8 ms·

I want a sort of civilization-but-for-countries. E.g. you are the newly elected president of Afghanistan/North Korea/Iraq/Other etc - now go rebuild infrastruc

I want a sort of civilization-but-for-countries. E.g. you are the newly elected president of Afghanistan/North Korea/Iraq/Other etc - now go rebuild infrastructure etc, set policies, see how the country develops as a result. E.g. do you invest in universal healthcare, or transport infrastructure? Is transport infra required while your country is still largely subsistence farming?. What about education - save money there and spend on natural resource extraction? How will that play out over decades and centuries? It would be nice to have direct control over city-level layout etc - demolish this neighborhood for flood defences, put in railways, major roads etc linking different parts of your country (not sim city levels of simulation, more just at the major civil engineering level of that makes sense - happy for actual city population to grow organically as a result of major works). Civ gets close, but it's too high-level and more focused on conquest. I want to zoom in and have more control over where major irrigation canals get built, where to best build a nuclear plant, where that bridge should go or which mountains to tunnel through for a railway etc. So instead of the grid being the entire planet, the grid would just be one country. Edit: I am specifically interested in the "building" aspect (so think civ-style grid with units moving around doing things), and less so on simple a-vs-b decision game model you see in Democracy et al.

Siecje 4y ago
Have you played Democracy?
- tut-urut-utut 4y ago
  The concept of the game of "Democracy" is nice, but the issue is that its main goal becomes quickly winning the elections. And once you start listening to the majority and adapt your party policies to whatever the population wants currently, you keep winning the elections, but can't do much to influence what you think is right. If you really want to shape a country in your direction, autocracy, or dictatorship is the only way. Otherwise, you become just another populist leader that always wins elections but nothing changes. Just like in real life ;)
  - Taikonerd 4y ago
    > Democracy is a nice concept, but the issue is that its main goal becomes quickly winning the elections. And once you start listening to the majority and adapt your party policies to whatever the population wants currently, you keep winning the elections, but can't do much to influence what you think is right. So... it's pretty realistic then?
    - qorrect 4y ago
      Sounds exactly like the current implementation of democracy.
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        Except in current democracies there are lots of important popular issues that voters want addressed and yet politicians refuse to, because their owners are against it.
  - Siecje 4y ago
    I played Democracy 3 and you didn't have to get elected the first time. I reduced funding to religious schools and then the religious voter demographic eventually went away after a few elections and then there wasn't any opposition to science funding.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Someone should make a version of Tropico but it's a democracy and you're the media, deciding where things get built indirectly by choosing which stories to run.
    - piperswe 4y ago
      "Headliner" is a somewhat similar concept, though it's lacking the simulation aspect
  - kungito 4y ago
    Isn't that the point? It's harder to win while doing what is right? Or you want the game to reward unrealistic do-good scenarios?
kaoD 4y ago
You might enjoy Rebel Inc. It's a bit more abstract and counter-insurgency focused than your description, but sounds pretty similar. https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc
erehweb 4y ago
You might find Hidden Agenda interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_(1988_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_(1988_video_game...
- vijayr02 4y ago
  For a more general list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_simulation_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_simulation_game I recommend: Conflict: middle East political simulator Shadow President There's also an interesting one reflecting Stalin's challenges after world war 1 - he has to choose between guns and butter to prepare for the coming conflict with Hitler. Don't remember the name...
  - erehweb 4y ago
    Stalin's Dilemma. https://www.old-games.com/download/4428/stalin-s-dilemma https://www.old-games.com/download/4428/stalin-s-dilemma The author's "No Greater Glory" on the US Civil War is also very good.
    - vijayr02 4y ago
      That's the one, thanks!
pornel 4y ago
I'm currently obsessed with an idea of scaling SimCity-like simulation to a whole country. Since it's infeasible to place roads and buildings manually at such scale, it would have to have an AI to grow cities automatically based on simulated demand and higher-level policies.
- konschubert 4y ago
  Why sim city and not cities skylines? (I don't have an opinion either way, just curious.)
  - pornel 4y ago
    I've just used a classic name for the genre. I'm a big fan of Cities: Skylines. At a country scale some simulation techniques need to change. For example, tilemaps become ridiculously inefficient (a byte per 10m^2 becomes tens of GBs), so they either need some form of compression, or the simulation has to use vector-based maps instead (more like Cities Skylines). Another quirk is that at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter, and that starts looking just like a normal distribution of the simulation data you put in.
