EMPIRE! Community World-Building Game III: Prepare Your Inbox! (Messages Are Coming)

[zabbarot]

I have some complaints(the same as Quinton's really) about the Confederation rules, but maybe they could be explained by the fact that the Triumvirate is building into a federation, not a confederation.

1. Requiring Diplomacy 5 to rule suggests either that the confederation in question is democratic or that the nations in the confederation have a loose connection to each other.

- Right now many of our nations are monarchies and we have no rules saying a low Diplo score will offend the populace. So in order for a low score to be a problem something has to suggest that the whoever is selecting the head of the confederation is either fallible(ie. not an absolute monarch ), or does not have the authority to put that person in charge (still probably not a monarch)
- Also the way that's written each member still has full control of their own individual states, so I feel like any uprisings should only take place outside the head member's lands(ie. these guys are upset that your jackass of a king is in charge, but your guys are swelling with pride because their jackass of a king is in charge)
- In general we all run our nations in different ways, and a real confederation is usually formed to deal with outside threats (Greeks uniting to fight Persia, Italy uniting to keep from being carved up by the rest of Europe) So there is a certain amount of de facto confidence in a chosen leader, and they will likely be chosen for the task at hand. If we're at war nobody will care that he's awful at speeches so long as he wins battles.

2. The listed benefits are effectively thus: a single bonus action for one member and general inactivity protection. These are nice, don't get me wrong, but quite marginal compared to the drawbacks otherwise incurred.

- If several large empires were to consider confederation (perhaps a strengthening of the Union of the North for example) they would actually be loosing out, since they've already just about got Great Kingdom status.
- It just doesn't scale well. You always have 5n+1 actions, where n is the number of players in the confederacy. That +1 just gets more and more negligible as you add members.

Edit/Addendum:With just 3 players using 5 actions a piece to form the Confederation this means you will break even on action economy 15 turns later. Add 4 more turns for each additional member nation. A large confederacy(many players) is very quickly not beneficial from a purely action economy standpoint.

- You can work together without being in a confederacy already.

Expand it to allow additional bonuses according to the constitution(as ratified by GM) and it could be alright.