Heavy GMing? I'm just trying to keep this IOT from going where all other IOT's end up. Unless you want that
No, but I'd rather not have a GM jumping down everyone's throats the instant they take even one step out of line. Like with Lucky, we do a little diplo, and all of a sudden you're there with big red ink threatening to ban us. That doesn't sound heavy-handed to you?
Diplo restrictions are there to make sure we don't have someone signing an alliance, quitting that alliance, joining another, quitting, joining a league, and causing a world war all within the same turn. It happened in IOT IV and I'd rather not see it happened again.
Sure there is that, but I think the problem is much easier solved with concrete stats. Look at NESes. A NES is basically an much more developed, intricate form of this, with unrestricted diplomacy allowed (encouraged, even, since it's the whole point), and yet, you don't get these kinds of problems. Then again, they also have an IRC server for discussions/diplomacy, so that may help. But I think the biggest reason is the actual, measurable stats, that allow every player to know just where they stand in the game, and allows them to more easily judge the quality of an alliance they wish to enter into. The problem with previous IOTs was that war was based almost entirely on how many allies you had, rather than the quality of them, which meant it was beneficial not only for imperialistic players to gather as many allies as they possibly could, but it was strictly speaking nearly impossible to survive more than 1 round without any allies.
Ok, I'll tell you what this means, first in NES terms, and then in IOT. In a NES, the game is more abstract. You don't really get to select where you expand, and the map isn't divided into provinces. Usually the GM will give each player a set of stats, detailing what their income/expenses for the turn are, what their military is, and what the quality of said military is, and how much money they have to spend for the turn. The player then PMs a set of orders to the GM, which details what they want to do in their country, and how they want to spend their money. The GM then collects all of these orders, and then posts an update, which tells through a narrative, everything that happened over the course of the turn, and the GM will update each nations stats to show the effect your orders had on your nation.
Recent iterations of IOT have gotten closer to this system. To understand what I mean by concrete stats, let's look at the differences between IOTI and IOTV. In IOTI, you could claim as much land as you wanted on the first turn. Not only that, but you were responsible for providing (if you wanted), the statistics for your nation, what the quality of the military was, what the population was, and what the GDP was. This left the game wide open for abuse, as Math demonstrated, by saying his GDP was 17 trillion, and he had an army of 100 million soldiers, despite occupying land that by modern day standards would barely offer a fraction of that amount. In IOTV, each territory is worth 1 gp, meaning that you the GM are, indirectly, telling them exactly how much their nation is worth, and through gold, are limiting the size of their army. That big excel sheet you put up each round update is the stats for this game. While they are much more simplistic than you'd find in your average NES, it works a heck of a lot better, because, as I said, each nation knows where they stand. It's much harder for someone like Math to go around saying they're the strongest nation in the world, and using that as an excuse to bully people, when in actuality, the stats say otherwise. Do you understand my meaning?