    - prionassembly 4y ago
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emergent+behavior+agent+based+simulation&t=brave&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emergent+behavior+agent+based+simu...
    - ouid 4y ago
      >at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter This is very untrue, which is why this problem is infeasible.
      - l33t2328 4y ago
assbuttbuttass 4y ago
I'm really enjoying Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic It lets you control a small country and build basically everything from scratch, factories, railways, housing. Honestly it hits most of the points you describe above.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ajmurmann 4y ago
Maybe City State? https://store.steampowered.com/app/774351/Citystate/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/774351/Citystate/
discardedrefuse 4y ago
I think the Tropico games covers a lot of this.
pgruenbacher 4y ago
U want victoria 3 game by paradoxplaza
tdrgabi 4y ago
Suzerain - does that, more from the political pov. You are elected president of a somewhat democratic country. Then you are presented with choices and the game starts.
- munk-a 4y ago
  I'd also highly endorse Suzerain - but I don't know if it's a great fit for them. Suzerain is essentially a political narrative game where the player is navigating through an amazingly deep set of pre-scheduled events and crises and trying to effect change. It's also strongly influenced by Turkish politics, specifically the rise of Erdogan, which was a very complicated time for Turkey.
DylanSp 4y ago
I think Paradox's games would be up your alley, with the upcoming Victoria 3 probably being the best fit due to its focus on economic details and sociopolitical dynamics.
- munk-a 4y ago
  Victoria 2 was an absolute favorite of mine. I'm excited to see what they'll manage to do with Victoria 3. Vicky 2 unfortunately suffered from a pretty rough UX beyond even what EU3 & HoI3 had in terms of information visibility and user interactions.
  - DylanSp 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm really excited too. Vic2 is my favorite concept of the Paradox games; simulating economics, industrialization, and mass politics like it does is a great idea, allowing for a grand strategy game where the everyday lives of your populace still very much matter. But the UI's not great, the economic simulation is kind of janky, it's much more railroaded and inflexible than the modern games, and it's extremely Eurocentric.
fxtentacle 4y ago
I would like to have a civilization where you start on earth and then mid-game you launch your rockets and colonize another planet with aliens.
- TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  Before we leave is somewhat similar. Build up a civ on 1 planet, scale to multiple planets, survive space whales... https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  This is basically what Civ 2 + SMAC/X is.
sogen 4y ago
There are plenty of boardgames to choose from: - World in Flames - Churchill - Fort Sumter - Food Chain Magnate
- sogen 4y ago
  Also - A Distant Plain
malfist 4y ago
This somewhat reminds me of Majesty series of games. You built cities and paid for people to be educated, but the goal was to defeat monsters, but your only control was to place bounties on them. The populous would do whatever they wanted.
criley2 4y ago
I have been thinking about this concept / similar concept for a long time. My chief complaint with Civilization games is that they've become a history-themed board game. A fun board game, but less and less it doesn't feel like a history simulator. The problem with "country" simulator is that countries are a more modern concept, the vast majority of human civilization doesn't feature strong nation concept. How do you model a country that goes from Villanovans to Romans all the way to Italians? How do you model a civilization which can boom and collapse? How can you set the systems up to support things like the mayan collapse or the bronze age collapse? The fall of the roman empire? Technological regression? How technology truly transforms culture, engineering, politics, etc? Adding +1 to a score is nice and dandy but how you simulate your nation having dynamic classes enjoying luxuries based on location, industry and technology? I want to see that the urban elite are using silver utensils while the farmers are stuck on wood. I want to see that the civilization used wood too fast and used it all up, causing a collapse. I actually envision the map as a grid with each grid holding information about the people there. Population, class, technology, industry, culture etc. A rural tile would have low population and be influenced by other tiles. An urban tile might be generating let's say `copper age 3` and in a radius around it for some distance, their tools would be upgrading towards that level. But invading and pillaging this urban tile might lead to those levels dropping, setting a region back in many ways. The hardest part I have is that I just want a pure simulation with no user input. Gamifying it ruins the purity of my simulation and leads to civilization the game!
- von_lohengramm 4y ago
