# Interest - 'Children of the Ancients' Conquest RP



## Yru0 (May 9, 2011)

Straight to the point, how many of us are interested in another conquest RP joining the ranks of Heresy? I’ve been working on this here and there for quite a while now but never really put anything up for fear of a lack of interest, with the obvious solution of an interest thread never really occurring to me. My original idea was an RP based heavily off of Karak’s ‘Age of Imperialism’ and Romero’s ‘Darkness’, but I really wanted to try something on a full map of the world; because why not? In the end, I edited a map I found on the internet for the purposes and thrashed out a bunch of mechanics. Fair warning, WALL OF TEXT AHEAD!

*Premise:*​ I’m not too good at originality I’m afraid, so input is welcome here. The idea I’m running on is that at some point in the near future, a catastrophic event thrusts civilization back to the dark ages, and humanity has to crawl its way back. Eventually, the modern world is lost to legends and the relics which we leave behind, but humans rebuild. The RP would be set after this world emerges into the Colonial era, emerging from its own recent era of bloodshed and stagnation, with the players’ nations setting out to stake their claim on the world. 

However, the players are not alone. A number of NPC nations also occupy the globe, with some seeking to expand their horizons much like the players, or simply get by in a rapidly changing world. But, the ones that the players should watch closest are the ‘Superpowers’, NPC nations that start the RP with a hefty advantage over the players and who are the current dominant players in their world. These nations would start off as seeing the players as little more as pawns in their great game, but I’ve set them up in such a way that I fully expect the players to easily match or over-take them by mid-RP. Now, don’t get too worried about some NPC gobbling you up early on. These ‘Superpowers’ would primarily be plot devices and essentially my personal ‘no-rush’ mechanic. If a player lags behind early on because they risked it all and lost, no problem, a superpower may intervene and help you get on your feet. One player goes on a war-rampage and starts killing everybody, a Superpower may get involved. Late-comers could also be accommodated as regions declaring independence from Superpowers, even if there’s not much land otherwise left to go around. The plan is for these superpower NPCs to be an extension of my almighty GM-powers whilst not necessarily involving a sudden cut in the immersion of the RP. That’s the theory at least.

*Maps:*​*Territory Map:* Just the plain demarcations of land. The plan here is to colour-code this map based on ownership so that everyone can figure out where everyone else is. SOON!

*Terrain Map:* Speaks for itself. This shows what terrain each territory is, and therefore what can be built on it. I tried to base this off of somewhat real-life ideas, but it’s not perfect, I point to the Canadian desert as exhibit A.









*Trade Map:* Ugly and difficult to understand, I know, I suck at Photoshop. The idea behind this map is that it shows all the naval and land-based trade routes available to the players, which is a major economy mechanic.










*Mechanics:​*
*Combat:*
The combat system was stolen shamelessly from Axis and Allies, so if anyone’s ever played it you’ll figure out what I’m getting at pretty quick. Every unit in the game has an Attack and Defence rating, which are used if it attacks or is attacked respectively. Whenever a combat occurs, I’ll roll a bunch of dice for both forces ‘simultaneously’. In order to score damage, a unit must roll equal to or less than its combat rating. In general, there’s no way to negate damage here, so a hit’s a kill. Kills are removed with weakest units first, calculated by their ‘total combat strength’, which is the sum of the attack and defence ratings of a unit. The exception to this is transports, merchant ships, missiles, etc which are automatically removed last. This would constitute 1 round of a combat, and if one side is wiped out, then also the entire battle. However, if there are still survivors then the entire scenario repeats until a victor emerges. I’m considering adding the ability for the attacker to state ‘retreat conditions’ but that’s not perfect yet.

These combat mechanics, if the board game they’re based on is anything to go by, are quite killy, so don’t expect a unit to survive long during a campaign. As time goes on, more combat mechanics are introduced which govern submarines, planes, missiles and even nukes but I’ll go into more detail if this gets off the ground. The key thing I’m trying to get across with these mechanics is that their unbiased. I’ll just be rolling dice so everyone will be on equal footing as far as combat is concerned and I want to make it as transparent as possible.

*Economy:*
Every update, each player would collect income based on the economic buildings within their territory and any trade routes they operate in. The building income is the easiest to figure, as each economic structure generates a fixed income, which is added together and rounded down to the nearest whole number to give your total income. Note that some buildings can’t co-exist, such as cities and farms, or are essentially ‘upgrades’, such as railroads to roads; also some can only be built on certain terrain, with mines on mountains and oil wells on desert. Cities have specific requirements, such as a number of farms to support the population, and later on a number of ‘oil supplies’.

Trade routes are my new addition, and frankly one of the things that I’m not so sure how would turn out. These are major money makers, and can be accessed quite early on. However, you need to either be big, or make nice with your neighbours to exploit them. Both naval and land routes require trade offices to be built on them, although naval routes require a merchant vessel to be present during construction as well. If you have an office at both ends of a ‘route’, shown on the trade map, then you can collect a nice income from it. The trick here is that trade offices do not have to be built in your own territory. As long as a nation, player or NPC, has colonised the territory and given permission for the construction to go ahead, anyone can build a trade office there. With further technologies, trade routes can be extended further and further away from your borders, granting more income. The catch, however, is that all routes must link back to your territory, and if you build a trade office in a foreign land, that country can at any point shut it down, potentially crippling an entire network of trade routes. 

*Research: *
This is fiddly. I’ve tried to create a system in which everyone can assume to get a new technology every update, but also so that you have to keep increasing your Research Point production as time goes on to keep up. Definitely a WIP, but for research-focused empires, they could potentially be researching multiple technologies a turn, which would give a decisive edge as other nations units and buildings quickly become obsolete. The Research tree is also the way I divide up the game, with each technology belonging to a different ‘era’ and key technologies separating each era; for example combustion and flight. The tech tree would also ease you into the game, with a skeleton-set of rules at the start, with naval combat later introduced, followed by aircraft, then submersibles, missiles and even nuclear warfare if I can get it to last that long. 

*Tech tree – 1st era:* SOON!

*QUESTIONS!: *
Feel free to post any questions you have in the thread, unfortunately I think by the time I post this I’ll be overseas for a week, so replies may be late in coming, but I just have to get this up. I'd also like to point out that this is the first RP I've attempted to make, so any advice would be appreciated too. So far I'm getting the impression of spreadsheets-are-king.


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## Romero's Own (Apr 10, 2012)

Oh, you will learnt to live by spreadsheets Yru0!

Speaking from experience, working on conquest RP's are hard work, but seriously rewarding if you get it together and have a good, constant core of posters to keep it alive.

So I say, this idea looks good. All it needs is to hammer out the details and get up a recruitment thread. Trust in other players, I mean a lot of the mechanics I'm using in Darkness came from the players post-recruitment, as I'm sure you'll remember personally.

Go for it, I'll happily welcome another conquest RP here on Heresy.


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## Gavoon (Sep 26, 2013)

I'm a bit interested, but I do have a question - no across sea trade routes?


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## Yru0 (May 9, 2011)

The grey routes connected to the anchor icons on the trade map are the sea routes so far. They're basically exactly the same as land routes except you have to establish them by sending a 'merchantman' vessel to them. I'm still thinking of some way to allow for fleets to blockade naval routes, but nothing solid so far...


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