But not all is stable in the modern world. In Italy, the ideological heart of the fascist world, a younger generation is growing tired of the old system, and what happens there may shake the Axis to its core. Greater Germany, too, is riven between military conservatives and reformers in the DNVP. The democratic world, for its part, is on edge as fascist India asserts its growing economic and military strength. The Manchurian Soviet Republic, a ghastly and totalitarian remnant of the Soviet occupation of Japan, threatens the peace in East Asia for the Americans, the Chinese and the USSR alike. And worst of all, the Third Reich lives on in Antarctica and its secret lunar facilities, ceaselessly plotting and scheming to retake the homeland from the traitors and the untermenschen.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new order.
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Yes, that's right, welcome to The New Order! I'm your host, Scrapknight. Inspired by the sadly short-lived The Great War and many similar nation games, I've decided to try something a little different. This game will be set in an alternate history, as you can hopefully tell by the introduction. Technology and society have developed in decidedly different directions, with the vision of the Jazz Age and the Second Great War living on. It's a world of pulp heroes and mad science, owing to media such as Indiana Jones, Bioshock, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Atomic Robo and the first Captain America. However, that doesn't mean that the struggles inherent in international politics can be solved by dashing heroes swooping in to save the day. The fight against the fascist menace / struggle for national liberation from decadent society (depending on who you ask) will not be easy to win, and it will take strategy and guile to to come out on top.
This game will follow the end of the Cold War, as the standoff between the two alliances reaches its endgame. I expect it to last until some time between 2007 and 2017 in game time, depending on what happens in the world. But one way or another, the conflict is moving towards a resolution. What you will determine is what side will "win" and how much - of course, it's always possible that both will lose...
Here are the nations involved.
The United Nations
United States of America - Played By: jeeshadow
United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Newfoundland and Belize - Played By: Gorganslayer
French Republic - Played By: Fingon
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - Played By: Maxwell500
Republic of China - Played By: Terraferma
Minor Powers:
Ireland - Played By: Captain Ozwain
United Mexican States - Played By: Plutonium95
People's Republic of Peru - Played By: LatinKaiser
Dominion of Sri Lanka - Played By: Galren
State of Israel - Played By: JermanTK
Empire of Ethiopia - Played By: Deaghaidh
The Axis Powers:
Greater Germany - Played By: Noco
Kingdom of Italy - Played By: Mikkel Glahder
Indian Free State - Played By: Simcull
Spanish State - Defunct
State of Brazil - Played By: Plank of Wood
Minor Powers:
Kingdom of Hungary - Played By: Mathrim
Tsardom of Bulgaria - Played By: DutchGuy
Kingdom of Albania - Played By: Ab Ovo
Egyptian State - Played By: Korona
United Arab Republic (Syria) - Played By: Bakerydog
People's Social Arab Republic (Iraq) - Played By: Sealy300
Rogue Nations:
Greater German Reich (a.k.a. The Antarctic Reich) - Played By: Aedan777
Manchurian Soviet Republic - Played By: Dadarian
Neutral Nations:
Free State of Antioquia - Played By: EmperorGrimm
Republic of Indonesia - Played By: Brettles
Central African Empire - Played By: Alexander23
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RULES
1: The GM is always right. If I say something is canon, it's canon. If I say something is non-canon, it's non-canon. If I say your order is dumb and failed, your order is dumb and failed. I don't want to deal with people sniping at me over each and every thing that happens to their country that doesn't go their way. RULES
2: Every non-Great Power country gets two normal orders every turn, as well as two war orders for countries in current conflicts. Each Great Power will have three normal orders instead. They can relate to your economy, your military, espionage, whatever it is you want to do. War orders are used for moving troops and carrying out operations, while normal orders are for non-war activities. (Building troops can be done in either.) You also receive a single treaty order that is used to sign economic or military agreements between other nations. I'm not going to be too stringent about treaties, but you need to include in your orders when you sign military or economic treaties.
