DocMatoi
Theoretical Lover of Girls
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The narrative fluff DICTATES the crunch, my dude.
Paths of Civilization
- Thread starter Academia Nut
- Start date
- Original
- Location
- Hell
They are our budget for various federal and provincial projects as seen in the Important Projects spoiler at the start of Turn Updates.
Golden Ages rely on having, once started, a maxed stat and positive Stability. Every midturn has a chance to spend maxed stats on advancement, whether they be social, technological, governmental, material etc.
LoserThree
Finds writing poorly easy
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- Greater Seattle Area
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- he/him
Thanks. Thing is, I do not have trouble following the narrative. The narrative is good, which is not surprising considering the source.
But there are posts that suggest some players have an understanding of the mechanics that is not apparent in the narrative posts that make up the threadmarks, nor has following the thread for the past few weeks fully enlightened me.
If so, whence die rolls?
Crunch dictates narrative. It is filtered through the characters and setting. It is guided by the Rule of Fun. But there are mechanics behind the quest master's screen that determine what happens.
I guess he could be making it all up as he goes. But this seems less likely and certainly isn't what is said to be happening.
ExNihilo
SPACE!
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- USA
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Hmm. So, one of AN's big things is having LOTS of hidden variables and stats. Up until like three turns ago that included Sustainable Forests, but values like War Exhaustion, Corruption, Overextention, and foreign actions are not displayed, mostly because we have know way of discovering them, E.G., a national bank might reveal inflation, or The Census did reveal population. So instead, the narrative and fluff give hints at the values. Sure, our stats were fine and our stability fine, but every advisor was telling us to pull out of the war, because mostly, hidden value logistics was pretty terrible. Similarly, minor pirate presence was -1wealth, easily ignorable if we had better things to do, but it doesn't take an Einstein to realize that "minor" implies higher levels to exist, and to lose our fleet to pirates would just suck.
Their main purpose by far is to"fill and empty"; they are our resource reserves, after all. Of course it should be noted that the rate at which resources are earned and used up is not at all constant or automatic and depends on our actions; a not-insignificant fraction of the crunch in this game is making sure we have sufficient quantities of the resources we need.
Stats also serve a secondary purpose, in that the direct value of a stat determines how well our society functions. These are most often "fluff" effects in that we don't have direct numbers for them, but it should be noted that we've seen events and the like kicked off due to e.g. low stats, so the effect definitely exists.
- Higher martial generally represents a larger and more prepared military, and I believe that this contributes to war missions.
- High econ means a surplus of food production, and means we suffer less from draughts and the like. There are also two explicit numeric effects:
- While at 10+ econ, we get +1 wealth production per turn.
- Events often cause temp econ damage, which is subtracted from our current econ until end of turn. If that goes negative then we don't have food for everyone and bad things happen.
- We've seen that low Wealth makes our traders rather nervous, and could hamper the functioning of our economy.
- Higher diplomacy generally means other polities are more likely to respond to us positively, and it has been confirmed in a word-of-AN that lower diplomacy increases the risk of vassals/subordinate breaking off.
- High Religious Authority affects our Pilgrimage trade good, and is generally a factor in how well our religion matches up against competing religions.
- High Legitimacy and Stability generally mean everything in our polity goes better; basically, when bad events happen, they are liable to be less of a problem when these stats are high. Conversely, we've seen negative stability directly cause bad events, especially when coupled with overflowing Martial.
Also, as other players have mentioned, Golden Ages are triggered based on times when Stability is maxed alongside with at least two of Economy/Diplomacy/Mysticism/Tech/Culture/Wealth/Martial*, and a golden age ends when either stability hits zero or all of our stats drop below their cap. During the course of a golden age, the improvements we get to vote on each midturn are determined by which stats we had maxed at the beginning of that turn.
*Not sure about that last one, since Martial doesn't have a cap in the same way other stats do.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Whooooof, finally home from a long/great day. And I can finally answer.
Uhhh... I think I do. I'll have to look for it.
@loserthree Heyo! Glad to see a new person speaking up. I'm a long time player here(though definitely not the longest) and now that I have access to a computer I can pass on some more information you might enjoy. Though not entirely mechanical per say since the folks above me have handled that for the most part(awesome of you).
