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
>