Proposal for New rules

[snip]

A suggestion on aircraft. Instead of paying for individual aircraft, I proposed that one payed for aircraft factories. A factory would say be capable of producing 100 aircraft per quarter/year etc, and could be expanded as needed. Factory cost would be determined by type of aircraft being produced and would have to be upgraded as new aircraft became available.

If you were going to use a factory-based production system, where each factory produces X amount of equipment, then this is the idea that I would favor most.  But rather than 100 aircraft, what about making it 100 tons of aircraft?  Factories will still cost more for each level but as the aircraft get bigger you produce fewer of them per factory. 

that is the setup that Tex and I originally proposed.

[TexanCowboy]

Yay; more posts in the past few days then there have been in a month.

*sighs* Ok....  first I dont play West World so I am completely ignorant of what they do over there.   But lets be clear here KISS is going to be a guiding principle.

I have seen some really good proposals In the Military Sections for Brigades.   And the Fortress and Fortified Lines and Naval Gun Batteries sections all seem to work exceedingly well.

Aircraft can be built in Car Factories so no Specialized BP or IC or whatever we want to call them.   Aircraft need to be built and maintenance is going to be expensive.

And finally starting in 1880/90 means we have 25 to 35 years of sim time before we have to start worrying about them

Yes, but all of those still aren't really that KISS; whereas these can be done without a spreadsheet, even a calculator and a piece of paper might take 15 minutes, maximum.

I'm gonna call bull on the second part. I'd like to see a naval gun manufactor suddenly start producing aircraft, with the same materials. It's possible for what, 10, 15 years at the most, until we get into more advanced aircraft. Also, the aircraft pay what we paid for them in 5/3 years; that's a pretty high maintances.

And to Darman; yeap, me and snip actually had some discussions over that very topic that lasted a while.

[Delta Force]

What is the major reason why smaller countries do not buy ships from the larger countries in game? I think I might have a way to encourage that.

[TexanCowboy]

Hm; ok. Fire away, in that case.

Don't think we specified anything one way or another, although, generally, small countries would have to build overseas from lack of slip size.

[Logi]

The major reason why smaller countries do not buy ships from larger countries is as follows.

Anyone who doesn't have enough BP to self-build are likely to not have money to buy foreign builds. Ships sell for high prices, further excluding poor countries. Hence, we get the occasional small ship sell, but almost never a cruiser or larger sell to a small country.

Money-rich but BP-poor countries tend to have bad relations with everyone, so there is little way for them to build. Most prefer to build up their own BP with that money anyways.

Larger countries also, in turn, rarely offer their old ships for sell, preferring to scrap them instead.

[TexanCowboy]

Yes. However, in WW, we've seen several export sales, including 4-5 BB's, and 2-3 Aircraft Carriers, all new...so, by that basis, it might, just might, be possible.

[ctwaterman]

I think the problem here for Ship sails has always been the BP costs....

Italia built a brand new BB for the DKB,  DKB built the turrets, turret armor, and guns and shipped them to Taranto where they were installed.   Italia built the BB out purchased BP [Used Bavarian BP to replace BP used by Italia from own production.]   Basically I paid around $2 per BP and then charged the DKB a bit over $3 for each BP purchased.   So the total cost of the Ship in $$ was expensive probably over $100 including the 20% profit figured in by the Greedy Italians who had bank accounts to line and bribes to pay.

So DKB who had spare $$$ in there Military funds was able to get a nice Battle Ship for about @ $10-15 per year for 4 years and 1 balloon payment of $20.  What they didnt have to do was build 4 more BP per year to cover the initial start up.

But as our example above pointed out Egypt could not afford such a ship.   And the reason is nobody who had spare BP was willing to spend them to build new stuff for other people.

[Delta Force]

I don't think that state-run shipyards were doing too much exporting in real life anyways. I propose that the major powers have a private shipbuilding industry that doesn't have the player of the host country get involved. A country that isn't a great power could certainly construct a dreadnought of its own, but it is problematic. A private dreadnought building industry is unlikely to develop for a country that is building only a few dreadnoughts. To make a dreadnought you need to have large slips and a highly trained workforce. You also need a large steel industry and people who already know how to make large ships out of steel. It's like building a large cargo ship at that point. However, when you put in the requirement for industries that exist only for warships like armor production and rolling facilities, high performance boiler (and possibly turbine) industries, gun barrel forges, shell production plants, large industrial plants for casting the turrets, etc. Not only do you have to have these large and expensive facilities to make a ship, you also need to continually invest in them to keep the equipment, techniques, and technology of the production and the products up to date. If you don't have the prospect of sales to your own nation's navy or to foreign buyers (and a fairly substantial level of industrialization and shipbuilding), a private industry will never develop. Japan was one of the largest naval powers and a growing industrial power, and yet it never was able to support a private warship industry, nor was France. Only countries with a high degree of industrialization like Austria-Hungary, Germany, the UK, and the United States had large private shipbuilding industries, and even then some of them never did export warships.

