FLAGSHIP Review of LORDS OF THE EARTH
by Andrew Barton

This game is designed to cover the history of the world from 1,000 AD or earlier to the present day.

If that sounds a touch ambitious, that's probably because it is. The first game of Lords started seventeen years ago and is just coming up to turn 200 - it's been calculated that to get to the end of the millennium would take about another eight years.  Some major rule extensions were introduced to cover the arrival of the Renaissance, and the designer, Thomas Harlan, has some ideas about how he'll represent the modern age.  He's got a few years yet to write those rules.

There are a couple of dozen games run by other GMs under license, and my first introduction to Lords came when a British GM, Steve Brunt, started a new game (number 24) in 1998.  I found the rules and background a bit overwhelming at first and didn't get in on the ground floor, but that wasn't a problem as
there were several nations still available to new players in different parts of the world.  So, around the middle of the 11th century I became the new King of Thaton, an up-and-coming nation in Southeast Asia, based roughly in the territory of modern Burma.

After seven turns I've acquired four new provinces by a mixture of force, diplomacy and royal marriages, developed three sea trade routes including one crossing the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, founded two great cities with frowning citadels, forcibly converted my minority of Hindu subjects to Buddhism, learned how to add cavalry and elephants to an army previously composed solely of footsloggers ...

and saw all my outlying provinces, half the kingdom, rebel after my King and his heir died within months of each other leaving no clear succession.  Fortunately, I may have lost a lot of territory but I still have 90% of the taxpayers.

All this in a quiet area of the map.  Players in Europe had a much more active time of it.

Lords of the Earth games all seem to have very active diplomacy and frequent underhand special actions. Although it's a long game, it is quite possible to have your nation destroyed in a single turn by the actions of your neighbours.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

So what does a new Lords player have to deal with?

Firstly, you pretty much have to have email and Web access. This was my first experience of playing a game where most information took the form of pages on a web site, and it took a bit of getting used to.

Detailed results for each player are sent out by email or snail mail, but you hear about what is happening elsewhere by reading the 'newsfax', which tells you what is going on in the rest of the world in narrative form.  In the UK games, the newsfax is put up as a web page on the GM's site, and most of the earlier faxes are also available so that you can read up on past history.

Most of what a new player needs to know is on a well organised and easy to use central site, Thomas
Harlan's Throneworld page (www.throneworld.com/lords/index.html).  This gives easy access to the home pages of each Lords campaign, and central information like the rules and starting maps of the world. 
There is also a well-stocked page of player articles about the game, including several pieces aimed at the new player.  To give an idea of the flavour of these, here's a list of titles at the time of writing:

New Player?

- Lords of the Earth According to Bruhn
- The Long View
- Advice for New Players
- "Help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope!"
- Lords for Newcomers
- The Movement of Hordes
- A Rambling Response

Warfare

- The Art of War
- Danish Rules of Engagement
- Winning Wars at Sea

Economics

- Economics for Established Empires

General Carrying On and Bitching

- Dogbert's Guide to Lords of the Earth
- An Unrepentant Reply to Dogbert

Religion

- Surviving the Catholic Experience

How To Win

- Being Sly
- Communication and Trust

If you're only going to read one of these, make it 'The Long View'. Despite its title, it's highly relevant to the first few turns because of the things it warns you not to do - principally, don't grab too much territory early on until you have the governmental structures to handle it and the economic foundation to get any benefit from it.

... AND MUCH STUDY IS A WEARINESS OF THE FLESH

The rulebook runs to over a hundred pages, with obscure-looking equations scattered through the text. 
The good news is that a new player can ignore large parts of the rules, especially in the early stages of a game.  The bad news is that it takes some time to work out which parts you can ignore.

My advice to a new player?  You need to study the description of provinces, especially the codes that tell you the control status.  This tells you how well the locals like you, how much tax they're paying, and whether you can recruit them to your armies.  You need to study the descriptions of the various types of leader, at least those which you actually have in your nation.  You should look over the list of tasks a leader can do so as to get an idea of what is possible, but the bread-and-butter tasks you'll use most are DP (diplomacy), and A and AP (conquer territory).  You need to get an overall idea of the movement rules.

Steve has introduced a simplified set of movement rules for his game, and other GMs are watching with interest how these work out.  I think it would have been much easier to pick these up than the standard rules (which keep track of where each leader is during each month of a five-year turn).  So if you're
joining a new game when this article comes out, that's one reason to pick game 24.

