I advise making your civilization somewhat unique from your generic medieval empire. I am not strict at all on themes, so go make your kingdom whatever you want it to be themed after. Hell, you can make a Goddamn Minecraft-themed civilization for all I care. (Don't worry, I won't judge you for that, I actually play Minecraft every now and then.)
Hello and welcome to Land Wars, a forum based grand strategy game! In it, players create fictional high-fantasy nations and send their armies after other players in an effort to conquer the world, or failing that, each other. It's a ton of fun.
If you're new, welcome, and read on; it may be a lot but I promise the game is less complicated than it sounds and it's absolutely worth it
So, to start off: your kingdom (kingdom is just a traditional name, you can be a republic or hivemind or queendom or something) will need a theme. This is just to give the other players an idea of what your civilization is based off. Your theme can be absolutely anything and is encouraged to have a theme that will stand out; Some players pick high fantasy races like dwarves, elves and orcs. Others base theirs off historical civilizations like rome, the vikings, or native americans. Still others just do broad, general ideas, like primitive steampunk (emphasis on primitive, this is meant to be roughly late middle ages/early renaissance in terms of game balance), undead, demons from hell, or a wizard's guild. If you want, you could roll with an empire based off of or even ripped straight out of a video game, book, or movie-something like the lord of the rings, game of thrones, mario, or skyrim. Multiple people have even picked minecraft as their theme, and some people even run silly/joke themes like My Little Pony or sentient strawberries. Whatever your theme is, just bear in mind that the technology level should be around high fantasy or late 16th century or balanced for that range-so a primitive steampunk theme would be fine as long as you build up to it and you're not using gatling guns from day 1 or whatever. I will allow sci-fi theming, but keep in mind fancy cyberpunkified muskets are just as effective as standard medieval muskets. So go nuts, as long as it would make sense gameplay wise.
Now, once you've got an idea for a kingdom in your head, there are a few things you need to do.
Maps
First off, you need a map of your kingdom. The only requirement is that it's exactly 500 by 500 pixels. It doesn't have to be good or anything close to decent. Seriously, most maps are made in five minutes in MS Paint or the like. Here's an example. Adjust the example if you're gonna use it as necessary so it makes sense your theme-a tribe of desert warriors wouldn't live in the frozen north, etc.
If you need inspiration for a map layout, go find a map in your house of an area roughly town-sized, and base it off that. Remember, since the scale will be 50 pixels per mile, try and base it off of a 10 mile by 10 mile region.
All player maps will be edited into one, giant map of the continent the game takes place on, so you know who your neighbors are. Late joiners will appear at a location that has similar terrain to what their map shows.
For map scale, it should be roughly 50 pixels for 1 mile, so a single kingdom map should be roughly 10 square miles.
Troops
Troops are the guys that do your fighting. You begin with four different kinds of troops (and can get more kinds in projects, but more on that later). Troops don't necessarily have to fall under the infantry/archer/cavalry trio: feel free to have wizards, war dogs, skittle gunslingers, giant spiders or whatever, as long as they're balanced. In your daily kingdom updates, each troop should have a short description of its capabilities, equipment, backstory if you want to add lore to your kingdom, and its strengths and weaknesses. Each description should be a couple sentences minimum, and please don't write any longer than a paragraph. Feel free to add an image detailing what the unit looks like if you want.
Here are some example troops to give you a general idea:
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Peasant archers: Lowborns trained with the longbow and equipped with minimal armor. They excel at dealing damage over great distance and can fire further than shortbows, but they're not very good in melee and quite vulnerable to cavalry charges.
Dwarf warriors: Mighty, bearded fighters wielding an axe in one hand and a shield in the other. They also come with thick plate armor. They're quite strong, and their thick armor gives them good survivability. However, like all dwarves, they're slow and can easily be outrun.
Hoplites:The standard warrior unit of the Greeks, equipped with a spear and shield. Fights in tight group formations, and is quite good against cavalry and on the defense, but struggles to lead aggressive charges.
Riders of Rohan:Cavalry from the legendary kingdom of Rohan. Obviously much faster than ground infantry, and can devastate the enemy when charging, but attacking on horseback is quite awkward on defense, and they're vulnerable to spears, polearms and the like.
Clerics: battle-priests skilled in the art of healing magic. They can heal the wounds of other troops in battle, but have no melee skills whatsoever.
