Port of Call, part I

Today, we talk about Port of call, a game that my uncle from the weird branch of the family designed some decades past.

I have the surviving materials of the game, two pieces of plywood with the world map drawn on them, and a bag of hand crafted wooden ships and cargo tokens. Oh, and a couple dice. There is no surviving copy of the rules, which I'm told is perfectly fine. They never had a really complete copy of the rules anyway, and they figure the rules could use some work anyway.

The game board is a map of the world, showing various ports on the various continents. Lines connect the cities, with spaces demarkated. The Panama Canal clearly displays the price to go through it-- $3000, which I'm told is unrealistically low. Oh, and there's a pirate, which I divine from the fact that the "Pirate Route" is clearly labelled on the map, including direction arrows and the "Pirate turns around" space. For some reason, the priate doesn't just hang around Somalia.


Possibly because the game was made before Somali Pirates were an issue. We can date the game partially by the fact that one of the "continents" is actuallly the Soviet Union, with Leningrad and all it's -istani SSRs. Redesigning the board, my first impulse might be to break up the old CCCP and dename Leningrad back to St. Petersburg, to bring the game up to date. On the other hand, period isn't critical to this sort of game; having it set a couple decades past doesn't require any other changes to be made, and there's a certain nostalgia for the cold war tensions. Frankly, I think a nuclear Iran is more likely to drop the bomb on someone than the old Soviets were. Well, except for Stalin; I wouldn't put it past him. That guy wasn't right in the head, to put it mildly.

Where was I? Stalin, the bomb, Nuclear Iran, cold war, CCCP, Somali Pirates.... oh yeah! I was talking about the game. Let's get back to that.

The major theme of the game is international shipping. You need to take cargoes from one port to another. Ok, that's a pretty solid basis for a game, there are a number like that already, although mostly I've played train variants on that theme. So let's look into what you need to run a game of that sort. You need an origin point, you need a destination, you need to be able to move from one to the other, and you need some sort of compensation for same.

The first two are partially dealt with already. The way the game board is set up, there are six continents (well, China and southern asia are in the same group as Australia, and the Soviet Union counts as a continent unto itself), six continents numbered one through six. Each continent has six cities on it, also numbered one through six. The advantage here is that you can uniquely determine a location on the map just by rolling two dice; the red one is the continent and the yellow one is the city, or some such. (1,5) gets you New York, (5,2) gets you Odessa in Russia, and so forth.

So we have a method of randomly selecting destinations, now all we need is a reason to go to these destinations. In the game Rail Baron you just move from one city to the next; once you reach one destination that becomes your new starting point and you roll up another destination. It's a decent way to go about it, but it doesn't support the notion of carrying multiple loads. As was explained to me, one of the things you can do in the game is upgrade your ship to bigger ones that can carry more loads. So instead of just the one, you could carry several, going to different destinations. Also, we want players to be able to subcontract; that is, they can ask such and such to carry a load for them for a fee. There's no way that's viable if you're just moving from point to point like that, so we look onward.

As an aside, if we weren't looking for that deal aspect we might be able to hack it with just point to point movements like that. You can manage ship upgrading as carrying multiple of the same loads, for multiple of the payout. It would even make the game more interesting, when to upgrade your ship changes things from a simple race (can I hit my destinations more quickly than my opponents) into strategic competition, what with deciding when to upgrade your ship. But unless it's completely impossible we still want the subcontracting mechanic in there somehow, so let's leave this aside err... aside.

Back to the task at hand. We have ways of randomly determining cities. How do we determine what we're picking up and dropping off? Well, we could roll for both; say you just dropped of in Rio de Janerio and you need a new run. You roll for pickup (Vladivostok) and dropoff (Anchorage). A neat little run, if you weren't halfway accross the world to begin with. But maybe you can pay the guy who's docked in Shanghai to do it for you. And he'd want to upgrade his ship, because he's already got his load from Singapore that he's taking to Vancouver.

