Player's Guide
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY
In this game, you control the
government of your polity or nation, and there is a strong interaction between the economy of your nation and the overall political situation. Simply put, everything is connected, and your power is limited by your ability to accumulate and dispense both economic & political capital.
Political Capital is your most fundamental resource: this is an abstract number, derived from your government's political situation, which directly expresses the number of actions you may take per turn. If you have 3 political capital, you may make 3 actions per turn.
Now, what qualifies as an action? Well, broadly, everything. Any particular activity a government or political entity can undertake will require on average 1 political capital to see through to completion; any less, and we call that going off half-cocked, which will assign an indeterminate penalty to the action you wish to undertake. Note that this does not always refer to undertaking certain tasks of government, particularly the most basic ones such as taxing and policing, provided it is already established in the fiction that your government is providing for these services in a consistent manner (we call this benefiting from inertia). If your government is having a problem in one of those areas (say, with corruption in the police force), then attempting to address that (say, with an anti-corruption drive) will take 1 political capital.
Broadly speaking, if you would like clear examples, any of the following can be considered actions taking 1 political capital:
· Recruitment drive for your armed forces or civil service.
· Anti-corruption drive or other political purge for members of the armed forces, civil service, or higher echelons of the state.
· Hunting down a new breed of tax evaders, or expanding or changing the tax code.
· Creating new investments or grants for industry or research, private or public enterprise.
· Changing or addressing the functionality of a public enterprise or major government bureau.
· Creating a new public enterprise or major government bureau.
· Privatizing public resources; i.e. liquidating them for cash.
· Pushing a cover-up or exposition narrative on the media.
· Provide and fund an emergency response.
· Mobilize and deploy armed forces for a military campaign.
· Oversee or undertake any expedition or significant project.
The national economy – which is partially the product of your government and of which your state is normally assumed to have the most privileged access to – is represented in four groups:
Finance, Resources, Expertise, and
Development; or
FRED. The added combination of all these stats is your total
Economic Power (EP).
Finance – Also referred to as
liquidity, this is the most coveted form of economic power there is. Finance allows your nation to continue expanding, creating more projects and adding to its powers using the sheer weight of money. It is also a shield for when your nation hits hard times, the only real antidote to debt. When you’re in negative finance, you’re in
debt. NOTE that ANY EP can be converted to finance EP –
liquidated – as an action (and you may liquidate multiple different EPs in a single action). Finance EP can be
sent to other nations, and is the only EP that may be used this way, but is inherently more vulnerable than other EP to
market corrections. However, it is still best to be the one with Finance and not without.
Resources – This refers to the most desperate of things, the
access to resources. It is always necessary to have resources, and while most nations are somewhat positioned to access the basic ones, there are usually resources you don’t have that you’re somewhat dependent on. This dependency is represented with
assets, and provides “necessary” resources in exchange for finance. Keep in mind not all this finance is actually transmitted to the sourcing polity, as certain middlemen take their cuts.
Expertise – This refers to the contributions made to your society in the theoretical, metaphysical, literary, scientific, and engineering spheres. Truthfully, it is a very broad category, and covers everything from the science of human psychology to the science of nuclear physics. Expertise is most often cultivated within lucrative societies, and results from the interaction of populations with increased levels of development, as higher education and elite professions slowly become normalized. More broadly, however, it can also refer to local expertise in several important tasks for social reproduction, such as surviving the environment.
Development – Refers to a normalized value related to your nation’s development and gross domestic expenditure. The higher your nation’s financial status, the higher this tends to become, as high-finance individuals move in and create communities. In practical terms, this means a nation has a good quality of life, access to consumer goods, and new technology. Inequality can still be rife; generally, the higher the finance score, the higher the inequality. Nevertheless, the development score still serves as a good average of those circumstances.
PRODUCTION (INCOME)
For each of the four economic elements referenced before, your interaction with that resource is dictated via your control of its
production, or
income. The income represents your assets which produce those elements directly, each turn.
Whenever you liquidate resources, you are liquidating these hard assets and the income they create. These hard assets then enter the
World Market, and you are compensated at the
market price for that resource in Financial EP.
SPENDING
Spending in this IOT is done according to simple budgets. Whenever you spend PC, you spend 1 EP as well. EP is also used to maintain your
state upkeep and your
military upkeep. These upkeep come from the various long-term civil projects you maintain, as well as military units. For civil projects, this expenditure will be clear based on how those projects are represented in the stats.
Note again that when it comes to
sending EP to others, the ONLY EP you may send this way is
Finance EP, and that is taken before any EP that is then used for your other, overall expenditures. Other EP can only be sent if they are converted to Finance EP first, which is permanent (AND will result in those resources entering the
World Market, where others can still buy them). Finance EP is not “used up” when sent, but the markets can always
correct themselves…
SPENDING: REINVESTMENT
Since you cannot bank your resources, you can opt to “just reinvest my monies” as some people in these games do. Unspent resources are indeed
reinvested in their respective categories: finance is reinvested into finance, development into development, and so on.
