(I'm going to rant for a bit, just hear me out)
I my opinion, all the civilization games have taken a hard line approach to the world: technoilogy is seperated into nice little chunks, there are only a few different governments, you get the idea. I think an abstraction proccess really needs to be implemented relation to some of these areas.
technology has been talked about in other places with the blind researching and selecting general paths of research as opposed to specific technology, so i'll skip that.
There are so many different governments that it would be hard to make all of them for the game, a better aproach might be to take certain concepts and group them to form a government. You could take capitalism, representation in government, seperation of powers, constitution, etc. to create a democracy. Each idea would carry some good and some bad points, a constitution would give a higher happiness level, but would limit your ability to directly control citizens; capitalism would increase commerce drastically, but would also drastically decrease control of production (you could tell them to produce certain things, but you would have to pay them); and the others could basically be thrown together to form a government. Its been a long time since I played SMAC, so this might be how the social engineering works, but I can't remember.
I always have a hard time trying to understand why all the nations are so cut and dry: here, you can be the English, next game you can be the persians. Nations are the way they are becuase of where they started and their culture/beleifs/religion. Why is Carthage seafaring? Have you ever looked at where the real carthage is? It's more or less surrounded by desert, on the coast of a relativly calm sea. If your capitol is on the coast, you could be seafaring; on a river, commercial; in the hills or forest, industrious; surrounded by grassland, agricultural. The problem is, that the rest are harder to pin down on location, but could still be pinned down by actions in the early development of a nation, perhaps based on your initial choice of production for your capitol. By doing that you are left with the problem of each nation having a UU, but UU's in general are created during the peak of the nations power/culture/etc, aka - a golden age. With that in mind if there were different units for different technologies and culture groups, each nation could be individual, not cut from the mold a real nation.
not only would these changes add realism, they would make sure each game you play is unique.
I my opinion, all the civilization games have taken a hard line approach to the world: technoilogy is seperated into nice little chunks, there are only a few different governments, you get the idea. I think an abstraction proccess really needs to be implemented relation to some of these areas.
technology has been talked about in other places with the blind researching and selecting general paths of research as opposed to specific technology, so i'll skip that.
There are so many different governments that it would be hard to make all of them for the game, a better aproach might be to take certain concepts and group them to form a government. You could take capitalism, representation in government, seperation of powers, constitution, etc. to create a democracy. Each idea would carry some good and some bad points, a constitution would give a higher happiness level, but would limit your ability to directly control citizens; capitalism would increase commerce drastically, but would also drastically decrease control of production (you could tell them to produce certain things, but you would have to pay them); and the others could basically be thrown together to form a government. Its been a long time since I played SMAC, so this might be how the social engineering works, but I can't remember.
I always have a hard time trying to understand why all the nations are so cut and dry: here, you can be the English, next game you can be the persians. Nations are the way they are becuase of where they started and their culture/beleifs/religion. Why is Carthage seafaring? Have you ever looked at where the real carthage is? It's more or less surrounded by desert, on the coast of a relativly calm sea. If your capitol is on the coast, you could be seafaring; on a river, commercial; in the hills or forest, industrious; surrounded by grassland, agricultural. The problem is, that the rest are harder to pin down on location, but could still be pinned down by actions in the early development of a nation, perhaps based on your initial choice of production for your capitol. By doing that you are left with the problem of each nation having a UU, but UU's in general are created during the peak of the nations power/culture/etc, aka - a golden age. With that in mind if there were different units for different technologies and culture groups, each nation could be individual, not cut from the mold a real nation.
not only would these changes add realism, they would make sure each game you play is unique.
