[TWF] The Way Forward - Dev Diaries

[Bonecracker(NL)]

((Corrected.))

There's great bazaars all around Iran. Maybe you could barter for some good jokes :^)

 

[lordmichael95]

Republic of Cyprus

((Great things have small beginnings...))

((EDIT: When I trying log into coldfront I get a 2048 security error. Does anyone know how it solve it? I have the most recent version of Flash Player.))​

 

[alexander23]

Use mibbit to enter coldfront

 

[lordmichael95]

Use mibbit to enter coldfront

Yep, that did it.

 

[Korona]

Italia
​

 

[Haresus]

Just reserving Syria's Place in the Sun, for myself or Syriana (should he reappear).

 

[Bonecracker(NL)]

 

[oxfordroyale]

 

[PotatoMan]

Republic of Yemen
الجمهورية اليمنية

الله، الوَطَن، الثَورة، الوَحدة
God, Country, Revolution, Unity

(Hadi forever)
​

 

[Nax24]

Dutchbag I will gib nuke if you help me get Kashmir from dirty Pakistan

 

[Bonecracker(NL)]

k

 

[ThunderHawk3]

TWF Dev Diary #8: The Military​

And now for our most avant-garde dev diary to date, we're going to talk about the military.

1. This dev diary, basically​

Military effectiveness in TWF is not being judged on any set of stats alone, and indeed The Way Forward engine doesn't keep track of many stats related to the military. I will be deciding the results of military orders and conflicts based on judgement and dice rolls. There is much more to fighting than just the size of your military, or indeed the hardware it has at its disposal. Some militaries punch far above their weight, and some below, depending on a tremendous mixture of factors.

As with everything else, military orders are much like regular orders and cost PP. However, orders directed at deploying and maneuvering military units will tend to be considerably cheaper in terms of PP than other order, and during crises and such may actually be free. (Obviously it depends on the country and circumstance.) However, war fighting is a rich man's hobby - military operations tend to be very expensive in terms of actual cash, and even ragtag rural militias will need to keep one eye on their finances.

2. This is quite possibly my favorite graph of all time​

I said this in an earlier dev diary but I want to reiterate that I'm not going to tolerate the sorts of massive warorders I occasionally encountered in All for the Empire (AftE - my previous forum game), where people occasionally sent me massive, treatise-length warplans riddled with conditionals and minute (tiny) details that made me question my own sanity while trying to evaluate them. If you send me military orders that are overlong, or involve military micromanaging or tactical level details, or else are riddled with if/then typed statements, I will ignore them. I may either ignore the offending clauses or the whole order as the case may be.

3. Pictured - something not appropriate to submit as a war order​

Oh, also, when deploying troops I will probably ask for a sense of scale. If you just say, "deploy troops to such-and-such a country," I'll probably come back with more questions like, "how many troops?" ("To do what?" may also be one I'll ask.) Also be wary when using terms like "army," "regiment," "division," or "brigade," here because these unit sizes vary dramatically from country to country. In general, deploying military forces to another country, particularly to conduct a forced entry, will be an order likely to start a crisis and has to be submitted by Thursday.

Development or adoption of new military weapons systems is an order, and one that's likely to take several years at that. A few people have asked me how international arms deals will work. All major international arms manufacturers have players, so to buy weapons from them, you basically need to strike a deal with the seller. This deal can either agree to purchase a fixed set of weapons for a fixed amount of cash (ie: 100,000 AK-47s for $100M) or simply the seller authorizing you to buy whatever weapons you like from him in orders, in which case I'll come up with some sort of price for the transaction.

4. Counteroffer - $15 and a can of silly string​

For those nations whose currencies aren't generally accepted in payment on the international market or else have some kind of currency manipulation scheme going on, this is one of those places where foreign currency reserves might become relevant.

5. You didn't think this stuff comes cheap, did you?​

And now here's the avant-garde part. Since I'm not willing to tell you exactly what I consider important for evaluating militaries, here's a bunch of random military-related words and phrases other than size and equipment that I may consider in determining how good your military is. On the other hand, some of them may be from an anime/video games/movie/tv show/wikipedia/news article I watched/played/read recently. There may also be factors that I don't mention here. Enjoy!

