Maintaining Military Equipment

[Dutchy]

Dear roleplayers,

I've had a short discussion with Jamie regarding the possibilities for introducing a cost to maintaining military equipment. This costs would incentivise players to carefully plan out their militaries, and avoid players ballooning their militaries just because they have the excess funds. Furthermore, this would also become an annual expenditure which ensures that players are spending money on maintenance rather than letting their accounts rise to exorbitant heights with nothing to spend it on.

The basic idea is that once a player has purchased a type of equipment (for example a F-16 Fighters), they would be required to spend a certain percentage (to be determined) on maintaining these fighters:

Breakdown:

- Procurement cost: $35,000,000
- Annual Maintenance Cost (5% of procurement cost): $1,750,000​

If a player were to have an Air Force of 32 fighters this would mean the following:

Breakdown:

- Procurement cost: $1,120,000,000
- Annual Maintenance Cost (5% of procurement cost): $56,000,000​

If you are the US military with 930 F-16s then you'd face a significant cost:

Breakdown:

- Procurement cost: $32,550,000,000
- Annual Maintenance Cost (5% of procurement cost): $1,627,500,000​

Now the player has to keep in mind that they need to budget $56 million annually in order to properly maintain their air force. Of course, cash-strapped players could decide to skip a year of maintenance or decide to place their aircraft in reserve due to budget restraints. I believe that in response the economy system should be adjusted slightly to ensure that larger countries also receive a larger tax income in order to account for realistic GDP differences and allow larger countries to afford larger militaries.

I have no idea whether this is something the community would be interested in seeing further developed or implemented. So please react to this message if you are interested in this proposal, or comment below with your thoughts.

 

[JamieA]

Such a great idea, fully behind this idea

 

[Dutchy]

Let me add, something which I forgot to mention, that the maintenance could be done through the current forms system. A new sub-forum would be created in which these forms would be posted. A similar form to the 'create an order' form could be made through which players can submit their maintenance.

This is aimed at creating a centralised and visible forum where both staff and players can check on the conducted maintenance of other countries.

We would have to work out how to determine which units are being maintained, perhaps it could be made the players responsibility to note which of their equipment has been maintained in order to avoid arguments in conflict over the maintenance status of a given piece of equipment.

 

[Alex]

So we have to manually maintain each and every piece of equipment that we have? For someone like myself who has more than 50 unique products, with variants of their own, this seems extremely inconvenient. I'd have to post 50+ 'create an orders' for separate products, which would take hours. I can barely write my RP for MN to begin with, I'm not going to sit down and stare at production orders for that long. In my opinion this addition would bring nothing to the forum. Instead it would just make it more tedious and demanding for A-list and B-list nations (or any nation in general that has a medium to large-sized armed forces). Then you have to create yourself new sheets to see what you have and haven't maintained, etc. I can already smell the nit-picking that'll come from this (no offense) and the countless support tickets during war/military operations. Furthermore, through my calculations I would spend ~18billion dollars on maintenance alone, God-forbid poor China whose twice my army size or the US that has very high priced military equipment. I just see this suggestion turning MN from a hobby to a chore in all honesty.

But, if this is implemented (which I'm against), the funds of nations will have to be increased by a lot.

Speaking of, I don't see the issue with countries having money saved up. The entire point of saving money is to have it when you need it most: funding countries, funding a war, buying stocks, etc. We already have an income cap for when countries have too much money. If nations having too much money is still an issue just bring back riots/protests and natural disasters. Unlike maintenance, those are nice and simple (and sometimes very fun) to handle and brings RP for people to either read or participate in.

 

[Odinson]

Dutchy I'm going to break down why I think that this proposal is a bad idea. Then I am then going to point out the unintended consequences that this proposal would have, which are also bad. Finally, I'll look at your reasoning and explain why I think you're offering a solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist - and that even if that problem did exist, your proposal would not fix it as intended.

A Bad Idea
​

A. Impracticality and Impossibility to Manage
Historically in MN, many players have had trouble keeping up with the equipment they build and the soldiers they train. Even right now, there are at least half a dozen players that do not have an up-to-date military structure (including myself, I'm working on it). I also remember players like Logan and Moe who didn't even know all of the equipment they had because they didn't bother doing any kind of structure or keeping track of their equipment until they got themselves into a war. Now, this proposal would only exacerbate this issue. Because now it will be dependent on the admins and the moderators to make sure everyone is keeping up with their equipment. What will inevitably happen is that twice a RL year, around the time that these repairs are suppose to be paid, the Staff Team will be rushing to go through 300 pages of productions to see who has what and if they are accurately reporting what they do have, and if they are accurately adding up the numbers. I think that this will be futile, and we would end up just being able to spot check certain big productions. Ultimately, what will happen is that the more honest among us will be paying more - and then we'll all become dishonest because there would be no incentive not to. Ironically, the few players who are autistically diligent in keeping their structures (or listed productions) up to date will now be incentivized to do the opposite, and just keep an accurate ledger on a private spreadsheet on their computer.



