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Discussing the Point System


Evangeline Anovilis

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Alright, so, we have a nice point system now. While it is a basically nice idea, there are some fundamental issues I see with the point system as it is. And it mainly has to do with the weight points have.

 

For a start, technology points are pretty much the strongest. Why would you opt for being a 1945 tech nation, if all it gets you is 4 points? Of 80 overall. 4 points are not decisive in any of the three branches of military and chances are, if you cripple yourself to 1935 tech, you'll be losing stuff faster than 4 industry can replace. These are four no-brainer points. I would say, increase the point cost of these to something more substantial, so it isn't a no-brainer, or take them out.

 

Army points are ok. The sole issue I had there was that there are so many things that eat up points, that you won't get far here without severely neglecting some other.

 

Navy points are just insane. First off, a destroyer is classed the same as a battlecruiser. And I can get one destroyer (those 2,000 ton vessels that are utterly inconsequential on their own to the whole war effort) or a whole tech year? Next off, the maximum I could put into naval forces is 40. I resolved to do that, so the Marine Nationale isn't a complete joke. I came out with one carrier (which will be the Bearn, more carriers would be far too expensive), six battleships (of RL 8, but I found anything less than 6 would not be able to form a proper battle line) and 20 smaller vessels. These 20 smaller vessels cover everything from heavy cruisers to light cruisers to destroyers to submarines to seaplane tenders (France had already 18 cruisers alone). It is utterly impossible to put more points into more ships. Now, the French RL Navy is a navy that is maybe no the largest, but it was one that was considered substantial enough to be on the Naval Treaties (though, together with Italy it was in the lowest category). However, the expensive nature of navies is even too much to have the Spanish pre-Civil War fleet. And that fleet was an utter joke.

 

The industrial points need a definition of what a RL week is ingame. Otherwise, I could just post every seventh day and get my refill in actions that should take hours. Also, it is quite unreasonable that even if I put 8 points into industry, I could build a carrier a week. Ships should require much longer to be constructed.

 

Aircraft are utterly too expansive. Unless you plan to have WWI style aerial engagements utterly unimportant to what is happening underneath, the pricetag of aircraft is simply too high. You can get 12 aircraft for the price of 45,000 soldiers? I figure there'd be at least 20 Flak per aircraft and while Flak isn't the most accurate of measures, it'll make the opportunity cost of aircraft too high.

 

Overall, I'd think points need a rebalancing and would hope this can be discussed.

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[spoiler]

 

 

World_Map09092014.jpg
 

Link to Full Size

 

 

 

Cybernations Roleplay

"1940"

 

The Setting

The year doesn't matter; we'd never all agree on a timeline anyway so you might as well use 19XX. The only common history is that World War I happened to some degree, except it ended in a white peace of some kind.

 

The technology years range from 1935 to 1940. This will be detailed more in the rules.

 

Starting a Nation

There are three ways to start a nation.

- The first is to find white space that is not labelled as a protectorate, and request a portion of land.
- The second way is to find a protectorate and either request it of them private message its owner (there is a list of protectorate owners below) or find them in our Coldfront channel, #cnrp2.
- You may also make a post in this map thread asking if there is any significant land. There is a rare occasion that someone will grant you a piece of their own (coloured) land, but this is, like I said, rare.

 

(Thank you CNRP2 Rule Thread)

 

Oversea Territories (colonies) are allowed when establishing one's nation, but will be limited.

 

List of Nations & Protectorates

Nations

[spoiler]American Enclave - JEDCJT

Austro-Hungarian Empire - Uberstein

Commonwealth of Massachusetts - Ferdinand Foch

 

Italian Social Republic - Fizzydog

 

Imperial Japan - Mogar

 

Poland - Euphaia

 

Sweden - Lysergide

 

Tsardom of Russia - Centurius

 

Mexico - Voodoo Nova

 

Yugoslavia - Rudolph

 

Finland - Kevin Kingswell

 

Egyptian Empire -  Hereno

 

Second Spanish Empire - Greywall

 

Legion North (Switzerland) - TidyBowlMan

 

Persia - Mr Director

 

Kurdistan - Yerushalayim

 

Confederate States of America - AggressiveNutmeg

 

Ottoman Empire - Markus Wilding

 

Third Republic of France - Evangeline Anovilis

 

Denmark - Horo the Wise Wolf

 

The Caucasus - Chicago Noise
[/spoiler]

 

Protectorates

[Spoiler]

None

[/spoiler]

 

The Rules

Section 1: Points & National Strength

 

Players start with 80 points. If dividing a number which enters decimals, round down.

 

Tech: Each point invested in the Tech category results in gaining one more year of available tech. You start with zero points invested, and access to 1935 tech. Invest four points and you get 1940 tech. Your tech year gives you access to whatever entered production that year. Minor customization, such as switching out the AA armament on a ship, or mounting an AT gun on a truck, is allowed.

