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Welcome to City-State NES, the latest in NESing technology, brought to you by none other than Bipolarbear and Appleciders, your friendly neighborhood moderators. What have we got in store for you this time? Only time and reading the next few posts will tell.
This NES, currently in the set-up phase, will be ahistorical but will follow historical technologies roughly, starting at a technology level comparable to Rome and progressing gradually over the course of the game. You are encouraged to model your nation after a real ancient nation or culture so that different cultures who never encountered each other in real history can meet (and probably fight). Ever wonder if a heavily armored Greek phalanx could hold up against light Hunnic cavalry archers? Or if Egyptian chariots would really rip through fierce Celtic warriors? Now's your chance!
How do I begin?
Just pick (or invent) a culture, write a little about the culture to give me a starting point, then add a little bit about the government style of your nation. You will serve as your nation's head of state- be that president, head of a governing body, king, chief priest, or what have you. This will determine the way in which you interact with your people; an absolute monarch will have almost no one blatantly opposing your orders until your people suddenly revolt, while a democratic governor will have resistance from within the government but will find his people less likely to revolt. A religious leader may find that corruption within the government saps his strength, though the people themselves may be a bastion of support, at least until that pesky Messiah comes through. Almost anything would be possible here. Choose wisely!
Beware that this model of NES stresses not simply your military prowess but your ability to keep order within your nation. You'll find that your nation in this NES behaves more like a collection of city-states than one coordinated whole. Careful attention will be required to keep your cities from revolting against your rule and attacking one another.
How do I give orders?
Simply post them to the thread. General governing orders should be posted directly, because these represent the official policies that you use to make broad, sweeping moves in your government. PMs can be used for any secret orders, which might include espionage, military raids, or vast surprise attacks. Anything secretive can be ordered by PM, while anything general should be posted to the thread, because it's just more fun to be able to get ideas from reading other peoples' orders, and it keeps the thread busy, which helps keep people checking back.
How do the nation statistics work in this NES?
Your nation has several important statistics in the stat block. From top to bottom, they break down as follows:
Size: This is the size of your city relative to other cities in the world. This doesn't represent any concrete number, but rather a way to compare how big your city is to other cities. To expand your city to the next size level, you must have an excess of at least 1000 of food, ore, and lumber. Having this excess is not a guarantee of growth, but it is impossible to grow without the excess and the greater the excess, the greater the chance for growth. If you do tap out resources entirely, you run the risk of having your city shrink in size. To found a new city, you must order settlers to be sent out from your city, which will reduce your city's size by 1.
Total Monetary Income: This is your government's income from taxes, tithes, tarriffs on trades, tolls, fees, and systematic plundering of your population. This is also the money that you spend on any pet projects that you see fit to begin. The ill-gotten gains from plundering of other populations varies from turn to turn, and goes into....
Treasury: Your national bank account. No deficeit spending here! If you need to spend more than your yearly income, spend from here. If you don't need your full yearly income to continue your quest towards world domination, the extra is stashed away here for the future. Other money that you come across (bribes, tributes, plunder) also gets put in here to be spent.
Total Food: This is the total amount of food you will harvest in a year with perfect weather over and above what your people keep to eat themselves. This doesn't nessecarily represent the amount of food that you will wind up with; as much as half of this figure may not be harvested due to weather factors, and food may be imported or exported on top of that. If your food reaches zero, your people are hoarding all the food produced, and starvation may ensue. You need food to expand and pay upkeep on your army, and you can use it as a source of income if other nations purchase it.
Fish, Farm Produce, Fruit and Hunting: These represent the food sources for this city. Hunting is a basic staple of small cities that becomes rather unimportant as cities grow because it is very difficult to increase the amount of food gathered through hunting. Hunting is, however, a reliable source of a small amount of food that varies little year-to-year.
Farm produce is produced primarily by cities with plains or valleys in their territory. Grain is a very productive staple, providing the means for a very large city, but grain production tends to decrease sharply in particularly wet, dry, hot or cold years. Herding is the other alternative here, similarly sensitive to temperature and water supply. Both are largely immune to wind factors, however.
Fruit is produced by cities with large hillside territories in orchards. The excellent drainage provided by the contours of the land makes irrigation easy and efficient, helping to keep fruit from being affected by particularly wet or dry years; the water can be channelled to the orchards in dry years and away from it during wet ones. However, fruit is susceptible to temperature fluctuations and windy years tend to break limbs and decrease production.
