New NESes, ideas, development, etc

[Symphony D.]

I don't claim to be an Excel guru, but if there's any sort of "IF" and "THEN" commands, it should be possible to rig something up where IF a value is detected (one of the final numerical values), THEN it displays a certain other set of data (from a table of word equivalents).

no constructive comments.

Sometimes dealing with destructive ones is fun too.

 

[Abaddon]

To my knowledge there is not. You can do anything with numbers, but convert to words is beyond me.. an i should know my way reasonably around it the amount of stats I did for my degree!

 

[The Strategos]

Well, the "IF" function allows you to change to two word values because it works by only displaying "true" or "false"

So for example,

If(B2<3,Low,High)

Means that is the number in B2 is less than 3 it will display the words "Low" while if larger it will display the words "high." However, to be useful for my needs, you need more than two catagories. Will play around more to see if I can trick it.

 

[Swissempire]

Symphony D, I really like your ruleset. Its is probably one of the best i've seen. Having read through it, I think the foundation of your game will be rock solid. The 3 Worlds Concept in particular I like, along with the leadership constraints. Those are my favorite ideas. A few questions/criticism though.

• I would argue that Monotheism+Knowledge+Economic Growth+Progress are not exclusively Commercial World beliefs/practices as outlined. I would say instead they come about during the beginning of Imperial and would ebb and flow with that "world" and become more constant within the Commercial world. Monotheism in particular wasn't strengthened by industrialization. Knowledge has always been prized if not extremely widely available(but it being widely available is fairly recent anyways). Economic Growth was always sought, just in different ways than now(though not entirely different). Finally, progress is an almost universal imperitive for any human civilization. No culture seeks stagnation or outright regression.
  
  
• Within Government/Polity, Democracy shouldn't be exclusively Commercial or even a favored commercial form. Correct conditions really need to exist for it to exist, as we have seen with the attempts to force Presidential OR Parliamentary Monarchies on societies. If Germany had won either WW, the commercial world wouldn't be one of democracies. Also, I think there should be a totalitarianism Government/Polity within the Commercial World. You cannot ignore the prevalence of such societies...
  
  
• Within the "progression" statistic, would regression be allowed? Could a culture regress to low or middle?
  
  
• How long/descriptive will the development stat be in terms of flora, fauna and mineralogical?
  
  
• Under Military, how will the difference between a small, elite professional force, a large conscription force, and a volunteer force be shown? How specific will force descriptions get? Will there be any size indicator?
  
  
• Are physical and immaterial under vitality at all intertwined? If so, how will they affect each other?
  
  
• The world Aquatic is so...unwieldy. What about Nautical?
  
  [*]Why is secular/pious an strictly commercial value?
  
  
• Under tenets, how exactly will it be portrayed? Will there be the religion, and then the values emphasized within that religion. A Christian state could emphasis social justice and love or fundementalism and persecution. An Islamic state could be extremist/jihadi or not. Will this be shown?
  
  
• Under tenets, will percentages of religions be shown?
  
  
• For leadership, I love the advisor thing, but will we be able to choose our advisors? Or are advisors arbitrarily assigned? The difference between Woodrow Wilson's cabinet and Andrew Jackson's is huge, and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln cross ideological lines to get the best people in their cabinet.
  

Great job though

I attempted to use the bolding but i probably failed miserably.

 

[The Strategos]

Well, the "IF" function allows you to change to two word values because it works by only displaying "true" or "false"

So for example,

If(B2<3,Low,High)

Means that is the number in B2 is less than 3 it will display the words "Low" while if larger it will display the words "high." However, to be useful for my needs, you need more than two catagories. Will play around more to see if I can trick it.

Figured out how to nestle formulas, so I got it to work, here's how. For the formula:

=IF(B2>4,"High",IF(B2>2,"Medium",IF(B2>0,"Low")))

Excel looks at the first opperation, in this case, if B2 is greater than 4. If that is true, it displays "High." If it is false, it goes to the next formula, in this case if it is higher than 2. If that is true, it displays "Medium" If false, it continues. Excel allows for up to seven values using this method. For this to work, the highest value must always be first in the chain and the lowest value the last.

 

[North King]

Interesting work, Strategos.

I'm currently hammering out the following:

Economy

The economy has been completely retooled from previous NESes, so you may wish to pay attention here.

Economy is mostly produced on a local level. There are various types of economy, of course: agricultural, industrial, and trade. Each of these is taxed (the rate is set by, naturally enough, you), and the revenue generated from these taxes (minus that which is skimmed off by corrupt collectors) eventually ends up giving you a certain amount of money to play with.

