Ruins 2 Nation Creation

Nation Creation

Archetype

Great Powers

The great nations of the post-Collapse universe, capable of exerting geopolitical power on an interstellar scale at the cost of being constrained by obligations, alliances and the contradictions inherent in all large states.

Starting Package

Playstyle

Emerging Powers

Upstart powers, comfortably outgrowing the expectations and limitations imposed on them by Great Powers to come into their own.

Starting Package

Playstyle

Hermit States

Minor pirate states and sheltered enclaves on the fringes of human space, unknown and sometimes unloved, and beneath the notice of Great Powers.

Starting Package

Playstyle

United Nations Extrasolar Fleets

The UN's lawmen, exerting Solarian influence out in the Verge and providing teeth to the letter of international law. The ESFs exist in constant tension between the demands of their patrons in Sol and the working relationships they keep with local Verger states.

Starting Package

Special Features

• General Staff:

Playstyle

Free Companies

A special class of mercenaries, inheriting a tradition from the various Solarian navies who deserted when the Reconquista began and then loaned their power to fledgling Verger powers when the long night of the Disconnect began. Mercenaries who claim descent from those early freelancers are generally viewed as legitimate by most parties and extended broad lassitude in their affairs, even allowed to possess military equipment and warships- though some of those are now well over a hundred years old.

Starting Package

Special Features

• General Staff:

Playstyle

Transtellars

Transtellars are puissant interstellar corporations and other non-governmental organizations, capable of exerting economic power that would even give the greatest of Verger states pause. They are only constrained in power by the demotivational nature of highly atomized, accelerated corporate life: Standard Helium might be worth trillions of spacebux but nobody wants to die a screaming death getting railgunned while taking a mining platform. To make up for it they often make use of mercenaries and sympathetic governments, who often have a lot to gain by working with them.

Starting Package

Special Features

• Symbiosis:

Playstyle

Traits

Estimated ~15 points total per player.

Diplomatic Traits

Positive Traits

• Fair Dealers (1):
  • Effect: You are known as fair dealers and straight shooters on the galactic stage and have considerable good will. NPCs will react accordingly. Hypocrisy, treachery or committing international crimes may serve to damage your reputation.
• Asari (2):
  • Effect: No matter how duplicitous or badly behaved you are, something about your state means it never quite sticks to your reputation. As such, NPCs will not allow your previous conduct to effect their reaction to what you’re doing currently
• Client State (3):
  • Effect: You have a superior relationship with an NPC about one third of your stature, on your homeworld or on another world. You don’t directly control them and their desire for freedom may grow in response to mistreatment or bad behavior, but they’re functionally a ride-or-die ally when it counts, for instance in your defense. (Modern USA and Germany)
• Poodle (3):
  • Effect: You have a less powerful (half of Client State) NPC either on your homeworld or on another world who acts as your ally. While significantly less powerful than you, they are stable and will mostly do what you say unless it’s particularly egregious or humiliating. (Modern USA and Britain)
• Alley Cat (3):
  • Effect: You have a disreputable friend who can provide you with the good stuff. They are less powerful (Half of a Client State), but are well connected to the galactic underworld, smuggling and daring do.
• Superior Cat (3):
  • Effect: You have a friendly relationship with an NPC about a third of your stature, but the relationship is somewhat strained and annoying, and they have a tendency to pull you into conflicts over their own interests whenever they can. They however have superior strategic placement and many interests in areas vital to you. (Modern USA and France).
• Our Guy in Deneb (10):
  • Effect: For some reason (effective lobbying, historical reasons, some kind of debt of honor) you’re widely loved by one faction or block, to whom you can practically do no wrong. This faction will support you to the best of their ability no matter what you do, and constantly cover for your crimes.
• Enclaves (2):
  • Effect: You have Independant Enclaves on your homeworld. These are Client State-size powers who are nominally friendly at game start with introspective foreign policy, who can easily be subjugated or confederated with relatively little effort.
• London Laundry (3):
  • Effect: You are a huge center of extremely dodgy finances. For every black market deal, trade sanctions break or profit from piracy, you gain X additional wealth. If this is discovered your reputation may suffer.
• Vatican Bank (4):
  • Effect: You are a huge center of extremely dodgy finances and nobody can ever call you on it. As above, but you suffer no reputation loss from this.
• Canadian Politeness (4):
  • Effect: You’re known as a nice, mild country who doesn’t rock the boat and doesn’t ever do anything strange or evil. People are more likely to ignore your internal crimes, and will politely ignore most of your international actions or treat them in a positive light.