It's a very rosy picture, assuming it all works out that way. Maybe the guy in Shanghai is going the other way; in which case he says "deliver your own load" because it isn't worth his while to backtrack. Or maybe nobody's closer than India, in which case you might as well just do it on your own. Or maybe it isn't worth their while to upgrade, since it'll cost more than you're offering them and the chance to take a second load for profit comes only infrequently. Generally, it has to be convenient for your opposing player to take the offer, otherwise they'll just go about their business. Any one of those factors (not on their way, no room for the cargo, farther away from the run than you are) makes haggling fees not worth the effort, and the set of them might make it so the mechanic almost never comes up. Which would be a sad thing.

If we look at the pieces (metaphorically, I don't have them right in front of me and neither do you), the cargo comes in the colors of the various continents. That gives us some tools to work with. For example, if in the above scenario it was for a load of goods from ANY city in the Soviet union to Anchorage, then it's easier on our buddy in Shanghai. You could have rolled Archangel just as easy, and that's not on the way for anybody. Much easer to pick up from any city in Soviet Russia. (In Soviet Russia, city picks up you. How did Yakov Smirnov make any money again?)

Here's another question. What exactly are you doing while someone else does your run? If each person only gets one run, you might as well do it yourself because you've got nothing else to do but avoid the pirate. If we move it in the other direction, say you can roll infinite runs, then what stops you from rolling dozens and dozens of times until you get one you like? Subcontract out any that make sense, forget the rest. Now let's say you can get as many runs as you like, but you have to pay some fee to acquire new ones. Sure, you can get half a dozen, but increasing the options will cost you. There are pitfalls with this approach too, if you make it too cheap you run into the infinte runs problems. And you've still got the memory issues.

Let's say you've got three or four runs you can be going on, and each of your three or four opponents has their own three or four runs. How are you going to keep track of it? By memory? That's a recipe for disaster. Write it down? Writing things down takes time, time that you could be playing the game. It needlessly slows down the action, like when they saddle a perfectly good action movie with a superfluous romantic plot. Perhaps some sort of token to represent it? In Empire Builder they give you cards with potential runs on them, with the cargo, the destination and the payout written down there. Let's try something simpler.

Let's say we provide the game with a deck of 36 cards, one with each city name on it. They start out in a general pool off to the side (like the properties in Monopoly). Then, when you roll up a new run you get a destination card. Put a load on the card. Then, when you pick up the load, you can move the token from the card to your ship to indicate you've picked it up. You still have the card to remind you where it's going. Hmm... maybe you want to leave a second load on the card to remind you what color goes where. But anyways, it gives you a visual tracking method to remind you what your options are, and it lets you look over at someone else's runs to tell what they're doing at a glance. It also provides a convenient way of subcontracting; rather you can sell the run to another player, and represent the deal by physically handing them the card. Neat.

Although that brings up another issue. It's one thing to allow players to wheel and deal. It's another thing to encourage it enough that they actually do it. Bargaining in games is all kinds of fun, and I think a lot more games should be built that way, but just suggesting the possibility isn't enough. I'd like to design some more mechanics on that, but the post is pretty long, I've got other things to do today. And, I mean, I haven't even touched on the pirate, or the rewards for runs, or the money system, or ending the game. That's a lot of stuff for another day.

A Conversation about MMOs

Had a conversation on Windows Messenger today, on MMOs and an article about them. Editing it slightly and reposting, because it's still worth reading.

Dramatis Personae:
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls: This is me. The quote come from Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Heinlein.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia. This is my friend and co founder of Awesome Games. Not sure where his statement comes from.

