[Poruku]

If you look at the official Korvara website, you'll learn that Geladyne is a place with not much food. And Telegrad is a place with a lot of food. This sort of concept is crucial to the world's dynamic. However, if you go into the game... Not only is that not really visible, it's also something people disagree on in certain cases. The existence of player farming, and grinding, and all those mechanics, means that as players, we live in a world of post-scarcity. There is no way anyone is going to go hungry or struggle because the first random person will simply give you food and money. That being the case, the nations and the setting feel mostly meaningless to a person who isn't purposefully playing up the harshness of the world. You can go anywhere and live as a nameless drifter without experiencing any hardship. By extension, this also means nations are not very different from one another. Unless players come to agreements and post stuff on discord we just never really know what is up. Should we expect everyone to read the 4 lore documents and keep themselves updated on the political shifts? How can the player feel like the world is alive without going through the work of informing themselves about all that's going on? And even if they do, there isn't that much happening in the world that impacts nations as a whole. Why is not much changing? I believe it's in part because... Everyone is prosperous and chilling. Why would they be at odds? The only problems nations face are usually mismanagement, crime, power shifts and drama. Events as well, but those are usually solved as soon as they arise.

I would like to propose a system to change this. Simple but significant.

Korvara Nation Status Message
Each nation would have stats and a status. When you enter a nation or log in inside it, you get a very short system message that describes the current situation as well as the resources it has. Here's an example that should explain what I mean.


You could make the values have a little clickable link that explains to you what the number means. For instance:
2 food: People are starving and many are dying. The people are angry and close to rebellion
3 food: People are very hungry and restless
4 food: People are going hungry
5 food: People have just enough food to survive
6 food: People have enough food, but aren't always satisfied
7 food: People are satisfied
8 food: People have plenty of food
etc.

These values don't represent a stockpile, but production. Meaning the values aren't going to accumulate, they are just the amount you get, for instance, per year. This means that if you trade 1 food for 1 treasury, those values are changing exactly once and as long as the trade deal is in effect, that change will remain. If the trade deal is off, then boom, the values return to what they were before. This means there is a finite amount of resources "available" in the world, and the factions must trade or fight over them.

So, how do we change it? And how do we determine what nation has what resources? Well, that's simple. Dev decides the starting values because he made the game. Then, the values can only be modified via trade, conquest, or gm-approved significant changes in the nation, and never from mechanics such as farming. GMs would be the ones who can tweak the values in the first place, while the status could be modified by the nation leader. So once a trade deal is done, one of the leaders message modmail, and a GM makes the change.

What effect will this have?
From a glance you might realize how useful this would be. First, the status itself would allow people to quickly learn what the hell is actually happening in a nation without needing to dig. Additionally, it would let people know of the IC conditions of the nation. It would let people know in-game that, oh yeah, this is actually the amount of food we have. How about we trade it? How about we go take it from another nation? Oh, we lack this or that, how will we get it? These are things that can't just be fixed with gathering 1000 tomatoes, you actually need to interact with people and make shifts in a nation, a movement, interact with OTHER nations. Make big projects that cause visible changes to the nation, not just in the map, but in the actual IC of the nation in a quantifiable manner.

The obvious issue that arises would be that players naturally tend to want to fix every single problem that arises in the game. It would be good if those people could be pointed to what they can do to change that value. You want to fix your nation's economy? Well first of all, you can't do it alone, and you'll need to make it a significant movement with rp to back it up. I'd like to see an SL2 where things are allowed to not be perfectly ok in every way all the time, and as such, it should be a difficult endeavor. Something that takes a lot of time and interaction with many people.

Furthermore, this system would introduce a way to have a war with much lower stakes. Currently, the only real point of war would be conquest for the sake of it. With a resource system, war could have an actual purpose people could get behind. You could just take a small part of territory and steal one point of resource. No nation-ending conquest needed to have some conflict. Just... We want to be better off, so we'll take some of your land.

I'd love to hear thoughts about such a system. I think a departure from the "just let the players figure it out as they go" mentality and the hard mechanics is needed to have meaningful inter-faction roleplay. We need broad game-ified systems, because this is a game after all, and without something being written down as truth, people simply cannot agree on what "should be" on that scale.

Although my example is crude, it would obviously be more elegant when/if implemented, without being too complex. We would need to decide what resources are relevant, and what exactly is required to shift a resource one point up or down.

In addition, the status message is kind of a secondary suggestion to the resource thing. Both can be addressed individually.

[Blissey]

This seems like a good starting point to weigh nations. I wish I had more ideas to add on, though, but I don't.

[firehawk11]

I...have to agree.

[Sawrock]

I absolutely love this idea.

My only concern is how new nations would be accounted for- would they parasite off of other nations when first created, or would they generate their own new values? If the latter, one could technically "game" the system by generating new nations, harvesting their resources via war, and then creating a new nation after the war is complete and the old nation is assimilated. If a nation's resources disappear completely after it is conquered (like the example of a trade deal being reversed from the original post), then there's really no point in conquering in the first place.

[Kameron8]

I agree that outside of lore documents, little is done to represent the economic status or general differences in resources between nations. 

That being said, to me it seems like more elaboration and expansion would be needed on the suggested system.  In some capacity, resource points need a system in which to be stored and actually used.  Otherwise, it serves almost exclusively as a factoid -- because people would be arguing/conflicting over imaginary resource numbers, which they are already more than capable of doing after consulting lore documents.  Easily accessible information is never a bad thing, and it does make understanding a nation's circumstance easier, but it sounded like the goal of this was a bit broader than that.

[Poruku]

My only concern is how new nations would be accounted for

I guess the answer is simply to use bigger numbers. And then the little nations need less food to have "enough" food because I guess there would be a "size" stat. Each big nation is the same, but new ones are small. They would probably get their own resources based on the land they have as well. Like when fairview was made, they got fields and such, so they essentially added food production into the world. But these values would be small and if a bigger nation went to war against them and won they wouldn't gain that much proportionally. And it would imply you're literally murdering people or creating refugees and uh... Generally a terrible idea to abuse that, you're literally killing your own people. Instead, you can just expand and create new farmland and such. No need to create a new faction.

For instance, Fairview being founded would add 20 food units into the world. Fairview needs like 15 units of food to have enough. So they can trade with other places, but they have no other industries so their money isn't very high. Meanwhile Meiaquar has like, 200 food production, and they need 250 in order to feed everyone. So Meiaquar would probably trade with that small faction. Just as an example.

So yes, it would probably create more food if they have farmland, but also more food need.

---

It sounded like the goal of this was a bit broader than that.

Yes, the goal here is to kind of introduce the idea. Dev usually does what he wants anyway, and this is mostly to gauge interest.

Though, of course, you guessed right that I had a grander purpose with this. I am currently writing up a larger proposition about war rules, and it would require (or greatly benefit from) a basic system like this. The IC information about nation status is in my opinion a big boon, but it's also the precursor to having proper wars.

[caliaca]

I approve of this whole heartedly as well.

I think consulting with the leaders for when to have these change would be helpful. Don't have a lot to add, this is a great start, just wanted to add a comment to voice my approval.

[Turadis]

I like this concept, and I also don't think the numerical values for quality of life in a particular nation need necessarily be anything but cosmetic. So long as they're easily visible, it would definitely spark competition or efforts to 'fix' the implied quality of life issues in one's chosen nation. Although I wouldn't veto them having a mechanical benefit either.

I was also going to note, that if a system like this was introduced, a fair system for determining the 'victor' of instances of warfare would be totally necessary. But it sounds like Poruku has something in mind.