  If you haven't already tried them out, I'd highly recommend the Rhye's and Fall of Civilization (RFC) genre of mods for Civilization IV. Civs spawn in their historical period (and location) and are given a set of historical goals. Maya may have been doomed to fail, but the historical victory goals make every country unique and interesting. A stability mechanic keeps countries in check and provides proper friction to nonsensical actions. Persia is much more capable of conquering and stabilizing the Middle East than say Japan would be. Economic downturns give instability; barbarians pillaging the Greek countryside could be the final straw leading to the collapse of Alexander's empire. Each civ also gets their unique power (before Civ 5 did it!) in addition to their unique unit(s) and building(s) that help them orient towards and accomplish their historical goals. Greece's Great Person generation bonus will help (and is probably necessary for) them to achieve their goals of being the research a number of techs. Persia's power helps them manage instability from maintaining a far-reaching empire. Overall, RFC essentially builds a new game on top of Civ4. The best part is that there's a number of RFC-derived modmods with varying locales and mechanics. Here's a few that I would highly recommend: * RFC Dawn of Civilization[0] - An actively developed fork of the original mod that keeps the "vanilla" feel and the global map. * The Sword of Islam[1] - A Middle East themed variant that although is long-abandoned is one of the most polished modmods * RFC Europe[2] - Self explanatory. Focused on Europe starting from the rise of the Franks ending with the Industrial Revolution. [0] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-dawn-of-civilization.533861/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-dawn-of-ci... [1] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-sword-of-islam-rfc-medieval-middle-east.373155/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-sword-of-islam-rf... [2] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/rhyes-and-fall-of-europe-starting-information.363679/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/rhyes-and-fall-of-eur...
rcfox 4y ago
It's somewhat old, but the Caesar series might be what you're looking for.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  Isn't that more of a city builder, like Sim City? I only ever played Pharaoh, so I may be off.
  - rcfox 4y ago
    It does start off like that, but I think after you start an industry within your city, you gain access to empire management, where you start organizing trade between other cities, building roads, managing armies, etc. It's been a long time though, so I might be misremembering.
    - forty 4y ago
      It's really mostly the cities, outside of the city management is really secondary (at least in Caesar and Zeus which I have played the most). I strongly recommend the whole series, they are really great games.
einpoklum 4y ago
Special bonus action subgame for Afghanistan: Exfiltrate stolen central bank funds from the US :-) https://therealnews.com/afghan-central-bank-calls-us-theft-of-7-billion-injustice-to-people-of-afghanistan https://therealnews.com/afghan-central-bank-calls-us-theft-o...
- hereforphone 4y ago
  Plus free equipment donated by the USA. Plus no media coverage at all covering your atrocities because the media is aligned with those that pulled out, so everyone's going to focus elsewhere (Ukraine as an example). I lived there for more than a year and a half. The things happening there now are terrible. But you don't know about it, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it right now. It's a massive tragedy.
rixrax 4y ago
That would be a fun game. Do as well as you might, and then in the end, you get screwed over by one or more of the global powers. Would you like to play a nice game of Kobayashi Maru?
pwillia7 4y ago
I'm sure it will end up costing $10k USD for all the DLC, but Vicky 3[1] might come near this in some ways... probably still too macro though. [1]https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/
- von_lohengramm 4y ago
  Unfortunately, Victoria 3 is rather unfun due to a number of fundamental flaws. The trade system is even more tedious micro than HoI4's trade system. Plus, the simplifications to the economic simulation introduced (chiefly infinite supply and complete lack of stockpiles) remove most fun mechanics (and a sense of realism). In Victoria 2, a very strong strategy as an early industrializer is to stockpile machine parts to delay other countries from industrializing. Victoria 3 simply has no analogue intentionally. Heck, Victoria 3's embargoes can't even be country-specific, they're good-specific and not even absolute! To top it all off, the developers are very explicitly encoding their political biases into the game's balancing. There is simply no reason to not be woke in Victoria 3. The only benefit that you receive for not being extreme lib-left is the ability to magically make more infrastructure appear with more "authority" mana, but the amount gained is insignificant. I'm sure mods will make the game somewhat more fun and I'm probably going to buy the game for that reason, but after playing the beta I have absolutely no faith in Paradox's ability to live up to Victoria 2 despite it being a heavily flawed game that ended up being mostly a commercial failure. The worst part about all of this is how much effort they're spending on completely inconsequential things, like replacing the icons for POPs with horrendously ugly, anachronistic 3D characters. Something tells me that it was just an attempt to recoup losses from CK3's development. But don't worry, I'm sure Paradox's newfound console audience will enjoy Import-Export Trade Deal Manager 2022 and keep the company afloat.
  - pwillia7 4y ago
    Well that's a bummer. Thanks for the info
muzani 4y ago
