Work with me here...

[The Rock Doctor]

Just something that came up in a chat room with Valles and a couple of involuntary WW participants.

It's another naval sim idea.  Think David Drake's "Surface Action", but as nations rather than mercenary fleets.

Setting:

-It isn't Earth.  It's another planet, settled by humans.  It might be a different Venus or Mars, or Alpha Centauri A-3, or an Earth in an alternate universe where its poles are different.

-Whatever the planet is, it's mostly water.

-And the land is...problematic, because the biosphere is a lethal jungle.  Everything wants to eat everything else.

-So most people live in underwater cities, or in fortified "domes" on "sanitized" land, mostly smaller islands.

-Tech has regressed to ~1930s-1940s era.  Not enough people, and too much difficulty with basic colonization, to support anything more advanced.

Nations:

-Entirely fictional, based on whatever ethnic/philosophical/political concept a player wanted his to be.

-They're initially individual city-states.  In time, they grow to become multi-city states through conquest or union or colonization.

Focus

-Nation creation:  Its personality.

-Nation building:  Conquering neighbours, settling land.

-Naval Warfare:  The primary form of power projection.  Wars are likely limited and not to the death, because if one's ship gets sunk, the crew probably gets eaten by carnivorous fish before the escort arrives.  Even if the admiral is prepared to risk it, the crew probably won't be.

-Land Warfare:  Limited; given how lethal the biosphere is, cracking a city is virtually a death sentence for its inhabitants, because then they can be eaten.  Traditional seige rules might be typical.  Most land units will rather be used to sanitize the land of the lethal plants and animals residing on it; these could be primarily armored units, as grunts will not have a good and long career.

Rules

-The focus is on money and access to a few commodities - probably food and steel-making, maybe others.  Fuel not an issue - probably bio-diesel, refined everywhere.

-No BP.  Just cash.  You're playing your government, not your private sector.

-Seaborne trade important, obviously.  Will need access to stuff you don't control yourself.

-Very limited infrastructure considerations.  Big cities can build/service big ships, small ones can build/service small ones.  Ship construction consists of designing the ship, paying for it, and taking reciept when it's finished - so much less sim report work.

-Tech progressions limited, and more tied to general ability to use historically known ideas rather than develop new ones..  Nukes outlawed or handwaved ("old world with limited U308).  A limited range of general techs to consider, rather than many specific incremental ones.

Valles - what am I forgetting?

Folks - whatcha think?

[The Rock Doctor]

...And to be clear, I'm not trying to muscle in on N4 turf or anything.  It's a discussion topic.  If folks wanted to take it somewhere, peachy.

[Valles]

I think you've covered it fairly well. I suspect that atomic weapons might be possible, but simply not considered that desirable - producing a compact weapon with 1930s tech would be... nontrivial, even if all of the theoretical knowledge needed had survived as probably wouldn't. More massive devices would only be worth the sheer hassle of deploying for strategic strikes or fleet-killing operations - and nuking and poisoning cleared land would probably be a last-resort option even if it weren't outright taboo.

Might see distinct 'classes' of settlement/infrastructure - city domes vs 'suburbs' vs 'greenhouse complexes', and a distinction between landside and aquatic development.

I'd want to go into a fair amount of detail about just how and why the biosphere is so nasty, because that would have follow-on effects on settlement, economy, and culture - view the influence of Bellevue's life on the 'Spirit of Man' cult in the Raj Whitehall books for a milder example.

[The Rock Doctor]

The background in Drake's book - based on some other guy's book decades earlier - was that humanity terraformed Venus, and seeded it with normal Earth life.  However, greater UV exposure due to proximity to the sun meant that things mutated really quickly - animals and plants that were small and had short reproductive cycles rapidly evolved to be more competitive.  That means bigger, faster, and nastier.  Vines creep and attempt to strangle or root in animals.  Mosquitos impale you.  Fish are shark-sized. 

By the time humanity figured out just how shitty a job they'd done, they had no choice - Earth had nuked itself, so there was no turning back.

(Hence no nukes in the book - Earth was a constant reminder of the risk).

The underwater cities were supposedly safer, though I don't recall why, exactly.  The approach to land was - for the most part - to leave it alone.  Given that a lot of minerals would be on land, landings would nonetheless be necessary to a point.  In those situations, people's approach was usually to go to war with the environment - burn, shoot, or blow up everything organic - and establishing sanitized areas behind walls and defences. 

