Inactive AURORA: The Great Game - Gauging interest

[Kalin]

Excellent work GarfunkeL!

 

[GarfunkeL]

Also, if any mod could change the title into just "Aurora: The Great Game" as all interest gauging has been done now, cheers.

 

[laclongquan]

Espisionage fall under research or outside?

 

[Kz3r0]

Espisionage fall under research or outside?

Note to self, give express orders to watch for South-East Asian Alliance spies.

 

[Cassidy]

Clearly the current EU flag is quite lame, so it needs to be replaced by something a bit more... majestic.

I might need to clean it up a bit though.

I decided to try the same:

"THE GOD-EMPEROR IS THE LIVING PERSONIFICATION OF THE PROLETARIAT"

As stated by His Excellency, God-Emperor of Mankind, King of Kings of America, President for Life, Field Marshal Doctor Bernardo Ambia, VC , DSO, MC, PhD, MD, Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights winner, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in America in General and Brazil in Particular.

 

[Kalin]

Very nice.

 

[Johannes]

India still pickable?

 

[Hellraiser]

Clearly the current EU flag is quite lame, so it needs to be replaced by something a bit more... majestic.

I might need to clean it up a bit though.

I decided to try the same:

"THE GOD-EMPEROR IS THE LIVING PERSONIFICATION OF THE PROLETARIAT"

As stated by His Excellency, God-Emperor of Mankind, King of Kings of America, President for Life, Field Marshal Doctor Bernardo Ambia, VC , DSO, MC, PhD, MD, Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights winner, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in America in General and Brazil in Particular.

Some major in this LP.

 

[GarfunkeL]

India still pickable?

Yes. I'll add you shortly.

Espionage and You: A Short Guide

You need to put together a team of 5 specialists. They are considered to be the team leaders for an espionage operation, not the only agents taking part. They can military officers, scientists or civilian administrators. Once your team is together, you can send it for a mission:

• Spy on country X - this mission, if successful, will give you detailed information about target country.
• Steal research from X - can give both generic and race-specific research results.
• Assassinate Z from X - governors and scientists being prime targets. You must know the name of the target before you start this operation.
• False flag operation - if successful, your target is notified that a player of your choice is messing with them. This can be added to all of the above three.
• Counter-intelligence - your team remains home and tries to uncover and reveal foreign espionage teams.

Mechanics of espionage - each team has a rating that's a sum of the skills of its members. After a certain time period, I will roll 1d100, add it to the team rating and compare this to the team rating of enemy counter-intelligence team, which will also receive a 1d100 roll. Higher combination wins.

How To Convince Neutrals to Join You?
Through diplomacy. Diplomacy skill, like espionage, is tracked amongst your personnel. Create a 5-person team, assign them to a neutral country of your choice. Each month the team will create a "Diplo-Score" that is equal to their diplomatic rating but does not diminish. Eventually this diplomatic rating will be higher than the population (in thousands) of the target nation, at which point popular opinion is exceedingly in favour of joining up. Players can have only a single diplomatic team active at a time - otherwise I won't be able to keep track of them and their scores.
Target nation must have a believable reason to join you in the first place. Thus, Russia can woo Ukraine, but so can EU. EU and USA can woo Israel but Islamic Caliphate cannot. Most of South-America is neutral but Brazil probably will not appreciate everyone crowding in there. However, that's how it works. If, in the future, there are neutral/friendly aliens encountered, this same process is applied to them.

 

[Destroid]

You should probably give a deadline for orders GarfunkeL.

Made a map (corrected as per requests):

 

[GarfunkeL]

Thanks Destroid, that's kewl! Add Greenland, Norway and Switzerland yellow. Make Bangladesh white. Brunei should be white but it's so small that it doesn't really matter.

Deadline is tomorrow, as Johannes just joined as India and has not even received his initial info packet yet. So DEADLINE - 15/February/2012 18:00 GMT

 

[Absalom]

USA, the former superpower

 

[Destroid]

Interestingly there is a disputed territory between the African Union and the Islamic Caliphate (West Sahara).

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

Does the location or vulnerability of a factions capital city matter? If so since the EU doesn't really have a capital I would like to place it in Zürich Switzerland. Good luck invading my glorious Alpine fortress.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Not really Merk, except for LARPing purposes. Ground combat is highly abstracted - there's no territory to capture, only numbers matter. I'll have to figure out a way to put some more depth into it.