3: Sometimes, often when your nation has low stability but not always, you will receive Hearts of Iron-style events determining the course your nation will take. Each option will have different consequences, and may trigger additional events. Here's an example event:
US Elections of 2036
Blah blah instability blah! Blah blah do something blah!
A) The elections will go forward! (-1 Stability, uncertain effects)
B) Invite General AckMarthur and the Army to step in (Government change, uncertain effects)
4) There will be mini-updates occasionally for regional conflicts or particularly significant events. I will allow players with a stake in the crisis to send a number of orders that I will decide when this happens.
5) I don't save rolls, nor do I show them except possibly right as I am rolling them (which I will do on IRC). I reserve the right to not tell you your rolls for any reason.
6) I also reserve the right to have implausible, drastically off-policy, abhorrent, forum-rule-violating or simply dumb orders to fail automatically. This is not subject to appeal.
7) To keep me sane and able to write good updates, please keep orders short; no more than 3-4 lines, please. Some flavor is good; treatises are not.
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EXPLANATION OF STATS
Link to Stat Page
EXPLANATION OF STATS
Link to Stat Page
Here's a brief explanation of what the stats mean.
Population: Your country's population. Pretty self-explanatory, really.
Population Growth: Your country's rate of population growth. If you send me orders trying to raise this, you probably also get slapped frequently by people at clubs for trying bad pickup lines.
GDP: Your country's gross domestic product, which I kind of hope I don't have to define for you.
Tax / Tariff Net Rate: An (admittedly abstracted) percentage of your GDP that you're taking in. It doesn't quite work that way in real economics, but let's pretend it does here. You can't adjust this directly with your orders per se, but an order to "raise taxes" or other methods that increase government revenue will likely increase it. How much depends on both the severity of your order, the luck of the draw and so on. More isn't always better, either; the higher this number is, the more likely you are to take stability hits. Generally, this number won't get much lower than .4 or much higher than ,6, except in truly exceptional cases where the state is in a position to virtually monopolize its economy.
GDP Growth Rate: The amount your GDP will grow each turn. Shocking, I know.
Revenue: How much money you're actually making. You can calculate this by multiplying your GDP by your Tax/Tariff Rate. If you send me orders that say "increase my income" I will laugh. Think of how you would go about doing that.
Military Expenses: How much you pay for military upkeep and supplies. This is determined in direct relation to your supply usage, and two countries using the exact same supply usage will have the exact same military expenses, even if their unit composition is drastically different. No bulk discount on rifles and booze, I'm afraid. You can't change this with orders; if you want to do that, build or scrap some units. (I know in real life this *does* vary a bit, but for the sake of my sanity we are abstracting differences in supply doctrine and potential arbitrage in ammunition sales.)
Civilian Expenses: Everything else your government spends money on, from healthcare to schools to roads. You can try and lower this with orders. Going for increased efficiency is less likely to anger your citizens, but has pretty low marginal returns, whereas as cutting spending is more effective at cutting costs but also more likely to backfire.
Net Income: What you're walking away with at the end of the day.
Balance: How much money you owe / have stored up. Running a deficit is fine - in fact, most countries do and will run deficits - but very high levels of debt will start to cause economic issues, and if you default, things will be very bad.
When you are in danger of default depends on the country, but generally speaking, a debt between 150 and 200% of GDP is in the danger zone. Bigger economies have a lot more leeway. For consequences, defaulting results in a really big stability hit. If you've anything less than perfect it will almost certainly trigger a Bad Thing.
Supply Limit: Abstraction of how much materiel you have available to keep your units around. Based off of industrial power. All units cost varying amounts of supply, and you pay your maintenance cost based on how much supply you’re using. If you’re using more supply than you have, your units suffer a penalty in combat, with this penalty being greater the more undersupplied you are. Let this go on long enough and you may even lose some units as they become inoperable.
Supply Usage: How much of your supply limit you're currently using. This accounts for part of your expenses; each unit of supply has a set cost. It includes maintenance, fuel costs, etc etc. Included in the overall cost of supply are other military expenses not directly involved in unit upkeep (maintaining an officer corps, transports, etc etc.)
