Post by Zenios on Aug 21, 2013 13:13:37 GMT -5
So some of us have played AJ's Medieval 2: Total War risk. Some of us missed the start and are now too afraid to join because of how crazy it got.
Some of us hate dice because we can't regularly roll above a 3.
So what I propose is a - wait for it - diceless Medieval 2 Total War forum Risk game which will probably end up more like Civilizations or actual Medieval 2 Total War than a Risk kind of thing.
Now since this is the highly experimental, 'nobody knows what will happen' stage, I request two things of anyone who participates: First, bear with me. The only reason I started this is because I got tired of crap dice rolls (seriously, look in the other thread - there's no way the dice system is random) and it's a work in progress. Two (yes, that's grammatically incongruous), do stupid stuff you wouldn't normally in order to test the system and make sure it works okay. Like starting a few territories away from someone and declaring war on them ASAP. Actually, the initial map (once I add it) will probably be pretty small to encourage a shorter game - because not only do I want to test this, I want to see how different strategy will affect your ability to fight a war.
So now that I'm done with the exposition, here's how actual play works.
You start with one territory of your choice, a settlement in that city (size to be determined later), and two thousand gold. Easy enough.
So before I launch into a detailed description of how turns play out, here are a couple of lists to establish how much gold you get for owning territories and settlements. Bonuses are not cumulative, but you do get bonuses to defending a location for owning a settlement as depicted below.
Territory - total of +100g, no defensive bonuses
Village - +100g; +100g to defense
Town - +200g; +300g to defense
Large Town - +500g, +500g to defense
City - +750g, +750g to defense
Large City - +1000g, +1000g to defense
Huge City - +2500g, +2000g to defense
Fort – +100g, +500g to defense
Motte and Baily - +150g, +1000g to defense
Wooden Castle - +200g, + 1500g to defense
Castle - +300g, +2000g to defense
Fortress - + 500g, +2500g to defense
Citadel - +1000g, +5000g to defense
So, as you can see, it can be advantageous to build cities or castles - but be careful, because you can't have both in the same territory. Now, a table on upgrading things:
Territory >Village – 1000g
Village > Town – 2500g
Town > Large Town – 5000g
Large Town > City – 7500g
City > Large City – 10000g
Large City > Huge City > 25000g
Territory > Fort – 1000g
Fort > Motte and Baily – 2500g
Motte and Baily > Wooden Castle– 5000g
Wooden Castle > Castle – 7500g
Castle > Fortress – 10000g
Fortress > Citadel – 15000g
So it's expensive to build a city or fort type structure. But the rewards might be worth it to you. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that you can only have one of a village or fort - but you can convert a settlement from one to the other, for the equivalent price to upgrade it. Say you wanted to change your Wooden Castle to a Large Town because it's no longer on the front lines - it'd cost you 5000 gold as outlined above. Huge City to Citadel would cost you 15000 gold, and so on.
So now we have the exposition and the prices to upgrade things. So now let's get into how your average turn starts! Generally speaking, there are four phases: taxation, expansion, action, and reinforcement, but the latter three are interchangeable (so you could tax, reinforce, expand, and then act) and blend a bit.
The first phase happens more or less automatically. You gain a certain amount of gold based on how many territories you own, and you gain more if those territories possess settlements. You can also get more if you have a trade agreement, but more on that later. One thing to note is that the money you get remains in the settlement you earned it from - say Stockholm generates you 600 gold in a given turn, that 600 gold remains in Stockholm until you move it. You don't get to just spend your 600 gold from Stockholm to build a village in Cracov; you have to move it there.
Expansion. You get to take an unclaimed territory for free. Yes, that's it, one single territory. For free. You can spend two thousand (2000) gold to expand to a second one. It's gonna be slow. I know. That just means you can spend more on expensive troops and stuff.
Action. You can take two actions here, from two types of action. You can attack an enemy-controlled territory, or you can build or upgrade a settlement. You can attack twice, or you can build two castles, or one and one. Your call. What you can't do, is attack a territory, take it, and then move from that territory to attack another one. For example: you want Stockholm, so you take Stockholm. You then want to attack Arhus. Well, you can't use your troops (represented by your gold in a territory) in Stockholm to do that. Because they just attacked. So you'd have to use your troops in another adjacent region. Note: You can take the territory of Stockholm, and then the city located in Stockholm, because they're technically in the same location.
Of note on attacking places: It takes two attacks to take a territory if there's a settlement in it. You battle once for the territory, and then once for the settlement; the defender gets their gold bonus for the settlement added to both battles, but must distribute gold in the territory accordingly - you can leave all those troops to defend the settlement and use the defensive bonus only, or defend your territory with everything you've got, or anywhere in between. Take the territory, and you besiege the settlement - which immediately cannot be reinforced and only generates
Redeployment/reinforcement. In times of peace, you can redistribute gold from anywhere you'd like to any one province of choice. Say you want to put all of your gold into Stockholm. Well, go ahead - but you can only do this once per turn. You can't move a ton of gold into Stockholm, then another ton of gold into Riga. It's Stockholm, or Riga. Not both.
