Suggestions for the Game Rules

I've created this thread for discussing changes or additions to the game rules. Rules modifications, new tech, anything to do with the crunch.

CASUALTY SYSTEM

How about: both players roll, we add all modifiers. Then, we add the two values together.
Say, one player got a 20 in total, the other one got only 10. In total, they make 30.
Then for casualties, you suffer a proportion of troops equal to the proportion your enemy's roll is to the total value of added rolls (this sounds very complicated, but it's not, I hope you know what I mean. Not sure how to word it).
So the player who rolled 10 will suffer 20/30(66%) casualties and the player who rolled 20 will suffer 10/30(33%) casualties. How does that sound?

RANDOM EVENTS
Dogstar has suggested random events. What do you guys think? I personally think it's a little bit too much for the first playthrough.
Like I said before, there is a huge number of variables and modifiers already.

@Admin
-Casualties: Could work. Part of me wants to put in a criticals system, but the another part thinks that's a stupid idea and that it's already represented in the way casualties work.
-Random Events: Depends on what you mean. Do mean alien invasion random events, or your climate change random events?

The biggest problem I have is the fact that the totals and government factors really don't change casualties. The Tor Nation, from what I know has a sort of Human wave/Militia type of army. With quality taking a back seat to sheer numbers. My total was 4x his, I fielded a professional army, outnumbered him and I still lost the same number of men as him.

Perhaps you could consider circumstances other than what the current numbers dictate?

@Casualties
We could use that system. Let's see what Teutonic and flailingtortoise have to say.

@random
Since the whole climate incident, I've been against random events like that. Thing is, Dogstar has just PMd me about it. I think he might like SOME randomness added. This is a pretty big thing, but I was actually planning a timed event a large number of turns in that would present a challenge to ALL the players. I'm not sure if I should spoil it or not.

@Teutonic
But Teutonic, did you read the new rules I'm suggesting? If we followed them then 36+9=45
9/45=20% 0.2x14= 2.8
36/45=80% 0.8x9= 7.2

So, according to this system, he would have lost 7 Armies and you would have lost 2 (always round down is a good rule, I think).

What we could do is take the same system we have but make it scaling. What I mean by this is that rather than 20-base roll, we have X-total roll where X is the lowest number that is divisible by twenty and greater than the highest result rolled. For example in the Tor v Teuton fight since Teutons roll 36, casualties would be calculated at 40-36=4*5=20% casualties.

EDIT: this is @casualties, for clarification.

Admin wrote:@Teutonic
But Teutonic, did you read the new rules I'm suggesting? If we followed them then 36+9=45
9/45=20% 0.2x14= 2.8
36/45=80% 0.8x9= 7.2

So, according to this system, he would have lost 7 Armies and you would have lost 2 (always round down is a good rule, I think).

Just looked them over, and I approve.

@LongFangNaga
Just had a look at your system. I don't know, it seems a bit weird. Also, the Tor would have suffered 153% casualties.

@Teutonic
I'm sure you do. What to the rest of you think of the "Proportion of total roll" system?

Random events sound good, it depends how complicated you want to make them/what they are.

I don't have any alternative options but I don't think that it should be an unmodified roll, there should be something that represents training/numbers of combatants rather than an unmodifiable roll.

Also, good idea for a thread. Game still in play test mode so this is a good place to put ideas.

Semi Edit
Suggestions that came up while writing this seem good, proportional casualties

@Proportion
TBH I kind of liked the way it didn't factor in modifiers before from a fluff perspective (tactics- represented here by rolling high- are more important than equipment or numbers). On the other hand, it puts a massive penalty on military factions compared to cultural or econ factions so I do think a change is needed. Let's try this system out. If we don't like it we can always change it (beta is beta afterall).

@all
IMPORTANT UPDATE
Looks like we will use the "Proportion of total roll inverted" system, at least for a while. We'll see how it works. I do agree that it slightly favours the more militaristic nations (they conquer your Region AND suffer little casualties), but the previous system WAS kinda silly (equipment+doctrines don't factor into casualties).
If anyone comes up with something slightly more balanced that we all agree on, we can add it to the rules section.
Updating the rules now.

@all
Also, random events Dogstar mentioned. I don't think we should have these (too many possibilites etc.) BUT I have a good alternative.
RP-based rewards/penalties.
Let's say, every turn or two I could present player with an event, like "the jungle tribes demand independence, because they feel their way of life is in danger!".
Then the player could do anything he wants with that. Ignore it (no results of event), or give them independence (creating an "NPC" small nation), destroy them (granting a Res/Food bonus but increasing Unrest) etc. The big difference between that and random events is that this type of events allows the player to do what he wants and has no set outcome - every player would react differently and get a different result. It would also make RP more important, because a lot of these events would come from what YOU do, not out of thin air. Oh, and most importantly, the player would always have the choice to "ignore", so the event has no effect. What do you guys think?

@Events
In all honesty I'm against that simply on the basis that you (admin) has enough shit to do already.

You do bring up something I've been meaning to talk about for a while: what is the system for unrest? You mention it a few times in the rules (looting pop, certain doctrines decrease unrest falling rate, etc) but you never really laid out a system for it.

@LongFangNaga
Yeah, there is a lot of stuff to keep track of already. Also, the Unrest system. I'm pretty sure that I explained it in the rules section.
You might have noticed I like to add more rules, but when it comes to actually calculating and keeping track of all this stuff, it's like URGH. I never think about that second bit when making new rules. I remember ages ago when we said "Gov modifiers are enough, it's too rules-heavy already!".

Looting Pop resulted in 10% Unrest, which meant that every turn there's a 10% chance that a Region will leave the Nation. There was also an 80/20 chance that they will join their original Nation / form independent state.

@Unrest
Yes, but you left elements out (how unrest falls for example).

@Unrest fall
"which falls by 2% per turn". That's what it always said since Day 1. You must have missed it when reading it, I know the rules are an awful block of text.
I also have to do a turn with Dogstar now, I'll be back when done.

Alright, some ideas I came up with at work today (not saying I think we should use them, just putting them out here).
-Turn structure: rather than have turns on a player-by-player basis, at the start of the round everyone writes out what they want to do and sends it to admin AGI style. Admin then takes the orders and executes all of them simultaneously. This means that players that go last won't have the advantage of knowing what everyone else does that round, and means that admin wouldn't have to constantly be online for fourteen hours at a time (though maybe he enjoys it, I don't know).
-Combat: what if rather than have firepower/armor techs giving units a bonus depending on whether or not they're the attacker, we separate them into two statistics similar to power/toughness in MtG. Firepower represents how effective the unit is at dealing damage (bonuses to the combat roll) and armor represents how resilient the unit is to damage (reduces casualties somehow). This way the system could represent units with units with high damage/low durability that defend (artillery positions for example) and units with high durability/low firepower on the offensive (I can't think of a IRL example of this, but imagine a tank that replaced its gun so it could carry more armor or something). It would complicate the system (probably a lot more than I realize), but I think it's an interesting idea.
-SCIENCE!: I noticed that we don't have a terrain improvement that boosts tech research, which is rather odd (especially considering that their are improvements for pretty much everything else).