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International Architecture: Not About Buildings


iamthey

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This honestly just weakens everyone but tricent though basically.


How? Triyun and centurius having the two largest GDP's is hardly shocking, they occupy massive land masses, and have huge populations relative to me or most others in the rp. This is already a widely assumed fact. They also already reap the single greatest benefit (strategically speaking) from this, their unrivaled militaries. A subset of players voluntarily collaborating to flesh out the architecture of international commerce only really serves to add depth to the RP, it hardly compromises anyone else or disrupts the power balance further. At the end of the day if you want to be a self sufficient island, or close trade to just you and a few others, you can clearly still do that, but why shouldn't others want to expand avenues of player collaboration?

Overall it seems like one of the greatest issues with cnrp is that 90% of the joint RP is either adversarial and zero sum where someone wins and others lose (war), or boring and canned (treaties). The UN was a huge leap forward in terms of advancing our diplomacy beyond just the aggregation of treaties, but I think we can do more. We need more areas of play that bring people into greater interaction. With such alternatives there could be yet unseen ways to approach the game (than the expansionist militarist powers, hapless victims, and isolationist neutrals we've all seemed to embody thus far) bringing some much needed diversity to play.

In short opening up other areas where players can collaborate (even if they aren't economic in nature) can hardly be seen as a bad thing. Edited by iamthey
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I don't believe the problem lies with the system, I believe the problem lies within the players, I for one enjoy character RPs, but considering this is an environment in which any character I create will be targeted to kill or capture for eternity, it kinda removes alot of my motivation to develop a character. Make people not be dicks would be a better start.

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I don't believe the problem lies with the system, I believe the problem lies within the players, I for one enjoy character RPs, but considering this is an environment in which any character I create will be targeted to kill or capture for eternity, it kinda removes alot of my motivation to develop a character. Make people not be dicks would be a better start.

This is neither a fault of economic RP, nor is it anything that was intended to be fixed by the proposal. It's just something that has pretty much no relevancy to the topic being discussed.

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I've argued many times before a big reason I feel for using military means in CN RP is because economic means of compellence are unavailable.  Even more, they are often mixed, for example the lack or ability to blockade countries, a traditional tool of war fighting, means that the longer a war draws on all there is going to be is bitching, no exhaustion.  The population of the blockaded country can remain 100 percent loyal with a 100 percent good quality of life.  

 

Absent the option of a blockade, sanctions, embargoes, the only option for changing an hostile state's behavior (hostile being defined here as beyond diplomatic overtures with a reasonable chance of succeeding) is lightning strikes to destroy as much as possible as fast as possible.  

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I mean, I like the idea, so long as its voluntary anyway, but what about someone like me who is not really that knowledgeable in these types of matters?  I've never taken a formal class on economics nor read up on the subject that much.  I mean, people already complain enough about having to research and deal with the military stuff but I can tolerate that because thats something I actually enjoy to an extent.

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To my mind would it not produce a balance agains the most intensive offensive (and by necessity technologically intensive) doctrines, offering the ability to disrupt the logistical components of a war machine in drawn out conflicts as well as democratize the norms of behavior of states through the ability to launch collective embargoes (that's not to say there aren't counters to this last point, there in fact are.)

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I mean, I like the idea, so long as its voluntary anyway, but what about someone like me who is not really that knowledgeable in these types of matters?  I've never taken a formal class on economics nor read up on the subject that much.  I mean, people already complain enough about having to research and deal with the military stuff but I can tolerate that because thats something I actually enjoy to an extent.

A lot of it isn't really that complicated, and a quick read of the basics of something on Wikipedia can be good. tutor2u was pretty good for me. Edited by Horo the Wise Wolf
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MostGloriousLeader I think where the difference lies between the complexity of one and the other is that deep military knowledge is esoteric and more difficult to come by while an understanding of broad economic concepts could be googled and obtained rather quickly. A closer analogue to the military status quo (in terms of obscurity and difficulty) would be if we started rping the outcomes of exotic derivatives trading and the details of specific financial instruments (something I doubt anyone here is interested in or qualified to do). Another reason why I think this wouldn't significantly alter the balance of play is simply that economic consequences are more ambiguous and leave the implementation of their impacts to imagination. If players could engage in a trade war rather than an actual war I think there would be greater room for give and take (that it would be more cooperative) rather than the unquestioned outcome of missile strikes or bombings.

Say if you were embargoed and the embargoing nation was a major supplier of rare resources for particular industries- how you RP the consequences really remains up to you. You could ration the remaining supply to industries you felt were important, or try to find substitutes. Your situation would also provide opportunities to other suppliers who might rush in to take your business (which might in turn aggravate your economic adversary). In either case I think an economic angle would give greater content to our diplomacy as it could be an alternative rationale for alignments that aren't purely hard power balancing. Again I don't think this requires or needs a rule change, more just a consciousness of the possibility and active players interested in laying the IC groundwork while writing with that in mind.

I find RP war pretty boring myself so personally the idea of a deeper economic metagame is both enticing and something I would be interested in exploring further. I've always wanted the RP to be more than just RISK, and I think a crucial component to realizing that is sublimating conflicts between players into more diverse theatres of action (than just outright military confrontation).

Edited by iamthey
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