Re: Very Important Thoughts I Wish to Share With Your Brain Meats

[Middle Snu]

If I could make a modest suggestion:

Vas, would you consider just staying as a roleplaying, historical divergence, and general 'History Cop' mod? (If TLS is amenable, that is).

I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we really value your in-depth historical knowledge and strong point of view. And Mod-ing is a big workload, so TLS could share the load. It would let you stay involved and do what you enjoy.

I personally also don't enjoy the wargaming minutia, but I know others (*cough cough* GB) do. So I'm fine to put up with some complexity in wargaming if it gives me a cool story.

[Haneastic]

I know a lot of people have thoughts on this, so I'll try to be brief. While I definitely love waging war and all that entails, I do agree that the system can become burdensome, and it's prone to exploitation.

My humble suggestion would be to simply use Infantry and Cavalry as military units, and Ship of the Line and Frigate as naval units. Since we're not really using hex systems like WiF, we can simply use multiples of a thousand. Eg. "Charles XII marches south with 12,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry." I think that way it keeps units as simple as possible, and it's not prone to unit bloat or micromanaging.

EDIT- After talking with Kilani I have a few other simplification suggestions:
-Simply use fortresses, with all Urban fighting having a defender bonus (some people already suggested this)
-Do away with forts and simply allow a player to designate troops as guarding a string of forts. Since forts are mostly earth and timber it's easy to simply allow them to dig in well
-Eliminate Naval Stations and anchorages. Most repairs are wood/nail/sail based. Simply allow any coastal town or port do repairs, with the Naval Yard for construction

[Vas Pokhoronim]

Thanks. It's good to know that I'm not entirely out of line with my concerns.

[Kilani]

I'm generally in favor of flexibility over rigid stuff and it's something that's also popped up in RPGs, funnily enough. You go for more of a narrative give and take (see the Apocalypse World system or FATE).

ETA:

And, like Han, I do enjoy the wargaming bits. It's fun to strategize and plan things out. But I also know that it can get sorta burdensome at times, for both players and referees Like, how many times did we grind to a halt waiting for results? Which isn't that fun for people who aren't involved in the ongoing war. So anything that makes life easier for everyone involved is A+ by me.

[Lefty]

Throwing crazy ideas out there because, why not, but what about having multiple players per country, especially ones with parliaments and such. One player could do the micromanaging, the other could do the grand strategy or flavor or whatnot.

[TLS]

Alright, a lot has been thrown at me today while I've been in class, so I'm going to try to synthesize my response to all of these points.

I am not at all opposed to streamlining the systems, but I want to emphasize right here, and right now, that after years of talking about maybe restarting, I was the only person to actually go out there and do it. Furthermore, I understand that we come from disparate backgrounds and feelings on war-gaming as a genre, but I hold up the past fifteen years of experience in favor of there being a concrete structure underwriting the game--every time we've come up with "narrative-focused" or "RP-focused" systems, with poorly-thought out and balanced mechanics (Rome, Space, and that like post-apocalyptic one most notably) the cohesiveness fell apart and we couldn't keep going. Without a strong structure, powerful moderator (as in who has the sole discretion to decide the outcome of events), and underlying mechanics, we are unable to keep going.

What brought me, and I think most of us, to e20 among other things was the fact it had real structure. We had units, we had economies, it made sense. Yes, our narratives were often ruined, because we couldn't plan out the arcs of our wars in minute detail. Things fucked up. We lost battles we needed to win, our bizzarro dystopian regimes collapsed because of mis-allocation, people we needed to live died, etc. It wasn't because of mod fiat, it wasn't because the other person wanted to win more, it was because the rules shook out that way. The NS community was fundamentally broken because the person who won wars was the person who cared more, because it was untethered from reality.

Vas, I wrote this scenario in large part with you in mind, so I am certainly willing to do a lot of reforms to the rules system. But what I am not willing to do is have our game be fundamentally altered solely at the behest of someone who, if I am being honest, has left us in the lurch at key moments because things didn't go his way. In the first iteration your abandonment of the USSR almost sunk us, and in the last Gunpowder your abandonment of China did sink us. I understand why you did it, and I hear what you're saying--and maybe it's best if you leave before starting rather than leaving us in the lurch. I'd rather streamline things and keep you than adhere to this structure and lose you. But it sounds to me that you're unwilling to find any sort of compromise.

