The Empire, rule and discussion

[Kipi]

After long consideration, I finally decided to start this new game here. If any of mods or Buck sees this as wrong place for this, feel free to move it to proper place

This is a game for members here in GameBanshee, and everybody is welcome to take part if interested. Following is the rules and information about the game:

The Empire

General information

In this game, each participiant rules their own land, makes decidions of how to react different situations, what to build, how arrange their army, religion and goverment, trades with other players for different things and of course wars against others. You may have seen similiar games somewhere, but do not be fooled: all the rules are made by myself, and thus there ain't no plagiation.

The theme of the game is fantasy, so you can find many aspects of that style in this game like magic, dragons, fighters, dwarves, elves etc.

Before joining the game, pleace read carefully the rules and how to play, since when you join, you agree to follow the rules. If you don't do that, you won't play, it's that simple

How to join?

Joinin this game is very simple: Just send me pm that you are willing to join this game, and when I have approved you, you will be in the game at the start of next round.

There is no time limit to joining this game, you can join anytime you want, even if the game is already running. The rules ensure that each new player has proper chance to survive at the early stages even if there are much stronger kingdoms playing.

The "application" pm should include the following information:

• Your kingdom's name
• Your player name (may be the same as your username here in GB)
• Race
• Style of goverment
• Main religion
• Tax rate

Races

Humans:
Average race, no bonuses and no penalties.

Dwarves:
+ Bonus to building things
+ Bonus to strengths of army
+ Longer life expectancy than humans
- Not so good at magic
- Demands more food to live than average

Elves:
+ Great bonus to magic
+ Great bonus to research
+ Longest life expectancy
- Lousy fighters
- Don't tolerate other races very well

Centaurs:
+ Fearsome fighters
- Don't tolerate other races at all

Orcs:
+ Fearsome fighters
- Lousy magicians
- Bad at reasearch

Undeads:
+ Best selection of different type of soldiers and mages
+ Immune diseases
- Very bad at research
- Minimal need for food

Gnomes:
+ Best researchers
+ Very good at magic
+ Very tolerate towards Dwarves
- Not so good at direct fighting

Goverments: - UPDATED!

Total despotism:
You rule, and others obey. Population lives under fear of their king.
One advisor for each field
+ You make all the decisions
+ Almost none fear towards war
+ Nearly none riots
- When riots, those destructive ones
- Mostly content or unhappy population

Elders:
Ruled by you and few other elders.
2 advisor for each field
+ Rarely any riots
+ Only small fear towards war
- In few occasions, other elders may make decision instead of you.

Democracy (limited):
You are selected to lead your country, and if the population is not happy about your actions, they may make new election.
4 advisor for each field
+ When riots occur, they are quite peacefull ones
+ The genral mood of population is happy
- At times citizens may make decisions instead of you
- If riots get too far, anarchy takes place in few turns

Anarchy:
Not a goverment to choose from. Usually takes place as a goverment after riots.
No advisors. If empire had such, there is 50% chance for each one that that advisor will quit.
- Building stops
- Research stops
- Possibility of destruction of buildings
- Possibility of losing wealth and resources

Religions:
God of War:
+ Bonus to stats of army
- Penalties to magic

God of Magic:
+ Bonus to magic
- Penalties to war

God of Research:
+ Bonus to research
- Penalties to War
-Penalties to Building

God of Constructions:
+ Bonus to building
- Penalties to war

God of Farming:
+ Bonus to food production
+ Bonus to population growth
- Penalties to war
- Penalties to magic
- Penalties to research

The mechanisms of the game

Gametime
The game is fomed by turns, which representates one month in the game. During turns you can make different decisions and actions, described belows. After each turn I'll post to the game thread general public information about happenings, as well as PM players kingdom related information. At the end of each turn I may throw some special events which player may react if they see it necessare.

Trading
Players can trade with each others anything they want. There is no limits of what they can trade, and how many deals they can have going in the same time. Note though that if you are in war with somebady, every deal with that player will be canceled and no new deals may be made without making peace first or at the same time. The way how you negotate with others are up to you decide, you can use PM, IM, or even discussion thread (the last is not good idea if you want to keep the deal secret ).

