Game rules for the Thousand Crowns

## What is this?

Welcome to A Thousand Crowns! This is a collaborative worldbuilding project with game-like elements, in which a bunch of people have decided to come together and populate a fantasy world with their own races, civilizations and cultures. Participating in this project means joining a community of fantasy enthusiasts, worldbuilders, and basically all kinds of people that enjoy creating for the sake of creating.

### Disclaimer about the wiki-ruleset

This is the secondary source for the ruleset, the primary will be found in the rule section of the offcial Discord project ; if any discreapancy appears, the Discord ruleset will always prevail.

### The project

A Thousand Crowns has two sides to it: on one hand, we offer you the opportunity of placing your civilization on the map, interacting with other nations and writing their history in a continuously developing world. On the other hand, this development is dictated by a set of “gamey” rules that is explained in this document. This ruleset has 2 objectives: first, set an even ground for the worldbuilding of nations, so everyone has a basis for comparison between cultures. Second, because most people in the project enjoy its game element, and we want to make it fun for them too.

### How do I play?

The structure of the game is simple: it takes place on a map, where the land is divided into provinces, and the ocean into sea tiles. Each week is a “turn” in which you can take different actions that affect either your people, other’s people, or both. These actions have an associated cost and different effects, that you can find under the Actions in Nation and/or Culture sections. You can choose to play a Nation, in which case you’ll control both a Nation and its people (Culture), or a nationless Culture; you’ll have access to a different set of actions in each case, detailed below.

As a rule of thumb, the Culture play for nationless Cultures is more relaxed and recommended for people that want to do their own thing and chill with other worldbuilders or conlangers, while the Nation play will see you involved in political intrigues and wars of conquest. Or not, who knows? It depends on you!

## Culture Play

The Culture Playstyle involves minimal gameplay, but allows you to worldbuild as a nationless culture. Playing the culture playstyle will revolve around gaining Culture Points (CULP) for writing lore and spending CULP to expand or move your culture into empty areas or gain levels in culture-specific research techs with no in-game bonus. Cultures may interact with players, but these interactions are purely roleplay and are rewarded with CULP once resolved. In case of actual Actions, any Action in which you and another party are involved needs to have both parties either adjacent (whether it’s your Culture and another, or your Culture and a Nation), overlapping (only possible in case of your Culture and a Nation), or within a given range, such as when trading with a culture (see Actions).

Your primary way of gaining CULP is by writing lore. Every week, for every piece of written lore at least 1 paragraph or 6 sentences long (whichever is shorter) in your weekly lore chain, your first weekly piece provides 4 CULP, and the next piece 3 CULP, 2 CULP for a third piece, and 1 CULP for all succeeding pieces. This resets when the next week starts, and by then your first weekly piece will gain 4 CULP again, and the next piece 3 CULP, and so on.

A long piece, written lore that is at least 1,500 words long, gains you 4 CULP, but is outside the weekly lore chain. In this way, if a weekly piece gaining 2 CULP is followed by a long piece, the latter will gain 4 CULP, and a weekly piece written after the long piece still gains 1 CULP. In the same way, the first weekly piece, even when written after a long piece, still gains 4 CULP. For a long piece to be considered, it must also be mentioned as either a long piece or being at least 1,500 words in the same message, otherwise it will be counted as a weekly piece.

CULP can be used to expand your culture in a multitude of ways. Universal Culture actions can be taken by any player, both Nation/Culture players and nationless Culture players. Independent Culture actions can only be taken by the latter.

### Culture Actions

#### Universal Culture Actions

The following actions can be performed by any player (Culture or Nations) for their affiliated costs.

 Research
Culture Sections / Culture Research subjects
These “Culture Sections” don’t provide any mechanical advantages, they’re here simply to provide you with ideas and a progression system in which to spend your CULP. Think about them as the things that make your Culture more unique: do they have a deep belief in the sanctity of monkeys? Think about investing in Animal Handling. Do they like to draw depictions of those monkeys in their religious texts? What about investing in Art? Do they pride themselves in the tastiness of their monkeys? Maybe you should invest in Cuisine. The world is your oyster!