PRODUCTION

Production is essentially all industrial and artisan activities in your nation – everything besides agriculture and trade/services. It is limited by the amount of labor and resources you have: you need power to run industrial factories. In the ancient era, of course, things are rather easier to set up and maintain; however it takes a great deal to get a proper industrial economy started up. This will be a relatively minor sector until the era of steam.

AGRICULTURE

Agriculture is probably the most important part of the economy in the early eras... in fact, it will remain that way until the Industrial age, and even then, you need it to feed your people. The amount of money you can make off of agriculture is limited by the area you are growing in (this is, of course, represented by climate). Agriculture takes a long time and a lot of money to get started, and if you push it too hard, soil exhaustion is entirely possible. Note that advances can greatly improve yield: the moldboard plow, three field system, nitrate fertilizers, and so on.

TRADE

All trade is based on specialization, supply, and demand. Specialization refers to a nation producing what it is best at producing. Honduras, for example, is prime banana country, whereas Saudi Arabia would do best investing in oil. Supply is what a nation produces. Demand is what it needs.

Supply and Demand are listed on a national level. All regions’ trade goods are summed to create the Quantity Supplied; all regions’ needs are summed as Quantity Demanded.

In early eras, trade will be physically conducted through major cities – Trade Centers. These are large urban areas, typically serving more than one nation. Unless you set an embargo on goods from a specific TC, your merchants will automatically trade with the nearest ones. These cities gain a bonus to their income from intraregional trade that passes through them, and in later eras will begin to see investments flow through them, along with the setup of service businesses as additional bonuses.

Provinces and cities will make money through selling their goods to these trade centers (in practice, that is; in theory they’re just conducting them through the region). The money made off of these sales appears as taxable revenues in the Province section under Trade.

Occasionally, as a player, you may facilitate the creation of a TC. This is usually done by making yours the exclusive first port of call for some trade route; to do this, you’ll need to set up a trade route. In order to accomplish this, you have to firstly map the route (if you don’t do this quite thoroughly, you may well end up losing merchants at sea or in a desert), secondly establish it (sometimes necessitating the agreement of the country on the other end to trade), and thirdly ensure its safety from pirates and bandits.

Some trade goods give additional benefits. Luxuries will improve your people’s loyalty (in the ancient ages, usually only the rich will experience this boost). Coal and oil, as you might have guessed, are necessary for the workings of your production. Some nations need grain to avoid utter starvation.

TAX RATES

Each of these economies ends up giving you a tax base from each province and city. This tax base is (hopefully) a large number; as the leader, you can only take a part of it. This is levied through a tax rate.

There are two primary tax rates you will have to deal with.

The first is the tax for each province or city. These can, theoretically, be levied individually, or you can simply set a blanket tax rate over the entire nation. As a ruler, your objective will be to ensure that taxes are not high enough to starve your people, but still high enough to keep your nation functioning. Keep an eye on the loyalty stat.

The second set of taxes are tariffs. Now, in real life, you can play with tariffs quite a bit. For simplicity’s sake, we will limit it to a single rate; a specific tariff on an item can be represented by a quick decrease in the importation of that item. Tariffs are the only way in the ancient age to make money off of trade. As in real life, therefore, free trade zones don’t make any sense whatsoever in the early periods.

Keep in mind that high domestic taxes can be a bad idea. For one thing, they can lead to rebellion. For another, they can stifle economic growth. Tariffs, on the other hand, are necessary for trade, but if they are too high, trade simply will not exist. Moreover, in later eras, the tariffs from province to province can lead to stunted development, as people have little incentive to trade or develop a modern economy.

******************

It's rather lacking on specifics at the moment; this is mostly a concept outline. Not even a proofread one, for that point.

For the record, I fully intend to have this a visible system, with any formulas out in the open. While black boxes work well in some regards, I want to make a flexible ruleset that will work for all mods, and excluding them from seeing it seems silly to me.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Each continent has its own workbook (is that the right term?). Each nation will only have enough money to change a couple cells each turn, so I change those, and let formulas take care of the rest. The only real time consuming part is the switch from the workbook to the actual stat layout, which I admit, is a pain.

