Pax Italia: Scope and Scale, Leaders and Retainers, Timeline Divergence
In the spirit of starting from the beginning, I suppose it's a good idea to lay the most basic trackwork of the game concepts down first before getting into the juicier parts of the ruleset (where my mind keeps trying to drift off to focus).
Scope and Scale
The game will begin in 1492 and will not have a set ending date. I have a limited amount of experience with nationsims, but I observed during the most recent round of Gloria that the players knowing when the round would end gave rise to some gamey and unsual decision-making in the endgame turns. I hope that not establishing an end date will at least prevent endgame, pin-your-ears-back rushes.
For the style of gameplay itself, I think that gameplay will be largely numbers-based, although the vast majority of these numbers will be behind the curtain, the sole province of the GM. The successful player in Pax Italia (hereafter abbreviated as PI) will be goal-oriented as opposed to task-oriented and will be able to develop a proactive strategic plan and concentrate their efforts on that plan as opposed to simply reacting to in-game events and trying to take advantage of every opportunity that comes along.
I'm not entirely sure how the mixture of strategy and tactics will finally break down in-game. Combat will largely be hands off as the Italian Princes had very little control over their armies. In essence, wars will be conducted by players giving their Generals (specific in-game entities with attributes of their own) objectives to accomplish and the Generals will go about it. Combats will be resolved by making determinations based off of the size and composition of armies, the quality of the troops involved, the quality of equipment, the skill of the respective generals, morale, the skill of the battalion captains and [i]condottieri[/i], the presence of X-factor technologies (such as artillery), the quality of player-defined orders given to each General, the tactical situation in the province (weather, terrain, disposition of the province's population), and a randomly-generated number representing the fortunes of war. All of the above determinents will be represented by a numerical value, which will be plugged into a formula. The formula will output a number between -10 and 10, with -10 being an overwhemling victory for the defender, 0 being a draw, and 10 being an overwhelming victory for the attacker. Casualties will be determined by a seperate formula.
As the players are playing the roles of the Princes themselves and the Generals are seperate entities, players will not be required to submit tactical battle plans as part of their war orders. To this end, combat itself will resemble combat in the Civilization series of computer games.
To compensate for this, the player will have more to do on the management end of the game. There will be multiple streams of income (census taxes, trade, tariffs, tribute, and patronage from great powers among others) to fund players' adventures, and there will be a multitude of factors that can increase or decrease them, all of which the player can affect. Diplomacy, too, will also play a major role in the game. Not only will players be able to interact with one another, but there will also be the matter of interaction with the NPC great powers. The great powers will represent both a threat and an opportunity for players, as manipulation of them could lead to prosperity for the successful player, or it could bring the French storming across the alps to everyone's detriment. Each nation will start the game with a diplomatic rating with each of the great powers, ranging from hatred to the deepest friendship.
Espionage and court intrigue will also play a larger role in PI than in most any other game. Bribery, assassination, and subversion were the favorite strategic weapons of the Italian princes in the age of the Borgias and they will be available here to a great extent. Players will not only be able to gather information or sabotage a project but they can also bribe away condottieri from a rival state (even on the eve of a battle), bribe or subvert a provincal ruler, affect a favorable appointment for a local bishop, affect the Papal election, and most any other action that could have reasonably taken place during the era. So, while PI will not be a deeply tactical military simulation, there will still be plenty of things for players to do to affect theirs and others lands.
Leaders and Retainers
A very important part of the game will be the effective use of retainers. This was the age of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Macchiavelli, and others, and all of them will be available for use in the game. The leader of the nation itself will be the player, and while they will be the historical leader of that state at the beginning of the game, they will not be constrained by that person's historical strengths and weaknesses. The only attribute the national leader will possess will be prestige, which will basically be a measure of how well they are known and respected throughout Europe. Prestige will range from universally loved to universally hated, with unknown lying at the middle point, and prestige will affect a great number of things, including national and provincal stability, the ability to hire retainers, the success of diplomatic moves with NPCs, etc.
