IOT Developmental Thread

[Civ'ed]

You're implying we don't stop caring after 5 updates

 

[Terran Empress]

+1

Speaking of which, I had a non-XVII-related idea.

Is everyone here familiar with cradle NESes? If you aren't, they basically are (End of Empires is far and away the most successful example) fresh starts on a non-Earth map, but with the start limited to a small section of the world - the eponymous "cradle" - with everything outside blacked out until the cradle physically gains knowledge of what's out there. (I'm bad at descriptions but you get the point )

So my idea was running one of these, but with two cradles (on the same map, obviously), with one cradle filled with IOTers and that thread here, and one cradle filled with NESers and their thread there. Perhaps it could end up having two mods, one for IOT and one for NES, if that could work better.

Would there be interest in this?

Sounds interesting, and similar to my idea for running a sequel to SKNES II, utilizing both forums and 2 mods to run it. We talked about for a bit, but then you left

 

[TheGryphonPrince]

Let the wars fly between both forums.

Seriously, an IOT like that would make me ROFL for a long time. The first war is probabily going to be over the mechanics or because of internal jokes on both forums.

 

[SouthernKing]

That would be fun, although if I've learned anything from my psychology class it will probably end with the two continents flinging nukes at each other...

A literal IOT-NES flame war would be absolutely amazing to mod though, you've got to admit that much. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever get that far, even if this does happen.

You're implying we don't stop caring after 5 updates

I wasn't aware that this wasn't a problem of all forum games

Sounds interesting, and similar to my idea for running a sequel to SKNES II, utilizing both forums and 2 mods to run it. We talked about for a bit, but then you left

*slaps head* Honestly, I'd completely forgotten about that
(I'm still open to it, actually)

 

[SamSniped]

That would be fun, although if I've learned anything from my psychology class it will probably end with the two continents flinging nukes at each other...

You don't need a degree in psychology to figure that one out.

 

[Tani Coyote]

I believe I hit everything, what do you gents think?



It is January 1, 1901. As Colombia is torn apart by a civil war and the British finish up the Boer Wars, the New Imperialism is at its zenith, with the European powers, America and Japan stretching their empires across the globe.

From the tiny one-province states of Kuwait and Luxembourg to the massive British and Russian Empires, any state with some degree of autonomy is playable. Not all positions are equal; play according to your ability.

==Polities==
The map is divided into multiple “polities” of varying statuses:

Independent – A state that is fully autonomous in its affairs.
Dominion – A state that is autonomous domestically, but follows the foreign policy of another nation. Basically a forced alliance. 10% of a dominion’s income is collected by the suzerain.
Client State – A state that enjoys some autonomy domestically, but follows the overall directions of another state. 25% of a client’s income is collected by the suzerain.
Colony – No autonomy. Controlled entirely by another state. Colonies are not playable. 50% of a colony’s income is collected by the suzerain.
Condominium – Controlled by two states. Condominia are not playable. 50% of the condonimium’s income is split between the various stakeholders.

Occupied territory can be any of these, or outright annexed into your nation. Naturally the latter carries a penalty if too much territory is annexed in a short span.

==Economy==
Every polity has a percentage of its economy devoted to raw materials, agriculture, energy, manufacturing, or services. You may shift your production by 1% towards any category each turn. Bear in mind that each category of goods is governed by supply/demand, which is also influenced by trade. A state with a lot of manufacturing is going to require huge amounts of energy, agriculture, and raw materials, whether imported or home-grown; trade agreements will impact the economy accordingly.

You also have a set amount of manpower each turn, that is beyond your control unless you decide to institute forced service (this leads to unhappiness, however, so beware). Manpower generally adjusts in response to certain events; if someone declares war on you, for example, many young patriots will sign up, greatly increasing your pool.

Population growth is largely beyond your control, but it will grow faster if you produce a lot of food.

==Military==
For simplicity you have only fleets and armies, each of which are considered to more or less be self-contained and have all the various mixtures of forces therein. Armies do not cost money to recruit, but you can only raise as many as your manpower allows per turn, and must also pay maintenance on every unit.