Because of the above rationale behind my actions, I am considering making stats (such as infrastructure) be displayed, not as numbers, but as vaguer statements. I haven’t yet found a way to have a formula so that numbers are changed to words automatically, though if you know of a way, I would love to hear it. As an example:

State’s Name: Intermarrium Empire
Available Spending: 4
Culture: Average
Corruption: Very High
Infrastructure: Very Low
Patronage: Low
Nobles’ Power (Opinion): Very High (Low)
Commoner’s Power (Opinion): Low (Low)
Army (Leadership/Troop Quality): 5 units (High/Medium)
Navy (Leadership/Troop Quality):

I use excel to do all that. It is pretty simple

This converts numbers to text:
=IF(AND(B62>=0.5,B58>=1,B59>=1,B54>3),"Yes","No")

It identifies when a player can start projects. If b62 >= .5 and B59>=1 and B54>3, then Yes, otherwiswe No. As those three stats change players move closer to getting project capability. I will post the answer to #1 in a minute.

EDIT: The AND statement could be an OR statement or as posted above nested IF thens can be used. The "text" is what makes mixing numbers and text work. I use similar formulas for UUs and the Maps and Charts.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I have a stat worksheet for each player/nation. In a single workbook I have 45 tabs of stuff: 36 nations and 9 other tabs of various information. Each cradle is color coded by tab color. Each cradle has a tab that collects all the stat data so I can cut and paste it all at once. Every time I change a number in a nation, the stats change automatically.

I have attached an Excel example. It is for the Oracle of Wendar. The Manonash tab collects the data from the Strategos tab. And in my copy all the other Manonash nations are listed too. The strategos tab just shows the very top of your player tab. It is a 4 step process.

1. Stat data is entered on lines 30-220 of the spreadsheet and various calculations are done.

2. The yellow cells collect the data for the stats from below and get them in the left to right sequence I want for the final stats.

3. In the green area, the data collected in the yellow cells is combined into a single cell with appropriate spacing and "/" dividers.

4. Once the data is in its final stat format, it goes to the Manaonash tab wher it is listed with all the other players and can be cut and pasted into the thread. You will notice that I built in vBulletin codes for coloring the lines.

With this system I only have to enter data once and the stat post is automatically updated at every change. Let me know if you have any questions.

 

[Symphony D.]

I would argue that Monotheism+Knowledge+Economic Growth+Progress are not exclusively Commercial World beliefs/practices as outlined.
[...]
Within Government/Polity, Democracy shouldn't be exclusively Commercial or even a favored commercial form.

Below is a table illustrating the constituent parts of these components, and (not necessarily wholly inclusive, nor exhaustive and comprehensive) some of their manifestations in real life, by cultural world.

Bolded for emphasis.

Within the "progression" statistic, would regression be allowed? Could a culture regress to low or middle?

Theoretically, though if that happens it's just really more likely it'll be absorbed or destroyed by something that doesn't that much more quickly.

How long/descriptive will the development stat be in terms of flora, fauna and mineralogical?

That's entirely subjective depending on what you mean by "long," but probably less than 100 to 200 characters. Major strategic minerals or resources (Cu, Au, Ag, Pb, Limestone, Hardwoods, so on), domesticable megafauna, major crops.

Under Military, how will the difference between a small, elite professional force, a large conscription force, and a volunteer force be shown? How specific will force descriptions get? Will there be any size indicator?

They won't, other than small blurbs. Your military's specifics are more or less completely pointless to expound upon when viewed across a span of around 600±400 years, and given the average lifespan of a nation, let alone a dynasty, your country will probably long since have bitten the dust.

Are physical and immaterial under vitality at all intertwined? If so, how will they affect each other?

Maybe marginally. And, by my whims and estimations. The only Black Box here is my mind. I suppose if anything should terrify you, that should be it.

The world Aquatic is so...unwieldy. What about Nautical?

I preferred Naval, and then realized there was no corresponding word for land. Too bad.

Why is secular/pious an strictly commercial value?

That... isn't mentioned anywhere under the Sec/Pio Value...?

Under tenets, how exactly will it be portrayed? Will there be the religion, and then the values emphasized within that religion.

There is X. X has Y%. X's details are listed elsewhere, where X gets a paragraph long or so blurb, possibly augmented with links to any specifics X has elsewhere.

Under tenets, will percentages of religions be shown?

... whatever percentage of the people it is they represent?

For leadership, I love the advisor thing, but will we be able to choose our advisors?

Presumably it would be generic, since role playing specific people is difficult, time-consuming, and mostly unnecessary. Presumably since the idea of strong opposition parties is gaining favor, there would be wildly differing advice, but that's up the the moderator.

 

[Birdjaguar]

...and one of the things I intend to add is visible trade routes (meaning the most important routes, ofcourse). These are not only obviously important with regards to trade, but also are useful for army movement (which is generally best kept to rivers, coastlines and those routes).