Fish are harvested from the sea, and seaside cities tend to rely heavily on fish as a source of food. The ocean holds heat well, and insulates fish catches against changes in heat or cold. However, stormy or especially calm years make it difficult for boats to navigate, and wet or very dry years make fishermens' lives harder as well, so fish catches will drop according to wind and rain factors.
Total Ore: This represents the total metal ore harvested beyond what your people need and are using themselves. Ore is needed both to expand and maintain your armies, and to encourage growth in your cities. Mining operations are not significantly affected by weather conditions, so the only difference between this value and what you actually harvest is the amount exported and imported. Whether or not a city has ore deposits is random; you could potentially find ore deposits anywhere, but they're most commonly found in mountains, so cities in hills tend to be the richest with regard to minerals.
Copper: The inferior but more common of the major ores available, copper can be used to wage war or to build your cities in peace. However, if you maintain your armies using copper ore, they'll be rather inferior to iron-using armies.
Iron: The superior and less common of the two ore options, iron makes higher quality weapons when used to maintain armies. Iron will always be used first when maintaining your armies, so make sure that your iron output is higher than your army size to make sure that your armies are as good as they can be.
Total Lumber: This represents the amount of lumber that your people harvest each year above and beyond what they keep to use themselves. Lumber is nessecary to encourage growth in your cities and to maintain and expand your navies.
One major change from past NESes to keep in mind: Each city supports one army and one navy. Each city incurs the upkeep charge for its own army; you can't have your tiny iron-producing city way up in the highlands foot the ore bill for your lowland city. This is reflective of the city-state nature of your nation; it's incredibly inefficient to channel resources through different cities so that each individual city's accountants can know what's going on, and anyway, Athen's citizenry won't put up with paying for Corinth's military. You can set up trades between your cities, though that is an expensive way to get your resources spread around.
To start a trade, simply order the trade to begin and your merchants will proceed to carry it out. A trade costs one gold for each one resource purchased. A fee to establish the trade route between 50% and 200% of the annual value of the trade will be charged at the beginning of the trade. So to begin importing 500 units of fish per turn, simply order your merchants to do that, and 500 gold will be traded to your trading partner and between 250 and 1000 gold will be charged as a initiation fee. Initiation fees represent the initial investment in hiring merchants, brokering deals, and learning the most efficient routes to this particular city. Therefore, the exact cost of initiation fees is dependent on many factors, like how well the cities are situated for trade (cities with deepwater harbors are best, while inland mountain cities are worst), how close the cities are, and levels of corruption and piracy in the area of the trade. Sea trade is most efficient, river trade is next, and overland trades are extremely expensive.
The major change in trades from previous NESes is that trade deals do not need to be mutually agreed upon. If you want to buy out your neighbor's entire iron supply, simply place the order and it will be done. If your neighbor wants to stop this trade, he will need to enact a blockade, begin arresting his own citizens who sell the resource, and generally imposing sanctions on those who defy him, which will cause unrest and hurt his economy.
Please note that you cannot force an enemy to accept your exports; you must negotiate with the player or NPC to get them to initiate that trade. You can only force-initiate trades with unwilling players if those trades are imports for you.
How do military forces work?
Each city can support one army and one navy. Each man in an army requires one gold, one food, and one ore each turn in upkeep. Each ship in a fleet requires 100 wood and 100 gold in upkeep each turn. An army has a maxium size of 1000 men per size rating of the city (A city of size 4 can have a 4000 man army, for instance) and a fleet has a maximum size of 10 ships per size rating of the city. A cost of 1 gold over and above upkeep costs increases your army size by 1 man, and it costs 100 gold to increase your navy size by 1 ship.
Your army is broken up by percentage into several different types of units (to be detailed below). You can change 5% of one type of unit to another for free each turn, or pay extra to change more than that. This represents the military stubborness, tradition, and infrastructure that resists change. Putting a little money into that system greases the wheels considerably, which makes for much greater change than simply ordering it.
You are greatly encouraged to write in stories and tailor your orders to customize and develop particular parts of your armies. Bear in mind, though, that the more parts of your army you try to specialize and perfect, the less special and perfect they will be; you can have one or maybe two very powerful units and the rest of your army fairly bland, or you could have several slightly above average parts of your army. If your speciality becomes particularly distinct, I may even give your army an extra division to describe it. Or you could do neither, and try to improve your city's trading abilities instead. And these traits can vary from city to city; don't consider yourself tied down to being a nation of hard-core heavy infantry a la Sparta or of nimble light cavalry like the Huns or a merchant kingdom like Venice. You can have all three, just as long as they're in different cities.