Maintenance is automatically paid at the start of a turn.

You can send your armies to war against other powers. Battles are calculated automatically in most cases, but if the forces are more or less evenly matched, then there will be some luck thrown into the result.

Sending armies across large distances can be done in a single turn, but there will be a penalty applied to represent the various costs of such. Russia, for example, will still have problems fighting the Japanese due to most of their manpower being concentrated in Europe.

==Technology==
Technology is where the bulk of your money will be spent. Every nation has a tech modifier that will influence the cost of technology, representing the amount of educated professionals available, corruption, etc. For example, a country like the USA or Britain will have an easy time developing a new technology, but somewhere with a lot of corruption like China or Russia will lag behind.

Tech costs are displayed in a tech tab.

Tech fields:

-Defensive Army Quality
-Offensive Army Quality
-Navy Quality
-Agricultural Productivity
-Raw Materials Productivity
-Energy Productivity
-Manufacturing Productivity
-Services Productivity

The military qualities are self-explanatory. The Productivity techs increase the yield that particular industry gives your country. Naturally, you will want to spend more money on whatever field is your nation’s strongest, or a field that is becoming lucrative. Alternatively, you will want to spend money on fields that are in high demand, so as to avoid importation.

==Diplomacy==
Do what ye will. Will the League of Three Emperors rise again? Will the USA seize Canada when Britain’s distracted? Will Italy successfully conquer Ethiopia? Will China manage to reassert itself as a regional power? There’s really no limit on what you can do, provided it’s not inherently gamebreaking (e.g. giving all your income to another power barring as part of some peace accord).

The only part of the game that’s really tracked is trade. If a nation won’t play ball, smacking trade restrictions or outright embargoes on their goods can do serious damage in some cases. The colonial powers, after all, need raw materials more than minor powers need their industrial goods.

==Events==
From time to time, events happen to your nation, some historical in origin, some random, and some based on the game. Generally they are there to add flavor.

 

[Double A]

From the tiny one-province states of Kuwait and Luxembourg to the massive British and Russian Empires, any state with some degree of autonomy is playable. Not all positions are equal; play according to your ability.

What about Andorra?

 

[Mathalamus]

would it be possible to play as Cyprus?

 

[SouthernKing]

This has been bothering me about your map Tani, Germany didn't gain the extra bits of Kamerun until 1911, so those outside the RL Cameroon border should still be French. Also, Sikkim. Make Sikkim independent. Please?

 

[Tani Coyote]

What about Andorra?

I'm not adding what would essentially be a Franco-Spanish puppet.

would it be possible to play as Cyprus?

Cyprus is a colony at this point in time, so unfortunately not short of the British deciding to grant it autonomy or independence.

This has been bothering me about your map Tani, Germany didn't gain the extra bits of Kamerun until 1911, so those outside the RL Cameroon border should still be French. Also, Sikkim. Make Sikkim independent. Please?

Kamerun fixed. Sikkim granted independence because why not.

 

[Mathalamus]

Cyprus is a colony at this point in time, so unfortunately not short of the British deciding to grant it autonomy or independence.

Fine, if i manage to find your game when you release it, ill play as Greece. the megali idea deserves some practical use...

 

[TheGryphonPrince]

Just because 27 is my birthday and 28 there is going to be a national strike, I'm going to dedicate the little free time I have thanks to MedIOT, my Byzantine AAR, exams and CKII if I get 2 more GBs of RAM to make the greatest IOT this forum has ever seen.

Spoiler :

Link to video.

 

[KaiserElectric]

As most of you know by now, I am now running my very first IOT! And it's because of that I have a question, and this seems like the best place to ask.

I want to write a brief history from a point of divergence during the Second World War up until the game start. I would be more comfortable writing it as a narrative, but I think that some people would be put off by that. So I want to ask, should I write the history as a narrative or just a simple block of exposition?

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Well on the one hand a narrative sounds like it'd be multi-part flashback interludes so it'd probably take forever to unwind, but given almost all game backstory tends to be infodump, it'd be treading fresh ground.

