Iron and Blood 5

[Tee Kay]

*music*

"Nicht durch Reden oder Majoritätsbeschlüsse werden die großen Fragen der Zeit entschieden, sondern durch Eisen und Blut"
- Otto von Bismarck​

 

[Tee Kay]

Iron and Blood 5
An Imperium Offtopicum Game

Rules
​

Housekeeping

Setting

IB5 is set in an alternate-history version of Earth, populated by player-created nations. The game’s starting year is AD1831. The level of technology and cultural development of this world is similar to Earth in our timeline (so no nuclear weapons in the mid-19th century, for instance).

Starting Out

To start, choose twenty provinces on the map to establish your country, with one of them as the capital. All the provinces must be connected to the capital in some way; either by land or sea. Write a short history/background to your country. In this fictional world, history is the same as OTL (our timeline) until it starts to diverge around AD1450.

Update Policy

The game is turn-based, with a turn representing five years in game-time (and later four years or two years as the game approaches the 20th century). A turn will be divided into a “peace phase” and a “war phase”, with a mid-turn update in between. A new turn begins with a final update from the GM summarising all the events of the previous turn.

Orders: Peace Phase

You will have five days (=120 hours) after an update to send your orders for the turn. In your orders you can give out instructions for how your country would develop, what treaties you have, building orders, and so on; basically, everything including spy actions but excluding battle orders. Send your orders secretly to the GM by private message. If you change your orders, you must send your entire order again in a separate PM.

Any new declaration of war (DoW) must be made within the first 24 hours of an update. Allies of the belligerents can respond with their own DoW within the next 48 hours after that. All DoW must be in the main thread – no surprise attacks can be made. Any land transfers between countries must also be made during this time.

I will not accept any new or changed orders after the five days deadline, and I will start to work on the mid-turn update. This can take anything from a day to a week or more to finish, depending on my schedule.

Orders: War Phase

If there are no wars, then the war phase is skipped and a new turn begins. Otherwise, the war phase follows a mid-turn update (MTU). You have 48 hours after MTU to send in your orders for the war phase. I will conduct battles in this order: air battles first, then naval battles, then land battles.

Roleplaying Policy

Roleplaying is very encouraged. The way you roleplay your country can have in-game effects. The more you guys put into roleplay, the more lively our alternate history timeline will be.

When deciding to take action, this is how I determine the impact of a post on world affairs.

1) A post in the main thread is like publishing in the main world newspapers, these can cause an event or impact in between updates
2) A post in an alliance group, chat room, social group, etc is like a diplomatic meeting behind closed doors and will usually only cause an impact when the results of these discussions are publicised in the main thread.
3) A PM between the GM and a player is considered secret and will only make an impact when the update is announced.

NOTE: Items 2 and 3 can be investigated via espionage.

Game Concepts

Spoiler :

Events

The world is a chaotic place. As leader of a country, you will have to deal with unpredictable happenings and intended and unintended consequences of your policies and actions.

The game will involve lots of events, and the way the player respond to their events will influence the way their country develops. Some will be random events, others will be events issued at GM discretion based on how the player roleplay their country. You will mostly be given several choices on how to respond to an issue, each with its own pros and cons.

Industrial Capacity (IC)

IC is the most important number in game. It represents the economic resources that you have at your disposal.

The world is divided into provinces, each of which will be level 1-5. The sum of all the province levels you own is your Base Income. Each country will also have an industrial score. IC is calculated simply by Base Income multiplied by your industrial score. So if you have three level 5 provinces, and a score of 2, then your IC is 3 x 5 x 2 = 30

IC is also affected by other assorted modifiers (eg events). You can also pay or get paid IC for trading with or lending to other countries. Note that if you receive IC from another country either from trade or aid or loan you can’t spend it until the following turn.

Province levels can be upgraded with improving technology or events. Industrial score can be increased by spending what I call the IC Cost. Each upgrade increases your industrial score by 0.1. The cost generally goes up with the amount of IC you currently have, but this too can be modified by events, tech, etc.

IC also can be converted to money and banked away for a rainy day, where it earns interest.

Resources and Trade

Some provinces produce resources which are important to keep your country running and which you can trade with other countries. They generally reflect real world resource distributions. The relevant ones at the start of the game are coal, metals, food, tropical crops, and cotton. Oil, uranium, and rubber become important much later.

You can support any number of level 1 territories and an industrial score of up to 1.5 without any resources, but if you expand further you will need to secure them unless you want a -20% IC penalty if you are short of any resource, plus a series of nasty events (food riots if you are short of food, for instance).

Dissent

Dissent is an abstract measure of how happy your populace is with your rule. Dissent grows naturally, but its growth can be controlled. Factors which can affect dissent and dissent growth include war weariness, economic situation, standard of living, responses to events, and food shortages.

If dissent gets too high, you may pay IC to attempt to reduce it. This is akin to, say, giving people a tax break, or hosting a festival. Dissent will be reduced, but randomly.

