New NESes, ideas, development, etc

This would be some more ideas about how stats would be handled in my possible future NES:

Nation/Player
Capital: self-explanatory. Losing it can cause problems.
Population: would start with 100,000 people (between the capital and surrounding places), growth would come from immigrants and natural growth.
Stability: the higher it is, the best. It can be increased through certain methods.
Culture: it measures how cult your people are. It can be increased with stories and other ways.
Economic Points: you can bank these. How many EPs per turn you get depends of your population, trade, projects and others. (Note: initially you would be getting EP=0.5% Population) Have yet to determine if the army and navy should have upkeep costs.
Research Points: cannot be banked. It depends on population, culture and projects.
Army: an army unit has four stats: Melée, Long Distance, Protection and Mobility. When developing an unit, each accumulative point costs 10*2^(n-1) RP in development, and the cost would be the number of points in EP. For example, a Swordsman with stats (8/0/4/2) would requiere 273 RP and 14 EP.
Army Quality: states the maximum points you can allocate in the development of an unit.
Navy: a navy unit has four stats: Power, Protection, Speed, Transport. RP and EP costs would be the same.
Navy Quality: the same as for Army Quality.
Air Force: an air unit has four stats: Air-to-Air, Air-to-Ground, Speed and Range. I'm having half a mind of allowing these from the start, which of course would be very limited in range and power, but could be quite useful for many things.
Projects: the objective of these are to allow you to improve your nation. Be it through the construction of Universities to get more RPs, Trade Houses to get more money from trade or Great Forges to get better units (these are just examples), there are many things you can do.
Research Projects: this will only show what techs you are researching or have researched. I am thinking about allowing players to make their own techs, as long as they can demonstrate they can research it with what they have. When one nation researches something, other nations will be allowed to copy it, but it will also cost RPs and will not get bonuses (or, at least, bonuses like the ones the original investigator gets). The front page would be showing which technologies are being developed, and who can access to them.

Opinions? (I know you will probably say something about it all, especially the air force and the money, but, well, these are my suggestions)
 
I like a Mix. I really enjoy how Amon has these unique techs in Motherhen, infact, on a pencil and paper NES I'm running, that's how I handle techs myself.

A very basic tech tree to represent simple bottlenecks of research (going form vacumn tubes to transistors and microprocessors? anyone?) with lots of open ended space for creativity.

Please accept these points of advice if you do so!
1) Be ready to quickly judge the costs of anything, familiarize yourself on the subject of the complexity of various things compared to their descendents.
2) Be ready to allow both narrow and wide interpretation of techs, and adjust costs necessarily. "Kopesh Swords" in the bronze age is rather narrow, and would definitely cost less than "Hammered Steel", which can be used from anything to armor, to weapons, early machines in the Iron age.
 
I know I've started and abandoned a fair number of NESes over my time here, but what would people think of a Post ME3 Control Ending NES? Players would play as Isolated colonies of the various in-game races, or new races, trying to make their way in this new, Mass Relay Lacking galaxy. (Which would make it hard for Planets like Palaven, Earth, Thessia, Etc, to keep contact, especially with all the work needed to reconstruct themselves.
 
I've been thinking a lot about Stars Without Number recently, and I reckon you could play a NES with the faction rules.

The question would be, do we start off with all the factions on one planet or open up the whole sector?

Holy poo-poo, so I downloaded the pdf and read through the factions part and it seems like a pretty good system for a NES. I am in the process of tweaking the ruleset a bit and am considering opening a pre-thread that functions a lot like Eltain's current nes where players casually build up a world. Not that I am abandoning my current NES or anything (really, I'm not), just think it would be a great way to get a NES up and running lorewise at some point in the future.
 
More ideas!
- Eliminate the Bronze Age/Iron Age/etc thing. It means nothing, and it is just a way to measure it according to RL parameters.
- Start in the Bronze Age. Agriculture, mining, fishing, hunting, animal husbandry, the wheel... those things are already known. You are already a freakin' sedentary, stable society! You SHOULD know these things!
- The fixed tech tree would just be formed of basic technologies. A nation would be free to go for each technology, as long as they got the previous techs. For example, we could start with Bronze Melting, Masonry, Writing and Sailing.
- Other technologies would be player-designed. You want to have a currency-based economy? Then you research Currency. You prefer to keep a barter-based economy? You don't research Currency. You prefer to have a mixed economy, with barter but also allowing the use of currency? You research Currency, and use your stories to reflect your choice. Great flexibility! So far, I have come up with the following basic techs: Bronze Melting, Masonry, Writing, Sailing, Iron Melting, Alphabet, Mathematics, Metal Casting. Don't know what else to put, but I think I can pick them out of MilarNES II's Tech Tree.
- Population: there would be 2 factors: natural growth and a random factor to account for immigration or assimilation of other people as your borders expand.
- Economy: the economic power you gain would initially be proportional to population, but as you develop new technologies or finish projects, there would be certain bonuses to that quantity. Trade would also affect this, but that is something I have yet to determine (I think it could depend on each countries' population...)
- Research: how much research you can do in one turn will depend on population, culture and any projects you may have finished that directly affect research.
- Culture: increases through stories and also from projects. Not sure of how to implement culture-flipping, or if I will actually allow it. I think that there could be some system by which the border between two nations would be subjected to changes due to culture differences until both nations agreed on a fixed border, which would not change unless there was war. Fixed borders would be marked, while variable borders would not be.