As for the economy, you don't need to deal with the intricate calculations hat govern all the different types of gold income, just spend all the gold you can on Public Works Bonus
(PWB).  This is the simplest way to invest, it gives a reliable return of 10% per turn in gold, and in the first 20 or 30 turns of a game it gives a better payoff than any other investment.  If you run out of places to build PWB, expand an existing city or build a new one to make room for more.

Trade is important in the long run, but to start with just set up a route with any neighbour who'll agree to it.  The early income will be trivial (Thaton only gets one percent of its income from trade, 15 turns into the game), but when trade eventually does start paying off you'll get a bonus for how long the trade route
has been running.

Besides gold, your other resources are conscriptable population, measured in National Force Points (NFP) and food.  Food won't be a limiting factor in the early turns, but eventually it will place a limit on city size and the number of troops you can field.  NFP are needed to raise troops, but also to build cities, roads, and useful things like that.  The amount of NFP available increases only slowly, although in an emergency you can conscript the next turn's recruits into the army early - but then when the next turn comes, you can't recruit them again!  In some parts of the world you may be able to launch slave raids and get more NFP for construction, but a slave-based economy isn't as efficient in other areas.

TRUST NO-ONE

Your leaders are crucial to any plans to acquire new territory or gain the loyalty of what you already have.  Problem is, there's only one leader you can trust completely and that's the King (or sometimes Queen) that represents you in the world.  Other leaders have loyalty ratings, which governs how far you can trust them out of your sight.  Loyalty ratings are hidden, and the only way to tell which leaders can safely be sent on
distant missions is to send them and see whether they come back.

Leaders have three stats you can see, which describe their military and diplomatic abilities and their charisma.  These don't change much in play, so if your current leaders don't have the skills you want you have to get new ones.  Sacking existing leaders is risky since they might turn against you (sending them
on risky missions likewise!), but with turns that are each five years long it won't be too long until a poor leader dies and can be replaced.

Trouble is, it also won't be too long until a good leader dies  and has to be replaced.

How can you get more leaders?  Several ways.  If your diplomacy with a neighbouring nation makes it an ally, their leader will become an Allied Leader, nearly as useful as a native member of your court.  If you have a princess to spare, you can marry her to the Ally who will then become a Prince, and the allied province will become a full part of your kingdom.  Handy!

What I like to do is see how good my Allies' ratings are, marry them intothe family if they're competent, absorb their provinces into the kingdom if not.  Either approach creates a vacancy for another ally.

Meanwhile one of the King's male children, once he reaches the age of 15, can be made into an Heir and his brothers into additional Princes.

There are limits on how many leaders of each type you can have, and these are governed by your Bureaucracy Level (BL).  In this game, Bureaucracy is good, and it's one of your main aims to get more of it.  There are many benefits, and perhaps the most obvious is that you can have more leaders.  A nation
with BL one can have one King, one Heir, and at most one Prince, one Lieutenant, and so on.  A BL of three entitles you to two Princes, three Lieutenants, more of everything.

Until recently, Have Children was a separate order for a King (or his Heir), and it was fairly common to see a King spend the whole of a five-year game turn doing nothing else. Recent rule changes have made it easier to combine being a father with other activities.  Queens find it just as easy to be mothers!

THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING

There's another reason Kings want lots of children.  If the King dies, and there's no obvious heir (or too many possible heirs) you can have a Dynastic Failure.  All your leaders make loyalty checks and may decide to make their own bids for the crown or set up separate states, taking their provinces and armies with them.

This is what has just happened to me in Thaton.  I thought I had the succession fairly secure, but both the King and his Heir died during the same turn and most of my leaders rebelled.  A son of the King came of age and became the new king, he has the loyalty of the core territories, but all my best generals have set up shop on their own or been executed for making the attempt.

I'm pretty sure of being able to recover because none of my neighbours are near enough to intervene.  If I'd had neighbours with designs on my territory, and if the deaths in the royal family had been the result of assassination plots ... well, I said you could get knocked out in a single turn.

OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

I haven't said much about the military.  There are four basic types of troops at the start of the game, infantry, cavalry, siege engineers and warships.  Variations on these are heavy and light troops, elites and irregulars, but most reasonable mixes will do.  The game starts in a period when cavalry dominate the battlefield, so it's important to have a good proportion of cavalry in any field army - unless your nation is in the part of Africa affected by the tsetse fly ...

Come the Renaissance there may be additional types of troops, but that's several real-world years away in any of the games run by British GMs.  The time-scale of the game is so long that there's little point in introducing fine detail of troop types and equipment.  These are represented by an Army Quality Rating
for each of the four types of troops.  When I said I'd 'learned how to add cavalry and elephants to an army', in game terms this just meant that I raised my cavalry AQR from 0 to 1.

