Molotov

Post things I did wrong. Please be nice.

You spelled 'Inaccuracies' wrong.

damn it

I would either increase or remove reserves, since unit numbers have been so substantially increased. If you remove them, that's all you need to do, but if you want to rejigger the system you'd probably shift some of the large numbers of units we have from standing armies to reserves/conscripts, since they're misbalanced right now.

Otherwise it looks mostly fine.

I'd maybe make the following changes to the rules:

-50 instead of -100 for NPC government reforms.
-75 or -100 instead of -150 to set up rebel movements.
-5 instead of -50 to recruit a unit, given just how many we're operating with.

I'd also recommend changing the spoiler type from type 1 to type 2 so you can fill in the titles of each section and we're not having to guess which is which.

Spain is listed in the NPC stats and the player stats by the way.

Sudan should probably be listed as Madhist Sudan, rather than the Anglo-Egyptian Co-dominium which didn't exist until an agreement was reached in 1899.

Some of the spacing between NPC stats, rebels, player stats, etc., is weird and could be fixed for purely aesthetic reasons.

Arabia should be a network of warlords and tribal leaders, not a monarchy. And nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, which probably needs map-fixing.

There's no listing in Afghanistan's stats for how much the opium bonus is worth.

I'd personally not think the rebel movements and government reforms should be cheap - this isn't exactly a Cold War style era where you can just spawn ideological rebels at the drop of a hat, nor supply them with a flood of AK-47s. But that's my personal opinion.

But military reforms are pretty necessary, either increasing or removing reserves - I think it'd be more sensible to have a system where national mobilisation for full-scale war (and I mean WWI) doesn't cost anything in itself, or costs a flat fee for the nation, but maintenance costs are doubled from peacetime - though we might want to consider reducing peacetime per-unit maintenance in this case. Naval units would also be vastly more expensive than Army units, for obvious reasons, at least to construct, if not to maintain.

Conscription into the reserve is pretty much normal in most countries at this time, with few exceptions (Britain and the US, mostly) and so these men aren't being 'maintained as reserves' permanently, they're just working their normal jobs until called up again.

I'm trying hard to find an actual naval order of battle for 1898, but so far haven't had much luck (unless anyone wants to shell out £26 to get me a copy of Brassey's Naval Annual 1898, or can get one via ILL and their university quickly). I have a hunch, however, that the current naval statistics are incorrect and reflect a later post-1905 time period, unless Dr. MoO PhD can give me his source. The French Navy and Russian Navy were in second and third position of size and strength after the Royal Navy, respectively (according to Parliamentary speeches I've been looking at describing the Two-Power Standard), with the Russian Navy not being weakened to this degree until the Russo-Japanese War and the Battle of Tsushima.

On other military sizes: the Indian Army should account for a whole lot more of the overall proportion of the British Army than 10/80, and even at the height of the post-Boer War professional buildup to approximately 500,000 Britons in arms - excluding the Empire - the actual British Army is still dwarfed by the French, German and Russian armies of the same time. Currently, only Russia has a larger one. This is overpowering Britain a bit, or at least ahistorical: perhaps we need to decide roughly how many men each 'army unit' represents? In general, given the time period, the Royal Navy ought to be significantly larger, given the maintenance of the Two-Power Standard at this time (being equal in size to the next two largest navies put together) until the Dreadnought era, but the British Army perhaps cut by a third, made more Indian, and the other nations increased to more historical proportions. This'd be easier if we work out how many men each 'unit' represents.

EDIT: None of this is gamebreaking issues or anything, just raising a few concerns and suggestions for improvement. I still have full confidence in Dr. MoO PhD and this game.

FURTHER EDIT: Thank the gods - Brassey's 1902 has a listing of when each ship was launched. Consequently I've been able to kludge together mostly-accurate figures for 1898's pre-dreadnought navies. Stuff in red is what I've redacted/corrected given the launch dates provided - it's a generalisation to assume all 1898 vessels are active as of the game start, but it otherwise gets too complicated working out what was launched in what month. Cruisers are so much of a pain and a thornier issue of what counts as a cruiser - even more so than what counts as a battleship - that I've left them out for now, especially as naval strength was measured in battleships for the most part, and further subdivided into ages and tonnage.






As for fixing the starting naval stats: I've done a calculation based on assigning values to different ship classes then calculating a total Naval Strength. This number will then be rounded either up or to the nearest whole number to give each nation its starting Naval Units. Then we just need to assign a credit value for building 1 Naval Unit, which represents any combination of ships to that value being acquired, and a maintenance cost per Unit. This calculation puts the Navies on the same 'tens' scale as the Armies that Dr. MoO PhD has put in.

For the TL;DR, the major naval powers' unit numbers would look like this under the 1898-adjusted calculation from Brassey's Naval Annual, with all numbers rounded up for simplicity:
Britain 60, France 28, Russia 23, Italy 13, Germany 15, USA 15, Japan 6.

Other nations not included in Brassey's can be assigned naval unit numbers relatively arbitrarily in relation to these numbers, but they'd all be smaller than Japan's 6 - which is why I'm reluctant to make this any less granular.This at least gives us some hard and simple numbers to work from when determining naval units - we can then reduce these numbers proportionally if necessary to make for easier bookkeeping.

If we want to make these numbers smaller, I suggest divide by 3 and round up as the operation.

Unless there are any strong oppositions I will adopt Aegis's fleet numbers.

As for units, there has always been a vagueness about what they mean. Afterall in most BOP games the USA, China, and the USSR do have a large number of units, but it is no way proportional to their size relative to a country like Togo. I think units should incorporate both the size of the army and the "quality" which isn't necessarily the same as the technology. Using AP Taylor's "The Struggle for Master of Europe" I found the following stats for army expenditures in 1900
Germany- 33.6
Austria- 12
France- 27.8
Great Britain- 21.4
Italy- 10.8
Russia 32.1
Perhaps I can alter the units to be closer relative to this.

Aegis did fleet numbers?

Serenissima wrote:Aegis did fleet numbers?

Yes

Post those? :p

I kept them the same from the stats he had.

They're pretty inaccurate. Will do a relative comparison of proportions tomorrow.

I stickied all the main threads, hope that's fine?

http://i.imgur.com/pjrc8Jy.png

Fixed the map, this is the final version so far.

Apparently Greece owns Thessaly at this point in time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greekhistory.GIF

Updated map: http://i.imgur.com/fTgnhXZ.png

Mah Thessaly!