In my posts about the distinctives of Strategic Primer, I’ve described several features that it, unlike other games, offers players. And a couple of years ago I described the purpose of “AI” players in the game. But I thought it would be a good idea to consider what the role of a human player is in Strategic Primer. Read more…
Today we continue the annotated log of the firt campaign of Strategic Primer, which I continued last month with the beginning of the third turn, dated February 17, 2001. We continue the log of that turn today. Read more…
Over the past few months of development of the map viewer for Strategic Primer, after going to a great deal of effort to convert to a much higher resolution, populate the map with several “fixtures” on every (smaller) tile, make sure that players’ maps matched the main map, and then keep everything up to date with improvements to the viewer and the map format, I’ve come to the conclusion that the current size and scale make the map far too big to deal with, in practical terms. Read more…
Today we continue the annotated log of the first campaign of Strategic Primer, which I continued last month. Read more…
Over on the Holy Worlds forum somewhat recently, Aubrey Hansen posted a link to an app that lets you design flags. Which got me to thinking about flags, and their uses.
In Strategic Primer, the players don’t know everything about each other. They might not even know for sure how many players there are, and they certainly don’t know each other’s “code names.” But it’d be nice to know, when encountering two of another player’s units on separate occasions, whether they belong to the same player or not. And it’d be nice to give players another outlet for their creativity.
So I am suggesting that players in the current campaign, and any future campaigns, create flags to represent their forces. (Using that app, or any other tools they prefer.) I’ll create flags for the “AI players”, and I’ll add support for displaying them to the map viewer.
Any thoughts?
Today I’m continuing the annotated log of the first campaign of Strategic Primer, which I last updated in January. Read more…
One of the features of earlier campaigns of Strategic Primer that hasn’t (yet) made it into the current campaign is “maintenance costs.”
Previous campaigns included a single currency and measured most costs in that currency. Maintenance was an additional cost charged each turn, consisting of a set percentage of the purchase price of each unit or improvement the player owned. (This cost could be modified by improvements and General Advances.)
Maintenance was intended to represent several things, taken together:
Maintenance also served as a primitive handicapping system, as more powerful units and improvements generally cost much more, sometimes even when this didn’t really make sense.
Maintenance costs, as they were modeled in previous campaigns, almost certainly won’t be added back to the game. This is partly because there’s no longer a currency to levy it in, but more because we’re increasingly able to model what it represented more directly. I do intend to add back in maintenance requirements (representing the last point in my list above) sometime in the not-too-distant future, and sophisticated workers may demand “pay” (more about that when I next talk about culture, I think), but there’s no need to include the costs of message transmission or resource costs in the same measure when they can be modeled separately.
While the setting and gameplay of Strategic Primer are largely, generally, based on our own history, there are several points on which it diverges into “creative anachronism”. Some of these are artifacts of its own history, but some are changes made for the sake of the gameplay. Read more…
There are several approaches that a player of Strategic Primer might take. Today I’ll describe several that I’ve thought of, which I divided into three categories.
(I note that these are not all mutually exclusive, and that they are generally orthogonal—only indirectly relevant—to the player’s dealings with other players, independent towns, and villages.)
The first category for which I thought of possible approaches is the defense of the player’s territory, fortresses, and people. I came up with four ideas.
First: camouflage and “security through obscurity”. The goal is that an enemy “could pass through and never even know they’ve been here”, or to at least never be, or leave a trace, there when a potential enemy arrives. How you’d go about this could vary, and would depend on the terrain, the available resources, and the skill-sets of your workers—in a forest you could (after inventing the necessary technology) live in the trees; in plains you could move from temporary fortress to temporary fortress, never building anything permanent and always leaving the land as you found it. But there are a number of other ways. This approach is probably one of the most difficult, but I can see great results if a player managed to pull it off.
Second: enforced isolation. Much like Japan before Perry negotiated its opening, or Lothlorien in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, you could simply firmly deny any untrusted outsider access to your territory. In extremis, this will necessarily boil down to treating deliberate trespassing as an act of war, and this would require a great deal of manpower (more and more the larger the territory) to police the borders and the interior and (unless you want to become totally isolated, or only send trade or diplomatic missions but never receive them) to ferry goods and messages to and from your few open ports, but every one of the approaches I’m outlining today carries its own costs.
Third: layers upon reinforced layers. Walls upon walls, and more than walls. The idea here is that if one defense fails, or one wall falls, the enemy may take some small part of the territory, but the next level is more likely to hold—particularly once it’s reinforced by the survivors of the fallen defense. The main downsides to this approach are the sheer quantities of resources needed to build and maintain all the walls and other resources, and the labor needed to build and man them.
And fourth: watchmen and fields of fire. With this approach, you’d eschew walls almost entirely; instead, you’d build large towers and man them with watchmen and (as needed) archers and other ranged weapons. The towers would be placed not too far apart, enough that they couldn’t be used against each other if one was taken but close enough together that getting to them, let alone by them, would be prohibitively expensive for any enemy. The reason for avoiding building walls is, of course, that they would just get in the way—there’s no sense in building cover for one’s enemies.
