Mad Renaissance STGOD

[Comrade Tortoise]

Nation Info thread is up.

[Lys]

It says final rules, but there are a few issues I'd still like to bring up. I did promise you some suggested stats to go along with my ideas. Can I still do so?

[Comrade Tortoise]

Yeah, send via PM. If the changes are large I will add them to the files proper, if not, they go in the errata section for minor rule tweaks.

[Charon]

So who all do we have playing? It'd be great to have some Hungarians, Austrians, Germans, and Arabs/Crusader States to play with too. :)

BTW: My territorial claims.

477- Anatolia
478- Smyrna
482- Konya
483- Adana
1610- Antalya
1611- Taurus
479- Ionia
358- Macedonia
321- Rumelia
Then either Thrace or Hellas depending on what Havoc and I decide on the matter of Constantinople.

[Lys]

Current Players:

Republics of Florence and Venice - Ben, our GM
Republic of Roma - General Havoc
Kingdom of Sicily - Academia Nut
Crown of Castille and Aragon - Lys
Kingdom of Occitania - fridgidmagi
Habsburg Domains - Cavalier
Ottoman Empire - Charon
Unnamed Arabs Around Egypt - Derek Thunder

Not sure if Derek is still playing, we kind of ragged on him on his concept v.v

I hope he's still on board. >.>

Bit of a short list to be honest, was kind of hoping there'd be more interesting. Though, I do know someone who would probably like this sort of thing, I'll ask him. That would be on more player.

[Derek Thunder]

I'm still in the game (at least theoretically), I'm just... distracted by IRL issues at the moment. Hopefully I'll have time to get myself established within the next few days.

[Comrade Tortoise]

This is a general poke for players to start getting their stuff up.

[Academia Nut]

There's a lot more coming in my OOB but I felt I should get something up in the time I had available today.

[Charon]

@_@

So many longships...

Yeah, I'll work on that OOB. Still have to finalize things.

[Simon_Jester]

Hello, everyone; some of you know me from SDN or chats.

I'm... considering joining, if there's time. Although frankly most of my creative juice is either diverted elsewhere or dried up at the moment. My other misgiving is that it's not an era I really know very well, in terms of being able to capture the social and cultural aspects, or being able to insert realistic personalities into things. So I'm not sure.

It seems like everything's very Mediterranean-centric, which makes me think a bit about how to move beyond that into northern Europe...

An anachronistically early Netherlands, or a creatively re-interpreted Hanseatic League might be interesting, but they'd be on the other side of Europe from everyone else.

Maybe a Hussite-influenced Bohemia? Or would that overlap with Cavalier's intent to set up the Habsburgs?

[Cavalier]

The Netherlands are already claimed, though North Germany and Bohemia are both free. The Hanseatic League would be particularly valuable to introduce another major trading state and balance against the concentration of trading states to the south. It would probably be a lot easier and involve a freer hand than Bohemia, which would be heavily involved in the politics of central Europe.

[Simon_Jester]

I've been discussing a Hussite Bohemia with Comrade Tortoise, but I'm nowhere near ready to write something up. Still thinking about the Hansa, but Bohemia interests me for some reason.

[Cavalier]

A Hussite Bohemia will be enemy number one for the Holy Roman Empire and subject to constant attempts to destroy it coming from Germany and Hungary, and quite possibly Poland. It will be surrounded and besieged from day one, and it will face serious internal disruptions from the large German population of its borderlands. It is very much hard mode and will rely largely on your ability to weather constant military assaults and incessant plotting and will have no friends anywhere near its borders. If you want a "low maintenance" state, Hussite Bohemia is not it.

[frigidmagi]

Well, in reality yes. In game? I mean who is running all the NPC states we're going to have?

[Simon_Jester]

A Hussite Bohemia will be enemy number one for the Holy Roman Empire and subject to constant attempts to destroy it coming from Germany and Hungary, and quite possibly Poland. It will be surrounded and besieged from day one, and it will face serious internal disruptions from the large German population of its borderlands. It is very much hard mode and will rely largely on your ability to weather constant military assaults and incessant plotting and will have no friends anywhere near its borders. If you want a "low maintenance" state, Hussite Bohemia is not it.

I think I'd like to talk things over with people other than the man running the Habsburgs before I make up my mind on this.

Suffice to say that the idea has a certain appeal to me, and while I may abandon it, I don't particularly want to discard it out of hand. Playing a nation which I would have fun with would, for example, probably motivate me more to stay involved in the game.

There are significant questions in my mind about how the Hussites would interact with the alternate-historical Catholic Church and its divided papacy. As it stands, by the mid-1430s they had already proven the ability to defend their realms against repeated crusade attacks from all directions. I doubt that that the Germans, the Austrians, the French, or anyone else would keep pissing armies away indefinitely, if they were not able to exploit internal dissension within the Hussite movement to split it politically and reassimilate it as historical.

