Update 4 is out for Sixty Years in Space

Update 4 for Sixty Years in Space is focused on completing the colony administration rules in (A)-Base (D)-Landing and expanding  the counter and dice "vocabulary" used across the game. The  (A)-Base (D)-Landing supplement is now also priced at the same pre-release price as all the other supplements and core rules; but if you contributed $60 or more to buying the core game rules, you now get it for free!

The colony administration game is the most board-game like of the any of the rules I've written for Sixty Years in Space and focuses as much on the social stratification of your growing population due to housing insecurity and inequality as it does on the mechanics of ensuring that you have enough food and labour to keep the colony running.

The full release notes follows:

All Rules

Renamed Designers as Builders. Designer implied more player control than the builders typically give — there is a new colony administrator set of rules in (A)-Base (D)-Landing which gives you more control at the cost of much greater complexity.

A face down card overlapping a face up card in an artificial structure now represents a high density building instead of a terraced building. Two overlapping face up cards in an artificial structure now represents an open space such as a field or plaza. Both cards can be upgraded separately.

Crewed Rules

Fixed typos on the crew folio (head should not have been marked as the default bleed through location) and missing fuel types on spacecraft cards.

Trouble is less likely for nonstandard turn lengths when performing some actions.

Trouble does not affect times for printing, reprinting or repairing assets. The Print wiring breakthrough makes printing effectively instantaneous.

Contacts and encountered cards from purple BSUs also roll 1D6+7 for their first outlook.

The access (was privilege) level you have as a result of a bypass is now be recorded using counters on the asset or cardq, and you can trigger a modification to the asset or system as an action once you have access. Adjusted the Bypass privilege levels to better match alert levels that they trigger. You can now hull breach and set traps this way.

Computer damage is now always handled as a complication.

Damaging a body part, asset or component completely now renders it inoperable instead of decommissioned. Decommissioning occurs when all hit boxes are faults (blacked out) instead.

Incorporated the base 1D6 bonus damage from continuous damage into the continuous damage table; tweaked the improvement going from instant to fast interval; added a row for shorter time intervals.

EVAs without PLSS cooling now use the slow time interval; hypoxia uses the very slow time interval.

Fixed it so that spreading fire uses the heat counters you removed to distribute heat to adjacent cards (was intended but not in the text). Suppression is now indicated by black counters; and you can put white dice under a counter to indicate the total number of counters on the card, for both heat and suppression.

Partial repairs are now 10 times faster rather than treating the object as 1/10th the size.

White, purple and black counters can be placed under units or on face up cards to indicate damage (purple), disabled (black) and faults (black on white).

A stack of two or more yellow counters on a card indicates the entire card is breached, regardless of scale.

The map scale applies a minimum edge value between cards before halving if the terrain is natural. This is 1 for Facility scale and increases by 1 for each larger scale.

Continuous damage hazards only do damage = hazard dice value instead of double value. This better matches the range of values from e.g. the crater of a nuclear explosion.

You can now use crew module or workshop printer tallies to seal very large (5m+) breaches.

If the crew exhibit suspicious behaviour while under surveillance, increase the alert level by one if the surveillance level is greater than or equal to the alert level. The surveillance level of a card is equal to the number of counters in the highest stack of white counters on the card or the highest face value of any uncovered white dice on the card edge, whichever is higher. Suspicious behaviour is considered any action where the intruder fails or has to add a defect, tally or stress to succeed.

Tweaked lab masses.

Searching now also provides useful data or a trail to the location where data can be found.

(A)-Base (D)-Landing

Factories, refineries and ports now use diamonds instead of hearts if placed during the site map, or assembled.

Added points of interest to maps which can be surveyed for scientific data and to claim glories.

Fixed explosives use for clearing obstacles.

Added the ability to build towers and add stories to existing buildings. Multi-story buildings are represented by white dice; where each point of dice face value represents a doubling of height.

Road and expressway slopes now equal twice the value of a white dice on the line connecting the two nodes instead of using counter colours. Grading roads is now optional, and roads can now have different rolling resistances.

