(This is largely the same as
a post I had in the Citadel GD forum.)
Strategic Primer is a strategy/simulation game I'm designing and developing. I've been running a campaign to help "ground" the development for a few years now, using email, Google Docs (and Wave while it lasted), web chat, and the like in place of the original pen and paper. That campaign could always use new players (an ideal number would be half a dozen human players, I think, and we have about half that), and now, when we've recently (this past week) finished a turn, seems like a good time to post about the game and ask if anyone would like to join this campaign.
In Strategic Primer, each player takes the role of the commander of a small fortress in an imagined world, and uses his or her wit, ingenuity, and knowledge to lead this populace into the future. Each turn, he or she is responsible for managing food production, mining, manufacturing, defense (and other military action), diplomacy, and scientific research. In many of these areas this can merely amount, at first, to giving instructions to individual workers (players started the game with ten workers), and later to signing off on proposals developed by a deputy, but where the player has a better idea orders can be made far more detailed. The player creates (possibly with my help and critique) a "strategy" for the turn, and then I, as "Judge" (in tabletop games/RPGs parlance, "DM" or "GM") determine and inform the player of the "results" of that "strategy" and of anything else in the game-world that's relevant.
Two items from that list of responsibilities are worth mentioning in much more detail. First, research: While it is possible for a player's scientists to make discoveries on their own, this is not the primary way scientific and technical "advances" are gained. Instead, there's a rule that allows players to short-circuit this: If a player can (and does) describe an advance in terms that his or her scientists and other workers can understand and could implement (i.e. they have the necessary physical and mental equipment to build a working prototype, or whatever, from the player's description---which can include diagrams), the player gains that advance. Because of this, a quite large fraction of most turns' strategies for the players has been advances the players would like to gain, and a large proportion of the revision requests, critique, and such that I've made before accepting strategies has been asking for more detail in these "designs" or pointing out missing prerequisites. This is part of one reason why turns tend to take so long (more about the time commitment in a bit)---it's fun to think of and research technologies that could give you an edge going forward.
The second item is the military. Strategic Primer is a game of strategy, and one of its major concerns is logistics. While I won't say absolutely that there'll be no tactical elements to it, because the player might eventually invent in-game technology to let him or her micromanage tactics, and even without that technology direct control would be feasible should a battle take place at his or her headquarters, the game is designed so that logistics are fairly plausible, and so that players don't *have* to micromanage. Should the player have an army (or navy, or whatever), he or she should only have to give orders to its division commanders (however large the divisions might be---at first they might be individuals, but as population grows a chain of command should develop). And both news and changes to orders must be delivered by messengers (or labor-saving and communications-speeding technology), so players have to think ahead, train for the future, discuss contingencies, think strategically, and then trust their commanders.
In addition to email, online documents, and other electronic equivalents of pen and paper and face-to-face conversation, players use "assistive programs" I've developed (and continue to develop), especially a map viewer; I give each player a map of "the known world" in a format the program can read.
I hope this has made some of you interested ... so it's time to talk about what joining the campaign would involve. Each turn you'd have to create a strategy. I think this shouldn't take (at the minimum---there's a
lot of room for imagination and research, which can make this a bit of a time sink) more than an hour or two at first, before you've really learned what you're doing. (Not counting time waiting for me to answer questions, of course.) And in practice a turn (which is supposedly a game-world day, though a game-world year lasts only a fortnight) takes on average a month or two to resolve
(if it isn't held up waiting for someone or other to answer his or her email ...). We try to work around your schedule---email and Google Docs don't require both people's attention at the same time, and chats can be scheduled if necessary---and at utmost need I can "have a deputy prepare the strategy for your signature in your absence."
Is anyone interested? Or does anyone have any questions or comments?
