IC-ThreadWhat is this?The First Solar War will be a Strategy game about a War between the Multinational Powers in the Solar System.
Players will take control of a Country (or an Alliance of Countries) waging war for Supremacy over the Solar System.
How does it work?While mostly concerned with Strategic Battles, players will be able to form Alliances and non-aggression pacts and it is even possible to score an alliance victory if nobody but the members of your alliance are left.
Non-Aggression Pacts are in fact more formal than allliances. You may dissolve them at any point but need to wait at least two turns before attacking.
Alliances can be dissolved at any point, allowing your troops to become immediately neutral in any conflict they would usually be engaged in. That is if your betrayed ally or your former enemy don't decide to attack you anyway.
Of course you can have both simultaneously.
But lets get to the meat of it all: the Military.
In this game we presume that the sudden state of Open War hits the Countries in various states of preparedness and as such your resources are limited and may run out at any given point.
All states use the following resources:
ManpowerQuite obvious. Your population that can be effectively mobilized for war. However bringing people into space is expensive and hte more advanced the Technology the less of it you can field. Manpower does not only represent your population but also the ability of your Country to field and replace military formations. While manpower might slowly increase again, massive losses might turn the war sour simply due to the time it would take to replace important personnel.
As an example: Your Regular Regiments can make up between 0.3% and 1% of your Population depending on the state of Mobilization. However fielding specialized Marine Regiments for Planetary Invasions drops that number to about 0.0006% of your people.
As the game runs on you might start to run out of personnel and equipment to outfight specialist and elite formations simply due to attrition. The more expensive, fancy and strong the formation the less you can field of it.
On average 1 Manpower (1.000 People) is required to field a Regiment or crew a ship. Doesn't seem that much? Replacing losses within a Regiment always takes 1 Manpower which over time might turn into quite the investment.
As the war turns grimmer you might be forced to enact more desperate measures to continue fighting effectively.
Industrial CapacityA measure of your Economy to produce the Equipment, troops and ships you need. Industrial Capacity contrary to manpower cannot be replaced at all. A destroyed factory is a destroyed factory. While in the short term of the war it might seem useful to bomb the enemies industry into oblivion and be done with it in the long term it might turn out to be a terrible idea as you destroy industry that might be vital to YOUR war effort.
Industry has a three fold purpose: 1. Production of Ships and Equipment for your general Military 2. Production of Supplies and 3. Production of Defenses.
While Defenses are mostly of secondary importance, both Fleet,Army and Supplies need the same Resource desperately and you will propably need to make some tough decisions whether it would be better to push out another battleship or prepare for that incoming martian siege by putting out more supplies.
1 IC can produce either 1 Marine Regiment, 100 Supplies or 1 Corvette per month. The Bigger the Ship, the more advanced the Regiment, the more time or IC it takes to finish it.
SuppliesFood, Ammunition, Medicine, Housing, Replacement Parts - all of that and more falls into the Category of Supplies. To Function in the field and especially on foreign territory your troops require supplies, less so when they are at home in a safe fortress, more so when they are on a foreign planet.
Any Ground Regiment on Home Turf not engaged in combat in that turn requires 1 Supply. The same goes for Corvettes. However larger Ships require more Suppplies. As units move or engage in combat or end their turn in enemy territory they require more amounts of supplies.
Supplies are also needed when replacing losses or repairing ships and repairing fortresses and defenses.
WarfareSo how does Warfare actually work? First we have to differentiate between Space and Ground Warfare.
Space WarfareThe more complex of the two. When two Fleets engage in combat they don't fight till destruction, they might not even fight to a victory.
Space Battles contain three Phases for which Players give Orders to the entire fleet.
These Orders are codified and depend on the mix of ships you have in your fleet.
For example a fleet containing only corvettes may only take Three Actions:
Magnetic Field (Defensive|Offense): Enemy Damage is ignored
Weapon Overclock (Offense|Tactics): Fleet Strength + xd10 Bonus Damage (x being the strongest ship in the fleet)
Retreat (Unblockable): Fleet retreats after suffering 2 Turns of Enemy Fire
What does all that mean? Actions are always of a certain Type (the first one in the bracket) and blocks another Type (second one in the bracket) when giving orders your fleets will usually simply engage on a Strength vs. Strength level.
So a Fleet with 10 Corvettes would have 10 Strength as opposed to a Fleet with 20 Corvettes (20 Strength). however through using above Tactics the playing field can be leveled. Right now it looks like Corvette fields would only throw potshots at each other until one side retreats. However once Large Ship Types come into play things change again.
Light Frigates would bring in the Short Circuit Tactic which would completely disable the Magnetic Field Ability.
When an Action is blocked, a fleet won't get it's special effects and on top of it doesn't get to fire. While the other fleet not only gets to fire but also gets the bonuses of its Tactic.
When the Orbit over a planet is under Control a Fleet may attempt a Planetary Invasion or alternatively bombard the planet if it has WMDs stacked and the Ships are capable of Orbital Bombardement.
Ground WarfareGround Warfare is more straight forward. Per opened front five Regiments duke it out simultaneously. Strength vs. Strength +1d5.
Opened Fronts means here simultaneous attacks from different Regions of a Planet.