Neutral Traits

• Treaty Ports (/):
  • Effect: You have a set of colonies of another power on your homeworld, which makes for easy trading opportunities and makes you hard to blockade, but can also result in enemy ground forces having a place to stage.
• Wildcat Colonists (/):
  • Effect: You have a set of Wildcat Colonies on your homeworld (as the Feature). They keep to themselves and can be decent trading partners or recruiting pools for agents, but may gleefully assist the first invader if you mistreat them.
• Factious World (/):
  • Effect: At some point your colony project split into several factions of about equal strength, you share your planet with them. They begin fairly neutral to you but may become friendly or be conquered.
• Who Cares about Tanzania?(/): (Minor Powers Only)
  • Effect: You are a small, distant nation that nobody cares about. Unless you make a major splash, people won’t react to what you’re doing. However they’re unlikely to help you out either.

Negative Traits

• Black Mark (-1):
  • Effect: You recently did something that most of the international community regard as bad, for instant an unprovoked invasion. Your diplomacy will be penalized.
• Failson-Industrial Complex (-2):
  • Effect: No matter how much money you pour into allies you want to cultivate or international organizations you nurture, around half that value just vanishes into the pockets of elite scions somehow put into related sinecures.
• Big Houses in Virginia (-5):
  • Effect: Your foreign policy establishment has a way of getting enmeshed in business dealings with the people you’re dealing with. As such, it is functionally impossible for you to break off foreign policy commitments (such as an occupation, guarantee to a smaller power etc.), even if it becomes disadvantageous to you, short of military defeat. You may conduct dealings with powers of equal rank normally.
• Swiss Bank Account (-2):
  • Effect: If your nation ever receives any gifts of money, men or materiel, only about half (50%) of it makes its way into the hands of the state.
• Santa Klaus Schwab (-1):
  • Effect: NPCs find your attempts at internationalism to be unsettling and sinister. If a word-salad multilateral project has even a whiff of your involvement in it, nobody will want to be involved other than diehards and vassals.
• Satanic Empire (-3)
  • Effect: Your formidable reputation somehow exceeds your crimes, to the degree that no amount of threat can compel people to surrender: they simply assume you’re lying and will fight to the death. NPCs will also readily believe lies about your atrocities. Ironically, normal diplomacy still works.
• Little Green Men (-5):
  • Effect: You are known as huge jerks internationally, commonly used as the villains in pop culture and otherwise disregarded. Everyone wants to see you taught a lesson. While you may find support among other badly regarded powers, if you reach out your arm too far the international community is likely to band together to cut it off.
• (Dumb/Sad/Evil) Little Brother (-5):
  • Effect: You have a smaller (½ Client) state you for some reason need to look after, even though they constantly put you in bad situations. Pick your flavor. Dumb little brothers will constantly make diplomatic gaffes and get themselves into sticky situations. Sad little brothers are angelic, but are in highly threatened locations. Evil little brothers are larger (equal to a Client State) but are constantly committing international crimes which stain your reputations as well, getting into wars, and generally being a headache.
• Liberation Pact: (-3)
  • Effect: Your state has an ideology (communism, cthulhu worship etc,) which elites across the international community regard as a threat. Gain a +X bonus to espionage actions and the automatic friendship of states with similar ideologies, but NPCs will seek to destroy if they can.
• Secondary Power: (-4)
  • Effect: You are the client state of another, larger empire and they expect you to pay for their patronage in blood and treasure.

Planetary Traits

Positive Traits

• Terraformed World, Minor (1):
  • Effect: The moderators will build your state to the specifications, with creative license.
• Terraformed World, Major (2):
  • Effect: You are allowed to design your planet completely from the ground up, with the exception of rare features which require other traits.
• Heavyworlder, Adaptive (3): Adaptive Heavyworlders are often given names like 'olympians', 'amazons' or similarly bombastic titles reflecting their tremendous stature and robust, muscular builds.
  • Effect: Your planet has Heavy or Hellish Gravity. Your ground forces have their Attack, Defence and HP values increased by 1 each and do not suffer increased fatalities in higher Gravity.
• Hyperoxygenated (1):
  • Effect: Everything works better in a hyperoxygenated ecosystem! Ground forces build 25% quicker and Industrial developments of the Agricultural type increase their minimum yield by 2%.
• Fallen Spire (2):
  • Effect: Begin with Megacity Ruins extending over up to 7 territories.
• The Spire (4):
  • Effect: Begin with an intact Megacity extending over up to 7 territories.
• Paradise Lost (6):
  • Effect: Megacity Ruins are a Dominant Planetary feature.
• Special Biome (1+):
  • Effect: Take 1 of Gaia, Mutagenic or Quantum Brainwaves features as dominant for planetary your Biome. Can be repurchased twice, adding an additional feature to the list.
• From the Ashes (1+):
  • Effect: Failed Wildcat Colony, Disconnect Era Ruins or Primitive Alien Ruins appear in roughly 50% of claimed territories. Repurchasing makes it a Dominant Feature or adds an additional feature to the list.
• Golden Age Remnants (2):
  • Effect: Planet has one territory with Golden Age Human Ruins, a valuable source for scientific study.
• Dreamland (2):
  • Effect: Planet has one territory with Advanced Alien Ruins or Precursor Alien Ruins, a valuable source for scientific study.