What is your opinion?
 
At the risk of sounding trite, I think there are two kinds of advances: revolutionary and evolutionary. The former is a serendipitous thing that can't be predicted or rushed. In human history, these things (alphabet, agriculture, the wheel, bronze working, etc) occur once, and then are spread through trade and warfare. Evolutionary advances are things that can be directed. Once you have agriculture, you can focus on improving yields, expanding crop selection, controlling pests, etc. Once you have bronze working, you can refine smithing techniques, create new alloys, focus on armor design, spear design, etc.

How I would translate this into a NES (granted, I've never run one) is this. Have the major discoveries happen semi-randomly, weighted towards appropriate player actions (arch keystones for builder types, ballistics for warmongers, cyphers for sneaky types, etc.). These techs, once discovered, would spread via tech diffusion, trade, and warfare. The players would be able to invest research improving the major techs they already know.

Players shouldn't know the major techs beforehand (other than the obvious known arc of history), and gaming the system should be discouraged (i.e. King Warmongerman declares that his people should gather tin and copper and mix it together to see what happens). I think this fits well with historical advances, since revolutionary discoveries by definition can't happen by design. But it still gives enough game elements to satisfy the tech-tree cravings some of us have.
 
Trade should determine on the value/demand of trade goods.

A small country with highly valued trade goods will get much more money funneled to it than a huge nation with little-desired trade goods, despite size.

I guess that that would work quite well, although making up the trade goods, as well as production and cost, would be a bit tiring. Perhaps some trade goods would appear randomly, and other trade goods could be conciously made by the players.

At the risk of sounding trite, I think there are two kinds of advances: revolutionary and evolutionary. The former is a serendipitous thing that can't be predicted or rushed. In human history, these things (alphabet, agriculture, the wheel, bronze working, etc) occur once, and then are spread through trade and warfare. Evolutionary advances are things that can be directed. Once you have agriculture, you can focus on improving yields, expanding crop selection, controlling pests, etc. Once you have bronze working, you can refine smithing techniques, create new alloys, focus on armor design, spear design, etc.

How I would translate this into a NES (granted, I've never run one) is this. Have the major discoveries happen semi-randomly, weighted towards appropriate player actions (arch keystones for builder types, ballistics for warmongers, cyphers for sneaky types, etc.). These techs, once discovered, would spread via tech diffusion, trade, and warfare. The players would be able to invest research improving the major techs they already know.

Players shouldn't know the major techs beforehand (other than the obvious known arc of history), and gaming the system should be discouraged (i.e. King Warmongerman declares that his people should gather tin and copper and mix it together to see what happens). I think this fits well with historical advances, since revolutionary discoveries by definition can't happen by design. But it still gives enough game elements to satisfy the tech-tree cravings some of us have.

While your idea is quite good and realistic, it would, unfortunately, make for a very slow game pace. It would require me to ascertain the probabilities of each nation to get a certain advance, based on all of their actions, and considering that all nations would start from scratch, it would become quite tiresome. Your suggestions are good for NESes where the scenario has already been established and when you can already do more things than just waiting for something to happen. I would be bored if I did it that way.

Why don't you try to do a NES where tech advance goes that way? Who knows, maybe you can make up a good set of ideas for it!
 
I am struggling to understand why players will be waiting around to discover technologies. They surely would have a ton of other things to do: managing political factions, dealing with economic crises, rending off other peoples... You know, the things people dealt with in history.
 