In addition to the national leader, there will be retainers. Each player will have many retainers, not all of which are necessarily loyal to the player. Each province will have a provincal leader, each military unit (standing army or condottieri) will have a Captain, and the player him or herself will have a collection or personal retainers, such as a court engineer, court painter, General, spymaster, etc. Retainers will have attributes which govern their effectiveness as well as traits, which determine which roles they can be used for. To keep the statistical workload from getting too elephantine, the attributes will be fairly simple. There will be skill, which is a measure of the retainer's ability to do the technical aspects of their job. For a General, this would be a knowledge of tactics while for a provincal leader their deftness at managing their local bureaucracy. The next attribute will be charisma, which will basically affect their ability to inspire and lead others, which will in turn affect troop morale, provincal morale, etc. The third attribute will be loyalty and measures how loyal that retainer is to you, personally. This will affect the susceptability to be subverted by the actions of others. The last attribute will actually be a table of sub-attributes which will measure the retainer's opinion of the other nations and the great powers. For instance, a German condottieri who thinks highly of the Habsburgs may not be too enthusiastic about attacking that Imperial army bearing down on your city.
Timeline Divergence
There will be no alternate history up to the point where the game begins. If it happened prior to August of 1492 in real life, it happened in the game. However, there will be no guarantee that any event which happened afterwards takes place. This is to allow the players to chart their own destiny secure in the knowledge they control their little section of the game world. Charles VIII invaded Naples in 1494, prompting the First Italian War, however his invasion was largely the result of coaxing by Ludovico Il Moro and Pope Alexander VI, and neither the Milanese nor the Papal player may take the same course of action in the game.
To keep things interesting, there will be a large random events table that will, from time to time, spit out events that affect one or multiple states and be of varying degrees of magnitude. The events will be both good and bad, although the likelihood of getting a good or bad event will in someway depend on the player's effectiveness. To clarify, the formula to determine which (if any) event from the random events table comes into play will take into account attributes such as player prestige, national stability, and other factors as well as a random number. The events on the 'high' side of the table will have a greater mix of good to bad while events on the 'low' side of the table will have a greater mix of bad to good.
Alright, time to make like bad eggs and run. More to come later.
Scope and Scale
The game will begin in 1492 and will not have a set ending date. I have a limited amount of experience with nationsims, but I observed during the most recent round of Gloria that the players knowing when the round would end gave rise to some gamey and unsual decision-making in the endgame turns. I hope that not establishing an end date will at least prevent endgame, pin-your-ears-back rushes.
For the style of gameplay itself, I think that gameplay will be largely numbers-based, although the vast majority of these numbers will be behind the curtain, the sole province of the GM. The successful player in Pax Italia (hereafter abbreviated as PI) will be goal-oriented as opposed to task-oriented and will be able to develop a proactive strategic plan and concentrate their efforts on that plan as opposed to simply reacting to in-game events and trying to take advantage of every opportunity that comes along.
I'm not entirely sure how the mixture of strategy and tactics will finally break down in-game. Combat will largely be hands off as the Italian Princes had very little control over their armies. In essence, wars will be conducted by players giving their Generals (specific in-game entities with attributes of their own) objectives to accomplish and the Generals will go about it. Combats will be resolved by making determinations based off of the size and composition of armies, the quality of the troops involved, the quality of equipment, the skill of the respective generals, morale, the skill of the battalion captains and [i]condottieri[/i], the presence of X-factor technologies (such as artillery), the quality of player-defined orders given to each General, the tactical situation in the province (weather, terrain, disposition of the province's population), and a randomly-generated number representing the fortunes of war. All of the above determinents will be represented by a numerical value, which will be plugged into a formula. The formula will output a number between -10 and 10, with -10 being an overwhemling victory for the defender, 0 being a draw, and 10 being an overwhelming victory for the attacker. Casualties will be determined by a seperate formula.
As the players are playing the roles of the Princes themselves and the Generals are seperate entities, players will not be required to submit tactical battle plans as part of their war orders. To this end, combat itself will resemble combat in the Civilization series of computer games.
