Empires of Ragnarok

Empires of Ragnarok, a theoretical game inspired by this.

Concepts

• Every turn, each nation plays a set number of actions. These are called Cards.
• Each Card has a name and fluff to it but their main effect is obviously to modify NRV in some way.
• NRV points have a Type and both a Subjective and Objective value formated as s/o. eg. "Industry 60/40"

Very loosely, Subjective value in a given area is your attack value while Objective value is your defense. As time goes by, everyone's values go up in both fields but the absolute differences between the two generally grow larger and larger.

Eventually, everyone becomes an eggshell with a hammer and the world erupts into cataclysmic, game-ending warfare.

• A given Card usually has at least two fields. Basic Example:

New Battleship

You've constructed a new battleship and it's just come online.

Line of Battle +40/+20

Treasury -10/-40

• Note that the second number is almost always less than the first one - actions a player play seem better to him subjectively than the objective benefit as viewed by all other players.

Numbers

Absolute value - the country's current stats - are whole numbers that cannot be reduced to zero at any stage. Where fractions occur and are somehow significant, all numbers are rounded downwards after each and every operation.

Arithmetic modifiers can be positive or negative.

Terrain bonuses and special effects may apply a percentage value. Where somehow significant, round the number down after each and every operation.

Attacks usually say to compare the attacker's subjective value on one stat to the defender's objective value on another or the same stat.

Over time, both numbers for all countries generally grow and grow but Subjective value is always higher than Objective and the differences between the two get bigger and bigger.

The number balance will be such that an early war will have the tendency to either drag on for ages or be stopped by a Trump card but later wars are more lethal until you reach a theoretical point where everyone can one-shot each other and Ragnarok is inevitable.

The numbers don't decrease. Ragnarok is inevitable.

Cards

Basic cards have a Suit associated with them that matches the main field to which they are related. The above example card would a Navy card.

Trump or Arcana cards are more special. They are generally statements of fact and their results are felt forever. One example of Arcana would be the Democracy card which provides a moral terrain bonus. Once that card is applied, it is considered fact and cannot be directly logically countered later on. A card that tried to declare the relevant country later on as an outright dictatorship would fizzle automatically.

At the start, players construct their nation with Arcana.

Possible Fields

Line of Battle
Naval Interdiction
Public Opinion
Treasury
Trade
Economy
Heavy Industry
Precision Industry
Technology (multiple?)
Production (specific by unit?)
Resources (specific by type?)

World

Military Power 101

Land

Land combat in empire building games differ in some fundamental ways to how it worked in real life. There is no attrition from hunger, disease or desertion unless specifically invoked; there are no difficulties in logistics nor limitations in sea transport unless specifically invoked; old guards never get in the way of progress; and the wounded statistic after each battle is an imaginary number. Besides this, most empire builders take the following lessons from history.

German invasions of Poland and France 1939-1940
That the level of technology and doctrinal development is half a century in advance of most empire building games is irrelevant because the how and why of history are never so important as the possibility it inspires. What Germany taught empire building players isn't how or with what gear to fight; it is that France and Poland are noobs and that any country could be a "discovered noob" so long as you're German or affirm that you fight like them.

Units

Infantry
Players will generally contrive either pre-knowledge or quick and speedy acceptance of equipment known best practices with the technology available: infantry in a game set in 1895 will function like elite units from late 1918. Machineguns are of particular note in that virtually all players will assume their commanders and troops know exactly what impact these weapons will have on the face of war and always have as many as they need.

Artillery

Cavalry

Armoured Cars

Tanks

Sea

Control of the sea is key in any empire building game. Most maps place all player countries on one continent on all the loot overseas in other continents. Even if the player continent has extra spaces, they are usually verboten both to maintain room for new players and because other countries on the continent are presumeably on the same page militarily and have strong consideration as hard targets. Few games tolerate significant home continent conquests well, especially if it occurs early, usually resulting either in the pacification of the offender or an early Ragnarok. Since viable colonial targets are overseas, land power is applicable only so far as the player isn't opposed by someone capable of winning a naval confrontation. Players who intended to form great empires without the support of a robust navy will usually realise their strategic error within a year in-game.

In most cases a naval confrontation is envisioned as a single gigantic sea battle where both sides muster every resource and ally available, often playing fast and loose with the time required to communicate, transit, plan, coordinate and execute such a battleplan. In this case, the total naval resources of each side are taken into account with numbers of ships of each class, clear and tangible country-level advantages in naval power and the minutiae statistics of each dreadnought playing the biggest part. All this, of course, plays second fiddle to the clear destabilising influence of such a battle. Uninvolved players will likely observe the conflict carefully and will play a part in dictating each side's losses in order to bring the game below criticality if necessary.

A more advanced use of naval power is the application of commerce interdiction, a principle which fewer players are likely to be familiar with because how it actually worked is historically more obscure to the average idiot. Legal fictions such as the right to blockade or inspect, to reject trade from owned ports, nationalize assets, or the centuries obsolete "letter of marque" are sometimes invoked in the process. The end result, in any case, is a form of naval conflict that is considered more acceptable and therefore less destabilising to the game as a whole. In this scenario, resources besides dreadnoughts achieve greater prominence. The risk in this strategy is, as with all strategies, that a sufficiently disadvantaged player may opt to escalate.

Dreadnought
The dreadnought is every country's biggest toy, by which we do mean every country's. Even countries that don't start with them are sure to build them at some point - some start with none so they can poop out a pile of brand new ones and states professing a preference for the concept of cruisers will quickly find themselves backpedaling on their commitments. Countries with no dreadnoughts at all may be dismissed as NPCs even if they're a PC who happens to be landlocked or entirely dedicated to land power. This is a threat which should not be discounted as an ill-respected earthbound player may soon be convinced that his only endgame option is to bring it about early.

Battlecruiser
The resulting offspring of yuri between a battleship and a cruiser with the best characteristics of both and, if the cruiser lobby had its way, the disadvantages of neither. Depending on the game, battlecruisers may sometimes become better rated than either dreadnoughts as a measure of power and naval encounters have more than once been determined by heated arguments of exactly where battlecruisers lie compared to dreadnoughts in the stand up encounters that they were never designed for. More reasonable or better informed players will have more historically accurate assessments of a battlecruiser's role and usefulness (though our actual knowledge is almost entirely anecdotal) and be able to opt for either a German or British approach to the matter.

Armored Cruiser

Light Cruiser

Destroyer

Torpedo Boats