Very Important Thoughts I Wish to Share With Your Brain Meats

[Vas Pokhoronim]

So, as I mentioned on Facebook, I have (Very Important) Thoughts about ways to tweak the rules.

I shouldn't imagine significant alterations - if anything, they're possibly too complicated as it is - but I do think that at this tech level, there shouldn't be any particularly noticeable "peace dividend" for countries that aren't at war, and no particular provisions for "war exhaustion."

Warfare in Europe was pretty much endemic - peace as the exception, rather than the rule - between the end of Classical Antiquity and the Industrial Revolution. Then there was maybe thirty years of peace before the World Wars started, and even those only ended (or rather shifted into proxy and brushfire wars) under the pressure of nuclear deterrence.

We, as players, have a habit of fighting for a couple of years and dropping out for a decade or so of peace. That's a postmodern thing. In this era, the reality was practically the reverse. Nor was there all that much infrastructure to be threatened, let alone destroyed. Entire cities - including major capitals - could be thoroughly razed by disaster or enemy action as late as the early Nineteenth Century, and they'd bounce back within a decade or so (or less) practically on their own (I mean, sure, there was planning and investment and lucrative contracts and all that, but still). Losing cities and even capitals should be regarded as a dreadful but-by-no-means insurmountable inconvenience, rather than a catastrophic disaster.

Moreover, deficit spending was still the normal mode of functioning for states even in this era (the Roman Empire itself ran its budgets in deficits). Financial instruments in the preindustrial world weren't nearly as sophisticated as what developed later, but loans to sovereign powers have always been available, even before the establishment of treasury bonds and related devices. And although it's obscured by the common practice of framing debt in moral terms, in a strictly economic sense a certain amount of sovereign debt is desirable. One's own debt, after all, is your creditors' income. They don't really want you to repay your debt. They'd be happiest if you just made regular interest payments (literally) forever, without paying a penny's worth of the principal down (and indeed, it is my understanding that this is exactly how central banks are founded). And if, for whatever reason, interest payments eventually exceed revenues, there's this one weird trick (creditors hate it!) to reducing your payments -that's debasing your currency (which is admittedly disruptive, but only disastrous if taken too far).

So before we get too far into builds, I'd like to at least raise the possible suggestion that debt be basically unlimited, and that maybe Eighteenth Century infrastructure shouldn't be the main source of state income. (Which would bring into taxes, corruption, and administrative competence, a whole different subject).

Also, can military units be simplified a bit? Holy crap, there is an unnecessary profusion of choices. We don't need 9 types of naval units and 11 types of ground units, do we? Along with Jehovah-knows-how-many fixed assets and support units, as well?

[Kilani]

At the scale we play at, I feel like ground combat can reasonably be split into the "infantry" "cavalry" and maybe artillery down the line. We're at the operational and strategic level, mostly. We don't much care about the precise tactics used, so I do think reducing the overall profusion of ground units is worthwhile. Maybe with some differences for things like militia. I'm not entirely sure that we need heavy/light cavalry distinctions since some nations entire cavalry force is only equivalent to a single brigade or two, but it's probably worthwhile making the distinction between dragoons and cavalry since they did fight differently.

Similarly it might be worth simplifying fortifications into "fortified" and "unfortified" locations with maybe "fortress" as the penultimate level (instead of tracking 5 little bits of a fort complex) or maybe even roll colonial and harbor protection forts into the modifiers for attacking/defending a city or port, since almost all major cities and ports have at least some measure of harbor protection, if only to scare off pirates and make sure people pay their harbor dues with only super major fortifications that require large amounts of outlay being worth paying for (like the massive fort complexes in San Juan or Cartagena de Indias, for example) or some other modifier to reflect that yes, the government is totally paying for those forts instead of letting them fall apart.