Quick ideas to combat a slow game:
-Everyone gets a starting tech(s)
--Start off with some BT orders to determine what 'flavors' are granted
-Guaranteed minimum of one new major tech per update. This would encourage players to find as many neighbors to trade/war with early
--depending on geography, this should give every nation several major techs to focus on by update 5 or so
-have NPC with tech to steal
-allow nations to design religions off the bat, invest in them instead

About me running a NES? I barely have enough time to play in a single small NES. There's no way I would be a successful mod :lol:
 
I am struggling to understand why players will be waiting around to discover technologies. They surely would have a ton of other things to do: managing political factions, dealing with economic crises, rending off other peoples... You know, the things people dealt with in history.

My point is that it would mean a slow technological advance, which could mean that it could take a nation around two-three turns to even be able to actually work on doing things with bronze, and development of one "revolutionary" technology would require the mod to take into account a lot of variables.

However, as I have told hbar, if he feels he can do a good NES with that tech system, he can give it a try.
 
Guys, look what I have just discovered.

makeagif.com. Freaking awesome.
 
That could have some practical uses. Could make seeing the growth of nations easier without shuffling through previous updates.
 
Check out the N3S front page for a good example. (The gif of which is hosted on imageshack.com, but the idea is the same. I actually don't know how to link makeagif.com into an image on this forum (not that I am tech-savvy nor that I have experimented), but it is worth experimenting with, surely.)
 
I believe the gif on N3S is mine. Not too sure, but I make them from time to time. I just use GIMP's optimize for animation filter with some layer ordering to make them (along with some fiddling around with the layer placement for smoothness). You don't even have to use GIMP, Photoshop and Paint.NET have the some ability I believe. I can make one for you Eltain if you want, never takes more than 20 minutes. Gathering the necessary files takes longer than the gif itself! :lol:
 
NES Proposal


StarNES
Updates Without Number

Overview: Players take on the roles of factions in a spacefaring setting and attempt to do whatever the hell it is that they want to do. These factions range from religious cults to multi-system corporations to mercenary outfits to greedy planetary nobles to research institutions. I will be using a modified Stars Without Number ruleset, as the ruleset is pretty nifty to me.

However, before all of this can happen you must first invent the universe.

Taking a page from Eltain's rather brilliant NES I first want to create a universe for this NES to take place in. The scale of my focus will not see me make maps for each individual planet (that would be terribly time consuming), but one single map of the known universe. Like Eltain's NES StarNES will take place over multiple phases, each phase adding onto the other until a whole galaxy has been created thanks to the contributions of the community.

This NES will be soft sci-fi, so pretty much anything will go so long as we do not create flying penis monsters. 'Space-magic,' such as the force, is allowed.

Epoch I: Stellar Dust, Planetesimals, & You
The goal of this epoch is to create the galaxy that will be the primary play area for future epochs. In Epoch I players primarily will act as some sort of twisted galactic pantheon of creation gods; they can summon up stars at whim, populate systems with planets, moons, and asteroids; even hurl a comet or two at people.

Each action will cost a certain amount of GalCred¤ (GC¤) and players accumulate GC¤ every turn via dice rolls done on my part. However, to avoid gains of 1, each player will get a minimum of 10GC¤+1d20. Players can stockpile GC¤ as they see fit.

Epoch II: World-Building With Dementia
Now this is the fun(nest) stage, in my opinion. After the galaxy has been filled with stars and planets players can now begin plopping down their own creations. These creations range from sentient species to plant/animal life and, again, all of these are purchased with GC¤. As in the previous epoch GC¤ is accumulated every turn via dice rolls adding to their minimum of 10GC¤. New stellar objects can be created in this epoch, however they cannot be added to existing stars/systems.

Epoch III: Taking to the Stars
In this epoch whatever sentient species that managed to survive the chaos of the previous era achieve space-travel. Players are not assuming the roles of the species they created, only indirectly controlling them so as to make a galactic history. By expending GC¤ players can direct space-faring races to new systems to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate as they see fit. New stellar objects CANNOT be created in this epoch.

Epoch IV: ???
This is the last epoch and the phase where factions come into play alongside stats. The NES has begun. Players now exist within whatever strange and messed galactic empires that were formed in the last epoch. As factions players now spend GC¤ to purchase ASSETS on the planets, moons, and space stations that have been created over the past few epochs. These assets fall under one of three primary categories that correspond with the three primary stats: Militancy, Cunning, & Affluence. Utilizing these assets players attempt to increase their Influence, which doubles as their health, and attempt to do... whatever, really.

There will most likely be an overarching narrative during this epoch that depends on the results of epoch III. Will two massive galactic empires be fighting to the death? Will a pan-galaxy republic become a playground for petty politicians and greedy corporations? Will a fearsome empire begin to crumble as rebels sow the seeds of sedition? Who knows! We will have to create the universe to find out.
 
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