13-06-2004 01:43									#1
	Events form history... and Civ? Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

Pre scriptum: This came to me while playing www.nationstates.net : play 2 minutes/day for 2-3 days and you will understand pretty well. I found it genuine and think that it may bring something to Civ. You may have GalCiv in mind when we talk about building a nation by "random events". GalCiv certainly brang something but it was not meant to be as intrinsic and crucial as in Nationstates.net


In Nationstates.net practical decisions (to events) build the caracteristics of your country (economy, culture...). By your decisions, you get some consequences and build your country. Perhaps a bit like SMAC with its engeneering, but bringing the player into the action instead of a macro approach.

Just to see how it is, I played this little game for two weeks now and maybe there is some potential in such a system (cumulated into the rest)...

There are two general possibilities, which I believe cannot form the entire game model but bring a bit of punch (like in GalCiv):

1- Normal decisions have an impact

Examples:
You decide to go to war with a nation
--> civilization turns more militaristic, more imperialistic in some cases, etc.

You build barracks and force all citizens to be ready for war (Charlemagne did that and it worked well, in France)
--> civilization turns more militaristic


2- Decisions called "random events" have an impact

In this case, you really get random events as in NationStates (or GalCiv), but these random events really represent a global direction: it is not simply ONE isolated event, but should rather represent a tendancy just as we can say that Apollo project represented well the Soviet-US race for space. So an event could be presented, while it should I believe also give the "feeling" of a more complete context to a player.



Comments? I know it is not exaustive, but you get the idea and I would like to see if you believe that we can get something from Nationstates.net that was not there before (including GalCiv).


PS: I believe that to appreciate the positive sides of this idea, puting a few minutes in Nationstates is a must