Milestones are when line go up, and the more line go up the more milestone they are

Why we had Milestones, and why we don’t

Once upon a time, in a subreddit far far away, there was an idea. In theory, part of what makes XPowers wonderful is the wide array of claims scattered around the world, each with unique gameplay experiences. In the real world, XPowers players spend a shocking amount of time making the exact same posts about “science” and “development,” no matter where they’re claimed. Even when the posts aren’t literally the same, the intended goals usually are. The year was 2019, subreddit was r/GlobalPowers, and the idea was “Milestones.”

Originally, Milestones were meant for wacky scientific achievements and prestige projects, like moon bases or nuclear fusion. The Mods were understandably a bit tired of treating every single attempt like a unique R&D post requiring specific oversight. Instead, they decided that if XPowers players, among the most dopamine-deprived people on Earth, were willing to continuously post about one thing for a month or two, they might as well get a treat for it. The structure of milestones was fairly straightforward: to complete a milestone, a player would have to make the required number of posts over the required number of in-game years about it. All claims would be assigned to a tier reflecting the claim’s economic and technological abilities, which would influence the number of posts and years required.

This was, more or less, the system that arrived in CWP in 2020. Except, CWP players don’t post about moon bases. The technology of the past is mostly old news, after all. No, CWP players wake up every day to play with their trains. And their dams. And their gigantic coal-fired power plants. So milestones in CWP mostly became about building infrastructure or developing WMDs. This is the old list, if anyone’s curious.

So, what went wrong?

• Milestones were, well, kind of unbalanced. A lot of countries were either completing things ridiculously quickly, or being unrealistically handicapped.

• On a similar note, the tier system created a lot of disagreement. Even when assigning tiers via economic data was attempted, there was simply a lot of room for argument and people often left feeling screwed over.

• Military and WMD-related milestones ironically gave very significant rewards in a relatively short time, so people quickly started powergaming those.

• There was a huge overlap between the milestone system and the economics system at the time. What milestones actually did was left rather vague, and so players often didn’t feel there was a purpose to using economic milestones at all, as opposed to making econ posts.

• People didn’t like only being able to engage with a small number of milestones at a time, and then having to stick with that small number over a period of several weeks to months.

• The milestone mods sometimes disappeared for days and there wasn’t any way to tell if they were actually keeping track of your stuff.

But nevertheless, the system mostly sort-of worked, even if Dek was making like half the milestone posts. So why don’t we have milestones anymore? I’m the problem, it’s me. Back in 2020, I was like, “milestones suck! We should have a new, more logical system for them” and deleted the entire existing milestone system. Then it turned out milestones were actually pretty complicated and I gave up. So I’m sorry about that. They’re back now though.

Sheets!

Every player who wishes to participate will receive a Milestone Sheet that looks like this

No part of the sheet is editable by players. However, on the various tabs you can see all aspects of your progress, including the precise details of all point submissions mods have made on your behalf, and a list of available milestones together with their design details. The exact formulas used are not available to players.

Q&A about the new system

The new system is also pretty straightforward. You submit milestone posts. Each post gives you a number of points, which gives you additional progress on the milestone.

What determines the number of points I get per post?

The number of points you get per post is determined by three factors:

• A 9d20 dice roll.
• A mod-assigned quality bonus, as per the rubric below:

• An overall national bonus, calculated based on the total number of milestone points the nation has.

What kind of posts are acceptable as milestones?

For the new milestones system, we’re allowing a much broader range of posts to count for milestone progress. The criteria is more or less that any post under any non-conflict category with a concrete connection to the milestone in question can be counted for milestone progress. For example, a diplo post where you recruit teachers abroad can be double-tagged as a literacy milestone.

Even tangentially related posts can be counted, as long as they contain a clear reason they will have an impact on the milestone. For example, building a dam could be counted for electrification if it has power generation capability. But, if your post includes some mention of how the dam will improve piped water supply to local farmers, that could count for expanding plumbing access.

