The few of you who've been keeping up with my LP of Europa Universalis 3 probably realize I'm a big fan of Paradox interactive. The games are absolute glorious breaths of fresh air from the smog of the mediocrity of modern gaming.
I do feel that there are certian things lacking, things I would do differently. For example, the world is carved up in exactly the same way at the start of the game, and the world is exactly the same world. If I were to make a big dramatic change to say, Crusader Kings, I would introduce concepts found in Dwarf Fortress just to start with. Procedural generation of the game world, procedural generation of family lines and characters, procedural generation of cultures, and lastly procedural generation of religions, and finally procedural division of the game world into individual territories.
It would not need to be anywhere near as deep as Dwarf Fortress, of course, though the more I think about it, the more I think that this idea could in fact be a part of the finished Dwarf Fortress… Anyway, it wouldn't need to keep track of more than a character's general appearances and a few statistics relevant to leadership abilities and their overall status.
By necessity of random generation, certain things would have to be very different. Events would have to be extremely generalized to apply to a virtually limitless number of possible scenarios. There could never be events that trigger to the same country at the same time every game. While most of the events in Crusader Kings, as an example, are this way, they are also narrow in scope due to the nature of the game. It is Crusader Kings after all; you never get the chance to play anything other than a christian monarchy without hacking the game, and thus the range of events is necessarily limited to the confines of this government type.
For example, while it is important in a Monarchy to groom your heir to be prepared for leadership, one of the principle focuses of Crusader Kings, that cannot be the focus of a Republic. In addition, several of the things like keeping track of piety and how much you give to the Church may not be as important, or even relevant at all for leaders, in a given cultural or religious group.
I need to think on this idea further. Expand on it, explore the feasibility. taking things one step at a time, the first step is probably to tackle the generation and division of the map and rendering it, which for me will probably be the second most difficult thing after the GUI. Never been good at graphics, but I can shuffle numbers around like an IRS agent.
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Topic: Just a rambling idea... (Read 628 times)