The most complex game?

[licker]

Complexity is going to mean something a bit different to everyone in all likelyhood. What is complex about Dom2? The economic model isn't complex, the equations for combat arn't complex, the magic system isn't complex. What you have in Dom2 are a phenominal number of choices and all those choices multiply on each other to give the illusion of complexity. I would argue that the underlying game elements are not complex at all, what makes the game appear complex are the number of choices available to the player. However, once you pick your nation and god and start actually playing there isn't as much complexity as people may think. There isn't even *that* much information that you need to keep track of from turn to turn. What there is are a large number of units (though you will only ever have access to a small subset of them, and within that subset there will be certain favored units and never build units) and spells (again within the set of available spells there will be obvious choices for use and then 4x as many never cast).

I guess my point is that quantiy /= complexity, other than in a fairly narrow deffinition of complexity.

A game like SMAC also has fairly simple elements so I'm not sure I'd call it complex either, a game like MoO3, though, has very complex mechanics defining economics, combat, and maybe diplomacy, MoO3 is complex, as is EU2 (from the small amount of time I put into it).

If you want to define complexity based on learning curves then things are different again, but I assume that we are looking at the games once a fundamental knowledge of the game mechanics is in place.