Neutral Traits

• Heavyworlder, Nonadaptive (/): Nonadaptive Heavyworlders are sometimes derogatorily given euphemistic slurs like 'squats' or more bluntly, 'dwarves' or 'dorfs'.
  • Effect: Your planet has Heavy or Hellish Gravity. Your ground forces have their Attack, Defence and HP values increased by 1 each and do not suffer increased fatalities in higher Gravity. In Normal, Low or None gravity however, your forces suffer from their biological adaptations and experience +25% higher post-combat casualties.
• Hellworlders (/): Your people adapted to a planet that is particularly inhospitable to human life. Some call you monsters, but you are prepared to survive the next galactic night.
  • Effect: Pick any number of deadly planetary features as Dominant on your homeworld. You are not recognizable as baseline humans, but any units which are specialized around those features like Specialists or Troopers have doubled stats (including HP). This comes with the minor downside that all espionage-related expenses are doubled due to the need to use proxies for everything.
• UN Outpost (/):
  • Effect: You have a UN Outpost on your planet due to prevailing interest in local ecology or a need to watch a specific part of the spacelanes. They’re good neighbors but will also snitch on any unseemly goings on.
• Primitive Aliens (/):
  • Effect: Your planet has a set of primitive sapient or pre-sapient life forms on it with a civilization no more advanced than bronze age. These beings may have useful skills and abilities or be useful workers, but are protected by the UN charter and thus block development in some areas.

Negative Traits

• Worse Earth (-1): You settled on the most common, least pleasant kind of habitable planet. Generations rue the day they made planetfall.
  • Effect: Your planet type is the Worse Earth archetype outlined in the planetology document. You cannot support Tourism in any fashion and events that might spawn refugees will disfavor you.
• Inhospitable Planet (-1):
  • Effect: Your planet is enormously hostile to human life and you didn’t adapt to it. Your people live in domes or warrens and damage to infrastructure can cause civilian casualties to tick up into the thousands very quickly.
• Nightmares (-2): You are not alone on your home planet, and the things you’re not alone with are extremely bad.
  • Effect: You must constantly keep (X) military units on your homeworld to fight off the xenomorphs rampaging in the woods, and may at any time see a more severe outbreak.
• What Lies Beneath (-2) Something ancient and dark lies far beneath your homeworld, not dead but dreaming. Its artifacts may be useful to you, but in the longer term its presence will cost you dear.
  • Effect:

Economic Traits

Positive Traits

• Blackbeard 2525 (1): The Golden Age of Cosmopiracy was the half-century following the Disconnect, but the explosive growth of spaceborne commerce, unaccounted-for weaponry and trans-verge chaos has opened the door to a new age of cosmopiracy. Old habits die hard and it turns out you can teach an old zero-G dog new tricks.
  • Effect: Double loot from Piracy and Blockades, pirates use flags of convenience and can only be identified via espionage.
• Lesser Pillar (1): Disruptions to your economy represent disruptions to life in your region.
  • Effect: Choose a Resource, Industry or Service Type. At least 45% of your Sector production has to be assigned to it. You are one of the primary providers of that resource in your local area, allowing you to trigger or solve Minor Shortages at will.
• Greater Pillar (SPECIAL): Disruptions to your economy represent disruptions to life as we know it.
  • Effect: Choose a Resource, Industry or Service Type. At least 65% of your Sector production has to be assigned to it. You are one of the primary providers of that resource in known space, allowing you to trigger or solve Major Shortages at will. Unlike other traits, Greater Pillar for any given resource is selected by auction via Nation or Growth Points. Losing bids are demoted to Lesser Pillar.
  • Note for Services: Greater Pillars for Services also require the Soft Power trait.
• Mayflower Society (1): Colonization bonus, civilians are quicker in moving in and making you get money.
  • Effect: Colony Rush is always 5 years long.
• Merchant Marine (2): It can never be doubted that the goods will be delivered by this nation, which believes in the tradition of DAMN THE TORPEDOES; FULL SPEED AHEAD!
  • Effect: Double the value of your exported Resource and Industry surpluses, which is added directly to the State Budget as untyped income.
• Exotic Resource (2): With names like Delta Dust, Sakuradite or Protoplasm, known space is positively lousy with the discarded ladders ancient races built to reach heaven.
  • You produce an exotic resource that has useful scientific properties. You and everyone you trade to gets 1 bonus Breakthrough per quarter simply for having access to the material, but all research carried out using these Breakthroughs is automatically flawed with a reliance on the material. A state that produces an Exotic Resource is also functionally a Lesser Pillar for their chosen material.
• Communism means more Trains(4):
  • Effect: Gain a 25% cost break on all infrastructure building, and you may automatically deploy train based combat units to any point.