Trade comes in two flavors: actual routes (ie silk road) and trade areas (Eastern Mediterranean, Volga River, Baltic Sea, etc) I think you should "show" both types. Trade routes on a map is a nice touch and could be affected by war. But maritime and regional trade is as, if not more, important.

My idea is to have two-three (depends on how many end up being necessary) military mini-updates before the main update that would sum things up and put them in the greater context. Basically, one is supposed to first send main orders and military orders for the first "phase"; after that, if a drawn-out conflict begins, I would post a mini-update describing the early action in those drawn-out conflicts and describe the present situation, complete with an army positions map and updated military stats (for everyone, so that nations could try and intervenne, or launch a new war in the light of a new distraction). Then the second and if need be the third, the latter being followed directly by the main update. I think this makes more sense than having the military updates follow the main update, as it is clear that the outcomes of the military action would always greatly influence the overall end-turn situations in all the countries; and I would not want to just merge them, because in spite of this not being a wargame it would go against the principles of historical realism to oversimplify warfare and the diplomacy tied to it. Still, I could see this making for a very tight updating schedule (personally I plan on spreading the entire process out over approximately two weeks; that still will require a great amount of commitment on the behalf of the players, but I think that's a good thing; at worst, some people will have to master the fine art of NPCing instruction).

I really like the idea of an update that unfolds across both game time and real time and my recent attempt to get the mechanisms in place in birdNES that "blew up" will be revisited. For me the biggest problem is that it tends to make updating a never ending process.

And if I am going to go there, then I would like to see a game that links the flow of real time days to game time years. Every three or four days (or as action warrants) an X year update is posted that reflects the actions of the orders most recently sent. If a player doesn't send but once every two weeks his actions appear every X times 3 years. Players who send orders/spending more frequently see more happen. The game rolls on with or without players. If a war starts, players may get more active. Players who drop their participation may see their nation decline and disappear. I think I would have to be retired to do this though.

 

[Birdjaguar]

For the record, I fully intend to have this a visible system, with any formulas out in the open. While black boxes work well in some regards, I want to make a flexible ruleset that will work for all mods, and excluding them from seeing it seems silly to me.

Of course I like your ideas, and given the current discussion of so many interesting rules sets, I empathsize with an open book approach to formulas. I sometimes want to post the stat builder for BirdNES. But for now I think while it might be helpful for those of you who are trying to develop new rules, I think it works against game play. When players know exactly how all the stats work, they will write orders and play to improve them. They stop playing as a leader of a nation. In my first NES I posted all the formulas and explained how it all worked. And players took advantage of that to build their nation in ways that were OOC. I think it detracted from the game.

Another thing happens when players "game" the stats. All of the problems become quickly apparent (and every complicated spreadsheet will have them) and various rounds of fixes are necessary during the game. Players will find ways to do things you did not expect or notice in your testing and when those are pushed hard, the game balance blows up. Two players end up with 12 EP while most have 3-4.

In any game that uses Excel to go through a series of caclutations, you will find after a few updates that some of your inputs or modifiers are wrong. For example, I use a value that is divided into a nation's domestc economy to calculate the number of ECs. That number is my best guess for now. If I tell the players that I divide DE by 6.5 to calculate ECs, then if that turns out to be a bad choice from actual play, changing it will create a public relations mess.

If I say that ECs are based on DE and nothing more, then as the game moves along I can tweak the value and find the best one without creating a feeling that I'm changing the rules part way through hurting some players and helping others. It also means that if a player does something special to his nation, I can change his divisor to 6 to speed up EC creation and it won't provoke controversy. Once BirdNES is over, then I will post a complete workbook for all to see exactly how it all worked.



I have already built much of what strategos, das and NK are talking about into BirdNES and if anyone has questions about how to some of those things mathematically, please just ask.

 

[North King]

Of course I like your ideas, and given the current discussion of so many interesting rules sets, I empathsize with an open book approach to formulas. I sometimes want to post the stat builder for BirdNES. But for now I think while it might be helpful for those of you who are trying to develop new rules, I think it works against game play. When players know exactly how all the stats work, they will write orders and play to improve them. They stop playing as a leader of a nation. In my first NES I posted all the formulas and explained how it all worked. And players took advantage of that to build their nation in ways that were OOC. I think it detracted from the game.

I quite understand this approach. However, there is quite a simple way around it. That being: not all the formulas are strictly defined up front in the rules. Instead, we keep some numbers and some sections up to the moderator. I'm thinking, for example, that economic production in terms of agriculture will be defined by quite a simple set of ideas. First of all, the climate type limits how much you can achieve maximum. Secondly, the infrastructure matters in getting any production out of the region. Then you have a long initial investment, increasing returns for a while, a peak, then negative returns as the soil wears out.

