Taxes and You
So there will be tax income, and you may think that means I’ll track population somehow. You’d be very wrong. I haven’t tracked population for my games in over a year and I’m not starting now. Way too much a headache. Instead, your taxes are determined primarily by the size of your country. How can I relate country size to taxes? Don’t worry about it. Just know that bigger means more taxes. However, it also means more instability. More on that later. Also, you can increase your tax income less invasively by increasing tax efficiency, which is related to your stability among other things.
Resources
Resources are a constant in any self-respecting nation-builder. For this one… It’s a bit complicated. Numerically, there is Tax Income(discussed above), Production, Food, Research, and Dust. However, these numerical values(sans taxes-ish) are derived from actual resources you come across. Some of these “hard” resources might give you a bit in each “soft” resource, while others will give you a large amount of one “soft” resource. For example, an iron vein would give you a huge production boost while something like horses would give you a fairly large production boost as well as some food.
What do these Resources do? Well, most of them are rather straightforward. Tax income gives you a medium to trade with players as well as to obtain bodies to field your armies. Production allows you to build various structures as well as equipment for your military units. Food is more subtle; you spend it to combat instability from expansion. Your men also require an upkeep in food. Research is pooled together in order to complete research. That is discussed later in the Technology section.
Now, you’ve also seen this “Dust” business thrown around. What is it you might ask? Well… Go find out. I’m not spoiling the game because you’re too curious for your own good. However, if you wanna know more… Look in the technologies section. Probably.
*edit*So somehow water resources went over my head. It's pretty simple. You use your fleet to claim a resource and it will be marked as "yours." Resources marked for you will be yours to do what you wish with them. Because I love fun, you may skirmish with other players without declaring war for control of at-sea resources.
The Map and the Calendar
So the map is pretty basic. There will be all the players clearly marked, as well as a handful of NPCs you can interact with. Because I’m lazy, I won’t be filling /all/ places that probably should realistically be filled in. I’ll use the excuse that they were largely wiped out by the onslaught of the Creatures of the Spectrum, discussed later.
The Calendar is pretty straightforward. The first turn will start on Spring. The next turn will begin a year later, but the season will be Summer. The next year, Fall. You can see a pattern by now I hope. This affects a few things, such as the effectiveness of your armies, some resource yields, and the frequency of certain events. It also does other things that I won’t reveal yet.
Military and Combat
Each of your countries will have to build a military, either to subdue your adversaries or combat the forces of another world. To do this, you must field armies and navies. However, one unit does not an army make. How this works is you build units and throw them together in groups - this is what I refer to as Armies or Navies. While a single army might be fine to start out with if you’re that small, as you expand it will be obvious you’ll need to field more and it’s possible you won’t be able to cover all your bases all the time due to economic or logistical constraints.
In addition, armies cannot be reasonably composed of many units without a leader fit for the job. You, in all likelihood, want a leader for each one of your armies. However, the number of generals and admirals you can train is limited by the starting traits you choose and the buildings you erect. the actual skill of the general or admiral is based on your Army Tradition and Navy Tradition respectively, each having a maximum of 10. Essentially, I roll a 1d20+[Tradition] which determines the skill of the leader. You increase tradition by fighting battles and from particular structures, or perhaps even special traits derived from your culture. Tradition is decreased by being inactive militarily or losing favorable battles. Barring that, all players start with 5 tradition that you can distribute to either focus.
Military units all have two “classes” generally, their main class and their sub-class. The classes are: Assault, Support, Fire Support, and Siege. Assault deals with damaging enemy units, Support deals with the survivability of your units, Fire Support mitigates enemy damage, and Siege is for neutralizing enemy structures. The effectiveness of your unit depends on their Combat Value. The combat value is used in full with regards to a unit’s main class and used in half (rounded down) with regards to their subclass. So a unit with a main in assault and a sub in support with a combat value of 3 contributes 3 assault and 1 support to the Army. Each military unit has health and their main class determines the order in which they receive damage. Support classes take the most damage. If they are too weak to continue taking damage or are flat out wiped out, it goes to Assault, then Fire Support, then Seige. Not coincidentally, that is the order of how much health each class has from greatest to least.
Stability and Leadership
Your stability is a measure of your people’s approval of your leadership. People are fickle, and the current state of affairs means the situation is quite volatile. Most will be afraid and view the new inhabitants of this world, whether they’re alive or not, with contempt. Trying to interact with them positively might not be well received. However, the people react to wealth and prosperity and who knows how much these possibly new resources can do for society? You will have a choice to make, to be sure.
Your leadership is founded upon the decisions you make and the traits you chose. A popular king with a like-minded son would definitely cushion the blow when inevitably the time comes for the prince to succeed their father. However, if the King is widely unpopular in the same situation, it could be a recipe for disaster. Your betrothed traits does not affect your country, but your successor’s traits will somewhat depend on the traits you’ve chosen. Therefore, you must think carefully when selecting your traits for them as well. Each time an heir rises to meet their destiny, you will select a new significant other for them with, perhaps, totally new traits.
