In this never ending story that we have here, you will start out as a city roaming the traction lands from South America (renamed to Aztlan), to the great expanse of the Great Hunting Ground extending over what was once Eurasia, from Britain to the ruins of Russia to the walls of the burgeoning Anti-Traction League already forming in the mountains of the Himalayas and around them. Africa as well is open via land bridge via what were once the Iberian Peninsula and the Arabian Peninsula as well, while Australia can be accessed via water craft. Antarctica is a spot that has been unfrozen and now has gold mines and oil wells available to enterprising traction cities in its new and mountainous terrain.
The goal of your city in the never ending story is simple; survive. The threats that are posed through the system of Municipal Darwinism is that the strong will triumph the weak and smash them asunder, ripping them apart to be consumed by the larger cities. Large cities and metropolis will consume smaller cities, which in turn consume towns, which consume villages, which consume static settlements and others of the sort. At the beginning of the game, your city will be but a small and careful predator city upon the continent and hunting ground of your own choosing, but it will not remain like that for long; as time progresses and goes on, you will expand and add new things to your arsenal of tricks and tips. With the advent of material acquired through consumption of other cities, scavenging, trading, and a supply of cash, you will be able to build your city higher, especially if you convert a former metropolis into a conglomerate with your own. You will also be able to build suburbs for a higher price, but these satellite cities will be handy and unique, circling around you, protecting you, fielding guns and soldiers against threats and sharing in the spoils as your hunting party grows and becomes larger.
To start of the mechanics and the rules page, diplomacy and such is first up. At first, you will only be able to contact cities that are close by to yourself, and moving away from them will reduce your communication to nothing. Long range radio equipment that you can manufacture, as well as other communication devices reverse engineered from Old Tech and other such things will allow you to do the same. Airships, built by yourself for trade or for warfare between yourself and other cities, can be utilized to keep in touch with other cities, but do keep in mind that even they have a range to them unless they can land upon a friendly city. Airships concerned with diplomatic affairs can shed their guns and other such things for extra engines, fuel, and power in order to reach a farther destination more easily.
Much like in any other never ending story, you will be able to decide what sort of diplomacy you want to inflict upon your neighbors. Being a kind and caring one helpful and interested, or a savage warlord that chases down those that flee and threatens to bring them under the yoke of the new hunting party that is assembling against them can be done. Currency and EPs can be traded between cities as you wish, either for goods such as food, water, fuel, technology and other such things, or set up for contracts if you want to hire a mercenary city or perhaps a city to help establish crops upon your own city as it grows larger (if not set up a contract for them to provide food for your own metropolis). You can additionally set up pacts for non-consumption between cities or create your own alliances and coalitions. If you are familiar with the Traction City books themselves, you may know about the Traktionstadtgesselschaft, the German led alliance of cities fighting another side; you may as well set up your own coalitions and alliances against other forces if you so wish, but be wary as NPCs and others will do the same against you if they feel threatened by your reign of power.
Trade itself within the game is a simple and yet complex matter. You have a variety of goods to exchange to other cities, based upon currency, weapons that you might wish to exchange, food, water, equipment, supplies, Old Tech, Stalkers, airships, slave labor, etc., and even things that you might have found in your travels or stuff that you yourself might manufacture aboard your cities. These trade goods are essential to a citys survival upon the Hunting Grounds when it is not having a good run and collecting lots of dead cities under its belt, and you can set up trades if you and another trundle along, or more perhaps, or even set up a trading cluster with a series of cities, where the freeform environment of the cluster allows interesting trade goods from a variety of metropolises to congregate and be exchanged as need be. The price of goods is not set in stone, and as one would say the price of the goods is what the purchaser will pay for. Airships, refitted into cargo capability, can also be used to trade with long range cities, but you will need to experiment, retrofit, and change as need be.
In terms of goods themselves, most are pretty simple and self-explanatory. Food is split into a different variety of categories, being grain, meat, poultry products, fish, vegetables and fruits, and luxury items, which are needed in that order to keep a good population healthy and running. Grain is perhaps the easiest to acquire, as miller cities are some of the most common cities in the agricultural category, allowing a simple and easy flow of grain and bread into your city if you should happen to make friends with them. Luxury items typically include such things as wine, alcohol, chocolates, and other tasty delicacies that are produced by cities only with the ability to do so; cities like NPC Boudreaux produces wine, and Aztlan cities will produce chocolate. Water itself is self-explanatory, and can be collected through either de-salinization, water traps in the air, or by following rivers and refining the water in order to make sure that it isnt polluted and inconsumable. Although your populace may be able to survive the usage of polluted and unclean water, it will cause side effects the longer you go on, and low water stores will cause riots, as will low food stores. Food and water stores aboard cities can be expanded with a round of currency and some trading, and the larger a city is, the larger its stores can be built and held out, while it will consume more and vice versa for the smaller cities as well.
Fuel is another necessary component for a well-oiled city to keep up and keep going. Fuel is a variety of things, from the fossil fuels of oil and natural gas and coal, to hydraulics driven by water for sea going cities, solar panel using metropolises, and even things like nuclear reactors and fusion generators, as well as biofuel drives. In terms of efficiency, the efficiency of fuels and the space they take up goes from least to most efficient, and most space to least space is biofuel, fossil fuels, solar cells, fission plants, and fusion reactors. Do keep in mind though, the higher you go on the chain of fuel sources and engines, the more experimentation with Old Tech that you will need to utilize and test, as well as create expeditions to look for as they cannot be created by scientists within your own cities. You can also have more than one to increase your speed and power, but they will require more fuel and more fuel storages, which can be upgraded much in the way supply storages can.
War between cities can be an ugly and brutal affair; focused between two or more cities engaged in destroying each other, they will have to use their bonuses effectively against one another. There are no hard counters against a specific type of city, but instead soft counters; a Panzerstadt can successfully fend off a pair of cities and sustain minimal losses, but being chased by a group of cities or engaged by lots of smaller predators will see it ripped to shreds very quickly. You must be able to use the engines of war that you have amassed, be they your own city, artillery batteries, soldiers and militias deployed from city to city, or even Stalkers that are created from bits of old technology gleaned from ruins of North America and such here and there. Artillery used to incapacitate a city through destruction of its engines, its jaws, and its reactors and internal bits will pave the way for an invasion of the city if you dont wish to start consuming it right away. Fighting may be bloody from street to street, as many cities will have their own soldiers and militias and perhaps even Stalkers fighting against you in the streets as best that they can. Upon completion of taking a city, you have the option to dismantle it and take the populace aboard (either for slave labor or to become a part of your citizenry), destroy the city, or vassalize it and force it to become a part of your roaming hunting party or alliance that you are amassing. Most cities will probably be glad that you didnt put everyone to the sword, but be wary of long harbored grudges that some may have if they try to split away from your hunting party.
So, the basic outline of the mechanics is done, and the cities posted so far look very good. I'll finish up what else has not been covered here shortly, over Friday-Sunday.
emocratic Repulic
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