@North King, I can only say that the thought occured to me: things like the current financial crisis etc don't seem to happen in NESing. Admittedly most NESes don't take place in the modern era, but anyway I agree the model of limitless growth seems unrealistic.
I guess you could prevent spending on the economy altogether, and make it so that you have to take out of the economy as much as you need via taxes etc, with the possibility of decreasing your long-term income and causing unhappiness etc (I remember at least one NES did this already, though I can't remember which). And ontop of that, add random fluctuations in the economy, or allow players to set the amount of regulation they want to prevent such things but have slower growth overall...
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[obsessivewierdness]
Civ4 Dilemma: as we all know the Socialist Republic of Native America is a great threat to world peace, a barbarian state with pretences to great power status, a state that is hiring evil Khmer airship mercenaries to incite fear and terror in all free nations. And so our second great colonial war (Operation Greater Justice) is being carried out to bring them into the enlightened co-prosperity sphere of Korea, and put us back above the evil Khmer Empire as the world’s leading power.
We capture two cities (B and A, offscreen) and prepare to attack another (E) with the bulk of our great expedition force of justice (F). But the natives have fooled us, while launching failed invasions of our nearby island colonies (macemen vs machine gun lolness) there were in fact gathering their main stack of doom on their mainland (C), with some seven cuirassier units, one war elephant, and a few catapults, pikemen and longbowmen.
City B has only three fortified riflemen to defend it (and two captured workers). Rifle unit at hill D has repelled some initial cuirassier attacks. Our main fleet with the galleons (G) can get adjacent to city B, but can’t enter the harbour in one turn. So it would take two turns to move any of our main forces at F back to B.
So I see four options:
1, Move fleet to outside B, and evacuate our three defenders to the safety of the ships. The natives will reclaim their city, and our brave soldiers at D will be abandoned to fate.
2, Move the three riflemen from the city to hill D. They probably have the same def advantage as in the city, and the enemy might not be so keen to attack, once they get their city back. Survivors might be able to join up with our main force (F) in following turns.
3, Move the riflemen from D into the city, and hope for a miracle. Half of the main force will press the attack at E, while the rest will sail to reinforce B if it can survive the turn.
4, Ask for peace, maybe after sneakily attacking and capturing city E first. Then resume a more careful campaign in ten turns time. But that is ‘gamey’, and we really want our colonial wars to be finished before the 20th century starts.
So, what would you do???
[/obsessivewierdness]
I remembered you say something about it a couple weeks ago.
) and other such stuff. So I got the 3.17 files without the full patch (too big to dl), got the 'Revolutions' mod/pack to add cool things like rebellions and splinter states (although it can get a bit crazy with AI overexpansion), better AI in wars, all civs at war with neighbours until both have discovered literacy (actual ancient wars happen), and 32 civs on a map. And then, I finally made my own map in the worldmaker thing, and placed civ's manually, with related civs placed near to each other. Even with the 'tectonics' map script, the maps were just not to my liking. So yeah now I'm enjoying it lots, but its taken three years and a lot of fiddling around 
