--- In mepbmlist@y..., "Laurence G. Tilley" <laurence@l...> wrote:
pinsonneault.1@o... wrote
>There is some virtue in having an end to games. If you make it
harder
>to knock nations out, there should instead be some finite victory
>condition (own or destroy all starting capitals of the other side,
for
>example.) It is already *very* difficult to knock a moderately
>capable player out of the game until their entire team is on the
>ropes.
I agree Marc. It would not be good to make it even harder to knock
a
nation out (except for Harlequin's bank account!) But look how some
of
the suggested changes, if they were adopted, already have the
potential
to balance each other out:
Slow caravans might make it slightly easier to knock out some
nations.
I really think that you'd have to extensively reconfigure the
starting population centers to do this one right. I don't want to
give Noldo players an even better excuse not to help their teammates
Where does the gold come from, for example? Let's say the Dragon
Lord has a lot of population centers in Mordor; why should his gold be
magically teleported back to Dol Guldur? And why should it take a
long time for, say, the Blind Sorceror to send gold to the DL when his
capital could be surrounded by DL camps?
Not being able to buy stuff, that your reserve, or tax at 99% can't
pay
for, would remove the most irritating of the current accidental
eliminations.
This is sensible, at some level. I wouldn't restrict it to gold in
reserve, since that would make market buys much harder.
Army desertions replacing automatic tax hikes would make it slightly
harder to knock out nations.
This is the cause of the majority of eliminations I've seen, and it
would effectively make eliminating nations really difficult. I'd like
to see this and the caravan thing extensively playtested; these could
be drastic game-play changes. FYI Legends has an extremely cool
system for caravans and trade. Part of my reservations here are tied
to the existence of another RPG by the same provider that already does
a lot of these things. Hey, I *like* casting fast movement spells and
sending my merchants zooming across the countryside on flying mounts
to make buckets of gold to raise big armies of spell-casting knights.
(But the orders are complicated!)
I also like what Richard said about possible removing bankruptcy all
together, though I don't agree wholly with his historical
statements...
I think of it as being a loss of so much prestige that the nation
loses the will to fight. In which case it does make sense; think of
the tax raise as being the equivalent of food riots in the streets and
soldiers revolting against their leader from lack of pay and setbacks
in the war effort.
cheers,
Marc
(To look briefly at those) I think a lot depends on which historical
period you imagine Middle Earth to parallel. Whilst Richard's
picture
of a goods economy is accurate for the Iron Age and Dark Ages (label
of
convenience used here for approx 400-1000 ad), its off for the Roman
Empire and the Middle Ages, where a gold economy became more
important.
Though there's no sudden change, it's a very gradual transition.
You could argue that a king needs a certain amounts of wealth - look
at
Beowulf, the King as the Ring Giver. (And, oh dear, I'm beginning
to
contradict what I said above, because this is the Dark Ages.) If a
king
can't pay the costs of his supporters (characters?) then he gets
deposed. I know that's not the same as national collapse, but it's
probably the nearest thing, as you don't have modern nation states
until
the Renaissance anyway.
So: If the army costs exceeded the available gold, the troops
should
desert. It might be a proportion from all armies, or troops might
be
taken first from the army furthest from the capital. If the
character
and other costs still exceeded the available gold after all troops
had
deserted, then the nation should be eliminated.
An issue would be the automatic tax hike. I think it might me fun
to
remove it - so that if your tax was at 40% you would have to think
about
raising it OR allowing desertions. In some cases, that would be
preferable to having your tax whacked to a crazy 93%, and 6 camps
degrading, thus ruining your economic base for the next 10 turns.
Yes, there'd be a knock on - it would become even more critical to
keep
a commander in the capital, and agents sitting on enemy capitals
would
have even more consequences. There are fixes though, ranging from a
complete overhaul of agent actions to a simple changing of the
ChTxRt to
a Misc instead of a Comm order (You don't have to be an
ex-serviceman
···
anymore to get a job with the Inland Revenue!)
Regards,
Laurence G. Tilley http://www.lgtilley.freeserve.co.uk/
