IOT Developmental Thread

Anyway, I've rebalanced the Empires of Joy ruleset and slashed a lot of the fat/problematic features of the original based on the input of players.

1. Streamlined. In short, 1800 words of the old ruleset worth of stuff has been removed. Mechanics that have been removed include the entire political system and the international market. The political system is now largely a 1-6 stability system by province that provides small bonuses at high levels and heavy penalties at low levels.

The international market is gone as is Iokril, Seskine, and Daprese. Factories require less inputs overall.

Penalties for going over building and military limits have been simplified to being a straight reduction in provincial/national production respectively. Sea and air units no longer count against the military limit.

From a practical standpoint, this reduces the number of sheets players need to pay attention to from 9 to 5 and tightly focuses the resource game.

2. Added Power. Most buildings require Power, which are produced by Power Plants. There are two plants at start: Clean Plants and Hasnine Plants. Clean Plants don't require any input, but don't produce as much power. Hasnine Plants produce a lot of power, but have a large upfront cost and require Hasnine.

Surplus power can't be banked, but gives the province a bonus to prevent the need to minmax Power too much.

A special factory, Battery Plants, can convert Power to Batteries, which can be stockpiled. Batteries can be used on a province to temporarily increase Power in the province. Two starting units require batteries every turn to run.

Provinces with Hasnine no longer have a limited amount of Hasnine. In exchange, Hasnine Mines now cost more.

3. Science system is more passive. Most buildings and units produce science in a field. A special university build provides a large amount of science per turn.

4. Added and tweaks to espionage. Your spies can now attack the stability of other empires or steal their science. You can also turn your spies against your own population to increase the stability of your empire.

5. Resource shortages no longer close down factories entirely, just reduce output.

6. More varied starts. Players will be given a very large amount of IP in the pre-game to spend on their starting provinces.

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The changes were all made with an eye toward, you know, making player interaction easier to focus on. The old political system was too single-player, and the international market was too broken and unreliable.

Players are now given a large amount of IP at game start and throughout the starting conference to develop their empires. Want a large starting military over a large industrial start? Go ahead. Want a lot of intelligence centers and universities? Go for it. The starting spends follow conference rules, which is you have to post your builds publicly.

This will reduce the beginning "I don't have enough X" issue. A player can just balance their starting economy to deal with the lack of X.

Summary of Resources

IP/Shipbuilding/Munitions: Industrial resources, no change to how they work.
Raw Materials/Hasnine: Work as before. Hasnine now how immediate use. Less raw materials is required per factory.
Power/Batteries: Provides the foundation of an industrial economy and high-powered military. Provides bonuses for having an excess.

Other Notes

Again, most units no longer require any upkeep beyond Munitions/Shipbuilding except for the starting high-powered naval units. No more micromanaging Iokril. Otherwise no large change to the military system.

Less starting techs. A number of techs will be randomly given out to randomly selected players, and one or two techs will be generated per conference round.

Added Production Licenses. A player with a unique building or unit can give other players a licenses. Each license allows the player to produce one of that building or unit. A player receiving a license can't trade that license to a third party.

Both of the above tech changes should, hopefully, reduce the amount of tech brokering.

Everything is still being tweaked on Discord.
 
If Y = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Net Exports, a 50% reduction of the population wouldn't lead outright to a 50% reduction in the size of the economy still. Consumption would decrease, yes, but investment and government spending don't necessarily fall by 50% as well. [snip]

Hm, yes, this seems like a reasonable formulation.

So, if Y = (L)^x (K)^y, for { x,y : x + y = 1 where x,y are Reals greater than or equal to 0 }, then the problem of the GM is finding the values of x,y for which the economy is accurately measured. Hence, it could be useful to derive a law of determining x and y for any given economic scenario.
 
To be honest, the numbers I were taught were ~.65/.35 for L and K respectively.
 
I'd be very interested in a study on varying those.
 
@People Who Know Things about Modern Navies

How are modern navies structured and what are the roles of the various types of boats? Doesn't need to be super in depth, just a basic overview would be nice.
 
I dont know a lot about them, but what I know is most navies dont have capital ships anymore. The WW2 destroyer has evolved and is nowadays typically the mainstay of most fleets, being as heavy but more powerful than mid century cruisers (which only 3 navies in the world still operate).

Missile boats are the smaller, cheaper alternstive. I think they first saw real combat in one of the Araboisraeli wars.

Of course carriers are still a thing, but only a handful of nations field, can field, or want to field classical role carriers. French, Spanish, and Australian navies, for example, have smaller carriers (the Australian navy actually purchased the Spanish design) developed not so much as a floating airfield for independent operation than as a logistic support base for overseas military operations.
 
When it comes to navys, there are basically three types of navys.

Brownwater navy: Coastal defense forces with no oversea capabilitys, mostly patrol boats and corvettes. Doesn't mean primitive navy, for example the Swedish anvy is a Brownwater navy.