 

Army: Each point invested in the Army category results in gaining Corps of 45,000 soldiers, or equivalent of armour and/or artillery.

 

Air Force: Each point invested in the Air Force category results in gaining one squadron of 12 aircraft, of either fighter or bomber type.

 

Navy: Each point invested in the Navy category results in gaining access to one additional combat ship (e.g.: Destroyer, Battlecruiser), or invest two (2) points to get a Battleship, or invest four (4) points to gain a carrier. Carrier aircraft come with the carrier.

 

Industry: It doesn't matter what your economy is, capitalist or communist, it has some measurement of strength. The number of points invested in Industry determines your nation's ability to recover. During war, your nation recovers half its industrial score in points every week. During peace, it recovers its full score. For example, if Examplestan had 5 points of industry, and lost 10 points of its army, it would take 5 RL weeks for it to fully recover during the war at a pace of 2 points a week, or only 2 RL weeks if at peace.

 

No more than half one's points can be invested in one category. Point Investment numbers should be included in one's fact-book, for ease of reference.

 

Section 3: Gaining Land

Players may gain land by expanding into it. Land expansion is fully contestable for two (2) weeks, and the annexed land cannot be added to the map until the two weeks have been completed. Land Expansion should typically be only of provinces/states; exceptions to annex a whole country* may be asked of the GM team. Annexation requires a minimum of five (5) posts; up to three (3) additional posts may be requested by the GM as a team should the territory be considered large.

 

*This would be most appropriate in areas such as the Balkans.

 

All links directly related to the expansion must be included in the map thread post requesting the land, at the end of the two weeks.

 

Section 3: The Gamemasters & Mapmaker

The Mapmaker holds the position of making the map. This is a volunteer position. The Map Maker's powers are limited to the following:

  1. Making the map; this means that it is the mapmaker's job to place the territory held by players onto the map.
  2. Denying unreasonable claims. The mapmaker may decline claims of excessive starting size (for example, China + Tibet + Mongolia, or Germany + Poland, would be excessive starting claims). This can be overruled by the GM team.
  3. Enforcing Section 3 through their Map Making powers.
  4. Maintaining Updated Rules: The mapmaker must keep the rules in the thread accurate and up to date.

 

There are three (3) GM's, who are elected for two (2) month terms. The nomination period lasts 48 hours, followed by a 48 hour election. Only players with nations may vote. Their powers are explained below:

  1. Random Event rolls & points: Once a week the GM team may make a roll for a Random Event (Section 4). Nations targeted may opt out of the event. Nations which RP the Random Event out may earn up to 3 national points, the awarding of which must be approved by the full GM team. If a GM's nation is chosen, they are excluded from the GM team in terms of the vote.
  2. Dispute Arbitration: The GM team pause, retcon, or make rulings on roleplays in order to create a healthier community. During a dispute, the two parties must send a PM to all involved parties, as well as the full GM team. If a GM's nation is involved, they may not rule on the matter.
  3. Creation of Rule Polls: Alternations to rules must be made by the players. A player discussion must run for a minimum of one (1) week, after which polling options must be presented by the players. An option for the status quo must always be included in the poll. The poll runs for 48 hours. The winning option is then given to the mapmaker to be placed in the Map & Rules thread.
  4. Removal of Players: The GM team may create a poll to remove a player. A 75% majority is needed to remove a player from the RP.

Section 4: Random Events

Once a week, the GM team may make two rolls: one to determine the impacted nation, and one to apply one (1) of the effects on the list. Nations targeted may opt out of the event. Nations which RP the Random Event out may earn up to 3 national points, the awarding of which must be approved by the full GM team. If a GM's nation is chosen, they are excluded from the GM team in terms of the vote.

  1. Emergence of Counter-Government Revolutionaries
  2. Drought/Poor Harvest
  3. Economic Recession
  4. Heavy Rains & Flooding
  5. Workers' Strikes in one or more major cities
  6. Soldiers' Strikes in one or more brigades
  7. Assassination/death of a government official
  8. Pandemic/Plague in one or more major cities
  9. Large National Disaster (Earthquake, large tornadoes, etc.)
  10. Economic/Industrial Disaster (Major mine collapses, price for specific commodity collapses, major ammunition factory explodes, etc.)

Section 5: Community Drive Rules

Changing the rules is up to the community. The members of the community have a voice in deciding what the rules are and how they should be applied. Members of the CNRP'40 community can post discussion threads to talk about new rules, old rules, and/or changing the rules.

Polls can be posted as well, however, GM polls are the official measure of the community's desire to modify, remove, or add new rules.

