Fwurg

[Mercury]

I also have a question about the nature of this game: There's a 'numbers' aspect and a 'roleplaying' aspect. Which prevails? Are we negotiating in political roleplay in order to get higher numbers on our income sheet, or do we have the economics game as a backdrop for political intrigue?

The original goal was to create political role-play with the numbers as a support system, like a character sheet.

Currently, its very number focussed, as it seems that getting better numbers is an important motivator. Since the system is not done yet, a lot of my time working on the rule design rather than the backstory and events. This will get better as the system is fleshed out more, I believe.

Regardless, I am curious to hear the points of view of the players on this matter.

[The Lifebringer Clans]

The rules system currently appears to be solid, interesting, and fun to play with, so right now, this has my focus.

Additionally, we're all rapidly growing economies, and all investments are focused on personal growth or increased trade with each player's trading buddy. At some point (around week 12-15, hopefully sooner with options like loans and open market) we will grow past this bottleneck, and everyone will be comfortably producing/trading for an income of 1300ish after taxes. Here, people will have trade fleet capacity to spare, and investment in the special options becomes a factor as well. When people start finding niches (focusing on special goods?) I expect the current game rules themselves to encourage negotiations with third parties.

However, it's still very easy, and very tempting, to measure succes by your income figure, and to make all roleplaying efforts subordinate to and focused on increasing income. It's very hard to make a 'roleplaying choice' if it would cripple the income of your system. A very basic example: if you play a peaceful race, you don't want to be involved with Weapons. But Weapons are part of tax set 7, so you're either going to have to build them or import them in bulk.

Short term, I don't have any problems with the current system. I enjoy the numbers game, and I like seeing how the new additions (loans, corporations, etc) change my plans. However, I also like the roleplaying aspect of things, and long term, I think it would be good to have large goals that require cooperation between players, and cannot be met by using economics alone.


tl:dr; version:
I think the current plan of finishing the rules part first and then focusing on RP events is a good idea.