ON HIS MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

There's a wide range of possible actions included in the rules, but you can also carry out special actions limited only by your imagination and the patience of the GM.  Here are some examples.

I wanted to bind a skilled Allied leader into my royal family, but I had no suitable princess.  So, I used a standard diplomatic action, and added text that I was offering to adopt the leader as my heir if his province agreed to become part of my kingdom.  This worked very smoothly.

I tired a similar manouevre in another game, but handed over too many of the levers of power to my heir.  He decided not to wait for his inheritance and seized power, while one of my other leaders thought he was just as good a candidate and started a civil war.  I was lucky that it ended quickly without much economic damage, but I'd lost the use of my original King and one of my best generals.

Or, here's an excerpt from a recent newsfax in the other game I play, Lorne Colmar's Lords 17:

'In the weeks prior to Rachid's accession to the throne, Sicily became the centre of a spontaneous outbreak of Islamic fervency. The story was told of a young girl out picking flowers for her sick father when she came upon a stone bearing strange marks. Fascinated, though oblivious to any meaning conveyed by the inscriptions, she took it home with her. She
placed the stone on the low table next to her father for him to look at when not consumed by fever.

'A mere two hours later, her father stood before his family, apparently rid of the malaise that had afflicted him. Holding the stone in his hand, he declared it must surely be sacred for it bore an inscription "Allah shall bring succour to the needy and the sick".

'The news of the stone's apparently divine powers of healing spread like wildfire. First tens, then hundreds, then thousands of people came to know of it. Ere long, the stone was taken into the keeping of the Islamic clerics in Palermo where it quickly established the city as a focus for pilgrimage.

'GM note: Henceforth, Palermo counts as a Holy City for Holy War and other such purposes. '

Sounds like somebody was making creative use of Religious and Intelligence operations!

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

It's probably clear by now that one of the strengths of Lords of the Earth is the scope it gives for imagination and creative special actions.  The downside of this is the burden this puts on the GM.  You have an open-ended game likely to run for years, complex turns and only limited computer support to resolve them, multiple players moving leaders and forces about the map over five-year turns and interacting with each other, and unlimited special actions.

Can you say 'recipe for GM burnout'?  Thank-you.

As I write, half a dozen or more Lords games are stalled or totally inactive, and a few others show 'due dates' several months in the past.  Thomas Harlan takes a degree of overall responsibility for his creation, and there are enough Lords devotees that new GMs often come forward and are able to resurrect these game.

The two British GMs, Steve Brunt and Lorne Colmar, both seem to have chosen a pace that they can realistically expect to maintain.  Steve recently slowed down his planned turnaround to five or six weeks a turn, and reduced the turn fees he charges (to 2 pounds or 3 dollars) to reflect the amount of effort he
expects to give to the game.  Lorne, by contrast, has raised his personal targets for rapid and reliable turnaround and has hiked up his turn fees accordingly - they are currently on a sliding scale of pounds 2.75 to 4.75 according to the position of each nation in the military strength league.  Several players
dropped out when he raised his charges but these have been more than matched by new ones.

Lorne is also in the process of reviving Lords 10, which had stalled under its previous GM, and aims to meet the same reliability standards in both games that he is currently maintaining in one.  Does this guy ever sleep?

IT'S A WHOLE NEW WORLD

Most if not all Lords games can be played from anywhere the Internet goes to, but most GMs are based in the USA where the whole thing started.  British readers who want to give it a try would probably be wise to start with one of the two British GMs, because of the hassle involved in sending small amounts of money abroad.  Full details of both their games can be found by starting at the Throneworld website at the address I gave earlier, and following the links.

If you like lots of diplomacy and skullduggery, you'll find it in either of these games in Europe or around the Mediterranean.  For a quieter life try some of the further corners of the world - both GMs are happy to advise on these.

How historical is the game?  I think the rules do a fairly good job of representing the forces that are important in the long term without going into excessive detail.  To succeed, you have to build up a solid base in terms of what Stalin called the Permanently Operating Factors, while coping with whatever fate, the GM, and other players may throw at you in terms of historical accident and the personalities of individuals.  The one major criticism I'd make is that some of the rules are rather Eurocentric - the royal marriage rules assume monogamy, and the rules for religious primacies encourage players to build up
Hindu or Buddhist leaders as if they had the centralised authority of a Pope.

You can't afford to get too attached to individuals or put too much role-playing burden on them.  What Lords of the Earth allows you to do is role-play whole nations.

I don't know of another PBM game quite like it.

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