Rnes7: Gang Lands (board NES)

[RoddyVR]

well, Rnes6 was a complete failure. not a single post other then my own. too complicated i guess. so here's a simpler one.
Warman closing his game came as a bad shock to me, and so i just had to do something in its memory.


Rnes7: Gang Lands

You are a powerfull (and powerhungry) person with influence over some of the gangs that rule the streets of this corrupted island city. You could be a corrupt cop, a doctor who "perscribes" rare drugs, a mafia boss or just a gangster who wants more from life (or any(shady)thing else you can think up).

To become more powerfull you need to own more territory of the city. Every territory you own gives you control over one of the city's many gangs. To gain ownership of a territory you need most of the gangs in the territory to consider you the owner. Noone knows for sure which gangs you control, but it is public knowledge who owns what territory. Compete or cooperate with the other players to gain more lands. Betray them or be loyal to suit your goals.

Gangs
The 26 Gangs are represented on the map as letters of the alphabet (A-Z).
Each gang has a "home" territory. Whoever owns that territory will control the gang. I will tell you in a PM when you gain ownership of a territory which gang it allows you to control.
A Gang can move to any adjasent territory during a turn (or stay in the one its in).
A Gang will excert "influence" over the territory in the name of one of the players, and which ever player has the most influence for a territory gets ownership of the territory and control of its gang (which may not even be in the territory).
Every Gang every turn will have orders, wheather they be given by players or made up by me or made by a random order generator i've made for this game. If a player does not send orders for his/her Gangs, it is entirely possible that his gangs will end up turning on him for that turn and working for someone else (random means they move in a random direction and give influence to a random player wherever they end up).

Territories
There are 31 territories on Marina island. 5 of them are "special" and do not grant control of a gang, the rest are each "home" to a Gang.
I know which territory is "home" to which gang, but you'll have to either figure it out or guess or remain ignorant. The player who owns a territory will be told which gang "lives" in that territory, that's the only SURE way to know.

A territory can be "owned" by a player, or it can be neutral. Gangs that live in neutral territories are controled by my random orders generator and are completely unpredictable. They will move around about half the time (and stay put the other half), and will randomly give their influence to players.

To gain ownership of a territory, you need to have the most influence over it at the end of the update. Each gang has one infuence "point" and the current owner of the territory has one influence point in his favor. If there is a tie for top influence in a territory, then it becomes neutral. So one gang "attacking" an enemy territory will only make it neutral and then next turn can make it owned by its player (if there's no intereference).

Special territories
There are 5 "special" territories on the map. they have little icons representing what the are:
Heli Pad (on top of scyscraper)
Court House
Police station
Subway station (metro/underground, whatever you call it)
Hospital

for now these territories are guarded by the government (police) and cannot be taken by gangs. gangs can go in there (and random ones proly will) but they will not be able to wrest control of the territory from the government.
later, i will add special bonuses for taking control of these territories, but it will be tough (like the governement will have a 2 or 3 influence defence or something).

Updates
i'm planning on making updates once a week. because i expect quite a bit of secretive diplomacy in this game. if i get all the orders faster then a week i'll do the update earlier. those who do not send orders by the deadline will have their gangs be issued random orders.

updates will have a new map, which will show who has control of which territories and where all the gangs are.
i will NOT list HOW someone won a territory. if there are 5 gangs in a territory, you will not know if the winner won with 2 gangs while the other 3 worked for 3 different players or if the winner had 3 or more gangs "vote" for him. this makes it harder to figure out who your real friends and enemies are. and the random gangs just make it even harder.
after each update, i'll send a PM to each player telling them which gangs they have control over. you have no more then 1 week from teh time of that PM to send in your orders.

Signing up
When you sign up, pick a color (i'll try to get as close as i can to it) and the territory you want as your starting location. remember that your starting location will have control of a gang, but that gang will MOST LIKELY NOT be on your starting location, and could be all the way across the city. so in truth, most of the starting "expansion" will be done by the random gangs giving out their "influence" to random players.

 

[RoddyVR]

the numbers will only be on this empty map
later maps will not have the numbers. you can refer to territories by their number or by "go up", "go north" and so on if you want.