 

Special Note:

To allow for a smooth start to the game, Section 5 and Section 3-3 are suspended for one (1) month, until October 9th, 2014. The goal is to make players try the new rule system out and experience it prior to offering alterations.

 

[/spoiler]

 

It says month, but why not allow changes for one month?

Edited by Evangeline Anovilis
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[b]Special Note:[/b]
 
[b]To allow for a smooth start to the game, Section 5 and Section 3-3 are suspended for one (1) month, until October 9th, 2014. The goal is to make players try the new rule system out and experience it prior to offering alterations.[/b]
 
That's where it says that. Section 5 is clearly suspended for one month.
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As the person behind the points system, I'm aware that it'll need balancing. This is a first draft. Please feel free to make some suggestions for better balance, and I'll happily consider them (though Uber may not, we'll see).

 

Though, admittedly, I did make tech dirt-cheap on purpose.

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I would suggest as a rebalancing act the following:

 

30 points per tech year.

 

1 point for 10,000 soldiers.

 

1 point per 100 tanks/300 artillery pieces/150 tankettes/200 trucks or half-tracks.

 

1 point per 100 aircraft.

 

Navy-wise:

 

1 point per 2 destroyers

 

1 point per cruiser

 

3 points per battlecruiser

 

5 points per battleship

 

10 points per carrier

 

2 points per seaplane tender

 

1 point per 3 submarines

 

Carrier aircraft/seaplanes come with their ships.

 

Destroyers need 2 weeks for recovery, cruisers need 4 weeks, capital ships need 6 weeks. Going on a scale of 1 RL month = 1 IC year.

 

As a baseline, people get 800 points to spend. This sounds like an awful lot. Damn, I can spend this on a fleet that can rival the US navy in 1945, almost. I could get eight million soldiers or god knows what. But it actually is not. People will have to buy soldiers, but also all kinds of artillery, tanks, even motorised vehicles (horses are free). Why are trucks and jeeps in there? Because mechanised armies should be a luxury. Most armies od the day marched on foot and Germany used more horses in WWII than in WWI. People have more points in this system, but also higher costs for their armies, lower costs for their navies and airforces. It would be an actual choice for people to invest into a decent naval force at the cost of soldiers, or to be more land based and have millions of soldiers. You also can decide whether to forego greater mechanisation and be more numerous, or to have a higher degree of mechanisation in a smaller army. Lastly, tech years now actually are a choice, between getting top of the line assets (mostly important for aircraft and tanks, so it is mostly for the more mechanised), or whether to just forego the tech for more numbers (1935 is perfectly adequate for people who need more soldiers and not tanks, as bolt-action rifles and artillery often stem from WWI).

 

Industry should get balanced in a way that ships take longer to be constructed. Even with 800 points, people can invest like 100-200 points in industry at most. These industrial assets can during wartime restore per week 50-100 points. If you consider that people need to restock not just one branch, but at least two, and that one RL week is like 3 IC months, a year is like 500,000 mobilised soldiers, 2,500 tanks, 7,500 artillery pieces, 5,000 trucks and 2,500 aircraft. Sounds crazy, but this can get lost quite fast. As an example, this would not suffice to recover German losses for Operation Barbarossa (Let's not even talk about Soviet losses). That was a 5 month campaign. So, having high industry will be an edge, but it will not make you invulnerable. Having higher industry will most likely need to happen at the cost of areas you feel you do not need, which could mean you could sacrifice naval strength, you could sacrifice mechanisation, you could also sacrifice however tech years in your setup. There are decent assets for 1935 around and some people might actually prefer having the points for more troops or higher replenishment rates.

 

Naturally, the time issue needs to be unified to some degree, so it actually conforms to the scale. I would say, replenishments happen everytime at least a week has passed and at least 5 posts of each main combatant has been made since the last replenishment. It is at the GMs discretion however and they need to judge whether credibly the IC time has passed, so as to avoid purposeful stalling.

 

People are obliged to keep a factbook with their points.

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I've looked over it, and frankly, I like your revision to the point system Eva. And it does not violate the reason for my month-long suspension, which was to prevent people from immediately abandoning the point system.

 

I'm willing to allow a vote on systems this Friday (aka fairly quickly so people don't make their nations with one system and feel entrenched to use it), so I suggest people conduct constrictive criticism quickly.

 

Right now the two polling options would be Status Quo and Eva's Point System.

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I feel that more detail could be paid towards tank tonnage, given their importance in that time period.

 

I'm thinking 1 point towards armor could get you 150 tankettes, 100 in the 5-20 ton range, 50 in the 21-50 ton range, or 25 in the 51-75 ton range, or 10  of the 75+ ton range.

 

Otherwise, my entire tank force could be KV-1's...

 

Thoughts?