Neutral Traits

• Autarkists (/): Some states out of ideology or circumstances have never rejoined the great Verge trade routes, instead adopting policies of autarkist self-sufficiency; the successful ones coupled this to society-wide norms.
  • Effect: You cannot benefit from foreign Investments or invest in states you do not directly control. On the other hand, you can Invest directly in your own state.
• Dirty Cops (/): Your anti-piracy efforts have been compromised and you are more vulnerable to it.
  • Effect: Piracy effectiveness against you is halved, but you are completely incapable of stopping it.
• Large Population (/): While the average Verge state can be measured in the tens of millions, your population is well into the hundreds of millions.
  • Effect: Your Developments have an extra 10% minimum yield (so 1d100 has a min of $10), stacking with similar benefits. Your Services Sector requires 100% aggregate Resources and/or Industry inputs to be productive.
• Soft Power (/): Culture is power.
  • Effect: Your Services sector surplus can be exported at doubled value, the bonus income of which is added directly to the State Budget as untyped income. Your Services sector is now subject to additional pressure from Piracy.

Negative Traits

• Five Year Plan (-1): The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
  • Effect: You have to plan your economy 2 years ahead and cannot change course, suffering penalties and lost production from shortfalls. On year 1, submit budgets for Year 1, 2 and 3. On Year 2, submit Year 4 plans.
• UN Sanctioned List (-2): You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty it will let you down.
  • Effect: You are under automatic embargo with everyone except for other Sanctioned List states. If more than 5 players have this trait, the value drops to (-1).
• Poor Merchants (-1): There is no friendship in trade.
  • Effect: By default any trade you get is assumed to work itself out even if the numbers don't totally line up. You instead have to calculate the surpluses of your trading partners and ensure they meet your demands.
• Used Future (-2): One of the great sins of the post-FTL colonial system is the loss of the efficiencies that were gained in the early centuries of spaceflight. Societies that knew how to work with little grew conceited when they escaped to the high frontier.
  • Effect: Double the required inputs to the Industrial Sector.
• Yearning Masses (-1): Society is suffering tumultuous times, either in some slow unravelling of postwar malaise or the tangling of civil institutions into new, Kafkaesque terrors.
  • Effect: Double the required inputs for the Services Sector (100% normally, 200% with Large Population).

Ground Warfare Traits

Positive Traits

• Full-Spectrum War Doctrine (3):
  • Effect: You may buy units from all three ground warfare lists.
• Arms Imports (1):
  • Effect: You can pick 2 units from other ground warfare lists, or gain access to the National or Clique lists if you aren't already.
• Martial Tradition (#):

Neutral Traits

• Trait Name (/):

Negative Traits

• Trait Name (-#):

Space Warfare Traits

Positive Traits

• Space Shipyard (2):
  • Your state has one of the few orbital shipyards in the Verge. As such it can construct ships without the trans-atmospheric trait, however the difficulties of doing so increases the final cost by 50%.
• Advanced Shipyard (2):
  • Your state has a shipyard system as good as those of the origin system. There is no cost penalty to building ships in space. Requires Space Shipyard.

Neutral Traits

• Trait Name (/):

Negative Traits

• Trait Name (-#):

Exploration, Research and Espionage Traits

Positive Traits

• Trait Name (#):

Neutral Traits

• Trait Name (/):

Negative Traits

• Trait Name (-#):

Government and Social Traits

Positive Traits

• Trait Name (-#):*

Neutral Traits

• Ruthless Dictatorship:(#):
  • Effect: The nation is ruled by a singular powerful leader, with the state both legally and practically subordinate to them. This government allows greater economic control, but requires aggressive internal policing to maintain stability.
• Alliance Of Tribes (#)::
  • Effect:The nation is less a ‘nation’ and more an association of smaller groups who mostly agree to act in concert. This government gives the player less direct control over the economy, and cannot mobilize as effectively, but their homeworld is vastly difficult to conquer.
• Military Junta:(#):
  • Effect: Your government holds power by playing on national fear of The Enemy, and so must always have such an Enemy. You are always at war with someone, or your own people.

Negative Traits

• The Last Tsars (-3): Your elite rules the state with a noose and an iron fist from a throne of swords. This doesn’t tend to be a stable arrangement.
  • Effect: You may ignore the effects of the loss of the level of popular support, but after that any loss of support immediately sends you into rebellion.