Probably the biggest remaining unknown in the universe of Tiny Empires 3000 is the set of requirements for creating a guild. A Director needs a number of things, and that has been published. But a guild is still unknown territory.
One thought that has occurred is this: what if one requirement is to have a Board of Directors? After all, every corporation has a Board of Directors, so a potential Guild Leader could well receive the message "Before you can form an official guild of your own, you must have a Board containing X Directors".
In game terms: have this many of your direct subjects be Directors. It would be a very effective way of requiring a guild to have a minimum fleet size. Say you need five Directors, each Director needs at least 25,000 ships to have that title, so the minimum size of a guild immediately becomes 125,000 ships- more, in reality, since it would be unlikely that five Directors would have just barely the minimum amount required.
Add that to the possibility that much "guild business" requires a "quorum of X Directors", and you could have the perfect way to "de-activate" smaller guilds. It would also give a Guild Leader a motive to keep his or her Directors in the guild- if one of the Directors leaves to form their own guild, it could put the old guild out of business if they had only the minimum number of Directors required to do business.
At this point, pure speculation, and very likely off the mark... but it just fits together too neatly to be dismissed quite so easily.
Alamiga and I were chatting about this post. I wonder if a Guild Leader could actually be elected by -- and removed by -- a qualified board of Directors? It would certainly provide alternatives to line-hopping and guild multiplication, and add a new level of diplomacy and intrigue to high-level play.
ReplyDeleteAn intirguing thought! The main complication that I can see is how do you restructure the lines if a Guild Leader were to be recalled by a Board. Unless they had their own set of subordinates outside of the board, they could lose their position as a Director as well.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, if a Board were to elect a Guild Leader, in theory they would go under the new leader... what would happen if that Director couldn't fit them all in without exceeding ten subordinates?
Why does a Guild Leader have to be "over" the Directors? Perhaps a first-among-equals structure is more appropriate. Or perhaps the process of removing a Guild Leader is concurrent with electing the replacement, and the two effectively switch places.
ReplyDeleteI don't see ten direct subordinates as a necessary limit at that level. We know that in the first couple of days of TE3K the limit was set aside temporarily to handle the flood of unguilded who at first could not get in.
It also has me thinking about the possibilities of one or more High Kings in classic Tiny Empires -- the existing monarchs maintain their sovereignty whilst throwing their support behind one or more High Kings who enjoy increased something from the backing. Not necessarily a classic liege-subject relationship, but certainly the literature supports lesser kings in service to greater ones.
But I digress.