Now, I could technically set out a definitive formula, or I could say that the general idea is there, and leave the specifics up to the moderator.

Another thing happens when players "game" the stats. All of the problems become quickly apparent (and every complicated spreadsheet will have them) and various rounds of fixes are necessary during the game.

I'm hoping to iron out the problems before I go anywhere with my own, partially through a full disclosure of the ideas I'm using so people can point out errors (by the way, do you see anything seriously wrong with the current set I posted?), and partially through extensive testing of the formulas myself before I start this thing.

 

[jalapeno_dude]

Having GMed a fair amount of D&D recently, I'm becoming more inclined to agree with NK's philosophy. From my point of view, there are two characteristics a ruleset should have:

1. It should clearly present what mechanics it does have and spell out their effects on gameplay.
2. It should also state what isn't covered by the rules.

Hmm. #2 is sounding like a Donald Rumsfeld-type "unknown unknown". What I mean is that it's frankly impossible to cover every situation that can occur in history with a mechanical ruleset, so what rules there are should acknowledge that they're by necessity incomplete.

Yes, open rulesets do create opportunities for powergaming (which I've been guilty of myself), but I believe that if the game is truly immersive enough most people will act in-character and semi-realistically, and those who don't should be ruled in by mod fiat.

It seems like there are two schools of thought about what the role of a modder should be, and at least at the moment BJ and NK seem to be coming down on opposite sides. Either the mod is there to "moderate" the game, run the stat updates and battles, and add some poetic fluff to make it look better, or the mod's role is to facilitate the creation of an interesting game and work with the players to tell a good and/or realistic story.

That last sentence came out sounding fairly biased towards the latter picture, which is probably unavoidable since it reflects my opinion at the moment, but I want to emphasize that both approaches can be successful.

The culmination of the former approach is to create a stat system such that either all possible actions or all permitted actions are easily translatable into what is basically pseudocode. The orders can then be run through a program/spreadsheet/random number generator, and results are arrived at. Only then are the results actually translated back into writing.

On the other hand, a possible culmination of the latter approach is, indeed, something like a "never ending story", with nonexistent or minimal or purely qualitative stats.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Economy

The economy has been completely retooled from previous NESes, so you may wish to pay attention here.

Economy is mostly produced on a local level. There are various types of economy, of course: agricultural, industrial, and trade. Each of these is taxed (the rate is set by, naturally enough, you), and the revenue generated from these taxes (minus that which is skimmed off by corrupt[ion] collectors) eventually ends up giving you a certain amount of money to play with.

These are all good. I count 6 variables (bolded), but you have left out some important things that affect "money to play with". How about the quality of the leadership? The sophistication of the bureaucracy? Tax efficiency?

I would list all the stats you want to track (posted or not) and then group them by area. I divide my stats into Nation, Government, Domestic economy, military, trade and culture/religion. Then I mix them as needed. By keeping them grouped, it makes troubleshooting much easier. In addition it helps you to see where new items need to be added.

PRODUCTION

Production is essentially all industrial and artisan activities in your nation &#8211; everything besides agriculture and trade/services. It is limited by the amount of labor and resources you have: you need power to run industrial factories. In the ancient era, of course, things are rather easier to set up and maintain; however it takes a great deal to get a proper industrial economy started up. This will be a relatively minor sector until the era of steam.

Production is really a subset of domestic economy and can include agriculture, manufacturing (crafts), roads, infrastructure, shipbuilding, education, war effects, upkeep in infrastructure, ECs.

AGRICULTURE

Agriculture is probably the most important part of the economy in the early eras... in fact, it will remain that way until the Industrial age, and even then, you need it to feed your people. The amount of money you can make off of agriculture is limited by the area you are growing in (this is, of course, represented by climate). Agriculture takes a long time and a lot of money to get started, and if you push it too hard, soil exhaustion is entirely possible. Note that advances can greatly improve yield: the moldboard plow, three field system, nitrate fertilizers, and so on.

I would just put all this under Domestic economy. I have a land value (under Nation), based on type (river valley, steppe, desert, mountains etc.) that feeds both agriculture and population growth. By changing this value, I can capture changes, good or bad and have them flow into othe rplaces.

TRADE

All trade is based on specialization, supply, and demand. Specialization refers to a nation producing what it is best at producing. Honduras, for example, is prime banana country, whereas Saudi Arabia would do best investing in oil. Supply is what a nation produces. Demand is what it needs.

