I am working on a semi-realtime strategy game, but I have run into a little difficulty with where to draw the limits in gameplay. There are just damn too many possibilities. My basic concept runs as "something along the lines of Civilization/The Settlers", where you start out small in long past times and through research etc arrive in a modern technological world to do stuff.

One of my ideas was that akin to Civilization, you start out as a tribe and the whole thing goes into managing a country and political relations.

The other was that you start a business in the stone age, and engage in all kinds of unfair business strategies and political manipulation over the course of history.

And then it'd be possible to combine the two approaches. One of the things I particularly disklike about Civ is that warfare is the dominant thing in gameplay, all the effort ultimately goes into having better weapons than your opponents and nuking the hell out of them. That is something i'd like to avoid.

Or, if there would be many people liking to nuke each other, I could imagine a nice warfare game, though that would not have the aspects of long-term technological and economical/political evolution. Just burning oil rigs and stuff

So, please let me know what of the above babbling makes sense, and what you'd suggest.

personally I'd take either have a political game about business, trading, economy etc. and have the developement of nuclear weapons and such as a scare tactic to forcing alliances or annexing canada

or you could stick to the basic mould of strategy games and have it about war, fighting and developing technologies.

You could do them both if you wanted to put in the work, I'm happy to play either and both really. The main factor is whether you actually want to focus on either the politics or the fighting depending on the game your creating.

just my 2 cents,

~skrew

A way to keep people from nuking the crap out of the computer, would be to have certain faction only resources or technologies, which are extremly helpful to your civilization. You can get a hold of them two ways: making peace and trade with your neighbors, or declaring war and capturing, but not blowing up, their cities and labs. There should be a bit of a deterrent to this, like as you don't fully understand the technology, it's only half as effective as if you had made peace.