A brief description of the basic pieces of your army:
Light Infantry: Armed with only the lightest weapons and armor, light infantry are mobile skirmishers suitable to ambushes and scouting. They are extraordinarily weak in pitched battle, but are well-suited to hit-and-run attacks in any terrain and have small projectiles that allow them to be fairly useful in seiges.
Medium Infantry: With moderate arms and armor, medium infantry form the mainstay of an army. These troops are light enough to be mobile in most terrain, but heavy enough to withstand a cavalry charge with only moderate losses if given time to brace for the attack. Medium infantry are best countered by archers, as their armor will only hold out for a short time.
Heavy Infantry: The strongest of weapons and armor make heavy infantry nearly invulnerable in melee combat. This is the only unit that can easily throw back even charges from heavy cavalry, and is also nearly invulnerable to fire from archers. Heavy infantry are only strong, however, when their formation remains intact, so these troops can be easily flanked and cut down as they rout.
Light Cavalry: Lightly armed and armored, light cavalry are ideally suited to destroying a routing army as it flees the field. As the fastest unit on the battlefield, light cavalry are also well suited to attacking undefended light foot troops like archers and light infantry. These troops are still poor in a pitched battle, however.
Heavy Cavalry: With so much armor that their speed is only slightly above that of foot soldiers, Heavy Cavalry are the strongest unit around in charges. Their armor gives them a fair defense against archers as well, though the fact that they are a larger target negates that somewhat. They are less effective once bogged down in a battle, as much of their advantage comes from their speed and momentum.
Archers: Lightly armored but equipped with bows, archers are the only unit around that can effectively attack at range. These soldiers are entirely unarmed with regard to melee combat, but are excellent in sieges.
Artillery and Sappers: The behemoth machinery of your army and the dedicated combat engineers who work them. This catagory includes devices for defeating sieges, like catapults, trebuchets, and siege ladders and towers as well as small anti-personell equipment like mangonels. Particularly high amounts of sappers in your army will even allow you to begin to fortify your position in open fields before battle.
So that's what I have so far. There are more detailed things about your resources that I have yet to write, but that's just how to read the spreadsheets that I will inevitably need to post. Bipolarbear will handle the stories, intros, and that sort of thing, while I'm setting up the nitty-gritty rules on how exactly to play this. The map is partially done, and will be posted before the week is out, if I'm lucky. The map will consist of one major continent that takes up about one-third of the total area, and the rest will be various archipelagoes.
Any questions/comments/suggestions?
This NES, currently in the set-up phase, will be ahistorical but will follow historical technologies roughly, starting at a technology level comparable to Rome and progressing gradually over the course of the game. You are encouraged to model your nation after a real ancient nation or culture so that different cultures who never encountered each other in real history can meet (and probably fight). Ever wonder if a heavily armored Greek phalanx could hold up against light Hunnic cavalry archers? Or if Egyptian chariots would really rip through fierce Celtic warriors? Now's your chance!
How do I begin?
Just pick (or invent) a culture, write a little about the culture to give me a starting point, then add a little bit about the government style of your nation. You will serve as your nation's head of state- be that president, head of a governing body, king, chief priest, or what have you. This will determine the way in which you interact with your people; an absolute monarch will have almost no one blatantly opposing your orders until your people suddenly revolt, while a democratic governor will have resistance from within the government but will find his people less likely to revolt. A religious leader may find that corruption within the government saps his strength, though the people themselves may be a bastion of support, at least until that pesky Messiah comes through. Almost anything would be possible here. Choose wisely!
Beware that this model of NES stresses not simply your military prowess but your ability to keep order within your nation. You'll find that your nation in this NES behaves more like a collection of city-states than one coordinated whole. Careful attention will be required to keep your cities from revolting against your rule and attacking one another.
How do I give orders?
Simply post them to the thread. General governing orders should be posted directly, because these represent the official policies that you use to make broad, sweeping moves in your government. PMs can be used for any secret orders, which might include espionage, military raids, or vast surprise attacks. Anything secretive can be ordered by PM, while anything general should be posted to the thread, because it's just more fun to be able to get ideas from reading other peoples' orders, and it keeps the thread busy, which helps keep people checking back.
How do the nation statistics work in this NES?
Your nation has several important statistics in the stat block. From top to bottom, they break down as follows:
Size: This is the size of your city relative to other cities in the world. This doesn't represent any concrete number, but rather a way to compare how big your city is to other cities. To expand your city to the next size level, you must have an excess of at least 1000 of food, ore, and lumber. Having this excess is not a guarantee of growth, but it is impossible to grow without the excess and the greater the excess, the greater the chance for growth. If you do tap out resources entirely, you run the risk of having your city shrink in size. To found a new city, you must order settlers to be sent out from your city, which will reduce your city's size by 1.
