Making alien aggressiveness optional post 1.0
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It bothers me that I've never played a game where some race doesn't go after military superiority in a big way and where that race doesn't *always" choose to attack the militarily weakest races right off the bat.
Unless I am just playing wrong and don't know it, I'd prefer a game where the alien's choice of what kind of end-game to pursue is not automatically a military one first and foremost. Certainly they should keep track of what's going on and try to keep up, but that doesn't necessarily have to lead to a vicious cycle of competing militarys that always ends in war.
The game has so many other interesting aspects, but I am always forced to gain military superiority and then I achieve a cultural win simply because my superiority always depends more on resources, productivity and research than on warships and the sheer numbers of Terrans guarantees overwhelming cultural superiority. In fact, besides military, cultural and technological, are there any other realistic win conditions left? Are economic/trade wins even possible?
I'm not slamming the game by any means, I just think that it has the possibility to be a lot more subtle and interesting if war wasn't always so inevitable.
Maybe a choice of initial conditions (post 1.0) that allow you to decide on a game's warmongering factor with a slider? That would determine things like how close militarily is "close enough" for a race to be comfortable; how far under militarily triggers a panic buildup; how likely it is that a particular race will go after a military win as opposed to some other; how likely it is that there will be a UP issue voting on the sharing of all military technology (rather than all technology) from that point on; or how likely it is that races will vote to share if that comes up.
That UP issue might be worth considering in 1.0 if enough of the necessary plumbing is in there (I know, I know, 1.x).
I also think, in a way, that galactic resources contribute to the run up to war. Perhaps an option to make galactic resources work more like real-world resources. That is, make them randomly finite and allow new resources to appear randomly (be "discovered") throughout the game. That way, even if one race has a lock on all the military or research resources, they might not forever. And the more heavily they mine those resources, the quicker they are going to run dry, so it would behoove a race to balance immediate need against the benefit of keeping capabilities in reserve.
-Robert
Unless I am just playing wrong and don't know it, I'd prefer a game where the alien's choice of what kind of end-game to pursue is not automatically a military one first and foremost. Certainly they should keep track of what's going on and try to keep up, but that doesn't necessarily have to lead to a vicious cycle of competing militarys that always ends in war.
The game has so many other interesting aspects, but I am always forced to gain military superiority and then I achieve a cultural win simply because my superiority always depends more on resources, productivity and research than on warships and the sheer numbers of Terrans guarantees overwhelming cultural superiority. In fact, besides military, cultural and technological, are there any other realistic win conditions left? Are economic/trade wins even possible?
I'm not slamming the game by any means, I just think that it has the possibility to be a lot more subtle and interesting if war wasn't always so inevitable.
Maybe a choice of initial conditions (post 1.0) that allow you to decide on a game's warmongering factor with a slider? That would determine things like how close militarily is "close enough" for a race to be comfortable; how far under militarily triggers a panic buildup; how likely it is that a particular race will go after a military win as opposed to some other; how likely it is that there will be a UP issue voting on the sharing of all military technology (rather than all technology) from that point on; or how likely it is that races will vote to share if that comes up.
That UP issue might be worth considering in 1.0 if enough of the necessary plumbing is in there (I know, I know, 1.x).
I also think, in a way, that galactic resources contribute to the run up to war. Perhaps an option to make galactic resources work more like real-world resources. That is, make them randomly finite and allow new resources to appear randomly (be "discovered") throughout the game. That way, even if one race has a lock on all the military or research resources, they might not forever. And the more heavily they mine those resources, the quicker they are going to run dry, so it would behoove a race to balance immediate need against the benefit of keeping capabilities in reserve.
-Robert