B. Disproportionate Affects on A-List Countries
I think A, B, and C-list countries will all be negatively affected by this. However, A-list countries will take the brunt of the bad effects, and A-list countries with expensive military equipment will take the full force. I think that the United States and Russia would be the worst affected by this proposal, followed by China and India. The latter two at least have the advantage that their military equipment is relatively cheap (for China, partly because it is unusually difficult for us to do price requests for their products). The problem they are going to run into is when they try building their ground forces, or anything resembling their RL ground forces, and suddenly find that they can't afford to even do that. If they try to utilize more expensive foreign military equipment, they'll be in an even worse position. I haven't done exact math on Russia and China, but if the amount of money they would have to pay to have semi-realistic militaries to their RL counterparts is just 50% of the insanity that I know America or Russia is going to have to pay, they'll be even worse off then I thought.

At this time, under the perimeters you gave, it would cost me $14,217,740,089 to just maintain the equipment that I have now. Keep in mind that I have seriously neglected my Marine Corps, Army, and National Guard and that in RL, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carriers while I only have 2. If my Army, National Guard, and Marine Corps were realistic (and my Air Force, which is a fraction of what it should be), the real cost I would be paying each year would be somewhere between $50-$70,000,000,000. I understand that the intent of this is, in part, to stop a B-class nation from rapidly souping up a military that could cripple an A-List country, but this proposal will only nerf A-List countries more, and basically make it impossible for world powers to exist in any meaningful way. I will expand on this in the next section.

Unintended Consequences
​

C. The Rise of the Third World
Because of the overwhelmingly high price of American equipment, the limited tax income the United States gets (this effect is lesser for Russia, but is still there) it will become economically unfeasible for these two countries to be able to project power on a global scale. In fact, I think it would even hamper our abilities to project power in our own hemispheres. While would become much more expensive for China and India, an unintended consequence is that they will be able to afford to have armed forces that are x3 the size of the U.S. or Russia with x3 the equipment. It will become unaffordable for the U.S. and Russia to outclass China and Russia because of the price of American equipment, and to a lesser extent the price of Russian equipment and the size of the Russian military IRL. Therefor, it will also be economically unfeasible for a player to simulate anything resembling the RL Russian or American armed forces (at least using their native equipment). This brings me to my next unintended consequence.

D. A-class Countries Will Abandon Native Equipment
With this proposal in effect, A-class countries with expensive military equipment (America, Britain, France, Japan) will be greatly incentivized to stop using their native equipment because of the high cost of maintaining it. I personally could scrap my native military equipment, walk away with over $100-billion, and build an ungodly armed forces made up of Chinese, Russian, and (limited) American military equipment/vehicles that would average out to the same year maintenance cost, while having a military that's x5 stronger.

E. It Will Not Be Possible to Simulate RL Armed Forces
It will not be possible for the United States, Russia, or China (considering their immense ground forces) to RP armed forces resembling/simulating their RL ones. I've already stated this, but I think it needs to be said again because of how much of a focus some of us put into our militaries.

The Problem Does Not Exist
And this Proposal would Not fix it if it did

​

F. Having Saved up Money Isn't The Problem
1. United Kingdom: $50,865,664,910
2. Sweden: $40,046,926,434
3. Ukraine: $34,663,544,348
4. Mexico: $17,692,690,159
5. France: $16,913,976,385
6. Pakistan: $15,344,733,150
7. United States: $14,635,945,083

Looking at the top seven wealthiest countries (this is not taking into account stocks or money in alternate accounts), the United Kingdom and Sweden would continue to be able to hoard wealth. Ukraine, France, Pakistan, and Mexico are all inactive or on leave (Josh just got back), and my current economy numbers aren't accurate because I just spent about $20-billion. This proposal will not stop players from hoarding wealth. However, I don't accept the premise that accumulating a large amount of money like the United Kingdom or Sweden is such an unfixable thing. What, in the end, could the UK or Sweden do with that money? From a RP and realism standpoint, the most frustrating thing they could do is get into a war and then suddenly buy $50-billion worth of equipment in three days and have a formidable military out of nowhere. To fix this problem I think that there is a simple answer: triple the amount of time it takes to build anything from aircraft carriers to rifles and vehicles. That way players cannot use this ridiculous tactic when war strikes - but I'll go into detail with that below. Also, I would advocate that a player cannot have more than $50-billion in their bank balance at once (or in another bank account under the control of their country).

