Can anyone tell me how profit factor is made from a colony. I have been reading the colony section of stars of inequity and am confused, can give me a simple explanation as to how colonies work?

The short answer is the colony makes PF based on size (there is a chart) and a bonus for high Productivity. The slightly longer answer is it doesn't necessarily do so, colonies are mainly profit sinks unless the players leverage them properly. The long answer is divided up below. Note that my players main goals revolve around colonies in the Expanse and they have managed to make those colonies quite profitable.

Colony Formation: This is an Endeavor that sets up the colony. You should probably plan it as if it was a +3PF endeavor. They find a world, survey it, deal with any dangers, and decide where to build it. They then find backers, obtain necessary equipment, arrange for colonists, get Ad Mech support, and decide on the type of colony. They finally transport everything there, start the colony, deal with emergent issues for a year or so, and pay 1d5+(3 to 5) PF. The new colony is worth up to 4 PF if they ballanced everything right and got all the bonuses. So, they have lost PF.

Colony Development: Every so often they roll to see if the colony grows or shrinks. As it does so its PF changes. If it grows they need to do a Lesser Endeavor to set up additional infrastructure. This does not award PF. At size 10 the colony is generating around 20PF if they did everything right. By this time they have done a minimum of 1 Greater and 10 Lesser Endeavors (at least 13PF in endeavors, at the very minimum). They will have to make sure to keep all 4 colony stats (Complacency, Order, Piety, and Productivity) up so that the colony stays stable. They do this by building both Infrastructure Upgrades and Support Upgrades.

So why build a colony?

1) If the players are smart and willing to let it grow organically, they can use the colony administrator to run the endeavors for its upgrades (as background endeavors). This means that all they have to do is make the aquisition rolls for the upgrades and give the administrator directions. Sometimes it will fail, and they will have to step in and clean up the mess. This does make the colony grow a bit slower, but allows the players to be very hands off.

2) Access to special resources. Colony upgrades can include Imperial Navy and Imperial Guard bases that provide bonuses to military endeavors. You can also build Manufactorums to ensure you have access to the torpedos and fighters you need to smack people around. You also gain a +5 PF bonus when buying stuff at your colony, which can make shopping a lot easier. The administrator is also capable of running background endeavors in the colonies area. That means that they can set up lesser endeavors to exploit the colony and surrounding system resources for the players, without the players needing to run around setting up 'yet another mine'. That translates into additional PF, although at some risk of things going wrong.

3) Prestige and personal accomplishment. Your players get bragging rights and a place to lay back and relax in their 50km wide personal resort catered to by hundreds of nubile men and women. My players entire campaign revolves around building a new model for worlds in the Imperium. Including trying to reconcile the Ad Mech and Imperial faiths. This would, of course, be seen as heresy in the Imperium and get you killed. When you have massive colonies (some carefully hidden), you can have a lot more say and influence. Inquisitors aren't necessarily capable of following you out into the Expanse just to burn you for having an 'excessivly deviated cult'. In fact, with sufficiently advanced colonies you might not ever have to head back into the Imperium for anything ever again.

For a GM, colonies give you lots of different options for story ideas. You can have psyker uprisings, xeno attacks, ancient ruin buried under the colony, or even chaos incursions. As long as you don't pick on it too much, the players will be more invested in saving their colony that any random world found out. That makes for more interesting sessions, and more rewarding victories.

Do I gain +4 PF every 90 cycle or does it stay at 4 until it grows in size?

It is not added every cycle. It is a lot easier to keep track of your base PF seperate from you colonies. I just add the colony PF and base PF when they use it to determine total PF. You are less likely to make a math error that permanently adds to or reduces their PF that way. There are several ways a colony PF could vary (grow, shrink, loss of stat, penalty from event), and it is better to track it seperately on the colony tracking sheet.

To add to the confusion, sometimes the planet you set your colony on has exploitable resources (such as minerals, fauna or even archaeotech). These can be harvested by the colony and can do one of two things:

• Help the colony grow
• Be converted into Profit Factor

The problem is that these resources are limited and it is entirely possible to mine an entire world dry, leaving the colony (and its inhabitants) as the most valuable thing on the planet.

I recomend you really read though the rules then set up a practice colony and take it though growth and see how the stats and modifiers work. I use an Excell spreadsheet to track the colonies in my game. It makes it a lot easier to keep track of.

Feel free to ask additional questions. I never mind answering them.

Can some one explain how profit is made from a colony then?

Short answer (since the posts above explain it pretty well for me): A Colony has an innate Profit Factor, separate from (but ultimately added to) your 'normal' Profit Factor. When the Colony starts out, this innate PF is negative, since it costs money to keep it running. After the Colony grows, this innate PF turns positive, and instead of draining your profits starts adding to them.

The trick is to balance out the money you take from the colony (its exports) with the growth that will give it a positive PF.

That's a pretty good summary.

Also note that (assuming it remains about the same size) it doesn't repeatedly add profit factor.