Naval combat you might be able to get away with simplifying a bit, too. You have man-o-war/ship of the line, which are large ships with lots of guns, heavy frigates, frigates, and smaller craft (which could reasonably be abstracted into brigs, sloops, or galleys, depending) without worrying too much about the different ratings and possibly adding modifiers if a given ship is better than the other or something. I mean, I like naming all my ships and that's kinda neat, but simplifying things would probably help.

I do think we need to designate where major ship building operations are and centers of supply, though. Logistics are important at the strategic/operational level we tend to operate at (if not moreso than the caliber of cannon or the type of musket or whatever).

[Vas Pokhoronim]

Oh yeah, I'm not advocating doing away with infrastructure and logistics, just simplifying them. And reflecting that losses aren't necessarily all that difficult to recover quickly. I mean, Moscow was burned to the ground in 1812, but Russia still won against Napoleon. Prussia was entirely overrun by French troops at least once to my certain recollection, but they still won against Napoleon, too.

And for the naval stuff, I mean, we got by with like BatRons and PatRons in the Napoleonic scenario, didn't we? I'm rather dismayed that I now have to figure out how many 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Rate Ships-of-the-Line I need, and in what ratio, before I even to two-and-a-half ratings for frigates and then into patrol squadrons and transports and miscellaneous. I don't need that level of detail. That's just going to mess me up, because I'll choose wrong.

And yeah, the ground units are honestly not quite as needlessly complex, but they seem like they could stand some simplification, too - especially, as you observe, the fortifications.

And I'm not sure that in the preindustrial era that they should cost much more to raise than their maintenance. (And I'm fine with reducing revenues in general accordingly if expenses are reduced.)

[Kilani]

To a certain extent, I enjoy playing around with all the military doohickeys because I'm into the Age of Sail ships, but yet, I do tend to agree. Simplification overall streamlines play experience and makes things easier on players and referees and avoids choice paralysis, so I'd definitely be on board with getting it streamlined.

I'd be willing to help work on any revisions to rules, etc, that might need to happen, to. I've got some free time and an idea of how things might work out.

Also depends if we want to track individual ships or not (which might be worthwhile, might not).

[Vas Pokhoronim]

One would hope that it shouldn't be too difficult to persuade our overworked referee to consider making his own life simpler.

I mean, I ran one of these, once, and it got pretty overwhelming when literally every player was immediately at war somewhere at the same time. And that's will - and realistically should - happen.

Jon'll lose his life to rolling dice without some streamlining.

[Rodenka]

TBH I wouldn't mind a bit of simplification.

[Galveston Bay]

I suggested individual major ships to make you guys name them. You have no idea how big a pain in the ass it is to come up with ship names for a naval battle (which adds color)

However, if you said BatRon 1 (ships Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta) it would make the referees life easier

Heavy cavalry is a nod to the huge amounts spent on colorful expensive troops that the Nobles still think are important. Although it is a hell of a reserve when used properly (it will crush a broken infantry unit and drive off a light cavalry brigade). You do need a lot of cavalry though, its how you figure out where the enemy is and keep him from finding out where you are.

Big heavy units like siege trains and bridging engineers should be rare, limited to the 1st rate armies, and man when used properly can decide an entire campaign.

A fortress is expensive because it is really expensive to have a massive fortified location that also acts as a magazine (supply source) and a garrison point for training troops.

However, it might be to our advantage (for simplicity) to simply assume that all European cities are fortified. A special rule to allow the Spanish to have fortified cities in the New World (the French only had one, the English and Dutch had none, even Wall Street was named after a pretty simple fortification to protect from Indian attack, not European bombardment)

Basically European cities are fortified for free, only Spanish ports in the New World and Quebec are fortified, no other New World Cities are. Extend that to the Asian and North African cities as well (because boy were they)

by the way, regarding ships of the line in the early 18th Century.. Just because your historical ship says it has 100 guns does not mean that it has 100 useful guns. Up to 30% of the guns on the ships in the Great Northern War were 4 pounders or less, which cannot penetrate your average hull (even a merchant one), and an 8 pounder (most of the rest) has a hard time against the hull of a frigate (wood is hard). Really a lot of those "Ships of the LIne" are glorified frigates

On the plus side I didn't get into the real trivia of Dutch ships of the line having issues with carrying lots of heavy guns because they were shallow draft to get over the shallows on the Dutch coast (it actually really did matter)

About mid century guns become steadily easier to make (cusp of industrialization) and thus cheaper, while administrative machinery (especially organization) got better and professionals and politicians reduced corruption to a more sane level (to keep the armies from looting the peasants and the sailors from deciding that piracy beat the hell out of starving on a warship)

Which is why last game units got cheaper later in the game as population and resources expanded.