Supply and Demand are listed on a national level. All regions’ trade goods are summed to create the Quantity Supplied; all regions’ needs are summed as Quantity Demanded.

In early eras, trade will be physically conducted through major cities &#8211; Trade Centers. These are large urban areas, typically serving more than one nation. Unless you set an embargo on goods from a specific TC, your merchants will automatically trade with the nearest ones. These cities gain a bonus to their income from intraregional trade that passes through them, and in later eras will begin to see investments flow through them, along with the setup of service businesses as additional bonuses.

Provinces and cities will make money through selling their goods to these trade centers (in practice, that is; in theory they’re just conducting them through the region). The money made off of these sales appears as taxable revenues in the Province section under Trade.

Occasionally, as a player, you may facilitate the creation of a TC. This is usually done by making yours the exclusive first port of call for some trade route; to do this, you’ll need to set up a trade route. In order to accomplish this, you have to firstly map the route (if you don’t do this quite thoroughly, you may well end up losing merchants at sea or in a desert), secondly establish it (sometimes necessitating the agreement of the country on the other end to trade), and thirdly ensure its safety from pirates and bandits.

Some trade goods give additional benefits. Luxuries will improve your people’s loyalty (in the ancient ages, usually only the rich will experience this boost). Coal and oil, as you might have guessed, are necessary for the workings of your production. Some nations need grain to avoid utter starvation.

I ahve spent a lot of time talking about trade so i'm sure you know what I think.

TAX RATES

Each of these economies ends up giving you a tax base from each province and city. This tax base is (hopefully) a large number; as the leader, you can only take a part of it. This is levied through a tax rate.

There are two primary tax rates you will have to deal with.

The first is the tax for each province or city. These can, theoretically, be levied individually, or you can simply set a blanket tax rate over the entire nation. As a ruler, your objective will be to ensure that taxes are not high enough to starve your people, but still high enough to keep your nation functioning. Keep an eye on the loyalty stat.

The second set of taxes are tariffs. Now, in real life, you can play with tariffs quite a bit. For simplicity’s sake, we will limit it to a single rate; a specific tariff on an item can be represented by a quick decrease in the importation of that item. Tariffs are the only way in the ancient age to make money off of trade. As in real life, therefore, free trade zones don’t make any sense whatsoever in the early periods.

Keep in mind that high domestic taxes can be a bad idea. For one thing, they can lead to rebellion. For another, they can stifle economic growth. Tariffs, on the other hand, are necessary for trade, but if they are too high, trade simply will not exist. Moreover, in later eras, the tariffs from province to province can lead to stunted development, as people have little incentive to trade or develop a modern economy.

I agree with all this but bury it under government practices. I think that having different rates for different areas is overly complicated. I do like the idea that taxes will affect both confidence and stability.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Having GMed a fair amount of D&D recently, I'm becoming more inclined to agree with NK's philosophy. From my point of view, there are two characteristics a ruleset should have:

1. It should clearly present what mechanics it does have and spell out their effects on gameplay.
2. It should also state what isn't covered by the rules.

Hmm. #2 is sounding like a Donald Rumsfeld-type "unknown unknown". What I mean is that it's frankly impossible to cover every situation that can occur in history with a mechanical ruleset, so what rules there are should acknowledge that they're by necessity incomplete.

Yes, open rulesets do create opportunities for powergaming (which I've been guilty of myself), but I believe that if the game is truly immersive enough most people will act in-character and semi-realistically, and those who don't should be ruled in by mod fiat.

It seems like there are two schools of thought about what the role of a modder should be, and at least at the moment BJ and NK seem to be coming down on opposite sides. Either the mod is there to "moderate" the game, run the stat updates and battles, and add some poetic fluff to make it look better, or the mod's role is to facilitate the creation of an interesting game and work with the players to tell a good and/or realistic story.

That last sentence came out sounding fairly biased towards the latter picture, which is probably unavoidable since it reflects my opinion at the moment, but I want to emphasize that both approaches can be successful.

The culmination of the former approach is to create a stat system such that either all possible actions or all permitted actions are easily translatable into what is basically pseudocode. The orders can then be run through a program/spreadsheet/random number generator, and results are arrived at. Only then are the results actually translated back into writing.

On the other hand, a possible culmination of the latter approach is, indeed, something like a "never ending story", with nonexistent or minimal or purely qualitative stats.

I hope you are affiliating the red one with NK, because I'm certainly on the side of the blue one.

