Turn Length for Update 6:
Prefer Animas to stay with 10 year turns vs 100 year for now: 6-0
Prefer Manipur to stay with 10 year turns vs 100 year for now: 3-5
Prefer Manonash to stay with 10 year turns vs 100 year for now: 2-4
Someone might check my math on this one. It appears that most of Manonash has not voted. In spite of that, 11 are for no change and 9 for moving back to long turns. If de-synchronizing is an option, then it is not problem, if it is not, then it is pretty even.
Stat Changes
Custom stats versus all the same: 4-11
Leadership 1 stat vs 3: 7-12
Tech the same vs expanded Tech stats: 3-13
Most of you seem to want the expanded leadership and tech stats and do not want any additional customization. My inclination is to grant each of your wishes: I would give those who want more the expanded versions, the extra lines, and those who do not, may keep things as they are. From an IC perspective I see it as some leaders want and need more information to be effective and other s don’t. For those who need that additional information, more also becomes available for others to know. But if you are a leader whose need to know is less demanding, there will be less for your neighbors to know too. The choice is, perhaps, a strategic one.
bombshoo, das, emu, North King, you all voted for custom stats. What would you like to see that is not visible now or what would you like to be hidden that is visible now?
Keeping Cradles synced in time:
Keep cradles synchronized in time vs let mod de-link them.
There seems to be a heavy push to allow this in spite of the obstacles it might create. It is the toughest for me decide on. My thinking is that this would not be an uncontrolled process and that I would ‘force’ re-syncing as cradles got closer to contact so that when they met they would be at the same year. If I had to force a cradle to catch up a few hundred years, we would do it in 50 year increments as shown in the new order structure.
By allowing cradles to separate I saw an opportunity when one cradle needed to stay with short turns and another needed to move along faster, they could do so. I did not anticipate not bringing them into sync and letting those time differences be a stand in for different tech paces. As Iggy said so well, that would certainly create an interesting game. Imagine that if you didn’t know what was going on in other cradles. From a selfish standpoint, I also saw the de-linking as a way to have more variety in the updates that I have to write. This is a very strategic question about the games as a whole and is closely tied to what you, as players, expect this game to become. It really should be answered in that context.
I think that before this question can be answered, we need to come to some kind of understanding about where this NES is going and what we all want it to become. I think that for this discussion we can assume that we have until the end of the year before I go bonkers and need break of some sort and that we will move along at about 2 updates a month. Since Jan 4th I’ve managed six updates (zero-5) in three months. That gives us 18 more at the most before a break.
Over that time we could have no goals and just mosey along at whatever pace suited us at the time and reach whatever point we were at when we paused; or we could make sure that all three cradles with some time to spare so a ‘mixing’ can occur; or we could make sure that all three cradles meet and if there were, by happenstance, vast unknown lands of strange and savage peoples, some of our intrepid players could meet and fraternize with them a while. I have no idea how long any of these will take, even though, to some extent I can control the pace of progress. More long turns speed things up for sure; too many 10 year turns and we will never get there. Too fast a pace and much of the fun is lost. I guess I am asking about how to balance the pace to make sure that we all have the expected fun and still get where we want to go.
So what does this all mean? Well, how about if everyone tells me what you expect out of this game in terms of progress and pace and the place you want the world to be in when the fall rolls around.
Non players are welcome to chime in on this last question, because I think it is an important one to NESing in general. Sym?