Scandigrad:
-snip- ...since they had to have diverted money from somewhere else.
I absolutely
adore ranting on this, though I will spare you the threadjack. Mostly. While I understand the allocation of resources in modern times (e.g. a nation who focuses exclusively on building a combat-capable railgun, as well as the materials and technologies to power it, can obtain them quickly, though they will likely fall behind in other things such as aerospace technology and vehicle armour if all their scientists' efforts and all the military's budget is focused exclusively on building said railgun), there also seems to be very little, if any, leeway in how people think of alternative economic systems. Actually, if permitted, I might start a separate thread for that later.
But yes, I do agree with the need for balancing of "MT+", as well as non-arbitrary technology level definitions. I would however caution that, RP-balancing aside, actual technological, combat and economic capability is not a fixed-budget, zero-sum, self-exclusive property. This is not Sid Meier's Civilization, there is no fixed quantity of "Science Points" to spend on certain technologies while others must be abandoned to your detriment. In reality, it's far more complicated than that, taking into account everything from culture, to geography, to economics, to politics, to random madmen/geniuses... To reduce everything to a fixed sum and say something like "you can have your railgun, but if so, you cannot have your tactical bomber fleet because budgets" is fallacious at best. In the world, different countries have different technology and economic levels. Full stop. Given that we are talking about RP here, we do need to make allowances for balancing purposes, that I recognize. However, simply reducing it to "A is better ergo B is worse" is, at least partially, incorrect. Care must of course be taken to avoid godmods, but technology and economics in and of themselves are not zero-sum games.
And remember that not all nations are always created equal; Nation A with a population of 10 million and an army of 25,000-100,00 (in times of war) cannot fight Nation B, with a population of 750 million and a standing army of 2 million, on an even playing field. I understand the desire to believe that Nation A's entire population of 10 million could be conscripted to form an army five times the size of Nation B's army, or that Nation B could be giga-nerfed down to Nation A's level, but this often has the effect of reducing peoples' willingness to be creative and novel in RP's for fear of having it burned out of existence as "unfair" and "unrealistic". The same thing goes with technology: Nation C with He-3 Fusion reactors and general-use railguns, and who can explain the workings and capabilities of their nation required to produce and use these technologies in a sensible and realistic way,
should have an innate advantage over Nation D, who is exactly the same as Nation C except they are "stuck" with MT. As a matter of creativity, it should be up to Nations C and D to RP their conflict in an orderly fashion and avoid deliberate godmods. C being superior to D in literally
every way, thus giving D no possible chance at winning, is problematic and godmodding. But as long as D can find a legitimate way to stop C and gain a prospect of winning, then it should be allowable, even if C
seems to hold an unfair advantage over D. Ultimately, this is an RP, not an actual war; if D does or doesn't want to face C, that is for D to decide. If D thinks they can RP out a creative way to beat C, and if C doesn't godmod, then the RP can be successful. If D however thinks that C is godmodding, then D does not have to play with C; if enough people think likewise, then C will not have anyone to RP with, so they will either leave, or re-examine their canon
of their own volition.
Honestly I wish people could just be responsible, mature and creative when dealing with RP's, especially asymmetrical ones, rather than getting angry and asking the mod team to crush down the other player to the complainer's level. I will repeat this again: if you don't like them, ignore them, and if they are ignored enough, they will leave. It's really quite simple.
