Founded in 2120, the Confederacy of Sol was founded by the reassembled United Nations, after the 30 year long reign of anarchy on Earth following the nuclear war in 2088. Though much of Earth's on-world industry had been destroyed, the twin space stations Damocles and Demothenes had survived, and the inhabitants had continued their R&D despite the absence of the UN to back them. By drawing resources from the Mars Industrialization Project, Earth's three major colonies were able to help reconstruct Earth at great speed once the planet unified under the mostly-for-show banner of the UNE. The Confederacy of Sol thus initially consisted of the UNE, the Damocles, the Demosthenes (known as “The Twins,” colloquially) and Mars, which remains the industrial center of the system to this very day.

>>12735445
Of course, during the 30 years of darkness, many of Earth's earlier colonization efforts had lost contact with the Sol system. Two major wars were fought by the re-emerging Earth in the act of re-unifying its colonies, the furthest of which, appropriately named “Nowhere,” was only rediscovered four years ago in the game's timeline. The first war was with the Soldarin Empire, in 2122, the bulk of the fighting of which was actually done by the Republic of Chiron, one of the more successful colonies, whose own sub-colonies were the point of contention. This war resulted in the Soldarins being pushed back, and the near-total extermination of one of their client species, the Sarins, at the hands of the vengeful Chironites.
The second war was with an enigmatic species known as the Cryzhe, who had rolled over several human colonies that had infringed upon its terraforming projects, and was ultimately halted at New Volgograd, at the cost of over a million human lives. This engagement saw the first usage of the Echo, a biologically engineered super-soldier project left over from the Third World War. They performed so admirably that the government was pressured into giving them citizenship by its own people, when cries of injustice over their compulsory military service with no apparent reward began to undermine the populace's morale.

(On what could be interpreted as either a humorous or a dire note, the gifting of citizenship and voting franchise to the Echo was one of the reasons why compulsory voting was legislated in 2133, after it was found that despite there being 3 billion humans compared to the relatively miniscule 250 million Echo on Terra, ballot counts came out about the same between the two.)

>>12735467
After the Colony Wars, the Confederacy was approached by an ally of the Cryzhe, the “Kodin,” who proposed an end to the war, and offered Humanity a place in the League of Sapients. The humans were initially skeptical, but were then told of the looming threat of the Machine Tide, and the necessity of allies in the coming days. After two representatives from each Terran world were shown firsthand the dangers posed by this inorganic menace, the Confederacy quickly agreed, on the condition that it not be given auxiliary status, but a place on the League Council complete with a vote. Despite the comparatively low level of technology possessed by humanity at the time, these terms were accepted.

Pic not related. That's a vulcan, get out of here vulcan. Kodin are horrible fish-people.

>>12735478
In the modern day of 2150, the Solar Confederacy has become the rising star of the League's younger races. Now with 40 star systems and a population of 21 billion, Earth and her colonies are a political and military force almost the equal of their old enemies, the Soldarins and the Cryzhe. With their excellent performance against the Machine Tide as an indicator, many believe that it is humanity who shall take the first true steps to breaking the stalemate between organic life and machine tyranny that has been bleeding the League dry for the last hundred and fifty years. The machines are a deadly enemy, with territory at least in excess of the total of that controlled by the combined species of the League, but with humanity on their side, and old animosities set apart (officially, at least) Earth might just have a chance of snatching the galaxy from the jaws of a steel machine of defeat.

>>12735483
...Or will it? There are some who disagree. Kyton Von Richtofen, the apparently immortal Autarch-For-Life of the Republic of Chiron, and the leader of Christlam (currently the largest religion in the galaxy with 15 billion members,) has openly accused Earth's government of being corrupt, and of serving Earth's interests before those of humanity at large. Some have begun to listen, and rebellion is brewing in the breast of the fledgling kingdom of humanity. (To hear more about Chiron, and how they ended up strong enough to seriously challenge Earth for control of humanity's destiny, tune in tomorrow!)

Coming up, the stuff that's actually interesting, I.E., what the army is going to look like from a mechanical perspective.

