Post date: Feb 2, 2018 8:57:39 PM
Happy almost Valentine’s Day everyone! The 2045 Turn has officially begun! The new budget files and history section for 2045 has been posted. Thank you to Liam for his efforts helping to write the history section, he did in a few weeks what would take me months to achieve.
The deadline for submitting your orders is March 2 1200 UTC. As always, if you have questions or are unsure about something then write to me at kelvinsoice@hotmail.com. [For the new players: Send me your trial set of orders well ahead of time and we can go through them and sort out any problems you might have. Note that most of the really interesting action of the turn, e.g. combat and most player-to-player interactions occur some time after the budget and written orders have been submitted, after the March 2 deadline.]
I have uploaded the blank budget spreadsheets for your nations, this time to the files section of the website. I know that is not what we have been doing, but it was just too much work for me to constantly have to drill down to your pages when I needed something.
Onto bonus Response PAs. [For the new players, this is the closest we get to some kind of victory conditions in this game, this is where the GM hands out bonus Response PApoints as a reward for good play in the previous turn]
Luis gets 1 bonus PApoint: For being so active on RPOL and contributing to rules etc all the time.
Liam gets 2 bonus PApoints: For the articles. I can now say truthfully that one of my hobbies is to help write BDSM fiction.
Kelvin. 3PAs because he is totally awesome. Ok, Andreas did not say that but he gave me leave to.
As many of you are aware, there have been many important changes to the rules lately, three of which are of key importance right now. Any asset which continues to have these following features has 0 capacity or strength for anything until you fix these things. Remember that when you suddenly find yourself trying to defend against an invasion by an enemy who has fixed these things and you have not!
-The replacement of the old map and its coordinate system with the current map and its coordinate system. [For the new players: if you have an asset whose location is given by <Star System><Satellite><letter><2 digit number>, then it is the old system]. The old map was beautiful, thank you, Castle, where ever you are, but it just did not have much relevance to the game and had to go. So look at your assets, get them updated to the current system of <Star System><Satellite><number><letter N or S><number>. Remember, no asset of any kind ever gets to list its location as “Secret”.
-We used to do Carriers and Missile submarines as having separately carried squadrons of planes and missiles. Not anymore, these carried squadrons have been simplified to be inherent properties of Carriers and Missile subs. Look at your list of available units, delete these carried units. This will also change the totals that some nations pay for Supply unit maintenance.
-Shared ownership of assets used to be allowed, but that opened up impossible complications of who really is allowed to give the orders for an asset in case of a conflict between owners. The GM is NOT going to deal with that anymore! Every asset has to have ONE owner of record, and while that owner can share the USE of that asset in any way you like the GM will only ever accept orders from that ONE owner. Decide exactly who owns what, now.
As those who have been with us for a long time know, we started this game with nothing more than a vague expectation that we would do something better than the ephemeral earlier iterations; NOT my idea, I am just the fool trying to clean up the mess this created. The first problem this created is that we have been trying to invent this game in the middle of it being played. This problem has largely been fixed, but I can think of a few gaps which will eventually need to be filled, and of course, rebalancing tweaks are going to be a permanent game feature. In trying to fix the first problem, we created two additional problems: Somehow the assumption got deeply embedded in the game that the universe would never change. Nations, borders, national traits, etc. would never change, unconsciously the first GM's likely never really ever thought that we would ever get beyond Earth's orbit and built the game accordingly. This is a serious problem for a game which is supposed to cover the stars and the centuries. Thank you to all of those people who in the past worked so hard on the NPC pages, it was beautiful, I am sorry I had to mutilate it but in the 2185 Turn the player for the Dutch Reformed Cyberpapacy of Alpha Centauri is going to want to plot an invasion route through to the territory of the Harmonious Hive Federation through either Georgia or Laos, and no IRL Wikipedia based article written in 2010 detailing the armed forces of Georgia or Laos is going to satisfy the player's questions. The last problem was created in our haste to have something, *anything*, for functional rules set. We, mainly I, grabbed a number of 2300AD prior works and smashed them together. So most parts of the game did not originally connect to all the other parts, I have worked hard to change that, yet if you ask me questions like “how does statistic X relate to statistic Y”, whatever I say, the real answer is “what a great idea, they should”. …So the upshot of this long paragraph is that there will continue to be changes to the rules as we move forward, just perhaps not quite so many as before.
Let the games begin!,
K