Check out the Clarus Victoria games, especially Predynastic Egypt. It's not quite a city builder, but closer to Civ. You start from building a settlement - some basic fields, huts, cemeteries, temples, barracks, and so on. It's nice, the map changes based on progress, and you end up growing from a city to taking territories up and down the nile. Marble Age is notable too and has some mechanics unique to the game. Story is mostly the same, but there's three city states with slightly different tech trees. E.g. you'd need to fight the Persians at some point. Athens would be the classic path of farming, making alliances, building a wall and armies. Spartans need to raid for slaves for growth, but hold off on killing neighbors before facing Persians. Corinth would be more trade based and consider buying mercenaries and buying out the other city states. I've bought all of them because they're an excellent ratio of time for fun as far as games go.
balaji1 4y ago
a similar but smaller policy based simulation game: You are the government leader of a nation and a new pandemic is starting. The science is not clear yet. How do you manage as the leader? What policies do you set up? What research do you pursue? Along with variables of budgets, economy, population morale, upcoming elections, travel, etc. If there was a good model of how the policies affect economy especially, it would reveal to the players how hard lock-downs are on the economy. If the dynamic between the federal state and city governments are modeled, it would show us how actual policy implementation happens. Just even how hard it is to test and track the spread of a pandemic. This could indicate to people how hard it is to lead in such a situation. At the same time help the player evaluate how things were handled recently.
axus 4y ago
CivMC is starting up tomorrow. It's a Minecraft server with 100+ people organizing into nations, building out their facilities, and arguing over land. The planning level decisions are a little simpler than you're looking for; where to put farms, roads, housing, vanity projects, and military structures, and when to replace them. But the fun is that you're working with real people to make it happen, instead of doing everything yourself. Nominally it's an experiment to see which government and organizational structures are the strongest, though being a multiplayer game it can devolve into who's fighting skills or automated bots are the best.
jollybean 4y ago
These are not the issues. If you were to 'take over Iraq' the first thing will happen is that one of your political challengers will use all of their means to usurp you. The issues are power, control, corruption, clan loyalty, incompetence, dysfunction, bureaucracy, radicalism, laziness, embezzlement, short nearsightedness, lack of key resources, petty infighting, political inconsistency and duplicity from supporting nations, bureaucracy etc.. What happens when the entire system is corrupt? The Judiciary, Police, the Army, the politicians? Everyone is trying to embezzle, selling votes, stuffing ballot boxes, using multiple ledgers, giving their family members jobs, handing out MD's to the rich kids? Some Billionaire owns the TV Station and is lying about you daily, destroying your ratings. There are protesters outside your door while you're trying to 'plan the buildings'. The guy who funded your campaign to ascension wants special state-guaranteed contracts. The rebels in that 'ugly border area' have killed some civilians and the locals want blood. ... and consider that many of the same kinds of constraints exist even in modern countries. 'Building Bridges vs. Schools' is completely pedantic exercise. They should make the game called 'Saddam' and see how a regular person might fare at that 'job'.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Pull the rug with negative interest rates and land value taxes and general anti rent seeking policies to make corruption highly unprofitable. If you get 10 million through corruption you are basically set for life in a positive interest/rent seeking environment because interest acts like a force multiplier on your original act of corruption that gets stronger over time. So your personal goal is to earn as much money as possible, as early as possible and through any foul means. I.e. the reward function strongly favours corruption. With a negative interest rate, corruption no longer guarantees a high social status and automatic wealth accumulation which means you will have to do honest work until you retire if you want to keep your money. Automatic wealth accumulation is the primary metric that makes money laundering profitable or not. If you can only make 25% of the stolen money clean you can still grow it exponentially over time after it is clean. If the land value tax is paid out as a dividend then everyone, even the destitute, would benefit from classic USA style homeowner corruption (artificially distorting the allocation of land by restricting it's use). Another form of corruption would be to spend your student loan on Bitcoin when it was still under one thousand and then skipping college because you "made it". You earned money without producing anything, you are a net negative to society if you don't work for even a little bit.
itzprintz 4y ago
Heart of Iron 4 mixed with Millennium Dawn: Modern day mod is something that resembles what you’re writing about, but on bit on a higher level. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777392649 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27773...
dwd 4y ago
What about Colonization? I probably spent more time playing it (and Alpha Centauri) than Civ.

