Post date: Jul 3, 2020 10:09:07 PM
Hey, remember us! It's that 2300AD role-playing nations game! Well after a lot of work and troubles your Referee is back on the case!
All of the initial Turn orders are in and we are now onto the War Round portion of the turn. Your orders for War Round#1 are due July 24 at 1200UTC. As a reminder, in addition to any orders for combat, this is the time to impress the Referee with your role-playing and use of Response PApoints to enhance the chances of success for your Political Actions that you submitted at the beginning of the turn AND to interfere with the Political Actions of other players.
At the current time for this War Round#1, your Referee knows of no combat occurring, I will inform the relevant parties if that changes. If there is no combat during a War Round then the Referee MAY have another War Round or MAY declare that the turn has ended and move on to close it out, meaning any left over Response PApoints are wasted. You have been warned, it is at the Referee's discretion.
Laurent has had to leave us. Good luck Laurent, I am sorry to see you go. This does bring to a head the fact that we have too many player positions open, your Referee urges you to put the word out to your friends and groups, we need new players! So I am making a new competition: From now until the next turn, the player who brings in the most new players will receive 3 Response PApoints next turn per new player. A new player only counts if that new player stays around long enough to at least submit valid orders for the new turn. The player who brings in the second highest number of new players gets 2 Response PApoints per new player. If you play only one nation, being willing to take on 1 more nation also counts as having recruited a new player. We need new players!
I have had the time for a long look at the game and come to the conclusion that Brigade sized non-Spaceship units are not a good fit for a game of this scope, and the complexity added to the game to sustain allowing for Division AND Brigade sized units is ridiculous. For a long time this has been clear, but for just as long I resisted doing what needed to be done for several reasons, among those reasons is that Brigades are the primary building block of modern militaries, but it is just too clear that for this game they have to go. I console myself with remembering that each of our hexes are about the size of France and so somewhere within them Brigades are operating as usual, we just will not be dealing with units that small in this game. The plan is to remove Brigade sized non-Spaceship units and Division sized Spaceships as an option; then the rules and spreadsheets will be simplified to remove all of the apparatus needed to account for Divisions and Brigades. This means all of you will have to look at your tab on the Unit_List spreadsheet and do whatever needs to be done to convert soonest all of your Brigade sized non-Spaceship units to Divisions. It is too late to do anything about it for your nation this turn, and I know that some nations will be difficult to convert over in just the next turn, so this rule will not come into effect until at least the 2075 Turn, perhaps 2080, but it is coming.
One of the things that has happened in the interregnum is that we finally have a real, usable game map for all of the solar systems and planets that we will visit. It seems like a very basic step for any sci-fi game, but in all the time that the game has been live we have been missing it. This is a truly exciting thing to me, we started this game a long time ago with nothing but a vague expectation that we would do something better than the previous iteration of the game, we had no rules set, no spreadsheets, nothing. A real, usable game map is the last piece of major game infrastructure that we were missing, I can finally say that we are out of the 'Alpha build stage', and into 'Beta'. We of course will likely be in Beta for the rest of the run of the current game, but I hope that changes will continue to decline in number and importance, as they have been. One thing that is likely to change soon is the Facilities_List spreadsheet, it was created as a stop-gap because the notes section in the Heaven&Earth database was not accessible; now that it is something has to change, I just have not decided on what exactly. The important part is that now we are out of Alpha and into Beta I hope that I can actually have more time to devote to moving the game forward instead of constantly having to slow things down just to keep the game from falling apart. In related news, Liam is working on an updated and expanded subway map of the stars, the current subway map has many limitations and problems, but there are still some more things to do on that so it is not ready yet.
Let the battles begin!