Hello and welcome to Royal Ambitions, a strategy game where you take the reins of a kingdom in a particularly unstable area.
Royal Ambitions will have a large focus on grand strategy and warfare and less on managing the minutae of your kingdom.
The simple goal of the game is to unite the varying Kingdoms of the Region under your rule, either by outright conquest or by vassalage.
IC-ThreadThe KingdomEach Kingdom has a number of Burgs and Provinces which represent its administrative units.
Provinces have both a Manpower and Prosperity Rating.
Prosperity is a general indicator of how well that province is doing. Be it mining, farming, trading or something completely different, prosperity indicates how wealthy that region is. It is capped at 100 and increases by itself by 1 every turn. On top of that Gold can be invested to increase propserity artificially.
Manpower meanwhile is just that it tells you the population of a Province.
Together the two determine how much Gold a province provides to you per turn.
Burgs also have a Manpower and a Prosperity Rating.
While each province has one or more Burgs, these are completely independent from the province as such. Burgs are not only cities but also strongholds and though a province might be lost you can still hold out in the Burgs dotted around a Province.
More so, while a Province can simply be conquered by the presence of your troops, a burg has to be sieged and/or stormed to actually come under your control.
Burgs and Provinces - a Dynamic of UnrestMedieval Nobility often times had trouble with Free Cities (especially in the Holy Roman Empire) since peasantry tended to run off into cities for a better life. This is modelled in this game by the prosperity levels. The higher the difference in Prosperity between a burg and the province it is located in the more people will wander off to the burg or the province per turn. This causes unrest.
UnrestUnrest is something that is almost impossible to get rid off. After all you are a Medieval Feudal Kingdom...there is always a lot of discontent people around. Thanks to the dynamic of prosperity your Kingdom might constantly get Unrest. Only if an when prosperity is equal across your province, does Unrest decrease again.
If a certain Threshold is exceeded you will have to deal with an uprising of your peasantry.
Worse even, these peasant armies roam your kingdom looting and plundering, causing even more devastation and thus even more prosperity damage and with it unrest.
So keeping a tight lid on popular unrest is of utmost importance.
Your DynastyContrary to other feudal games if gmed, in this one your dynasty will play a (relatively) smaller role.
You have a designated King, who will rule your kingdom and more importantly lead armies.
You have a designated heir, one of your children who also leads armies and will take over once you die.
Every turn you are married, you have a chance of getting a child. To make things easier on management your child is assumed to be instantly grown up.
Children have two uses:
First as Generals.
You always need someone to lead your armies and that is an honor restricted to family members or hired mercenaries, should you really be so desperate.
Secondly as a Diplomatic Tool.
Children can be married to other players families to strenghten the bond of a diplomatic treaty. While players can break any alliance or non-aggression pact at their own leisure at any given time, they cannot break any treaties they agreed to under the auspices of marriage...for as long as that marriage lasts.
In other words if you marry your daughter to the son of the neighbouring kingdom your marriage will last until either one or both of them die.
But wait there is more and its not good. So you have somehow managed to luck out it seems and have more children than you ever needed. Well unfortunately for you thats a bad thing. Upon your Kings death each of your children that is not a general of your armies or your heir has a chance to press its claim upon your throne.
Succession CrisisOne might think those are rare. One need only look into a history book to find out how wrong that assumption is.
Succession Crises as mentioned above happen when one of your "unlanded" children (aka one which is neither a general nor an heir) decides to press its claim upon your monarchs death.
Once one such Claim is pressed, everyone of your other children has a chance to defect, or decide to press their own claim.
Even worse other Players can use this crisis to press the claims of children you married off to them.
There is however one slight ray of hope. Once a succession crisis has played out to its inevitable conclusion, Unrest across the entire Kingdom will be reduced to 0 to allow you some breathing room to fix the mess of a civil war.