 

[Civ'ed]

preliminary warhammer IOT units spreadsheet, as well as SPESS MEHREN bonuses. Combat engine to be called either Krieg or Mars Pattern.

 

[NinjaCow64]

I hope that you call this Imperium Off Man.

 

[Robert Can't]

Just things and things

 

[Civ'ed]

Warhammer IOT is cancel
sorry for any dissapointment although to be fair I lost half of my playerbase the moment I omitted Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar, I have no idea how to get the combatsys up, and I don't have time to commit next week so it'd die.

 

[Sonereal]

or: Why You Can't Understand IOT Militarism with a 21^st Century Economy

It's every military-industrial complex's wet dream: an entire economy predicated on aggressive war. A common misconception held by the Imperium Offtopicum player base is that outside of explicitly conquest-oriented games such as SonRISK, the series is not about wargames. Many players have frequently objected to the sort of naked aggression demonstrated by warlords like christos200 and Patriotic_Fool; even when they bemoan Multipolarity 5's boast that it will completely remove the military sphere, they still maintain that IOT is about more than armies duking it out in the field. Sadly, such prescriptive sentiments only serve to obscure the underlying structure that has provided the impetus for these problem players' imperial ambitions. Ironically, it is the economy, not the military, that provides the greater reinforcement to this ethos, and the failure by players and game moderators alike to realize this fact is the reason attempts to reform IOT's core philosophy have so routinely failed. There is no clearer evidence that IOT has become a wargame than the market design of every title that has implemented hard statistics. Game moderators have tried to escape the paradigm of gunboat diplomacy through a number of means: back-door spy attacks, NPC-based power checks, punitive resistance mechanics, to name a few. But these are all attempts to circumvent the inherent problem of an economy teleologically grounded in fuelling war.

This post is oldish now, and I didn't feel like bumping that thread, so instead moved it to this one.

Things have changed a bit since this thread was posted. For starters, we've seen a few giant IOTs such as IOTXIV that bucked the trend of mechanics-oriented rulesets and proved to be very popular. At the same time, IOTXIV has been slow/over for a while now to look back and point out that absent any mechanics in a competitive game, greater geopolitical power is the dominant goal for most players.

In theory, there was no incentive to go to war in IOTXIV other than for map painting reasons. Were there long term benefits to taking territory? There probably were, but without any hard numbers such as industrial capacity, labor, or object measure of standard of living, figuring out the effects of policy outside of what was written in updates was difficult. One of the benefits of numbers is that you don't need to mention every update that economies grow, because that is something you can see just from the numbers, which frees the GM up to focus on something more interesting.

It isn't so much that IOT is uniquely a series of war games, but again, a problem of competition, which is only a problem as far as you let it be a problem. The reason the emerging complex games starting in 2011 had rulesets focused so heavily on war was likely just because that is where most of the action was. At the same time, avoiding "snowballing", a player who is able to subsidize future conquests nearly immediately with recent conquests, was something GMs tried to mechanically pull off with varying degrees of success.

The problem, of course, is that it made a form of competition more difficult, and therefore required more avenues to compete.

Early IOTs, by virtue of their simplicity and the casual culture of the founding player base, were about diplomatic interactions, not the sort of empire-building that they are today. While they had war, they were not wargames, and beyond the inaugural problem players were not treated as such. Thus, when the push began for a stabilized combat system, we conceived it as an auxiliary feature rather than a core component. The results were stopgaps that varied widely and were frequently criticized for being too arbitrary or 'unrepresentative',¹ and creating a 'comprehensive' combat system became the primary focus of the IOT V development thread. It was during these deliberations that the militarist framework took root: as war had been the primary venue of powergaming, it dominated the discourse, while the civil sector was completely ignored. The result was that income could be applied either toward military units and technology to increase their strength, or to improve the rate of income, which would then be spent on the military. It is a decidedly Medieval ethic of statecraft: one raises more funds to support a larger army that is then used to seize the territory of rivals to grow the revenue base. In hindsight, the irony is tragically hilarious: in an attempt to control war, we had inadvertently made it the sole mechanical focus.