The second category is “economics”—which includes, well, you’ll see. These can probably be combined better than the military ones, for the most part, but here I’m thinking mostly of emphases. I had five ideas on this front.
First is technological bootstrapping. In this approach, you’d conclude that most problems can be addressed by sufficiently advanced technology, and so focus on advancing your tech level as quickly as possible to build the tools necessary to build the tools necessary to … This approach would only work well for a player who knows what technology he or she wants to use to solve the problems, and what intermediate steps are needed to get it, but (it would seem) has its advantages for such a player.
Second: “Build, borrow, or steal.” (I mention this approach for the sake of completeness, as it’s one an “AI” villain “player” might use but I hope no human player would.) Instead of buiding infrastructure, applying available labor to the fields, or otherwise trying to solve problems directly, a player could train his people as soldiers and send them to his neighbors to demand tribute or steal their resources and technology.
Third: Bottom-up or pyramid development. In this approach, you apply resources to the problems that most directly limit you (food production in the beginning), on the theory that the surplus you thereby produce will provide sufficient margin to tackle the next problem. This seems to be a popular approach in the current campaign, though it should be less necessary in future campaigns as they’ll provide each player with a stable position to start with.
Fourth: “A city on a hill.” You could try to make your single fortress as glorious, advanced, powerful, and large as possible, so that it can never fall, and its “shadow” spreads across the land.
Fifth: “multiple redundancy.” Contrariwise, you could build lots and lots of fortresses, allowing none to grow all that large or more powerful than any of the others. Some of the fortresses might fall to an enemy, but a few fortresses wouldn’t be any great loss if you had many fortresses, especially if you had replacements for their functions ready to take their place in your system immediately.
And the third category is priorities. Each of the four priorities that I identified is important, but any resources spent on one can’t be spent on the others.
First: “Keeping up with the Joneses.” In other words, economic growth. There are hard limits in place on how quickly your population and economy can grow, at least at first. (You can only harvest so many acres in a turn …) To “keep up with the Joneses,” you would try to stay as close to that limit as possible each turn.
Second: “securing the borders.” In other words, the military. Each player is, after all, the commander of a military outpost, which is why I call them “fortresses” rather than “towns”. But (at least in the current campaign) the military position at the beginning is not very good; only the knowledge that everyone else began in the same position makes you secure from immediate danger. On the other hand, improving this position through intensive training wouln’t be all that difficult …
The third priority is technology. To improve your situation, technological advancement is crucial, but some players consider it more important than others.
And the fourth priority is morale. (See my previous posts about morale and culture, which are being added to the game.) Too low morale could ruin your position; high morale can make things easier. And some players simply like thinking about it.
Are there any approaches I’ve missed? Or any other questions or comments?
I’ve talked before on this blog about the starting conditions provided to each player in Strategic Primer: a small population of subordinates, a fortress (constructed to the player’s specifications), a collection of resources, and a list of “advances” describing (incompletely) the population’s scientific and technical background. Today I’d like to talk about the story behind this—how and why you come to be there.
But first, an aside about how the situation will be slightly different in future campaigns. The current campaign began with each player’s starting position in a state of flux, that if neglected would end in disarray but if nudged led to perhaps exponential growth. In future campaigns the starting position will be somewhat stronger—several dozen workers instead of only ten, with all of them in previously-established roles—but one that’s designed to be stable but not difficult to improve. This will be helped by the addition of more “maintenance” factors to the current sole requirements of food and living space (as I’ll talk about sometime in the next few months).
Now, the story. The world (or, rather, the universe … as there are other worlds which can be reached) in which the game takes place contains cities and fortresses. While it is presently at peace, there has been bitter war in the past, and the system of fortresses—mutually independent and independent of the cities—was established long ago for the world’s defense.
In another universe, several groups—there’s no way of telling who yet, as you’ll see—independently tried to insert their own agents as commanders of the fortresses, using devices that were supposed to “swap” their personalities—what the Interstellar Patrol in Christopher Anvil’s novel Warlord’s World calls an “inside job”. (We don’t know why, either.) But just as in that novel, something went (from their perspective) very wrong: the original commanders never “showed up” there, the “replacements” they intended to insert stayed there, something prevented the machines from even attempting another insertion, and you (the players) showed up in the commanders’ bodies.
So that’s the situation. You find yourself the commander of a fortress (conventiently designed and situated to your specification, as it happens …), in a perhaps somewhat confusing situation. Fortunately, the world moves slowly yet, and the “new” commanders of the other fortresses are in the same state. But unfortunately, the ones who got you in this position know that their original plans have failed, and they may have contingency plans they’ll use next. And with the intrusion of outsiders, not all the fortress commanders are now on the same side …
A Christian Worldview of Fiction
Rewrite, Reword, Rework
The Bard on the Hill
