It's a fault that plagues almost all grand-scale strategy games. Because you always expand and expand and expand, you'll come to a point where you have 20 cities and can't really be bothered to check most of them out. This was mostly dealt with in Galciv2 with the specialization of planets, just have your planet full of some building and you don't need to manage it much at all after that.
Now, I don't know the scale of the game, whether you really do expand uncontrollably and end with dozens of cities or not, but there is an interesting mechanic that might be suited to deal with it.
You could use a system of "action points" where you have a certain amount of them each turn, and must carefully think where to invest them. Maybe you want to move an army? Or perhaps build something in a city? Casting a magic spell would be nice too, or engaging in diplomacy. Decisions, decisions.
This would certainly lower the amount of time spent on each turn as you can only do a certain amount of things(and especially lower the amount of time the AI thinks about it's turn, I suspect), and so your decisions would be very important, and it would somewhat "force" you to a certain style of play. (If you have huge armies, you'll be spending most of your action points in moving them, and such)
There are many disadvantages to this idea as well, especially for the people who want to tinker with everything, but I think it has enough merit to at least think about it.
It's a bit like boardgames. But the computer can handle such things. It just needs what civ4 has : a quick way to supervise your whole empire with ths lists that can access each city build queue.
But I like the action points thing. It's a bit like logistics. And it could have some way to improve it like telepathy or assigning mayor to your towns. And you would give them general orders and they would try to respect them .. or not (if you have a city with a low alliegeance, the mayor wouldn't listen to you and construct the thing HE thinks are needed for his town).
That would give more influence to an alliegance system and the counter-measure you could take like spying and inspiring rebellion.
I'd like to see a command points system and possibly a regiments system similar to Kohan (but more detailed since game is turn-based) to help prevent infinite unit sprawl,
Are you guys familiar with the game Master of Orion 3? I followed that game really closely during development and they had the same concept built in- just because you *can* do anything doesn't mean you should be able to (or want to). This sounds great, right?
Well, as development for that continued, they kept running into problems. How many points should changing a fleet design cost? How does one balance out races with high levels of points with those without? The list went on. And as this kept plaguing their development team, the game itself (resulting from scope creep and mis-management) kept coding, and coding, and coding while running into problem. Finally they had enough. Their solution? Add in a timer.
Really, that's what they wanted- forcing a user to use their time wisely. I'm not sure how many people used that option for games, but I didn't (a lot of games with limits on time just stress me out).
I like the concept, but it's the application I'm really concerned about. Where I whole-heartedly is the micro-managing as your empire grows. GalCiv 2 really suffered from this (although the 2.0 patch for Twilght of the Arnor addresses this somewhat). Civ 4 does have a nice empire management tool and one SD would be well advised to emulate. I hope testing of Elemental is done on a huge map to identify some of the micromanagement needs early on, as that will only help streamline gameplay.
A point system to spend on improvements and such is a good idea (has anyone played Battle for Middle Earth?) and one that adds in a reward system with cool effects/bonuses without much micromanagement.
I followed it as well very dilligently, but enough of that. MOO3 is a game of hellish bureacracy, it's more of a simulation than a game anyway.
A very well designed way of handling it can be found from Armageddon Empires, a turn-based hex game where you control an empire in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and try to squash others. That's really where I got the idea from. The choice of how to invest your points is quite well handled in it, and I think anyone interested in the concept should try it. There's a free demo on their website.
This is why I've always hoped, that somebody at some point, would create a 4x fantasy game, where you had to manage your resources indirectly, the way a leader does in real life, and making this premise a part of the core gameplay. Create a command interface, that allows the player to only see detailed information about the are that his avatar is actually in (a fog of war that is not only on the map), The rest of his information, should be based on what he remembers from visiting other places before, along with intelligence reports. Then the player can only directly change things in the area his avatar is in, and before leaving a place, he would issue commands and pass laws to different AI's (the city mayor, the general of the army in the area, the merchants). MAybe he could expand his intelligence network with better logistics stats, magic, better advisors allowing him more control, even control at a distance at some point. I would just love to see indirect control and AI work.
We could even have it that depending on how morale and or loyalty is the mayor will or will not follow orders. At which point went you come back to the city and find out he betrayed you, you have him beheaded.
Then again I prefer to be omnipotent and be able to see what is happening in my towns just as it is in Galciv. It's more hands on. I would hate to have to go and visit all my towns to make sure my orders are being followed. It's just to heavy.
An indirect management system is very interesting. It also provides a game mechanic skeleton to build up a more immersive interface where the mayors, viceroys, generals, etc are all distinct characters to be interacted with, with their own personalities and agendas.However such a system (even without said character personalities) is quite complex to implement and tune for fun.Also, this is a fork in the road for the design of a 4x game. If you go with indirect management it can be difficult to provide an "optional" classic-able-to-manage-every-detail direct management mode without having to duplicate significant parts of the development effort.While I would like to see a good indirect management 4x game someday, for this one I'd rather see a classic approach augmented with robust micromanagement "power tools" that make it easy to quickly process information about the empire and issue orders to each city and unit. As a concrete example: the "view all cities screen" should be similar to the GC2 "colonies" screen but with:- ability to add a wide range fields (columns) to the view, like:-- a field saying how many of building X are in the city-- a field saying how many of unit X are in the city-- a field saying whether the city is under the effects of enchantment X- ability to sort by and filter by each field (population, food production, industrial production, the custom ones from above, etc)- shift and control clicking to select multiple cities (and right click to change the orders of each one in the selection)- can create custom labels and assign one or more cities to each label (a city can have more than one label)- right clicking brings up a quick menu that allows:-- change building production in all selected cities to X-- change unit production in all selected cities to X-- apply label X to all selected cities-- remove label X from all selected cities that have it-- queue up city enchantment X for all selected cities (if there's a spell queue, which would be helpful)
The best effort in this direction that I've played is Alpha Centauri. In the space 4x genre, it's also by far the most immersive game I've played. I don't know how many really sophisticated hero units the game will be able to support, but maybe it really is time to try doing this right.
Maybe the devs can make the really neat notion of "a fog of war that is not only on the map" the way to balance a next-generation set of micro-management support units with features that meet the info and control appetites of folks who are fond of feeling omnipotent and/or omniscient.
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