I am certainly willing to streamline things. I can reduce some of the types of units. I can further simplify income--get rid of the slave trade mechanic and make it just another resource, streamline colonialism, reduce the specific types of units, remove forts from the non-colonial space, narrow down the ships, etc. But what I won't do is make it fundamentally untethered from any underlying structure. Your recommendations on basically "just make the economy non-existent except for during war, when I can borrow as much money as I need to keep the war going" untethers us from the necessary commonalities to keep the system going.

My reticence is ultimately predicated on the fact that what we have works. These games go on for months, sometimes over a year, and it's in large part because there are common touchstones we can all point to and understand. When battles don't go our way, we know why--when one country is richer than another, we see the root causes. I am willing to simplify, absolutely. This is at the end of the day a game, and I hate math as much as you do and I don't have any more of a desire to put things into spreadsheets. I am more than willing to meet more than halfway with those of you who are overwhelmed with the scale of the rules, because if there are no players there is no game.

[TLS]

Proposed New Rules

Ground Units

Mobile Units

Expeditionary Infantry battalion- 1,000 men, combat 1, move 3, cost 1, maintenance .1
(expeditionary battalions can now do battle with brigades and not be automatically eliminated)

Expeditionary Cavalry regiment – 1,000 men, combat 1, move 4, cost 2, maintenance .25

Infantry brigade- consists of 4 battalions armed with flintlock muskets, plus 4 batteries of field artillery (so roughly 16-24 cannons).  Combat 4, Movement 1, Cost 4 maintenance .5

Light Infantry brigade- as above, but lighter artillery  Cost 2, maintenance .25, combat 2, movement 2, can operate in wilderness areas without attrition penalty

Militia Brigade- as light infantry, but generally performs poorly if forced to fight in line of battle.  Adequate for occupying ground, patrolling and fighting Native Militia and Light Infantry.  Can operate in wilderness areas without attrition penalty.  Cost 1, maintenance .10, combat 1, movement 2.  Militia brigades cannot leave their home region or homeland at any time.  

Dragoon brigade- REMOVED

Heavy Cavalry brigade- REMOVED, now only cavalry

Cavalry brigade- Horses kill people
cost 4, maintenance 1, combat 3, movement 3

Skirmisher Cavalry brigade- REMOVED

Siege Train – REMOVED

Pontoon train- REMOVED

Variants
Native light infantry and cavalry are free to raise, but cannot remain mobilized for more than one season each year.  They suffers penalties if forced to fight against Infantry, Light Infantry and any cavalry or dragoon unit in a pitched battle.  

Colonial units- REMOVED (Just specify if a unit consists of locals or imported soldiers)

Guards units- REMOVED

Fortifications
Garrison brigade- REMOVED

Fort- REMOVED (designate infantry unit to fort duty)

Fortified Cities- REMOVED -- all OLD WORLD cities are fortified.

Fortress- in addition to being more powerful forts, these bastions also act as supply bases for armies, mobilization centers and depots.  Treated as an infantry brigade for cost and maintenance cost, but cannot move, and if captured are permanently eliminated and have to be rebuilt.  Also acts as a supply source for field armies that can trace a supply line by road or waterway to them.  cost 4, maintenance .5, acts as a depot, can be built alongside or inside a fortified city (making it really strongly fortified)

Building times:
Infantry, Cavalry require 2 seasons to build and train (treat as militia until then)
Fortresses require 2 years to build and equip
Militia can be used the same season they are raised and equipped

Logistical Units
Depots - cost 2 point to build, free to maintain.  These never move, and represent  the recruiting grounds, barracks and and training grounds for several regiments of troops so can train up to 1 brigade at a time.   They can also send replacement drafts to armies in the field, and thus build replacement brigades.

Replacement brigades- REMOVED You have to raise new units if your unit has been completely destroyed.