G. Countries Will Still Ballon Their Militaries
As I mentioned in points C and D, all wealthy countries will have to do is buy cheaper military equipment from other countries, and they can still maintain excessively large armed forces (this goes for both A-List and B-List countries).

Actual Solutions​

Instead of doing something that will nerf A-List countries into being very powerful B-List countries, I have these alternative proposals below:

H. Cap Money at $50-billion and Lengthen Construction Time
See point "F" above.

I. Make National Statistics Matter
I really like the idea of the national statistics in the economy section (i.e. Crime, Tourism, etc.). However, there is no point in trying to change those statistics from the player's perspective when they don't seem to do anything, and it's difficult to tell if a National Project that you do had any influence. To change this, I think that each country should have certain statistics that they start with (the best option would be to do this for each country, but I understand if that would be too much work and instead it could be broken down into 5-10 regions of countries). Each tax period, these statistics get worse by, say, 1%. Once a category gets below a certain number, your country starts to suffer detrimental affects (a loss of tax income, staff-RPed disasters, or riots are good examples) that you have to deal with. This will incentivize players to building National Projects that will increase tourism, or decrease crime, or increase education. I would also make the minimum cost of these National Projects $1,000,000,000 and require a 500-word count. If you think that nations having too much money (and focusing too much on their military) is a bad thing, I think this would give players something to spend their money on to focus their energy on. Each National Project would improve your targeted statistic by 1% - 5%. The moderator or admin who QAs your national project would have to determine what % you earn based off of how well your proposal is, how much money your spending, and other factors.

J. Limit Domestic Productions per Month/Tax Period
If your concern is that B-List countries can balloon to unrealistic behemoths in two weeks after a couple of super realistic loans from Sparrow Industries, then limit how much countries can domestically produce. You could even break this down by country class. For example, an A-List can produce 100 fighter jets by tax period, a B-List can produce 40, and a C-List can only make 20. While these countries could still import products from other countries, you have to keep in mind that those other countries are still limited by what they can produce themselves, so they may prioritize their own domestic productions instead of productions they are selling to other nations. At the very least, this will stop a B-class country from suddenly coming into existence and then having 400 F-16s two weeks later.



Dutchy I think that your proposal came from a good place, but after careful consideration I think it would do more harm than good, and it wouldn't fix the issues that your stated.

 

[JamieA]

I’m sorry but both above posts just proves a point, all I see is a problem for those who have numerous equipment. This will make you think before you go big, it’s definitely a good idea.

it is what it is, just another concept that we need to focus on. It’s a great idea and being shot down by two players who WANT big militaries

 

[Alex]

I'm not sure what you're talking about to be completely honest. We're A-list nations, we're supposed to be large, we're supposed to be the ones with a slight edge—that's why these nations are considered A-lists. But none of what we're doing is unrealistic when it comes to MN standards. Both Odin and I are simply recreating the IRL armed forces of our countries, something the most of us do. I don't see how that's a negative nor why we should be penalized for 'going big'. Do you expect everyone to be on the exact same playing field instead? If so perhaps we should scrap the entire MN economy and move to a point-based system.

Regardless, as Odin said (which I'm assuming you didn't read), it's a well intended idea but would prove negative for the site.

 

[JamieA]

I don’t think it would prove negative for the site all. It makes you think before you go big, if you want an A-List country then you should put the effort in, even if it means maintaining you’re equipment

 

[Alex]

All A-listers have put in more than enough work RPing, structuring, and internal development. I have spent dozens of hours alone just structuring. Maybe I'd take your opinion more seriously if you played a nation for more than a handful of months (at most) and actually knew what it meant to put effort into one. But at this point it's clear you've read nothing that either Odin and I have put up and you're just repeating yourself without providing any real reason for this suggestion being good for the site, so I'm going to stop wasting my time.

 

[Axis12]

After reading everyone’s proposals thoroughly I’m going to have to say no to this proposal, I agree with Alex and for the most part with Odinson that this would become a massive chore for those with large armed forces, I have a massive number of equipment right now with a number of variants and to go through every single type would take egregious amounts of time.

Furthermore to address a reoccurring theme here I believe that the so called “Ballooning” of the armed forces is not really accurate. In example look at my year as Turkey, I went through massive military expansion but with that expansion comes hours of structuring my armed forces. These B-List nations aren’t a threat because they have to take time to create a proper structure which can take months in order to get proper logistics, communication, and other services in order. Alex and Odinson steamrolled me in part because I just didn’t have any structure beyond my northwest and southeast regions. The bottomline is that it takes time to create a serious armed force so even if a nation has a huge amount of equipment it doesn’t do them much good if it’s in a warehouse in the capital and thus there’s no reason to put a maintenance cost or cap on production.