New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
also, interesting essay: http://www.wordaroundthenet.com/2008/09/5th-generation-massive.html
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
They're forgetting the Realm Online
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
where does that fit in?
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Just before Ultima Online;
it was a graphic MMO first.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Naturally I'm now annoyed at the article, enough that I'll be arguing
ie, arguing against game balance is a very suspicious activity.
so arguing that they should make encounters that adjust to players is all fine and good, but in practice that's pretty hard to manage
any sliding scale like that is going to have places where it's easier and harder and more and less profitable. In an MMO, people are going to rapidly find the easier/more profitable nexus and just keep hitting that over and over
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure, but that'll happen no matter what you do
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Hold on a sec, it's peanut butter jelly time
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
that'll happen
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Right, so even in WoW as it stands and so forth there are dungeons that people hit and people skip. It's very easy to find a group for the Deadmines, but almost impossible to find one for Blackfathoms Deep
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
but as i understand it when you're off to the Deadmines you have a great time
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
What would happen with those dungeons is that you could easily find a three player group for X, but never a five or seven player group. the 25 man raids would only hit three dungeons anyways, since those are the ones with the best loot and everybody knows it.
Strath, Scholo, UBRS or LBRS, and even less of LBRS. Don't ask about Dire Maul, and heaven help you if you want to finish out BRD
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
So you're saying the 5/7 man dungeons are pretty much worthless?
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
No, that for that particular dungeon everybody will know which number is appropriate.
people will sign up for 3 man X, and 5 man Y but never 3 man Y or 5 man X
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
okay
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Never mind if people are right or wrong about what everybody knows, it's a cascade effect. Dire Maul had some really good drops, and there wasn't a better trinket for a Melee class than the one you get from the king in BRD, but people never ran them regardless.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure, i can see where that would happen.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
The other thing is, it's impossible to write an algorithm that will uniquely balance the dungeon for any given number of characters, levels. I mean, you could do it but it wouldn't work that well. You have to get designers in to fiddle with it, and test it, and so forth, for every iteration of every dungeon. That's a lot of work.
Oblivion had an algorithm that determined monster level and treasure types based on your character level. It had a lot of problems.
If you're an explorer type like me, you can go all over the game and dig through unique and interesting dungeons to find exactly the same crap in the chest, which isn't ever especially powerful for your level. And the only way to make the combat fun after a certain level is to manually adjust the game difficulty.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
There's a lot of thrill in figuring out how to do something solo that's way more difficult than you should have been able to do, and if you manage it you should be rewarded appropriately. But all that means that it isn't a function of computer power that's slowing down different dungeon power levels, it's game designer time, which is a lot more expensive.
Quests that adapt to the player are a decent idea, except 1) Every single version of every single quest still has to go through design, development, creative, the whole thing, which means that multiple versions requires multiple amounts of design time and money. and 2) only so many quests are interesting. Pity the poor healing class who gets to spend fifty levels treating foot disease rather than skulking in shadows or beating down bandits.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Granted. On the other hand, presumably there's a certain amount of people that would prefer to do that rather than skulk in the shadows for 50 levels. I can't say the same for beating down bandits because that's always a good time
or being a bandit, also good.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Right. And I mean, it is fun being a healer, and there are people who went from level 14 to 60 in old Wow just healing in dungeons. But every group needs a healer, and less than 1 in 5 level that way. the rest of your player base are going to get royally bored to get to end game content for a guild that's going to dissolve in drama three weeks later.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Oh yeah, and you do have to balance for PvE too. I mean, if it's markedly easier to level as a hunter you'll end up with a surplus of hunters in the end game. you'll have the groups of three hunters waiting for a tank and a healer until kingdom come.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Though depending on how overpowered they are it might not matter, not sure if you saw the Noob comic on the subject.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
I probably did, don't remember it
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Basically one of the devs went to the boss and said they were getting complaints about hunters being OP because the devs played hunters, the boss said that's ridiculous and went back to playing his hunter, which was ridiculously powerful,
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Oh yeah, I remember that now.
But yeah, in the end most MMO tasks involve tanking, healing and killing stuff. I get that it's nice to have ways to differentiate between different classes that do those essentials, but there's only so much you can do. If a class can't do any of that then it's by and large useless. I'd argue that WoW does it all well enough already, that the classes are varied enough that you can tell the difference between them. A rogue is not a warrior is not a paladin is not a druid is not a priest. While there's certainly a lot of overlap between classes, and in the end they still do the same three essential tasks, the classes are differentiable by other characteristics. Rogues pick locks, stealth and pickpocket. Mages are the only ones who master Portal Magic, and nobody but druids shapeshift.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
And if she wants different characters, then limiting what sort of character can do what sort of profession isn't the way to go. "Oh, you're a warlock? Herbalism/Alchemy or Enchanting/Tailoring?"
It doesn't make much sense for a frail student of the arcane to be out there with a pickaxe mining copper, but it does help to individualize characters.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Yeah, true. It also leads back into what you already said, people are usually going to do what's best for them doesn't make much sense for a warlock to be mining, less use for it I'd think.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Well, mining and engineering is a decent choice for any character type. And so is MIning and Skinning, if you just want to sell your crap on the auction house. Doesn't make much for character definition that way. But to do what she wants, what you could do is make for difficult/complicated quests to allow you into certain branches of the profession. Makes a higher barrier to entry, and makes it more important for an individual to be in that particular branch.
Experience for everything has two pitfalls; either it's very easy to level up this way (rogue gets experience for stealthing past monsters. Set your rogue to auto run into a wall behind a particular guard, walk away and let your EXP tick up. Bingo progress quest!) or it's very pointless; exploration experience in WoW is nifty, but it's worth about one monster kill per area visited, which means that you don't