So, that's how you take turns. Now, for interacting with other players - which you can do at any time so long as it is dictated in the thread.
First up is diplomacy. There are a couple of options you can take. You can choose to donate gold from one of your territories to an adjacent allied one, if you like; this doesn't count as your redeployment move. Say you own Prague and your ally owns the adjacent Breslau, which is about to be attacked. You can take as much gold as you have in Prague and donate it to Breslau, if you like, as long as you're bound by at least a non-aggression pact.
Speaking of which, non-aggression pacts. These are pacts which guarantee you will not attack the other treaty members. You can negotiate the length, if you'd like to put a specific length on it to be renegotiated at its end; or you can make it indefinite, to be broken when one party breaks it. And on the subject of breaking non-aggression pacts: when any one is broken, there's a one-turn grace period during which you may not attack the other members of the pact. This does not apply to non-aggression pacts with an expiration date, which have expired. These can also only be signed when you're adjacent with the other pact members.
Hand-in-hand with non-aggression pacts go trade agreements. As the name sounds, you can agree to profit from trade with other members of the agreement. Each of you earns an additional 100 gold for every settlement in the trade agreement. Say Bill owns three towns, and Bob owns four. Both Bill and Bob earn an additional 700 gold for the duration of the agreement. Note that you have to be under a non-aggression pact in order to sign a trade agreement.
There are also alliances. You can sign a treaty of alliance with any other player adjacent to you, but can only sign one at a time. With an alliance treaty comes an assumed non-aggression pact and an assumed trade agreement, both of which are outlined above. You can also reinforce their cities as you would your own. You can also break or end alliances under the same circumstances as a non-aggression pact - either with a set expiration time to be negotiated, or by breaking them. Former allies can attack immediately after the expiration date; but there is a three-turn grace period between breaking an alliance and being able to attack. Because backstabbing your best friend is kind of mean.
So that's diplomacy. Now on to combat. Couple of notes: like Medieval 2, you have to wait for the strongest units. This translates to only being allowed to use Early-period units initially, until 25 turns after the first combat in the game you can use units from the High period and then at 50 turns later Late period units will be allowed. So there's that. You also have to pick a nation, which can be switched anytime before the first combat but cannot change afterwards. You also can't pick the same nation as someone else.
Well, we use Medieval 2 Total War. You use your gold in a territory (say Bill owns Stockholm with 6000 gold in it, and wishes to attack Arhus) to attack another territory, which can defend - in this instance, let's say Bob has 4000 gold in Arhus after factoring in his Castle. The amount of gold dictates how much you can spend to purchase units for the battle in Medieval 2. You also lose gold based on how many units you lost. Say Bill spent his 6000 gold and started the fight with 1000 units. He lost 500 of them in the battle. 500 is fifty percent of 1000, so Bill loses fifty percent of his 6000 gold - which leaves him with 3000. For simplicity's sake, we'll round your losses in troops to the nearest fifty - lose 405 troops of 1000, lose 40% of your gold. Losing 430 translates to 45%, and so on and so forth.
Because of the territory-settlement battle system as explained above, let's arbitrarily limit the maximum amount of gold to be used in a battle to 50,000 gold (may be shifted later) because according to Immortal 100,000 lets you do silly things. So if you have 100,000 gold (counting bonuses) in a territory you are defending, you can use up to 50,000 to defend the territory area and up to 50,000 to defend the settlement. Any excess may not be used, barring a potential third battle.
For refereeing purposes, we'll need a third person (probably just whoever isn't in the battle) to play Spectator. The spectator will ensure that each person will A) use the proper amount of gold and
use units from the appropriate periods. Attackers don't have to use all of their gold; Bill can spend 4000 of his 6000 gold trying to attack Arhus. Defenders, on the other hand, don't either - but might as well, because losing a city means you lose the territory and all the gold in it.
You can also retreat to avoid being attacked - this will save you any gold stockpiled in a territory and move it to the closest territory, but will cost you that territory and any settlements in it. Settlements don't get destroyed when someone takes something else, so be careful with your retreats.
After winning an attack, you can choose how much gold to move into a territory. Looking back above - say Bill used 4000 of 6000 total gold to attack Arhus. Say he won, but lost 50% of his troops in the battle - so he's down to 2000 of a total 4000. He can send up to 4000 gold to occupy Arhus, but he has to move as much gold as is left over from the attack. Since he initially sent in 4000 gold, but lost 2000, he must move the initial 2000 into the territory.