6. Also relevant...​

Spoiler

Mistrust
Point And Click Warfare
Disloyal
DUTCHBAT
Combined Arms
Nationalistic
Odessa Day
Starving
Guerillas
Esprit du Corps
Ignition
Poorly supplied
Topheavy
Alpine infantry
Sortie generation rate
Battered Bastards
Marines
Bloody Talons
QRF
Poor Communication
Teufel Hunden
Airmobile
Element of Surprise
Airlift
Attrition
Patronage
Honor
Penal Battalions
Military Culture
Iron Martyr
Order 227
Warlordism
Conscripts
Green Water Navy
Engineers
Resentful
Multinational
Special Operations
Trailblazers
Ruse de Guerre
Unpaid
Ground crews
Ignorant
Intelligence
Politicized
Bloody Talons
Decoys
Stay Frosty
Last Line
Stormtroopers
Mig Killers
Ill-informed
Feudal
Maneuver Warfare
Jungle fighters
Morale
Misinformation
Every Marine A Rifleman
Mechanized
Illiterate
Power Projection
More Than Human
Common Cause
Rebels
Banzai
Disease-ridden
Carpe Diem
Raiders
National Defense
Stealth Tank
Foreign Legion
Naval Infantry
Autonomous
Rangers
Sappers
Lacking Cohesion
The Few
Future Warrior
Airborne
Night Operators
Sealift
Black Mark
Rapid Mobilizers
Cowardice
Armored
Fear
Corrupt
Infiltration
Professionalism
Fanatical

Next week we'll talk about Economics. (muhahaha)

7. (Evil Cackling)​

 

[ThunderHawk3]

TWF Dev Diary #9: Economics​

So. Economics. I could easily write an entire book on economics in TWF engine (or knowing, me more likely several books), but I won't. I'll just write this one Dev Diary.

1. Muhahahahah​

TWF engine is basically a giant economics engine that I stapled some other stuff onto so I could convince myself that it was a game engine. It keeps track of the effects of your monetary policy, fiscal policy, exports and imports, the foreign currency market, labor conditions (like average wage), and a lot of other good stuff. Some of you may remember the sample stats output I posted a while back; in this dev diary we're going to go through a lot of what those stats mean.

Most of you are playing as governments, which means you're going to have considerable control over your nation's fiscal policy. Fiscal policy is more or less the national tax and spending policy. You can think of it as how much you get and what you can spend it on. In its stats output, TWF engine will spit out everything you spent money on in your budget, both in raw 2015 $ and in % of GDP to several decimal places. However, under the hood TWF is capable of evaluating revenues and expenditures in lots of different ways - in raw nominal $, % of GDP, or even in terms of margin on barrels of oil (to name a few). The difference between the amount of money you spent and the amount of you took in is your deficit. If you spend more money than you take in, you will automatically deficit spend in TWF, increasing your deficit and your debt. This will in turn increase your debt spending and probably your borrowing rate (the rate your government borrows money at - this is the 'Government 10-Year Rate'). Negative debt figures mean you have a sovereign wealth fund; negative expenditure figures are revenues.

2. Knowing you, you probably spent a lot of money on this​

Most countries will have at least four lines in their budget - Receipts (which is actually income tax + unclassified revenue sources), General Expenditures (unclassified government spending), Debt Service (money spent paying off debt interest), and Welfare (which is called something else in the example output).

Fiscal policy greatly affects your national economy in a number of ways. Obviously if your debt rises too high you will have a debt crisis, which may result in a sovereign bankruptcy.

3. You just have to understand this simple graph​

Some of your nations will also have access to monetary policy. Monetary policy is more or less the efforts by your central bank to regulate the supply of money in the economy. At the bottom of the economics output, there is a line that says "Currency," followed by a currency code. After the three-letter code it will either say "(this is our own currency)" or something different. If it says "(this is our own currency)" it means you can conduct monetary policy.

