- TODO
- How does trade status -> Wealth per turn?
- Add more detail to the Action list (Actions)
- Explain Policies better
- Explain Subordinates and Provinces better
- Include order of costs/income (Income/Expense Timing)
- Add a section on connectivity
Stats are presented in the format
$CURRENT_AMOUNT {$EFFECTIVE_AMOUNT} [$CHANGE_PER_TURN] ($FUTURE_ONE_TIME_CHANGE) / $MAX_AMOUNT
'Overflow': if the amount of a stat exceeds $MAX_AMOUNT, the excess is shifted into one or more of the other stats, representing people choosing to shift their labor to areas in higher demand. The first option listed is the 'preferred' stat, which gets filled first. The second, 'alternate' overflow pathway only operates if the preferred stat
and all the stats downstream of it are at their respective $MAX_AMOUNT-s.
- Martial: labor devoted to conducting military operations
- Substats include highly specialized units like cavalry and navy
- Economy: labor devoted to producing food and supporting more specialized activities. Overflows to Wealth or Martial.
- Sustainable Forests: amount of wood usable before beginning to do environmental damage
- Expansion: land that could potentially be brought under utilization. In some cases, represents efficiencies that could be implemented.
- Overcrowding: lower limit of expansion before significant social problems
- Wealth: labor devoted to producing trade goods. Overflows to Diplomacy or Economy.
- Categories of goods
- Bulk (food, lumber, common cloth and pottery)
- Strategic goods (iron)
- Luxury (salt, gold, fine cloth and pottery)
- Cultural (pilgrimage, expertise)
- Trade statuses: (hoarding, noncompeting), minor, competing, significant, leading, dominating
- Wealth generation is something like (status # x # of goods at that status # category multiplier?) wealth per turn? May be further impacted by economic and government systems.
- Diplomacy: labor available to improve / smooth out internal and external relations. Overflows to Culture or Wealth.
- Intrigue: as diplomacy, focused on covert and taboo issues
- Culture: labor devoted to producing art. Overflows to Mysticism or Tech.
- Mysticism: labor devoted to spiritual and philosophical pursuits. Overflows to Culture.
- Tech: labor devoted to research, development, and highly skilled labor. Overflows to Mysticism.
A stat being at or near $MAX_AMOUNT can have significant and potentially disruptive narrative effects, particularly for Martial.
Prestige: civilization's perception of its own historical importance?? The civ with the highest prestige in a region (granted status 'King of the Hill') gains a per-turn bonus to their Diplomacy stat.
Stability: confidence that those living in a civ have in the competence of its leadership. Progressively lower values represent increased likelihood of things going wrong, such as rebellions. The maximum amount, initially, is 3 (because that's the initial max Legitimacy, see below), while going to -4 represents the end of a civilization as a coherent entity.
Legitimacy: confidence that those living in a civ have that the leadership are those who
ought to be leaders. Sets maximum Stability. Initial max is 3.
Centralization: degree of administrative focus on a central government; important to stay balanced (higher values improve disaster resistance but may paralyze the government apparatus with too many issues to handle, while low values can leading to civil strife and establishment of a new, less-centralised government type)
Hierarchy: measure of the number of layers between state heads and peasants (has something to do with tolerating high centralization and administering large areas...?)
Religious Authority: amount of power the spiritual authorities of the land hold, reflected by the degree to which a typical inhabitant adheres to the moral and spiritual values those authorities espouse.
Statuses, Values, and Legacies: modifications to mechanics based on significant events in-story.
- E.g. 'King of the Hill' Status for having highest prestige regionally, adds Diplomacy per turn but can produce trouble by attracting militaristic action (seeking to gain prestige) or be forced info conflict with another KotH, 'Baby Boom' status resulting from a maximized Economy stat for several turns, 'Golden Age' results from ending two turns in a row with multiple maximized stats and Stability 3+ and gives several stats per-turn bonuses and allows the option to spend stats to purchase special bonuses or innovations.
- 'Early Iron Bringers' Legacy from discovering iron extremely early allows more material science innovations during Golden Ages
- Economic and government types are probably best represented as 'statuses' tbh
- Values tend to result form more narrative and/or long-term actions, e.g. consistently choosing to spend time and resources managing the land led to developing the Personal Stewards of Nature value, consistently taking in refugees promoted the Acceptance value line.
- Curretly divided into social, honor, and spiritual values, with different numbers of slots for each
- A society may also have debilitating beliefs/values and harmful statuses/legacies!
Turn mechanics: cycle between 'Main Phase' in which the thread votes for actions from a set list based on the concepts and tech available to the civ, and a 'Midturn' in which the thread votes in response to special events that may arise due to special opportunities, obstacles to what was voted on in the main turn, or due to the effects of Legacies/Statuses/Values. Sometimes the turn will be subdivided even further into multiple phases due to circumstances such as war or other crises.
In some circumstances, stats will get 'refunded' after being spent. This means that at the Main Phase *after* they are spent, that number of the stat is added to the pool.
'Actions' are administrative efforts that can be organized by a civ, the number and impact of which are ultimately determined by the size and complexity of the polity. Can be either Main (full) cost and impact or Secondary (lower, not always exactly half) cost and impact.
There are also various 'Policies', which work in the background passively and can be rearranged using Actions.
- Basic
- Infrastructure
- Buildings
- Forests
- Projects: spend actions and stats for one or more progress toward completing a project
- Megaprojects: special projects that require a lot of effort or otherwise generations to complete which eventually pay out in special rewards.
- Provinces
- Settlements
- Roads
- Subordinates (Loyalty [L] describing desire to remain part of the civ and chance of breakaway or rebellion, Dependence [D] describing how much help they need from the central authority and their *ability* to break away or rebel, both out of 5)
- Colonies - provinces not directly governed by the core, which take their own set of actions and have the ability to grow larger
- Client States? - foreign nations who have agreed to provide you with privileges or other payment in exchange for protection
- Free Cities - cities given special privileges regarding administration of their immediate area (Trouble track)
- Marches - militarily oriented frontiers
- Mercenary Companies (effectiveness track, representing their martial strength) a slot for military stat points, a group that can be hired out to other polities to earn Wealth or kept at home on payroll for Wealth cost per turn
- Vassals - foreign territory under your control
- Trading Posts - small subordinates focused on obtaining trade goods and serving as ports for exploration
Government system limits the set of possible economic systems, determines the rarity of extremely good and extremely bad leadership, sets an effective limit on the size of a civ by applying penalties (to e.g. max centralization) based on size (in terms of provinces, subordinates (prestige-limited?), and cities) sets the base number of actions and policies available to the players, sets the base number of actions and policies available to NPC control, determines how actions and policies are divided up between the players and NPCs, determines the number of cities and subordinatesand may have other special effeccts.
Economic system affects temp econ damage with some formula, may or may not grant exta actions, policies, or wealth generation, and likely has particular circumstances which cause extra problems, such as low Wealth causing instability under the Guild Mercantile system.
Factions are groups of NPCs with meaningful impact on the way a civilization's resources are used and on the course of its development. For example, priests, nobles, and guilds will be common factions, though the specific mix of factions and their relative importance will be heavily context- and history-dependent. Factions have one or more special mechanical effects, as well as
Technologies and concepts serve to define the range of options for actions and policies, to determining how much information about the civ is available to the players, and to provide bonuses or maluses to rolls (e.g. having better military tech makes it easier to win a military conflict)