Recent content by DaviddesJ

The market doesn't reward developers for making strategy games challenging. Make it even a little bit hard and the number of negative reviews you get on Steam is astronomical. People want to be able to crank it up to the hardest setting and win easily even if they aren't very good at these...

I think there are plenty of ancient examples of tensions between religion and science. But clearly we aren't going to agree.

"Faith vs Science" is fairly historical. Usually these two things have been in conflict throughout human history. Of course, they don't *have* to be. But if it keeps happening over and over, there are probably reasons for that in human psychology.

No, that just makes the game asymmetrical. Almost all computer games are asymmetrical, the AI players play differently than the humans. Most people playing these games don't actually want the computer opponents to play exactly the same as the human players, although you are not wrong that there...

It's perfectly reasonable to just give the AI players bonuses, to compensate because they can't or don't do quests, etc. Comes out basically the same.

I'd favor naming the difficulty levels Impossible Beyond Impossible Ultra Beyond Impossible just so that people can play at the easiest difficulty and win and still feel awesome about themselves.

It's an ego thing, unfortunately. People want to play on high difficulty *and* they don't want it to be hard, because they want to feel uplifted by their success. No, it's not very rational. :-(

But if you're taking civ-style games as a representation of the real world then there should be plenty of copying of designs in the game, too.

The other historical aspect of things like nuclear weapons is "leakage", the idea that when one country develops nuclear weapons other advanced nations aren't going to be far behind, partly because they can learn quickly from what their competitors do. Ideally, in many areas of research it would...

Your "accurate" model doesn't seem to be what actually happened in the last 65 years since the invention of nuclear weapons. To be accurate you have to make it possible for each nuclear power that has nuclear weapons to quickly build 1,000 or 10,000 warheads, as happened historically. If each...

Mutual assured destruction (once you attack a nuclear armed competitor you automatically lose the game) would make sense.

I find it hard to believe anyone reading this thread is concerned about spoilers?

If you want the computer opponents to be able to conduct offensives and to not easily get defeated just by cutting their supply, then you would have to invest an awful lot of resources into getting them to master this supply system. It seems like a complication that doesn't address a real...

This isn't too bad for human players. But it's way beyond what AI players can handle. You have to have a game that the computer opponents can play too, right? If the AI player can't manage and defend its supply lines, then it becomes way too easy to defeat.

Fine, I can think of lots of ways to change that. I just wouldn't introduce a supply system as one of them. FWIW I think it's intentional that it's relatively easy to "conquer the world" and it responds to what most players want. I agree it's not "realistic" but that isn't the goal.