Total Monetary Income: This is your government's income from taxes, tithes, tarriffs on trades, tolls, fees, and systematic plundering of your population. This is also the money that you spend on any pet projects that you see fit to begin. The ill-gotten gains from plundering of other populations varies from turn to turn, and goes into....
Treasury: Your national bank account. No deficeit spending here! If you need to spend more than your yearly income, spend from here. If you don't need your full yearly income to continue your quest towards world domination, the extra is stashed away here for the future. Other money that you come across (bribes, tributes, plunder) also gets put in here to be spent.
Total Food: This is the total amount of food you will harvest in a year with perfect weather over and above what your people keep to eat themselves. This doesn't nessecarily represent the amount of food that you will wind up with; as much as half of this figure may not be harvested due to weather factors, and food may be imported or exported on top of that. If your food reaches zero, your people are hoarding all the food produced, and starvation may ensue. You need food to expand and pay upkeep on your army, and you can use it as a source of income if other nations purchase it.
Fish, Farm Produce, Fruit and Hunting: These represent the food sources for this city. Hunting is a basic staple of small cities that becomes rather unimportant as cities grow because it is very difficult to increase the amount of food gathered through hunting. Hunting is, however, a reliable source of a small amount of food that varies little year-to-year.
Farm produce is produced primarily by cities with plains or valleys in their territory. Grain is a very productive staple, providing the means for a very large city, but grain production tends to decrease sharply in particularly wet, dry, hot or cold years. Herding is the other alternative here, similarly sensitive to temperature and water supply. Both are largely immune to wind factors, however.
Fruit is produced by cities with large hillside territories in orchards. The excellent drainage provided by the contours of the land makes irrigation easy and efficient, helping to keep fruit from being affected by particularly wet or dry years; the water can be channelled to the orchards in dry years and away from it during wet ones. However, fruit is susceptible to temperature fluctuations and windy years tend to break limbs and decrease production.
Fish are harvested from the sea, and seaside cities tend to rely heavily on fish as a source of food. The ocean holds heat well, and insulates fish catches against changes in heat or cold. However, stormy or especially calm years make it difficult for boats to navigate, and wet or very dry years make fishermens' lives harder as well, so fish catches will drop according to wind and rain factors.
Total Ore: This represents the total metal ore harvested beyond what your people need and are using themselves. Ore is needed both to expand and maintain your armies, and to encourage growth in your cities. Mining operations are not significantly affected by weather conditions, so the only difference between this value and what you actually harvest is the amount exported and imported. Whether or not a city has ore deposits is random; you could potentially find ore deposits anywhere, but they're most commonly found in mountains, so cities in hills tend to be the richest with regard to minerals.
Copper: The inferior but more common of the major ores available, copper can be used to wage war or to build your cities in peace. However, if you maintain your armies using copper ore, they'll be rather inferior to iron-using armies.
Iron: The superior and less common of the two ore options, iron makes higher quality weapons when used to maintain armies. Iron will always be used first when maintaining your armies, so make sure that your iron output is higher than your army size to make sure that your armies are as good as they can be.
Total Lumber: This represents the amount of lumber that your people harvest each year above and beyond what they keep to use themselves. Lumber is nessecary to encourage growth in your cities and to maintain and expand your navies.
One major change from past NESes to keep in mind: Each city supports one army and one navy. Each city incurs the upkeep charge for its own army; you can't have your tiny iron-producing city way up in the highlands foot the ore bill for your lowland city. This is reflective of the city-state nature of your nation; it's incredibly inefficient to channel resources through different cities so that each individual city's accountants can know what's going on, and anyway, Athen's citizenry won't put up with paying for Corinth's military. You can set up trades between your cities, though that is an expensive way to get your resources spread around.
To start a trade, simply order the trade to begin and your merchants will proceed to carry it out. A trade costs one gold for each one resource purchased. A fee to establish the trade route between 50% and 200% of the annual value of the trade will be charged at the beginning of the trade. So to begin importing 500 units of fish per turn, simply order your merchants to do that, and 500 gold will be traded to your trading partner and between 250 and 1000 gold will be charged as a initiation fee. Initiation fees represent the initial investment in hiring merchants, brokering deals, and learning the most efficient routes to this particular city. Therefore, the exact cost of initiation fees is dependent on many factors, like how well the cities are situated for trade (cities with deepwater harbors are best, while inland mountain cities are worst), how close the cities are, and levels of corruption and piracy in the area of the trade. Sea trade is most efficient, river trade is next, and overland trades are extremely expensive.