To compensate for this, the player will have more to do on the management end of the game. There will be multiple streams of income (census taxes, trade, tariffs, tribute, and patronage from great powers among others) to fund players' adventures, and there will be a multitude of factors that can increase or decrease them, all of which the player can affect. Diplomacy, too, will also play a major role in the game. Not only will players be able to interact with one another, but there will also be the matter of interaction with the NPC great powers. The great powers will represent both a threat and an opportunity for players, as manipulation of them could lead to prosperity for the successful player, or it could bring the French storming across the alps to everyone's detriment. Each nation will start the game with a diplomatic rating with each of the great powers, ranging from hatred to the deepest friendship.
Espionage and court intrigue will also play a larger role in PI than in most any other game. Bribery, assassination, and subversion were the favorite strategic weapons of the Italian princes in the age of the Borgias and they will be available here to a great extent. Players will not only be able to gather information or sabotage a project but they can also bribe away condottieri from a rival state (even on the eve of a battle), bribe or subvert a provincal ruler, affect a favorable appointment for a local bishop, affect the Papal election, and most any other action that could have reasonably taken place during the era. So, while PI will not be a deeply tactical military simulation, there will still be plenty of things for players to do to affect theirs and others lands.
Leaders and Retainers
A very important part of the game will be the effective use of retainers. This was the age of Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Macchiavelli, and others, and all of them will be available for use in the game. The leader of the nation itself will be the player, and while they will be the historical leader of that state at the beginning of the game, they will not be constrained by that person's historical strengths and weaknesses. The only attribute the national leader will possess will be prestige, which will basically be a measure of how well they are known and respected throughout Europe. Prestige will range from universally loved to universally hated, with unknown lying at the middle point, and prestige will affect a great number of things, including national and provincal stability, the ability to hire retainers, the success of diplomatic moves with NPCs, etc.
In addition to the national leader, there will be retainers. Each player will have many retainers, not all of which are necessarily loyal to the player. Each province will have a provincal leader, each military unit (standing army or condottieri) will have a Captain, and the player him or herself will have a collection or personal retainers, such as a court engineer, court painter, General, spymaster, etc. Retainers will have attributes which govern their effectiveness as well as traits, which determine which roles they can be used for. To keep the statistical workload from getting too elephantine, the attributes will be fairly simple. There will be skill, which is a measure of the retainer's ability to do the technical aspects of their job. For a General, this would be a knowledge of tactics while for a provincal leader their deftness at managing their local bureaucracy. The next attribute will be charisma, which will basically affect their ability to inspire and lead others, which will in turn affect troop morale, provincal morale, etc. The third attribute will be loyalty and measures how loyal that retainer is to you, personally. This will affect the susceptability to be subverted by the actions of others. The last attribute will actually be a table of sub-attributes which will measure the retainer's opinion of the other nations and the great powers. For instance, a German condottieri who thinks highly of the Habsburgs may not be too enthusiastic about attacking that Imperial army bearing down on your city.
Timeline Divergence
There will be no alternate history up to the point where the game begins. If it happened prior to August of 1492 in real life, it happened in the game. However, there will be no guarantee that any event which happened afterwards takes place. This is to allow the players to chart their own destiny secure in the knowledge they control their little section of the game world. Charles VIII invaded Naples in 1494, prompting the First Italian War, however his invasion was largely the result of coaxing by Ludovico Il Moro and Pope Alexander VI, and neither the Milanese nor the Papal player may take the same course of action in the game.
To keep things interesting, there will be a large random events table that will, from time to time, spit out events that affect one or multiple states and be of varying degrees of magnitude. The events will be both good and bad, although the likelihood of getting a good or bad event will in someway depend on the player's effectiveness. To clarify, the formula to determine which (if any) event from the random events table comes into play will take into account attributes such as player prestige, national stability, and other factors as well as a random number. The events on the 'high' side of the table will have a greater mix of good to bad while events on the 'low' side of the table will have a greater mix of bad to good.
Alright, time to make like bad eggs and run. More to come later.
posted by Travis | 11:38 AM
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