Thanks for putting in the effort to get this thing going again. Posting to reconfirm my interest and intent to participate. I guess I'll need to download the latest version of Emperor Wars.
Do we want to have some definite rules about securing our passwords this time around? Giving it to the person in front of you seems like a decent measure.
Does anyone wish to change anything about the current settings? Plague/Rebellion/Universal Warehouse, etc.?
In the previous game, the war between the Church and the League either involved plague bombs or aggroed plague-bomb rebels on Sutek. Basically the entire industrial/palace/shield megacity-complex was infected, and there wasn't really anything I could do about it. I might like plague to be turned off. I'm not sure how much it adds to the game as a threat for the players to use against each other in the late game, but at least it will prevent disasters happening in the first 10 turns.
And I'd like to talk about starting traits. I think we should go with an edited version of the Nova rules (link to be added soon) specifically the trait Battlemaster. In regular vanilla and Nova mod you only have five Nobles to control which brings up a cautious balance of using these now very capable commanding units in battle versus risking a very limited resource. In this mod Battlemaster is a very potent trait with many more units to take advantage of it. I know personally how valuable it is from the last game, so I believe we should at least double its Nova value.
Yeah, we definitely need better house rules for the traits, as the vanilla point values aren't at all balanced for the mod. Decadence was basically just free points last game- I turned my tax rate to zero and was still making tons of firebirds every turn.
EDIT: On consideration, I think maybe it would be best to use the provided
bracketed values with the Nova house traits system. "It's War" is similar enough to our starting scenario in that the players begin with a higher level of development than default.