Depression Era America

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm interested

After all, being a John L Lewis type might be fun

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course it would be 'Atlasia 2', as applying similar offices helps with familiarity (and no point reinventing the wheel) Hopefully it could run alongside Atlasia, with people involved in both as very similar or indeed very different characters.

One thing that could be done easier than in Atlasia would be to have NPC's of some sort if there's a shortage of people for some positions or something.

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A couple.

One very important (perhaps the most important) thing would be to establish a few boundaries over timescale (so the game would end at the onset of the Second World War, say), which is perhaps obvious, but... there's also a need to eliminate the use of hindsight (especially important as regards the actions of our "Hoover" actually) and of "obvious" fixes to the Depression dreamed up by academics writing decades later.
I think great care has to be taken over the impact of a few individuals over the course of history; most events that happend in real life would have to happen here as well, else things would get silly.
I'm not suggesting that in a killjoy way, quite the reverse actually.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A Six Region map (ignore the names, better ones can be found I'm sure)...



Mostly based on economic and political stuff of the time.

If we have five regions (like in the other place), then the Seaboard one would go (with Maryland and Delaware going to the South, and New York and New Jersey merging (with New England) into a North East region).

To explain the reasons (& etc) for each region...

The West is kinda obvious really.

As is the South.

The Industrial region includes America's main coalfields and a large proportion of the traditional manufacturing (now "rust") belt.

The Seaboard is based around the ports of New York and Baltimore, while New England is another obvious one (even if Boston had more in common, politically, with New York than with Maine or Vermont).

The division between the South and Northeast (if five rather than six) is fairly obvious, even if Delaware voted for Hoover in '32.

The Mid-West sort of picks up the left-overs in some ways, but there's a certain logic to it methinks.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

PA should be placed with Seaboard and renamed the Mid-Atlantic.

I did think of that, but most of PA at that time had an economy dominated by manufacturing, and allied industries such as coal, rather than the more mixed economies in New York and so on.
Politically as well there's reasons for it; the area around Pittsburgh was  similer (in most respects) to major industrial centres to the west of it, while Philadelphia's politics at the time seem to have been very unusual and quite unlike New York's or even Baltimore's.

Your names are better than mine though

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As for a time limit, I don't see why things can continue if the game proves popular, into WW2 - what we could see is an escalation of the game 'speed' until the post-war era which to me is just as interesting as the depression. But thats perhaps thinking too far ahead!

If the game is a success, it might be better to finish it at the beginning of the War, and then start a new game based on the Post-War situation (but with the same general rules and so on).

More on this later.