Siecje 4y ago

Have you played Democracy?

tut-urut-utut 4y ago
The concept of the game of "Democracy" is nice, but the issue is that its main goal becomes quickly winning the elections. And once you start listening to the majority and adapt your party policies to whatever the population wants currently, you keep winning the elections, but can't do much to influence what you think is right. If you really want to shape a country in your direction, autocracy, or dictatorship is the only way. Otherwise, you become just another populist leader that always wins elections but nothing changes. Just like in real life ;)
- Taikonerd 4y ago
  > Democracy is a nice concept, but the issue is that its main goal becomes quickly winning the elections. And once you start listening to the majority and adapt your party policies to whatever the population wants currently, you keep winning the elections, but can't do much to influence what you think is right. So... it's pretty realistic then?
  - qorrect 4y ago
    Sounds exactly like the current implementation of democracy.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      Except in current democracies there are lots of important popular issues that voters want addressed and yet politicians refuse to, because their owners are against it.
- Siecje 4y ago
  I played Democracy 3 and you didn't have to get elected the first time. I reduced funding to religious schools and then the religious voter demographic eventually went away after a few elections and then there wasn't any opposition to science funding.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Someone should make a version of Tropico but it's a democracy and you're the media, deciding where things get built indirectly by choosing which stories to run.
  - piperswe 4y ago
    "Headliner" is a somewhat similar concept, though it's lacking the simulation aspect
- kungito 4y ago
  Isn't that the point? It's harder to win while doing what is right? Or you want the game to reward unrealistic do-good scenarios?

kaoD 4y ago

You might enjoy Rebel Inc. It's a bit more abstract and counter-insurgency focused than your description, but sounds pretty similar. https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc

erehweb 4y ago

You might find Hidden Agenda interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_(1988_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_(1988_video_game...

vijayr02 4y ago
For a more general list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_simulation_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_simulation_game I recommend: Conflict: middle East political simulator Shadow President There's also an interesting one reflecting Stalin's challenges after world war 1 - he has to choose between guns and butter to prepare for the coming conflict with Hitler. Don't remember the name...
- erehweb 4y ago
  Stalin's Dilemma. https://www.old-games.com/download/4428/stalin-s-dilemma https://www.old-games.com/download/4428/stalin-s-dilemma The author's "No Greater Glory" on the US Civil War is also very good.
  - vijayr02 4y ago
    That's the one, thanks!

pornel 4y ago

I'm currently obsessed with an idea of scaling SimCity-like simulation to a whole country. Since it's infeasible to place roads and buildings manually at such scale, it would have to have an AI to grow cities automatically based on simulated demand and higher-level policies.

konschubert 4y ago
Why sim city and not cities skylines? (I don't have an opinion either way, just curious.)
- pornel 4y ago
  I've just used a classic name for the genre. I'm a big fan of Cities: Skylines. At a country scale some simulation techniques need to change. For example, tilemaps become ridiculously inefficient (a byte per 10m^2 becomes tens of GBs), so they either need some form of compression, or the simulation has to use vector-based maps instead (more like Cities Skylines). Another quirk is that at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter, and that starts looking just like a normal distribution of the simulation data you put in.
  - prionassembly 4y ago
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emergent+behavior+agent+based+simulation&t=brave&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emergent+behavior+agent+based+simu...
  - ouid 4y ago
    >at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter This is very untrue, which is why this problem is infeasible.
    - l33t2328 4y ago

assbuttbuttass 4y ago

I'm really enjoying Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic It lets you control a small country and build basically everything from scratch, factories, railways, housing. Honestly it hits most of the points you describe above.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ajmurmann 4y ago

