Great, great examples guys.
SCENARIO ONE: ISRAEL AND THE MIDDLE EAST
In 50+ years, you can count the amount of actual war between these states in mere days. There are many more factors that are involved in this conflict, making it as interesting as it is.
Displaced Culture: There's another thread where I'm talking about this... but the idea is for a culture to exist without a state. For there to be Jewish culture floating around in the middle east, but no Jewish state. For there to be Palestinean culture floating around in the middle east, but no Palestinean state. You simply cannot model the scenario without these. If you create a city where the Palestineans are in control, then you've already resolved a key element in the conflict!
Terrorism: You can't model the conflict without terrorism. Less so state sponsored terrorism than terrorism from non-state actors. In the 1930s and 1940s, before the creation of Israel, Zionists bombed cafes and restaurants. In the past 50 years, without the creation of a Palestinean state, the Palestineans also committed many acts of terror against Israeli citizens. Terrorism was a symptom of a problem, and also the problem itself. Would the creation of a state reduce the violence? To model this scenario with state-controlled official army units, that would make this into a simple conquest. If the units can simply conquer territory, then you can easily eliminate the problem once and for all by destroying the units, and taking the territory back!
More Challenges to Nationalism: The idea that it was Israel against the rest of the Middle East would give too much credit to the idea of Arab unity. There were some kings who wanted to rule over the entire Arab world. This was the classical idea of Imperialism, where everyone pledges allegiance to a King or Emperor, who rules over a lot of people who might have little in common except their King. This was the Ottoman Empire. It crumbled, leaving many people who couldn't stand each other in its ashes. Some of them sought to re-create an imperialism. In some cases, there are still leaders in the Middle East who rule over lands with very little sense of National Identity, but only a sense of pledging allegiance to a dynasty, like the House of Saud. Imperialism is the opposite of Nationalism, to a large degree.
There was also the emergence of Arab Nationalism, which never really caught on. They didn't care about religion, and wanted to keep it out of their rule as much as possible, to forge greater unities even with Syrian and Lebanese Christians, and secularists all around. They faced competition with kings and emperors who would rather carve off a piece of the Near East for themselves and keep all the profits.
And then, of course, there was Pan-Islamism, which sought to forge an international unity with Muslims as far East as Pakistan and Indonesia, often to the exclusion of secularists, liberals, Christians and Jews all over these regions. This doesn't even begin to describe the difficulties between Sunnis and Shi'ites.
These three interests with their strengths and weaknesses feuded against one another. Egos of kings raged against those trying to forge a greater unity. Arab Nationalists crushed coups from religious zealots and greedy demagogues. And Islamists tore the region apart, challenging every leader to hold people of many denominations and sects together.
Sometimes Israel was the least of their enemies. Ultimately, they had to find ways to push the various political movements and ideologies in their countries. To allow them to do a sudden government shift would make the challenge way too easy, and totally imbalance the scenario against Israel!!
Vassallage: The Suez Canal crisis was a key moment in the history of this war. And you cannot model it without the idea of having an Egypt that was partially occupied by the British. For an Arabist like Nasser in Egypt, the Suez Canal was a symbol of colonial humiliation, hundreds of years of oppression by the Empire. For the British, the West, and Israel, the Suez Canal was a gateway to the other side of the world, and if Egypt were to control it themselves, it could be used to exclude and even assault Israel or others. Egypt decided to Nationalize the Canal, and the **** hit the fan, leading to another slew of conflict. And, of course, the conflict wasn't to conquer Egypt, but merely to resume the foreign occupation of the Canal, a kind of colonialism. To let the British outright conquer Egypt would be absolutely wrong. They couldn't merely conquer a city, they'd have to experience a kind of vassallage of the canal region.
Canals: Yep, if you're going to talk about the Suez Canal, you might as well build it. Not as a wonder, but as a real living breathing geographical structure.
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Which ties into the next topic I want to take up. International interests wanted to balance the politics of the region so violence wouldn't escalate between Israel and the rest of the Near East. But moreover, the USSR wanted to support communist parties in Iraq and Egypt. A few Arab Nationalists managed to convince the Western interests that the best way to fight communism was to fuel Arab Nationalism. All while Western interests wanted to ensure Israel's security, and keep the USSR out. All while many middle eastern interests wanted to maintain independence and non-alignment. Of course, modelling the cold war is an issue in itself, but is worth discussing. I hope to take that up next time.
But you can already see, in order to make the modern age more interesting, you need new conceptual frameworks to keep the game full of those historical quirks.
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