The poor administration issues are one of the reasons why colonies are more valuable (compared to population) than the homelands are and why taxes don't add up to as major a cash cow as say owning all the sugar being exported from the Lesser Antilles or Cuba (the Crown gets a bigger cut you see)

As to the issue of peace breaking out... a lot of that had to do with referee fatigue!

[TLS]

I'm open to both points, but they worked well enough last time--indeed, I was using the simpler early 1700s Naval rules and GB convinced me to switch to the more complicated 1720 rules, if only because they're more accurate and took the naming duties away from me. I can dial it back again if you all promise to name all your ships individually, and am not opposed to the whole "all European cities are forts" rule. But we still need forts to represent colonial stockades and such, no?

[Galveston Bay]

as to the forts... that was to allow the simulation of little campaigns (in terms of size) that had major consequences.. like Washington and his merry band at Fort Defiance which started the 7 Years War. IN game terms, he had a fort, the French had a expeditionary battalion while Braddock and his disaster were 2 expenditionary battalions being ambushed by a French expeditionary battalion and a Native American Light Infantry Brigade.

Fort William Henry (last of the Mohicans fame) is basically 1 British fort, a militia brigade vs a French Light Infantry Brigade and a Native American Light Infantry brigade with a good siege roll by the French.

hence the reason for small units and big units

[TLS]

Four other points:

1) as to "war exhaustion" and the claim of perpetual war, that's true to an extent, but at the same time by halfway thru many of these 10 year slogs you had peasant uprisings breaking out all the time. The Nine Years' War saw peasant uprisings, saw, and the Fronde during the Franco-Spanish war nearly ended up with the death of Louis XIV (which we already have, yknow, but you get the idea). So yes, there was a lot of low-scale fighting at many points, but at the same time France wasn't constantly at war on the European continent, say. The perpetual war was more "there was usually, at some time, a war going on in Europe" than "Everyone was constantly at war with everyone". I think the war exhaustion mechanic is useful for simulating the trade-offs between stepping up rapacious taxation during war and the risk to the stability of the realm.

2) The concept of modern sovereign debt was also not very developed at this point in history, however. The first central banks weren't created until right around this time, and financial markets were pretty garbage to begin with. Having an overwhelming about of capital about would be unrealistic, and frankly it would be a bitch and a half to model. The standard practice prior to the early 1700s was just to default on your loans, and your creditors in Italy or whatever would just grumble and promise not to lend back to you--hence why the economies of so many European countries went thru such crazy swings during war time, they had no reliable sources of credit (by the late 1600s lenders were basically sick of ever lending to sovereigns) and these institutions had to be codified.

3) I understand your point about not investing in infrastructure, but unless I'm mistaken the only real way to invest in infrastructure at this point is to build military facilities or colonial ventures. You're absolutely right in that income (which was quite small!) for the state was derived more from taxes, but the point of the "resources" on the map is that they simulate the government having a sufficient monopoly on the trade/transit/sale of those goods that it can extract revenue. The French, notoriously, had like 16 customs zones in the immediate pre-Revolutionary period--taxes were almost entirely extracted from commerce and tariffs, hence the importance of ports.

4) To address a lot of the economic issues we had last game (basically people pumping out giant armies and navies and spamming colonies) I raised the purchasing price of a lot of units, made depots and naval facilities even more expensive, etc. Which doesn't address any of Vas' comments per se, but that was one of my guideposts when redoing the rules.

