[dogscoff]

So go play Sim City. Sure, it has no warfare, but you only wanted warfare to be a small part of the game anyways.

I've heard some bad things about the latest Sim City games. I wouldn't mind playing "Sim Galactic Empire", but as far as I know that hasn't been made yet. SE4 goes most of the way to what I want, I just want it to go that little bit further.

SE4 is not a war game, it is a strategy game. A war game is just that; war.

As usual, you're trying to divert the discussion into tedious quibbling over semantics. My point (as you well know) is that the focus of SEIV is warfare.

A strategy game is war + economics, essentially.

But the economics- as well as the research, colonisation, ship design, and diplomacy- are all represented simply as support services for warfare. But in reality, it's the other way round. War exists to defend/expand one nation's economics and culture, economics and culture do not exist simply to perpetuate war. (Although there's probably potential for a whole new thread out of this statement.)

Strategy games are not about managing the minute details of your populace. Stuff like that will undoubtedly bog down a strategy game into unplayability if it goes too far into the minutia.

Not necessarily. It would probably involve a lot of extra code, but from the player's point of view things would not necessarily have to be much more difficult or complex. I'm not going to repost all my lengthy suggestions for dynamic populations, improved plague modelling, settlement growth, regime types and everything else, but if you don't remember from the Last time I posted them just believe me when I say that nearly all of the extra work would be done in the background. Not in a "MOO3 taking control from the player" kind of a way, but in a "this is what the indirect results of your actions would be" kind of a way.

What you are looking for is a completely different genre,

I'll grant you that it is a different genre, but not a completely different one. Like I say, SEIV is half way there already.

All I'm really asking for is an empire that actually feels like it's a complex, unpredictable, living, breathing society rather than a collection of variables to be considered when designing my next fleet. Conquering the galaxy is all very well, but I want an empire worth conquering the galaxy for.