves will be sent to compendium.galactica at g mail, the results being sent to the address the moves were sent from unless otherwise specified.
Any questions, comments, or suggestions can be posted in the CG: Comments thread. Anything else posted here will be considered an official entry into the Compendium.