RE: Operational Game

Isn't there a bunch of this in Pocket Empires and the old Trillion
Credit 
Squadron?

Michael Brown

-----Original Message-----
From:	B Lin
Sent:	Monday, January 13, 2003 3:15 PM
To:	gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
Subject:	RE: Operational Game

Perhaps you can apply some other factors - if you spend more GDP on
Military, 
your economic returns are lower.  After a few turns of compound
interest, if 
you've invested too much in non-economic areas you'll be behind the
economic 
curve.

To make it interesting the gamemaster should tell the players to have a
5 year, 
10 year or 20 year plan then start the campaign at some time in-between.
 YOu 
can add random economic growth (various galactic recessions and
expansions) 
that impacts all the players.  You could allow some to run deficts to
build 
fleets that would impact their long-term economic stability and possibly
allow 
a victory by economic means (a la Cold War, where the Soviet Union was
run into 
the ground by keeping up the arms race)

You'd need to figure a model for the economy though.  Probably need a
few 
basics like Education, Consumer Goods/services, Energy, Military,
Foreign Aid, 
Domestic Security.  Add in factors like bureacratic red tape (increases
cost of 
government), graft and corruption, and the amount actually available to
spend 
on Military might be far less than expected.

All the player needs to do is set the precentages of GDP he wishes to
spend 
each year.  You chug it through the various formulas for the economy and
it 
will spit out a monetary value for the Military.  Various random events,
plus 
events caused by foreign nations can decrease the value.  For instance
if 
Saboteurs cause three of your domestic fusion plants to catastophically 
explode, it might cost your government 300 Mcr to rebuild them, of which
50 Mcr 
is coming out of the Military budget.  Or subversives have raised
discontent in 
your populace, so efficiency at various factories, including military
related 
ones has dropped.

The end result is that you may or may not get exactly what you planned
to have 
at a certain time and/or place.  If you thought that you'd have 2 SDN's
done 
within 5 years, but labor shortages and graft might mean that you only
have 1 
available with the other still only half completed after 5 years.

Some ideas.

--Binhan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roger Burton West [mailto:roger@firedrake.org]
> Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 3:55 PM
> To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
> Subject: Re: Operational Game
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 09:44:19AM +1100, Robertson, Brendan wrote:
> >Maybe create some sort of economic "pick-a-box" which will
> affect your
> >overall strategy.
> >One side generates a low-education/high resources society and another
> >generates a high-education/moderate resources society to
> determine their
> >initial crew and fleet allocations.
>
> The problem is that some strategies are clearly optimal from a
> war-winning point of view. I'm thinking at the moment of
> having a system
> which lets you pick pretty much any level of resources you
> want in each
> field; but they cost victory points from your eventual total (in
> game-balance terms, because they're making you stronger; in in-game
> terms, because you've shaped your society to be a war-fighter rather
> than anything more interesting). So just as blowing away the destroyer
> escorting a convoy doesn't count for much if you use a SDN to
> do it, the
> NAC doesn't get many victory points for crushing Alarishi
> Rock #1637-B.
>
> R
>