rezaf
Cipher
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2015
- Messages
- 650
Yeah yeah yeah
If you can't expand because muh realism, you do what exactly?
When you're not busy expanding in a 4x game, you should be busy exploring, exploiting or exterminating I guess.
That said, I hate for example Paradox' tendency to put in artificial barricades to limit player expansion. Such methods are annoying and idiotic, imo.
What I meant was there ought to be some point when expanding further is only worth it for the galactic equivalent of geopolitics - you'd not get a significant ROI. And at some point, it should be in your best interest to let go off some of your control.
The best example I can think of is again from Paradox, in the vassal politics in CK2. You have a limit on how large your core are can be. You can go over that limit, but at a significant premium. Eventually, you WILL delegate some of your power - and once you grow big enough, there'll be quickly more power that you have delegated vs. power you directly control. This can lead to some pretty challenging situations in case of crisis - in CK2 this is usually the death of your ruler.
The CK2 system isn't perfect (and I totally think there should be a game option disabling vassal disloyalty alltogether for people preferring to paint the map their color), but it's a solid start.
Eventually (in space 4x terms), your advances should just propel you into a different ballpark. Say, early game you'd usually strive for a big populace with fertile planets to sustain them, with loads of people staffing your farms and research labs. Eventually, you'd develop AIs that'd research better than all your scientists ever could, and self replicating nanites that make all your factories obsolete. But maintaining all of that would require the output of powerful stars. Systems without planetary bodies worth colonizing would suddenly be extremely appealing, whilst all those planets with backwards people would lose a ton of their value. You'd want to delegate the busywork of managing them to AI governors, and a game should make you care little if those populations eventually are conquered or break away.
And so on and so forth.
I realized this is not the topic of this thread at all, so I'm putting this in a spoiler tag.
What I meant was there ought to be some point when expanding further is only worth it for the galactic equivalent of geopolitics - you'd not get a significant ROI. And at some point, it should be in your best interest to let go off some of your control.
The best example I can think of is again from Paradox, in the vassal politics in CK2. You have a limit on how large your core are can be. You can go over that limit, but at a significant premium. Eventually, you WILL delegate some of your power - and once you grow big enough, there'll be quickly more power that you have delegated vs. power you directly control. This can lead to some pretty challenging situations in case of crisis - in CK2 this is usually the death of your ruler.
The CK2 system isn't perfect (and I totally think there should be a game option disabling vassal disloyalty alltogether for people preferring to paint the map their color), but it's a solid start.
Eventually (in space 4x terms), your advances should just propel you into a different ballpark. Say, early game you'd usually strive for a big populace with fertile planets to sustain them, with loads of people staffing your farms and research labs. Eventually, you'd develop AIs that'd research better than all your scientists ever could, and self replicating nanites that make all your factories obsolete. But maintaining all of that would require the output of powerful stars. Systems without planetary bodies worth colonizing would suddenly be extremely appealing, whilst all those planets with backwards people would lose a ton of their value. You'd want to delegate the busywork of managing them to AI governors, and a game should make you care little if those populations eventually are conquered or break away.
And so on and so forth.
I realized this is not the topic of this thread at all, so I'm putting this in a spoiler tag.