Base-building can now be done with much less restrictions, including allowing the placed card to overlap tokens. Grading now removes counters and slides dice off the card, except deep terrain and water doesn’t remove counters from the base. Grading water only decreases the dig rate on a site with active hydrographics.

Added base building rules for aerostats.

Construction now requires allocating workers to cards being constructed at the Complex scale or larger instead of just passive population.

You can use cards from additional decks for base-building, as long as those cards remain face down.

You do not have to add yellow counters to buildings when you flip them — instead buildings under construction are indicated by a stack of two or three yellow counters on the card but only if they require multiple turns to finish building. You do not explicitly mark cards without power during the base-building process -- supplying power is now a building function.

Fixed anchor times for Bernals (was incorrectly using non-geostationary orbits for small sites, and not applying 80% efficiency rating).

Reactors and reactor-supported and solar-powered generators can also be assembled at the Complex scale.

Simplified the preconditions for bootstrapping a building. Bootstrapped buildings are self-powered if the source map had an operational power plant.

Added building functions, which determine what role(s) the building has and are represented by stacks of either two or more identical coloured counters on the card, or network counter stack on the card. Some functions grant special abilities for buildings.

Times now given for 3D printing District scale buildings.

Added rules for re-enabling, upgrading and repairing buildings, along with the effect of Promoted and later technology buildings.

You can collect off-map ink by building docks and warehouses.

Added a Colony Builder chapter, which includes colony events and rules for sheltering and housing colonists -- moved the growing the colony rules to this chapter.

Immigration periodically doubles the colony population, resulting in overcrowding and unrest.

Hinterlands (the most zoomed out colony map) are now used to track total colony population and food production, rather than requiring every map supply this.

Food production rates multiplied by 10 to give colonies a chance to survive when growing biomes other than algae. Starvation implicitly reduces biosphere ratings instead of explicitly doing so.

Orange domes and cylinders now track prosperity. Prosperity now determines how much space has to be devoted to parking and the maximum population in residences.

Decorations now have significant additional abilities: red decorations act as housing of various kinds and qualities; purple domes and cylinders add free building functions; orange domes act as workers; green domes double the effectiveness of housing and hospitals; green and white domes cap or prevent immigration.

Large cubes are now used to represent the site’s technology level, with one cube representing ET technology, two Advanced and so on.

You have to allocate workers to ensure building functions are maintained, although commuters from outside the map can contribute significantly.

Changed how the Launch infrastructure capability works.

Robot sensors reorganised so that station robots have more limited sensors. Added a Lab capability which upgrades the robot sensors to act like sensor suites; the Lab capability gap also increases the range of the robot’s primary sensors.

Launch system capability levels reorganised to remove ground tug capability and provide refuelling rates for fuel tenders. Most launch system abilities now use the capability gap of the robot.

Refactories can print themselves at Print, no wiring speeds.

A Facility with Words

Civil location tiled maps have been redesigned to look more like streets, with a lot more face down cards.

Orange disks are now used to indicate spotted units — clear counters instead indicate which units are using infrared this turn. Robots don’t always have infrared.

Repairing abandoned facilities includes a large number of additional actions and activities.

Valuables of various types now appear throughout an exfiltration map at most scales. Add rules for how long it takes to copy various types of data.

Adding rules for primary (crater) fallout from nuclear explosions.

All Errors are My Own

Pluggers now have partitioned bodies which prevent bleed through damage but results in severed limbs instead.

Renamed Technoselves to Knitted.

This Space Intentionally

Fixed an error in the Hope mission plan.

Tweaked micrometeroid, solar flare and radiation hazard damage amounts.

Ecology required for avoiding life support accidents instead of Engineer.

Solar cycle events are now resolved annually to allow them to have a greater chance to occur throughout the year via trouble.

Made the frequency of solar flare/CME events and elections and their effects more closely match the board game.

Anti-nuke space politics prevents you from boosting reactors again (was missing in update 3).

Moved immigration events to (A)-Base (D)-Landing and made accelerated immigration require a Bernal.

Breakthrough attempts are harder if performed as year long operations.

Simplified creation of low mass valuables.