Industrial Capacity: How much industry your country has. This has a few effects, most of them good. The more IC you have, the more units you can produce at a single time (you can only order a given batch of units with an IC cost equal to or less than your current IC score x your current economic mobilization percentage in a single turn; this stat is called "effective production.") It also increases your GDP growth rate (duh), but GDP growth isn’t only tied to IC - trade and services are also parts of your economy. High IC also will give you better chances at random stability boosts and increase your supply limit. You can build IC via orders.
Economic Mobilization: Scale of 0 (complete peacetime economy) to 100 (total war economy.) The higher this percentage is, the more of your IC is devoted to producing military instead of civilian goods (and vice versa.) EM of 100, for example, means your economy produces no consumer goods and is increasing your supply limit by 100% over its natural limit. EM of 0%, converesly, means you have no active defense industry and your supply limit stays close to its “base” (inevitably too low to support all but the tiniest of armies.), but is instead giving you 80% protection against stability drops for failing orders. The average peacetime country has an EM of about 20 to 30 percent, depending on where exactly you are. You can set this at any time with an order by up to 20% in any direction. (In times of war, you may get a bigger swing at my discretion if you so wish.)
High economic mobilization means that you can build military units cheaper (you get a discount at high EM levels due to economies of scale), faster (your order limit will rise with higher EM), and maintain more of them (your supply limit is higher.) On the other hand, you are more likely to receive stability drops for failed rolls, and at very high levels you will suffer automatic stability drops over time. Combined with war exhaustion, this can undermine a struggling power very quickly. Conversely, low EM countries are more protected against stability fails, gradually improve their GDP (though note a war footing doesn’t shrink your GDP and may also increase it; generally, war provides a short-term economic boost, but a prolonged war is bad for your economy) and may get free stability points. However, they pay more for new units, they can’t build them as fast, and have a lower supply limit.
You’re perfectly capable of fighting a war with low EM (see: modern OTL US) and of staying in peacetime with high EM (see: North Korea). What you use your economy for is up to you.
Effective Production: A function of your IC and Economic Mobilization. You can only order units with a total cost of this or less every turn. You also can't save it up from turn to turn; if you can't produce big units yourself, it may be best to buy them from someone who can.
Wunderwaffen: This determines what kind of advanced weapons you can build. There are six levels, from Class D (the lowest) to Class X (the highest.) The ranking is D -> C -> B -> A -> S -> X. For example, a Class D country can't build any advanced weaponry at all - their armies are strictly what we'd call "conventional". Class C grants access to things like battleships, basic power armor and so on. All Great Powers start at Class A, and no minor powers do. Each unit has a tech level required to build it, as indicated in the unit document. As more nations advance past Class A, new and more advanced units may become available - you'll be notified when this happens.
Any country reaching Class A will have access to a unique unit that only they can build. These are expensive, but can turn the tide of the war in ways that your enemies can't expect. Their abilities will be PM'd to you, and while you can keep them secret, maybe you want to auction your secrets to the highest bidder?
It generally takes 2 to 3 turns to advance in tech level, depending on how you roll.
Class S and above is where the science starts getting weird, and this is where the Antarctic Reich starts. While potentially powerful, there is a lot of insanely dangerous stuff being cooked up at this level, and upgrading from here is where you have a much increased chance of triggering a Bad Thing. In fact, if you screw up enough, it could be a Bad Thing for not just you but for your neighbors or even the world. Have fun with that!
Stability: A very important stat. Stability is both a measure of the security of your rule and the contentedness of your populace. It ranges from 0 to 10, with 10 being "imaginary place where everyone is always happy" and 0 being "the cities are burning and the people are at the barricades." Stability has a chance of falling every time you fail a roll for an order, but this chance is smaller at lower EM percentages - a populace with lots of civilian goods to buy is less likely to be pissed at an incompetent government enough to take to the streets. Stability can also fall at high EM percentages, by losing a lot of battles in a war, for doing things your party or the populace are strongly against (read: being off policy or stupid; this is at my discretion, see Rule 1), the interference of other players, consequences of events, or sometimes just plain bad luck. You can raise stability by using orders, having a high GDP, lowering your EM percentage, winning battles (up to a point; eventually, endless little victories but no final victory tires people out) and signing a favorable peace deal.