Waddle dees: The grunts of king deedee's army. Lacking weapons, they just kinda punch their opposition, which is more effective than it sounds. Their lack of vital organs and inability to feel pain means they can fight for a long time, but they're quite unskilled and will die easily to a well-trained warrior (like kirby).
Trebuchets:A big wooden contraption capable of launching massive stones into the enemy and/or his buildings. While quite good in a siege, as it can fire over walls, they're pretty inaccurate even for siege weapons and will generally miss infantry in an open field. Furthermore, they're expensive-building one Trebuchet is equal to recruiting 50 regular troops.
Hopefully you have some troops in mind with those examples. If you're stuck, feel free to look through old land wars games to see what people came up with.
As a side note, I'm not considering "sub-units", or units that could be considered the same as an existing unit with different equipment (but still similar enough to the original one) as different ones.
Heroes
A hero is one unit that's significantly more powerful than the average dude. They can be a powerful wizard, a legendary king who inspires his troops, a super-skilled warrior, the royal guard (hero units can be multiple individuals, just don't get crazy) a dragon, Legolas, Gimli, Jon Snow, Bowser, a giant, the vampire queen, a particularly powerful catapult, Julius Caesar, Moby Dick, Fenrir, or anything you can come up with.
Like troops, you should give your heroes a short description of their capabilities and backstory, if applicable.
"Miniheroes", or units which are way more powerful than the average rank and file mook, but not powerful enough to be a hero in itself, like for example, heavily armored machine gunners (If the game even gets to the point where machine guns are available, but just an example.), would be better suited as really high cost troops, and not heroes.
Supplies
A supply is anything unique that your kingdom has at its disposal for war. Basically anything magical or technologically advanced or just unique that your kingdom can use. Whether it's a natural resource (like mythril or super strong wood) a battle supply (like armor, gunpowder, or weapons enchanted with fire magic) or a legendary artifact (like Excalibur or the One Ring). A supply can be whatever you'd like to come up with.
Again, in your update (more on this later) you should describe your supplies in a paragraph or less. Your starting supplies are automatically mass-produced, meaning you have a virtually infinite number of them (unless it's a unique weapon or something like that.)
Projects
Projects are arguably the most important aspect of land wars. Each day, you get two project points that you can allocate to improve your kingdom in some way-be it forging new weapons, building new buildings, training your troops to do something, recruiting a hero, or anything you can come up with. Obviously, doing something like inventing muskets would probably take decades if not centuries in real life, but for the sake of gameplay, it's shortened into days. Use this official guideline in order to see how long everything takes:
Quote
(Cost with Industry focus is in parentheses)
Recruit a hero: 2 points (1)
Build a fortress: 6 points (4)
Train units to do something (fight stealthily, use bombs, etc.): 2 points (1)
Mass produce something: 3 points (2)
Reverse engineer a foreign item received in trade: 2 points (1) (Free if you get blueprints for it)
Train a new type of unit: 2 points (1) (Upgrading already existing units with better weapons (like giving your soldiers double barreled shotguns to replace blunderbusses) will not count as a new type of unit. What does count as a new unit is any particular unit with some form of differentiation from already existing units, like giving them different training, different weapons, etc.)
You can spend more or less project points if you like, but that will affect the quality of your results. If you spend ten days training your troops to fight on boats, you can be damn sure you'll be the best sailors in the world. If, on the other hand, you build a fort in two days, it's probably made of manure and not worth defending as even a ruined building with half of it destroyed with no fortifications would be better.
One more thing: you can spend two project points on one thing, as long as you don't mind forgoing your other project.
Focuses
At the start of the game, you pick from one of the three below:
Force: You have a militaristic society, or maybe just a surplus of warm bodies. You may recruit a hundred extra troops (Units that cost more to train are counted as multiple troops) each day.
Industry: Your kingdom is full of hard workers, intelligent scientists, and the like. All projects cost 3/4 of their original speed (rounded down).
Legacy: Your kingdom is a mighty empire, well established in history, and is quite powerful. You start with 15 completed project points and 1000 extra troops. However, unlike the other focuses, you have no long term bonus.
Right, now that's all the mechanical stuff.
Each day, you should post an update in this thread. The update should contain all the information above condensed into the following format provided at the bottom of this post.
To join the game, you must PM me your day 0 update. For the start of the game (day 0) you should have one hero, two supplies, 2000 troops, and zero spent project points (so no completed projects without the Legacy focus). Once you get the seal of approval, you may post your kingdom in the thread.
