BrikWiki

[Quantumsurfer]

@Colette: Good to know. Maybe you could make a battle page like Brag's and link out to it from the tank page. We could probably do with a section there that lists battles in which tanks played a significant role.

@Bragallot: Good job on the battle page, I like it. Where to put it is a hairy question, though, since we've taken a patchwork approach thus far. Battles have been redlinked in individual articles all over, plus we have a page for forum battles and a page for battle reports, specifically. Oh, also, we have a place for major battles in History and major conflicts that took place in a specific place are linked out from the location specific pages.

So, the individual links won't be found unless a user is browsing that article. As an extension of that, same is true for locations linking to major conflicts. Forum and Battle Reports seem geared toward IRL organization by player and are not given context. Major Battles in History and Chronology are themed toward universal, galaxy-wide, or system/planet conflicts that had a profound impact on the overall narrative (wars) and do not necessarily include smaller battles of importance to smaller narratives.

I have to think things through sometimes by writing or talking them out. So, yeah, why not have a battles category? Battle is fundamental to the BrikWars concept. It's in the name. What to call it? Battles in BrikWars? Battles and Wars? Conflicts in BrikWars? How to organize it? If done by scale, interrelated battles may be separated from one another by both category and alphabetical order. Unless we do by scale and nest interrelated battles under their same heading. So, all the battles that took place during the Prussian-Monarchial conflict would be organized under that heading, which would be organized under, what, Wars? Then, unrelated battles could be organized by themselves under other scale headings: major battle, minor battle, skirmish, tactical engagement, fight, maybe a miscellaneous category for races and the like.

[Quantumsurfer]

Bam. Location Template. I don't like not knowing how to do things.

[Scratch]

Aww man, I had just finished my faction's planet using brag's style, I'll fix it later.

[Quantumsurfer]

I redid New Prussia with the template because I wanted to see what it looked like with an actual image instead of the blank template image I made in there. Looks good, I like it. I had no bloody idea how to approach Venice. Maybe two planets one overlapping the other? But I figured I'd leave that for you, Scratch.

[Natalya]

What happened to the G.R. system? Everything says Rekonstruciton now instead of Galaktik Revolution. WTF?

[Quantumsurfer]

That's how it was when I came to the wiki. Presumably, its from these:

Following the first destruction of the universe in R-1,978, broken shards of the SpaceMen's shattered reality ripped forwards and backwards throughout their own past and across dimensions, disrupting and shredding the fabrik of the Brik timeline. While the overall sweep of history remained similar, holes torn by chunks of the SpaceMan universe tangled the flow of time with new snarls and dramatic complications.

In the altered history that formed, the Royal bloodline in their Yellow Castle remained pure and strong, but in this new reality their countryside was overrun with strange flattened trees and the terrifying anthrofig abominations of Furbuland. In the industiral era, the hat-based caste system that once maintained civic order became frayed at the edges: some minifigs in policeman hats started driving cars instead of becoming policemen, while others put on never-before-seen chefs' hats in a direct insult to tradition. Others still bucked the system entirely, going hatless and wearing nothing but hair like a common girl minifig - even though they were male! Chaos reigned in the streets.

Inevitably, the SpaceMen rose up once again, this time in warships of even greater sophistication and variety, and broke the universe even more efficiently than before. Shards of the second universe ripped forwards and backwards through time, along with extra shards left over from the first universe; Brik history was tangled and disrupted even further.

A new, third history developed, incorporating the broken pieces of the first two. After the third timeline was shattered, there was a fourth, and then a fifth, in never-ending recursion. With each catastrophic iteration, the reformulated universe received unpredictable influxes of minifigs and constructions from all the realities that had gone before, becoming all the more sophisticated and complex. Plants and animals appeared in greater variety, the pure Royal bloodline split into endless factions, and the original handful of citizen castes multiplied into unintelligible minifig multitudes. The great Yellow Castle became lost to obscurity after the sixth repetition (R-1,983), and even the mighty SpaceMen finally succumbed to the effects of one broken universe after another, first splitting into more and more faction colors, then from colors into Trons (R-1,987), and finally into the current spectrum of mishmash space factions, far removed from their purer forebears, the undiluted Spacemen who still always erupt at the close of time to destroy the universe again.

Because ABS, whether used as a construction material or as fuel, has the side effect of warping time and space, and because SpaceMen's inborn compulsion to kick ass must inevitably destroy every universe and rip all histories into a nonlinear tangled mess, time in the BrikWars universe is inconsistent and poorly-defined. One might leave in the morning on a brisk walk, and find oneself arriving home 300 years in the past. Two sides of the same street might be on separate planets one day, and interdimensionally superimposed on one another the next. How does one organize a timeline when such extreme distortions are possible?

