Conserns about sim speed

[Jefgte]

I imagine just 4 states in Europa

BRITANIA:
United Kingdom + all states from Maine to Mississippi
ROMA:
Italia+ Spain + Portuguese + France + Greece +Tunisia + Algeria + Morocco
OTOMAN:
From Turkey to Libya + Bulgaria + Romania
SCANDINAVIA:
Norvegia + Sweden + Danemark + Germanie + Poland + Austria ...

For 4 players of course.


Jef

[Jefgte]

Another alternative, if we want to continue NAVALISM,
is to divide the number of states by 2.

Major states (players) sharing the remaining small states.


Jef

[Darman]

Okay, I have considered a reboot before and come up with several ideas. 

1.  This idea has been influenced by a series of science fiction novels I read recently, the novels take place in space but because of that everything is naval, armies play no role and the political backdrop is of the Napoleonic conflict between small wealthy England and the large, poor republican France.  I can get into details on nations if people are interested. 

2.  My other idea is more a collection of things, some already mentioned
     1)  Earth geography with no changes
     2)  set provinces to determine territory
     3)  At the beginning of the game:
          a)  Everyone starts with a small group of territories
          b)  Everyone gets the same amount of points
               - points used to purchase additional provinces/technology advances/infrastructure
               - Why?  Because then everyone can arrange their nation the way they want to, either large and
                  populous, or small and technologically advanced.  And if the mods want to create a large
                  country they can, or they can let countries expand on their own.  Basically start where
                  everyone is in the same boat as Prussia was in the mid 1800s where Prussia had to unite
                  Germany and then begin colonizing. 

I also believe natural resources are important, the where and maybe even how much. 
Unless we go with an all-islands approach land warfare is always going to be important.

Just a note but I liked Kaiser Kirk's "Regime Popularity Level" idea.  It allows the mods to end a war if it promises to drag on and on. 

[Desertfox]

I'm cool with any solution, since win or lose NS is still screwed anyways.

One thing I would like to see is a way to limit the "snowball effect", big countries reach a point where they just outrun completely the smaller ones. Some way to limit economic growth as the countries get larger would be nice.

Oh and I call dibs on the Mexican Empire! :-D

[Valles]

A merger is, in effect, more or less what the Maori are trying to do.

That said, if the mods wanted to impose a Versailles-esque settlement, I could work with that - probably Hawaii, Papua, and any further 'native'-inhabited insular territories, permission to carry off every industrial tool and die in Phoenix and Olympia, complete technical data, and something like $200 military, would be my set terms.

I'd be entirely in favor of a 'great powers for everybody!' model; I, at least, am looking forward to eventually 'stretching my legs'.

I'd be very reluctant to use an unaltered map; one with altered sea levels or polar axis would still have landmarks that could be used as a basis for feeding into existent distance calculators - the shape of a good harbor isn't going to change, after all, nor its relative location - without indulging the tendency to slavish imitation of existing background.

If we started earlier than, say, 1885, I'd want to run the first few years until that point as some kind of 'fast forward', without full sim reports or war adjudication, however that works out - more like a 'roughly what do you do? ...Okay, you got that territory but not this one, now what? ...okay, that worked, so you can...' and so forth.

Technology-wise, I'd like to suggest a twist on our current system: rather than pinning the timing of access to 'new research' to a specific calender date, make it a question of how long since the last thing in that tree was completed. Each player can be responsible for noting down the 'cooldown complete!' time when he completes a given research item, keeping the mods from having the keep track.

The fact that this will lead to progressively greater divergences from OTL technological progression while still maintaining full plausibility is considered a feature.

[snip]

I liked Kirks "Regime Popularity Level" as well.

I think we need to look at how to fill in the current holes in the big powers if we are going to continue with this incarnation. If we cant do that, then we need to consider a reboot just to bring down the number of countries to something more suiting of our playerbase.

As to the power-block issue. As we already have a mod in charge of France, would it not be possible for another mod to wield a unified China as a counterweight to aggregation in the Pacific? Or is the Unified China idea DOA no mater who controls it?

Technology-wise, I'd like to suggest a twist on our current system: rather than pinning the timing of access to 'new research' to a specific calender date, make it a question of how long since the last thing in that tree was completed. Each player can be responsible for noting down the 'cooldown complete!' time when he completes a given research item, keeping the mods from having the keep track.

The fact that this will lead to progressively greater divergences from OTL technological progression while still maintaining full plausibility is considered a feature.

I like

[Darman]

I like the idea of not tying research down to the timeline as well.  I feel like it discourages people from leaving the historical timeline because we have already tied ourselves down to it. 
For research, I feel that it shouldn't be tied to industrial capacity either, because that puts smaller nations at a huge disadvantage in researching technologies. 

[Delta Force]

I'm cool with any solution, since win or lose NS is still screwed anyways.

One thing I would like to see is a way to limit the "snowball effect", big countries reach a point where they just outrun completely the smaller ones. Some way to limit economic growth as the countries get larger would be nice.

