(I posted about this before a couple of years ago, but that thread got moved to the archives, and I wanted to revise it anyway.
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I am still, or again, looking for players for my ongoing campaign of Strategic Primer.
Strategic Primer is a strategy/simulation game I am designing and developing, run by email (and Google Docs, web-chat, etc.). In the game, each player takes the role of the commander of a small fortress in an imagined world, and uses his or her wit, ingenuity, and real-world knowledge to lead this populace into the future. Each turn, each player writes and submits a "strategy" containing plans and instructions for whatever food production, mining, manufacturing, defense (and other military action), diplomacy, scientific research, or other tasks he or she wants done that turn, and I use those "strategies" and my own imagination to determine what happens in the game-world and report "results" to the players. Writing a simple strategy for a turn takes no more than a few hours (more complicated or ambitious ones take longer; as with most creative endeavors, there's always more you can do ...), and the campaign never manages to get through a turn in less than a few months.
There is one interesting features that I regard as the strongest "selling point" of Strategic Primer: the "scientific bootstrapping" mechanic. 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 implement (i.e. could build a working prototype, or whatever, from the player's description, which can include diagrams) with the physical and mental equipment they have available, 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 game-world starts at a more or less medieval "tech level," and is full of many animals, plants, villages of each of six races, ruins and battlefields to (have your people) explore, adventures to (have your people) take on, and even portals to whole other worlds to find.
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. A map, in the map viewer, looks like this:
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?
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