Your milestone post also doesn’t necessarily have to include a policy change or even any concrete action by your government. They can also be purely roleplay-based posts showing, for instance, what kind of impact your milestone progress is having on your people. That said, you should have at least some policy-related posts. There’s no specific rules on this, but in general try to have at least one in four milestone posts be a policy-based one.

The only concrete rules are that the milestone in question must be explicitly mentioned (and you must clarify out-of-character which milestone you are pursuing), the post must have a milestone tag in the title, you may only pursue only milestone per post, and you must fulfill the subreddit’s overall length requirement.

How frequently can I milestone post?

Each milestone has its own maximum posting frequency. But you can pursue as many as you want at the same time.

These quality bonuses don’t look very large?

Yes, the majority of your points will probably come from random dice rolls rather than quality. This is deliberate. While we all love posting our gigantic generational policy changes, in the real world, things don’t just change in an instant like that. In the interests of promoting broader and more socially-focused roleplay, and allowing people to make good progress on milestones without breaking their backs writing, players are explicitly being encouraged to submit a larger number of mediocre milestone posts instead of making one, gigantic, perfect one.

CWP is fundamentally about telling the story of your claim. Development can be a story of its own, not just numbers. We love to see megaposts and you will be rewarded for them, but keeping a continuous flow of smaller posts updating us on what milestone-related things are going on in your country will be an equally feasible option for advancement. More importantly, they will help make your claim and the subreddit as a whole look more alive.

Can I opt out, either fully or partially?

Players can choose to opt out of the milestone system and continue to receive whatever progress their claim made in real life. This progress will be subject to change based on external circumstances — if your nation has a civil war, safe to say you’re worse off. What is assumed to stay the same is your government’s commitment to making progress.

More specifically: players can choose to opt out of some milestones and continue to pursue others. However, you will only receive overall bonuses for milestones you have explicitly opted into (we’ll just mark the others as having zero points on the sheet). And once you’ve opted into a given milestone, you cannot opt out again. If you’re claiming after someone else has gone inactive and want to change things, we can discuss that, I haven’t thought a lot about it.

If I do choose to participate, how often do I need to post to "keep up"

However much makes you happy. But in general, posting at the literal maximum allowed speed for all milestones will allow to zoom from extremely poor to fairly well-developed in 20-25 years (you can do the math yourself). Posting about once every month and a half is about globally average progress (that is, average for an unexceptional developing country) for a given milestone. Don't feel pressured to post too frequently if you aren't aiming for exceptionally a-historic progress.

What are the milestones and what do I get from them?

We have ten milestones right now. Most of them reference specific data, and your progress on milestones is meant to represent your claim’s literal progress on that data point. Which is to say, if your sheet tells you your claim’s literacy is X%, that is the literal state of things in your claim.

So the milestone is what it says on the tin. But, in addition to this, we will be considering the broader implications of milestone progress on a subjective basis. If your country has high literacy, it can and should be assumed by both mods and players that a relatively high level of basic education has been achieved, as long as the content of your milestone posts hasn’t made this a completely implausible interpretation. This subjective progress will be considered in the economic system.

• Literacy This one is fairly basic — what percentage of your adult population can read at a basic level. It takes 2000 points from start to end, though almost every claim will start with some progress. More broadly, represents basic education.

• Plumbing Access Again, pretty basic — what percentage of your population/households have access to running water. 3000 points from start to end (You might think it would be easier to build people toilets than teach them to read, but historically apparently the opposite is true). More broadly, it can represent basic sanitation and clean water access.

• Electrification — what percentage of households have electricity. 2000 points in total. More broadly, well, this is a lot of things.

• Nationwide Census — this is where things get less straightforward. Yes, you are literally conducting a census, but progress on this milestone can be understood as an advancement of your government’s ability to collect statistical data on your citizens. Effective data collection is, after all, immensely important to modern governance. Every 200 points will constitute a single census.

• Disease Eradication — every 250 points will represent one disease eradication “program.” This does not always have to be a single disease — clearing out mosquitos or giving people MMR vaccines are single, well-defined programs that target several. On the other hand, completing one does not necessarily mean a “complete success” — rather that a reasonably well-run effort was made with the science available at the time. Like the census milestone, it also represents your government’s broader healthcare and disease-fighting capabilities maturing.