Edited by Uberstein
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I'd be pretty concerned about this going way overboard on math and whatnot. Keep things simple and easy to look up, calculate, and play with. While we're using 1930's/1940 tech, we're not actually doing a World War Two game, remember that. So far as I'm aware, this is still a nation/political RP, not a war game.

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I agree with Yeru. The philosophy appears to me to be to turn this RP into a Hearts of Iron RP - which I love, don't get me wrong - but if I wanted to play Hearts of Iron, I would have loaded it up yesterday instead. Keep things simple, keep it easy to figure out, shine light on unclear rules and statements, and RP more. We don't need to go through people's 800 points to figure out if they overspent somewhere or made an error in math - 80 points is more than enough.

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Actually considering the size of armies, air forces and navies in the ww2 era 80 points isn't even nearly enough under the scale used for them. Eva's system has a nice balance, it isn't too advanced and people can properly focus on military branches they need for their territory. The math isn't hard Just divide the total of a certain unit by the amount you get per point and you have just how many points were used.

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I feel that more detail could be paid towards tank tonnage, given their importance in that time period.

 

I'm thinking 1 point towards armor could get you 150 tankettes, 100 in the 5-20 ton range, 50 in the 21-50 ton range, or 25 in the 51-75 ton range, or 10  of the 75+ ton range.

 

Otherwise, my entire tank force could be KV-1's...

 

Thoughts?

As said on IRC, I support this point, as it does address an important point of balancing.

 

I'd be pretty concerned about this going way overboard on math and whatnot. Keep things simple and easy to look up, calculate, and play with. While we're using 1930's/1940 tech, we're not actually doing a World War Two game, remember that. So far as I'm aware, this is still a nation/political RP, not a war game.

I agree with Yeru. The philosophy appears to me to be to turn this RP into a Hearts of Iron RP - which I love, don't get me wrong - but if I wanted to play Hearts of Iron, I would have loaded it up yesterday instead. Keep things simple, keep it easy to figure out, shine light on unclear rules and statements, and RP more. We don't need to go through people's 800 points to figure out if they overspent somewhere or made an error in math - 80 points is more than enough.

This is a calculation you actually only make like once when you set up your nation and then every once in a blue moon, when you shift points for whatever reason. While it may be some math (nothing above multiplication/division though), it's not too hard and definitely not harder than the usual "lets run everything through multipliers". The 80 point system is unbalanced to the point that it took me a five minute glance to know how to minmax it. That is not the point of points. The point of the point system is to allow choices for people to customise their nation without necessarily weakening themselves. Not to present an almost clear choice of what is best and what else is just handicapping yourself.

 

And while you may complain about having to do some math to RP, I think we can all agree that common sense is not going to regulate how many people, tanks and aircraft nations have adequately and without tons of conflict. This might not be WWII-RP, but as long as militaries are of any importance, so is a system to put limitations on said militaries.

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The 80 point system is unbalanced to the point that it took me a five minute glance to know how to minmax it.


This isn't a fault. An easily understood points system is one where everybody knows exactly how to do things so that more people have better defense forces, rather than you and whoever you decide to share information with knowing what's "best". It only took me a few minutes to figure out what you did, because you more or less did spell it out... you made it so that people who forgo 5 years in tech and armor can have armies 4-5 times the size of the people who go 1940 and want medium or heavy tanks. Not to mention that your buffing of this philosophy goes hand-in-hand with French military designs of the interwar period, but that's more or less irrelevant to whether or not the system you proposed based on that is good or not. You also tried to make navies and air forces better, but they're still going to be useless because the reality is that they were supplementary to ground systems. Sorry, it's going to be very hard for the Europeans to colonize when the colonized nations are 1:1 strength parity. Such is life.
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Any army without tech nor armor isn't going to do particularly well against a well armed force with armor. A nation without air superiority is going to suffer greatly, as can be seen with what happened to Rommel in North Africa when the Luftwaffe completely failed to prevent British and American air strikes, or what happened to the Russians when their air force was heavily damaged at the start of the war.

 

The current point system does have its flaws, and while perhaps you may not like Eva's system, surely you can agree that at lease some level of clarification and modification of the current system would make sense?

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As long as people are rping, I really don't think it ought to have a sense of urgency about it. Besides, you founded this retarded clown show, if you want to change the point system, change it. In a few weeks if people have changes they think will work, do a vote about it. 

 

Be dictator now, whip people with the cruel lash of rp, and then allow them their freedom to make stupid decision later.

 

in short, treat these kids like the children they are.

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The primary areas of the initial point system that I'd like to revisit is in the navy and air force. I'd like to keep it simple and easy to understand. The focus of nation creation shouldn't be the points, in my opinion. They should be a supplement to RP.

 

To this end, I'll be submitting a revised rule system to Uber later today.

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