get any levels by wandering around. I'll grant you it's nice to have incentives to do stuff other than the scripted quests, but that and a thousand monster kills will get you a level.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
heh
Yeah, the exploration xp in Fallout III wasn't so bad though, it was enough to actively make me want to wander out of my way a time or two just to get a new location on the map.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Yeah, not saying it isn't a good thing, but most of the time you got that experience by killing things or turning in quests.
On to the economy section. ooh! fees and taxes. That'll be popular with the player base. I dunno, I mean it seems that money sinks aren't that hard to come by in the games. I mean in WoW they had repairs, Auction House fees, postage, gryphon fees, so on and so forth.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure. You can get around some of that if you really try though.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
First of all, you want a slowly inflating economy; people are happier when they're making money. That means of course that more money is going to be going into the system, but again in a free market there are things you can do about that.
Generally it just means that the price per unit of time farming changes, and stuff is about as expensive as it was previously.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Yeah, much as the continual adding of content happens.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Secondly, it's fine putting in money sinks, but you've got to convince your players that they're getting value out of it. Take the stuff in Uncle P's Antiques. You in no way get more meat out of the events than you spend to access them, but they provide unique content, which people are willing to pay to see. Just outright taxing them, or making different currencies that are worth different amounts is less fun, and currency exchanges also increase complexity without adding much gameplay value. Thirdly, I'm not convinced that gold farming is such a terrible thing. I mean yeah, it sucks when you have to farm the same thing they are, and you're a loser for having to pay real money for in game currency, but for the most part you can work around it. It distorts the amount of money in the economy, but there are always ways to make money off of the people who bought gold. Rugged Leather can be
farmed in almost every high level zone in Classic WoW, and it sells plenty well. Not worth as much as hanging out at Tyr's Hand, but plenty of gold per hour if you're just looking to buy that vanity money sink.
Honestly I think that KoL does it best with the Mr. As on sale for $10. If you want in game currency, you support the game itself to buy it, both by paying the devs and by supporting your local meat farmers.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
True. I might also buy that t-shirt: "Support your local gold farmer."
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Supply and demand, items selling better or worse to NPCs of an area based on availability would be a pretty cool mechanic. Not sure how easy it is to code.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Pretty sure the other half of that can't be too hard, the part about changing the quest requirements based on demand.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Well yeah, but that also leads to all sorts of screw. I mean, take her point further down about legless spiders. You spend half an hour getting spider legs and suddenly they ask for treant bark. Kill a score of treants and now they want lizard eggs. Suck Eggs long enough and now they want an amber ring from a local wizard. If the economy shifts enough you could never finish that quest.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
I would assume that the quest being given would stay the same
I'm using the Bounty Hunter Hunter as my example here
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
I mean, if they did it easier, like a contract is a contract and whatever you sign up for you finish, but then they have different sign ups at different times, that's fine.
Yeah, I didn't read it that way.
I do like the point about being able to make almost anything. And being able to make custom items, so long as the custom items are comparable in power to dungeon loot
Too much power and why are you going into that dungeon? Too little power and why bother?
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Yeah, that's a tough call.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
I did really like it in Diablo II where the monsters used essentially the same abilities as the player classes. These ghosts shoot chain lightning. The Fallen Shaman shoots firebolts. That sort of stuff.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
So when I played Runescape, you could pretty much master every skill available, if you were willing to put in the time or the money towards it. However IIRC generally the loot you could get from monsters was better than that which could be crafted, however last time I checked in they had some new loot that was a craftable drop.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
A craftable drop? As in you get it off of a monster but you can upgrade it by crafting?
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Well, no. One was a piece of ore that could be smithed, the other was a half of a shield that could be smithed. The other half shield was bought from a merchant in the place where you started the quest.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
OK. Still, a decent mechanic, without knowing the particulars.
Interesting idea about dynamically varying spawn density based on player population. The problem is your graphics engine. If a hundred players parade through snigland with their mounts and a dozen pieces of customized clothing each (customized clothing is also bad for this sort of stuff) then a bazillion lesser snigs spawn, players start raining down blizzards and firestorms on them because I don't care if I don't get much loot off of them, there's so many, bet I can crack 10,000 damage, and everybody's videocard crashes or the server overloads and goes down. They introduced a global LFG channel in WoW one patch. Somebody made a macro to display about a thousand messages on it a minute to everybody in the faction and it was enough to take the server down.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
I don't think you can really use that as a general example though
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
No, I'm just saying that the additional stress of a bazillion text messages being delivered was enough to bring the server down. WoW has very limited character design options and no armor dyes or anything just because they try to make the game accessible to older machines. You start changing that, you start running into problems
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure. But this is looking at what would be next in line for the new generation of games or to make it truly "role-playing" which I think was more the point of the essay.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
the idea of a dynamic environment is interesting, not at all sure that it's easy to code. Early on in WoW development they had an idea for an alliance incursion into the Barrens, that would get further and further as patches progressed. WHat really happened is that the alliance was scared off by Barrens chat.
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
heh
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
Or rather they realized it's be pretty bad to take away the major early level horde leveling area. Still, I think that the 5th generation, as he terms it (I just realized it's a he, and I've been referring to it as she all along. Embarrassing), will include a much more interactive game world. The example with trees is nice, the example with weather effects is possible, but I'd really like to see actual war zones that change hands. Say the plaguelands in classic WoW, where one faction or the other controls the zone and their members can only accept and turn in quests in the area until the other faction manages to stage a comeback. Or stuff like that
New Zealand is kind of like the Canada of Australia says:
Sure
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls. says:
As I've been saying for a while, I'd really like to see MMOs that adapted the GM role for the world.

