Coiler wrote:And, for the sake of the game in general-I know this will be controversial and won't go along well with some people, but I actually want this incident to escalate further into hostilities. I want the world to be truly shaken up, to truly have clashes between superpowers-and not just filler and padding. I know that nukes flying and armies clashing isn't what many people want, but I feel that constantly backing down from superpower wars is just a sign that the status quo would be maintained.
I don't want the status quo to be maintained. I want to see Nova Terra go through a clash that truly changes it and the world order. It's not just to see big explosions-it's to truly keep this world moving, and not static.
That's just my opinion, and I hope you can understand my perspective.
I'm just catching up with all this, I generally don't look in much on weekends except on rare occassions.
While I do understand your point of view on this, what I've noticed in doing STGODS a lot is that there are three different ways these things can go--
Character games, where we all play one or two characters, sorta like a first-person shooter or RPG, which this is not.
and Empire games, of which there are two types--
-- Big-time war like a strategy game.
-- Political brinksmanship, diplomacy, and strategizing.
This one has pretty much evolved into Political Brinskmanship. Wars happen but they are contained. There are reasons for this... in Big War games, the stories tend to get sidelined and the games bog down into 4th-grade "I got you first!" "No you didn't!" "Yes, I did!" and arguments about "MY 6-skillion ton nukyulaer submarine ultra-carriers can sink your artificial-intelligent fusion megasubs!" "Well they could if they could find them past the cloaking device! I sinkz your carrierz and drinks your milkshake!"
Egh.
Plus, when tossing nukes around, we end up with a Mad Max apocalyptic scenario rather than the stories we signed on for.
Most of us are here as fiction writers and for those sorts of challenges. Controlling urges to use, say, player-character knowledge, metagaming, etc.
I actually wouldn't mind a conventional war with limited WMD use, but th eproblem is Shep (and to a lesser extent Skimmer) has organized military forces in such a way that it is impossible to avoid nuclear war. Shepnukistan doctrine regards nuclear weapons as just a bigger stick of dynamite and nothing more. The rest of us operate under established Earth doctrines that nukes are you "I give up, end of the world time" weapons to be used only under the most utmost extremes.
It kinda frames the debate in a way this is, really disadvantageous to many of us. Hence, we end up with more brinksmanship, politics, etc. That's the challenge.
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