Hey there space cadets! Time for a good old miss-mash of a mix-tape of a hodge-podge post!
First: new N7 operation this weekend! WOO!
Awesome things to note:
- Commondation packs are pretty easy this weekend; you only need to get ONE person to extraction on SILVER or higher; and at least ONE person on the squad must be a new class (Vorcha, Male Quarian, or Ex-Cerberus).
- Victory Pack guarantees an N7 (or Ultra Rare) weapon! So get out there and play some games!
This should be a nice, simple, fun N7 weekend, space cadets. I for one will be rolling random map/random enemy on silver and gold as I level up my soldiers, sentinels and engineers!
And now for something completely different: KINGMAKER!
My Thursday night group is currently on book 2 after over a year, I think, because a) we don’t get a lot of playtime and b) we are slooooooooooooow. In order to speed things along, we decided last night that I should go ahead and take care of the kingdom building stuff for about 12 months of game time on my own. I’m a big strategy game nerd so this appealed to me (and I’ve been basically running it for us from the get-go). The other players like the results but aren’t super into the crunch, being more interested in exploration and dealing with events/issues that arise. It’s especially hard to do the kingdom building as a group since we play online.
Thus, I went ahead and took some basic suggestions on what to build from everyone and plotted the events of our kingdom over the course of a year; and I have fairly handily busted the economy. And here is how.
SPOILERS I GUESS?
Every month your kingdom goes through four phases. During these phases you can assign new NPCs/PCs to leadership roles, acquire new hexes, try to get unrest under control, build cities/stuff in cities, and so on.
The important part is the Income phase, where you roll your economy check. It’s fairly easy to get your economy up rather high, but even so you’re not going to earn much revenue that way. This was slowing us down because we were saving to buy some big ticket items (market, town hall, etc), and it could take MONTHS to get enough income.
Then I searched a bit online and I found a clause in the Income phase that lets you sell magic items your kingdom generates for Build Points (the currency of this game structure). Since you generate magic items every month so long as you have empty slots, you can SELL them every month.
Minor magic items don’t sell for much, but when you start getting to Medium and Major items the rate of return is fairly significant; and this is on top of what you are earning with the normal Economy check.
To put it simply, I prioritized getting buildings that a) generated items and b) made OTHER magic item generating buildings cheaper, and by the end of 12 months our economy had increased it’s average income by over 800%. Pretty sexy, no?
For those of you who want to know the specific path I used:
Save money -> buy Cathedral -> buy Academy -> buy Caster’s Tower and Magic Item Shop -> go crazy.
Cathedrals halve the cost of Academies, Academies halve the cost of Caster’s Towers and Magic Item Shops. At this point you should have enough districts and enough items to be selling one Major and several Medium items every month, generating a TON of BP.
If you REALLY want to break your game, you can repeat that in multiple cities. I don’t recommend this, however; as with any strategy game, breaking the economy can make everything else a bit of a joke, and that can suck out a lot of the fun.
The cool thing about this path for us is that it made sense story wise, too; we have a good mix of Gods that we want represented (and a big Cathedral seems a great way to do that), our party wizard really wanted a tower, and Academies/Magic Item Shops are good for bringing in trade.
But I also made sure we built taverns and breweries and a garrison and a jail and so on, trying to flesh out the city.
All in all I found it to be an enjoyable exercise; it remains to be seen if our DM approves it or decides he needs to tone things down (which would be fine).
My suggestion to other DMs out there who are worried about this breaking their Kingmaker game is this: put a “cooldown” on magic items.
- Minor Items refresh every month.
- Medium Items refresh every two months.
- Major Items refresh every four months.
That should keep things from getting TOO out of hand while still allowing this to be a viable (and I think necessary) strategy to build up the economy of the kingdom. It also makes sense thematically, since it takes longer to craft things with higher GP values.
Kingdom building aside, I am enjoying Kingmaker as a whole. One of the big challenges in the game is that the story is (for a while) very open and sandboxy; and it will take some good flair from the GM (and a certain mindset from the players) to REALLY get into it. But it works perfectly fine as a weekly hex-crawl, too, which is how we play it. Just expect to do a bit more work than normal to get people invested in the world.
Finally, I’ve been preparing to run the introductory module for the Eclipse Phase quick-start rules.
Eclipse Phase is AWESOME. Crazy transhumanist dystopic hard sci-fi setting with a lot of flair and flavor. Mechanics are simple on the surface, deep as you get into things (from what I can tell). The best part is it’s all Creative Commons licensed! That’s right, the core book is FREE! CRAZY!
It’s good stuff, and I’m excited to run it for my Monday group (who have never played before).
One of the things I’ve been doing to get ready is to flesh out the very bare-bones scenario they give you in the quick-start rules; it’s a great framework, but it needs a bit more meat to be run properly I think. When I’m all done and have finished running it, maybe I’ll do a post about my process and reaction to it … until then, here’s hoping it goes smoothly!
That’s all for now space cadets, have a great weekend!
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