Cepheida Captain's Log

[Jubal]

This is my work log where I will record what I'm doing and what I need to do towards Cepheida as an idea and a project.

[Jubal]

Finally made faction threads for all seven planned factions.

[Jubal]

Some testing happened today. Turns out combat can kinda take forever at present. 

[Scarlet]

How long is it usually supposed to take? I am assuming not 70 odd pages of my book

[Jubal]

Well, I think the main factor was that we ignored all the psychology rules, as otherwise more running away would have happened rather sooner.

[Scarlet]

Ah, possibly the case. Is the amount of terror cumulative or just determined by one roll?

[Pentagathus]

How long is it usually supposed to take? I am assuming not 70 odd pages of my book

Seems like a strange way to measure time.
How did the tests go? Aside from the length of combat.

[Jubal]

Generally went well.

I'm currently busily simplifying a lot of the rules around temperature, gravity, etc, because those were kind of stupidly complex, you had to take account of comfortable and survival temp ranges for each different species. No longer!

[Jubal]

The League have also undergone a big redesign, and the forms/ideas for the major League races at last finalised. 

[Jubal]

Making another push on writing the exploration game rules this weekend: I'm getting close to finishing the first draft of the objectives, which are quite complex and frankly probably horribly unbalanced due to the dual-objectives system. In other words, every player has two things they can try to do, a scenario objective for all players and a faction objective for themselves, and either one can win you the game. By and large, the faction objective is meant to be grindier-harder: the scenario objective is often "do this to stabilise or exit the planet" whereas the faction objective is often much more about establishing your faction on the planet. However, you're less likely to be in direct competition over doing the faction objective so if the players are deadlocked on the main mission they might switch to trying their faction objectives. This also provides more exploration push: there are few objectives where squabbling over the centre of the map is helpful, especially as players are hard to totally shift (the ships especially are pretty rugged). I don't think I've got the system right yet and it needs more testing, but I think it's a good theory for making the game asymmetrical which was always the plan.

I also need to add some more to the item chart, and I've not done the terraforming rules yet. But things are getting towards a complete, albeit minimally tested, setup.

[Jubal]

Recently done some more adding to the game rules, particularly adding the list of things one can do at key sites, and the basic terraforming rules (not sure how complex these are/aren't going to get).

I think I'm pretty close to having a full draft, main remaining things are:

• Cataclysm rules
• Finishing faction lists
• One or two tweaks to objectives