Now, perhaps the concept is inviable, or would involve too much work, but I think I'm entitled to at least seriously entertain the notion.

It's probably that or Hansa, and Hansa leaves me still more strategically isolated and far from most of the other players, with a sphere of interest that doesn't even come into contact with anyone else's and makes it hard to justify bothering to participate at all as far as I can tell, unless I get very creative with the Hansa.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Well, in reality yes. In game? I mean who is running all the NPC states we're going to have?

That would be me, but their internal politics will be run on Easy mode, so unless approached diplomatically or actively provoked they probably wont go to war immediately.

[frigidmagi]

Simon, I can note that France is divided into two competing states and generally isn't interested in going on crusades that will benefit the Hapsburgs, Rome or other foreign powers. Occitania's main concerns are the Norman state to the north and the Norman state to the south.

[Simon_Jester]

With the divided papacy, I'm honestly not sure that both popes (pope and antipope, and it's an arbitrary sign convention which is which) would agree on policy toward the Hussites. Historically, it was Alexander V, a 'third candidate' appointed pope by a council which was trying to resolve the Western Schism in 1409, who excommunicated the Hussites in the first place.

It seems to me that the Hussites were quite capable of fending off direct military attacks against their borders; what proved to be their undoing was the internal split between the radical Taborites and reconciliationist Utraquists, and the eventual success of the Church in reaching out to the Utraquists and convincing them to rejoin the fold in exchange for some of the reforms they wanted (i.e., a reformed church in Bohemia, although one back under the control of the papacy).

How that would, or at least could, play out in the rather different face of Europe we now see, I do not know. I really need to talk to Havoc about this, at the very least.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Do I need to start eating people?

[Comrade Tortoise]

A note on fortifications. I know it can get complicated when you have a few million florins to spend. My recommendation:

You can get a certain level of abstraction. Say, instead of specifying exactly where a fortification is, you can specify that you have, for example, a line of six concentric castles on your border with Austria, each worth X number of florins, or you can specify a single standard design for those forts. Note major terrain features (you need only look at a topomap on google for this, and it can be approximate), such as whether there is a river guarding a side, or whether it is on rocky crag, and go from there. That way, if a castle comes under siege, you can specify the design then, or when a scouting force reaches it. Afterall, your enemies wont know the layout until they see the damn thing anyway.

It can then be assumed that in order to invade your territory, an enemy would need to either neutralize those forts, or risk being cut off from behind by the garrison.

If you need help with designs and are not architecturally inclined, you can always PM me, and I am willing to do that work for you. Just give me a budget for a design and what general features you want (concentric, norman keep, device/transitional/star fort), and I am willing to create a death trap.

[Simon_Jester]

I've only really looked at the rules just now, and one thing I have to say concerns me is the detail level. Comparing this game to the other STGODs I've participated in (SDNW4 and the abortive 1910 game here), the rules for just how you raise and equip armies are far more detailed. In SDNW4 you just arbitrarily defined how many 'points' a given unit was worth based on your own vision of its fighting quality, and in the 1910 game we had a limited number of possible units pre-defined for us by outside forces.

I'm more than a little worried about being able to put together a useful definition of a national military (whether Hansa or Bohemia), given that. It may take a lot of help, or a lot of time.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Well, something I wanted to do was explicitly deal with tactical thinking in a non-arbitrary way. When an STGOD is cooperative like SDNW4, it is less of a problem than in a competitive one, where a GM has to make a lot of apples to oranges comparisons between ships. There is also the matter of scale... millions and millions of soldiers compared to a few tens of thousands. Most of the rules that are down are for the GM to adjudicate things in a fully above-board manner, so the players know what the GM is doing to determine casualties etc.

As far as your workload is concerned, I am perfectly happy to assist in that regard, and it might help if you define what you want as standing regiment in your army to look like (say, five thousand men set up as a self contained army with infantry, cavalry, and artillery) define what you want each to have (in terms of upgrades like better armor), and then determine how many of those you can afford. You dont even need a spreadsheet like I needed in SDNW4...

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, that's true. I can easily enough define fundamental 'units,' then scale them upward. Obviously things will look totally different for Bohemia than they would for the Hansa.

I can do it; I just felt a bit daunted because it's not something I've done exactly before.

And I definitely need to talk to Havoc. Hav, if you see this, could you get on AIM some evening so we can chat? I don't think I'll be free for serious conversation tonight, but another night should work.

[Charon]

And I officially get the job of taking Constantinople.

From a revived and powerful Rome.

This is gonna be ugly...

[Comrade Tortoise]

If I can get people to post up their stuff by next thursday so we can get this show on the road, that would be awesome. Unless you are planning military action, you can wait on the military stuff, but I do need nation info so I can throw up the map and send you guys the various provincial bonuses.

Besides. I am itching to write up the Pazzi Conspiracy.