M2, HRE Tests PBEM

[Braden]

Ok guys,

Sign me up for this trial as your first (and only?) Count. Maximilian Mandorf will be my first choice as Avatar.

BTW – having issues on the boards still but these have progressed from my “Edit doesn’t work” phase to my PM saying I’ve got 65,535 Unread Messages!!

I don’t have any unread messages fortunately so can still receive (I think) and certainly send PM’s.

Have put a post in the WatchTower section……hmmmm

[Ignoramus]

I dislike econ21's idea. While a decentralised PBeM is nice, the Emperor is, after all, the Emperor. I think the Emperor ought to have a fair bit of power, but for the rest of his power, he must gain the obedience of the dukes. This seems to be the most enjoyable system to me.

[econ21]

I dislike econ21's idea. While a decentralised PBeM is nice, the Emperor is, after all, the Emperor. I think the Emperor ought to have a fair bit of power, but for the rest of his power, he must gain the obedience of the dukes. .

Are you just disliking the Chancellor/Emperor nomeclature? That's an RP thing and not a big deal.

Because if we think about the reigning player (Chancellor/Emperor/whatever name you want to give him), I am not sure he has less power under my proposals than under Lucjan's.

What my proposal does is reduce the power of Parliament (the Dukes collectively) and increase the power of the Dukes individually. The key change is that Dukes, not edicts, will decide what to build in their settlements. And they will have to confront the choice between troops or buildings individually, rather than collectively. I don't like the original proposal of buildings being decided by edicts - collective decision-making (voting) is not best suited for such minutae. The information and coordination problems are too large - as the Empire grows there will be too many decisions, too often to be manageable (do we really want to have votes on what to build in 44 settlements?!). By contrast, a Duke managing their own settlement or even half a dozen settlements is not a big deal.

And I think there's a big problem allowing Dukes to spend all of their income on troops (ie there could be no budget for buildings). By giving Dukes their own budgets, we internalise this choice.

The reigning player probably has more power under my proposals, because he gets taxes from the Dukes and uses that to pay for the Imperial army, in addition to gross profits from his settlements. AFAIK, that's pretty historical.

OT: one other thing occurred to me last night - what do we do with income from sacking? In my game, this is a massive money earner - in fact, it is the one thing that allows you to make major building investments. I think it is too much to just give to the conquering Duke. He already gets to keep the settlement. I would put it in the Imperial budget or find some other way of sharing it out more.

[econ21]

Just to make things concrete, here are some rough starting budgets, working from some notes of a hard campaign, medium units sized game:

Ducal budgets

Note:
[4]=[1]-[2]-[3]
[5]=[4] in first period; fixed thereafter for 5 turns
[6]=[4]-[5]
[9]=[6]+[7]-[8]

Imperial budget

The numbers don't match exactly with my game (I'm vague on agent costs) - I'll check things add up tonight.

But basically, according to these figures, the HRE is only making a profit of 129 florins. Not much of an income, once we've blown the starting balance of 6000 florins.

On the first turn, Duke's could each spend up to their 1000 share of the starting pot of 6000 to purchase buildings or troops. The "carried forward" column assumes they purchase nothing.

By changing taxes or disbanding troops, Dukes could increase their net profits this turn.

The Chancellor would revise the table on the basis of any purchases and any changes to net profit. This net profit, together with anything left of the 1000, would be carried forward to next period. It would be available for them to spend or save next period.

Note also that gross profits are very unequal across Duchies. Innsbruck (& Staufen), as a castle, gets much less and has much less potential for profitable investments. This is why we need to think about the balance between castles and cities. In a solo game, I would invest nearly all my money in upgrading Innsbruck and Staufen to get good troops. We currently don't have good incentives for that in a decentralised game. Letting castle owners "sell" troops for above cost price might be one mechanism.

[Lucjan]

After reading over Econ's suggestions, some of these were actually my own thoughts as well which I had altered substantially for 2 reasons. I Hadn't thought of making the chancellor do all the work..I thought the players would do it themselves, and this extra paper work would scare people off. I also hadn't thought of what would happen with the construction edicts when we got so many settlements...lol

In light of reading all of econ's rewritten proposals. I am in favor of all of them, and If econ would care to make a short, basic right up of his rules, I'll follow that with a short list of the rules I suggested which we're going to keep.

The only issue I would have is with the speadsheet, if this could somehow be kept in a post online that would be fantastic. Because, well, I don't have excel. I know, my computer is great for gaming, but really old school on the clerical stuff. I'm still running "Microsoft Works Spreadsheet", Excel's grandpappy. (Though to my understanding this along with all ''microsoft works'' tools are available on any windows os)

Econ, would you mind if I still ran the first 10 turns? Or would you prefer to, for the sake of making sure all the clerical duties work nicely? (The spreadsheet and stuff).

[econ21]

After reading over Econ's suggestions, some of these were actually my own thoughts as well ...

I know - you proposed this a while back in the WoS and ever seen I've been periodically wondering how to make it operational. In the end, the only way I can see is to go the whole hog and make it "Medieval Total Spreadsheet".

I Hadn't thought of making the chancellor do all the work..I thought the players would do it themselves, and this extra paper work would scare people off.

I think the Chancellors are probably happy to do the work - you, TinCow, DDW, FLYdude etc have all gone above and beyond the call of duty in the WoS game, computing kill rates, writing libraries, uploading patches etc. In a way, if Dukes control their own armies and settlements individually, and set HRE policy collectively, the Chancellor is almost reduced to this coordination role. And they only have to do it ten times.

The upside is that Dukes don't have to do any paper work - they just need to upload the annual saves and see what they want to do with the balance the Chancellor has posted they have for that year.

In light of reading all of econ's rewritten proposals. I am in favor of all of them, and If econ would care to make a short, basic right up of his rules, I'll follow that with a short list of the rules I suggested which we're going to keep.

Great - I will draft a synthesis of our proposals and you can revise it. I'll aim for tonight, but no promises.

The only issue I would have is with the speadsheet, if this could somehow be kept in a post online that would be fantastic.

I'll investigate this. I don't think there will be a problem getting Excel and Works to work together:

http://www.microsoft.com/products/wo...ktogether.mspx

Ideally the files will be so small, we can post them as attachments. But the sums involved will be fairly easy (at least for the first few Chancellors - God help the last) so they could even be done by hand.

Econ, would you mind if I still ran the first 10 turns? Or would you prefer to, for the sake of making sure all the clerical duties work nicely? (The spreadsheet and stuff).

No problem.

[Tamur]

The only issue I would have is with the speadsheet, if this could somehow be kept in a post online that would be fantastic.

I have to do spreadsheet-to-web conversions fairly often with my job. If the Chancellor-in-residence wants to send me whatever spreadsheet they have, I could make it web-accessible with just a little bit of work, regardless of the format.

I do like the autonomy of this setup a lot. At first I was concerned about the fixed (rather than percentage) tax rates, but that does make sense. I guess with the test run we can see which tax levels work and which don't.

Saying of which, with the test run are we playing nicely and not trying to break the system? Or are we testing the limits?