[Galveston Bay]

Another suggestion, and one I pondered all last game

to encourage lots of sieges (this is the age of Vaubon), probably should raise the cost of a fortress to 5 points, but its maintenance probably should be dropped to .5 points The troops are basically a garrison brigade with artillery

they can be replaced by militia in wartime, and those peacetime regulars become infantry after a season of training and equipping (they need horses and wagons after all)
this will create a lot of fortresses and create lots of slow moving sieges, which are MUCH easier to referee than a battle

This better reflects the fact that battles were rare until the Napoleonic Wars, indeed one a year is pretty unusual, and sieges were pretty common (usually one or two a year).

This also makes it easier (indeed possible) to create the line of fortifications that France had until 1815, as well as why the Dutch are not easy to conquer either

just restrict fortresses to the Old World (north of the Sahara) as they require a lot of skilled labor to build (not available in the New World or technically possible south of the Sahara), and we will get our long wars with less referee fatigue

as a fortress is 2,500 troops, just 10 of them basically takes care of most of the French Peacetime Army at this point in history

[Middle Snu]

I - personally - would be in favor of MASSIVE simplification along the lines of Kilani's suggestion. I am 100% okay with some Mod fiat / judgment calls if we want to add a bit more flavor or complexity.

[Kilani]

Mostly spitballing, in any case.

If it would help, I could write a brief primer on naval stuff. The TL;DR is basically going to be that BB3/third rates are really the best bang for buck, heavy ship-wise, since BB1 and BB2 are too logistically straining and unwieldy while maneuvering to be super worthwhile.

BB4s aren't quite fast enough, either and too under-gunned to fight stuff bigger than them, but BB1, 2, and 4 all remained common in the early part of the 18th century until people figured this stuff out.

Frigates sort of depends; both the FF5 and FF6 have their uses.

[TLS]

For comparison, these were the 1700 rules that I was originally going to use (the civilian ships basically stayed the same)

Heavy BatRon - consist of 1 - 1st rate and 2 - 2nd rate ships and between them these 3 ships carry more and heavier artillery than most field armies. Construction time is very lengthy, at 10 years, but these ships can last centuries if properly maintained. Cost 15, maintenance 1.5, Naval combat rating 7, range 5, speed 1

BatRon – consist of 2 - 3rd rate and 2- 4th rate ships. Construction is lengthy, at 6 years, but these ships can last decades if properly maintained. Cost 9, maintenance .75, Naval combat rating 5, range 6, speed 2

CruRon- consist of 1 - 5th rate and 3 - 6th rate frigates. Construction is lengthy, at 4 years, but these ships too can last decades, and heavy 5th rate frigates can last centuries as well. Fast, and heavily armed, but lack the durability of the heavier ships of the line. Cost 4.5, maintenance .=5, naval combat rating 3, range 8, speed 3

PatRon- consist of 12 Sloops and Brigs. Construction is relatively fast, at 2 years, and these ships can be readily converted from merchant ships during wartime as well. They are also ideal pirate vessels, as they are manueverable, and can operate in shallow water as well. These ships are not particularly durable, a couple of decades is the usual working life. Cost 2, maintenance .25, naval combat rating 1, range 8, speed 3

[TLS]

My goal is to have any rule changes up tomorrow night, so if anyone has any more suggestions, now's the time.

[Kilani]

I'm personally in favor of moving away from a zillion warship classifications but keeping individual ships so we can handle the naming process (except for PatRons of course), just with them split into a few broad(er) categories.

I understand the need/want to be able to represent smaller colonial actions as well, so I'm not quite sure how to handle that; might be able to leave most of the ground units as is, with just some tweaking to fortifications (which seems like it'd be fine, unless someone else objects).

If I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

[TLS]

Well you'd still have to name the constituent ships in the various Rons.

Also, I want to just point out that the people who played naval powers in Gunpowder last time around got used to handling a whole 8 types of combat battleships. I'm not sure how much more simplified I could make it if we're just going to use individual ship types--maybe cut the 4th rate Battleships, 6th rate frigates, and razees frigates?