'Profit' as a stat represents the dynasty's cash flow, rather than an exhaustable pile of cash; which is why 'spending' money - even on something priceless like a relic suit of artificer armour with your dynastic heraldry engraved on every single component (even the bolts and washers) - doesn't reduce it.

Equally, acquiring a huge pile of money - whilst a nice thing - doesn't increase it unless it's invested in something.

An increase to profit means acquiring or building something new that generates you money, or striking a trade deal, or gaining an improved reputation with the mechanicus so they don't gouge you so much every time your ships need an overhaul, or whatever.

Losing profit means the same in reverse, or setting up something which is a permanent drain on resources (such as a colony, until it's big enough to turn a profit).

The balancing act is always between increasing your by a bit profit now, increasing your profit by a lot long-term, and the long-term viability of the colony. Improving any one of the three always negatively impacts one and usually both of the others.

 

To add to the confusion, sometimes the planet you set your colony on has exploitable resources (such as minerals, fauna or even archaeotech).  These can be harvested by the colony and can do one of two things:

• Help the colony grow
• Be converted into Profit Factor

The problem is that these resources are limited and it is entirely possible to mine an entire world dry, leaving the colony (and its inhabitants) as the most valuable thing on the planet.

Do I, in this case, distract the said amount from all of the sources or just from one?

And also: are there any mechanics for extracting resources from asteroids or ship graveyards?

You set what the colony is depleting, so it burns through each of them one by one. Generally you'd burn through the smallest deposit to get the city growing faster, then use the interesting Resource for endeavours and profit.

As for asteroids and ship graveyards, not per RAW. You could create a new colony type that has a limitation on size and a special rule about needing to import foodstuffs, I guess?

As for asteroids and ship graveyards, not per RAW. You could create a new colony type that has a limitation on size and a special rule about needing to import foodstuffs, I guess?

Kinda, there's an Astroid Mining component which explicitly allows, well, endeavours based on mining astroids. That would deplete them.

But more importantly, there are no rules that I'm aware of that say you can't use/deplete these, so if you just get your colony a few scores of eg. halo barges, that should be entirely possible.

Well, all my players are engineers, so I expect lot of fun while trying to extract those resources. Personally I'd cover the asteroids in great synthetic bags filled with augmented microorganisms and artificial atmosphere and waited till they dissolve it. Then just get the bags, boil them and voilla, you've got yourself a sack of iron.

For Asteroids and Ship Graveyards remember that there are Asteroid Mining ships and Salvage rigs. My players have set up several endeavors centered around system ships equiped with both for mining the asteroids and dragging wrecks to the colony for salvage/recycling. A 1PF endeavor could be set up by the players using the colony leader to run it as a background endeavor. They would just need to provide some initial guidance and the mining ship. The colony leader even gives a 10% increase in odds of a successful endeavor. This would reduce the resource 1d10, as per the SoI rules. This is all RAW.

It kind of seems like a single decent colony is a good investment but managing several at a time is going to rapidly consume all your attention and resources. So get yourself one or two good ones maximum as background investments that can mature while you do other stuff. I think the ideal is the colony that gives you a small never ending flow of mechanized military units and starship repairs but that one is going to take a long time to build up.

Also I suggest house ruling that it takes more than ninety days for colonies to undergo serious changes, it should probably be more like two to five years which might seem like alot but it isn't when warp/realspace time dilation comes into it. With travel times included the typical adventure is going to end up taking about that long in the materium and therefore on your colony anyway. So establish the colony, go on an adventure, bring some more **** in to upgrade it, grab whatever fruits it's produced, sell those then go on another adventure repeat.

......

Also I suggest house ruling that it takes more than ninety days for colonies to undergo serious changes, it should probably be more like two to five years which might seem like alot but it isn't when warp/realspace time dilation comes into it. .....

The person who wrote the actual rules posted a very similar answer in another topic awhile back. I think he/she mentioned the time frame should of been 1 year, with depletion of resources the same. However, due to editing and other issues, it was converted to 90 days. From what I've heard (don't own NP) if it's at the 90 day cycle, and you combine this with the warp travel time from NP, you have some issues traveling to/from your colony and keeping it thriving. I'm sure this depends on where it is located (as in most cases), but once again, don't own NP so I can't test the time theory. Just from SoI though, the travel time is about 1 1/2 months of real time travel, so converting it to one year makes sense (along with the population change, how fast the resources deplete, etc etc.)

The 2 - 5 years Amazing Larry recommended has merit. Discussing the house rules with your players and coming to an agreement is the best advice I can give.

I have been using my house rules since it came out. The 1 year time frame works well. Note that the endeavors to set up your infrastructures can be Background Endeavors, which means you just need to hand your Colony Leader the supplies and set it up before you head off into the expanse. My players are all about colony expansion and at this point have 4 systems with a total of 9 colonies (2 are size 10). They spend about half their time dealing with colony issues/development, a quarter politicing and building contacts, and a quarter exploring. Of course we are almost 50 years (game time) into the campaign.