ANNOUNCEMENT: New Rule: EXPERTISE
Hello everyone! I'm here to annoy you all with still more rules updates. As I've mentioned before, for this coming update I've been focusing on introducing more sophisticated systems for tracking national development of science and industry, and on the other hand taking a look at militaries. The military rules changes are still under construction, but for now I am happily prepared to present a new rule that I am calling Expertise.
Expertise refers to the knowledge and learning in your nation, and is represented by Expertise Points, or XP, which are gained by doing just about everything. There are 10 categories of Expertise:
1. Army: Expertise in martial affairs as they relate to land warfare, and land-based war-machines and weapons.
2. Navy: Expertise in seamanship, sailing, nauticality, marine commerce and warfare.
3. Air: Expertise in pilotry, aeronautical engineering, and air doctrine and warfare.
4. Public: Expertise in the formation of public policy and management of public property.
5. Private: Expertise in market principles, finances, and industry.
6. Electric: Expertise in electromagnetism and the design and manufacture of electronics.
7. Chemistry: Expertise in chemical engineering, biochemistry, and medicine. Better living through chemistry!
8. Atomic: Expertise in the strange science of atomics.
9. Rocketry: Expertise in the explosive science of rocketry.
10. Social: Expertise in sociology and social organization. Generally indicates how advanced and flexible your social thinkers are. Do not underestimate this category.
XP is gained differently in the different categories. The total number of XPs you have (as well as the number of XP you've gained in the last turn, your learning efficiency for that kind of Expertise, and your share of the global XP for that category) will be displayed in your stats and in your government audit sheets, a third reference sheet that will be maintained as of this update. Mostly your attention should be focused on your global share, as this will determine the magnitude of the benefits you receive from your knowledge in that category, as well as the chances of a major discovery in that field occurring in your nation.
XP will be used to dictate policy effectiveness over the long run, as nations that acquire expertise in certain areas become trailblazers in those same fields. For instance, only a few nations will start with Rocketry or Atomic expertise.
Generally you will gain XP by engaging in relevant activities, and all Social Programs will natively generate some XP for you the longer you run them (and, in turn, benefit from XP). This process of Social Programs and XP slowly increasing over time will be referred to informally as "learning".
Expertise will also have varying syncretic bonuses that are context-specific. For instance, if you have a high Air expertise but low Army expertise and high Electric expertise, you will probably be very good at creating cutting-edge commercial liners and heavy aircraft, but not as good at creating tactical bombers and light fighters. High Air and High Navy will indicate good carrier capacity/naval bombing capacity, and High Navy and High Army will indicate excellent convoy supply integration and amphibious operations capacity.
One issue that is not yet resolved with this feature is whether or not the government audit sheets (including XP) will be made visible to everyone. While this is the easy solution, it is also not ideal, as it will be very obvious who has expertise in which categories especially as they pertain to sensitive science. Hence, I am considering obscuring some of the XP gains from general knowledge, while allowing XP stockpiles (representing aggregate knowledge) to be seen. Probably the only gains that would be obscured from the start would be Rocketry and Atomic, for obvious reasons. This is not a perfect solution as attentive players will be able to infer who is gaining how much and where, but we probably want that to happen anyway.
My ideal solution is customizing audit sheets for each player and having them password-protected. Info for other players would be available based on your relative espionage strength versus them. Obviously this would allow us to heavily customize the information available to each player. This would be cool, and provide a practical interface for espionage, but is not a priority feature at this point.
The next time I trundle up with some new features, I'll be addressing the way militaries and military conflicts are modeled in-game. Specifically, I'm looking at revamping the army quality and doctrine stat to allow for players to customize their doctrines according to their own strategic priorities. Doctrines will fit into certain "archtypes" of which there will generally be one or two "pioneers" who have a superior grasp of the strategic principles supporting their doctrine. For instance, you can expect the USA and the GFA to be the pioneers of their "Megafirepower" and "Vernichtungsschlact" [edited] doctrines.
Power Projection will also be re-tooled to accurately reflect the appropriate internal expertise, and will probably be pinned automatically to some measure of your relevant expertise, making my life easier and your lives more frustrating; i.e. any player with at least 10% of the global expertise and 50% mobilization will have Global power projection (or something like that). Yay!
Finally, force limits will be introduced to prevent large peacetime standing armies at 0 Mobilization. These force limits will be based on your doctrine, your overall manpower, and your relevant expertise.