Base- this is the administrative center of a field army and where supplies are gathered to be sent to the army, as well as were communications from home are received and transmitted further on to the field commander.   A base must be a city or fortress within reasonable distance (as defined by common sense and the referee) but typically is within 300 miles of the army it is supporting.  You will want to leave a garrison behind to guard your base.  It costs 2 point to establish a base unless it is a fortress (those have already been paid for and are designed for this purpose)

Naval Units

Combat Ships:

Naming Not Required: If you guys think it's too much of a hassle to have to name all your ships, I don't care. Don't do it. Do it if you want to.

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

Commerce Vessels

Flota- REMOVED

Commercial flotilla – RENAMED -- NOW ONLY ONE TYPE OF COMMERCIAL SHIPPING 50 ships the size of frigates, sloops and brigs.  All merchant ships of this era are armed and their crews trained to fight but not as effectively as naval crews and morale is generally far weaker than trained naval personnel as well.  Build time is 2 years, cost is 3, maintenance is free but it costs .25 points to use a merchant flotilla as a transport which takes them out of merchant service for that game year.  A merchant flotilla can carry 2 light infantry or 1 other type of brigade.  Combat rating 1 (defense only), range 5, speed 1.

Converting commercial shipping into warships is not advisable. The referee will give you specifics on that should you desire, but it is not advisable as any conversion is subject to a +1 to hit by purpose built warships, and is not as fast or maneuverable usually as a purpose built warship of the same size. They are built for endurance and cargo space, not durability and handling.  They also can carry only light guns, as their gun decks are not built up enough to handle heavier ordinance.  

Fishing / Coastal flotillas- REMOVED

Nations cannot have more than 2 Commercial Flotillas per port. Entrepots can support up to 10 additional commercial flotillas

Naval Facilities

cannot be moved once constructed, and can be destroyed by combat action.  

Naval anchorages-  REMOVED

Naval Stations- REMOVED - ANY PORT CAN REPAIR ANY SHIP, CAN BUILD PATRONS ONLY

Naval Yards – large facilities that can build any size ship or repair any size ship.  They have a work force of 10,000 military and civilian employees, and also serve as centers of administration.  Naval yards must be built in a port. It takes 10 years to build a naval yard, which must first start as a naval station (so 12 years total).  Cost is 25 points.  maintenance .5

Naval Factories – very large facilities that can build any size ship or repair any size ship in half the time of a naval yard.  These huge facilities must be built in a port, and require 50 years to build.  It takes 150 points to build a Naval Factory. As of game start, the only cities with the naval acumen to build them are London and Rotterdam.   These facilities employ 50,000 civilian and military workers.  Maintenance 3

Economic Rules

Income
Slaving income is no longer contingent upon establishing loops. It's just a single resource. I will re-allocate.

Financial centers-- Any country can take out up to 5 points in loans per year, up to 20 points total. A country with a financial center in it can take 10 points per year, up to 40. Interest rates will be decided by credit. The FC generates 1 point per year regardless, to signify taxation on private loans.

Wartime taxation will no longer come with a set % chance of uprisings, mod will take into account non-quantifiable factors when deciding when the population has had too much.

Commerce is now only one type of unit, worth .25

Supply Rules

I will massively simplify--I'll address how to do so in detail, but the TL;DR is that you only need to worry about the season and staying in supply for ground units, and not putting ships at sea for too long plus general ship deterioration rules. Will probably remove the sacking rules.

Special Rules

Not worth the hassle in removing them now that they've been allocated, and I want to keep transparency as to why if Spain and the Savoyards are both trying to convince an NPC to fight one another, why the NPC picks one over the other even if given essentially the same rule.

[TLS]

I feel like so many of the other, more complicated rules really only apply to me--discerning what % of ships are actually destroyed in battle, how many are captured, how many men die, what it means in terms of combat when shattered, etc. I'm willing to shoulder the complicated burdens. I am willing to entertain other rule changes, but I don't see any other place that on its face massively needs oversimpliciation from y'alls front end.

[Vas Pokhoronim]

I get where you're coming from, too, and you make very valid points, as well. And I know I'm no innocent.