If your stability hits 4 or below, you may get an event where you can choose how to approach the problems. The lower your stability goes, the more critical this crisis will be. An event you get at 5 stability isn't very serious and may even be beneficial in the long run; events at 3 or lower stability tend to be Bad Things, which if bungled will probably lead to further problems. If your stability hits 0, your country will plunge into civil war, with a specific event for it. This is Very Bad, and will have negative effects on pretty much everything. You can still get couped or forced out before 0 stability by popular or military (read: GM-controlled) elements, but I won't drop it on you without giving you time to do something about it.
For comparison, 10 is a sleepy country where nothing bad ever happens (Luxembourg). 9-7 is a very stable country where there still problems being discussed (Japan). 6-4 is a functioning, peaceful country that is facing deep political or social issues that are causing tension (Belgium). 3-2 is a country with lots of trouble spots but short of civil war or collapse (Mexico). 1-0 is a country in the midst of civil violence (Syria, TTL Northern Ireland were it independent).
Costs
Each unit in the game has a few different costs. I thought about it and decided to abstract manpower for most units and just say that if you try and train too many infantry units for your population, I'll let you know. With that being said, units have three different types of cost: Monetary cost, IC cost, and Supply cost.
Monetary Cost: How much money it costs to build the unit. The cost of new units will be subtracted out of your income one time only.
IC cost: How much industrial capacity is required to build a given unit. One of your stats will be something called "Effective Military Production," which is your IC multiplied by your Economic Mobilization percentage. You can each turn only order a number of units whose total IC is less than your effective military production.
Some small nations may have too little IC to produce some of the larger units. That's OK, because you can buy them from nations with the capability to produce them by using a treaty order. This happens all the time in the real world; have you ever heard of a Nepalese-made MBT?
Supply Cost: How much materiel is required to keep the unit functioning. This number will count against your supply limit, and you will pay upkeep based on how much supply you have.
Combat
There are three types of units: Land, Air and Naval.
Land units are capable of invading and taking territory. Naval units can blockade coasts to reduce GDP, target land areas within reach for bombing, and provide support to land units in a coastal province. Air units can support both land and sea units, but cannot hold territory themselves. Pretty obvious, right?
Each unit has a combat value (which you can't see, you min-maxers) that contributes to total army strength. Then each side's naval or air support factors in, increasing or decreasing total strength. After that, the stronger force wins, plus or minus some rolls.
One last thing: Only land units can occupy territory, and infantry is better at it than any other unit type.
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ORDERS
Unless otherwise noted, orders are due on Friday, 8 PM PST (that's 3 AM GMT). However, I'm generally pretty lax about this, having been there and done that with missing orders, so if you get your orders to me before I get to your country's position in the update (that being the order on the stats chart), I will take it. That means the USA will always go first and Ethiopia will always get checked last. However, I usually have things to do on Friday nights, so if you at least let me know ahead of time I can at least wait until Saturday morning. I am ruthless about stupid orders, but quite merciful on getting those orders in.ORDERS
The first due date is Friday, November 6th at 8 PM PST.
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Finally, we have an IRC channel!
IRC: #TNO_Main
Instructions:
1-Go to coldfront.net
2-Choose if you're using the flash ap or the java app.
3-Create a screenname
4-The page auto adds you to the #coldfront channel, which is displayed at the list on the left side of the screen. Close that
5-In the command box down below type /join #TNO_Main
6-You're in and ready to chat
IRC is not required to play the game, but it is highly recommended, and if you do not use it, you are expected to answer PMs of other players or me who may need to contact you. If you are totally unreachable and do not send in orders or respond to decisions, I may have to kick you.
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