Re: Traitor
In addition to command points, MOO2 also addressed the swarm thing by economics. You couldn't afford to build thousands of ships.
I do agree that Alpha Centauri was a successor to CivII. There were a few things about it I did not like. One was that the scenario was too fixed. Another, related to that, was that you could not turn off PLanet. The great thing about CivII was that you could make scenarios about almost ANYTHING. With AC, no matter what you changed in the part of the game easily accessible to modders, you were still stuck playing in the AC storyline. The other thing I did not like was about units. Even for a game on that sort of scale, units should represent more that 1 vehicle or squad. I mean, a bae is obviously a domed city with thousands of inhabitants. The way things were set up, you really couldn't do mods on any of the things units were built of, either. I think the concept is good, but it needs some modification.
If I was going to do a 4X game that takes place ON a planet (which I'm not, never having programmed in anything more advanced than Turbo Pascal), I would let you design vehicles & squads similarly to AC, only without the graphics for every chassis & component so you could roll your own easier. However, units would be built out of squads & vehicles as in Norm Kroger's TOAW series. I would use a somewhat simplified combat system based conceptually on TOAW, as well.
Of course, I would use a hex grid. I've never understood the irrational predjudice of most computer gamers against hex grids. A square grid creates a huge movement distortion because of diagonals, which hex grids eliminate. The earliest board wargames used square grids, and often introduced complexities like charging you 1.5 MP to move diagonal instead of just 1 to deal with the diagonal problem. Hex grids became nearly universal once introduced because they solve that problem so cleanly.
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