On that basis, I expect settler culture would be oriented strongly towards human survival, with a distinct antipathy for any organism other than humanity and perhaps domestic pets.  Probably codes of honor around safety of people - let a ship strikes its colors rather than sink it, let a city surrender rather than damage or destroy it - and, conversely, seek terms rather than dying a futile and horrific death.

We'd probably see a strong trading attitude, expansionism.  The setting might play out closer to Risk than a geopolitical sim, but to be honest, it's often how people approach these things anyway.

[Carthaginian]

I quite like it- simple, easy to make things 'fit' and very 'rules-light.'

[The Bushranger]

I find this intriguing and wish to know more.
;)

[Valles]

I suspect that the really troublesome aspects of 'clearing' land wouldn't be three-foot bloodsuckers or anemone-brambles, but smaller and more 'subtle' things, like fast-growing molds or malaria-equivalents. Ultimately, what we're looking at is a biome or set of biomes with a lot of free energy and water, and the things that tend to be hardest for humans attempting to adapt to those on Earth are disease and things like those ohgoditseatingitswayout flies from Africa. Horrible, and plausibly a serious barrier to colonization to the point of forcing domed or arcology settlement, but the Venus presented in the actual books is IMHO somewhat past plausible.

I don't think that the premium on individual life would be so high - it might be noticeably low in some cultures, given the naturally higher mortality - so much as there being a premium on infrastructure: smashing a city to ruins would be a capital-A Atrocity not because of the loss of life, but because of the ruined greenhouses, factories, water purifiers - the loss of those assets to the struggle to survive.

[The Rock Doctor]

I suspect that the really troublesome aspects of 'clearing' land wouldn't be three-foot bloodsuckers or anemone-brambles, but smaller and more 'subtle' things, like fast-growing molds or malaria-equivalents. Ultimately, what we're looking at is a biome or set of biomes with a lot of free energy and water, and the things that tend to be hardest for humans attempting to adapt to those on Earth are disease and things like those ohgoditseatingitswayout flies from Africa. Horrible, and plausibly a serious barrier to colonization to the point of forcing domed or arcology settlement, but the Venus presented in the actual books is IMHO somewhat past plausible.

I don't think that the premium on individual life would be so high - it might be noticeably low in some cultures, given the naturally higher mortality - so much as there being a premium on infrastructure: smashing a city to ruins would be a capital-A Atrocity not because of the loss of life, but because of the ruined greenhouses, factories, water purifiers - the loss of those assets to the struggle to survive.

Valid points there.  I hadn't thought at all about diseases and fungi in this context

Yes - infrastructure might be of more concern to some cultures than the people within them. 

[ctwaterman]

2 Words...

Soilent Green... :o

[The Rock Doctor]

I quite like it- simple, easy to make things 'fit' and very 'rules-light.'

Light-er, anyway.  There's no getting around a minimal rules set, especially one that establishes the setting.  The key's more to keep the ongoing paperwork lighter than has been the case.

[snip]

this could be interesting...

[Vukovlad]

Sounds fun

[Kaiser Kirk]

Interesting Rocky.
It would eliminate virtually all the potential for large scale land combat. Damaging livable space would be bad. Resources would be hard to develop in such a place making trade more desirable than finding and prospecting your own ore. Wars would be over livable space and accessible resources.  Aircraft might not seem so obvious if everything outside your city is nasty.


I'm fine with the real world and it's abundance of known data. 
If I was going with an alternate, my alternate world would be one with mid-sized nations, more important straits/canals, shallow shelfs, mid sized islands - kinda like the Dutch East Indies- and a short list of primary resources and a list of substitutes- everyone would have some but not all, so you'd need to specify where you get them for your economy to work full speed, giving motive for trade or war. Lots of lower tech areas scattered about for colonies/forts/strategic points.  Meanwhile the geography would introduce more 'terrain'  in strategic points, opportunities for smaller craft, mine barrages, and impose draft or beam limitations.

[Carthaginian]

If I may make a suggestion-  any of the Civilization series games (Civ IV would be the best choice) could produce a semi-detailed map with random seeds, resource distribution,  and generalized ocean data (shallow vs deep) which would suit this endeavor nicely.

We could choose to use or ignore the resource distribution... but the random map generator would give a good starting point for the new world.

I have Civ V, Snip has Civ IV... either of us could submit a few examples.

[snip]

I have III, IV and V. But I know the map generators in III and IV best.