IOT: Ab Antiquo - Sign-Up/Pre-Game Thread

House Rules
1. Do not flame, troll, or personally insult any other player OOC or IC. At all.You may comment on certain things negatively, but don't take it further than that.
2. Stay on topic. Make sure all comments are relevant to the fictional world of the current IOT and have nothing to do with your personal religious/political beliefs.
3. Your posts should actually consist of something relevant to your nation and not just one-liner comments. Do not spam.
4. Long diplomatic discussions (anything over five posts) belong to the realms of Social Groups or visitor and private messaging, not the Game Thread.
5. No powergaming. By definition, powergaming is making your country surpass every other country by all terms including armed forces, technology, etc.
6. Keep your actions realistic, and don't declare war on someone for a personal reason.
7. The GM reigns supreme. Do not challenge his authority.
8. Above all else, RESPECT THY FELLOW FORUMERS.

Failure to follow these will result in warnings from the GM. On your third infraction, I phone the actual mods. And ban you.

Updates

IOT is a turn-based game. A turn ends and new one begins when I post an update, which is roughly every 2-3 days. During a turn, you can spend money, claim territories, fight wars, conduct diplomacy, etc, etc. You can either post battle orders, spending and claims in the game thread or PM or VM them to me. If you want to launch a sneak attack, you can give me the battle order via PM without posting.

I will only update after 48 hours have passed since the last update. Orders not posted or PMed to me by that time run the risk of not being counted for the update.

Now for the actual game mechanics…

Map and Expansion

Ab Antiquo is played on a map of the (known) world, divided into provinces. Each province belongs to a terrain type (which will effect combat) and has two other values; Wealth and Forts. The provinces are named for easy identification.

If you are not at war, you can peacefully claim any three neutral provinces each turn, as long as they’re contiguous and you can reach it by land or sea (if the latter, the province you’re claiming must not be more than one sea away from your territories).

The province you started in is your Capital. Defend it at all cost. Bad things will happen if your Capital falls…

Income

Each province has a Wealth value. The sum of all the Wealth values of all your provinces is the amount of money (income) you have to spend for the current turn.

To improve your income, upgrade your territories individually. To go from a Wealth 1 territory to Wealth 2 costs 1 income. To go from a Wealth 5 territory to Wealth 6 costs 5 income. And so on. The cap is Wealth 20.

You cannot bank your income, but you can spend it on your military, or culture.

Culture

To be honest, Culture doesn’t really do anything. You can spend money on it every turn and it accumulates. One Culture point costs one Income. The money goes to fund your priests and your scholars and your alchemists and your poets and your bards, but it doesn’t have any effect on your income or your military strength. A bit useless really… except if you want to win. More details on that below.

War and Combat

First, let’s talk about military quality.

Military Quality

Military quality is a number that tells you how well your armies fight. There are separate values for Armies and Navies, unimaginatively named Army Quality and Navy Quality. You gain more by throwing money at it; 1 income -> +1 quality. There are two ways you can lose Military Quality – by creating armies/fleets and by losing them.

Armies and Fleets

Armies are your primary military units. They will be shown as sprites on the map. Armies can normally move 1 province per turn, and only one may be present in a province at a time. They cost no gold to create but you lose -10% of your Army Quality. Should one be destroyed (either in combat, or manually disbanded), you lose -20%. Upkeep per turn is determined by the formula 2^(n-1) where n is the number of armies. If your upkeep > your income I will randomly disband your armies until you have positive income.

Unlike armies, fleets can be stacked in a sea province. Otherwise they’re just armies at sea and everything above applies (just replace “Army Quality” with “Navy Quality”.)

Traits

On creating your army or fleet, you can choose one trait which will improve your army or fleet in a certain way. I will make a list of these when we actually start the game.

Army/Fleet Combat

When attacking a province, all friendly troops in provinces adjacent to it joins the battle too. I take the sum of all the strengths of both sides, run an RNG which modifies that by 0 – 50%, and apply defensive bonuses. Side with highest resulting strength wins.

Armies can be destroyed if 1) the combine strength of the winning side is more than half of the strength of the losing side or 2) the losing side has no where to retreat ie completely encircled.

Forts

Forts are special. They can be built in any province and costs 1+n, n being the number of forts currently present there, plus a turnly upkeep of 1 Wealth per 5 forts. If a battle takes place in the province, each fort provides +5% defensive bonus.

However, the real use of forts is to prevent an army from simply marching in to a territory and taking it if no opposing army is present. Forts provide a “defense chance” (the chance an enemy will fail to take the territory) according to the formula x/(x+5)*100 percent, where x is the number of forts in the province.

Max number of forts in a province is 20. FYI, this gives a 80% defense chance, meaning the attacking army has a 80% chance of failing.

Finally, the last part…

Victory Condition

Yes, I’ve decided to introduce it. When someone fulfils the victory condition and wins the game, Ab Antiquo ends.

There are two types of victory conditions:

Cultural – the first to reach 1000 Culture points wins the game (I might lower this, if it seems unattainable).
Conquest – the first to conquer all the provinces in a customized list I will PM to every player wins the game.

Attain either of these, and you win the game.