Rise of Imperialism: Developing Thread

[Tooth1066]

Hello everyone, know that summer has finally hit, I now have a lot more time to focus on more diplomacy game.

I want to make this thread so people can put their ideas out in the open about how to change and improve the game. I would think that most suggestions would come from people that have already played, but if you have not played feel free to throw in your comments as well.

I will start, everyone knows the major problem with the game.
Big starting countries control the game way too much and the little countries such as Austria, Prussia, Turkey do not have much of a chance. This is problem number 1 and should be the main focus of this thread. Here are some of my ideas for this specific problem:
1) Give England/Portugal/Spain less colonies overseas. Maybe only 1 per country
2) Penalize countries for having too many overseas too far away from their homelands??? (This seems kinda out there but it might be worth a shot
3)

Here are some of my ideas for map improvements:
1) Make a world map
2) Change the layout of some of the maps
a) Make Europe more detailed with more room (this would allow weaker/Europe dominated countries more of a chance)
b) Make India, Africa, North America a little bit smaller
3) Possibly delete the new maps



I know I have more ideas, if we can get some discussion maybe it will spark my mind a little.

[deanchuk]

First of all, in my opinion, lets return to the basic maps, Africa, Europe, North america and south America.
I agree, to balance it all we need that all the countries will have the same supply centers, so if it means England will have 2 supply centers in Europe and two in North america, Prussia and Russia will have 4 in Europe.

the other problem, is South america, once someone "wins the battle there" (Portugal or Spain) South america is impossible to take it from him and he is very strong, so the best option is to make South America much much littler and smaller, as well as closer to North America and Africa.

Lets focus first on the basic maps before we create new ones...

[mat.gopack]

Maybe all the powers in Europe could get a bid at the start of the game (a bid phase, but only for Prussia/Russia/Austria), which lets them get a colony (each would get 1 dollar)

[feldspar]

Maybe all the powers in Europe could get a bid at the start of the game (a bid phase, but only for Prussia/Russia/Austria), which lets them get a colony (each would get 1 dollar)

That's a really good idea, here's what I'm thinking:
Personally, I'd make all of the colonial maps (North America, South America and Africa) bigger by adding more spaces but keeping the number of SCs constant (or perhaps getting rid of all but a few SCs). Nobody would start out with SCs in the "New worlds" except that each country would get 1 dollar for a bid phase at the very start of the game (much like mat.gopack's idea). This would allow each country to decide where they are going to expand, and whether they want to be historically accurate or not. It gives more freedom to each country. I'd also allow the option of being able to waive this starting bid phase for one more army/fleet at home in Europe (because it's not like every country in Europe was imperializing in the 1800s.) I'd make the SCs in the new world scarce and spread out, so it took a while for imperial powers to become strong, but I'd also allow the option of building colonies, which would take the one supply to build for two years (just giving that as an arbitrary time frame) but would take no supply to maintain after that and would act exactly as an SC. I think that'd give this game a certain capitalist feel which really sums up how Imperialism actually was.

The problem with my idea, is that I don't know how the buy&sell phase would fit in. It'd need major changes in order for it to work or else it would have to be totally cut out. Still, I hope that at least a few of these ideas were helpful or interesting. This is one of my favorite variants and I don't want to see the ideas grow stagnant.

[Tooth1066]

I really like the idea of starting the game with an opening bid. If we can hammer out the details, I think this should be added to the game 100%

I am going to start creating a world map of just the original 4 maps.

[TheChosen1]

About #1: if changing the world map means to make this whole one big map I disargee.
One of challenges of this game is that there are many maps and you need to picture the big map by yourself.

[DOI]

That's something I hadn't thought of before, but it makes a kind of sense. From a Europe-centric point of view, the rest of the world is off somewhere else and you only need to know how to get there. Much to my surprise, I'll support keeping the multiple maps. But yeah, we need balance. And India and Australia are, if nothing else, the prettier maps.

[Tooth1066]

Making a world map was mostly going to help me in the GM'ing process, have 1 map instead of 4 keeps me from doing a lot of busy work. 1 map makes it a lot less complicated.