BrikWars historians order their chronologies by numbered Reconstruktions, numbering each reality according to the number of previously destroyed universes by which it was influenced and from which it inherits recycled elements. The timeline in which SpaceMen first arose has been assigned the number 1,978, after Brik science determined that the destruction of the SpaceMen's universe retroactively created 1,977 previous generations of reality leading up to their own. None of these previous Retconstruktions (or "Retcons") contain minifigs, but as they get closer to R-1,978, devolved forms of pre-minifig life begin to appear. These proto-life forms occasionally reappear in later Reconstruktions, and may paradoxically be the source of the protofig bioengineers responsible for creating the SpaceMen in the first place, who would then go on to bring about the existence of the preceding universes in which the protofigs evolved.

Brik theologians theorize that, because the Universal Ass-Kicking created 1,977 previous generations of reality, it must have created exactly 1,977 generations to follow, and the universe will finally run out of ABS in R-3,955.

Naturally, the great powers of history don't simply disappear at the end of their Reconstruktion. As pieces of their previous realities shatter forward into new ones, remnants and echoes of their minifig civilizations linger on in the garage sales and discount shelves of history. Some are forgotten and fade away, allowing themselves to be absorbed into new, more popular factions, while a few, such as the Royals, regroup and persist for several Reconstruktions in a seemingly endless series of evolved forms.

Some Humans have noted curious synchronicities between Reconstruktion numbers and Earth years, based on the construction brik sets appearing on retail shelves. The all-destroying invasion of Poop Dragons from the Negaverse in Reconstruktion 2,003, for example, happens to correspond exactly with Mega Bloks' Dragons line knocking Lego out of its rightful #1 Construction Toy spot in the year 2003, complete with its "Piece-with-Only-One-Purpose" premolded dragons. These are complete coincidences, of course, and no attention should be paid to crackpots and their conspiracy theories.

Really fleshes out the narrative.

[Zupponn]

Yep, I remember that.

[Bragallot]

Bam. Location Template. I don't like not knowing how to do things.

Nice!

[Natalya]

That article used to say Galaktik Revolution instead of Rekonstruction.

[stubby]

Yeah, G.R.s were from back when we were operating in a single galaxy. Now that we have galaxy-spanning empires and inter-galaxy conflicts and multiple dimensions etc. I realized we needed something more universal. And reconstruction is much more bricky-sounding.

[Falk]

Bam. Location Template. I don't like not knowing how to do things.

http://brikwars.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hus
Added capital to it. I guess I could change the template too.

[Natalya]

I guess G.R. looks and sounds cooler. Can we maybe go with Galaktik Rekonstruktion or Great Rekonstruction? Galaktik in this sense is ambiguous and could be referring to every galaxy in the BrikVerse.

[Tzan]

Mike made the change over a year ago, but I also prefer GR.
Its sort of like the Monty Python sketch about communist revolutions.

Like BC and AD, time needs two letters.
FU - Fabrication Universal (this is not a serious suggestion)

But yaknow, whatever.

[Scratch]

I have been thinking that a Rekonstruction is what happens after a huge battle, where the players are frantically trying to figure what is attached to where and who's severed head this was. Eventually they give up trying to get everyone the same way as before, and someone goes home with a different pair of pants.

[Quantumsurfer]

Added capital to it. I guess I could change the template too.

I've been using it for all locations, so I tried to keep it generic. No reason we can't make a specific planetary or country type template, though.

Yeah, G.R.s were from back when we were operating in a single galaxy. Now that we have galaxy-spanning empires and inter-galaxy conflicts and multiple dimensions etc. I realized we needed something more universal. And reconstruction is much more bricky-sounding.

I prefer this. R is simpler and more unique sounding. The word "reconstruction" is the most intuitive representation of the time concept for two reasons I can see. First, BW is a "construction toy" wargame, so it reinforces the association with bricks in the minds of players. You could just as easily play BrikWars with G.I.Joes but it loses a lot of its charm. Second, Rekons and Retkons are perhaps the strongest identifying setting concepts in BrikWars, especially to newcomers. The galaxy/interstellar/star empire stuff is only a part of the BW canon whereas Rekons virtually define the setting and explain how genres can collide. Lots of universes have gratuitous, often silly, violence. And we've seen plenty of settings where spaceship cultures interact with medieval ones. But few that are like Rekons (i.e. the universe being torn apart and rebuilt cyclically...a very construction toy theme). The coincedence concept spawns from this and allows for nearly unlimited potential. I imagine this has much to do with the idea that construction toys are creative engines. BrikWars derives its uniqueness from a focus on the destructive side of creativity.

I think I'd have to take issue with the word galaktik in the time scheme because, as Stubby said, BW has grown significantly beyond even the idea of multiple galaxies. We've gathered up every sci-fi and fantasy trope we could muster and have thrown the lot at it. We've got alternate universes, pocket dimensions, and entire co-existent planes of existence now. Natalya, your suggestion of Great Rekonstruktion is a good one though. We wouldn't have to change anything and older players could still use the G.R. time stamp because they'd mean the same thing. Others could just choose their preference. In-universe, most characters would just say Rekonstruktion or Rekon because people love to shorten things. Just like we just say "two thousand thirteen" or something. We can amend the Rekon article to note that the full description of a time era involves the word "Great."