However, each of the four economic aspects actually interacts with the economy in different ways, when that growth is encouraged. For example, you may intend to “simply” build electric lights for everyone, but you have the additional effect of promoting people’s expertise in the work of being electrical technicians.
When you reinvest, you
“draw cards,” which provide random benefits. These benefits will be framed in your stats as
assets. These will also provide hooks for further reinvestment as well as contextualize your actual reinvestment, in terms of the multiple aspects.
ASSETS
Assets include any holdings or competitive advantages that
produce income. Normally, your income is represented abstractly; but
assets are specific elements of your economy, such as a valuable ore extraction operation or a major industrial concern.
Sometimes, assets do not produce income, but may grant other benefits and
take income as maintenance. This is generally called
civil maintenance.
WORLD MARKET
The invisible hand guiding the destiny of all these mighty economic engines, the world markets are nothing if not volatile since the Great War. Even so, life goes on.
When you
liquidate resources, those liquidated resources enter the World Market in the form of an
asset and are compensated at the
average market price. Anything bought from the World Market straight-up is a
lump sum: a one-time exchange, whereby you may use the purchased resources that turn only. Otherwise, you can try to
buy the asset for
5x the lump sum cost (this amount can be adjusted based on certain aspects).
TRADE
As per the previous section, you may, as an alternative to liquidating to the market,
trade with another nation. In this case, instead of selling your resource to the market as an asset, you trade it to another player as an
asset. You may gift assets in this way, but probably there will be some kind of exchange going on.
MILITARY
Maintaining a military force is necessary to maintain your independence in this world. Over time, you will have to build up and maintain your military. While military operations and reforms cost PC, the rest costs EP;
you must pay to maintain force readiness, combat and support equipment, standing and reserve armies, and
officer schools.
Overall, your military will have a
Force Strength which determines its aggregate warfighting power. While strategy is important in the big picture, generally the side with the most guns and the deepest reserves has what it takes to stick it through a bitter struggle longer. However, even one doomed to be destroyed can bleed their killer as much as possible.
You’ll manage your Force Strength by managing the capabilities which form it up. These capabilities are your core reference for your
military stats: Combat Readiness, Equipment, Standing, and Technical (CrEST).
Combat Readiness (Cr) – This refers to the immediate availability and overall efficacy of formations ready for action. It only applies to those troops that are currently
standing-up, as reserves are generally not ready.
Usually, this stat is between 0% and 100%. The higher the readiness, the more active pay you’re paying out. You can attempt to
increase readiness as part of either a military reform or in preparing for a military campaign. Usually, unless you otherwise specify, the readiness will go up as part of undertaking military operations naturally.
Equipment (Eq) – This refers to the quality of your equipment. It is a straightforward number value relating the
total lethality index of your military’s equipment. This number multiplied by your Standing number is your
Basic Combat Power.
Standing(/Reserves) (St/Rv) – You have a pool of
manpower reserves which is all the folks you’ve got trained and ready to move into active duty should your state require them to. This generally increases slowly over time as people volunteer or are conscripted. Keep in mind you can institute a policy to conscript people more regularly at any time, but without an apparent need some will resent this imposition, and they will want some guarantees that their service will be worth it and not take up too much of their lives. In addition to the reserves you have
standing formations, which we also refer to as
standing-up. These are the formations which are more-or-less ready for battle, or are currently “manning the battlements” (and offices) so to speak. This number does not refer to the total number of combat fighters; broadly speaking, ¾ of military staffers, enlisted, conscripted, or commissioned, at any given moment are performing support duties, not fighting on the front line. When you
mobilize the reserves, usually as a result of preparing for war, you quickly move to convert reserve formations into active-duity ones. This may take several turns, and may adversely affect overall combat readiness if done quickly or recklessly, and is extremely expensive as the costs incurred by maintaing combat readiness for so many troops rises, but generally is a process you will have to undertake in times of need. This stat counts in groups of 1,000’s your standing and reserve personnel.
Technical (Tx) – This refers to the overall level of technological development applied to the armed forces, which
includes both advanced technology as well as all doctrines, organizational advancements, and other technical developments. The assumption is that this development is parallel. In cases where access to advanced equipment surges, the Equipment stat will rise before this one. Like Equipment, this is a straightforward index.
Combat Power (CP) = (Eq) x (St)
Force/Military Strength = (CP) x (Cr) x (Tx)
Basically: higher numbers, better army.
Now while Force Strength mainly refers to conventional ground-based forces with air support, there is also naval power. By and large, naval power is its own thing, but in this game is simply represented with two stats:
Naval Tonnage and
Naval Technical Expertise. These are multiplied together to give your overall
Naval Power.
Sample Stats
Nation: Soviet Union
Political Capital: 6
Economic Power: 12.75
-Finance: +1.75 [-3.25 from Assets]
-Resources: +6 [+2 from Assets]
-Expertise: +3
-Development: +2
Military Strength: 2250
-C. Readiness: 25%
-Equipment: 5
-Standing(/Rv): 1500 (3000)
-Technical: 1.2
Assets:
-Expropriating from the Kulaks (-1 EP, +2 Resources)
(Military Upkeep: -2.25 EP)
(Civil Upkeep: -1 EP)
