Awesome, i alternate between being the voice of reason or the voice of need-more-elven-babes-in-platemail-bikinis.

The whole point though, it that in a 4x game, unless the civs are pretty even, reversals are almost impossible without outside intervention. Once one civ gets an advantage you end up in a snowball postion where one side gets crushed. Trying to jump in and save a civ that has lost 90% of its territory is either pointless or gamebreaking. The only time you could really alter the outcome is when the sides are well balanced, but thats when you don't want to be interferring.

Although i have vast respect for SD, i just don't see how they can maange to make a losing civ stay a viable threat without giving the losing civ an i-win button. And that would be pretty unpleasent for the player with the winning civ who outplayed the other guy too.

Re the mop-up chores question, it really depends on how good the UI will be at minimizing repetitive tasks. As a non-competitive singleplayer type, I very much like the general idea of being a bit fuzzy on how close a rival is to ending the game. Especially if a good intelligence network can help reduce that fuzz more or less in proportion to the intel-counterintel resource totals for you & the faction you want to know about.

Actually the quote is from another thread.

Randomness is good, randomly being given a one or two use meteor spell when your or the AI losing is bad?

Aye, I agree with your espionage focus, although I love poring over my game graphs at cup of tea time, I think covering them with research-dispeling fog would be a very satisfying game dynamic. I guess the question in this however, is would the A.I. be able to infer the meaning that a human player would once "Flanders is pushing hard on quest" was revealled. Coming from a total n00b space...I suspect that programming an A.I. to assess "what it doesn't know yet" and act adroitly would be exceedingly difficult.

Um...hope that's clear...try this: If unveiling victory data will effect a priority shift in the AI, then I think it could only be an all or nothing scenario, because if you only got info on one team, then the A.I. could only respond to it as "biggest" threat because it doesn't have any comparables.

Lol, I think the biggest fear there is that "randomly" doesn't sit well amongst the conceptual pattern you have provided. But aside from that yes, getting an "out" card like that, especially to the point of learning to rely on it, would be annoying. I think this is a question that crops up often in games with multiplayer : Random versus balance. THe idea that these two titans are locked in unresolvable struggle has always bugged me, I don't see why we can't have both.Sure it turns out unfair for some players sometimes...so what?...diversity is interesting.

Perfect balance on the other hand, is to me the precondition of the golden path...that is, one strategy to rule them all. Er...okay rambling off-topic now...will give this more thought in effort to add context.

I like this idea. Since my empire of nightmares and horror would be immune. Failing to reach your quota of fish mined per day would lead to being added to the que for execution and transformation into a zombie for my ever increasing armys of the dead. A bunch of bandits who can't even reach an acceptable FM/D won't even faze the gears of my empire of pure evil. Perhaps one of my mutant custom bred super children who craves only blood and destruction can take a few ghouls and rip up the bandits for my amusment.

Actually, if i went hardcore evil empire, it would be kind of cool if every now and then a "Chosen One" would pop up and try and bring balance to the force or whatever by going on a quest to kill me. And i could laugh as my minions rip him apart.

But yes, it would be kinda cool and actually make a bit of sence if larg empires tended to attract more problems then small nations. Look at china for example, they have ethnic tensions along pretty much thier whole western border, the gobi desert is expanding southward into thier farmlands, they have trade arguments with damn near every other country, internal problems, global warming is going to sink thier eastern coastline where something like 20% of thier population lives. Being big lets you have big armys and big econemies, but it brings big problems.

Too true. If there is one strategy to win all the time, it simply becomes a matter of who can machine through the motions the fastest, which is great for high level competitive play, and horrible beyond words for things like fun.