West Sahara is a disputed land but as it's piss poor, I don't expect any wars to break out because of it.

 

[Hellraiser]

Unless somebody says it is the holy land because mohammed told him that in a dream. Then it will be neck deep in Mujahedin.

 

[GarfunkeL]

RESEARCH AND YOU - HOW DOES IT WORK?

In the game start, each Research Lab provides 200 Research Points (RP) annually. I will not customize these for each nation, it's enough that they don't have an equal number of them to begin with. These labs depict secret, government-funded research and information about them is not published in the yearly Global News Networks - unless the invention is such that its impossible to keep secret, or that its usage has become so commonplace that neutral analysts have figured it out. For example, a new method for generating energy in engines will remain secret as long as it's only prototyped in labs. As soon as ships utilizing it are built, the name and general proficiency of such engines becomes common knowledge. However, other players cannot know the details of the engines in use nor can they know how many engines each ship utilizes without espionage or active sensor data.

That initial 200 RP can be augmented by further research in the Construction and Production field. More importantly, the scientist in charge of a project adds a number of RP's on top of the annual production, depending on his/her bonus. Thus a scientists with a 10% bonus leading two labs would generate 440 RP each year. Exception to this rule is that if the scientists is working a project from his/her field of speciality, then the bonus is quadrupled (x4). Using the previous example, the RP-bonus would be 200+200*(10*4/100)=160 RP, added on top of the normal production of 200 RP per lab, giving us 560 RP instead of 440. So it's quite important to utilize the proper scientist in the proper field, though not mandatory.

In addition to general research that is available to all, there exist race-specific (player-specific) research, that is basically taking the established principles and then turning them into working prototypes. So it's entirely possible that all players use, for example, Magneto-Plasma Engines as a generic tech but each players utilizes a slightly different version in their ships, depending on their generic tech level and what they need. These player-specific technologies can be stolen through Espionage just like generic technologies can. Also, this means that a player need not only to research a generic engine level but he might have to research several different actual engines - one for missiles, one for fighters, one for fast attack craft, one stealthy military engine, one fast military engine, one commercial engine and so on. When it comes time to design player-specific research, I will give you the choices you have at that moment and you'll either give me a very specific project you want or at least general requirements: "This engine must be as fast as possible, who cares about explosion probability or fuel economy".

You can always peruse the Aurora wiki for the nitty gritty details: http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

I will, in later turns, provide you with the exact RP costs of techs available to you so you can sort of figure out the value of them each. This will also be useful for diplomacy. RP 2000 Tech is not quite as valuable as RP 5000 tech - unless you desperately need it now...

Also, since there will be specific models for sensors, fire controls, engines, jump engines, shields, missiles, missile launchers and all the beam weapons, it would be nifty if you think of suitable names for them, which you can then give me when you design these system. "10cm Railgun C1/V1" is a boring default name whereas "10cm Oerlikon-R11" is a name with character!

 

[Phelot]

AU should have special Break Dancing Technology as a race specific tech.

 

[GarfunkeL]

RP costs for research and money costs for installations added to the list on Page 3. The money cost also implies how long it takes to build something, though this of course is heavily affected by the number of construction factories/conventional industry/engineer brigades assigned to it.

 

[Johannes]

How do I measure how useful which neutral country is? Just check real life stats and gauge by that, or can you give something more tangible? Most relevant for me ofc would be Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

And Iceland was part of EU in the 4th page briefing.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Whoops, yes Destroid please - Iceland is part of EU already.

RL Population is the most important factor, then comes GDP and general education level. More is always good, of course, since this is an 4X game.

Also, unless people have objections, the game begins running after I get India's and Russia's initial orders even if there is time before deadline. I'm quite keen to get the game itself running and see what sort of problems crop up.

Edit: waiting on Humanophage now. Since it's midnight in Moscow, I think we'll have to wait until tomorrow.

 

[GarfunkeL]

All orders are now in. The game will move forward. Thanks for participation. All players are now free to publish their PR/Media reports and any sort of public propaganda, saber-rattling or dick-waving they wish to participate in.

 

[Phelot]

It is suspiciously quiet here...

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

Indeed, it is to quiet. I will update with more glorious propaganda truth from the EU once I come up with something lulzy.

 

[Kz3r0]

My friends, the most recent discoveries are opening wondrous possibilities and infinite promises, let's put aside past errors and misunderstandings.
A new prosperity awaits us thanks to the Free Market and human solidarity.