Oh and I call dibs on the Mexican Empire! :-D

Well, the budget system in place now is somewhat like communist central planning, in that you are constructing infrastructure, factories, telegraph lines, railroads, etc, and some people are spending money to encourage population growth and such. With few exceptions, countries didn't begin interfering in economies until the 1920s and 1930s, either to prevent communist and anarchist tensions by improving working class conditions, or by turning the nation into a massive military industrial machine out for revenge/expansion. We could have economic, population, industrial, etc. growth just be somewhat automatic, or we could use the system as is but with some benefits and drawbacks for capitalist and more state involved economies.

The more state-involved economies always had very high growth early on as they were able to utilize all the industrial resources of a country at full capacity regardless of costs, but by thirty years in things have always tended to get strange in countries that haven't started to become more capitalist as inefficiencies build up, like industries growing out of proportion to each other, a natural disaster damaging part of the interlinked economy, or more people being assigned to a factory than can actually work there because communist economies tended to view economic growth more as a matter of a certain number of inputs producing a certain number of outputs, as opposed to a certain value of inputs producing a certain value of outputs (also explaining some odd economic choices, like not caring about energy efficiency).

Of course, the pure lasiez faire economies didn't last either, as the Gilded Age is quite famous for all the scandals and corruption of the era. That, and reforms are needed to prevent massive disturbances since no one wants to live in a Charles Dickens distopia, and the recessions are much more severe than with a more controlled economy (Panic of 1873, Great Depression).

[Valles]

I don't think that our current sim reports necessarily imply much in the way of central planning; they are, after all, reports, rather than plans.

Now, granted, the Maori, being a kind of hybrid of historical Imperial Japan and modern Palestine, do do a lot of centralized organization, but given how much leeway players have in 'fluffing' their nations, I don't think that there's anything to imply that that's obligatory.

[Darman]

I think his point is that even if its not so much a plan as it is a report we still arrange our reports very much like a centralized plan.  And I agree.  It is also unavoidable that everything will be planned centrally because there are no individuals within each nation who make such decisions as whether or not to build a factory at Site A or Site B.  Or to use the more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly process over the energy inefficient, polluting process.  Or something like that. 

[Valles]

As far as that goes, I agree - it's a fairly obvious observation to make. My objection is that he seems to be confusing the organization of the report, our observer bias, with what's actually happening, and thus imposing a particular set of consequences regardless of whether or not they're actually applicable. If he were right about everyone using a planned or semi-planned economy, I note, I think he would be right about its consequences - but they're not, and the data we have is just too coarse to go into more detail using anything but 'news'.

[snip]

In all honesty, keeping track of all of that would be so much work if it actualy ment something. As it stands now, the reports do a fine job. Could we break the description about what exactly the reports represent off into its thread please.

[Valles]

In aid of that, I've dug up the last set of 'N4 Discussion' threads.

http://www.navalism.org/index.php?topic=4741.0
http://www.navalism.org/index.php?topic=4747.0
http://www.navalism.org/index.php?topic=4719.0
http://www.navalism.org/index.php?topic=4733.0

[Logi]

That, and reforms are needed to prevent massive disturbances since no one wants to live in a Charles Dickens distopia, and the recessions are much more severe than with a more controlled economy (Panic of 1873, Great Depression).

That results from government half-assed regulations which actually served to increase the size of the bubble dramatically rather than limiting it's size. But that's a discussion for another time.


With regard to the economy;

I do believe the 50% military budget, 50% civilian budget is a bit awkward, if we are to speak in semi-realistic setting.

The way I see it, the budgets should work out something like this:

Tax Revenue (10-20% of GDP, government can spend)
Corruption (Loss of Tax Revenue 5-10% of tax revenue)

National Consumption (Dictated by size of national pop, demands certain amount of GDP)
National Production (Dictated by size and location of national pop. Like N3's pop with IC and pop without IC, general trend should be some nations have to buy production from other nations).

Civilian Investment (5-10% of the civilian economy goes back into creating new businesses, jobs and expanding)

Government Production (Taken out of National Production to be used for Federal needs, like building warships-  limited by state of war/peace in the nation)

As you can see, the majority of the economy is civilian. Taking from civilian economy requires a higher state of alertness (war, etc.) and negatively impacts civilians. You then have to compensate for them.

For example:

Civilians can go with lowered national consumptions (think war rationing) but increases their discontent. This should go back into the proposed "Regime Popularity Level".

/////

As for research, I thought it would be interesting to have rather than research by date, research by points.

The date modifies the no. of points need to complete the technology (a set formula) such that you can advance in any one field without interruption but it gets progressively harder and harder to research.

Research points would be generated per sim report and are tied specifically to certain areas of research. IE; if you have research points in computers and you can't just take leftover points in that area to rocketry.

Of course, this might mean research points are given in each field per sim report based on "affinity" to the field (ie how much you have recently research in that area) but I fear that might be getting a tad too complex.

[miketr]

The system being kicked around behind closed doors is a tax based system.

BP's go away, its a pure cash system. 

You set a tax rate of X% and you get that much money to play with and the economy grows the next year by Y%.  You can spend cash on troops, tech, ports, ships, colony investment, etc.  Your economies core growth though is your tax rate, low taxes are good, and high is bad.

Michael