The following is a proposal written mostly by myself and /u/Dennysaurus539, which aims to correct the stagnation currently facing Mk.II. This proposal has already been shared with the discord, but I'm putting it here so it gets full visibility. Feel free to discuss it below.

Foreward

Many individuals on the sub have recently been saying the sub is 'dying' or 'in a coma', and I think we can all agree. Something needs to be done or we won't have a CivWorldPowers. I and Denny have a proposal that will not end Mk.II, which is what I'll detail in this proposal.

The Problem

Some individuals on the sub are citing 'mod laziness' as the cause of our problem. And I agree that many mods (myself included) are not doing all the work assigned to them. But I don't think that's the real problem. I think the main problem in this situation is that mods need to do so much just to keep the sub running. Between spreadsheet entry and rollme, basically every player action needsto be confirmed or tested by a mod, sometimes more than once. This is slowing down all action on the sub while people wait for mods to catch up. Rather than blame mods for this, I choose to blame the systems that are putting far too much on their plates (to the point where it is making some of us mods apathetic towards the sub as a whole).

Mk.I Worked

Well, it was collapsing at the end, but the main thing to notice about Mk.I is that it had prevalent RP/OC, and worked in spite of how busy people were. I think that what we need is to return to a more Mk.i-esque base, with some rules and systems to control quality, but without the spreadsheet and rollme dependence that is bogging down the sub.

Player Freedom

Once again, nations and players can do what they want, provided its fair to other players and reasonable for the time period. rather than restrict civs with spreadsheets, calculations, numbers, and rolls, we let players just write about what they want to do, and intervene WHEN something goes wrong, rather than preempting any potential problems. This means the mods will have to be harsher than they are currently when policing posts. Mods will have the executive ability to decanonize posts (though this will only hold if not challenged by enough other mods). HOpefully, this returns RP to prominence, rather than sheet-related minmaxing, and should provoke more interesting situations in the world that play out immediately, rather than waiting on a mod to come along and roll.

Metrics

But ithout the spreadsheet, how will we determine army and such things? The general rule here is 'be reasonable'. We will ask players to try and estimate their population given historical civilizations of similar cultural background and size, then extract their military from a fair proportion of that amount.

Rollme

We would not remove rollme, but rollme will now be a lot simpler and less important. Basically, rollme would only be used in situations where players want a random outcome, or can't decide on a fair outcome amongst themselves. Here's an example: if two nations go to war, they have the option to decide together what happens (who wins battles, who is overall strongest, etc) then write about it. If they would rather let it be random (to help spark their creativity), or to let the outcome be impartially decided so neither is mad, they can either ask a mod to decide, or use Rollme. The basic rollme form will become:

1-5 Failure 6-16 Normal 17-20 Huge Success

where the players get to define what happens in each parameter. This is much simpler, more closely mirrors other WorldPowers subs, and allows players to roll their own rolls when applicable. You may even write your own rolls. If it looks at any time like you are exploiting the roll privelage, a mod can decanonize your roll, and even make an arbitration about what happens. But unless something like that happens, players will now have the freedom to make rolls when necessary.

Mod Role

With rollme being deemphasized and permitted for common players, we should all but eliminate the mod backlog. A mod might ask 'what do we actually do now?' Well, aside from playing their civ, mods have the job of content policing. Mods will examine posts, and point out what is and isn't what we expect from content. If someone goes too far out of line (especially metagamnig or powergaming), mods can decanonize their post so that their action never happened in the CivWP world; but that's a last resort. A Decanonization Vote system may be implemented to give players similar power.

Establishment Rule

Lifted from CivWP 2.5, this rule is the main way major in-game effecting moves will be judged (basically replacing magistrates, cooldowns, retrains, tiers, etc). Basically it states that any major event must be properly established.

What that means is something major, like declaring war, moving troops, building military, researching tech, etc. must be preceded by posts that build up to them. This is a story not a board game, so you can't just magically have your troops at someone's border. This will necessitate respect of the Secret post. ALL INFORMATION that will later affect the game must be in a secret post, even if you worry that someone micght explait it. If they act in a way that seems influenced by your post, point it out and they will be decanonized. ONLY ACT WITH THE INFORMATION YOUR NATION HAS! This trust and honor system will be necessary to making a low-rules environment work. We will police this rule hard.

There is a second aspect to this rule. If you do something that is fair for your nation to do, but don't write sufficient RP, you can still be decanonized. Establishment refers both to properly building up big things, but also to properly describing even small ones. We are an RP sub after all.

Reclaiming

But this isn't even the biggest change. If we're going to be modernizing the sub, we can also fill all the empty boring land. Barbarian lands would be removed as a mechanic (thuogh players should still assume barbarians and pirates exist in the untamed remainder of the world). The most significant civs and city states will be chosen by players, and the map will be reclaimed and redrawn to fill up empty land. We would prefer that nations have at least two players for this soft reboot, but it isn't necessary. If you can think of a civ to merge yours with, or simply wish to ditch your civ and join another, please do. We will drop the city cap and size cap, an let nations fill more of the world.

That said, not everyone should be huge and expansive. If you are a smaller nation, it can be safely assumed that you have more significant trade or science securing your status as a 'world power'. We hope to trust people to choose nations of reasonable size, but if not, we can always resort to 'raffling' out size to civs.

Long story short, civs will be expanded to fill most of the world, and potentially consolidated as well. The map will be reclaimed, but still on the same map with the same Mk.II nations. We will start as if the current Mk.II was the 'medieval era', and jump forward to a more defined and full world in the renaissance era.

CLARIFICATION

Basically what the first paragraph means is 'we keep the civs and city states that players want' (but don't necessarily carry everything forward if no one wants it. We don't need artifact NPC nations). City states don't get more cities (though they may get more land if they get to stick around.) And player nations will fill a lot of the empty space in the world so that more borders touch.

Tech

Obviously tech has to change if we no longer have a means of attempting tech numerically. This area is up for debate, but the current best method is as follows:

Major and Minor techs are designated on the tree. Any tech requires sufficient RP to discover, and mods decide whether or not you were successful given your RP. MAjor techs require significant establishment, through multiple posts (something like gunpowder or flight is likely to be a major tech). Minor techs can be researched infinitely, but Major techs can't, and both are able to spread. Writing a post about how your nation discovered, heard about, bought, or stole the tech is easier than researching it yourself, so tech will likely naturally spread. We don't want to put a hard cap on tech, but it will probably be 1-5 tech discovery a week worldwide, so try to follow that soft guideline (lest we need to add a hard guideline in its place)

This is only a pitch. Specifics will be ironed out if people are ok with this potential course of action.

I will say that with my experience on the sub, I think a change of this kind is necessary. I do not think the sub will survive if we keep using rollme and the spreadsheet as we do, nor do I think it will work if we only blame mods for the problem. I think we can conceivably fix the problems, and fix them now, without even killing Mk.II, so I ask that you all seriously consider the proposal and let us give it a shot.