>>12735491
So, setting the fluff aside for a moment, as far as the military goes, and thus, as far as the tabletop is concerned, the Confederacy is currently our flagship army. It was the first one we came up with, and I think it's the most pure of them from a tabletop gaming perspective. It has a very traditional command structure, squadrons are designed more or less as you'd imagine them to be, and in a lot of ways (some more obvious than others) they resemble American and Commonwealth armies from World War II. Not always realistic, but I promise you, absolutely fun to play.

The army's direction right now seems to be versatility and specialization combined. The basic infantry of the Confederacy can do everything, from stand toe to toe with enemy infantry, to digging in and halting vehicular assaults with rifle propelled grenades. They've got some of the best leadership in the game too, which allows them to perform special maneuvers, manipulate the initiative order, and when the need arises, help increase the odds of destroying their targets.
But, they've also got a lot of cool specialist units, like the Echo, who are actually faster than most vehicles in the game, and the Assault Troops, who are basically criminals, thugs and soldiers who would otherwise be dishonorably discharged, slapped into crazy-heavy powered armor, given tons of heavy weaponry, and turned loose. Media darlings, too, but that's Future-MTV for you.
Vehicle wise, most of their stuff is based around IFVs, light vehicles that transport infantry and fight with them, and aircraft that pop in and out every other turn as they strafe enemy positions and drop off troops.

Jesus Christ words

Guy who coined the term "Humek" here.

I like you OP.

>>12735508
What's the system look like? It'd be a lot easier to interpret how this looks from a gameplay perspective if we understand the actual gameplay.

>>12735521
Oh hell yeah, dude, you don't even know how well all of this went over with the guys. The men upstairs (and the one somewhere in Eastern Europe) have always been wary of posting our stuff here, but after last night's thread, things started turning around. Stirring up interest in the project is fun, I'm glad to be able to do it.

You, sir, and the others who participated (even the incomprehensible guy at the end) have been a great help, and I'm gonna need a major internet high five right now, at this very moment.

>>12735522
Oh, I'm actually cleared to impart a quick explanation of that.
Basically, it's nothing too special, we tried to keep it as simple as possible. A big draw of the system, we hope, will be that there's not a lot of record keeping to do, and unit summaries are very, very short.

Individual figures only have two stats, Movement and Armor, the rest is determined by their equipment, and by what class of infantry they are. (Vehicles, obviously, get a bit more complicated.) There's a section for special rules, like Leadership or Elite status.

Once you get into equipment, things are dead simple for the most part. Weapons have Range, Power, and then Rate of Fire. The Power is measured on a 2 through 6, with that being the number that, without outside modification, one would roll to inflict a kill on a target within the standard range of the weapon. Rate of Fire is how many d6s you roll. Each increment of the weapon's range you exceed its original range by, you get a +1 penalty (I.E., +1 to the difficulty) and you also add the target's Armor, and Terrain modifiers.
Then there's a lot of squad movement, and special rules for weapons like armor penetration, explosive radius, etcetera.

>>12735567
Sorry, that's just a bunch of text, what y'all want is some examples, well let me dish 'em out. A good first one is the most generic figure in the game. Ladies and gentlemen:

The Confederate P.I. Trooper
Movement: 4 (can run 8, but gets a +1 penalty to shooting when doing so)
AM: 0 (this is average, a tank has like +4, a guy in a T-shirt has -4)
Equipment

K-Rifle
ROF: 1, POW: 4+, Range: 40
Special: Burst Capable (Can fire automatically, doubling ROF but suffering a +1 to POW for decreased accuracy.)

Rifle Grenade
ROF: 1*, POW: 4+/5+, Range: 30
Special: Blast 2 (first number is to hit, second number is the power that anything within the blast radius of 2" suffers a hit at).

This is all at length, the special rules are codified enough that you can remove the parenthesis and still read it.

>>12735600
Alright, that's pretty straightforward, but from this can I ascertain that... From 40 inches away on the tabletop, this guy could kill another one of him on a roll of a 4+? I.E., 50% of the time?
That's really high. Is everything this long range?

