[War] Game

[Michael Downey]

My suggestion is this: we move the game timeline five years into the
future, 2012. This is close enough that it would be almost identical
to our own world, yet we can change things a little bit to make the
game easier to control. Example, we can state that the Iraq War was
won but with a tentative and shaky democratic government put into
power. Same for Afghanistan.

The economic situation of most nations should be improved, taking into
account GDP growth over the five year period. I would say, on average,
we let the GDP of all nations increase about 10-15%. Unless we want to
make a global economic downturn for some reason?

This will also give players rather free reign to chose their
governments and introduce characters. The US player, for example,
could start at the beginning of a Presidential term in 2012 rather
than having to labor through the effort of killing off the sitting
POTUS. Quite possibly the most dangerous job in the game, as history
has shown us ;)

Another thing I suggest is that we be swifter in dealing with
international conflicts. A problem that this game has is that
conflicts drag on forever; no matter how many posts or how much effort
a player(s) might invest, conflicts just drag on and on and on and
nothing gets concluded. Re Hatia, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan.....
why bother posting on a subject when every WR just tells you how much
worse it is getting no matter what you do? Now of course this probably
more accurately reflects how things work IRL, but this is a game and
we can't really wait around for years for our story lines to
concluded.

I agree with John that automation of the WR would be nice, but I'm
really afraid we're going to get stuck in a rut over this and not do
anything if we can't get it automated. Really, the nature of the game
is going to require a lot of narrative writing for the WR anyway,
automation is not going to change that. A simple text template with
blanks that can be filled in would work just as well. A biweekly WR
could be possible if more than one person helps with it.

These are just some ideas I had. Thoughts?