Tomorrow's Dawn
Heroes Never Die
This is more of a problem with allocation of Hammers, as others have said.
When you have nothing left to build but Units, that's what you're going to do.
And arbitrarily destroying your buildings so that you can rebuild them again is not the solution.
Adding more Projects or alternative non-military units is a better solution to this. I am wary of adding additional buildings though, because yields are already so great in the Modern Era.
That's true, but this implies that the unhappiness people experience living developed lifestyles is magnified and greater than that of people living in impoverished conditions, which is not true.
See this for example:
I'm sure gettingfrom coffee is still appropriate today.
(For me at least. I will goif I didn't have any)
They're "First World Problems". You have a tacit acknowledgement that these are minor inconveniences to your daily life but overall,
they are pretty trivial in comparison to the problems people have in war-torn or impoverished conditions that lack these luxuries or conveniences that they would otherwise use in everyday life. People are unhappy in developed lifestyles for reasons such as politics, financial status & economy, personal life drama, but I don't think you recognize these reasons are universal. They just have a couple less reasons to worry about due to their affluence, reflected by the Happiness values those resources provide and the difference between those who have access to these resources and those who do not.
(Sorry, to use you as an example, merijn. I feel the same way about Spices <curry>)
There is quite a bit more to micromanage in the Modern Era.
Set aside Turn Times for one, and this actually a point I want to bring up
with all of you, concerning the Modern Era.
In games where I do play through the Modern Era, I can spend anywhere from 3-10 minutes micro-managing and playing through a turn.
That's 20 turns an hour at my quickest and 6 turns an hour at my worst pace (not counting load times, which averages out to about three and a half or so minutes total at 20 turns, and a whole minute at 6 turns)
The average ends up being somewhere around 12-13 turns per hour.
If I'm spending 3-10 minutes on a single turn, that is certainly enough action for me.
Actually, if I had it my way, at least America should be a conditional spawn.
I personally feel that I would get rid of the majority of civ spawns post-Tamils, but I don't act on this feeling because I understand that while this is supported by the Butterfly Effect,
there isn't an efficient way to generate or even think up all the different incomprehensible cultures that would have emerged or evolved with timeline divergence.
We thus use existing civs as a result.
And we already connect civilization respawns to instability.
This is why we don't treat colonies the same. They have no corresponding civ.
The game also wouldn't be fun if colonies just broke away constantly from you however.
Again, these developments should be a result of the player's poor management and not some invisible roadbump.
Even in Europa Universalis, which has many of the revolt and instability features you are looking for,
it's certainly possible and doable for people to just colonize the entire globe briskly and without too much trouble.
The design principle this evokes is the problematic one of artificial difficulty.
In many RPGs, developers tend to do this to raise difficulty:
You have a baseline "Normal" difficulty that sets the bar for enemy stats.
In "harder" difficulties, developers just apply a multiplier to the enemy stats like a x2 or a x4 to attack and defense and etc. and call it a day.
That is artificial difficulty, wherein true difficulty would be akin to giving the enemies a few extra moves to cover their weaknesses in the "Normal" difficulty or other nasty things it can do the player.
Civ does this too, AIs are given a myriad of advantages over the player in the absence of true difficulty on the higher difficulties.
Consider that on Deity, AIs begin with Archery and other goodies and play the game at essentially the Noble difficulty.
The AI is not any "smarter" and you can still use the same gamey tactics to play against them, except now, those gamey tactics are required to beat them because they would be nigh unbeatable based on the amount of difference in development between you and the AI otherwise.
These are things thrown in the player's way for no other reason but to spite them.
And people do not react to these mechanics well. Take Super Smash Bros. Brawl for example.
Sakurai is almost a black name for many gamers because of a single mechanic he added to make the game "anti-competitive".
Tripping. In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, your character could randomly "trip" and become vulnerable for a second or two,
for no other reason other than "you're to trying to move around too much" or "move with too much complexity", something you HAVE to do to win.
There is a reason why Super Smash Bros. Melee has a dedicated, thriving community,
and why Super Smash Bros. Brawl just mostly have people modding the game to become more like Melee.
TL;dr: The colony breakaway mechanic as is (when unstable) is already good.
People associate their bad management as the reason for the breakaway.
This provides positive feedback that the player is encouraged to learn from.
Your suggested mechanic (colony breaks away for no reason)
has no such rationale that triggers the outcome, thus the expected outcome, is player frustration, as there is no identifiable trigger.
It's not by era. Gradually, as more civs discover Military Tradition, and stay in contact with other, they will form factions and sign DPs with each other while plotting war. You could say this happens around Industrial.
Agreed.
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