>>12735616
Well, yes. But getting a clear line of fire from 40" away is really unlikely, and cover is a pretty big deal in this game. Every inch of anything that the shot goes through incurs an additional +1 penalty to hit, meaning that you've ever got to lay down a ton of fire, or get a clear shot.
High ground, outflanking, and suppressive fire are the best ways to take down enemies, unless they're stupid enough to be moving around in open ground where you can see them.

There's also the option of covering fire, where units save their actions to pop anything that exposes itself in their line of sight. Really useful if you're dealing with quick little bastards like Echo or some machines.

>>12735467
I have to reserve judgement on Shimmering Sword.
On one hand, her stuff all looks really cool, on the other hand her descriptions are always a bit painful to read.

>>12735467
>(On what could be interpreted as either a humorous or a dire note, the gifting of citizenship and voting franchise to the Echo was one of the reasons why compulsory voting was legislated in 2133, after it was found that despite there being 3 billion humans compared to the relatively miniscule 250 million Echo on Terra, ballot counts came out about the same between the two.)

It's funny because it's true.

Well, I can't see anything wrong with the fluff, though they're reading a bit like the NCR in space right now. Question is, who is Caesar's Legion? One of the aliens, or Charon?

>>12735660
I guess it could be any of them. Chiron has been compared to the Brotherhood of Nod by readers already, which might be comically evil enough to qualify.
The Machine Tide actively attempts to be as evil as possible to intimidate its enemies, at does it... Basically by reading the internet. Similar to what Caesar did in Fallout, theoretically.
Soldarins also eat babies. I think. Did Romans eat babies?

Erm. I'm a big fan of stat scaling consistency AKA "bigger number = better". Your Power rating is lower number = better, yes? I suggest you invert that somehow.

>>12735695
Yeah, that's a good point. Right now, lower power is better, while higher armor is worse, and getting plusses to your attack roll is also bad. It all sounds backwards.
Reverse it all somehow, and it'll be a lot more intuitive. Though I'll say this, this is probably one of the more simple ways of shooting people in a wargame that I've seen recently.

>>12735689
>The Machine Tide actively attempts to be as evil as possible to intimidate its enemies
Meh. I'd prefer traditional 'swarm' behaviour, going about business and ignoring everyone, but God help you if you get in the way. Uninhabitable lump of rock? Delicious minerals. Inhabited asteroid? Delicious minOH GOD IT'S SHOOTING AT US NUKE IT NUKE IT delicious radioactive slag.

>>12735695
>>12735709
I'm not sure how I'd do that without making the numbers arbitrary. I mean, Power 1 could equal 6+, Power 2 could equal 5+, etcetera, but then I'd just be adding another set of numbers to the stuff people have to remember.
I'm not particularly opposed, granted, but it'd be hard to get the boys to agree. You should've been there for the debate on whether or not the good Armor Modifier should be a positive or a negative. Positive for adding to the difficulty, or Negative for modifying the roll itself.

>>12735724
I'm with you there, to a degree, but our earlier popularity runs suggested that people liked the machines having a bit more personality to them. Stylizing their mechs as creatures of folklore from whichever culture they're fighting gives the players a lot of customization options, too, which is something we're looking out for for when we start making miniatures.
I mean, that's not to say some of them don't simply fall back on being faceless swarms. That's scary as hell in and of itself.

>>12735725
You could always just use a table, like the GW games do. Though I guess that might get you some flack for going a similar route mechanically.

>>12735725
Easy. Take all your + and turn them into -, then roll UNDER the value instead of over. Mechanics are identical, but higher values on stat sheets are better.
Remember, having logical mechanics is all well and good but you need to to be approachable by someone who doesn't have a fucking clue.
I don't know your business model, but trying to poach off BattleTech/WH40k players is NOT going to work. BT is technical as fuck and 40k is AWESOME!, unless you can beat either at what they do your best bet is to go for players new to tabletop altogether.

