The past week or so, I've been looking at the web site & forum for a game that has some great ideas about how to model diplomacy, limited wars, lots of "neutrals", etc... It isn't a science fiction game, but still lots of ideas there that could be applied in SE4. I got turned onto it by a review in the same issue of "PC Gamer" that reviewed SE4. Coincidentally, this other game has loads of things in text files, only one guy programs it and supports it with lots of patches, and there is an active modder community and friendly relatively flame-free forum. Very similar to SE4 in many ways, except the setting is the expansion of various European powers 1492-1792. Also coincidentally, the same guy did both reviews, really said nothing bad about either game, but gave both games an 80% rating (I guess he doesn't get the attraction for deep grand strategy games without a lot of graphic glitz). Unfortunately, you can't get this game in the US until later this month, but it has been out in Europe for a very long time.
I won't describe it in detail, if you want to see for yourself go to
http://www.europa-universalis.com.
As far as ideas for SE4, just capturing a province does not mean you get to keep it. To get peace, you have to negociate a peace treaty and there is a limit to how much territory you can take in one bite (based on how bad you are beating the other side). Most stuff you capture has to be given back at the end of the war (to keep one province you might have to capture several). There are costs in internal stability and money to get into or stay in wars, so you can't just stay at war forever and keep gobbling provinces. There are lots of interlocking alliances as well, so you can't just beat up on one country by itself very easily. I really can't describe it all, but my mind is full of ways the same concepts might be applied in SE4. Of course, to make this work in SE4 you'd have to create severe difficulties in just nuking planets to death instead of invading - like the ideas we've discussed for making it impossible to kill the Last few by bombardment, severe diplomatic penalties for genocide, maybe even internal stability penalties for genocide, as we've talked in other topics.
Diplomacy, limited wars, etc...
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