Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Further details on Megalomaniac

The opening scenarios using the halflife engine pit you in an every-man-for-himself set of battles. Your regiment will not attack you nor will they come to your aid if you get in trouble. Most are outdoor battles but a few would require you to hack your way into a stronghold or burn down a town etc.

The REVOLT chapter of the game adds a high degree of complexity to the game. The preceeding chapter of State Building is basically a clone of AofE.

In the Revolting chapter I made mention of assasinations, mercinaries and bribary.
Assasins are special units that you can create in a town structure called a beer hall. The assasin costs big bucks but can move through enemy terriroy without getting killed unless he is found out buy an Intelligence officer. This unit is also a beer hall creation and is the unit designed to counter an assasin. The assasin unit is a single use npc in that he will die in his attempt even if he is successful. Assasins are armed with a crossbow but it is not a long range weapon and so the assasin needs to get close. It is also an autonomous unit in that is out of your control as soon as you turn him loose. You go to your list of kings and generals and select the dude who is to be assasinated. Once that is done the assasin travels on his own to the location of the hit target and will try as often as he can to kill the guy until he is killed or dies killing his mark. If
you wish to call him off you will haveto hunt him down with your own forces and kill him. If the assasin is able to kill his target your plot will not be discovered and the nation the mark once lead will not attack you. Should he fail there is a 50% chance that the mark's country will launch an attack against you. And your personal glory rating will fall too.

Mercinaries were always a popular way to bolster your army if you were a poor slob of a king. Macheavelli didn't think much of mercinaries and warned against employing them. In the game I use Macheavellian rules for mercinaries. You can hire them from freindly lords for a specified length of months. Once they are in your command they will attack anything you order them to attack. Yet if they are outnumbered they will break and run. If the are garrisoned near a town, even one of yours, and they are not under orders of some kind, they will begin to attack the locals and burn buildings. If there receive no orders for more than a month they will go wild and you'll have to kill them. Mercinaries are best used for bolstering a force for use in a pitched battle where you have the upper hand. They pay no attentioin to your personal glory rating. Once their term is up they automatically leave and return to their home land.
Bribes can be a most effective and less violent way to revolt. In the game, during this chapter and onward, you can bribe any npc in the world. You can bribe clerics, knights, kings, castles, beerhalls, anything as long as you have three things. Money, a high personal glory rating, and your army must have a high renown rating. In otherwords you not only need the money to buy but the nature to intimidate. Bribed troops are loyal, unlike mercinary forces, and will fight even in death defying battles. However they cost more to bribe than mercinary forces cost to hire. The cost to bribe is tied to the stats you have and the stats of the king under whom they are presently serving. Once bribed they will remain yours unto death unless your personal glory rating falls below 10. In that case even your own troops will abandon you. Bribing kings is tough unless you have a huge amount of cash and the power to back up the cash with the not-so-subtle threat of war.

The chapter of Monarchy, where you have to attain the throne of your kingdom, adds further complexity. You have all the tools at your disposal that
you gain during State Building and the Revolt, but you also have to start paying attention to your kingdoms overal world rating. There are fifty kingdoms on the planet and your kingdom fits somewhere in that order. If you want to be emperor you have to get you ranking to number one. Not every kingdom who is listed as numero uno is an empire. Not only does kingdom have to rate number one but it's army must have the highest renown and the monarch must have a high personal glory rating. Once you have acheived that then you are, without doubt, the emperor of the world. As you claim more territory and vanquish your foes your kingdom expands and it gains in rank and stature. You should do freqent comparrison rankings with your neighbor states. If you see that you are inthe acendency you can try to bribe a kingdome off or take it over. If your overall rating (GRWR) is twice that of a neighboring state they may wish to have you become their overlord. As overlord you gain all the advantages of the wealth and troops of the subjegated kingdom without having to conquer it. If you decide to conquer a state you must reduce it unitl its GRWR is low enough so that it seeks
refuge under your rule. Only a kingdom that is adjacent to your domain can be subjegated without conquest. As king you must also continue your role
as leader by establishing farms, towns, castles, etc. You can also send exploration ships out to check out the big wide world. As your exploratio parties find more kingdoms your ranking will change.

Once you have beceom emperor your characters day are numbered. Eventually it will die. In selecting a successor you go to the list of generals and kings and you can literally select anyone under your control. You will notice there each character has a personal glory rating, an army renown rating, and a kingdom ranking. You want to pick a person who has high ratings. The higher the rating the less chance for a civil war to break out upon your death. However you also are given the age of each character. Since the life span, throughout history increases, at each time you choose the age matter changes. In the beginning the average life span is 45 with a maximum age of 65. So one way to choose is to takethe youngest leader with the highest rating. That way your emprie won't change hands to often. If you choose king Ulfwaln the sextagenerian he may rule well but may die before he can choose a successor. The main thing is that you don't know when your character will die. The likely hood that your emperor will die in a given year increases as he or she gets older. Chooseing a new emperor is an ongoing problem you will face many times in this phase of the game.

The last number you must deal with isthe world civilization level. It is a summary of all the ratings of all the kingdoms of the world. The higher that number the longer people live the less lieklyhood of war or plague and the higher all your emperors rating become. As this number rises new technology and society emerges. The main thing to emerge is the Senate. Peace leads to people demanding freedom. However, as in real life, the npc population is still pretty busy just tryingto survive. The kings are the first to see the need to cooperate with each other to achieve goals. You will be asked if you will permit a senate being founded. if you say no, depending on your rating, there might be war.

Bills do not come to you that often. The bills that come and their nature depend on the overall level of cililization of the empire.

I'll let you know of any other rules that pertain to this cool game ofthe future.

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