Assuming for Example that one invades the North American Region from the European and the African Region, that would be two opened fronts so 10 units per side are engaging each other simultaneously.
DefensesIn the Age of Interplanetary Warfare one might think deploying a space ship with nukes in orbit is enough to pacify anyone and anything. Well you are almost right. However Defensive Structures have made a technological Jump too and most of them are nuclear weapon proof. Some of them even sport ground to space defenses that make orbital bombardement a rather dangerous venture.
Fortresses depending on their size provide different amounts of protection to different amounts of troops.
Example: a Small Fortress provides 2 Levels of Protection to 10 Units.
What does that mean? If engaged in ground combat the defending units can suffer up to two defeats in combat without suffering losses. After that they take damage regularly.
Simultaneously orbital bombardement becomes an increasingly long-winded business. Each level of a fortress requires one WMD to level it. if somebody has stacked up enough fortresses it might be cheaper to bring in the troops and take the fortresses the regular way, rather than wasting weapons on the enemy.
Only after the last fortress in a region has been nuked into oblivion can one begin orbital bombardement on civic structures.
Fortresses themselves however can be outfitted with Automated Defenses (which deal damage to enemy troops attempting orbital deployment) and Ground to Space Defenses (which attack enemy ships deployed in Orbit). These however are exceedingly expensive to maintain and repair.
Capturing Defenses, Industry and SuppliesWhen a Region is finally brought to heel (that is when the last Fortress in a Region has fallen and its troops forced to retreat/surrender/have been killed), you can go in and grab the goodies. That is what is left of it.
A fortress will generally be heavily damaged after such fights and first requires supplies to be repaired if it hasn't been completely destroyed already. You can also simply raze such structures and gain a fine amount of supplies from them.
Industry can generally be damaged once all fortresses in a region have been destroyed. Pitched battles within the regions cities may cause destroyed Industry, otherwise everything else will be captured intact and will function like your own IC after one turn.
Supplies aren't just imaginatively placed in vaccum, they need a place where they are stored. That said one half of your supplies is stored in your capital or a Region you declare as Supply Depot. The rest is equally distributed among your provinces.
The RestEscalationYou do not immediately start in a state of Total War and as the Conflict within the Solar System progresses, the conflict will gradually escalate as your countries mobilize for war.
Through events you will be able to field better ships and military, your production will increase as the industry slowly shifts to a war footing and various other events will happen.
Measures of DesperationIt comes the point where you stare at the enemy hordes bearing down upon you and your population becomes aware that if they want to survive they need to do more for the war effort.
At certain points in the game i will allow players who are under grave threat to enact measures of desperation which will give them a short term boost at the cost of long term damage to their people, their industry and their land.
Conditional SurrenderNobody forces you to continue a lost fight. At any given point you can enact a Conditional Surrender allowing you to give up to another player. The Terms of your surrender may be dictated by him and you can agree to them...or not.
In any casse should you accept you effectively lost the game reduced to a puppet of said player. You are now in a forced alliance with him and depending on his terms you will have some vague freedoms to continue play under his rule.
Should your ruling player fall to somebody else you can be handed around as a bargaining chip and may even be completely annihilated. You basically hitch the survival of your nation to the good will of somebody else.
On the other side, nobody forces another player to accept your conditional surrender they might decide that annihilating you and claiming all your lands is more worthwile. However once he accepts a conditional surrender he cannot absorb you later on if he depserately requires your lands.
Sign-UpNation Name:(optional) History and Culture:(optional) Military(mostly fluff and will be brought in line with game-mechanics):Homeworld and Initial Bonus: Earther (Massively Increased Population Bonus): Sporting now populations in the low dozens of billions earth is as overpopulated as ever.
Martian ( Preparedness Bonus): Fiercely Proud of their Independence. Idealistic and Fanatic, Martian Societies are based on service for all. While not necessarily communists or socialists they all work towards the dream of making a new Earth. Martians are known to surrender everything for the Good of their People and so it suprises no one that after their war of independence with earth they have silently prepared for another War. In game terms you have a far larger manpower pool in terms of special and high-tech forces. The extra supplies you stocked up also help.
Belters (Industry Bonus): Fed up with the overburdening of Taxes from Mars and Earth, the Belters want their own slice of the cake. The belt despite few places to properly live in is rich beyond measure and provides much of the goods and raw resources in the solar system.
Outer Colonies (Tech Bonus): colonized relatively recently the outer colonies might be similiarly rich in raw resources like the Belt...but the Belt can extract it far cheaper and sell it so far under price that its simply not worth it yet to extract resources from the Outer Worlds. What however the Outer Colonies are great for is Research. The most advanced tech in the System comes from these worlds and thus the Outer Colonies are always a step ahead of the rest of humanity.
Earther Homeworlds: Earth, Luna
Martian Homeworlds: Mars
Belters: Ceres, Inner Belt Asteroids
Outer Colonies: Jupiter Moons(Europa, Io, Callisto, Ganymede, Smaller Moons), Saturn moons (Titan, Smaller Moons), Uranus Moons (Titania and Oberon), Neptune Moon (Triton)
Point Distribution (you get 200 points):Manpower
Industrialization
Standing Forces and Defenses
Stocked Supplies
I think i have forgotten nothing but in any case should there be questions...or if i have actually left out half the rules without noticing feel free to ask :I