This is about the attitude of “gunpower isn’t needed, sure it’s the first rockets, the first bombs, the first good ranged weapons, etc, but by space stage it’s only use would probably be in fireworks and hunting weapons, so it isn’t needed.” It’s technically true! It’s just… kinda silly. Sure, you could evolve without it… but your most likely alternative are guncotton, hydrocarbons, or loosing to civilization that was willing to research this stuff. Any civ that can can and refrigerate food while it’s enemies can’t will probably just win. It’s that busted. You can make rockets with other materials, and guns and bombs are kinda just optional, but would you figure any of that out as quickly as if you’d just done it all at once with gunpowder? You could go far without it but WHYYYY- Plus, drying and salting many foods removes some of their nutrients, and do you really want to smoke anything in space? NO! Air quality is life in space. You need better options by then.
I wonder just how detailed would urban warfare get…
For some reason, I imagined your comment as a sentient creature being exasperated by having to constantly keep its garden free of invasive weed-like plants…
Back to the topic at hand, would there be penalties in war for using or developing outlawed weapons like White Phosphorus?
If someone cares to stop you. I imagine the actual issue is the arms race between journalistic freedom and quality of coverups. In premodern times journalistic freedom was a non-thing but so was quality of coverups so you did war crimes and only if your neighbors didn’t like your victims. Then we oscillated a lot between people protesting or going to war with you over you being evil and you getting to crush dissidents easily. If someone makes a treaty, i suppose the game should support treaties with complex cause and effect, but yeh, it’s just a treaty.
I can guess at some point in late industrial stage you could establish/join some international organization which’d ban certain “unethical” kinds of warfare.
In fact, the reason many “unethical” weapons of war are no longer used is largely due to their obsolescence. Chemical weapons performed well in the positional World War 1, but their use as a weapon became obsolete by World War 2 due to the development of protective equipment and maneuverability of war.
I wonder how late industrial civilizations will handle potential bioweapons?
Like as if a space stage civ attacked them with such weapons? Also do you mean diseases or some sort of “species-designed-to-destroy-the-biosphere”?
Initially, I was thinking of later industrial civs making bioweapons to use on each other. However, it can definitely apply to
as well.
I guess they could try to trigger plagues and stuff in their enemies’ populations, but by that point of development the enemies should be able to treat the outbreaks well, if the bioweapons get through into the population centres in the first place…
Covid-19 still caused major problems even though it wasn’t a biological weapon.
I know, I meant it probably won’t end up going up to the scale of, you know, black death.
Yeah, sure, mustard gas is obsolete, hell, even chlorine gas is obsolete, but tear gas is used every day by cops, and both russia and isreal have used white phosphorus, and both were inspired by the united states using it a few decades ago, and a few decade ago the US was inspired to use it because a few decades prior it had been one of the most brutal weapons in vietnam. Landmines have been used for centuries, even if the traditional minefield is going away, IEDs are as effective as ever, and a few centuries is a good run. Truly cruel weapons are used all the goddam time. Which weapons it is changes, often due to technological progress or whatever enables the technology being useful going away, or due to the political capital better being spent getting people to overlook white phosphorus instead of poison gas, because everyone knows poison gas is evil and it just isn’t worth it, etc. Treaties can and do push people away from some strategies, but they don’t stop war crimes, they subtly push them around.
I wonder if there could be a species which would accept even some sort of a cancer pathogen being an accepted warfare type…
That sounds terrifying! 
Yeah, I went here for “designed to specifically cause very high long-term damage and suffering”-type weapons, which usually get banned irl
This will not be effective in destroying enemy troops, but it can be used to brutally destroy civilians.
Yeah, that’s one of the main points of bioweapons…
Can we, or the AI, engage in Hostile Takeovers of other business?
Most likely the civs will be very capable of doing that, especially the less friendly they are towards businesses which aren’t allied to them.