A while ago I had a conversation with a player about something along these lines. His point of contention was that having the most points/dollars/industrial production at the end of the day mattered the most. My argument, however, was that income generation in most IOTs was pretty easy.

Even when this post was posted (November of 2013), there started to be a problem in IOT rulesets. IOTers, understandably, want to do their best. Previously, getting into and winning wars meant more production, which meant more war, which could mean more territory. However, in an attempt to make civil economics more interesting and rewarding, some rulesets missed the mark entirely and ended up making the T0 war a death spiral you could not recover from.

It makes perfect sense that a country that isn't at war from the start of the game is going to fall behind economically compared to other countries. Where most games missed the mark, however, was that war became a contest of "who declares last". County A declares war on Country B on T0. Country C, on T2, declares war on Country A or B and, having two turns of economic growth under its belt, manages to defeat one or both countries.

Ideally, somebody who was snowballing economically would be forced eventually to spend some of that production on the creation and maybe upkeep of an armed forces. Of course, if every player peaceniking is pulling 20-30% growth a turn, that one turn of building up a defensive force nobody else is building puts you behind by a strange margin. The fact that somebody doesn't just take advantage of the factory race to send in a small army to annex somebody is the fault of mechanics that A.) Allow units to be used the turn they are built and B.) Gives defenders too large of bonuses.

Allowing units to be used the turn they're built leads to strange things, such as no-army economic powerhouse Pakistan to suddenly pull a hundred divisions out its ass to invade you in one go. If Country A is allowed to use the units the turn they are built, Country A can build an army and take half of Country B before B is able to respond.

If, however, Country A builds up, and Country B has a turn to see that Country A is mobilizing, then Country B has the benefit of being able to at least prepare and start building an army. It is the difference between all wars in an IOT being decided on the first turn and taking several turns to reach a conclusion.

complex mechanisms governing international trade

Amusingly, the relationship between countries in various IOTs aren't actually all that complex. Most times the GM just adds up total production and gives each country a small percentage of that multiplied by a trade modifier. There's no complexity here, which is the problem. Had there actually been complex mechanism governing international trade, players would

A.) Have more options for settling political disputes and

B.) Have less incentive to go to war in general

Case and point, IOTV/XV's trade ruleset was bad. Had either game lasted a significantly long time, it would have become apparent that trade did not matter.

—but the end purpose remains the same: bankrolling the army. It is neorealism at its finest: security, and more specifically security through force, is the be-all and end-all of the state. This is problematic because most games do not advertise themselves as glorified RISK, and in the past two years have deliberately sought to diversify their appeal away from purely military strategy. While such attempts may manage to stymie prolonged war, they have failed to transcend the militarist mindset. The reason is that there is yet no game to offer an alternative paradigm; as Sonereal bluntly explains, there is simply nothing other than military or army-auxiliary sectors in which to invest. Economic innovation has always been intensive rather than expansive: GMs have greatly complicated market mechanisms, but the scope of the system has remained unchanged.

The increasingly complex economic rulesets did have one advantage conceptually: Variability. Previously, you attack somebody, you gained provinces, provinces produce things, you attack more people for more provinces. Good plan, doesn't actually make things interesting. Population, industrial modifiers, infrastructure modifiers, and the myriad of things that could break when you went and invaded somebody were supposed to make it so you couldn't immediately capitalize on conquest while, at the same time, giving the GM more things to work with numbers wise to influence the game.

The trouble is, Taleb's "black swans" exist irrespective of what is most convenient to the working model. IOT reformers such as myself criticize this 'mainstream' market mentality for outright ignoring most of the complex and interconnected influences that affect that same market's viability: environmental degradation, domestic political activism, refugee crises, the entire destruction of a generation through war, and so forth

.

Some games attempted, but the attempts reached a few problems.

For starters, population growth in 99% of games with pop growth is lulzy. 20-30% in a decade or two? Sure, fine. 20-30% in a year? Problematic.

