One of the things that has seriously turned me off FA1000 is the lack
of character and military balance. Without LAS, it is an agent
game. With LAS, it is an assassin and emissary game.
My proposal is to create a set of "rules" for a game that will create
a FA game where all 4 character types are important, but none more
important than military conquest.
WAR (
Specifics:
1) FA 1000
2) Pre-aligned 12 v. 12 grudge game.
3) Regional setups. Ensures good dispersment of nations.
Here is where is starts to get controversial.....
4) Suicide Assassins (modification to NKA)... You may issue a 615 or
620, but if successful the character can do nothing but transfer
artifacts and retire the next turn.
If it takes 5-6 turns to replace a commander and re-recruit the 2K HI
army that was poofed by an assassin, the assassin nation shoud be
required to spend 6-8 turns training a new assassin to do it again.
Discourages piling all your agents on a single nation, killing all
his characters and frustrating him until he drops. Removes agents as
the "focus" of FA1000 games.
Agents remain useful for their ability to steal gold, steal
artifacts, take down bridges and forts, rescue characters captured in
combat, scouting for characters to challenge, and when desperate,
take out an enemy character.
Another ugly one coming up......
5) Can not refuse personal challenge unless on one of your own pops.
If you mess up and issue the refusal, that character is eliminated
along with another random character. Second time you "mess up", your
nation is dropped.
Once agents are removed as the focus of FA games, emissries become
the focus. However, emissaries have the lowest challenge rank. By
not beaing able to refuse, you wouldn't be able to hop from pop to
pop with squads of 8-10 70+ Emissaries without the opposition being
able to do anything about it. They'd be able to pick off your
emissaries with challenges.
Also, makes mages far more useful as even all those +500 artifacts
you LAT would help win chalenges.
One of the problems with NKA was that once a nation got a huge
military advantage on you, there was little you could do. By not
allowing the characters with that invading army to refuse challenge,
your teammates could get you a bunch of artifacts, and even a newly
hired army with a bunch of good characters would have a good chance
of taking out the invading army.
However, if you're invading with a huge army they'll have a hard time
doing block, block, block to hold your huge army off thier pops, IF
you have a good challenge commander.
6) Can't start with (or build into) any of the "army unreachable
hexes" (2430, 4215, 3329) as MT or City. Though
technically "reachable", I'd add 4029 to the list because it would be
SOOO, hard to get to.
Military focused game, so no putting your capital in a position that
enemy armies can't get to.
7) No nation can take +20 K/A. Too easy to rebuild assassins.
8) No more than 3 nations per team can take any one SNA. No having
10 nations with hire free and market bonus.
In NKA 2, we had too many nations with hire free and market bonus.
We rolled out HUGE armies too quickly and the game was over in 10
turns.
9) No starting with any 60 rank characters.
Not allowing characters to start at 60 should balance FP/DS
advantages, encourage more "well rounded" character bases, require a
few extra turns to get agent and emissary squads up and runnning, and
prevent early "challenge gods".
While I'd prefer 24 players, I suspect we'll have to play 6 people x
2 positions each to get the game going in a reasonable amount of
time.
Comments welcome.
Darrell Shimel