Ever since its initial conception (more about which in a later post), Strategic Primer has aimed to put at least some focus on logistics. In the current campaign, it is a major focus.
Messengers and Information Delay
The original rules for Strategic Primer called for orders and results to be delivered in the game-world by messengers, who would move at the speed of the fastest form of transportation the player had invented. In theory, units would not start carrying out their orders until they had received them, and messages could be intercepted. The table of “random chances,” though mostly consisting of various combat possibilities, included entries instructing the Judge to, when a messenger met an enemy unit or passed through enemy territory, roll to determine whether the messenger was captured. If that part of the table had ever been regularly used, about forty percent of messages passing through danger would have been lost. In practice, though, I only remember applying any significant message delay in carrying out a unit’s orders once, and I don’t think I checked for possible interception more than once.
In the current campaign, population logistics have so far been such a constraint that players have not sent changed orders to units beyond their headquarters; when a strategy draft included language resembling such a change, I’ve carefully made clear that revising the orders mid-trip would require sending the changes via messenger, and the players have chosen to let the pending orders stand. I have also been more careful to report results of expeditions beyond the immediate area only when those groups return, since the players have (wisely given their severely limited manpower) not sent messengers to collect such reports, and have so far not spent much attention or many resources on other approaches to delivering messages.
This need for messengers has the clear effect, unchanged from the beginning of the first campaign, that the player almost never has direct command of his or her soldiers in combat. The player can set plans and tactics through either direct instructions for a turn or long-term “standing orders” and contingency plans, but unless his or her headquarters is attacked, direct control is impossible.
As players’ populations and spheres of operations expand, they should consider how various messages should be transmitted. These might include orders for units, results of orders (or other observations) from those units returning to the player, blueprints or formulae for advances, plans for a new fortress, or diplomatic correspondence to another player, among other possibilities. Each method of transmission has its costs and risks: sending a messenger prevents using that worker and any mount or equipment he or she takes along for anything else until he or she has reached the destination and returned, though the trip could also be used to transport goods or materials, early in the game messengers using the fastest transportation available are quite slow, and a messenger could be intercepted. As an alternative, various technologies could remove the need for a worker to make a trip in person, and transmit the message much more quickly than hand delivery would permit, but these often require trained workers’ efforts at one or both ends (and sometimes at stations in between), and they may allow the message to be seen or heard by third parties.
Maintenance
Around the end of the first campaign, I started to experiment with the idea of “maintenance cost,” which I now understand to have been at least partly something of a proxy for logistics. Everything that a player could build in the game would cost 1% of its “sticker price” each turn (even if the player didn’t pay that price, whether by having a unit outfit itself with equipment dropped by a defeated enemy or, more commonly, using the rule that gave players a free prototype of every unit they invented) for as long as that unit or improvement remained in use, but that cost could be reduced by building improvements, such as the “computer cooker” or “semaphore station,” that reduced maintenance costs (globally or in some area) by a certain percentage.
While I have deliberately abandoned that game mechanic as such, I’d like the game to include something having to do with “maintenance costs,” whether making some things carry a continuing cost in certain resources, or (more likely) making equipment tend to wear out and break down unless resources are spent to maintain them. But that’s a topic for another day.
Consumption and Demographics
The current campaign does have one mechanic related to the old idea of “maintenance,” however: each member of a population eats 4 pounds of food per turn, and needs between 80 and 200 square feet of living space to sleep and store personal belongings. (Other requirements, such as clothing, are planned to be added over the course of the campaign.)
There are opportunities as well as costs here, however: each turn, if there is enough living space available, a fortress’s population grows by half its current size or half the number of extra mouths its amortized surplus can feed, whichever is smaller.
Mining, Manufacturing, and More
In the first campaign, there was originally only one resource: money. Fairly quickly a player invented a resource-extracting technology, equipped some units with it, and sent them off to begin producing that resource, but I ran that in a highly ad hoc fashion, and didn’t begin to develop the notion of resources any further until after that campaign came to an end.
In the aborted “sequel campaign” I had hoped to run, for which I did some significant preparatory work but didn’t even complete a single turn, the idea of resources was somewhat more developed, but “the game still ran on money”: strategies were to include a “budget” for the turn allocating the money in the player’s treasury to various sectors, one of which was “mining” (but would have included such resource-production activities as farming), and I think that another was “manufacturing” (which was conceived of, I seem to recall, as more along the lines of refining or processing raw resources than creating final products). If the resources that “mining” was to produce were going to be relevant to the game at all, I think (based on what little I can now remember) that they would have been somewhere between “material components” in Dungeons & Dragons (an additional cost, beyond money, to produce some things) and “strategic resources” in the Civilization games (which one needs to have a supply of to build related units, but the quantities of which are not often relevant).
In the current campaign, an initial (but, other than in food, very over-generous) allotment of resources was given to the players, listed with the “starting package” of advances (scientific and technical knowledge), and immediately put to use in the construction of their headquarters fortresses. I also warned players from the beginning of the campaign that logistics, starting with the purportedly-Napoleonic dictum that “an army marches on its stomach,” is ultimately their responsibility.
The resources in that initial allotment were all labeled “production-ready,” and the first instructions I gave players included an explanation that some resources must be produced from other resources. In subsequent play I’ve cut out the “intermediate step” for wood, but players who have done mining have found that this produces ore, which is not immediately useful.
“What’s Out There?”
The current campaign’s model for resource production was initially fairly simplistic, only one step or so beyond what I had previously envisioned: players would (I expected) decide they wanted resource X, if necessary invent the technology to produce or extract that resource, and say in their strategy, “I want to mine/grow/harvest resource X at fortress Y,” and if it was reasonable for that resource to be in the area of that fortress (no tropical fruits in tundra, for example), they’d go ahead. I shouldn’t have been surprised when, instead, players asked me, “What’s around here that I could use somehow?”
My first response to that curiosity was to develop tables, along the lines of “encounter tables” in Dungeons & Dragons, to produce more results for explorers (who had in some cases been instructed to look for places where particular resources were visible) than merely filling in the map with terrain types, units, and fortresses. Those tables had the disadvantage of producing results that were too random, however; if an explorer met an adventuring party, for example, there was no way to go back and find that same adventuring party later.
To address that, I wrote a little program to add a certain number of these “events” to every tile in the map—and I did this at the same time as I doubled (and tried to quadruple, but that proved so disastrous I reverted it as soon as I realized) the resolution of the map. (More about that in a later post.) While I’ve since used similar programs to add things that I hadn’t thought of when I originally created the tables, from that point on I have not had to make an ad-hoc ruling about whether a particular mineral is available to be mined, or a particular kind of animal can be hunted and tamed.
Trade
Where there are logistical problems to solve, but someone is more than meeting their basic needs, trade often arises to address deficiencies. Previous campaigns of Strategic Primer have not seen much trade (though I think “trade” was another line item in the daily “budget” in the aborted second campaign), but the current campaign has already seen some players send at least one trading expedition.
Unlike previous campaigns, this current campaign does not have a single resource designated “money.” This is a decision I have come to at least somewhat regret, since it makes trade more complicated (especially in its initial negotiations), but the players have managed so far, and more than half of the “treasures” I’ve put into the world map for players’ explorers to find contain some quantity of coins.
At the beginning of the current campaign I had a notion of players being able to engage in trade with “the global market,” to prevent economic but non-military blockades. I have now discarded that idea as such; players will be able to trade with each other, with independent towns, with traveling merchants, and with villages sworn to them, among others, but not with a nebulous “global market.”
Strategic Primer 