Now seems like a good moment to share some aspects of the upcoming game and how it works.
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In the most minimalist summary, the December World is a game about great nations fighting for influence over entire regions, using ideologies, economy, army, and fleet as tools of power accumulation. Social, economic, and administrative policies will help these nations adjust to their current needs, and a wide technological tree will improve their ability to project power or defend what’s been conquered.
Regions and influence
The map of the December World is roughly divided into regions (I intentionally do not offer exact borders for them, since these are socio-economic concepts first and foremost). These regions encompass large segments of the globe and will oftentimes include multiple countries in them (take Scandinavia, for example). It’s influence over these regions that player factions will be struggling for.
Please note that regions will not be used as minimal territorial units (like “provinces” in many strategy games), but rather abstract entities combining territory, population, economy, and political landscape.
Nations are political concepts that exist on top of that regional overlay. However, a nation is not just a territory on a map, but something much more. For the game purposes, I trace national presence in a region by a parameter called
Regional Influence (RI). In most simple cases, RI will be directly dependent on territorial presence of a nation in a region (for example, in Scandinavia, nations of Sweden , Denmark-Norway, and Finland will most certainly have some influence at all times - 30%, 25%, and 20% at the beginning of the game). However, RI also signifies economic penetration, industrial investments and outsourcing, cultural influence, clandestine spy networks, military bases, war occupation, etc. Returning to Scandinavia as an example, we’ll see that Directorial Russia, North-German Federation, and British Royal Commonwealth have some noticeable presence there (5%, 10%, and 10% accordingly), despite having no actual territories there.
Please note that RI is not necessarily directly proportionate to the geographic size of a country. Take OTL Korean peninsula as of today, for example. Both North and South Korea are roughly the same size in territory, but South Korea is taking the lion’s share of the peninsula’s economic, cultural, demographic, and industrial output, so it’d have much more than 50% of influence there.
How does the Regional Influence change? We’ll talk about it when we learn about in-game units and what they do. But before it, let’s ask ourselves another question. Why do the nations fight over these regions?
The answer is simple. Resources.
Resources
All resources in December World come from one or another region. Nations by themselves don’t produce anything, but rather tap into the output of each region they have some influence in. These resources are wide abstractions, which may be interpreted differently in different in-game situations. I encourage you to not get too picky about finding perfect definitions here, but just use the general impression of what each resource represents.
Human Capital (HC) stands for military manpower, industrial labor, and simply the ability of a nation or a region to find human resources for its needs, whatever they are. Big HC is not always going to be indicative of big population, and vise versa. In many densely populated regions, limitations of caste, tradition, corruption, or disenfranchisement may diminish the HC pool, while in some areas practically every member of the society is a ready-made recruitment resource, with little regard for class, age and gender.
Intellectual Capital (IC) stands for highly educated population, accumulated academic experience, artistic and scientific tradition, and even access to patents and calculating machines. Just like with HC, IC is not always going to be proportionate to population size or literacy levels.
Economic Capital (EC) stands for a wide variety of economy aspects, including access to natural resources, service industry, banking, small businesses, and light industry. Thanks to natural resources, even uncolonized areas may have sometimes rather high EC.
Manufacturing Capital (MC) stands for heavy industrial capacity, industrial manufacture, and region’s ability to produce complex, knowledge-intensive goods. Just like all other resources, it will not always be tied directly to the exact size of industrial output, although it’s one of the things it may represent.
As a fan of Paradox games, I’ll again use Scandinavia as my example again. Here are Scandinavian resources in the beginning of the game.
- Human capital (HC)170
- Intellectual capital (IC) 80
- Economic capital (EC) 110
- Manufacturing capital (MC)50
And here’s how it compares to, say, the Italian peninsula:
- Human capital (HC) 420
- Intellectual capital (IC) 95
- Economic capital (EC) 350
- Manufacturing capital (MC) 210
If these examples have taught you anything about resources is that yes, they are very abstract and can’t be directly tied to any single real world metric.
Now may be a good time to ask ourselves, how do resources grow? There’s several mechanisms for that. First of all, each region has its own
Growth Trend (GT), roughly signifying its modernization, prosperity, and speed of development. Each turn, unsolved social and national issues, high tensions, trade wars, actual wars, and other fun things like that will lower this growth, while events of the opposite nature may impact regional growth positively. These modifiers are tracked via
Growth Fluctuation (GF). As a rule of a thumb, GT is a more lasting effect and GF is very short-term. Of course, having a lot of negative GF for many turns in a row will impact GT and vise versa.
Another easily traceable way to modify regional resources is through addressing something I call
Regional Quests. (It’s a silly name, I know, but it’s the name that, hopefully, will remind many players about the tree structure of RPG quests and thus make it more intuitive to understand). Most of these will be regional issues, opportunities and challenges that could be addressed by any (literally, any) player in the game, regardless of how distant their nation is (for that, of course, you’d need to use your units, which we’ll talk about later). In fact, the entirety of the first update will be a list of Regional Quests region-by-region, which will tell you all you need to know about the world you will be playing in. As the game progresses, I’ll be tracking the development of each quest. Some of them will get resolved and replaced by new issues or opportunities. Others will sit patiently, waiting for somebody to tackle them. And some quests will not wait for too long before escalating into something worse.
What happens if a player sends units to address a Regional Quest? First of all, be prepared that your units will suffer losses in all four resources. (It doesn’t mean your people literally get killed (although, yeah, sometimes it will mean exactly that), but rather that your nation expenses its capabilities while addressing some task.) Secondly, in the end you will progress in percentage toward resolution of that Regional Quest. How much? Again, we’ll talk about unit mechanic later.
What if several players address the same Regional Quest? It depends on how they address it. It’s completely possible that while one nation is trying to negotiate with striking workers, for example, another one would try to push the strikers or the police toward an open confrontation, while the third one would just use this awkward moment to buy out a greater share of local economy from capitalists running short on money. I will use my own judgement as a game master to decide if that pushes the quest toward resolution or away from it.
What happens when a quest gets finally resolved? There’s five possible outcomes, based on a number of factors I’m not going to openly share:
- Complete success - generates lasting positive impact on the region and may open another opportunity as a Regional Quest (example: negotiations with striking workers have resulted in surprisingly limited concessions on both sides, and the region is experiencing a growth boom; also, a depressive industrial zone is having a chance to adapt to new economic realities and rebuild itself (new Regional Quest));
- Mediocre success - generates some positive impact on the region or the country working toward successful resolution (example: the workers grudgingly returned to work after some effective police crackdowns on their leaders, and regional manufacture grew in certain cities);
- Mediocre failure - generates some negative impact on the region or the country working toward successful resolution, but may also generate small positive impact on a country working toward negative resolution (example: the industry is back on track, but a lot of workers were forced to leave the labor force and now are burden on our economy; also, several struggling factories were sold to foreign investors, increasing their share of local economy);
- Complete failure - generates lasting negative impact on the region and may open another issue as a Regional Quest (example: negotiations led to a walkout by the union leaders, and the police crackdown that followed turned into a bloodbath for both sides; factory owners eventually were forced to fire a big share of their labor and hire cheap manual workers from a neighboring country, but the industry has shrunk; meanwhile, socialist agitators are starting to form terrorist cells among the disgruntled, unemployed craftsmen (new Regional Quest)).
Needless to say, not all Regional Quests are going to be crafted by me. A lot of them will emerge as results of your generic actions.
All together, this game mechanics gives players many different strategies to expand their influence and tells you something about how the basics of the December World work.
