What if there was a civ game that were from the start up team-based and multiplayer?

I have this stuff itching in my brain for a long time. What if we had a Civilization-Like game, multiplayer #and# team-based from the bottom up? Where democracy (or kingdom, or dictatorship) is the real deal?

I think that, for that to work, each player in a team may have one or more assignments: a member may be a city mayor, an army leader, a trade tycoon, a spy agent, a diplomat, a minister of research, or the civilization leader.

The game will be placed in a server that will have turns every, say, 10 minutes, and the game will be made sufficiently micromanaged in a way that one person, alone, can't handle the game. The game will go on, inexorably, at a specified schedule: if people leave the game or get disconnected, the position is open for grabs by other people.

This means that for each task there would be a different game: spy agents will have to handle actual spy actions: infiltrate buildings, assassinate influent people...

Trade tycoon will have to deal with manually handling the cargo and movement of each trade route, and will strive for profits...

A research minister will have to handle their scientists and execute research interchange missions, build and maintain universities...

A city mayor will have a kind of Tropico-Like game... Build a strong infrastructure to make the city thrive and grow. And also will have to deal with war-like situations, such as city sieges.

And there could be also subversive roles: new people could enter a civ game as a barbarian leader, for example... Or as a rebel...

And the ultimate goal is actually to make a *planet* that will withstand the test of time: survive the plagues, extraterrestrial invasion, asteroid collisions, the master of all volcanoes... Or have two planets, and colonize mars...

Awesome idea. I would definitely want to play in something like that!

I'm looking for people willing to help me build the specs for this... I'm also thinking on a way of development where modders can get $$$ for their mods...

For starters, the application will be client-server: that is, people will log to a server to play. And the *client* can be developed by one *or more* third parties: there will be a concrete protocol specification that client applications will read and interpret. People willing to have a cuter interface may buy a AA level client, people willing for less bells and whistles and more functionality may have another type of client, entirely. Even spreadsheet-based if so they want...

The AI will be specified/ developed by players/third parties. Scripts to be run on the server will be processed by the server in a time-sharing, limited time way, so there will be no way that crackers may cause a Denial-of-Service attacks (for example, by placing an infinite loop routine inside the scripts). The client will be able to upload the scripts to be used. If the player time is up, the AI they specified will kick in to finish the movements, making the situation where a player who gets disconnected return to the game to see it's *ss kicked less likely.

By placing the model simulation at a server, we may dedicate it's full resources to actual modelling and simulation, making complex economic / environmental simulations possible: so we will have a very dynamic map, with livestock growth simulation, finite resources, environmental stress...

And by placing the AI specification at the client, the use of efficient AIs will be game-changing... And fair, due to the limitations that the AI will have: players who want to deal with stuff by hand will still have a fair chance. And the old complaints that the AI is too weak will be culled out from the game.