ANES01 Preliminary Rules Work

[The Strategos]

Here's also something for your consideration: how many UUs should players be limited to, and why?

Since the whole battle system revolves around "Power" in terms of combat, it could theoretically be possible to fairly easily "create" UUs designed to do different things (mechanized, anyway). You could specify a tank with bigger cannons; translating to more "Power" but getting less units per IP than "base" (the default design). Or you could make the unit cheaper, and having less "Power" but getting more of them than "base". This could better simulate divergences in equipment: the chief determinant is the technology level, but also important is the priority of the builder. Shermans were made quickly and cheaply but it took 4 - 5 of them to reliably defeat a Tiger or Panther, which on the other hand were incredibly expensive. Basically, to summarize, it'd look something like this (obviously not totally complete):


Do these make sense? Essentially, you can design or specialize certain forces for certain roles. I suggest a cap on the number because I don't want people designing something, making me keep track of it, and then hardly ever using it. The kind of play it gives in combat is an interesting touch, I think. Again, this is sort of like the DNES system Daft had for UUs, only more quantifiable.

Discuss.

Yes, you should limit the number of machine based specialty units and I can see you doing this in two ways:

1) Before each new design can be put into production, you must pay x. X will represent the cost of research/development, prototypes, setting up the factories to produce it, etc. In game terms, you've just provided an incentive to keep the number of designs for mech units to an absolute bare minimum, otherwise you'll just be wasting too much cash.

2) The maximum number of designs you can have are dependant on the number of industrial centres you own. This would represent the fact that factories tend to be specialized, that is under normal circumstances you don't build different products in one plant. Thus once you have all of your available factories producing a product, that's all the different kinds of products you can produce. Now all you can do is shift raw resources between your existing factories in order to produce what you want when you want it.

or some perhaps some combination or variation of the above.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[Neverwonagame3]

I'm back, but i recently have been having trouble keeping up with NESing. Therefore, i will have to withdraw from this experiment. Sorry.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[Kozmos]

Hey Symph do you still want pics from Dawn of War (Space Marines) of the tanks?

 

[Symphony D.]

Unnecessary.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I think that the Conscript, Volunteer and Militia designations are fine, but...It would seem to me that no newly recruited troops of any sort should be able to be trained beyond regular. All higher level troops would have to get better through actual combat experience. Once troops have some combat, then elite troops and UUs could be drawn from those already experienced in battle. Actual warfare would be a prerequisite for getting any troops better than regular. Veteran status come with success in battle. The mod would/could designate further advancement based on the wars fought.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[jalapeno_dude]

So, are we going to see the test NES anytime soon?

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[foolish icarus]

Your ideas are fine. They're difficult to improve upon--which is not to say they're perfect, and I know you realize that. Because they are so mechanically precise, any change runs the risk of making things worse instead of better. At a certain point--you apparently think it hasn't been reached yet?--you need to just make the decisions and work the bugs out by running the system.

I have never much cared for spending a lot of time on military matters. When I play, I typically want to set up the basic organization, and then let it take care of itself during peacetime. When war comes, I want it to be easy to organize, and easy to order around. I personally am quite willing to trade complexity and precision in the military system for the simplicity to spend less time and effort on a part of the experience that I simply find less interesting. I also shy away from modern/recent pre-modern eras in general, for reasons unrelated to warfare.

What I have seen, particularly your latest ideas and revisions, looks promising. I can't be much more specific than that. I mostly want to see the fact that armies vary greatly, for good reason, between war time and peace time, and that those transformations can be very quick as well as surprising in their nature. And as a general rule, I think the military system should be built to take into account the civil attributes of a nation, but the domestic/civil characteristics of a country should not be designed with an emphasis on describing military capabilities, but the actual character and status of domestic society (unless it is by nature or in an unusual period where it is at every level a militarized society).
Take from all this what you will.

 

[jalapeno_dude]

I personally liked the older system where you get different numbers of troops. Much less subjective.

I don't really like the Volunteer/Conscript/Militia thing. There are always going to be nations with combinations of all three.

 

[Birdjaguar]

No rules, no test. Nobody wants to talk about rules, so I have to work them out myself, and until I do that, there will be no test. I've called in some outside parties to work with me, but that's going fairly slowly, so who knows when it might happen.

I tried to do the same with my rulese for a 1500 AD NES and got a similar response. No one really wanted to discuss rules and even fewer wanted to actually test them. I have decided that the only way to test them is start game and hope I get players. There are so many games at the moment , that I've decided to wait a while.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[jalapeno_dude]

So 2 elite divisions are equal to 20 untrained ones? That seems about right.

I like the idea of using manpower and industry stats--unfortunately, it's harder to make quick calculations like the sentence above. My gut feeling is that you should if you use manpower, you might as well go all the way and use the more complex recruitment system.

I think we've had this discussion before, but is Mechanized training really that much of a factor? You could come up with some other scale--or at least have fewer training levels for them (trained and untrained, and maybe add an elite level?).

If you do have special forces, you should limit them to a certain percent of a nation's total forces.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[Symphony D.]

Retroactive deletion.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Say, I just switched my NES to a population system just like that.

It is a good idea. As is the military one.