Oberlus wrote: ↑Sun May 05, 2019 3:12 pmActual humans in a country can give a damn about what happens to humans in another country, or even in the same street, as long as they don't identify themselves with the ones suffering.
Sure, but if we try to meaningfully model such detailed dynamics, the resulting complexity will dwarf even the complexity of a combined species-empire/colony empire relations mechanic.
We don't try to implement SimEmpire, as interesting such a game would be.
We need to stick to the more obvious and general dynamics where the Abbadony in your empire are most certainly going to be very upset if you start slaughtering the population of one of the Abbadony colonies, and will start hating the empire for such an atrocity.
Of course you can argue that we can't just assume word of that slaughter will get unhindered to all Abbadonis, especially if the government tries to keep that info contained. To that I'd say, you also can't expect to keep such horrendous and large scale mistreatment of a certain species within your empire completely under the covers, at least not so easily. Both extremes are not very realistic, where realism shouldn't be relevant anyway.
Unless you want to introduce complex game mechanics which allow us to model all the intrinsic workings of how treatment of a certain part of your empire (e.g. one colony of one of your species) affect the rest of your empire (the affected species reacting the strongest, other species reacting based on their values and their relationsship with affected species, reaction of species, ship crews and colonies based on distance, form of government, freedom of communication and travel, countermeasures you put in place to contain potential repercussions to your actions etc.), we have to seriously compromise here.
In the end it boils down to the question what gameplay effects do we want to have in the game the most, and what can we pack into the respective mechanics before things get too complex. We won't be able to get anywhere near something "realistic", all that relationship stuff is far too complex and nuanced in reality.
I think it's quite reasonable to expect the same from planet to planet. Except for telepathic/unified/hive-mind/pacifist/preservationist species.
In that case you need some means of keeping track of your treatment of a specific species anyway (regardless
how you want to do that more specifically). Might as well go all the way then anyway, as I don't think that will be much more complex.
- Pacifist colonies will be affected by aggressive actions on nearby colonies (regardless of the directly-affected species/colonies).
Not really relevant for this specific discussion, because something like that should be done regardless (either bad treatment of a species is going to affect other peaceful minded species in your empire, or bad treatment of a colony is going to affect other colonies).
- Communal-vision colonies will be affected by actions on any colony of the same species (regardless of the empire of each colony).
- All colonies of a given empire under the effect of certain propaganda/divulgation policies would be affected by certain actions on nearby colonies (they know about them and its public opinion is affected by the empire government actively disseminating the information they want to be known).
Again, in for that you need mechanics in place that allow modelling all these cases, in which case a combined species-empire and a colony-empire relations mechanic will be needed anyway.
- Normal species (no telepathy, no communal vision, no pacifism, no special policies in place...) won't be affected by actions on any other colony.
Well, that's not what I'd prefer, honestly. Actions that can alter a species/colonies opinion of your empire shouldn't be so locally restricted, that sounds just too easy and boring for me.
Would this be less silly and not complex enough to discard KISS?
IMO your suggestions are already on a level with a combined mechanic, so hm. If we want to find out for sure, we'd need to come up with actual models, rules, formulas for the relations mechanics (basically like we did for the tech tree).
The first and most difficult thig will be to determine what influences/affects what in what way and how strongly.
Brainstorming incoming... [snip]
Intersting ideas, but same as above: that all is already on the complexity level I'd expect for a combined mechanic. If you want that level of detail, you need to come up with a ruleset than is both simple enough to be still KISS, while covering all cases you want to model. You certainly enjoy challenges...