League tables.

There is a league table for honour. Which i am sure most players watch and enjoy. Just thought it would be a great idea to have running league tables for Military. Size and Economy, Wealth.Be good to compare with other nations/players.

It would be good fun and very informative to read and monitor each month. What do other players think.? Is it possible,? or too much work.? Would it be fun and informative.?

too much work and besides......... Honour is everything!!!

I don't think this would work well for various reasons.

1) details of each states position are mostly secret. If I overspend my treasury to raise a huge army because I'm going to invade my neighbor, I wouldn't want that appearing on some league chart.

2) For many of these things, what scales are useful? For raw strength, the big nations are going to dominate. If we use force/gold per population, how do you interpret that? For military how do we compare different units?

That said, I do like your general idea of having more things to compete on, and more ways to watch how you're doing versus others. I wasn't in the game when the annual economy report came out, but think it's too bad that it got dropped.

I would think things like the top 3 or 5 goods for a nation ought to be generally known.

The economy report was very good

More things to compete on, could help retain players. Give them more to compete with. In a game with very few players you can feel lonely and those games get unenjoyable. Hence players drop.

Everybody seems to have liked the economy report. It was a way of measuring. Not against others perhaps but more against yourself. Ways of measuring, gauging where you are in relation to both others and your own self seems very enjoyable to players.

I wonder if Richard could implement new metrics like "Military Strength" and "Naval Strength" that would be 1-10 and would show on your turn like Economic Health (EH). Some broad based metric to give you a sense of how you're doing against an average for your position.

I think the biggest hurdle here is that I think most of the turn processing work is manual, so adding anything is adding processing time, which is already at a premium.

Does anybody have one of the old economy reports they'd be willing to share? I've never seen one, and would be curious what it looked like and the kind of information it contained.

I agree that honour is the most important element, any other aspect would be easily gained by some direct action while honour score requires a major degree of "work".

I would like to have more than 10 nation on the league table.

If I remember correctly the Economic report came out once a year, did not give exact figures just a ranking both top 5 in overall income and a ranking for the 5 major traders in each trade zone. It cost a small additional fee to obtain which was probably money well spent if you were a pirate or thinking about attacking someone.

Probably a mistake in one game for the new French player to attack a player run HEIC......and ignore fact that the HEIC was not only the top trade power in India & the Far East but was also on the over all Income list.

Think income & honour is fairly easy to rank but how do you rank Military Power? Number of units? Number of Men? Military Budget? The fact that Swedes seem to have a 300% shock effect compared to any other unit of equal type.

I also seem to remember Richard stopped doing the economic reports on grounds of cost-took him a lot of time to do (I do recall they were very detailed)-and not many players wanted them. It wasn't economic for him to do them

I wonder if there is some middle ground that could be found.

A less complex report that could be done with less work?

If memory serves the report was priced at £10. Very detailed and great to read. I can understand it was a lot of work for little reward for Richard. But perhaps he has underestimated the joy it gave to players. Perhaps that joy helped keep players in the game rather than appeared to Richard as a straight monetary value. For example, I know the count de Monet looked forward to them and loved them. He missed them when they finished, very much. He played in nearly all the lgdr games going.

Yea I missed them like to pour over who was competing with me in certain areas

I always liked the bit in the rule book that said "players set their own objectives" as this enabled small states to compete with the larger ones, maybe by climbing to the top of the honour lists.

Maybe other lists can be made as to which nations spend the most on their armed forces, with naval/ army expenditure taken from the economic reports we all get once a year, which shouldn't need too much extra work, if it was just a list of Nations rather than actual expenditure, then it would help keep some secrecy.

Or in a more detailed report you could list " Bayonets, Sabres & Guns. " albeit this would require more work on Richard's part.

Ships could be rated as First Rate, Cruisers & Auxiliary


In a similar way just taking from the trade figures we all get a list could be made of those with the most trade in given areas, no need for economic trends to be included, which they were in the old reports, which maybe what took up so much of Richards time. A simple table with would be enough.

It would maybe help widen the scope for some of the smaller positions, give them other objectives, they may never clamber up the military ladder to the top, but maybe they could manage to dominate a certain trade area.

Reading all this with interest. AGEMA is somewhat reticent to bring it back due to the enormous workload involved (correct, for little gain; it was certainly a lot less than £10 quoted above, I remember it was originally priced at £1, back in the day when £1 still wasn't worth much!). HOWEVER! We've worked out a solution, which will soon be gracing the in-game newspapers. Each turn, if all goes to plan, a different trade region will have a 'top ten' table all of its own, and the region covered will change each month. So, first covered shall be the Levant, next issue after that the Baltic, and so on. Eventually the cycle will begin again, allowing players to see if any changes have taken place.

Yes it's not the full economic report, but a workable solution, and won't cost players anything extra, so we all win!

Richard D. Watts wrote:Reading all this with interest. AGEMA is somewhat reticent to bring it back due to the enormous workload involved (correct, for little gain; it was certainly a lot less than £10 quoted above, I remember it was originally priced at £1, back in the day when £1 still wasn't worth much!). HOWEVER! We've worked out a solution, which will soon be gracing the in-game newspapers. Each turn, if all goes to plan, a different trade region will have a 'top ten' table all of its own, and the region covered will change each month. So, first covered shall be the Levant, next issue after that the Baltic, and so on. Eventually the cycle will begin again, allowing players to see if any changes have taken place.

Yes it's not the full economic report, but a workable solution, and won't cost players anything extra, so we all win!

Excellent. Look forward to it.

Excellent news! Will look forward to it with interest.

Very interesting. I used to pick apart the economic report, calculating which nation gained or lost ground in all the trade areas. Good times.

I add my own enthusiasm and gratitude!