The bolded section does not necessarily apply to the red style. the complex stat calculations are only (in my opinion) about making record keeping simpler and removing some of the subjectivity from modding. They allow for a more realistic and automated subtext to the ongoing events of the game: player X now has the military leadership, technology and experience to create UUs.

 

[jalapeno_dude]

Ooh, I can bold things too!

<snip>
the complex stat calculations are only (in my opinion) about making record keeping simpler and removing some of the subjectivity from modding. They allow for a more realistic and automated subtext to the ongoing events of the game: player X now has the military leadership, technology and experience to create UUs.

This is where I disagree with you. Modding should be subjective, and I think it ultimately has to be. No matter how detailed you make the rules, or how much you hide the rules (unless you create enough hidden variables that players can't if you're being subjective or objective), there's always the possibility that the rules can be "figured out" in such a way that there's a dominant strategy.

In fact, I'd go further and suggest that hiding the stats actually encourages powergaming, in that it's hard to know what you're doing right or wrong unless you closely analyze the effects of your spending. I know that the first thing I've done after your updates is checking my spending against my stat changes and figuring out what caused what.

Either all stats should be qualitative and descriptive or it should be obvious how to increase each stat. If neither of these are true, you're rewarding players for thinking about their spending in the context of the stat system rather than in in-game terms.

 

[Symphony D.]

Figured out how to nestle formulas, so I got it to work

ASSUMPTIVE WIN!!!

In fact, I'd go further and suggest that hiding the stats actually encourages powergaming, in that it's hard to know what you're doing right or wrong unless you closely analyze the effects of your spending.

DUH. That's exactly the point. You don't know precisely what you're doing. You can't powergame if you don't know what the hell you're doing. I don't know what strange definition of powergaming your D&D group has, but it must be truly bizarre...

Either all stats should be qualitative and descriptive or it should be obvious how to increase each stat. If neither of these are true, you're rewarding players for thinking about their spending in the context of the stat system rather than in in-game terms.

False! A real world leader does not know precisely how to increase everything. And not everything in the real world is qualitative. Your argument fails reality, and therefore it just simply fails period as regards this issue. I will go further by saying this is quite frankly a dumb argument from anything like a realistic perspective on feasibility. A fully quantified system that is not extremely limited is impossible (by your definition it would have to be such as to approximate the complexity of reality itself, and even then, no mechanical system can account for all possibilities, as somebody pointed out). A fully descriptive system is ******** (because as has been pointed out, certain people will always exploit it, immersion capabilities or not, or even consciously or not). The only solution that preserves play or a semblance of reality is a framework of quantification with an interpretive structure guided by moderator intuition and research.

Spelling everything out has been done. It has not worked as you describe. The other has not been done, because it cannot be done. Extremism sucks. Centrism FTW.

 

[Birdjaguar]

This is where I disagree with you. Modding should be subjective, and I think it ultimately has to be. No matter how detailed you make the rules, or how much you hide the rules (unless you create enough hidden variables that players can't if you're being subjective or objective), there's always the possibility that the rules can be "figured out" in such a way that there's a dominant strategy.

In fact, I'd go further and suggest that hiding the stats actually encourages powergaming, in that it's hard to know what you're doing right or wrong unless you closely analyze the effects of your spending. I know that the first thing I've done after your updates is checking my spending against my stat changes and figuring out what caused what.

Either all stats should be qualitative and descriptive or it should be obvious how to increase each stat. If neither of these are true, you're rewarding players for thinking about their spending in the context of the stat system rather than in in-game terms.

I think that modding should encompass both subjective and objective elements and I use both. If a player spends an EP on agricultural improvements, then X happens. And it happens to everyone. But what if someone spends an EP to "increase agricultural exports"? The solution is not so clear cut. Players are all over the map with their orders and spending. I think that when rules are written you have to decide at the beginning just how structured you are going to make spending when it comes to improving stats.

In the first NESes I ever played in things were very structured. Players could spend EP on five or six things and that was it. The rules could and did list all the options. For BirdNES I choose to make spending totally unrestricted. Players can spend their money anyway they want and I will find a way to incorporate it into the game. In some cases the incorporation is completely objective. In others it is subjective. That is why I have goals and policies as part of the orders. They provide guidance in figuring out how to allocate spending. In some case when you spend 1 EP on something, I adjust a stat by .5 or 1.25. For example, if you buy 1000 infantry in peace time and that puts you 400 infantry over your max, what should I do? waste .4 EP or allow you to have more troops than you should? Usually, I give you 600 troops and add .4 to some other military stat you don't know about.