The first thing that comes to mind which I want to share, is that when we take war actions the war action resolves over the course of 3-4 "sub-phases" where opposing military rolls are made. This is pretty much what happened when Yenyna arrived and rofl-stomped during the Dragon War with the Khemetri, as each update was basically describing a sub-phase.
A similar thing to "sub-phases" is when we get extra midturns as in the case of the updates 'Intervening in foreign internal affairs' through 'Not Alexander'. Usually when things are going in rather curious directions, or a lot is happening. Such a thing happened when we first started the Palace, AN split up the mid turn there so as to not overwhelm us with complexity.
Another thing which you have probably cottoned onto, though if not now you will and so can anyone who follows after you, the idea that sometimes our stat numbers are not completely accurate as to the true state of things. An example was when several dozen updates ago we started building roads and suddenly we discovered that our Tax code was boned and had been boned for some time. Essentially our Cent number was not accurate because we were not actually fully administrating even close to effectively lands beyond a smaller chunk nearer to our core and thus we didn't know the Tax was borked. *scratches cheek* Hmm, well I hope I'm remembering that right, it's been a while.
Also another thing which just cropped up and is related to our Genius King from last turn, not sure if you caught the WoG, but when we get a Genius AN rolls for their "stability" which he explained to basically be mental health/ability to function in society. Tormulyna and Yenyna were both very unstable, while Yshyun was stable but fragile to certain stressors. And stability is also dependent on what kind of genius they are, with Martial and Mystic being some of the most unstable while Diplo and Admin are much more so naturally(I can't recall if this last bit was something he directly said or that we are speculating with logical deduction so take with a grain of salt)
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???
Sustainable Forest has been a thing for ages, since before the discovery of Iron at the latest (I didn't go further than that to check). It just wasn't tracked on the main page until recently. It was just tracked under the Actions spoiler each turn update. This is the same way Road Connectivity, Watchtower Coverage, and Wall Coverage is tracked now.
No, we had the number. Take a look under the Expand Forest action for any main turn; it is right there.
ExNihilo
SPACE!
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The stat (forests) wasn't being tracked visibly until fairly recently. I remember everyone was really confused about the values for a while, because we didn't understand them. It was right around when all the actions increased in costs and benefits. We agree with each other, I'm like 80% sure, were just talking past each other.
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BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Do you mean by "visibly" that they were not listed on the first page with all our other stats? Other than that, the number of sustainable forests we had at any one time has been an actual number for a long time, attached to the Expand Forests action. It's just gotten so important AN moved it in the last two months or so.
It's also possible that the confusion you remember was from that until very recently we weren't tracking half forests. With that we were often unsure as to when and how our forestry policies were going to pay out.
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No. The stats have been tracked visibly for AGES.
Here is a quote.
@Academia Nut are we keeping an eye on the Dragon General's kid? How are they doing?
Pretty sure it's still the other way around. Numbers are secondary to narrative.
If the players can predict what the QM thinking...or convince the QM that this is a REASONABLE way that it will happen, we can make good decisions.
That is why you don't see mechanic posts aside from explanation of what the stats mean.
He's probably dead, Jim.
ExNihilo
SPACE!
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It doesn't have totals. Yes, @PrimalShadow, you were correct and I was wrong, I had misremembered the tracking in Expand Forests. But, to be fair, that doesn't actually show how many total forests we have, which was important for the last Yeoman? quest.
It is right there to the right of the Slash: 3/4.
More distant offspring, then? The option said to breed her like a prized cow, so I'm interested in whether anything came of that.
I don't think that is what we did. Probably nothing came of it, law of regression to the mean and all.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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The total is actually the difference.
For example since we have 19/22.5 right now our total number is 3.5.
Reward from quest.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Nope, the (3/4 or whatever it is) thing attached to the Expand Forests action is waaaaaaaaaaaaay out of date. And what's happened is that 22.5 is the number of forests we could use, while 19 is the amount we are currently using. Thus the amount free to be used for something or left alone is 3.5. We want this 3.5 to go to 8 to complete the Yeoman quest.
Well, that number in particular is from an update that is more than 3 IRL months and roughly 3000 pages ago. Of course it is a bit dated.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Nah, it's just that the number in here hasn't been updated in ages.
AGES.