Maybe City State? https://store.steampowered.com/app/774351/Citystate/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/774351/Citystate/

discardedrefuse 4y ago

I think the Tropico games covers a lot of this.

pgruenbacher 4y ago

U want victoria 3 game by paradoxplaza

tdrgabi 4y ago

Suzerain - does that, more from the political pov. You are elected president of a somewhat democratic country. Then you are presented with choices and the game starts.

munk-a 4y ago
I'd also highly endorse Suzerain - but I don't know if it's a great fit for them. Suzerain is essentially a political narrative game where the player is navigating through an amazingly deep set of pre-scheduled events and crises and trying to effect change. It's also strongly influenced by Turkish politics, specifically the rise of Erdogan, which was a very complicated time for Turkey.

DylanSp 4y ago

I think Paradox's games would be up your alley, with the upcoming Victoria 3 probably being the best fit due to its focus on economic details and sociopolitical dynamics.

munk-a 4y ago
Victoria 2 was an absolute favorite of mine. I'm excited to see what they'll manage to do with Victoria 3. Vicky 2 unfortunately suffered from a pretty rough UX beyond even what EU3 & HoI3 had in terms of information visibility and user interactions.
- DylanSp 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm really excited too. Vic2 is my favorite concept of the Paradox games; simulating economics, industrialization, and mass politics like it does is a great idea, allowing for a grand strategy game where the everyday lives of your populace still very much matter. But the UI's not great, the economic simulation is kind of janky, it's much more railroaded and inflexible than the modern games, and it's extremely Eurocentric.

fxtentacle 4y ago

I would like to have a civilization where you start on earth and then mid-game you launch your rockets and colonize another planet with aliens.

TrueSlacker0 4y ago
Before we leave is somewhat similar. Build up a civ on 1 planet, scale to multiple planets, survive space whales... https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/
genocidicbunny 4y ago
This is basically what Civ 2 + SMAC/X is.

sogen 4y ago

There are plenty of boardgames to choose from: - World in Flames - Churchill - Fort Sumter - Food Chain Magnate

sogen 4y ago
Also - A Distant Plain

malfist 4y ago

This somewhat reminds me of Majesty series of games. You built cities and paid for people to be educated, but the goal was to defeat monsters, but your only control was to place bounties on them. The populous would do whatever they wanted.

criley2 4y ago

I have been thinking about this concept / similar concept for a long time. My chief complaint with Civilization games is that they've become a history-themed board game. A fun board game, but less and less it doesn't feel like a history simulator. The problem with "country" simulator is that countries are a more modern concept, the vast majority of human civilization doesn't feature strong nation concept. How do you model a country that goes from Villanovans to Romans all the way to Italians? How do you model a civilization which can boom and collapse? How can you set the systems up to support things like the mayan collapse or the bronze age collapse? The fall of the roman empire? Technological regression? How technology truly transforms culture, engineering, politics, etc? Adding +1 to a score is nice and dandy but how you simulate your nation having dynamic classes enjoying luxuries based on location, industry and technology? I want to see that the urban elite are using silver utensils while the farmers are stuck on wood. I want to see that the civilization used wood too fast and used it all up, causing a collapse. I actually envision the map as a grid with each grid holding information about the people there. Population, class, technology, industry, culture etc. A rural tile would have low population and be influenced by other tiles. An urban tile might be generating let's say `copper age 3` and in a radius around it for some distance, their tools would be upgrading towards that level. But invading and pillaging this urban tile might lead to those levels dropping, setting a region back in many ways. The hardest part I have is that I just want a pure simulation with no user input. Gamifying it ruins the purity of my simulation and leads to civilization the game!