The mighty Industries of Space!

Going to provide a short update to the terrible secret of space; more background sci-fi.

In the end it was batteries. Batteries that finally broke the confines of gravity and lifted mankind into space. Not literally, of course.

It was a great scientific breakthrough. Using the technique we made batteries that were tens of times stronger. Cellphones that you could talk on for a hundred hours before they needed a recharge. Electric cars that you could drive across the country and never need to refuel. All kinds of medical gear made smaller and more portable, ready to jump off the ambulance and save lives. When I think of how life was before we invented these things I don't understand how they got along. Durable, lasting, portable power sources. How could we do without?

There's a catch of course. There's always a catch. An essential part of the manufacturing process requires microgravity. The same sort of conditions that you could never find on the surface of the earth, that only occurs in orbit. But orbit is oh so expensive to get into.

In the end, it was a country in the Andes mountains that set up the first industry in space. You'd think it'd be America. Or Russia, or China, or even India. All of those countries had the technological edge. They also had safety standards. Don't get me wrong, raw space is incredibly dangerous, you can't get there without some safety devices. But the more developed countries were forced, over time, to adapt to ever more stringent workplace standards. Even China and India, as time wore on. If a company based out of Alabama wanted to get into space, it'd have to comply with so many OSHA standards, file so much paperwork, field such a large legal team and all the other headaches of the business world. Don't get me wrong; those safety standards have their place. Lots of people died to get that first assembler into orbit. Even so, the world will always remember the launching pads of the Altiplano as taking the greatest leap of space exploration since Neal Armstrong took his small step.