Note that your troops per day and projects per day change based on how many kingdoms you own. Here's the official guideline:
1 kingdom = 2 projects, 200 troops
2 kingdoms = 3 projects, 300 troops
3 kingdoms = 4 projects, 400 troops
4 kingdoms = 5 projects, 500 troops
After five kingdoms, you don't get any more benefits (although at that point +you've basically gotten powerful enough to just eradicate anyone who doesn't want to join an alliance with you)
Each day, you recruit troops and do projects. When you finish a project, indicate what exactly it did. you finished your baconator project, you should say "project complete" and then give a description of what it adds to your kingdom. Your "information" spoiler should be edited to reflect the new info as well. If you're in a battle and have poison arrows and you don't put it in the supplies and/or troops section, the battle judge will mod the battle as if they weren't there.
"Hey, 0cra, all this kingdombuilding is cool and all, but what about the actual war part?"-someone
Glad you asked! With that, let's move on to the two biggest parts of Land Wars: War and Diplomacy.
Diplomacy:
You may interact with kingdoms in two ways. The first is through letters, which must be posted in the thread at the end of your update. These can be about anything. Maybe you want to establish a non-aggression pact, or maybe you want to trade, or maybe you want to call the enemy king a fuckface. Whatever the reason, you post a quick letter, like so:
Quote from: Letter to King Ragnar of the Vikings
Greetings, your beardedness. We may not see eye to eye with your warrior culture, but we have no bad blood between us. As such, we propose a non-aggression pact between us. Furthermore, if you are interested, we would like to trade some of our healing potions for your mighty direwolves. What say you?
You're kinda expected to be somewhat in character for the letters. You don't need to follow ancient diplomatic tradition or whatever, just don't say "Hey 0cra, non-aggression pact?" or something like that.
The other way is through PMs. Obviously I have no control of what you send here so don't bother being in character unless you want to. Generally speaking, PMs, Skype, Discord and the like would be used for plotting joint attacks on enemy civilizations or other things you don't want other people to know about. Doing simple things like non-aggression pacts or alliances in PMs, while not forbidden, is heavily frowned upon. If you want to trade, please do it in the thread so I know why the dwarves suddenly started using elven longbows.
Quick note on trade: how many of each supply each person gives is up to the negotiators. However, you can't mass produce foreign items until you reverse engineer them, which requires a separate project to mass producing. If you trade for/steal the blueprints for the item, you don't need to reverse engineer.
War!
Alright, so let's suppose you want to fight someone! There are three different ways of duking it out. The first, and by far the most common, is invading. To do this, you would post in the thread separately from your update, and it would include the following:
-Who you are attacking
-What your objectives are (nine times out of ten this would be "take an enemy city" but you can burn their farms or steal their supplies if you'd like. The effects of such will be determined by the war mod)
-The troops you or your allies commit to the battle
-The supplies you or your allies commit to the battle
-The attacking strategy
The strategy is the most important part. Basically, you split this up into five phases. Each phase you describe what troops you're committing to that part of the plan, and what they're doing.
As soon as possible, the defending kingdom will write up a counter strategy. When doing so, the defender should try to avoid metagaming, i.e. they should pretend not to know what the attacker is doing (apart from obvious maneuvers like cavalry going around the side). Defenders can call upon their allies to help them-though there is no guarantee that they will arrive in time if they live on the other side of the continent or across hard to get around terrain.
Try to hit the "goldilocks" range for word counts; you should post more than "my raiders attack" but less than something people would spam "TL;DR" over.
Once both attack and defense are posted, I will determine the outcome of the battle. This isn't a RTD-all battles will be an impartial, informed decision based on the strategy and capabilities of each side. Once this is done, the battle judge write it up, post the battle in the thread, and determine who won.
Here is a good example of an attack, the defense, and the war mod's response.
The other two types of battles are stealth attacks and duels. Stealth attacks are when small groups of troops enter a kingdom and attempt to carry out a mission-assassinate the general, steal a legendary sword, blow up the city walls, whatever. You can't take cities in a stealth attack, for obvious reasons. How many times have empires successfully claimed cities via stealth missions? (Spoiler alert: None.)
Because metagaming would so rampant in stealth missions, when attempting to carry one out, all you post in the thread is who you are attacking. The strategy, troops you're committing, and objectives must be PM'd to me, whereupon the defender will PM as much information as they think is relevant to their kingdom--the layout of their cities, where items are kept, where the general is, where patrols go, etc. If the king, all troops, and all items are kept in an impenetrable bunker of immovable object-unstoppable force alloy with no hope of infiltration or something like that I reserve the right to call bullshit and determine these things using my best judgement. Once I have all the information, I'll post the results of the incursion in the thread.