The map will be edited in below. So pick where to start, pick your faction, name your faction (renaming locations is also an option), and bear with me because this was a lot of highly-experimental text and my wrists hurt.
Some of us hate dice because we can't regularly roll above a 3.
So what I propose is a - wait for it - diceless Medieval 2 Total War forum Risk game which will probably end up more like Civilizations or actual Medieval 2 Total War than a Risk kind of thing.
Now since this is the highly experimental, 'nobody knows what will happen' stage, I request two things of anyone who participates: First, bear with me. The only reason I started this is because I got tired of crap dice rolls (seriously, look in the other thread - there's no way the dice system is random) and it's a work in progress. Two (yes, that's grammatically incongruous), do stupid stuff you wouldn't normally in order to test the system and make sure it works okay. Like starting a few territories away from someone and declaring war on them ASAP. Actually, the initial map (once I add it) will probably be pretty small to encourage a shorter game - because not only do I want to test this, I want to see how different strategy will affect your ability to fight a war.
So now that I'm done with the exposition, here's how actual play works.
You start with one territory of your choice, a settlement in that city (size to be determined later), and two thousand gold. Easy enough.
So before I launch into a detailed description of how turns play out, here are a couple of lists to establish how much gold you get for owning territories and settlements. Bonuses are not cumulative, but you do get bonuses to defending a location for owning a settlement as depicted below.
Territory - total of +100g, no defensive bonuses
Village - +100g; +100g to defense
Town - +200g; +300g to defense
Large Town - +500g, +500g to defense
City - +750g, +750g to defense
Large City - +1000g, +1000g to defense
Huge City - +2500g, +2000g to defense
Fort – +100g, +500g to defense
Motte and Baily - +150g, +1000g to defense
Wooden Castle - +200g, + 1500g to defense
Castle - +300g, +2000g to defense
Fortress - + 500g, +2500g to defense
Citadel - +1000g, +5000g to defense
So, as you can see, it can be advantageous to build cities or castles - but be careful, because you can't have both in the same territory. Now, a table on upgrading things:
Territory >Village – 1000g
Village > Town – 2500g
Town > Large Town – 5000g
Large Town > City – 7500g
City > Large City – 10000g
Large City > Huge City > 25000g
Territory > Fort – 1000g
Fort > Motte and Baily – 2500g
Motte and Baily > Wooden Castle– 5000g
Wooden Castle > Castle – 7500g
Castle > Fortress – 10000g
Fortress > Citadel – 15000g
So it's expensive to build a city or fort type structure. But the rewards might be worth it to you. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that you can only have one of a village or fort - but you can convert a settlement from one to the other, for the equivalent price to upgrade it. Say you wanted to change your Wooden Castle to a Large Town because it's no longer on the front lines - it'd cost you 5000 gold as outlined above. Huge City to Citadel would cost you 15000 gold, and so on.
So now we have the exposition and the prices to upgrade things. So now let's get into how your average turn starts! Generally speaking, there are four phases: taxation, expansion, action, and reinforcement, but the latter three are interchangeable (so you could tax, reinforce, expand, and then act) and blend a bit.
The first phase happens more or less automatically. You gain a certain amount of gold based on how many territories you own, and you gain more if those territories possess settlements. You can also get more if you have a trade agreement, but more on that later. One thing to note is that the money you get remains in the settlement you earned it from - say Stockholm generates you 600 gold in a given turn, that 600 gold remains in Stockholm until you move it. You don't get to just spend your 600 gold from Stockholm to build a village in Cracov; you have to move it there.
Expansion. You get to take an unclaimed territory for free. Yes, that's it, one single territory. For free. You can spend two thousand (2000) gold to expand to a second one. It's gonna be slow. I know. That just means you can spend more on expensive troops and stuff.
Action. You can take two actions here, from two types of action. You can attack an enemy-controlled territory, or you can build or upgrade a settlement. You can attack twice, or you can build two castles, or one and one. Your call. What you can't do, is attack a territory, take it, and then move from that territory to attack another one. For example: you want Stockholm, so you take Stockholm. You then want to attack Arhus. Well, you can't use your troops (represented by your gold in a territory) in Stockholm to do that. Because they just attacked. So you'd have to use your troops in another adjacent region. Note: You can take the territory of Stockholm, and then the city located in Stockholm, because they're technically in the same location.
Of note on attacking places: It takes two attacks to take a territory if there's a settlement in it. You battle once for the territory, and then once for the settlement; the defender gets their gold bonus for the settlement added to both battles, but must distribute gold in the territory accordingly - you can leave all those troops to defend the settlement and use the defensive bonus only, or defend your territory with everything you've got, or anywhere in between. Take the territory, and you besiege the settlement - which immediately cannot be reinforced and only generates
Redeployment/reinforcement. In times of peace, you can redistribute gold from anywhere you'd like to any one province of choice. Say you want to put all of your gold into Stockholm. Well, go ahead - but you can only do this once per turn. You can't move a ton of gold into Stockholm, then another ton of gold into Riga. It's Stockholm, or Riga. Not both.
