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[Ukrainian Ranger]

I have a vague idea of rather roll-heavy system that allows to keep stuff vague but let people have general idea about what must be designed.

Nation starts with categories that have tech level with vague description like

Small arms: (National proficiency X) - Our nation is lagging behind in small arms department having access only to simple bolt action rifles, revolver handguns, shotguns. Machineguns are imported and scarce.

Every turn there are roll for each category that can raise the level and it is GMs job to decide how to comment the change and writes something like:

Small arms: (+Y in national proficiency) - During this year our army got machinegun (optional short description) and semi-automatic pistol(optional short description)

While random rolls are one way to improve national proficiency, designs proposed by a team is another.  Every time when design is voted and rolled some number is added to national proficiency.

If players never touch some category it will progress but more slowly than if players invest design actions in it.

[Kot]

We're going to extremes now. Making personalized designs that differ from other is major part of the fun.

[RAM]

About the starting point.  While it would likely take a bit more time at startup and would require using custom countries or post-apocalypse groups, would it be possible to give the two groups a list of design categories (ex. Assault Rifle, Pistol, Tank, etc.) and have them fill all of it up by going through a design phase for each category?

You could probably assume that all designs were legacy designs from before an intense militarisation and thus do not require rolls, they would be too familiar to have major flaws in their use and too obsolete and widely distributesd to have any exceptional properties...

[Ukrainian Ranger]

We're going to extremes now. Making personalized designs that differ from other is major part of the fun.

Who said that players will be unable to do personalized designs?

All I can say is that when I ran my game This one, I focused primarily on keeping things as vague as possible, and that worked out excellently.

Reread this game... Damn, It was so cool. The best naval warfare among all arms race. Great production system... Would love to see it continued\restarted

[Aseaheru]

 God... I hate reading my old posts...

 But yes, that game's naval stuff was particularly enjoyable. Also: Cods.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Out of curiousity, disregarding the more demonic stuff, how close do you believe this to an airbattle that might have occurred in the Arstotzka-Moskurg conflict?

[Aseaheru]

 I dont think there was a time where we where reliably using monowing all metal fighters against eachother, or that the Moskurgian would probably be using a sword, but otherwise, likely.

[Kot]

The Arstotzkan would proably try to stab the dirty Moskurg with half-broken bottle of Five-Star, but eh.

[10ebbor10]

All I can say is that when I ran my game This one, I focused primarily on keeping things as vague as possible, and that worked out excellently.

Reread this game... Damn, It was so cool. The best naval warfare among all arms race. Great production system... Would love to see it continued\restarted

There was one issue though, and that was ground combat. It never really happened.

[Aseaheru]

 There was some of it, particularly at the end.

[Sensei]

Alright, so I'm thinking of doing another one of these. No guarantees, it depends on how busy I am with upcoming classes, and it might run a bit slower. I'm thinking about making some of the following changes to the original set of rules, give me some feedback. Some of these are specific details, some of these are open-ended questions regarding how to solve problems with the previous game.

Premise:
This would take place as a war between United Forenia and some similarly powerful, ambiguously sized continent (maybe Tropico?), starting in 1937. As the war proceeds, WWII will begin in the background. The outcome of the larger historical war will be affected by the smaller player-controlled war, and vise versa. Player nations will have to accept the support of the allies or axis, under the threat of being overwhelmed by the world power aligned with the other nation if they remain independent. Instead of gaining or losing chunks of land on a continent, nations will gain and lose smaller islands.

Map:
I am thinking that similar to the map of Forenia, the map of Forenia, the other country, and the ocean in between will be split into three lanes. Each lane will consist of separate islands, and armies will automatically attempt to invade adjacent islands. It will not be possible to harass the enemy without an adjacent position unless using something like submarines or special long-range bombers. My concern with this model is that naval combat will be overly important, and worse, always play out the same since only the contents of the islands would differentiate each lane. Not sure what to do about this except maybe put a mutli-segment island in the middle somewhere.

Equipment:
Forenia will start with their equipment from the previous game, which constitutes great small arms but very few naval assets. The other nation will start with less advanced technology, but a better variety of naval assets.

Timescale:
It would be weird if you could only develop one new piece of equipment per year, given that this will take place parallel to some very fast historical advancement in technology. However, I really like having only one design per turn, it's way easier to keep track of. I'm thinking of changing the timescale of a turn to less than a year. Turns will play out just like they did before, only the outside world will advance slower. I'm leaning towards four turns per year and calling them seasons, since Spring 1937 sounds way better than, say, 1/3 1937 or First Half 1937 or whatever. I'm just hoping that isn't too many turns per year so you have jets by 1940 or something.

Resources:
I'm considering changing the ways resources work, both because using the same units for small arms and vehicles is a little wonky at times and giving the team with more land the ability to produce way more vehicles makes things one-sided quickly. Possibly instead of "This island gives 1 ore", it will be something like "Using Aluminum always raises the expense level by 1, but if you have island X aluminum is free" or "Titanium raises expense by 2, but with island Y it is only 1" so the resources and chemicals involved in making better armor, or explosives, or whatever become free/less expensive, rather than every territory gain contributing to having more of your biggest kind of tank/boat/whatever. On the upside, I think having a resource cap that's very vulnerable to attacks of shipping could be fun.