von_lohengramm 4y ago
If you haven't already tried them out, I'd highly recommend the Rhye's and Fall of Civilization (RFC) genre of mods for Civilization IV. Civs spawn in their historical period (and location) and are given a set of historical goals. Maya may have been doomed to fail, but the historical victory goals make every country unique and interesting. A stability mechanic keeps countries in check and provides proper friction to nonsensical actions. Persia is much more capable of conquering and stabilizing the Middle East than say Japan would be. Economic downturns give instability; barbarians pillaging the Greek countryside could be the final straw leading to the collapse of Alexander's empire. Each civ also gets their unique power (before Civ 5 did it!) in addition to their unique unit(s) and building(s) that help them orient towards and accomplish their historical goals. Greece's Great Person generation bonus will help (and is probably necessary for) them to achieve their goals of being the research a number of techs. Persia's power helps them manage instability from maintaining a far-reaching empire. Overall, RFC essentially builds a new game on top of Civ4. The best part is that there's a number of RFC-derived modmods with varying locales and mechanics. Here's a few that I would highly recommend: * RFC Dawn of Civilization[0] - An actively developed fork of the original mod that keeps the "vanilla" feel and the global map. * The Sword of Islam[1] - A Middle East themed variant that although is long-abandoned is one of the most polished modmods * RFC Europe[2] - Self explanatory. Focused on Europe starting from the rise of the Franks ending with the Industrial Revolution. [0] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-dawn-of-civilization.533861/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-dawn-of-ci... [1] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-sword-of-islam-rfc-medieval-middle-east.373155/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-sword-of-islam-rf... [2] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/rhyes-and-fall-of-europe-starting-information.363679/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/rhyes-and-fall-of-eur...

rcfox 4y ago

It's somewhat old, but the Caesar series might be what you're looking for.

jonny_eh 4y ago
Isn't that more of a city builder, like Sim City? I only ever played Pharaoh, so I may be off.
- rcfox 4y ago
  It does start off like that, but I think after you start an industry within your city, you gain access to empire management, where you start organizing trade between other cities, building roads, managing armies, etc. It's been a long time though, so I might be misremembering.
  - forty 4y ago
    It's really mostly the cities, outside of the city management is really secondary (at least in Caesar and Zeus which I have played the most). I strongly recommend the whole series, they are really great games.

einpoklum 4y ago

Special bonus action subgame for Afghanistan: Exfiltrate stolen central bank funds from the US :-) https://therealnews.com/afghan-central-bank-calls-us-theft-of-7-billion-injustice-to-people-of-afghanistan https://therealnews.com/afghan-central-bank-calls-us-theft-o...

hereforphone 4y ago
Plus free equipment donated by the USA. Plus no media coverage at all covering your atrocities because the media is aligned with those that pulled out, so everyone's going to focus elsewhere (Ukraine as an example). I lived there for more than a year and a half. The things happening there now are terrible. But you don't know about it, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it right now. It's a massive tragedy.

rixrax 4y ago

That would be a fun game. Do as well as you might, and then in the end, you get screwed over by one or more of the global powers. Would you like to play a nice game of Kobayashi Maru?

pwillia7 4y ago

I'm sure it will end up costing $10k USD for all the DLC, but Vicky 3[1] might come near this in some ways... probably still too macro though. [1]https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/

von_lohengramm 4y ago
Unfortunately, Victoria 3 is rather unfun due to a number of fundamental flaws. The trade system is even more tedious micro than HoI4's trade system. Plus, the simplifications to the economic simulation introduced (chiefly infinite supply and complete lack of stockpiles) remove most fun mechanics (and a sense of realism). In Victoria 2, a very strong strategy as an early industrializer is to stockpile machine parts to delay other countries from industrializing. Victoria 3 simply has no analogue intentionally. Heck, Victoria 3's embargoes can't even be country-specific, they're good-specific and not even absolute! To top it all off, the developers are very explicitly encoding their political biases into the game's balancing. There is simply no reason to not be woke in Victoria 3. The only benefit that you receive for not being extreme lib-left is the ability to magically make more infrastructure appear with more "authority" mana, but the amount gained is insignificant. I'm sure mods will make the game somewhat more fun and I'm probably going to buy the game for that reason, but after playing the beta I have absolutely no faith in Paradox's ability to live up to Victoria 2 despite it being a heavily flawed game that ended up being mostly a commercial failure. The worst part about all of this is how much effort they're spending on completely inconsequential things, like replacing the icons for POPs with horrendously ugly, anachronistic 3D characters. Something tells me that it was just an attempt to recoup losses from CK3's development. But don't worry, I'm sure Paradox's newfound console audience will enjoy Import-Export Trade Deal Manager 2022 and keep the company afloat.
- pwillia7 4y ago
  Well that's a bummer. Thanks for the info