Secondly, there are actually a few things better not left up completely to numbers. Domestic political activism is one of those. =IF(RANDBETWEEN(1,10)>Stability,RIOT,No RIOT) is a terrible, terrible system, for example, but that's the one a lot of used. RIOT used it. Did it "work"? Not really, and stability half the time is "throw money at poor people until they start smiling again".

The more interconnected, and more importantly, the more aware players are of the interconnectedness of their countries, the more likely the player is to make...diverse orders.

Take trade for example. Here is how trade usually works.

Example A

Pure =SUM(World Production)/100 or whatever * (1+r)

If Country A builds X number of factories, everybody on the planet derives some benefit. Some will derive more benefit from others, which is represented with r. R is usually just a trait, but sometimes r takes into account other line item spending such as infrastructure investment. However, the development of Country's B infrastructure, usually, doesn't help you out much unless national production itself includes infrastructure investment.

Amusingly, a lot of games with taxes didn't go far with this idea, and a few used tariffs, which was just a tax on trade. However, since every economy is pretty much a command economy, it isn't as if investors were going to go somewhere else, mainly because they didn't exist. Somebody with lower taxes and tariffs than you, at best, got higher economic growth rolls, the dreaded brain drain, and things like that.

Things get weird, however, the more complicated the trade ruleset.

Example B

Cities generate wealth. Cities trade with other cities, increasing their trade value. More trade increases the growth of cities even more.

SonIOT was weird. Six whole turns without a war. Largely because the ruleset made a wrong turn and put no emphasis or use for expansion, but all the emphasis on cities.

Example C

There are centers of trade. Each center of trade has a trade value, of which the CoT owner gets a cut. Each CoT has a limited number of slots to be filled by merchants. Therefore, you aggressively spent money in CoTs to get your merchants into the door, which had the added benefit of increasing the CoT's trade value. The more competition in a CoT, the faster its growth.

Furthermore, besides generating money for the merchant's sponsor, merchants also had the power to redirect the trade in a center of trade to a connecting center of trade. Things like blockades and wars could also redirect trade, causing a CoT to lose in value as others gain. Violently taking a CoT could actually destroy value, with another large chunk gets divided up into several connecting CoTs.

Therefore, competition wasn't just in ships. It was for control of centers of trade and for coveted spots in centers of trade. If there were already 20 merchants, you had to kick someone out. You didn't just get 1/21 of the center of trade's value.

That was IOTer. I personally liked it. Could've used a lot of work, such as making the cost of sending merchants to CoTs more expensive if the CoT itself has a large trade value.

Example D

The Private/Public Divide

The idea that a factory is either owned by the government or privately just was kinda left up to player discretion in the past, and had no real mechanic effects other than some games having RP/government bonuses and NPC favor weights. However, at some point, it is entirely possible to create an economic ruleset that does force everybody at the table.

Specifically, Country A is a super liberal country with a low tax rate and low barriers to trade. Country A's private sector is very wealthy and reinvests its profit in not just Country A, but other countries as well. Each turn, how attracted Country A's investors are to Country A and other countries is affected by everything from infrastructure projects, resource acquisition, relative tax rates, trade agreements, whether or not there is a war somewhere, and good ol' speculation. Country A's Investors, as a bonus, aren't just making money from Country A, but from factories and holdings all over the world.

Some countries with low taxes end up having a very rich capitalist class with investments all over the world. Governments all over the world benefit from the increased investment, which goes to build factories which are taxed. Country A benefits because its investors are making money elsewhere, bringing it back home, and building factories. The soft power implications of Country B having a lot of private assets owned by Country A's investors aren't lost on it either.

Then you multiply this by 30 or so countries and you get a picture of everybody influencing everybody. All of a sudden, that T0 war over there affects you because you have some investors who put money in there. The economy over there that every investor is flocking to lately because of speculation helps you because your investors are trying to get a cut of that action too.

And when Country A's years of being in a bubble finally end, everybody is affected.