However during such a Civil War Unrest is still a thing, so you might end up in a multi-decade lasting civil war with peasantry burning the countryside on top of various claimants trying to lay claim to the throne.
Warfare, the Levy-System and YouMedieval Armies by and large consisted of Levies. Which in turn consist of the folks you call up from the countryside.
You can decide to raise levies in single burgs and provinces or across the entirety of your Kingdom. Whatever your choose the affected areas will lose 1 prosperity per turn as you basically take farmers, administrators and craftsmen away from doing their Jobs to wage war instead.
Depending on the size and prosperity of your provinces and burgs, your levies may vary in size and composition. Which means in the beginning you will almost certainly start with a conisderably better equipped levy than later in the game.
ProfessionalsOf course many Kingdoms had often varying numbers of professional soldiers at all times and so can you.
Professional Soldiers, contrary to your levy, can be rather unique divisions of troops. Be it heavy cavalry, Coastal Raiders or janissary corps.
Whatever they may be Professional Soldiers want Land and Gold. To keep them going you can either hire them on as Mercenaries by paying a going rate in gold or you can settle them as a landed professional soldier class.
Which means you have to pay a fee of Gold to outfit them and then reduce the prosperity threshold in one of your provinces
permanently. In effect a large number of landed professionals not only will cost you money, but will also slow population growth, prosperity growth and recovery and increase unrest (at least potentially). On the other hand you have no upkeep whatsoever.
Generals and TerrainBeyond your militaries capabilities and experience there is also your Generals to consider, which grow more experienced and skileld with every battle.
Terrain and things like city walls obviously also impact combat. While your levy will have no bonuses either way, professionals can be hired with the express idea of them performing better in certain terrains.
And obviously cavalry performs worse in mountaineous or forest terrain rather than plains...
Occupation and Raiding.Until a peace treaty is concluded all that land that you occupy will produce nothing for either you or your enemy. In fact occupied land will consistently lose 1 prosperity per turn. So a province which is occupied and has a levy raised becomes very quickly very unusuable. Which is not in the interest of either war party...or is it?
You can of course deliberately raid enemy provinces. This will reduce prosperity by 10 but will gain you gold depending on total population in the province...which will also suffer.
Finally If Prosperity sinks below 50 population will start to decline.
The outcome of a battleThe Battle is over you have won, and the enemy is defeated before you. But wait there is more. Not everyone simply dies. A lot of soldiers will have fled or retreated, but a considerable number might also have simply surrendered to you or might have been captured.
All these prisoners can be dealt with in three ways: release, execute or ransom. You can sell them back to their owners, simply release them back home or kill them all. Releasing them decreases unrest in your own lands (if the numbers are significant enough), killing them all removes them from enemy manpower pool and ransoming them, well that depends on what the other side is willing to pay...
Vassalage 101So you lost the war, but you could still fight on and the other side really has other concerns. Agree on Vassalage! Vassalage is an easy out to avoid complete annihilation or protracted warfare. What exactly the stipulations of said treaty is is up to you to negotiate, but remember a marriage pact is a binding pact!
Trade, Espionage, Minor Players and so forthNo.
Trade and Espionage almost always ate up massive chunks of time in such games and tended to grind them to a halt. So no, unfortunately not in this one.
And no you can't be a spy, assassin, mercenary, wizard or inventor either. Become a King or later surrender to be a vassal if you really don't want to rule yourself.
TechnologyHigh/Late Middle Ages, Gunpowder is and will stay rare. There is no research so don't even try to bring about steam-powered robot soldiers with piston-machinegun crossbows.
And i think that covers it all.
Sign-upName of your Kingdom: (includes the title of your realm: so Jarldom, Despotate and what have you)
Name of your Dynasty:
Name of your First King/Queen:
Asymmetric Start: Y/N (important here, decides whether Kingdoms are randomly generated or whether you start with roughly equal Nations)
Author
Topic: Royal Ambitions - OOC Two Spots open (Read 3836 times)