So, that's how you take turns. Now, for interacting with other players - which you can do at any time so long as it is dictated in the thread.
First up is diplomacy. There are a couple of options you can take. You can choose to donate gold from one of your territories to an adjacent allied one, if you like; this doesn't count as your redeployment move. Say you own Prague and your ally owns the adjacent Breslau, which is about to be attacked. You can take as much gold as you have in Prague and donate it to Breslau, if you like, as long as you're bound by at least a non-aggression pact.
Speaking of which, non-aggression pacts. These are pacts which guarantee you will not attack the other treaty members. You can negotiate the length, if you'd like to put a specific length on it to be renegotiated at its end; or you can make it indefinite, to be broken when one party breaks it. And on the subject of breaking non-aggression pacts: when any one is broken, there's a one-turn grace period during which you may not attack the other members of the pact. This does not apply to non-aggression pacts with an expiration date, which have expired. These can also only be signed when you're adjacent with the other pact members.
Hand-in-hand with non-aggression pacts go trade agreements. As the name sounds, you can agree to profit from trade with other members of the agreement. Each of you earns an additional 100 gold for every settlement in the trade agreement. Say Bill owns three towns, and Bob owns four. Both Bill and Bob earn an additional 700 gold for the duration of the agreement. Note that you have to be under a non-aggression pact in order to sign a trade agreement.
There are also alliances. You can sign a treaty of alliance with any other player adjacent to you, but can only sign one at a time. With an alliance treaty comes an assumed non-aggression pact and an assumed trade agreement, both of which are outlined above. You can also reinforce their cities as you would your own. You can also break or end alliances under the same circumstances as a non-aggression pact - either with a set expiration time to be negotiated, or by breaking them. Former allies can attack immediately after the expiration date; but there is a three-turn grace period between breaking an alliance and being able to attack. Because backstabbing your best friend is kind of mean.
So that's diplomacy. Now on to combat. Couple of notes: like Medieval 2, you have to wait for the strongest units. This translates to only being allowed to use Early-period units initially, until 25 turns after the first combat in the game you can use units from the High period and then at 50 turns later Late period units will be allowed. So there's that. You also have to pick a nation, which can be switched anytime before the first combat but cannot change afterwards. You also can't pick the same nation as someone else.
Well, we use Medieval 2 Total War. You use your gold in a territory (say Bill owns Stockholm with 6000 gold in it, and wishes to attack Arhus) to attack another territory, which can defend - in this instance, let's say Bob has 4000 gold in Arhus after factoring in his Castle. The amount of gold dictates how much you can spend to purchase units for the battle in Medieval 2. You also lose gold based on how many units you lost. Say Bill spent his 6000 gold and started the fight with 1000 units. He lost 500 of them in the battle. 500 is fifty percent of 1000, so Bill loses fifty percent of his 6000 gold - which leaves him with 3000. For simplicity's sake, we'll round your losses in troops to the nearest fifty - lose 405 troops of 1000, lose 40% of your gold. Losing 430 translates to 45%, and so on and so forth.
Because of the territory-settlement battle system as explained above, let's arbitrarily limit the maximum amount of gold to be used in a battle to 50,000 gold (may be shifted later) because according to Immortal 100,000 lets you do silly things. So if you have 100,000 gold (counting bonuses) in a territory you are defending, you can use up to 50,000 to defend the territory area and up to 50,000 to defend the settlement. Any excess may not be used, barring a potential third battle.
For refereeing purposes, we'll need a third person (probably just whoever isn't in the battle) to play Spectator. The spectator will ensure that each person will A) use the proper amount of gold and
use units from the appropriate periods. Attackers don't have to use all of their gold; Bill can spend 4000 of his 6000 gold trying to attack Arhus. Defenders, on the other hand, don't either - but might as well, because losing a city means you lose the territory and all the gold in it.You can also retreat to avoid being attacked - this will save you any gold stockpiled in a territory and move it to the closest territory, but will cost you that territory and any settlements in it. Settlements don't get destroyed when someone takes something else, so be careful with your retreats.
After winning an attack, you can choose how much gold to move into a territory. Looking back above - say Bill used 4000 of 6000 total gold to attack Arhus. Say he won, but lost 50% of his troops in the battle - so he's down to 2000 of a total 4000. He can send up to 4000 gold to occupy Arhus, but he has to move as much gold as is left over from the attack. Since he initially sent in 4000 gold, but lost 2000, he must move the initial 2000 into the territory.
The map will be edited in below. So pick where to start, pick your faction, name your faction (renaming locations is also an option), and bear with me because this was a lot of highly-experimental text and my wrists hurt.