Also, your fluff conveniently forgets to mention why assorted factions don't just glass enemy positions from space. And don't give me 'banned by convention xyz', the Machine Tide wouldn't care.

>>12735745
I'm very worried about sounding too much like 40k. We're all a bit paranoid about being too much like Warhammer on this end, and mechanically, it doesn't help that those sons of bitches have a really, really good system for scaling linear numbers against each other.
It hurt pretty bad not to have an accuracy stat inherent to each figure, that was like cutting out my own spleen.

>Stylizing their mechs as creatures of folklore
MECHA CTHULHU?
DO
VERY
WANT

>>12735762
Regarding planets, my understanding of it is that if the planet is worth fighting for, it's too valuable to glass. Orbital strikes come up a lot of course, but often the ships in space have enough to worry about from the enemy fleet without having to deal with precise shots at enemy positions on the ground. Also, from what I understand, communications are very, very easy to screw with now, and a standard stratagem is to blot out the sky with gas or smog when an enemy lands, so that they cannot accurately fire at the planet without risking killing their own troops, or destroying something they desire. It also happens often that planets have better armaments than ships, making it easier to huck landing craft, drop pods and some covering fire towards the planet than to stay and fire precise orbital strikes on key targets.

When the tabletop component of the game is assumed to happen is when events coincide such (and this is often, as both sides in any given conflict engineer events as much as possible to ensure that this occurs) that conflict over a planet boils down to a land war.

The Machine Tide is actually a very old, very out of control terraforming program that some jackasses let get out of hand eons ago, so to them, glassing a planet is counter-intuitive to the entire purpose of waging war in the first place. It's hard to make grass grow from an irradiated, molten husk of a world.


As for your mechanical and marketing advice, I'll see about that. I hadn't considered just converting them, I guess it's an easier way of doing it even if it makes rolling 6s less fun. I like me some boxcars.
I definitely hold no illusions about our chances in the market. 40k's got this market nailed down tighter than a something in a something something.

>>12735805
Cthulhu, demons, devils, Rupert Murdoch, we're hoping to accommodate as much as possible.

Part of the fluff seems to be that Chiron believes that they're in the middle of the book of Revelations, and just when everyone finally got sick of their crazy and called them on it, a machine "overlord" (A.I. sub-routines that get put in charge of local operations) announced itself to be the Beast, and remodeled its foot soldiers to look like demons.
There's also some nifty cylon-stuff going on with them, they've got these things called Alphas that reload themselves into new bodies every time they're killed, and start developing personalities and experience, as part of their routines. A few of them start over-developing and gaining their own goals, and some even go rogue and start fighting their own private wars counter to the machine overall directive.

Hmm. What are the average living conditions for civilians in the Solar Confederacy?

>>12735818
>I definitely hold no illusions about our chances in the market. 40k's got this market nailed down tighter than a something in a something something.

I'm wondering, what's your angle? Obviously you'll never out AWESOME 40k, but that's actually not it's primary draw. 40k's big thing is that it's got so much lore, so much history, and such a large player base that players can make basically anything they can imagine and then play it. The universe is so expansive that there's nothing "against fluff," to speak of. That takes time to build up, and yours guys' universe is sounding pretty small in comparison.
Now the other route is to make it a mechanically good game, with a strong tactical bent and good rules. I haven't seen enough of your work here to speculate, but is this the direction you're going, and if so, what have you done to accommodate it beyond making units less survivable and making cover important?

>>12735905
It varies from planet to planet, but as a general rule they're pretty high, what we would think of as 1st World, today, but with a lot more tech. Cybernetics are big, but can't usually outperform human limbs without becoming prohibitively heavy. Artificial and cloned organs are available, and the average human lifespan is running around 100 years now.
One thing the Confederacy definitely isn't is post scarcity, though. There's a lot of demand, and it's hard to find work in the core colonies that isn't highly skilled, so people move away to colonize new planets, where while the work might suck, it'll at least be work.

>>12735906
Oh snap, sorry I missed you there. Hold on, I'm coming up with an answer right now.