Whe you have got to agreement what you trade, both players PM me a "contract", which should include the following information:

• The name of kingdoms and what they will give (the ammounts are needed)
• If trading resources or resources in they way that you pay decided ammount each turn, there must be also listed how many turns player will keep on paying each resources
• Is the deal secret or public

Both players must send identical deals to me (the layout isn't important, just the details) and when I get those, the deal will take place at the beginning of next round.

In case of trading science, I will determine the effect to the receiving player when the deal takes place.

War

To send armies to war, you must first form such. To do this, you assign free population to army. The next turn, when this assignment has taken place, you can send the ammount of soldiers and magicians to attack any player you want. To do this, you PM me how many units of each type available you send, rough tactic (conquer land, drive the enemy away, kill each enemy soldier, raze the land... the possibilities are limited almost only by your imagination) as well as general tactic of how units act (how many mages casts what spells in what situations, how many of soldiers will chase enemy away, in what situations withdraw...). When you have send this, I will make it to take place next turn.

There are two ways to start war: First one is just to attack. Second one is to make declaration in the game thread. When you have started war, both participiants must send me the announce of peace before the war will be over.

Population - UPDATED!
At the beginning player have certain ammount of population to use. Player can assign them as (s)he wishes, as long as there are available places in that job.

Each citizen needs two (2) units of food to live. Each new citizen born requires 2 jobless citizen and 3 units of food. Each unused acre of land produces 4 units of food

At the beginning, your population will consists only natives, but as the time passes, some of them may decide to leave your kingdom and join others' kingdoms, or there may be some population wanting to move in your kingdom. These new citizens require the same ammount of food, but they may bring some troubles with them. You can also get citizens from other kingdom by conquering their lands. Again, these new citizens MAY bring some problems.

Building
To build, you need to have spare workers. The ammount of workers determine how much time building needs. There are other factors too, whcih affect this speed. Each building requires one acre of free land.

The buildings which are available at the beginning are (The cost of each building is inside the "()" -characters:

Farm (20gp): Doubles the production of food of that acre. Can hold 10 farmer
Construction Guild (100gp): The workers occupying this building works 1.5 times faster.
Mage Guild (150gp): Can hold 10 mages
Smith (80gp): Products armors and weapons for soldiers. Can hold 10 smiths
Gold Mine (120gp): Produces 10gp each turn per one miner. Can hold 10 miners
Iron mine (100gp): Produces 1 piece of iron per worker. Iron is used by smiths. Can hold 10 miners.
Guard Tower (120gp): Increases the values of fighters occupying this tower while defending city. Can hold 15 fighters.
Laboratory (150gp): Each researcher will produce 1 research point per turn. Can hold 10 researcher.
Barracks(300gp): Can hold 100 soldier.
Den of spied (500gp): Can hold 10 spies
Temple (150gp): Can hold 15 priests - NEW
Fortress (1000gp): When under attack player can put his population inside fortresses to give more protection. Each fortress can hold 300 persons of any job, including soldiers. - NEW

Notice that new buildings may become available when certain point is reached in research.

[Kipi]

Research
To research, you must have free researchers in your use. When you have assigned reaserches to specific field, they will study that field that turn. Each point will be added to the total point of that field. At the beginning of each turn I will inform how many points different fields have grown, and how that has affected to your kingdom.

Fields of research:
Magic: Increases the power of spells
Mining: Increases the output of mines
Construction: Increases the speed of builders
War: Increases the chances in successing in war
Armors: Increase the defense of your units
Weapons: Increase the offense of your units
Farming: Increase the output of farmers
Study: Increases the output of researchers
Spying: Increase the efficient of your spies in gathering information and exposing enemy spies
Sabotage: Increase the efficient of your spies sabotage missions

Special events
At the beginning of each turn, I may throw some special happening to players' kingdom. Their job is to determine how they react to that event, and post it with their other actions. Also, players are allowed to decide what to do with their country even if I haven't introduced anything special. If they want to make genocide (ie. killing every citizen of specific race in their kingdom) they are allowed to do so. Only they sky (almost) is the limit of what player can do with their kingdom, trades, diplomacy and so on. Only thing they need to do is decide what they want to do, add it to their actions of that turn and send it to me, and I will determine what happens.

