Modern World

[jstott]

I have an idea for the Alaskan problem - have oil as a property a square can have. It gives you an extra 2 men, but individually does not allow you to build. This would reflect the situation today and how there is a lot of interested parties concerning what happens in
a) Iraq
b) Iran

Oil is in Alaska, by the way. This would help Canada - a lot.

I would split the USA, but give them incentives for working together, or with Canada. But make it require a lot of trust.

With Africa, perhaps make a few spread out supply centers, with a nation there, say for instance South Africa or Egypt or Ethiopia.

A "terrorist" player would be something to work on if you have some shortage of ideas.


As for ocean spaces, I suggest that they be many. This would protect sovreignty, and allow a player to clean up his enemies remains before worrying about enemies abroad. If there was a stalemate line in the ocean, that would be good.


Nice work everyone, keep it up.

[thegame]

The rules can be made like Imperial were if you capture a home SC, you can use it as a building location. That way, Iraq would have to capture coastal home SC to strengthen their navy.

Do you mean capture a home center of another power such as Saudi Arabia or India?

Yes, It may cause conflict early for Iraq, but Imperial Diplomacy is ran that way, and it doesn't cause a problem. It would also make it easier to expand in the game seeing if your battlefront could be really far away from your home centers with such a big map.

[Waterice man]

I agree that the home SC builds would solve some of the problem with Iraq, but where would it come from? - both Turkey and Saudi Arabia have three SCs each, and an attempt by Iraq to take one would leave Iraq at war with one, if not two greater powers.

Concerning the USA - I really wanted to make this game realistic, and I think splitting the USA would ruin this.

[Sanguinem]

I love the idea of a Modern worldwide map, but I think it needs to have more to it than just military expenditures in determining how powerful each country is. Economy, population and natural resources all play a huge part, not just military expenditures. At most, basing it on military expenditure basically would just give you an idea about the starting units, whereas other factors would have more to do with where the SCs are and how many each power has. Also, just because a country spends a lot on it's military, doesn't necessarily mean it's spent well.

Honestly, for determining who gets to start as a power in this game, military expenditures is only a small part of a war. Assuming that a Modern game would sort of simulate a world war, every country involved would probably drastically up their military spending. The real question would be who actually has the population, economy and resources to do it. As an example, Canada doesn't spend much on their military compared to several other nations, but it could. It has a trillion-dollar economy (or it did, and still has close) and the second largest land-mass on the planet (meaning a ton of resources). If international trading were to cease because of a world war, Canada would have control of a lot of resources (until someone tried to take it away, but that's the nature of the game), far more than a country like South Korea, which spends a lot on military, but probably is already at it's limit. Also, if an outside power were to choose a target, Canada's large size would probably warrant more SCs than Korea.

Just my two cents. By including other factors you also allow you to consider more powers for starting out. Africa could have countries like Nigeria (over 100 million people and large oil reserves), South Africa (about 50 mill, and the most developed economy in Africa) or Egypt (same as South Africa, although less economically developed).

I've been wanting to work on a map like this for a long long time, but just haven't had the time.

[Waterice man]

Here's an idea - what if the AU were to become a country?

I haven't yet done all the sums, but it would give a figure somewhere in the region of that of Australia

[Waterice man]

After deciding that the AU would be a better choice than Iraq, I am working on placing the SCs

[Waterice man]

I've gone over Major cities and assigned a preliminary Home SCs Map

Modern World SCs.png (58.95 KiB) Viewed 1267 times

[unfunfunt]

Just stumbled across this, and it looks very interesting. I've been mulling something like this over for a few years now (albeit as a civ 3 map, but the point still stands). I came to the conclusion that the world right now is horribly unbalanced from a gameplay perspective (curse you world). One solution I thought of was to examine not just a countries physical possessions, but also it's sphere of influence. Take the united states for example, the biggest problem. While they do spend the most on military power, it isn't all spent on standing armies sitting around on the continental united states, as the above map would suggest. The US has very strong bonds with countries such as Israel, south korea, several south american nations, as well as parts of eastern europe. While they have no forces deployed there now, it isn't a big leap to assume that they might if a war broke out. Thus, I would suggest placing a disproportionate amount of US centers outside of the united states itself. This would put them in everyones way, so they would have to negotiate like crazy to keep them. They also have a tendency to give up and go home if they are losing (see Vietnam, Gulf War 1). Thus, placing their centers where they are easily attackable simulates the decreased military capacity they would have if they began to lose overseas. While the loss of personnel and manufacturing capability would be negligible, they could not justify it to their own citizens.

This same logic holds for the other large nations. Placing russian units in cuba, for example, would certainly lead to a more interesting dynamic. The chinese should control north korea, and south korea should be replaced by american troops. While this may not be accurate to the military spending figures, the two koreas are basically outputs for the foreign policies of china and america. I also think that iraq should be expanded into one mega state, a muslim union consisting of egypt, jordan, syria, Iraq, iran, pakistan and probably some other nations I have forgotten. Most importantly, they should start with Palestine (in it's current incarnation as the gaza strip), bringing it in direct conflict with american controlled israel early on. Who knows, they might even work out a two state solution. This will also put them into conflict with india over the kashmir region, something that would definitely occur in a WW3 type scenario.

Hopefully this would lead to a situation where everyones military might is inversely proportional to their popularity. No-one would want to ally with america because it would severely limit their avenue of expansion. Countries like australia, however, could amalgamate their position before coming into contact with anyone else (unless they wanted too).

As for the question of canada, I must say I was surprised that we even made the list of the top 13, (or however many there are). One way of dealing with the problem might be, as Sanguinem said, to give them centers based on potential military might. Perhaps give them centers which do not start with units on them, and then position them so the americans can't steamroller them in the first year before they can build.

Also, I notice one large issue has yet to be mentioned, and that is the issue of nuclear weapons. If WW3 were to break out, it would not be confined to the two dimensional maneuverings that diplomacy is (being based on the era of Bismarck and WW1). If you are aiming to make the game truly authentic, you would have to consider a way of dealing with them. I have a couple in mind, but I've spouted too much crap already, so I'll stop for now.

If you are interested in having help with the development process, I would definitely be interested. It would give me something to do at work.

[Waterice man]

The problem is, if spheres of influence are used as the ultimate authority, the Americans would win before the game began, as their sphere of influence definetively includes NATO, which spends two thirds of the global military budget.

I will, however, look at the possibility of Muslim states working together

[Waterice man]

OK, I've done some preliminary research, and it looks like we could feasibly use the League of Arab States in place of the AU (due to many countries being in both, it would be impracticle to divide the nations)

The League, between its members, spends a total of $53.4 billion on the military, giving it fourth place overall, behind PRC, EU and USA. It shouldn't be hard to pitch the LAS against Brazil either, if Zaire/DR Congo was made an SC


On the Canadian issue, I can't think of any way to stop them being swamped by the Americans early on, so it would most likely be best to remove them from the board