 Trade
 War

#### Independent Culture Actions

The following actions are restricted to players with a nationless Culture. Nations have an associated Culture within them, controlled by the same player, but you can also choose to play only a Culture.

 Migrate
 Raid
 Aid
 Found Nation
 Rebel

## State Play

In A Thousand Crowns, you will control a growing nation from its inception. You will start by choosing one free province in the map, which will be where the capital of your state is placed. After that, you will be able to take different actions that will dictate how your nation develops.

### The concepts of WORK and COIN

In order for your nation to expand and progress, you will use your WORK. WORK is a numeric representation of the workforce of your population: you have a set amount that you can use for multiple things and regenerates each week, but you cannot store it (think about it as “action points” that you use to pay for different actions). However, you can increase your weekly available WORK by increasing the population of your nation through territorial expansion.

Your COIN is how we refer to the increasing wealth of your nation: it supports your economy and allows you to expand further. Your main source of COIN income will be your leveled-up provinces; you can level up provinces by building cities in them. Be careful: if your COIN goes into the negatives, your armies will stop obeying, unrest will grow and you won’t be able to expand until your COIN is back in the positives.

Your nation can either expand in territory (commonly known as “wide” expansion) or develop its already owned provinces (commonly known as “tall” expansion). Wide expansion provides a lot of WORK as your population increases, but it also demands a lot of COIN maintenance in order to keep your nation from crumbling, so a lot of that WORK will need to be invested in COIN. Tall expansion however will provide you with a higher COIN income and a smaller maintenance, as your provinces’ economies develop, but they provide less WORK as their population increases slowly.

Expansion: if you are in debt (negative COIN income), you cannot expand further until it is mitigated. Your first expansion provides more COIN than it requires maintenance, so it is self-sustaining, but this trend is soon reverted. You can expand indefinitely as long as you have the WORK for it, allowing for multiple province expansions at once if you have the sheer resources to cover it. It’s worth noting that expanding doesn’t instantly grant you the new province’s WORK, you’ll need to wait until the next week to get it, so no, you can’t keep expanding indefinitely.

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### Other stats

#### WILL

Your nation is defined not only by WORK and COIN, but also by a few other statistics. Among them is its stability, commonly called WILL: WILL determines the social cohesion of your nation, from 0 to 100, and will go down when certain actions are taken by you or against you. If your WILL gets too low, your state will start incurring cumulative penalties that go up in severity the lower you go in the scale:

* 80-100: no penalties.
* 60-79: your province maintenance is increased by 20%.
* 40-59: you can only use your armies for defensive wars.
* 20-39: your total WORK is decreased by 20%.
* 0-19: at the start of the next week, you lose as many provinces as you need WILL to get to 20. Your WILL goes up to 20.

Nations can take certain actions to increase their WILL or reduce that of others, but your main way to keep your nation stable is through a COIN income surplus: your WILL changes each week based on the following formula.

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{\displaystyle WILL change = (total balance/net income) \* 20}

For example, if your nation produces 100 COIN/week, and has a maintenance of 80 COIN/week, your WILL change will be: 20/100 \* 20 = 4 WILL/week. But be careful, because it works both ways: if you have a higher maintenance than COIN income, your stability will go down.

#### Scouting Range

Scouting Range is the range at which you can perform actions and conduct diplomacy. In-world, this represents how far you can move supplies, troops, and diplomats from your capital. Scouting Range is counted from your capital, with the Scouting Range to your capital territory being zero. Scouting Range is increased by technology and buildings, but begins with a base of 10 at the start of the game. Different territories will cost different amounts of Scouting Range to reach, and some may be inaccessible until certain technology levels are reached. Roads—and bridges over rivers—reduce Scouting Range costs by 1 in provinces you control or have access to.

**There are three terrain types with different associated scouting range costs:**
 Moderate Terrain
 Extreme Terrain are blocked until RLOG7

### Territory

The map is divided in provinces: each of these provinces is treated as a unique territory, and has a series of limitations. A province can only be owned and exploited by a single state, and has a resource associated with it (resources will be explained further in the document); these provinces can be upgraded by the owner nation, which is represented by the construction of a new city in the province.