[Galveston Bay]

It really shouldn't be a problem

besides, some of the ships (razees, heavy transports) are later tech than 1700 and came about because of all of those relatively useless 4th Rate Ships of the Line

definitely keep the 6th rate, its the standard frigate for most of the age of sail

for simplicity for now, stick with the squadrons... just everyone do the referee the favor of naming their ships

there are sources out there for that

[Vas Pokhoronim]

Look, I know I'm stirring the pot, I'm pot-stirring. But this isn't just a war game - it's a collaborative open-ended alternate history writing project. And in that context, something like (to reuse an example that I posted on Facebook) the revised status of Shakespeare's plays in English letter under a radical Puritan republic is an objectively more interesting subject than figuring out whether it's the Naseby, the Robin Hood, or the Ezekiel 25:17 that gets sunk at Fifteenth Battle of Slapton Sands.

I mean, I've modded wars, and I know how dull it is to just write, repeatedly, "Each side has two corps shattered, Graustark retires in good order and the Ruritanians successfully hold Zenda."

But I also know how frustrating it can be to spend the bulk of my efforts as a player just managing my economy and military, writing out builds and ORBATs. The rules ought to be there to facilitate the diplomacy (including armed conflicts) and provide a framework for what kind of internal developments are and not possible. When they start getting too complex, it gives advantages to players who are less interested in the roleplaying than they are in number-crunching.

As for debt, the relationship between credit and capital isn't necessarily always well-correlated. Bankers figured out how to overleverage themselves over two thousand years ago, for one thing ("We may not have the cash, as such, right now, but because we assuming our debtors will be making payments, that cash will be arriving in future, so we may as well lend it out right now as if we actually have it" - bankers were traditionally overleveraged, in Antiquity and the Medieval era, by a ratio of like 20:1 in terms of loans outstanding to cash reserves). Moreover, any time the government pays soldiers or contractors with IOUs (and that happened a lot), that's effectively a debt which the government is incurring, but without any even notional transfer of capital at all. And governments can get away with that for a long time - you can keep unpaid troops in the field for months or even years under the right conditions - so long as their de facto creditors have any confidence that they will be paid eventually.

And the most historically significant tax rebellions, i.e., the English Civil War and the American and French Revolutions, happened well after the end of their respective states' foreign adventures, when those governments were raising taxes specifically to pay off their debts.

But ultimately, I guess my point is just that I'm a simple working man, and I don't think I can do 15 years worth of builds and writing out endless Orders of Battle, especially just when I already know I'm only doing it to see all my effort inevitably destroyed in contact with the enemy.

[Vas Pokhoronim]

I guess ultimately I'm looking at these rules and having an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu where I see myself putting an inordinate amount of time and effort into number-crunching and naming and positioning military assets that only exist to be destroyed anyway, and finally watching my entire regime get erased from the world and consigned to the dustbin of history by better micromanagers because I've been concentrating my attentions on constitutional and cultural matters which my rivals have been ignoring.

I'd say that I feel that this gotten has gotten too far away from its roots, but it'd be more accurate to say, instead, that it's just gotten too far away from what made me love it to begin with. The wargaming aspect was always the least interesting and most frustrating part of it for me - it was the plausible divergences and the potential to see a genuinely different world emerge from our actions that captured my attention and fired my imagination.

Thinking about it that way, I can't see myself naming 108 warships just to see them get sunk. I can't see myself puzzling out the constitutionally ambiguous status of England's aristocracy and the complicated jurisprudence of slavery on English just to watch it all get erased by a Restoration because I forgot to properly fortify some tiny islet off the coast of Cornwall. I mean, I have a life, after all.

So, I guess, never mind. I don't think I can commit to this, as interesting as the scenario sounded.