One dirty little factory. Six astronauts, working in two man shifts, seven days a week. One dinky little, rickety as all getout shuttle struggling past the iron bands of gravity. And yet, when that shuttle came down... Do you remember Sir Frances Drake? The second ship to circumnavigate the globe. It came back from the far east stuffed with precious metals, jewels, silks and spices. Made his investors into rich men, all from one shipload. Every time that shuttle came down it was like Drake made his triumphant return into London. Those first loads of batteries were worth their weight in gold. Double. Triple.

Sure there were accidents, but never enough to stop them from going back up. The legend goes, I've never confirmed this myself, that whenever the shuttle would explode they hired scores of peasents to scour the countryside for debris, trying to find any batteries that survived intact. I'd believe it; one of those things was enough to pay for half a dozen searchers.

It didn't last long. You know what happens when you start making money hand over fist? A lot of sharp company pays attention, and starts copying you. You'd be amazed at how quickly those environmental concerns and safety regulations got waived once people realized how much money there was to be made. And when you've got your department of defense pressing down on you to not let us be dependent on foreign suppliers, well, you've got incentives. To their credit America had much more efficient and much safer facilities, but nobody cares about second place.

Soon orbital facilities were popping up like dandelions in spring. All over orbit you'd find another countries premier battery manufacturing company doing there best to get in on the action. It was a real headache for the diplomats and air traffic controllers, let me tell you. A veritable gold rush in orbit. Actually, the gold rush analogy is pretty good.

You know who gets rich in a gold rush? The suppliers. The prospectors in a California soon-to-be ghost town never really get rich and go back east like they always planned. You know who makes the money? That lady who bakes the pies they eat when they're living high. Those orbital workers got paid plenty for the strain and risks associated with the job. Are you surprised they wanted a place to spend it?

They followed the same pattern. The first one was small and crude, the next one was bigger and flashier. And then it grew. You reach a critical point where you're putting enough people into a place and suddenly you need more people up there to support them. And good heavens what do you do when people start having babies? The first true city in space was named Boomtown, set in geosynchronous orbit over Arizona. The manufacturing satellites had to be kept higher still, but once you're that high in orbit it's just a small energy expenditure to jump up and down, when your satellite swings over. And the strategic location-- close to Vegas, ensured that they got the bulk of the tourist trade.

As supply rose, the batteries got cheaper and cheaper. Tourists suddenly provided the next major revenue stream. The free market had driven the costs of pushing a payload into orbit ever downward, and it liberalized space tourism from the ultra-rich to merely the very well off. If you raise a boy on the old Heinlein stories then he's always going to want to get into space. There's plenty of cash to be made fulfilling that dream. Soon another industrial boom fueled the expansion into space, and another.

In all this time, the biggest expense was always getting men and material up into orbit. Asteroid farming naturally followed. Why go to the expense of shipping your copper up from the surface when you can crack it out of a nearby space rock? First you extract the metals from the ore. extracted from the rock. They grind up the chunks of leftover stone and chemically them into workable soil. Even the slang gets reprocessed. Men are awfully clever about using every part of the buffalo when the situation calls for it.

They also dug mines on the surface of the moon. At 1/6th earth surface gravity, the moon provided a compromise between the vast distances to the asteroids and the heavy energy burden of lifting them off from Earth. Much later, foundries were established on Mercury. It's much more difficult, but when the money's there, men brave all sorts of hazards and difficulties to grab it. They once asked J. Thompson Martin, the capitalist who commissioned the first mission prospecting the asteroids, why he went out to such great distances. He famously responded "Lady, if I could see a dollar's profit on the dark side of Pluto I'd walk the entire way if need be."

In the end that's how it happened. There was money in space, so we went there. And all it took was batteries.

Well, there you go. There's the explanation for why we're up in space, and why we have the different structures and industries and whatnot up there. Briefly, I'm going to talk about this in game terms.

You've got three kinds of installations up there. Space industries are the first. Large chunks of machinery, robotized wherever possible but never 100%. The second are Space Habitats, the cities where people live or at least try too. Like Boomtown. The third kind are Space Stations, which are more military in nature. They're the only ones that come armed, but boy do they ever!

I expect that you'll be able to recruit personnel out of the space habitats, and assemble weapons or some such from space industries. Furthermore they're going to be important strategic concepts. Of course, that's going to have to wait until I start figuring out resource types and uses and so forth. Another day... another day.