I have decided to launch a forum in the first week of September. I am going to bite the bullet and pay the cost for a good system and support. It's worth it for peace of mind.
The following was a response I made to a private message. I am repeating it here because I think it might be interesting to you all. Something that has long bothered me in grand strategy games is that so much is simulated that the actions of an individual can barely have a noticeable effect on the world and it ruins the GAMEPLAY for me. The SuperPower and Shadow President games suffered from this, Crusader Kings to a lesser degree.
"Thanks for all of the feedback! We have a lot of the AI already in the game, just not all turned on. We are about to bring in the abilities and the Most Wanted screen, AKA the levelling/RPG lite system of Arms Dealer. The thing about deep strategy games with such grand scale is that it can be hard to know if your actions had any impact on the world around you. To me, this is enemy number one for the game design. I need to counter that without making things into a cartoon. How do you become powerful but without becoming a character from Dragon Ball Z or The Transformers? I think the answer lies in giving the player the ability to clearly effect the entire world, but give him many good, natural reasons NOT to do so. We make it so that being sly and stealthy, leaving little impact on the world is the desired end state and then when it seems that little is happening, the player has a sense of achievement. If I am any good at what I do, it will be a real outcome and not a trick. "