New Status Reports and New Rules....

Citizens!

I am here to explain the changes that Fabio and I have wrought on the rules in order to create the new, semi-automated status reports.

I would, ideally, have liked for Brian to do this in his capacity as rules legate but being excel-phobic and himself extremely confused as to what the rules (which I have written, with Fabio’s co-operation) actually refer to, it falls to me to explain.

Ok, let's back track a bit.

 Why do we need new statreps?

Well, the answer is that the current statreps were created by me many moons ago from a large file I used to use to maintain all the players statreps on back in the days when I used to maintain every players statrep for them.

As such they aren't exactly 100% user friendly, as they rely on YOU, the player knowing everything that I the then umpire and writer of the rules know and intend in my often not entirely clearly worded rules*.

This state of affairs was OK when the rules had no such things as Cultural Points limits, religious limits (aka bandings) and the things that were included and things that were excluded from bandings, end of year resets, carried forward points and so on and so on....

As these changes came gradually into the rules the status reports did not change; this meant that players had ever more personal responsibility in maintaining their own affairs correctly, understanding the rules* and applying them honestly and fairly to their own statrep.

Over the last year or two it has become increasingly obvious that players don't always understand the rules in their entirety and that this leads to problems maintaining their sheets.  Add to this the fact that the sheets themselves lack certain entries that some players need to make and this just further confuses the issue.

That's why we needed new status reports, firstly to reflect the changes in the game since the first were introduced and secondly to make the areas that most commonly give rise to errors, automated and therefore, hopefully, less prone to error.

Ok, so now we have these new statreps, which you haven't seen.... yet... and you are wondering what's new?

Well, you may not have the actual statrep but I will post an example of a statrep up for players to look at, please don't waste your time entering your full details into it as Fabio will be sending out new and in some cases, corrected, statreps for ALL players, that you will need to use instead from now on.  Feel free however to see how it works, play around with it and get an idea.

The new rules have been posted up to replace the old, new sections are in RED as always, and you will also notice some in GREEN, but more on that later.

I will now go on to explain the changes, those of you that use excel (and I STRONGLY recommend that you do, if you know how) will not need to know hardly any of this as the statrep does it for you, but manual system players and the curious amongst us will like to know the thinking, so here goes.

The main changes are these:

1.  NEW CULTURAL ACTION POINTS LIMITS TABLE

In the current/previous rules, the section of the rules that deals with Cultural action point limits (ie: bandings) is confusing and contradictory.  It refers to both Denari spent and to 'Ceilings' as indication of where a player has to start adopting a differing percentage for his CUL points to D spent ratio.  This is unfortunately complete bollox, as this dual reference ONLY works as far as PUBLIC works INSIDE Rome are concerned.  This is the only type of expense that starts at 100% of D spent as CUL and therefore follows a linear relationship between D spent and CUL Ceilings.

When you spend in public OUTSIDE Rome or PRIVATE works of any sort then the Denari spent scale is meaningless as 10,000D spent in PRIVATE works inside Rome will only give you a CUL ceiling of 2,500 whilst hitting a D spent total of 10,000D putting you in differing bandings, if you take the rules literally.

Obviously, this is an unacceptable error to carry forward, D spent cannot be used as a reference when that on which you are spending carries differing percentages of CUL/D spent ratios.

Therefore, we have come up with a table that relies solely on various (unchanged) CULTURAL POINT Ceilings for the bandings and removes all mention of Denari spent.  This is not a change, as such, as this was the way the rules were intended to be read and to work before, it's a clarification of something that players might not have understood due to the aforementioned contradiction.

As with the existing rules, certain things are excluded from the 'bandings' such as Assembly LEX passed and games entries have a different scale before becoming reduced. These rules remain unchanged.

To these however, we have added another category of 'excluded' holding, the Stable and Palaestra. 

Whereas ownership of this structure previously gave players a one time 100 CUL points hit when they bought it/them which later disappeared over time with yearly resets, it now has a line of its own in the Cultural section that carries 100 permanent Cultural Points for as long as each structure is owned.  These points, like Lex passed, are EXCLUDED from the banding totals.

Keeping these items outside the ‘bandings’ necessitated a redesign of the Cultural Status section to produce a new point of reference for the 'banding ceilings'.  This is because the previous point of reference, Total Cultural Contribution Value included both Lex and games structures creating an erroneous result.

Therefore we redesigned this section taking the part of the Cultural section included in the ceiling (Cultural c/f, Current year Games expenses and current year Cultural expenses) into the top part and then creating a GROSS CULTURAL POINTS total of cultural points after this to act as the point of reference for the banding ceilings. 

This GROSS total is the sum of all the above works at their FULL points value without banding reductions applied. Eg: as percentages of Cultural action Points for denari spent: 100% Public in Rome, 25% Public out of Rome, 25% Private in Rome, 5% Private Outside Rome and 1000% of entry fee for Games/races.  In other words the points you would get for your works if there were no limitations on Cultural Action Points.

