Post date: Nov 15, 2018 9:28:39 PM
Happy mid-November-in-whatever-part-of-the-world-you-live-in everyone! The 2050 Turn has officially begun! The new budget files and history section for 2050 have been posted. Thank you to Liam for his efforts helping to write the articles section, he does in a few weeks what would take me months to achieve. The way we did the articles this time around is a bit of a one-off experiment; I think it looks pretty damn amazing, we may try to do something like it again sometime in the future.
The deadline for submitting your orders is December 06, 2018 at 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 Dec 6th deadline.]
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]
Kelvin gets 1 bonus PApoint: For being so helpful with the game. I checked with myself, its cool.
Sergey gets 2 bonus PApoints: For being so active on RPOL and contributing to rules etc all the time.
Liam. 3PAs because he is totally awesome in all the work he does for the game, in not just putting up with my strange requests but actually getting them done.
Over the past turn we have added things to game which have filled major gaps, namely a usable map of Earth and the Stars which actually relates to the game rules as well as a consistent way for everyone to track the motion of units and the same for the construction of facilities. As I have said before, the first GMs likely did not imagine that we would get this far in the game and so in a myriad of ways, large and small, they designed the game around the assumption that Earth would never change and we would never really get beyond Earth's atmosphere. There is still much to do to overcome that mistake. Yes,I know of many, many problems that still exist with the game, particularly with the Settlement_List/Budget_Spreadsheets, the Management is working on it. No, complaining about how the numbers in the Settlement_List/Budget_Spreadsheets are unfairly stacked against your nation is not going to get you anything, we have too many other more important problems that need fixing first. I still hope to significantly increase the pace of the game for the next Turns and I am heartened by fact that last Turn *merely* took us 8 months, we have not had such a short turn-around since the beginning of the game when turn-around was so quick just because the rules back then did not have the capacity to give the players options, so we all did almost nothing. While there have been a number of changes to the game to fix definite errors, the real reason behind almost every change is been to make the game easier for the GM to manage. I think you will find that the game will run a lot faster when the GM does not approach each session of working on the game with '<stares glumly at the screen>' and '<takes deep breath>'. I do note that the length of the change log on the rules versions between turns is finally trending down, still horrifically long, but it gives me hope that we are finally homing in on a stable game. Of course, we have never yet had a real test of large sections of the game, I can only image what is going to happen when someone finally builds an extra-solar colony and then a war is fought over it using the detailed combat rules!
Let the games begin!,
K