Dissent also affects your chance of getting an event; higher dissent means a higher chance of controversial issues being raised that you have to respond to. Depending on your perspective this might be a good or bad thing. Too high dissent (say, +80%) can spark spontaneous rebellion.

Research

You can put money into researching new technologies to improve living standards, military capabilities, and so on. Everyone starts at “level one” and invests IC into research until you reach the next level. The first country to reach a new level gets a one-off bonus through a special event, as well as the bonus from researching that level of technology.

There is no set tech tree; what will be researched and its effects depend on roleplay and the historical time period when a particular level is reached.

War and Combat

Spoiler :

Land Combat

To fight land wars you build land units. Obviously. Each unit you build is stored in a national pool until they are deployed. Units from the pool can be deployed in any province that is connected by land or sea to the capital. Once deployed, a unit can move up to three provinces on the map per turn, or it can lose a turn and be called back to the pool.

A unit has three attributes: power, integrity, and mobility. In a battle, the side with the higher mobility attacks first, and the two sides deal damage (decided by RNG) until one side’s power reaches zero; that is, when all of one side’s units have been defeated. Integrity determines what percentage of the defeated units is destroyed in the battle. The survivors go back into the unit pool, while the remaining units of the victor stay in the province, or move on if they have any moves remaining.

Things like terrain, events, technology can all influence the outcome of the battle. Damage dealt by RNG, for instance, will increase with technology. Mountains reduce an attacker’s mobility, while deserts reduce integrity, and so on.

Naval Combat

Naval combat works similarly to land combat. The difference is that there’s no terrain effect involved, the “provinces” are much larger, and you get a bonus if you control a coastal province adjacent to the area you are fighting in.

Amphibious Assault

Land units that are in the pool can be used to perform amphibious assault. First, however, the sea zone from where the units will land must be cleared. So if you are invading North Carolina from the sea but you failed to dislodge enemy naval forces from Zone 23, then the amphibious assault is automatically cancelled.

Blockade

You may get naval units to blockade a sea zone. In this way you may deny a capital the benefits of resources and IC from its overseas provinces, or IC from trading with other countries, unless there is a viable route over which it can be received (eg by land).

Belligerence

Belligerence refers to how much the rest of the world hates you. A country that routinely breaks treaties and mount aggressive wars of conquest will have a very high belligerence. Attacking a country with high belligerence gives a smaller dissent penalty than attacking a country with a low belligerence.

 

[Tee Kay]

The Map

Spoiler Political map :

Spoiler Terrain map :

Spoiler Ethno-religious map :

 

[Tee Kay]

Reserved..

 

[Tee Kay]

Reserved...

And you may now post.

 

[JohannaK]

I love you, I love you, I love you so much.

 

[SouthernKing]

The Empire of Arcadia

Color: navy blue
Capital: Williamsburg, Virginia (will later be renamed)
Claims: Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the southernmost province in New York. That should add up to 20 but if it doesn't start excising the westernmost provinces first.

History:

 

[christos200]

Greek Empire:

Spoiler :

More later.

 

[Tee Kay]

Oh, almost forgot. Islands with dotted lines connecting them count as one province. The Scottish islands are also the same province as the highlands, but I forgot to put the dotted lines in.

Also nominate a colour too.

 

[JohannaK]

I have a map, and if the ship's wifi stops being a beach, I will post it.

 

[JohannaK]

It is still a beach, but here it is:

Spoiler :

 

[videonfan]

Claiming this.More to come later:
The Caliphate

Spoiler :

Capital:Mecca

 

[WhiteRobber]

Boreal Mutherland (Siberia)

Spoiler :

more later

 

[Tee Kay]

One other thing. Serious nations only please. In joining, I also expect you to know a little bit about 19th-20th century history, as well as basic geography.

 

[JohannaK]

More 19th than 20th, surely.

I must admit Texas is quite a riddle to me.

 

[christos200]

I know a lot about the 19th century, since I have a love for history, mainly about the Napoleonic Wars, the German and Italian unifications and the history of Greece during the 19th century.

 

[videonfan]

One other thing. Serious nations only please. In joining, I also expect you to know a little bit about 19th-20th century history, as well as basic geography.

Is the Caliphate accepted?I have worked on the history,but it also depends on what christos writes about the Ottomans.

 

[Tee Kay]

I know a lot about the 19th century, since I have a love for history, mainly about the Napoleonic Wars, the German and Italian unifications and the history of Greece during the 19th century.

Is the Caliphate accepted?I have worked on the history,but it also depends on what christos writes about the Ottomans.

It's fine. You sure you want the Red Sea coast and not the Nile Valley?

 

[videonfan]

It's fine. You sure you want the Red Sea coast and not the Nile Valley?

That's an interesting question.At first I thought about making the caliphate Arabia & Modern day Iraq.Nevertheless,this is it's final form.I will try and conquer the Nile Valley later.

 

[WhiteRobber]

*looks up stuff about Siberia on wikipedia*
Well, apparently, my nation is half mongol. Me gusta