The basic idea is that in trade, there should be many, many, many things influencing the relationships between countries. Something as simple as one country being hit with a recession and raising taxes ends up meaning less factories built globally, and slower growth.

More importantly, in the centuries since feudalism, the state's responsibilities have dramatically expanded; contrary to libertarian demagogues, it is the government that creates and maintains the necessary preconditions for a so-called healthy competitive market. Even in one of the most militaristically-oriented countries, North Korea, defence spending only accounts for one quarter of annual state expenditure. Some players—indeed, some GMs—would argue that the administrative details are "boring" and needn't be emphasized, or that the day-to-day management and distribution of public services can be assumed from (God forbid) GDP stats.

I do think there is a lot of room for GMs running more complex games to just accept unique orders. I've gotten some pretty unique spending orders in RoR, some of which actually do include things such as education spending, subsidies for land grants, and things that I didn't think of when making the game.

Even the most military-oriented players show an interest in state administration to a degree. The picture of administrative details being boring is largely the result of the popular image of the faceless state bureaucracy.

GDP stats were a dark time, man.

Some might claim such a holistic scope would turn IOT into a bureaucratic simulation involving mountains of spreadsheets. These sentiments disregard the possibility that a) players want to tinker with the nuts and bolts of the machine, and b) by virtue of the GM's own limited patience, such a sim would try to drastically simplify the sort of statistical nightmare that is a Paradox Interactive game. Besides which, IOT already is a game played with spreadsheets; we simply chose to slap a tank on the packaging, rather than a health minister.

To be fair, players don't mind spreadsheets. They mind hard to read mountains of them. Especially sheets that don't actually have any effect on them whatsoever.

Every RoR update involves with me messing with sixteen sheets, fourteen of which actually involve formulas and adding things. Players don't need to see all of that. What benefit does a player derive from seeing the way the Investment Engine works exactly other than an urge to minmax it?

Traditional rulesets reinforce this premise by subordinating what might otherwise be independent variables to the military-industrial frame. Take, for instance, popular approval, or national stability. While in more recent games Taniciusfox has tried to diversify the contributing factors, approval rating remains in a slavish inverse relationship to tax rates: low means high and high means low, despite the fact that, as demonstrated by the Scandinavian countries, under a committed government high taxes fund an extensive social welfare system that alleviates the sort of day-to-day suffering that foments discontent. Or take population growth, which is always assumed to be constant, always assumed to be positive, and always assumed to be sustainable. Time and again, from resistance⁴ to clientage⁵ to espionage⁶, the full scope of a field is dumbed down to fit within a market-friendly frame.

I'm largely against the idea of tying stability changes to any hard numbers now. As for everything else, the reason we end up getting weird results is because IOT rulesets MP and higher are just bastardized economic models, and like all models, are simplified and lead to weirdness sometimes.

Otherwise yes. There was a strange tendency for some games to veer into a model where the government heavily influenced everything, but all the profits belonged to the private sector, which could be taxed. The numbers didn't allow for a communist country to really pop up because, functionally, there was no difference between how a communist country and capitalist one operates.

In the end, whether a ruleset is spreadsheet heavy or narrative heavy, the final source of quality is still the GM. It is becoming less and less acceptable for a "serious" IOT not to be relatively substantial in content and not have a point besides being a weekly update of a map and spreadsheets with footnotes explaining why some provinces went the way they did.

Updates themselves should be part of setting the narrative, a task many GMs have found prudent to outsourcing to players by paying a pittance in the form of RP bonuses and, like the government contractors players are, they a lot of times end up overcharging the administration. Pure numbers can work sometimes, and there'll always be some demand for Risk games, but with Risk games players go in knowing what to expect.

And players today sorta expect more than they used to, which is why IOTXV and XVI, which had rather weak narratives and very dated and unimaginative rulesets, ended up not doing as well as IOTXIV. IOTXIV's strength was the GM and the way the GM shaped and created a story along with the players.

 

[Double A]

What benefit does a player derive from seeing the way the Investment Engine works exactly other than an urge to minmax it?

And the worst part is I don't even know how.