Greenwater navy: Navys with limited oversea capabilities, mostly in the seas and oceans the border. Often well equipped and sized, but simply lack the bases and ships for world wide action.
Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, Japanese,German/Dutch Navy are good examples. Often have either alrge amphibic attack ships or small carriers.

Bluewater Navy: World wide active navys, best tech and ability to send forces nearly everywhere. Carriers are a must, just like a large support fleet.
US Navy is the best example, but also French, British, Russian and maybe even the chinese Navy.


Ships:

Can be divided in 4 types:

Light ships: All kind of boat (Patrol, Attack, Missile) and Corvettes. Small ships with limited range and armament, often used as escort and Patrol. Anything below 2000 tonnes normally.

Heavy ships: Frigates, Destroyers, Cruiser, Battlecruiser (Mother Russia ). Major war ships with strong armament and large range. These ships can either be used on their own, for pwoer demonstration or in Task forces and battlegroups, grouped around the support and transport ships.

Capital ships are mostly Carriers these days. Carriers can range from very small ones with hardly over 10 000 tonnes (see thai navy), Helicopter Carriers like the Mistral-Class or the Japanese navys ships, to small carriers (see Italian Cavour), Medium Carrier (Russian Kiev-class, French Charles de Gaulle), Large Carriers (British Quenn-Elizabeth-class) and of course Super Carriers (See Us-Navy).

Lastly Submarines. Two kinds of subs. Attack subs, small subs armed with torpedos mostly meant to attack cargo ships aor infiltrate enemy tasks forces for carrier sniping (German Fuel-Cell are currently the best at this). And Second, of course strategic Subs, with Nuclear missles, lots of them.
 
I would like to note that generally speaking the difference between frigates and destroyers is simply naming convention. For example the Spanish Álvaro de Bazán-class frigates are essentially the US Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. As Reus said, there is no meaningful difference in most cases.
 
Jep, Germany for example simply doesn't like to call its warships destroyers anymore, because they sound like something attacking. We call ship which are alrger than some destroyers still frigates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F125-class_frigate

A modern fleet will be centerd around destroyers and Carriers.
A WW I and WW II fleet will be centerd around its Carriers and/or Battleships, but most of the fighting will be done by Cruisers.
Battleships are rare and expensive, they are prestigous and loosing even one can be devastating for smaller nations. BBs are only usefull in a few scenarios, mostly in protecting carriers from Cruisers and Destroyers and in fighting other Battleships.
Most of the smaller battles, convoy raiding, blockading and protecting is done by cruisers, they are faster, cheaper and hurt less if lost.
All in all Battleships are not very usefull, except to keep other Battleships at bay. Afterall a lucky torpedo shoot from a destroyer or Cruiser is enough to sink these beasts.
 
And you all are forgetting the Dreadnaught, named after the HMS Dreadnaught, these ships are essentially proto battleships, used mostly during WWI

I include this cuz I like the name, however it is a useful distinction between WWI and WWII battleships. Additionally because of the name in fantasy or scifi settings, a Dreadnaught could be considered a hypothetical "Super Battleship" simply because of the name, in the event that you wanted to make a hypothetical class of ships larger than regular capitalships/battleships Dreadnaught is probably the most common term for something similar to what I just described.
 
yeah thats true, I just wanted to add the fact that in some cases of fiction they can also be used and considered as "super battleships"
 
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Once one understands the world through the lens of Solutionist thinking, the reason for the militarist paradigm becomes clear! Wars are not brave soldiers fighting and dying for their country in the field; they are competing investments to acquire property and resources. What makes a great leader a great leader isn’t his management of the citizenry, but his ability to allocate capital to maximize profit. Combat is competition! Wars are hostile takeovers! State conquest is merger! The sole motivating benefit of war is to acquire commodities: provinces, labor, and natural resources.

The rational actor must absolve himself of all moral consideration, of all moralizing factors, and engage in perpetual expansion. Wars aren’t waged in support of the market anymore. They are, themselves, a market mechanism. Any concern for the well-being of the citizenry is discretionary.

(Coming soon with more blur)
((Thanks Thor))​
 
Finally got a rough draft of the rules down. It is, largely, a streamlined version of Empire of Joy's with the biggest changes being larger starts, spending IP at game start and throughout the start conference, and espionage being a lot more interesting (IMO). Available buildings and units are more varied. The basic factory of EoJ has been replaced with two new factories, both with their strengths and weaknesses, but both produce 2 IP instead of 1.

University non-wonder civic buildings that cost 30 IP, produce 10 Science in each field, and provides the province with +5% to provincial build and military capacity. The penalty for going over capacity is now slightly more forgiving. Going over the building capacity in a province and the input penalty associated maxes out at double input costs.

Since all buildings now require input in the form of power or, in the case of Clean Plants, IP, this should be fine.

Finally, there's the expected workbook improvements. Less sheets and columns mainly.



Here is the map being used. Again, same as before except color changes and a filter to sharpen things up a bit.

Spoiler :
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