Monetary policy largely revolves around the stat labelled "Government Funds Rate." This is, broadly put, the rate at which banks can borrow money from the central bank. By changing this rate, the government can dramatically alter the money supply. Lower rates are generally agreed to be inflationary, while higher rates are deflationary. The "Inflation" stat is located right above the Government Funds Rate. This is the rate at which price levels are increasing in your country relative to older levels. Since your GDP and expenditure figures are in nominal 2015 US dollars, they are not (directly) effected by inflation. Inflation levels have broad indirect effects on your economy. Monetary policy affects much, much more than just inflation, but I'll leave you to find out about that for yourselves.

4. You too can "promote a healthy economy" with "decisions" and "actions"​

I spent a long time trying to figure out whether or not to give you control over monetary policy because it's a highly technical subject that involves a lot of finnicky adjustments. A lot of different countries also pursue a lot of different monetary policies though. Here's what I decided:

Those countries that have independent central banks will have their monetary policy adjust automatically. If you don't have an independent central bank, you will be able to issue general monetary directives to the bank. If you don't have your own currency, you don't get to play with monetary policy one way or another.

5. Suckers​

On the labor side of things, by the popular request, TWF keeps track of unemployment rate. You can see it there in the economics column, in all its percentaged glory. Median wage is also tracked to the third decimal place in TWF engine (although the way this interacts with the rest of the economy is sort of wonky, so take it with a MASSIVE grain of salt). Median wage may be marked in some other currency. GDP per capita on the other hand is given in 2015 USD. GINI indicates wealth inequality. Higher numbers are higher inequality. This is an after-tax-transfer figure.

6. Seriously, who makes these things?​

Lastly, forex (foreign exchange) effects. TWF engine tracks forex in extensive detail, but at present foreign exchange is almost completely broken. I'll presumably fix it at some point. Basically, this is the part that keeps track of imports and exports and the foreign currency exchange.

7. This is a visual approximation of forex right now​

Some countries will also have a line that says "foreign currency reserves." Foreign currency reserves are how much money you have in foreign-denominated cash and gold and such. As I mentioned last time, this is important if your country either a) is engaged in some sort of currency manipulation, in which case you use foreign currency reserves to defend the value of your currency at whatever you've pegged it to or b) because your currency is not accepted on international markets, and you need to use foreign currency to buy imported stuff (or both). Like the rest of forex, this is really really broken at the moment, but I'll probably fix it eventually. Running out of foreign currency reserves will result in a balance-of-payments crisis.

8. Foreign exchange​

I am working on implementing tariffs in TWF engine, but I haven't finished it yet.

Next time we'll talk about playing from opposition and what you can do when you're not the nation's primary player (the one in control of the government).

 

[Dadarian]

As requested, a TL;DR of Thunder's economic diatribe:

- TWF has an economics engine that also acts as the "game engine"
- This engine regulates the results of your orders through shoving them through said engine and popping out a myriad of results.
- These orders will have a budget consisting of 4 major categories (Revenue, General Expenditures, Debt Service, Welfare) and if you are stupid about your economics you'll get fucked
- You can regulate your currency unless you don't control your currency (pointed joke at the EU)
- Unemployment is a stat, but so is GINI, GDP, Median Spending, etc...
- Foreign Exchange stat is completely broken as is to be fixed soon (tm)
- Foreign Reserves stat is also broken and will be fixed soon (tm)
- Tariffs should be a thing, but in progress

 

[LatinKaiser]

In your face, Angela.

 

[sealy300]

In your face, Angela.

19:03 ThunderHawk3 The Euro big three will be able to agree on ECB policy
19:03 ThunderHawk3 France, Italy, Germany
How do you feel that Italy is more relevant than you?

 

[ThunderHawk3]

19:03 ThunderHawk3 The Euro big three will be able to agree on ECB policy
19:03 ThunderHawk3 France, Italy, Germany
How do you feel that Italy is more relevant than you?

((The UK isn't in the Eurozone, and therefore does not have control over the Euro.))

 

[sealy300]

((The UK isn't in the Eurozone, and therefore does not have control over the Euro.))

I know, I know.

 

[Andre Massena]

In your face, Angela.

We're bringing her down

 

[lordmichael95]

We're bringing her down

Yes, because the West really needs to have a currency war with itself right now.