STW DemoGame - or should that be ShoGame?

To save time, this is a direct copy and paste of the thread on the RTW forums (hope this is okay, mods!) Although some points here may refer more to RTW, the basic concept is the same.

If you wish to comment on this, including adding your support, please reply to this thread in the RTW forum.

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Since an underpowered computer and some fatal errors made by myself have left me unable to play any of the Total War games for the last three months, I have been getting regular (okay, non-stop) methodone treatments of Civ3 instead. Hardly a real substitute, but better than nothing.

One interesting concept of stumbled across is the Civ3 "Demogame", or "Game of Democracy". The basic concept is that anybody who wishes may take part in a single game, with the game decisions decided democratically by the community as a whole. This section of the Civfanatics forum can probably explain the details better than I can.

This got me wondering, and I think it might be nice to try something similar here.

The basic aim is to play a single game of RTW as a community, in which the members each contribute to the decisions made each turn.

In the Civ3 demogame, an individual, or sometimes a small group, would be responsible for what occurs in a single city. Another person is responsible for the military, and others for things like culture, science, and so on. A president is elected every so often, whose job it is to actually play the turn (this is done at a set time of day at regular intervals, with many of the community being reported to in a chat room). There are also positions for people on judicial bodies, to ensure that everybody plays by the rules, or even to change the rules of the community.

Some aspects of this could easily be translated to RTW. For example, you might have one person or a small council as a governor for each city/province, and one for each general, captain and family member in the field. This could cause disputes over who is in charge when two armies combine ;) How well this would work with the generals themselves then taking command of the battles remains to be seen - it might not prove practical for each general to fight their own battles (it would greatly increase turn-length as the community waits for players to wake up, log on and take their turn...) so either auto-resolve or one standard battle fighter would probably be good alternatives. Exactly how the game is played is entirely up to the player community as a whole.

Turns may occur every day, every week, every month - this all depends on what the players want. Needless to say, it will be a relatively slow, long game, but then you have to take the rough with the smooth...

The community itself might not even need to be formed as a democracy - in fact, keeping in the spirit of the game, I would recommend it doesn't! Family members would all get a chance to contribute to overall strategy, with the Faction Leader having the ultimate say. The rules might state that the city Governor has no authority over what construction occurs in his city, or they could be defined so that the city must be played in accordance with the governor's will (if this is in disagreement with the leader, there could be some assassins lying around ~;) ) The emphasis here is that the rules the community play by are entirely up to them. I will offer suggestions, I'd even be interested in playing a role in the game (but can't actually play RTW right now, obviously), but what we actually do is up to you guys reading this now.

I will also be suggesting this idea for STW and MTW, as it is equally valid there - in fact, it might be best suited to STW (especially in the first attempt), given the relative size of the map. A trial-run, as it were. Of course, there's no reason why multiple games couldn't run concurrently. Note that with STW and MTW, one important consideration for the community would be which expansion packs to use, if any.

All comments, suggestions and ideas are welcome at this point. In fact, I'll get the STW and MTW people to contribute to this thread at first, as the general feedback at this stage should be equally applicable.

Now, unfortunately, the bad news. I'm going to be out of action for a couple of days as I've got a long-haul flight, and things may be a little shektchy for a while after that as I have a number of job interviews to attend. But I'll keep my eye open here and post when I can. I hope to see lots of feedback!

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Remember, at this stage please respond in the RTW forum thread, not this one.