I'm not unwilling to compromise - hell, I always enjoyed naming ships, myself (and Ezekiel 25:17 is an awesome name for a battleship if I do say so myself), and I've crafted some pretty good ORBATs in my day.

But damn if I haven't always found warfare tedious, even when I was winning (which didn't happen as often as my reputation might suggest - most of my empires were built out of diplomacy, espionage, and bribery), and it's . . . heartbreaking isn't the word, but certainly aggravating to watch all that hard work go up in flames.

And maybe I am just too much of a snowflake to cope with that kind of triggering. But let's take a look at the rules and in the meantime I'll do some soul-searching to see if I can actually keep a promise not to betray you guys.

[Kilani]

Thanks, TLS, I appreciate the openness to feed-back; additionally, if you want help with some of the modding stuff, I could probably chip in on assisting with calculating losses, etc. I'm actually entertained by that sort of thing, too. Or if you jsut want someone to bounce ideas off of/be a beta reader.

Overall I like these changes; removing the three different merchant flotilla/sea income types is good, so is cutting down on some of the other stuff. If we find we really need more granularity, I think we can always add it.

I think there needs to be a soft or hard cap on total number of depots (maybe population based) just to prevent super ridiculous things like covering your country in 70 depots and pumping out troops.

ETA: Although that might be more a of a gentleman's agreement/mod thing.

Again, thanks.

[TLS]

It is better if we get it out of the way now. I honestly just want to be able to have armies of God's Own go on crazy adventures. But I also understand not wanting wars to reach a point where a year takes a month because they're so convoluted, which is why I picked 1700 and not 1930. And Commonwealth England isn't The Entire Continent of Asia Under Chinese Sovereignty.

[Kilani]

WANSUI! SHA SHA SHA SHA SHA SHA!

[Rodenka]

I really want to see the showdown between the Ezekiel 25:17 and the Royal Soveriegn in the Irish Sea.

[Galveston Bay]

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.

Regarding ships, you probably have the easiest job of any of us in naming them.... multiple players who played the British in Gunpowder Empire I, Divided America, and for that matter other games prior to that named their ships, and those threads are still available in the forums

For that matter every single British ship ever built seems to have a listing in Wikipedia somewhere.

Considering the time sink the Referee has to face, asking for some research from the players doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Which is why previously in other games I asked for that.

[Galveston Bay]

If I could make a modest suggestion:

Vas, would you consider just staying as a roleplaying, historical divergence, and general 'History Cop' mod? (If TLS is amenable, that is).

I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we really value your in-depth historical knowledge and strong point of view. And Mod-ing is a big workload, so TLS could share the load. It would let you stay involved and do what you enjoy.

I personally also don't enjoy the wargaming minutia, but I know others (*cough cough* GB) do. So I'm fine to put up with some complexity in wargaming if it gives me a cool story.

To be fair, going back to when all this started, the players (including nearly all present here) wanted to know how I was coming up with results and got snippy (indeed aggressively so) at times. Hence the detailed rules.

I too like the various writing aspects beyond the simple wargaming. But sometimes how the French invade Britain matters in the details

[Rodenka]

Admittedly, most of us were barely in college back then. Perspectives may have shifted.

[Kilani]

Yeah, we seriously needed to chill a bit about some of this back in the day...

[Galveston Bay]

Just to clarify, I am not trying to be grumpy here. It is after all in the end Jon's game and I gave him carte blanche to use any rules from any game we have played before.

After all, we played them and nearly all of us know the rules, and for the most part, the only person who has to know the rules thoroughly is the referee. The rest of us only need them to figure out how the mechanics work if we want to do things other than write up story.

If this was a computer game, most of this would be handled for you, but we don't have that.

On the other hand Civ or Conquestidor or what have doesn't support the freewilling actions we are able to do in these games, or allow the referee the options of throwing out bits of divergences and other things to add color or challenges.

So the entire thing is a compromise really.