Regarding players losing control of who is buying what, historically all the powers were selling things to each other, Germany and Austria sold guns and turrets to the Russians and the UK sold Austria turbines. Countries didn't even care about the best technology going overseas, Armstrong built the Agincourt for Brazil and later the Ottoman Empire, and Vickers constructed the lead ship of the Kongo for the IJN. With countries having more tensions in Navalism than in OTL, middle powers and aspiring middle powers should be clamoring for dreadnoughts from the yards of the great powers. You can certainly bar a power from buying from you, or seize their ships, but that is a great way to infuriate a nation and potentially cause them to go to war against you.

[miketr]

We debated having private and national ship building industries and decided it wasn't worth the effort.  Instead if people want to buy crap someone will sell it to them, just to make a buck. 

Michael

[Kaiser Kirk]

The major reason why smaller countries do not buy ships from larger countries is as follows.

Anyone who doesn't have enough BP to self-build are likely to not have money to buy foreign builds. Ships sell for high prices, further excluding poor countries. Hence, we get the occasional small ship sell, but almost never a cruiser or larger sell to a small country.

Money-rich but BP-poor countries tend to have bad relations with everyone, so there is little way for them to build. Most prefer to build up their own BP with that money anyways.

Larger countries also, in turn, rarely offer their old ships for sell, preferring to scrap them instead.

Interesting PoV, I've been at the other end. Bavaria has merrily built ships for the ESC, France, and Mughals, and built parts of Iberian and Italian vessels to spec.  This is because Bavaria didn't really see a need for a Navy, until the export sales, excess BP was a problem. Even so, just finished BP #13.

High ship Costs was something I found dismaying.  Some old PDs went on the market and were bought for several times cost. This explanation helps explain it. However, apparently several of those nations had built up a long term investment fund - carrying $ over year to year, which is why the prices were that high- they raided a piggy bank most of us aren't allowed to have.  It's a distorted price.

As for $ rich and BP poor having poor relations...that's rather a foriegn policy issue, not a structural one. 

The presence of 'Great Powers' with a fixed export BP available for bid might be a way to provide that alternative while mimicing Elswick and Vickers etc.

[miketr]

The presence of 'Great Powers' with a fixed export BP available for bid might be a way to provide that alternative while mimicing Elswick and Vickers etc.

The idea is that in the next game only Player Nations and perhaps a few others can build ships.  There will be lots of nations looking for new build or used ships. With no BP there is no need to scrap ships to recover scarce BP's for more ship construction.

I found it sorta strange the way people kept scrapping old ships to fuel new construction.

Michael

[Nobody]

So in the end the problem is as follows*:

We want a system which is

• easy, simple to keep track of things
  
  yet still
  
• offers more/better realism, and some kind of growth
  
• encourages trades
  
  while
  
• using that huge and detailed map miketr found
  
  Without some kind of EDP-system this is not going to work.
  
  Maddox asked me last year whether it would be possible to write a program that does all the bean-counting, my answer at that time was that while it wasn't worth the effort (especially the user interface would be a lot of work).
  BUT, if we would use a EDP-system it would offer much more options (e.g. for economic rules) while still keeping things simple for the player.
  
  
  *) probably a very simplified view missing lot of things

[Valles]

I have absolutely no interest in ship trading, and in fact am likely to avoid it no matter any mechanical 'enticement', simply to spite those trying to shove it down everyone's throats.

More productively, how do we reconcile that provided 'districted' map with the desire of many parties - myself included - for a physically altered world, one with differing sea levels at the very least?

[Sachmle]

That is the one thing that will turn me off completely, an 'altered world'. I don't care if we realign power blocks, de-colonize the world, make Italy the 600lbs gorilla, whatever, but I do not like a mutilated planet. I like knowing where A is compared to B without having to guess where they are in comparison to RL. It's the big reason I didn't want DKB to begin with...I have to GUESS where my cities are so I can figure out distances. It's really annoying and would probably be the end of me as an active player. I'm already swamped with school and work, but I still manage to check in at least 2-3 times a day and see what's up. I don't really want to make things more complicated. I do like the idea of "infrastructure/industrial decay" (Use it or loose it I suppose) Should make the export market more realistic.

I guess what I really look for in a sim is REALISM. I like the idea of taking some nation at a point in history and seeing what happens if you make decision B instead of the RL decision A. What if Germany doesn't back Austria-Hungary in 1914? What if Italy joins the CP instead of fence riding/finally joining the Entente? These are the things that interest me, and I'd be willing to do complex reports and stat tracking to get it. I know a lot of you don't. That's fine. I can always hang around and help people w/ ships and ideas, but I really don't want more Rohan/DKB/NS/Atlantis(WW)/Misc fake/altered crap. It's more annoying than fun.

My $0.02.

[Valles]

That is, in fact, not what I was talking about at all. My attempts to lobby for a completely new globe were shot down long before, and I very much dissaprove of the sloppy way the 'new lands' of the current Navalism were handled and have and continue to oppose the idea of repeating that experiment. The fine details of history that you're talking about don't interest me because they don't change anything really important... I'm more interested in thematic changes, preferably worked out with some rigor.

What I'm talking about when I say 'an altered world' is the idea of playing in a tilted or flooded earth. Thus, I'm asking if the 'district border' file is in a 'clean' image format that can be laid transparently over a mercator projection of expected flooding, or would territories need to be drawn in manually? Or if there are other complications I'm missing.