[Rodenka]

I think Vas has a rather valid point here. We tend to be extremely focused on the wargaming part of this to the point that sometimes plausible roleplaying kinda goes out the window (see, our entrenched alliance system of the last couple games). ANd I share the frustration he does--I've had to pick up a country a few times and then see a huge amount of the work I've put it into just get erased because I'm just not as good at the wargaming or micro-managing part of the game. I'm willing to stick to it but I'd hope maybe we can see our way to figuring out a way to keep Vas involved, since I do love his roleplaying posts.

[Kilani]

Vas, I'd urge you to stay 'in' for a little longer and give some more feedback on where you'd like the rules/game to go. Ultimately, it is your choice and if you don't think it'll be fun, do what's good for you. I have... more thoughts that echo a lot of my earlier stuff about simplifying the war rules down some more, but that'll have to wait for a bit.

I do echo Vas' sentiment, though. IT's not just about war, it's also about the culture and political developments that will come out of different countries. Wittlesbach Spain, for example, may be very different from the OTL Bourbon Spain.

I'll have more rules specific stuff later.

[Vas Pokhoronim]

I'd named this thread facetiously, but these thoughts are turning to actually kinda be important, after all.

I mean, I'd thought at first that the rules really could just be tweaked a little, compressed, and streamlined for the benefit of both players and moderators, with the overall objective of making war more casual - easier to wage, and easier to recover from a loss, which I felt was period-appropriate and a bit more user-friendly than the time-consuming, existential terror that it so often becomes (which is, admittedly, appropriate to the industrial era).

But the longer this conversation went on, and the more I thought about all the past experiences that had frustrated me, the more I've become convinced that this is a more profound disagreement than I'd anticipated, over the purpose of the game itself.

The naming of ships is a trivial matter, for instance, but it gets at the very heart of what we're doing here. Warships are essentially disposable. I don't need to know their names - I need to know whether or not I've stopped the French from effecting a landing at Dover, and if I have, whether their transports made it back to port or whether they've joined Pharaoh at the bottom of the sea. I wouldn't need or want any more information than that in the game I would actually enjoy playing. But I'm not sure that this game is that. It's evolved into something a lot more tactical and detail-oriented where military action and economic policy is concerned.

And I'm not sure that my wants are reconciliable with those of the Mods or other players.

[Kilani]

No, I think you have a point and I think it's something worth considering. I know Rod/Emmy has similar thoughts and it's something that's occurred to me as well, after several years away from the game and playing other games, even other wargames. The best and most enjoyable games I've found are those that are relatively simple in terms of mechancis and those that avoid too many modifiers and pages of tables (most recently i'm thinking about a game I've been meaning to play that reflects operational level combat in WW2; still surprisingly simple and uncomplicated and manages to do it fairly well).

We are, after all, trying to do a political/cultural shift and war is essentially an extension of politics. And while I think it is important to be able to track how things "work", so to speak, I also remember that when we started out on NS, it was basically all a gentleman's agreement to not be unreasonable and an umpire to track how our dudes fought and gradually we added on things to try and simulate the inner workings of industrial-era economies.

I mean, I enjoy naming ships, but that's me (and maybe some others) and to a certain extent I also enjoy some of the other micro because I'm also into military history and organizing ORBATs can be entertaining for me. But I definitely feel you and agree that we might want to make the game more streamlined, both for the sake of our sanity (I know that most of us aren't in college or high school anymore and some of us were working stiffs when we first kicked this off to begin with) and because it might make the game a bit easier for everyone.

So taking a step or two back toward that somewhat more free-wheeling NS experience that we started out with might be better. It sort of depends on what everyone else thinks, though.

ETA: I think some system is still necessary, just so we're not constantly bombarding the mod(s) with questions about "CAN I HAVE X WHY CAN'T I DO THIS" but there's got to be a happy medium we can find that's not SPREADSHEET SIMULATOR 3000 on one end or "MY MEXICAN COMMANDOS INVADE JAPAN" on the other (sorry, Childeric).

[Rodenka]

I'd post more but I think Kilani has summed up my thoughts pretty well.

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