In the next column the NET points actually received for the works in question are generated by the statrep as modified by the banding formulas within.

After the NET amount of Gross Cultural Points (in the cell immediately to the right) come two lines, Assembly Lex passed and Stable/Palaestra. 

After this there is the Total Cultural Contribution Value line that provides the figure that makes up part of your Assembly Influence Value but that is no longer used as a reference for the Cultural Banding Ceilings.

This might seem confusing on paper but basically aside from the new stable/palaestra points there is no real change from how the rules SHOULD work now if they are correctly used.  The only minor alteration is in the banded percentages for Private works, which now follow the same reduction curve as the Public Works.

An example: 

Caius Titius makes the following actions this January:

5,000 denari spent in Public works Inside Rome (base 100% of  D spent as CUL)

5,000 denari spent in Public works in his province, Sicilia. (base 25% of  D spent as CUL)

1000 denari in a private party inside Rome (base 25% of  D spent as CUL)

30 denari in a Race entry (base 1000% of  D spent as CUL)

I  General Assembly Lex passed (50 CUL points)

C.T. has 1,750 CUL c/f points from last year and owns a stables so his Statrep Cultural Status looks like this at the start of the month:

CULTURAL STATUS
C/F Cultural Points		C/F Cultural Points					1750	1750
Games contrubutions		current year games expenses					0	0
Cultural contributions		current year cultural expenses					0	0
	Gross Cultural Points						1750	1750
Stable/Palaestra								100
Assembly lex passed								0
Total Cultural Contributions Value								1850

Then he enters the above works in the appropriate boxes in the section to the right of this part of the statrep (or by hand if he wants to)like this:

				Races entry
This month public works in Roma		This month public works outside Roma		30
				Glad entry
5000		5000		0
This month private  works in Roma		This month private  works outside Roma		real ceiling reached
1000		0		8550
This months Aedile contribution				0
This months passed lex in Assembly				50

After doing this his Cultural Status section will look like this:

CULTURAL STATUS
C/F Cultural Points		C/F Cultural Points					1750	1750
Games contrubutions		current year games expenses					300	30
Cultural contributions		current year cultural expenses					6500	4875
	Gross Cultural Points						8550	6655
Stable/Palaestra								100
Assembly lex passed								50
Total Cultural Contributions Value								6805

All neatly presented and banded and what’s more his EXPENSES section will look like this:

				D. 20.000
		Mortgage & Interest
Obligare payment		0		D. 0
Private Works				D. 1.000
Public Works				D. 10.000
Aedile contributions				D. 0
Race Entry Fees				D. 30
Gladiatorial Fees				D. 0
Estate Purchases				D. 0
Factory/Shipping Purchases				D. 0
Stable/Palaestra Purchase				D. 0
Specialist Purchases		0	5	D. 0
Slave Purchases		0	0,5	D. 0
Temple Expenses				D. 0
Bribes				D. 0
General Expenses				D. 0
Total				D. 11.030

All from 5 cell entries! Neat huh?

The IMPORTANT thing for manual statrep players to remember is that little has changed for them beyond what I have said above.  It may look daunting but in reality as long as you do it the way the rules say you will get the exact same results.

Other changes.

2. RELIGIOUS SECTION:

Priest and Augur Offices now have a ‘Previously Held’ value, due to the possibility of losing these offices it was necessary to have a value for having held them.

Religious Action Points Bandings:

These stay the same and refer to a total called GROSS RELIGIOUS POINTS rather that the previous Denari/Religious Action Point listing.  This is mainly to make it conform to the terminology used for CULTURAL bandings which work in the same way and therefore to avoid confusion.  No change in how this works however.

3.  PC to PC Bequests:

This has only happened twice in Imperium history but when it does it causes work for the umpire and some resentment amongst other players.  From now on players will only be able to leave their estates to PC of they register a will with the umpire stating this AT LEAST six game months before.  This is to prevent players that suddenly drop out leaving their estates to one player.  The estates will also suffer a 50% penalty from bloodthirsty distant relatives that contest the out of family bequest.  We will see how this goes but there is a strong possibility that the possibility of doing this will end completely with the automated game.

4.  Province Swapping Costs:

These have been increased to reflect the fact that Governors now receive a considerable fund of cash with their province (whereas they didn’t when the rules was originally introduced) and that they aren’t likely to swap a 25,000D difference in fund for a couple of thousand.

5.       Vestal Rules:

We added these rules to reflect the presence of a vestal in the game.

Other remaining sections in red are just clarifications of badly written rules and established precedent missing from the rules.

GREEN Sections.

The sections in green are under consideration for the next revision of the rules that Brian, Fabio and I will be undertaking shortly.  If you have any ideas that you want to put forward and aren’t going to take offence at being turned down then please let Brian or I have your ideas.

Follow this rules link to see the new rules.

Follow this statrep link to the new Excel statrep sample.

*(downright contradictory at times is also a fair criticism).