The third type of battle is a duel. In this, two or more kingdoms agree to fight with a certain number of troops on neutral ground. This can be for whatever reason--roleplay, rights to a conquered city, a duel between two warriors, or whatever you want. All involved sides will post their troops being committed but PM their strategies to me.
Alrighty, now I know you're probably thinking "holy fuck TL;DR" but there's just a couple more things to be aware of:
For the sake of balance, no looting items off the corpses of enemy troops.
Spies are not allowed.
There's no actual mechanics in terms of diplomacy. A non-aggression pact or alliance can be broken with no penalty--in theory. In practice, doing so will generally cause every other player to hate you and consequently attack you.
You may attempt to intercept and raid enemy trade going to other nations. Consequently, you may also guard your trade convoys with troops.
You may have a maximum of 30,000 troops.
You may have a maximum of 3 heroes at a time. You can recruit 6 heroes over the course of the entire game (so if you have 3 heroes and they die, and you recruit 3 more and they die, you don't get any more.)
You are expected to be active. Obviously if you have real life issues that's fine as long as you communicate with the group. However, dropping off the face of the earth with no warning means that all your kingdom's members are dropped inside the Habbo Hotel pool and left to fend their own against an endless army of stingrays with aids and make it up for grabs by your neighbors. Hopefully they'll fight over it. We do so love our wars here in Land Wars. If you missed any days before I kick you for inactivity, you'll be able to cover them in your post under seperate update spoilers for missed days.
You don't get the benefits for controlling a kingdom until you do a 5 day project to "annex" it. This project cannot be double timed. After this project, you get the extra project slot and 100 troops per day. You also get to fuck around in the archives and grab information on any technology, training methods, or equipment production methods in case you didn't destroy the information you'd want to use for copying their tech.
No changing war strategies. (unless a major event was unaccounted for, such as an obvious super weapon which you did not know about being used)
No technology that's out of reason. Think medieval-times or maybe even steampunk-ish at best with some magic mixed in; not Star Wars or Avatar.
If armies work together in attack or defense, they must be united under one strategy.
It is understood that troops patrol kingdoms and territorial borders even if unstated in updates or logs, unless the player in question states that they're off guard duty.
No using out of game knowledge (army A does project A, Army B doesn't know about project A, yet makes a strategy as if they know about it)
You MUST list all completed projects in your updates. (very important, otherwise it's hard to tell what you have and have not done)
No mass-teleportation.
A limited number of prisoners are allowed but may only be used for information. I, and whoever owned the original troops will discuss what you can find out.
Recruiting units does NOT count as a project.
You may work together on structures and split the days between participating armies.
It's generally assumed that kingdoms have a rough idea of the capabilities of their neighbor's troops, supplies, and completed projects. Projects in progress are secret until the owner reveals his results.
If for whatever reason your civilization is in conditions that are inhospitable to a unmodified human with medieval technology, I'll call bullshit and make it so that they magically are not affected by it whatsoever. Toxic air? Free gasmasks! Floating islands? Free jetpacks! Underwater? Free Scuba Gear!
After you annex an unfortunate civilization that you've conquered, or have gotten units from friendlier nations, you can produce them after you get a project to learn how to train them yourself, provided you can mass produce the unit's key supplies.
I won't mind if you make a civilization of robots, just know that you'll start with steam-powered robotics.
The game will end when either A: There's only one alliance left (either because everyone allied with eachother or killed eachother), B: When someone decides to make their civilization create a mess that fucks over the ingame world beyond repair, or C: The players decide to rebel against the GM by making it hard to maintain a game designed for low GM maintenance.
So, that's the long and short of it! I know that this seems like a lot of information, but that's just because I like to say in ten words what could be done in five. It's really not that complicated
You can now put your pitchforks with "TL;DR" engraved onto them down, the wall of text just ended.
If you want to join, PM your day 0 update! The deadline to do so is July 18th, after which point the game will start.
Players can choose to leave this area blank. This is an optional space where people can put things such as the history of the kingdom, anything roleplay or in-character related, or it can just be a few random notes about your army and kingdom.
Note: this shit is not mine, it’s 0cra_Tr0per’s, but I used it with permission. Enjoy.