muzani 4y ago

Check out the Clarus Victoria games, especially Predynastic Egypt. It's not quite a city builder, but closer to Civ. You start from building a settlement - some basic fields, huts, cemeteries, temples, barracks, and so on. It's nice, the map changes based on progress, and you end up growing from a city to taking territories up and down the nile. Marble Age is notable too and has some mechanics unique to the game. Story is mostly the same, but there's three city states with slightly different tech trees. E.g. you'd need to fight the Persians at some point. Athens would be the classic path of farming, making alliances, building a wall and armies. Spartans need to raid for slaves for growth, but hold off on killing neighbors before facing Persians. Corinth would be more trade based and consider buying mercenaries and buying out the other city states. I've bought all of them because they're an excellent ratio of time for fun as far as games go.

balaji1 4y ago

a similar but smaller policy based simulation game: You are the government leader of a nation and a new pandemic is starting. The science is not clear yet. How do you manage as the leader? What policies do you set up? What research do you pursue? Along with variables of budgets, economy, population morale, upcoming elections, travel, etc. If there was a good model of how the policies affect economy especially, it would reveal to the players how hard lock-downs are on the economy. If the dynamic between the federal state and city governments are modeled, it would show us how actual policy implementation happens. Just even how hard it is to test and track the spread of a pandemic. This could indicate to people how hard it is to lead in such a situation. At the same time help the player evaluate how things were handled recently.

axus 4y ago

CivMC is starting up tomorrow. It's a Minecraft server with 100+ people organizing into nations, building out their facilities, and arguing over land. The planning level decisions are a little simpler than you're looking for; where to put farms, roads, housing, vanity projects, and military structures, and when to replace them. But the fun is that you're working with real people to make it happen, instead of doing everything yourself. Nominally it's an experiment to see which government and organizational structures are the strongest, though being a multiplayer game it can devolve into who's fighting skills or automated bots are the best.

jollybean 4y ago

These are not the issues. If you were to 'take over Iraq' the first thing will happen is that one of your political challengers will use all of their means to usurp you. The issues are power, control, corruption, clan loyalty, incompetence, dysfunction, bureaucracy, radicalism, laziness, embezzlement, short nearsightedness, lack of key resources, petty infighting, political inconsistency and duplicity from supporting nations, bureaucracy etc.. What happens when the entire system is corrupt? The Judiciary, Police, the Army, the politicians? Everyone is trying to embezzle, selling votes, stuffing ballot boxes, using multiple ledgers, giving their family members jobs, handing out MD's to the rich kids? Some Billionaire owns the TV Station and is lying about you daily, destroying your ratings. There are protesters outside your door while you're trying to 'plan the buildings'. The guy who funded your campaign to ascension wants special state-guaranteed contracts. The rebels in that 'ugly border area' have killed some civilians and the locals want blood. ... and consider that many of the same kinds of constraints exist even in modern countries. 'Building Bridges vs. Schools' is completely pedantic exercise. They should make the game called 'Saddam' and see how a regular person might fare at that 'job'.

imtringued 4y ago
Pull the rug with negative interest rates and land value taxes and general anti rent seeking policies to make corruption highly unprofitable. If you get 10 million through corruption you are basically set for life in a positive interest/rent seeking environment because interest acts like a force multiplier on your original act of corruption that gets stronger over time. So your personal goal is to earn as much money as possible, as early as possible and through any foul means. I.e. the reward function strongly favours corruption. With a negative interest rate, corruption no longer guarantees a high social status and automatic wealth accumulation which means you will have to do honest work until you retire if you want to keep your money. Automatic wealth accumulation is the primary metric that makes money laundering profitable or not. If you can only make 25% of the stolen money clean you can still grow it exponentially over time after it is clean. If the land value tax is paid out as a dividend then everyone, even the destitute, would benefit from classic USA style homeowner corruption (artificially distorting the allocation of land by restricting it's use). Another form of corruption would be to spend your student loan on Bitcoin when it was still under one thousand and then skipping college because you "made it". You earned money without producing anything, you are a net negative to society if you don't work for even a little bit.

itzprintz 4y ago

Heart of Iron 4 mixed with Millennium Dawn: Modern day mod is something that resembles what you’re writing about, but on bit on a higher level. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2777392649 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27773...

dwd 4y ago

What about Colonization? I probably spent more time playing it (and Alpha Centauri) than Civ.