I have about 150 active cells that generate the 15 or so lines you see. Some have very subtle effects that are inappropriate for change by EP spending. Posting all of what I use would confuse 90% of the players and create a huge advantage for the other 10%. Then I would end up spending an emormous amount of time explaining to players why they can't spend money directly to change a specific cell. My government practices section has 25 values alone. The domestic economy has 30.

BirdNES can easily be power gamed. All you have to do is spend and act like I think a leader in that time and place should act. I have built my own prejudices and preferences into the stats and how they are calculated. But I have also built in ways to compensate when things or players get to whacky. My goal is to moderate a good game and if it takes a little "subjective control" to do so, I am not afraid to do it.

By the way, I applaud your post update inspections to try and figure out how the stats work and at one level you can, but as the game progresses, more and more hidden variables and connections between values come into play so that keeping up will be very difficult. The single most important thing to keep in mind is that doing what a "good" leader would do, will almost always pay off.

 

[North King]

These are all good. I count 6 variables (bolded), but you have left out some important things that affect "money to play with". How about the quality of the leadership? The sophistication of the bureaucracy? Tax efficiency?

Quality of the leadership is covered under corruption, really. Sophistication of the bureaucracy also (though I think the sophistication doesn't really do much to help the corruption ). Tax efficiency, once again, under corruption.

I would list all the stats you want to track (posted or not) and then group them by area. I divide my stats into Nation, Government, Domestic economy, military, trade and culture/religion. Then I mix them as needed. By keeping them grouped, it makes troubleshooting much easier. In addition it helps you to see where new items need to be added.

Production is really a subset of domestic economy and can include agriculture, manufacturing (crafts), roads, infrastructure, shipbuilding, education, war effects, upkeep in infrastructure, ECs.

I would just put all this under Domestic economy. I have a land value (under Nation), based on type (river valley, steppe, desert, mountains etc.) that feeds both agriculture and population growth. By changing this value, I can capture changes, good or bad and have them flow into othe rplaces.

It is all under Domestic Economy. I'm basically just splitting that up into several stats.

I ahve spent a lot of time talking about trade so i'm sure you know what I think.

I know, in principle, what you do. I don't know how you'd respond to my system.

I agree with all this but bury it under government practices. I think that having different rates for different areas is overly complicated. I do like the idea that taxes will affect both confidence and stability.

I think it's important to put taxes under the economy, as they can quite clearly affect the economy themselves, as well as the more mundane point that they're absolutely dependent on the economy. Unless you mean something else by government practices.

In any case, I kind of like grouping spending and economy in the same area, as it's much less confusing to players.

As for tax rates for different areas -- players don't really have to do it, but it should be an option: some territories, after all, will be more disloyal than others, and lowering their tax burden might be a good idea. Also note that specific taxes on the American colonies led to the Revolution (despite the fact that we were paying lower taxes than people in England, but whatever).

Furthermore, if I were going for the Excel file approach (which I doubt I will; the math isn't particularly difficult), I'd group province stats together and sum their incomes for the nations elsewhere.

 

[Birdjaguar]

TRADE

All trade is based on specialization, supply, and demand. Specialization refers to a nation producing what it is best at producing. Honduras, for example, is prime banana country, whereas Saudi Arabia would do best investing in oil. Supply is what a nation produces. Demand is what it needs.

Supply and Demand are listed on a national level. All regions’ trade goods are summed to create the Quantity Supplied; all regions’ needs are summed as Quantity Demanded.[/quote]I like using supply and demand as descriptors. How are you going to quantify these? And what happens in areas where multiple crops are grown?

Occasionally, as a player, you may facilitate the creation of a TC. This is usually done by making yours the exclusive first port of call for some trade route; to do this, you’ll need to set up a trade route. In order to accomplish this, you have to firstly map the route (if you don’t do this quite thoroughly, you may well end up losing merchants at sea or in a desert), secondly establish it (sometimes necessitating the agreement of the country on the other end to trade), and thirdly ensure its safety from pirates and bandits.

Some trade goods give additional benefits. Luxuries will improve your people’s loyalty (in the ancient ages, usually only the rich will experience this boost). Coal and oil, as you might have guessed, are necessary for the workings of your production. Some nations need grain to avoid utter starvation.

Letting [players set up trade routes could become a nightmare to keep track of. If a regin has 10 nations and each sets up a trade route with its 9 neighbors, how many trade routes do you have to keep track of? And I think of trade routes as emerging over time rather than as being set up by some king. Countries that make it safe for traders, get trade.