>>12735906
Right, ok. The idea is, yes, to make a game with a strong tactical bent. Small unit tactics, that sort of thing. I remember some battletech from a long time ago, and that's not really the direction we're going. We don't have the level of notation that they do, we're trying to keep it simple, while still making it deep enough that players won't get bored and move on to something more sophisticated. We've got a really good system for officers going, that's too complicated for me to really explain without the rest of the system laid out, but suffice to say we're hoping it will add a layer of complexity onto the game that transcends move/shoot.

Regarding the depth of the universe, we're just starting out, and I didn't want to pour too much text into this one set of posts, y'know? I promise, when it's actually ready to be released, it'll be a very detailed world with a lot of rich background.

Also... On the note of the phenomenon of awesome (all in caps,) you should show up tomorrow for Chiron, they might fit the bill better. They're our token gasmasked jackbooted pseudo-mystical villains, but we didn't destine them to get their asses kicked by one plucky hero this time. A lot of people like that sort of stuff, particularly when they drown people in their own blood and make bombastic speeches to dramatic music.
And if there's one thing John Galt loves, it's bombastic speeches to dramatic music, and he's taken a shining to our dear space-soviet-nazi-christian-muslim-fascist-commies.

>>12736037
This John Galt? He's one of your guys?
Well that's awesome. Does that mean you've got sentient Earth rolling around in there somewhere?

John Galt can suck my parasitic dick.

>>12736132
Yeah, that's definitely the one. He's a cool guy, if a bit hard to work with sometimes. He doesn't explain himself well until he's sure he has something in final form, which means that yeah, his work's all good, but we all end up going off in another direction because we don't know where he is, and then we've got to reconcile it all in.
It works out in the end, though. There's an extra editing period once everything on a given subject is done, but he's the one who does all the work... So let him, says I.

Regarding Earth, and the possibility of it being an eldritch horror, I think that's something that can wait until tomorrow, because it's very much related to our next faction spotlight.

>>12736147
If it were that particular Galt, he'd probably have better things to do than make miniatures games, like feasting upon the middle class, or making women disrobe to melting ice sculptures.

>>12736205
Or writing The Sword of Truth!
No wait, that wasn't John Galt... He just thought he was.

Not too much response this time, so I'll toss you a bone that I've wondered in passing. Where did the Echo come from, what's their actual deal?
They can book it at 20 mph, which is really fucking fast, but that's a bit vague. What are they actually? The last thread gave some details, but it didn't go too deep beyond what function they serve in game.
I'm picturing kenyans, which probably isn't spot on.

>>12736037
Excellent. I eagerly await exposition on the Republic of Chiron.

>>12736266
Kenyans probably isn't too far off. They were made in an underground facility somewhere in the arctic sea, where scientists researching something... The exact nature of which I have not been told, but which has been implied to be of alien in origin. Something went wrong, predictably.
Most of 'em died, but the rest became the Echo. They're are essentially humans, but they are taller, with warped musculature that makes them more optimized at running, and capable of doing so very low to the ground, reducing their silhouette. The downsides of this are that their oxygen intake is huge, and they can't survive significant blood loss. They've also got less bone mass, making them a bit more fragile in general than humans, and their brains aren't as optimized for reflective thought, though binary choices and dispassionate decision making is definitely their forte. An Echo could do your taxes as well as a human could, maybe a bit quicker for lack of distraction, but would fumble spectacularly if asked "what is your favorite color?" There is no logical answer to that, so it cannot answer it without forcing itself to become emotional.
Ultimately, they're used as shock troops because their obedience, good personal initiative, and physical capabilities recommend them for the position. The fact that, given the proper drugs to make them fertile at all, they breed like rabbits, and grow to maturity within 10 or so years.

Anywhoo, I'm gonna go take a nap. I hope to see all you fine gentlemen tomorrow, and if you have further questions, I'll check back to answer them if I can, once I'm awake. Otherwise, pop in at the next thread, where we'll cover everyone's favorite fascist theocracy, The Republic of Chiron!

You're always welcome to drop by, because you're a wonderful person, and I love you for who you are.
Good mornin', neighbor.