• Civil Service Professionalization — this one is super abstract, unfortunately. But it is what it says on the tin. This one can go from negative 1000 to 1000. Again, affects a lot of things downstream.

• Radio/TV Penetration — the starting values for this one will be represented by the average between the percentage of households with radios and televisions, respectively. As a proxy for media penetration, this has more relevancy for nations with large numbers of illiterate people, whose first introduction to some kind of "national culture" is often radio/TV. 0 to 1500 points.

• Savings/Investment Rate — literally, gross domestic savings as a percentage of GDP. Less literally, your government’s financial muscle. Savings rates are almost never the way they are because certain people are culturally more or less thrifty. Savings is the result of government policy or social circumstances which make depository institutions available to people and motivates them in some way to refrain from consuming large portions of their income. A higher savings rate implies that, in addition to having access to a large pool of savings to spend, your government has the ability to control and utilize those savings, such as the level of financial repression taking place. 0 to 2000 points, capping out at around 45% of national income.

• Planned City — for 500 points, build a planned city. Please be reasonable with it. Unlike for the other milestones, we will be applying fairly strict realism standards for this one. What is understood to be a reasonable effect for your 500 points will vary based on the size and wealth of your country.

• Major Public University — for 250 points, you too can have a UW-Madison. Again, please be reasonable. Like above, this one will have some fairly strict realism standards. What is understood to be a reasonable effect for your 250 points will vary based on the size and wealth of your country.

Other stuff

• If you intend to participate in milestones, it would be greatly appreciated if you could find relevant data at game start (or any other time) for your claim. Otherwise, we may be forced to just estimate starting numbers.

• Other milestones may be on the way if we get enough interest after the game starts. Space will likely not become part of the milestone system, but we are strongly considering adding more politically-oriented ones, such as creating mass organizations or establishing domestic intelligence-gathering/oppression institutions.

• No one-size-fits-all system like this can depict reality with anything close to complete accuracy. With that in mind, we are always open to suggestions. I’m going to regret saying this, but in cases where a claim has historically made, well, ahistorical progress beyond what the system would imply, we are potentially open to adding manual bonuses after discussion with players.

• In theory, you are the only one with access to your own milestone sheet. However, it is viewable by anyone with the link and so you are free to share your progress with anyone you like if you so wish. If you wish to keep your milestone progress a secret, that is also your right. We will try to routinely share broad outlines of milestone progress where realistic via moderator events. Furthermore, if you so wish, you can discover how far along others are through BLOPS.

• You don't get to see anything other than the frontend player sheet(s). Like in EP, the real stuff is technically secret.

Why?

The reform basically has two parts.

The first is the restructuring behind a google-sheets based system with completely automated processes for calculating progress. This is intended to make milestones easy to moderate, easy to be involved in as a player, and if we stop moderating, easy to point at something to yell at us about. Most aspects of the system previously requiring a mod to sit down and make a subjective decision have been eliminated, or at the very least simplified considerably.

Secondly, milestones have been narrowed down considerably in actual content. The main reason behind this is that we don't want milestones to become an avenue for powercreep, more or less. Stuff that has the potential to really ruin someone else's day (military milestones) probably shouldn't be handled by an automated system. The new system instead focuses very heavily on the idea of state capacity.

In 1947, confidence in the ability of governments to solve social problems has never been higher. The experience of most nations in the Second World War has seemingly proved that with enough money and enlightened scientific management, essentially any problem can be solved. The success of Stalinist development in the Soviet Union and the New Deal in the United States have only reinforced this confidence. For any country that wants to "develop," then, the primary task is to make the state itself more powerful and capable. Pretty much all the milestones are centered around both improving and then flexing the ability of a state to do things — first of all because a state with a better educated, healthier, and more prosperous population is a more capable state, and secondly because in the process of gaining practice in "doing things," a state becomes better at mobilizing resources, organizing people, and delivering services.