The major change in trades from previous NESes is that trade deals do not need to be mutually agreed upon. If you want to buy out your neighbor's entire iron supply, simply place the order and it will be done. If your neighbor wants to stop this trade, he will need to enact a blockade, begin arresting his own citizens who sell the resource, and generally imposing sanctions on those who defy him, which will cause unrest and hurt his economy.
Please note that you cannot force an enemy to accept your exports; you must negotiate with the player or NPC to get them to initiate that trade. You can only force-initiate trades with unwilling players if those trades are imports for you.
How do military forces work?
Each city can support one army and one navy. Each man in an army requires one gold, one food, and one ore each turn in upkeep. Each ship in a fleet requires 100 wood and 100 gold in upkeep each turn. An army has a maxium size of 1000 men per size rating of the city (A city of size 4 can have a 4000 man army, for instance) and a fleet has a maximum size of 10 ships per size rating of the city. A cost of 1 gold over and above upkeep costs increases your army size by 1 man, and it costs 100 gold to increase your navy size by 1 ship.
Your army is broken up by percentage into several different types of units (to be detailed below). You can change 5% of one type of unit to another for free each turn, or pay extra to change more than that. This represents the military stubborness, tradition, and infrastructure that resists change. Putting a little money into that system greases the wheels considerably, which makes for much greater change than simply ordering it.
You are greatly encouraged to write in stories and tailor your orders to customize and develop particular parts of your armies. Bear in mind, though, that the more parts of your army you try to specialize and perfect, the less special and perfect they will be; you can have one or maybe two very powerful units and the rest of your army fairly bland, or you could have several slightly above average parts of your army. If your speciality becomes particularly distinct, I may even give your army an extra division to describe it. Or you could do neither, and try to improve your city's trading abilities instead. And these traits can vary from city to city; don't consider yourself tied down to being a nation of hard-core heavy infantry a la Sparta or of nimble light cavalry like the Huns or a merchant kingdom like Venice. You can have all three, just as long as they're in different cities.
A brief description of the basic pieces of your army:
Light Infantry: Armed with only the lightest weapons and armor, light infantry are mobile skirmishers suitable to ambushes and scouting. They are extraordinarily weak in pitched battle, but are well-suited to hit-and-run attacks in any terrain and have small projectiles that allow them to be fairly useful in seiges.
Medium Infantry: With moderate arms and armor, medium infantry form the mainstay of an army. These troops are light enough to be mobile in most terrain, but heavy enough to withstand a cavalry charge with only moderate losses if given time to brace for the attack. Medium infantry are best countered by archers, as their armor will only hold out for a short time.
Heavy Infantry: The strongest of weapons and armor make heavy infantry nearly invulnerable in melee combat. This is the only unit that can easily throw back even charges from heavy cavalry, and is also nearly invulnerable to fire from archers. Heavy infantry are only strong, however, when their formation remains intact, so these troops can be easily flanked and cut down as they rout.
Light Cavalry: Lightly armed and armored, light cavalry are ideally suited to destroying a routing army as it flees the field. As the fastest unit on the battlefield, light cavalry are also well suited to attacking undefended light foot troops like archers and light infantry. These troops are still poor in a pitched battle, however.
Heavy Cavalry: With so much armor that their speed is only slightly above that of foot soldiers, Heavy Cavalry are the strongest unit around in charges. Their armor gives them a fair defense against archers as well, though the fact that they are a larger target negates that somewhat. They are less effective once bogged down in a battle, as much of their advantage comes from their speed and momentum.
Archers: Lightly armored but equipped with bows, archers are the only unit around that can effectively attack at range. These soldiers are entirely unarmed with regard to melee combat, but are excellent in sieges.
Artillery and Sappers: The behemoth machinery of your army and the dedicated combat engineers who work them. This catagory includes devices for defeating sieges, like catapults, trebuchets, and siege ladders and towers as well as small anti-personell equipment like mangonels. Particularly high amounts of sappers in your army will even allow you to begin to fortify your position in open fields before battle.
So that's what I have so far. There are more detailed things about your resources that I have yet to write, but that's just how to read the spreadsheets that I will inevitably need to post. Bipolarbear will handle the stories, intros, and that sort of thing, while I'm setting up the nitty-gritty rules on how exactly to play this. The map is partially done, and will be posted before the week is out, if I'm lucky. The map will consist of one major continent that takes up about one-third of the total area, and the rest will be various archipelagoes.
Any questions/comments/suggestions?
That´s good, my friend!
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