[TLS]

I don't see any place else I can make cuts at this point, though tying depots to population (1 per 500,000?) seems reasonable to me--I had the scaling cost structure to heavily disincentivize that, but cut that in the name of simplicity. This isn't me saying that I can't make any more cuts, I just can't see where they're needed--this is admittedly informed by my love of wargaming, and the fact I would be happy as a clam if this included 10x as many units. But I'm selling a product, so you, the market, tell me what you want. Do you want laser bears? I can give you laser bears. Alien invasion? Fuck it, we'll do it live. Just love me.

My arguments against just having it be in 1,000 man increments (as has been proposed) is that there are scaling benefits to having brigades vs battalions, in that a brigade has a more cohesive structure and includes more ancillary things (artillery, basically) whereas a battalion has less. I also included militia and light infantry because of geography, but could be persuaded to simplify that further if that's a real ol' dealbreaker.

If these rules are acceptable to the brain trust, I will have to take another look at resource allocation to represent the fact that a lot of what y'all were spending your cash on doesn't exist anymore. But it might also free you guys up to have militaries more in line with what you were expecting/fits the time period. So who knows.

Also I think it's worth emphasizing that I can just do rolls for various NPC interactions, too. If you want to try bribing people, say, or sending spies, or whatever, I can do that in a more traditional GM-y way. I have no issue, and can just my D&D rules or whatever to inform that. That's a big reason why I included the dice rolls for characters in the rules, because I like being able to create a fleshed-out world of people as much as the next person.

[Vas Pokhoronim]

I don't see any place else I can make cuts at this point, though tying depots to population (1 per 500,000?) seems reasonable to me--I had the scaling cost structure to heavily disincentivize that, but cut that in the name of simplicity. This isn't me saying that I can't make any more cuts, I just can't see where they're needed--this is admittedly informed by my love of wargaming, and the fact I would be happy as a clam if this included 10x as many units. But I'm selling a product, so you, the market, tell me what you want. Do you want laser bears? I can give you laser bears. Alien invasion? Fuck it, we'll do it live. Just love me.

My arguments against just having it be in 1,000 man increments (as has been proposed) is that there are scaling benefits to having brigades vs battalions, in that a brigade has a more cohesive structure and includes more ancillary things (artillery, basically) whereas a battalion has less. I also included militia and light infantry because of geography, but could be persuaded to simplify that further if that's a real ol' dealbreaker.

If these rules are acceptable to the brain trust, I will have to take another look at resource allocation to represent the fact that a lot of what y'all were spending your cash on doesn't exist anymore. But it might also free you guys up to have militaries more in line with what you were expecting/fits the time period. So who knows.

Also I think it's worth emphasizing that I can just do rolls for various NPC interactions, too. If you want to try bribing people, say, or sending spies, or whatever, I can do that in a more traditional GM-y way. I have no issue, and can just my D&D rules or whatever to inform that. That's a big reason why I included the dice rolls for characters in the rules, because I like being able to create a fleshed-out world of people as much as the next person.

Thank you, Jon, for all your hard work and good will.

[Galveston Bay]

I suggest postponing the start until Sunday October 8 (deadline for orders) to allow for tinkering and discussion and then adjusting builds accordingly

[TLS]

GB suggested special national rules, and I think they're valuable but I also want to test the wars. In essence, each country/culture group would get a special unit type--i.e., the French (because of Vauban) and the Ottomans (because they've spent the last 300 years blowing up the great cities of Christendom) would get a siege unit (which I took out of the overall rules because of simpliciy), the Cossacks/Tribes/Crimeans would get skirmish cavalry, the British always have a Great Captain Admiral (or get a proficiency in naval combat), the Dutch would probably get a bonus to finance, etc.

Thoughts? I like the unique national aspects, but then it could be viewed as unfair. The converse is to have more units available (bring back at least some type of engineer brigade, militia cavalry, etc) but then we're back at having 12 types of ground units.

[Childeric]

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).

My memory is poor, but did I actually try to invade japan as mexico?

[Ottoman]

Maybe I did...I was nuts back then

[Ottoman]

Joking aside, we should have the ability for mothball our fleets, in peacetime the major powers didn't have their fleets at full strength all the time.

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