If your country happens to be a republic, things are different. While the stability reduction is more or less the same when a leader leaves their role, the selection for the successor is not. Three candidates will be brought in. You can select one to “endorse” and then a vote is held. The one who wins becomes the new leader, even if they are not the one you endorsed. It is possible, through subterfuge,to change the outcome. This runs the risk of upsetting the populace if another candidate is obviously more popular, however.
Expansion
Other than conquest, you have another means of expanding your borders. Completely naturally, your country will expand in unclaimed territory close by your current territory. As unclaimed "white" territory is also assumed to still hold people in them, disorganized they may be, your abstract population grows larger as you expand. This of course means, to keep stable, you need more food. You can also bar expansion or focus expansion in a particular area.
However, your citizens will not simply cross large tracks of sea to follow your ambition. For that, you need to fund colonial expeditions. But we are not quite at the age of exploration and colonialism, so we'll save that for another time. For now, if you want to colonize a relatively far piece of land, you will have to commit coin with your focused expansion there.
Trade Hubs and Diplomatic Trade
Trade between countries is pretty simple. Country A has something Country B wants, so B offers some sort of agreement. Maybe some income, maybe another resource they have in abundance. Whatever the case, this is automatic and the deal will go on for as long as the two parties decide.
There are trade hubs that will be marked on the map. These are semi-neutral grounds geopolitically and are comparable to trade hubs in EU4. The value of the overall hub depends on resources that goes through it; meanwhile, countries’ stake in it depends on their respective trade power. Holding a lot of land surrounding the hub and/or having your armies/navies patrol around it increases a country’s trade power in that hub, yielding income completely removed from taxes.
While you can use your resources and have them up in the local trade hub at the same time, you cannot trade it to someone else and do the same. Iron lent out to a country for whatever deal is completely removed from the market and is used by the lendee exclusively, except they cannot put it on the market themselves; only use it for domestic purposes.
Religion
Kinda a big deal in the 12th century, and it has been turned on its head. The map will show the religions and their domains at large as they are in the 12th century more or less, but as time moves on, cults revolving around the new state of the world are bound to rise. The question becomes how will you deal with them?
Your country will have a “Faith” stat for each faith within its borders. High faith will likely yield positive events about that faith. Having low Catholic Faith while running a nation dominated by Catholics is something of an issue. Meanwhile, having high Faith in two or more faiths can lead to religious disputes and outright civil war if the situation sours. On the flip side, it could lead to syncretism between faiths and the creation of a new one within your borders, almost seamlessly if you play your cards right. Religion in this game is very fluid, but also quite volatile.
Structures
Structures are a very good means to interact with your country. There are a variety of them available to begin with and more to unlock as technology advances. You build structures by committing production to the project in mind and placing them on the map. You will notice in the structures list, structures have a Tier system (not to be confused with technology). On the map, there is a key with some circles with "t#" roughly in the middle. That can be considered the structure's "range of effectiveness." In addition, no similar structures' ranges will be allowed to significantly overlap with them. This keeps players from building too many of the same structure in order to exploit a particularly good effect.
Technology
Along with Religion and Culture, this is one more thing that could define the future of this world with the changes that have taken place. There will be four technological paths to undertake. These paths are: Civic, Seafaring, Military, and Dust. Civic technologies advance the society, allowing better organization of the administration and construction of better economic buildings. Seafaring technologies advance your naval capabilities and opens the window to colonialism. Military technologies advance your military might for the security of your people and to defeat your enemies, and also encompasses espionage. Finally, Dust. Not much is known about this new substance, but many scholars believe that if it is applied to our way of thinking, it could advance technology well ahead of your rivals focusing on the mundane. Essentially, it is a “catch all” technology. Before going further, I will explain Technological Tiers.
So, on the technology “tree”, there will be Tiers. The first tier of any technology has to be researched in order for the second of that same technology to be researched. This is pretty obvious. Military 1 comes before Military 2 comes before Military 3. The cost for advancing will be displayed in the actual tree.
Dust is, like I said, a “catch all” technology. Advancing in dust will give you advancements in Civic, Seafaring, and Military categories. However, these advancements will be decidedly different. Furthermore, researching Dust before the others locks you out of actually researching the others in that Tier. For example, Researching Dust Tier 1 disallows you from researching Military Tier 1(and the others), and you must now either continue with the Dust research path or research the Tier 2 mundane technologies, which would then be unlocked. Only the first Dust technology is required to research all the other tiers of Dust, but you must either research the previous Tier or research all the mundane technologies of the previous tier. So, once you research Tier 0 of Dust, you can choose not research Tier 1 and instead go for the mundane technologies. Once all the Tier 1 mundane technologies are researched, you can research Tier 2 of Dust. This does not forbid you from researching Dust Tier 1, however. You can go back to it at any time, and in fact if you have researched a mundane technology before the respective Dust technology, and then research the Dust technology, you’re in for !!special surprises!!. However, this puts your country at the risk of falling behind of others in technology at the larger scale; while you’re playing around with Tier 1 dust tech, others could be farther ahead. Still, completing mundane technologies before their Dust counterparts has interesting implications. It’s ultimately up to you, though.