Getting more land
To get land you either conquer it or settle unused land.
To settle unused land you must have 20 free citizens (which can't have been assigned to any job) and 100gp per each 10 acres. When you settle the land, your population will be lowered by the total ammount of citizens needed. So, basically you lose 20 citizen for every 10 acres. This rule is to encourage players to actually start wars.

Advisors -NEW!!
After the game begins, everybody can hire advisors to help them manage the ruling of empire. Each turn I will give new list of advisors for hiring, including those who have been fired by other players. Each new advisor is randomly generated, excluding the ones who has been fired. Each advisor will have the following stats:

• Name
• Race
• Price
• Defense knowledge
• Offense knowledge
• Science knowledge
• Building knowledge
• Genreal knowledge of how to rule empire
• Trustworthy

Especially trustworthy will be determined by the previous jobs, so with new advisors it will be mostly average. Each knowledge stat will give you idea how good the advisor is that field, so ie. one with low Defense knowledge shouldn't be hired as Defense Advisor.

The number of how many advisors in different areas player can hire is dependable on his/her government, so this should be taken account while selecting government.

Also, everybody should note that if you fire advisor, and someone else hires him, this person will cary some of his knowledge of his previous employer to his new empire. This ammount is dependable on how long he has served this previous master.

Tax - NEW!!
Each turn your citizens will generate certain ammount of cash, depending on their jobs. The tax rating determines how much from that ammount your kingdom shall collect. The higher the rating, the more money your kingdom gains. But notice that high tax too long may bring some troubles, as your citizens don't definately want to give all their money to you.

How to play?

Playing the game is very simple: Each turn players post their actions (I would be very glad if all the actions are in one PM) to me, and after specific ammount of time has passed, I will post the results of last turn and the new turn begins. The only exeption to that one PM rule is trading deals. I would ask that only one deal is put in one PM. These rules easies my job as gamemaster.

Players are also allowed to post some general announcements to the game thread, but there is one rule to this:
The post is only allowed to contain ingame information, nothing outside of the game!
In example, you can make war declaration in there, but you aren't allowed to begun talk there.

At the beginning of game, each player has 1000gp, 200 acres of land with 2 Construction Guilds, 200 citizens and 1000 units of food. After joining the new player will be 8 turns under the protection of gods, which means that this player can't make any offensive actions towards other players, but neither can they.

The game will end after certain ammount of rounds has passed (which will be decided later), and the winner is the player achieved the most points. Points can be got from different things, like population, ammount of money, ammount of land, won wars and so on. Also, player can lose points from different actions, like losing wars, population too unhappy at the end of the game and so on.
There is also two rules to encourage players to join in the game at the later stages of the game:
First, the total points will be divided by the time the player has been on.
Second, players lose points if they attack against too weak opponents, and gain more if they slay more stronger opponents.

How to lose the game
Basically, you lose the game if you either lose all your land or your population. After you have defeated, you can rejoin the game by starting the new kingdom. This can be made, though, only after 3 turns has passed since your defeat.

Okay, these are the rules of the game, and I hope everything was covered here well enough. If not, don't hesitate to ask in this thread. THe game is basically quite loose in they way how players are allowed to manage their kingdom. As said few times, only imagination is the limit, at least mostly.

There is one request I make to everybody who decides to join this game:
Whatever happens in this game, please don't take it to other threads (especially in SYM). This is game after all, and everything happening inside of it should be left there.

So, I've been thinking about starting the game when I have at least 4 players. And, as said before, everybody is welcome to join this game even if it has already started.


ps. Damn, it took over 3 hours to write these rules down
Hopefully it was worth of it

[Siberys]

I have been trying to make a game exactly like this for SO long now, yet you manage to do it in 3 hours, well done mate. I would definitely like to get in on this, I still need to read the entirety of the rules, but otherwise, this is exactly like Grokking, a game I play on my site.

[Kipi]

Originally Posted by Siberys

I have been trying to make a game exactly like this for SO long now, yet you manage to do it in 3 hours, well done mate. I would definitely like to get in on this, I still need to read the entirety of the rules, but otherwise, this is exactly like Grokking, a game I play on my site.

Well, I didn't make it all in 3 hours, actually it took more than 2-3 weeks...
I just had to clarify some rules to myself while making this thread.

