Post cataclysm mechanics

[TinCow]

I think the revisions I've suggested are relatively minor and simple - I don't think they amount to a re-write from the ground-up. I must admit Stuperman's idea about a full rules re-write filled me with dread.

It was not my intention to say that your CAs were re-writing the rules from the ground up. I was simply making a general observation about the game. Re-writing from the ground up is stuff like I sent you last week. By comparison, even the most radical of the above CAs are simply a minor to moderate change.

I think limits on army size - plus spawning AI armies - may be a big part of the solution to the challenge. And I think having multiple modest armies and feudal levies may be the way to give all players some battles (as opposed to the Chancellor or Dukes doing everything thing with half a dozen uber armies).

I think it is worth testing those ideas - even if just for 5 turns - rather than starting a new game, because the cost of testing them in KotR would be low whereas we are not ready to let the game die just yet.

I agree. My concern about the army size CA is not that it would make the game more complex or slow it down. If anything, it's the perfect example of how to make significant changes to the gameplay without increasing the burden on the players. My concern about army size is simply that it will be too hard. Thus, I fully support a 5 turn trial period to figure it out.

Also, I was not speaking about any of your legislation at all in my "arbitrary limits" paragraph. That was more a cautionary tale for everyone based on my economic, recruitment, and movement rules, which I should really rename "guidelines."

Going back to reducing complexity: I had a thought about how to implement the feudal levy so that it does not cause confusion. Every Diet, I could post screenshots of people's levy for information and I could reorder the stacks so the levy units were the first ones in their avatar's stack.

Then it should be fairly easy for players and the Chancellor to keep track of what are avatar's feudal levies - they would be the first four units in their stack (five for Dukes/Prinz).

The levies idea intrigues me, but I am worried about the complexity. That is much less of a problem if you truly can do it all yourself, but I know there are limits on your time as well. I don't want the solution to all of our time and complexity problems to become 'let econ21 deal with it.' That's just unfair. You're a player as well as a the TR mod and KOTR overseer. We need to make sure we don't overwhelm you while we are trying to spare ourselves.

I also question how much value this will bring to the game in comparison to the costs in time and complexity. Perhaps I am wrong, but I have not personally found the unit recruitment and allocation system in the Cataclysm to be particularly fun. It is useful because it makes people struggle for resources, but I think it is the struggle itself that provides the most entertainment, not necessarily the intricacies of army customization. Most of the large armies that have been built have migrated towards a normal balance anyway, proving that what people want is really what we also give them in under the normal KOTR rules. Thus, minor tweaking of units seems to me to be of low benefit in comparison to the time and energy it will eat up.

That said, I do see a major potential in your levy idea: ownership. I get the sense that people really, really like "owning" things in the cataclysm. They like being able to look at the map and say "That city and that army are mine. No one else can take them away from me against my will unless they pry them from my cold dead hands." That gives people a great deal of incentive to protect their assets and accumulate more. It is the basic building block of a true balance of power and a proper political system. While basic KOTR rules can "give" people Counties, I doubt many of us have really identified with them to a great extent.

I put a lot of effort into making Lothar care about Florence, but at the end of the day, the person behind Lothar (me) didn't really give two florins what happened to it. No matter how much I wrote about it IC, the place never really felt like 'mine.' In contrast, being able to directly and materially draw on the resources of all of Bavaria has made me rabidly passionate about it. I let some of Bavarian cities fall early without a fight because I could justify it IC and it needed to be done to achieve the post-cataclysm status I am working towards. In contrast, I just recently stuck Lothar in Milan in a situation where he might very much die. I'm not sure I can beat that stack, but I simply couldn't stand the thought of letting it go without a fight when I had an army to fight with. At the same time, I have been agonizing about what to do with Nuremburg. I don't have enough electors or armies to pacify the place and keep it that way. It's tearing me up every time I have to roll a die to see which building gets knocked down, because I know those are my personal resources that are going down the drain. If this were the normal game, I would just shrug and add the building back to the construction queue, because its loss would have no material impact on me as a player.

If we can somehow find a way to continue this sense of ownership, perhaps we can make people more invested in the game. Many of us are invested in our characters themselves because we spend a lot of time creating their backstories and having them climb the political ladder. However, few of us care about the actual individual armies or cities. We may say so IC, but did any of really care OOC when Rome was lost? I suspect not. I think there is a lot of room to explore ownership via armies and provinces. It may require new rules that are too radical for KOTR, but the levy idea in general is a small step in that direction and for that reason alone I am willing to give it a try. Again, I would urge a trial period, but it would be an interesting thing to test.