Quoted By:
Anons, I have been thinking of developing a very unique spaceship trading game. It looks like this:
Instead of simulating things like spaceship armour, attack defense shield mobility, this spaceship game is purely FINANCIAL
The idea behind this game is because even though I have not played so many spaceship or 4x games, in the end nearly all these games just come down to having lots of income. So why not abstract away from all the stats like ship manoeuvrability or rangefinding etc - use those just for story embellishment - and make the ACTUAL stats about things that matter, like INCOME, cashflow growth etc.
You can write in whatever intergalactic space empire conquering starship story stuff you want, but the dice rolls decide the income and profitability and the variance of the cashflow stream etc.
The four stats are these
REV growth - attack statistic, taking mkt share
OPM operating margin - defense stat
VOL volatility - external event shocks, story-driven / DM narration
GOV governance - internal event shocks, also story / DM narration
Revenue is calculated like this
asset base
*asset intensity
*(1+REVG)
*OPM
*(1-VOL)
+or-GOV effects
The game is split into FOUR PHASES
Each player has 4 dice, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12. These dice always benefit you, but can only be rolled once per turn - once used they are expended.
1/ RUMOUR PHASE
DM announces some rumours. eg
- cyberathlete tournament announced on planet X!
- famine has stricken planet Y after blockade in internecine galactic war
- xenoarchaeologists uncover ancient shrine artifact on moon Z
etc
2/ ACTION PHASE
Players roll any amount of dice they want to benefit from a certain rumour, CITING 1 ATTRIBUTE to improve.
Eg a player could go all in and say, I want massive REV GROWTH from the xeno artifacts! and roll all their dice to get 1+(d6+d8+d10+d12)% growth from this. However, it might be wiser to hold some dice in reserve...
3/ REVEAL PHASE
DM reveals some consequences from the story / rumour event. These could be positive or negative. Eg maybe the alien artifacts turn people into Dead Space zombies! Or maybe they are fragments of a warp gate enabling faster travel to new planets (it is Hell, it is the Hellmouth from Doom 3 muahahaha)
4/ SHOWDOWN PHASE
players can then roll any remaining dice they have left to take advantage of the revealed information. DM calculates their income from the turn, and the cycle repeats to 1.
Importantly, the dice results persist into the next turn. So if you rolled 3, ie 3% for rev growth this turn, your next turn by default rev growth remains at 3% until you announce some new action and roll again etc.
Technically in real life the proft and loss is not exactly cashflow because of deferred revenues and expenditures and depreciation amortisation etc, will just ignore that for the simple purposes of fantasy spaceship trading empire game.