And I know that this may be somewhat samekind as Grokking, but actually I haven't read it's rules, so I don't know how much. I was more inspired by Swirve's Earth -game.

And you are definately welcome to join

[Siberys]

Grokking is basically you're given a set of 25 humans, 20 adults and 5 children to be precise, and they start with NOTHING. No technology, no houses, they just appear there in the land. Then you have to control them and make them advance in technology on your own wits.

It's a VERY challenging game IMO.

[Xandax]

Could be fun, I'll see if I have enough free time to join in on this - will need to read up on the rules clearly first though.

[Siberys]

Sent you an application to join, and I didn't understand how tax would work, as there were no real examples for it.

Also, in the event that anybody else joins and we decide to trade or need to contact each other for this game in any way, Instant messaging is preferred, but I can live with PM's.

[Kipi]

Made some updates to the rules, and expect more to come during next weekend. See sections either marked with "UPDATED" or "NEW" to find the changes.

Examples of different things will be added during weekend.

Those of you who have already sent me their aplications can resend new one during next week if they see it necessare.

[Kipi]

Okay, here are those much wanted examples.

Aplication:

Kingdom's name: Steregard
Player name: Sterwick Whitehand
Race: Human
Style of goverment: Democracy
Main religion: God of Research
Tax rate: 10%

Trading deal:

Kingdom A: Steregard
Kingdom B: Calaham

Kingdom A gives:
-100 Weapon
-100 Armour

Kingdom B gives:
-10gp per turn for 22 turns

The deal is made in secret.

Building:

Number of workers free to use: 20
4 workers start building Construction Guild
6 workers start building Fortress
10 workers start building Temple

Number of free workers left: 0

Assigning people to different jobs:

Number of jobless people: 144
20 persons assigned to farms as farmers
24 persons assigned to Mage Guild as mages
100 persons assigned to Construction Guilds as workers

Take 30 person away from researchers and reassign them to farms as farmers.

Number of jobless people left: 0

Determining the research:

Number of researchers free: 233
155 researcher starts research Armors
78 researcher starts research Weapons

Take 50 researchers from Magic -field and assign them to research Armors
Number of researchers left: 0

Building army:

Number of free people: 1000
Number of armors: 400
Number of weapons: 355

Assign 300 persons to army.

Number of free people 700
Number of armors: 100
Number of weapons: 55

Making an attack:

Send 2000 soldiers and 300 mages to attack Kingdom called Calaham.
Soldiers try to take the enemy by surprise, but if that fails, retreat.
Mages cast defensive and healing spells only.

The attack is made in secret.

Getting more land:

200 acres of new land will get settled.
Population: 4420 - 2*20 = 4380
Gold: 56200 - 100*20 = 54200

Example of special event:

Your citizens has begun to riot, reason being too long lasted war against Kingdom of Calaham.

10 soldiers has died as well as one Guard Tower has burned down.

What do you do?

Example of post giving results of last turn:

Turn 52.
Kingdom Sterwick has made an succesful attack against kingdom Calaham.
Kingdom Calaham has formed military alliance with kingdoms Sealre and Cormae.

Example of more detailed post giving results of last turn PMed to each player.

Kingdom: Sterwick
Your attack against kingdom Calaham was success! You conquered 100 acres of land, including 10 farms with total of 40 farmers, 1 Mage Guild with 5 mages and one Guard Tower.

One of your spies assigned to kingdom of Calaham has captured and killed.
Spy from kingdom Sealre reports that ruler of Sealre is preparing an attack against your kingdom!

Your workers has completed the several projects:
2 Farms
Guard Tower
Mage Guild

Total of free workers after these completings is 320.

Your researched made the following breakthroughts:
Armor + 20 pts
Weapons + 19 pts
Magic + 5 pts

Your new stats:
Population: 34122 (130 jobless)
Land: 3400 acres (200 acres unused)
Gold: 3200012gp
Food: 31113 units
Citizens general mood: Happy

[Kipi]

I have moved this game to elsewhere, to forum directly dedicated to this game.

So, if there was anyone interesting of this game, check here.

I would be very happy if mod would close this topic, as it has become meaningless...

[dragon wench]

As requested, thread closed