Everything around Territory Warfare

[ZarTaen]

This is gonna be a long one. Skip to the end for tl;dr.

 

Introduction

Territory Warfare in Dual Universe has to happen at some point. Cool, I'm here to talk about everything but the act of warfaring over territory. One of the "complaints" that some players mentioned is the lack of reason for war once Territory Warfare would arrive. This is what I am trying to address here with my idea.

 

Territory Claim vs Tile Ownership

First of all, I suggest splitting tile ownership from territory claims. I legitimately think this is a necessity. Not only are planets and moons too big to actually own it all, but having to own the tiles directly, taxes and all, would greatly inhibit the aspect of waging war. Reality does not have a cost associated with claiming some plot of land as territory (other than conflicts over it), so it should not be for DU either.

 

This means that some lonely industrialist could own a tile that changes territory claim ownership, and possibly would not notice a difference. However. this does not mean the nation should not be able to take ownership either. My suggestion is as followed:

• A Nation owns territory claim
• A Nation can seize tiles, but not own them directly
• A Nation can decide a new owner for a tile
• This could be limited in some ways or carry a cost for the nation

An approach like this would allow for vastly different ideologies between nations and a result of loyalty or indifference for actual tile owners. It would also foster possible ways to "force" loyalty by asking for assistance when trying to take over territory, or "else".

"But what would a territory be for then?" Tiles have taxes, right? Those might as well go to the occupying nation. Whether this happens fully, or partially can be up for debate. Yes, unowned tiles are not mentioned, see next chapter.

 

Reasons to have Territory

With territory claims and tile ownership split, what is the point of claiming unowned tiles?
For this I suggest a couple of things.

 

1. A nation should be allowed to assign tiles as nation specific safezone, based on a value related to territory claim, holding time and possibly other metrics.

• Such a safezone should be restricted to non-border tiles only and have a limited number
• The nation should be able to assign who this safezone applies to
• Assigning a safezone should have a cooldown or carry a substantial cost
• This must be transparent to every player playing the game, by looking it up on the map

2. Nations should have a set of policies that can be chosen and improved.

• Policies could be inspired by strategy games
• Imagine stuff like "Robust Building" which could increase health of all items produced in the nation, at a slightly higher resource cost
• Should not be free of course

3. The strategic aspect of creating a bridge to an enemy nation.

• A nation shouldn't be able to attack another nation unless tiles are adjacent
• As a solution to planet wide warfare: footholds
• A foothold would be a tile or group of tiles by a nation away from the big national blob "capital" that is held for long enough.
• This would allow srategic invasion preparation of nations across planets but also take time and preparation
• Adjacency rules apply to footholds as well and they can be "destroyed"
• After some conditions are met, the "capital" tile could movbe to a sufficiently big foothold, at a price of cost/time or both

 

Not a Nation for Everyone

So, lets assume a nation has a big territory, and some policies should not apply to the whole nation. There are reasons why one would want to subdivide a nation into zones.

• A zone could be named and be an arbitrary shape based on tiles inside the territory
• A policy can apply to a zone or nation wide. Zone specific policies would overwrite nation wide policies.
• Implementing a policy has to cost time/currency/asset for every implementation of the nation. So while zones allow policy specialisation per region, the policy cost to make it worthwhile compounds per policy implemented across the nation
• Only one policy ber zone

 

"Okay, this might be neat if its given more thought, but what about membership?"

This is where opinions might vary a lot. I legitimately think that an organisation must not be a member of a nation. Yes, you read that right.

A nation has citizens and organisations are not. Sure, there might be a Madistani organisation that happens to have 100% Madistani citizens, but the members voluntarily chose to be Madistani at some point and were not forced to be by the organisation.

Additionally, it should not be possible to change nations at will.

• Once you join a nation, you can forfeit citizenship, but then youre bound to have no citizenship for a while.
• Another nation might accept you earlier, but only as refugee/immigrant, which doesn't give voting rights

 

The Govern(mental)

This is where a lot of leg work would have to be done to make the implementation by NQ a smart one. As we already know, organisations themselves are fairly restrictive when it comes to roles and hierarchies. This is an absolute no-go for a nation and possible government structures. My hope/dream would be a diagramm based "coding" of voting processes and government structures. This is no easy feat and would have to allow for democracy of various kinds, monarchy, dictatorships, and everything inbetween. Some of it should be malleable, but only when the conditions, as defined by the nation founding, are met. (This almost sounds like duties of the RDMS...).

 

For example, let us take direct democracy with a minimum amount of representatives. It should be possible to assign enough representatives, for example per active zone, x amount per active zone, etc. However, every citizen has a vote when it comes to deciding matters, policies etc. Representatives would not be able to execute them unless the condition is fulfilled: enough people voted for it. They might however be able to suggest what is being voted on and are being voted on come election time. The election process would also have to be definable. Ultimately, the purpose of such a system is to do the enforcement of the government as it is supposed to be.

 

Of course, this is only my proposal and we could also go into metagaming and simply do it the way we handle organisations outside the game. But this removes some of the fun and participation as well as transparency for citizens and ultimately leaves enforcement to nobody.

 

Planetary Domination
So a nation managed to dominate the planet:

• Do we want this to be legitimized by the game?
• What should this look like?
• Planetary taxes?
• Planetary policies?
• Interplanetary warfare?
• Intersystem warfare?
• Intergalactic warfare?

At this point we reach a point of strategy that can probably wait a while until more important stuff is implemented.

 

TLDR:

• Introduce Nations as separate thing from organisations
• Split tile ownership and territory claim
• Nations should be able to claim territory without needing to touch tile ownership, but they should be able to if they want
• Allow creation of nation specific safezone that is configurable for who it affects (other nations, players without nationality, etc.). Border tiles would not be eligible.
• Policies assigned and improved by the nation
• Zoning of the territory for several policies and possibly other stuff (names for example, geography, etc)
• Territory should *usually* be connected together. However, a foothold system is necessary. Think colonisation, but near the enemy territory as possible forward base, or otherwise.
• One capital per nation. Losing a capital is *bad*
• Organisations cannot be citizens. Only players can be citizens and organisations can have members of various nations.
• Nation membership isnt decided willy nilly, it needs a proper membership procedure with immigration/refuge. Yes, this would become an ingame racism simulator.
• System of the government should be "codable": customizable enough to allow everything conceivable. From dictatorship to direct democracy, we should have it all.
• I think these need to be discussed and clear before we talk how war is waged.

 

 

 

This is by far not everything and I am sure I forgot something I already discussed before on the discord.