### Natural Resources

Each province of the map belongs to one of 10 “resource biomes”. These are a condensed version of the biome map, given some biomes are relatively rare. There are 15 resources, with 3 being found in each biome, and thus each resource is found in 2 biomes. When a province is colonized by a Nation, it will be randomly assigned an appropriate resource.

A province with resource X will automatically produce 1 unit of Resource X per week.. You can take the [Consume resources] action to consume it and gain a benefit depending on the resource chosen. Ressources are not stored at the end of the week, if a ressource was not consumed, it will be

#### List of all resources and their benefits.

**Resource Bonuses when Consumed.** All bonuses are capped at the bonus received when 10 units are consumed.
(Duration of effect are 1 turn ; except if stated otherwise)
#### Resource Biome Distribution

Each simplifed biome of the map can yeld one of three ressources. This ressource is attributed when the province is settled by a random table. At the moment. Basically each biome produces one ressource only per turn, said resource is locked and can't be changed naturally.

### Trading

Resources are traded in a global marketplace where the supply is infinite. All resources will start at a base COIN/unit price on release, and change from the previous price based on a function of the amount of resources bought divided by the amount of resources sold in the past week with the [Sell resources] action. This is the exact formula:

This means that if a resource is bought and sold an equal number of times, its price does not change from the previous week. If it is bought twice as much as it is sold (2 on the x-axis below) then its price will increase by 0.7 COIN.

We will limit this so that unit price cannot drop below 1. If the Unit Price of a resource drops below one, production crashes, and the resource cannot be traded or consumed that week and its price resets to 1 the week after the crash.

This means that if a resource is bought and sold an equal number of times, its price does not change from the previous week. If it is bought twice as much as it is sold (2 on the x-axis below) then its price will increase by 0.7 COIN.

We will limit this so that unit price cannot drop below 1**. If the Unit Price of a resource drops below one, production crashes, and the resource cannot be traded or consumed** that week and its price resets to 1 the week after the crash.

### War

A Nation attacking a province will suffer a penalty of 10 WILL, applied before battle starts. This penalty can be avoided by taking the [Declare casus belli] action, in which the Nation declares its intent to attack a specific province and the reasons to do so. After taking the action, the Nation will need to wait until the next week in order to avoid the WILL penalty. A Nation that has lost provinces in a war has an automatic Casus Belli for 2 weeks, starting the week they lost them. If the culture of those provinces is also the main culture of the Nation, it has an automatic Casus Belli for 4 weeks instead.

**WIP : IN DEVELOPMENT, WE’LL USE THE TWO WORLDS SYSTEM FOR NOW**

### Nation Actions

#### War and Diplomatic Actions

War Actions must be taken between Monday and Thursday of each week.

Build Actions

### Knowledge Areas

Your nation has a few statistics that determine its level of development, aside from its actual territorial expansion. These are Knowledge Areas, that represent the accumulated knowledge of your nation in a general area (hence, the name). These are:

* **RECO: Economy**
* **RGOV: Government**
* **RLOG: Logistics**
* **RMIL: Military**
* **RSCI: Science**

These Knowledge Areas gradually unlock new actions and bonuses the higher you level them up, which you do by taking related actions. For example, if you want to level up your military (RMIL), you will need to raise armies and fight battles; if you want to level up your economy (RECO), you will need to trade with other players.

## Glossary of game terms

* COIN: Coin, money, used to pay for certain actions and for maintenance
* CULP: Culture Points, relevant to cultures actions and culture research
* City : A city you worldbuilded in a province, the sum of cities (or advancement of one big city) on a province tile define it's level (see Province level) ; each newly settled province starts with one city by default.
* Province: the standard territory unit, with an identifying ID
* Province level : is the level of a territory, is defined by the number of Cities on the tile
* RECO: Economy Knowledge Area
* RGOV: Government Knowledge Area
* RLOG: Logistics Knowledge Area
* RMIL: Military Knowledge Area
* RSCI: Science Knowledge Area
* Scouting Range: determines how far you can reach with your actions from your capital
* Tile: same as province, can also refer to sea tiles
* Trade (action) : as an action is when you exchange one of your natural ressources for COIN on the global market
* WILL: Will stat, stability of your nation
* WORK: Your Nation’s workforce, similar to “action points”