 

[RoddyVR]

you dont need to read this if you dont want. just some ideas/suggestions i thought about while making up the rules to the game.
i dont think there are any rules as such in here (if there are, i'll move them up to post 1), just ways to abuse them, lol.


while it is possible to survive on your own, you will likely need allies in some cases to get their gangs to help you take control of territory (in return for you helping them with theirs).

the random gangs will continualy throw wrenches into your plans.
and you'll never REALY know for sure which gangs belong to who (unless you've owned their homebase at one point), so when an ally sais "well, i'll have Gang R help you there" dont be sure he actualy has control over it just cause it gave him a territory last turn. might have been random.

because you will get territories given to you by random gangs sometimes, and because gangs dont start out in their home territories, it will probably be prety hard to get a good "chunk" of the city to be yours. for most players i expect it to be more like scatered pieces.

i expect the game to be prety chaotic, so be ready for that.
and i MAY at some point, if there's enough interest in the game, expand the game onto neighboring islands of the city and add another set of 26 gangs (lowercase a-z), but only if hte game gets going well, and seems to be working as is.

it is prety easy to lie to your "allies" in this game. because no one will know what exactly happened in a territory. only who won it. and since its hard to tell who controlls which gangs, you could promise someone that you'll help them with a gang that you dont even control. yes, next turn they'll know you lied (either about helping or about controling that gang), but if you've gotten something out of them, then you're better off anyway.

use one of your gangs that you just got control off to attack an ally and have your gang give control of the conquered territory to a third player, your ally will go to war with that player, and you can pick up the territories they leave neutral.

promise an ally help in a couple turns if he helps you now. then after he's helped you attack him instead and tell him that its not you attacking that you've lost control of the gang (if you'd lost any territories then its a prety likely story) and that your enemy now controls it.

get two of your friends that dont know that you're friends with both to try to take the same territory. their gangs will cancel eachother out and neither will get it, but you could attack one of them while you know where his gang will be going, and then double team him with your other friend.

 

[blackheart]

I'll join. Yellow and #28

 

[RoddyVR]

you can post/join now or ask questions if you want.

guess i'll put the map for the first turn here. this is the initial distribution of the gangs. remember, the territory a gang is in now is not neccessarily its home territory. and they do not correspond to the territory numbers either

i'll put the starting locations in here too. just so people can see who's starting where and what colors are taken.

 

[RoddyVR]

oh, and i like badgering people to send their orders over AIM, so if you have AIM, but havent listed it in the AIM thread at the top of the forum, could you post that too.
not realy a requirement, but would be nice.

 

[RoddyVR]

well, game cant work with only one player. lol. i'd say 4 or 5 and we can start it

this is more a bump then anything else.

 

[Gelion]

Roddy maybe you want to take my medieval NES design?

 

[blackheart]

I declare my gang to be supreme over the land then.

 

[RoddyVR]

Roddy maybe you want to take my medieval NES design?

wtf???

i'm not changing the rules of the game, and i'm still waiting for people to sign up. i havent given up yet.
and if no one else joins this one then i'm not gonna start another one, as this is the second game in the last week that i'm starting, and if it too is largely ignored then i'll just decide that board nes have no place here and stop modding alltogether.

 

[Jason The King]

Roddy, this is not the same as a board NES. I consider this as a mini-reality NES, like warman's game, or plexus' pirate games. I for one have never joined these kind of games, I'm not a huge fan, I like the games based on regional or world maps where you take countries and engage in regular diplomacy and have armies and navies. I dunno, maybe its the fantasy that I like so much.

So that is the reason I do not join this, and I believe its the reason others dont as well. If you make a board NES based on a map like your past games, I am sure you will get players. I would join in a heartbeat, you are the most consistant mod in the world, lol. Not to mention fair.

 

[RoddyVR]

you cant seriously base your defenitions of "board nes" on what the map looks like. what's the difference if its a map of europe or of some random set of poligons set next to eachother?
its still territories conected to some (but not all) territories next to them. and while i could see the difference between a hex or square based map and one of these more "random" like territory ones, i see no difference between this and a map of world/europe or anything else.
yes, the armies in this game dont actualy fight and die, and that's a step away from a "basic" board game, but wierdly enough this is actualy closer to the "Diplomacy" game that board NESs almost became when board games were the norm around here.

well, anyway. lets see how many people join.
come on people, dont be afraid. i dont bite.

 

[RoddyVR]

well, this is depressing. still no more nesers that want to give this a try?

 

[Silver Steak]

Umm. Actually, I somehow agree with JK. The map HAS something to say. It's like an icon of NES, the succession of updates and the gradual changes of nations, alliances and dominance. It's what all players are waiting for, they want it to look good strategically as well as esthetically. Something like that. I for one did not feel like joining when I saw the map.

I'm sorry if I hurt your drive for modding, but most NESers seem to prefer the generic historical settings. If it's any help, I'm planning to start my own NES, and it'll prolly be a stillborn one.

 

[Toteone]

I'll join if there's a different map. Like the idea.