Unrelated, I probably need some more granularity around the top of the scale for, specifically, large watercraft. The difference between Very Expensive aircraft carriers, and a National Effort aircraft carrier is a little drastic to just happen suddenly.

World Powers:
You'll be interacting with the Allies and the Axis in this one. I'm thinking that providing them with good designs might earn you air support or resources. They might also want resources- regular ore, or uranium maybe, which I'd probably have as a resource that you can't use but gains favor with your patrons. Maybe they'll sometimes impose arbitrary rules that make the game or difficult, like requiring you not to use inhumane weapons or demanding that you make some piece of technology that suits their purposes. Also, I can threaten you guys with carpet bombing instead of frost giants. >:)

Bullshit:
One common complaint in the old game that I don't know how to solve was that the effectiveness of some new technology, or the difficulty in designing/manufacturing it, was a bit arbitrary. It was really a case of "guess what Sensei is thinking" for anything where there wasn't very clear historical precedent (hehe, recoilless rifles) at that time and even then it was sometimes a little unclear just how much some new technology stood to change the battlefield. People sometimes seemingly had to just hope they were reading the same wikipedia articles I did, when I researched some piece of technology.  I kind of wish there was something a little more clear but the only thing I can think of would be to just draw out a tech tree or something, which would really undermine the creativity. If you have any ideas for how to make new technology feel like less of a guessing game, let me know.

Unit overload:
There's just so many kinds of things! In the previous game we had small arms, support weapons (like artillery or heavy machine guns), ground vehicles, aircraft, watercraft, and technology like radios and encryption. I'm worried that at some point in this game, one faction's junk won't even fit in a single forum post. Judging the different interactions one new gun might have between allied soldiers who are choosing it from among eight guns, and enemy soldiers wielding ten different kind of guns, was hard to keep track of and made some battle posts read really dry. It's overwhelming to re-assess the expense of everything when a nation's resources change too. I'm considering aggressively retiring less-used designs or even setting a hard limit like, "You can only have three kinds of tanks at one time." I may even consider making a spreadsheet for rapid cost calculations, publicly viewable on google docs or something.

Espionage and stealing technology:
I'm thinking of maybe laying out some more specific tasks for spies, so they don't spend nearly every turn trying to steal whatever technology your faction is behind on. Maybe I'll even nix the spy department. I was thinking of adding a "reverse engineering" rule though: If you gained ground in a theatre where the enemy was using a given technology, you get the option to spend a Revise action reverse engineering it, and learning the technology involved, with a chance to fail. You might be able to counter this somewhat by, say, implementing self-destruct devices. Maybe it could even be an espionage action to recover or destroy lost military assets before the enemy can study them...

Well that got a bit long.
Tell me what you think of the rules I've laid out, and if you have any ideas. I'm also taking suggestions for what the other faction might be.

[Kashyyk]

Premise: I like it!

Map: Perhaps instead of lanes you have a web of connections between Islands? That way you can mix it up with clusters of small Islands, a couple of larger ones, etc. Die to the nature of the map, naval and aerial combat will take precedent,  but that happened the same way with Forenia anyway (with land instead of sea).

Equipment: Again,  sounds good,  so long as you feel it is balanced.

Timescale: The nature of these games is to try and invent the best stuff as quickly as possible anyway,  so it'll always happen to an extent. You can always faff song with this in game after all.

Resources: As this will mainly be focusing on vehicles anyway,  I think the granularity will mostly be solved itself.  I like the idea of islands giving more interesting resource effects as well.

World Powers: Outside  intervention really helps add a bit of variety I feel.

BS: If people are suggesting such technology, they should cite their information.  Otherwise they shouldn't get upset with what you've come up with. Either way, this isn't our Earth,  so anything different,  so long as it is self consistent,  can just be attributed to slightly different laws of physics.

Unit Overload: Perhaps you can get around this some what by having pre-defined 'equipment slots' for the armies. Ie: a light tank slot, Medium tank slot, heavy machine gun slot,  etc. A design will then be created with a slot in mind,  and anything already there will be considered out-dated.

Espionage: I like your suggestions on this one,  not got much to add though.

[10ebbor10]

BS: If people are suggesting such technology, they should cite their information.  Otherwise they shouldn't get upset with what you've come up with. Either way, this isn't our Earth,  so anything different,  so long as it is self consistent,  can just be attributed to slightly different laws of physics.

The problem is, there are players on both sides. So you get players from side A, saying design X doesn't work,  using certain sources. And, on the other side, you have players from Side B, saying the design does work, using other sources.

[Kashyyk]

Hence my second statement. This would be Sensei's game after all,  and his word is more powerful than physics. It may not be ideal for side B, or possibly even for Sensei if he is wanting totally accurate results,  but without actually going and testing it there's only so much he can do. Once the precedent is made however,  Side B should be welcome to make the most of it like side A.

This topic always bothered me a little bit, we never have the failures of our forebears because we have hindsight. We know something works because it already did. Adding this bit of uncertainty makes it more interesting,  as it won't come down to googling the counter to an existing technology, then hoping you roll well enough.

[10ebbor10]

This topic always bothered me a little bit, we never have the failures of our forebears because we have hindsight. We know something works because it already did. Adding this bit of uncertainty makes it more interesting,  as it won't come down to googling the counter to an existing technology, then hoping you roll well enough.

Sadly, all your solution does is remove the part where you need to google the counter. If you diverge from reality, all that remains is the whims of the dice and the GM.