i think types of sci fi technology and non sci fi technology should be unlocked or disabled before a game by the player. and if it is possible to discover, ai should be able to unlock it just like the player.
ai shouldn’t slow down to make the player win. game over is also an option.
i mean, there can be an easy mode, but that ai should be slow all the time irrespective of how far ahead or behind it is
when you’re losing, you can try to play better and advance even faster than them to catch up. if you have spies, the technologies you steal would bridge the gap faster if the bridge was longer? they wouldn’t protect very simple technologies to them that are very advanced and crucial to you
i think, if an AI civ gets too advanced, the game should make it automatically hostile to you, no matter how friendly it was at the beginning, so that you don’t end up in a limbo where you’re the junior partner, they have more diplomacy with aliens, it is moreso watching a simulation, the game playing itself rather than you playing it
FTL must be the beginning of the space stage. It has to be that
There should be big changes between the stages, right?
What has changed in our daily lives since the apollo programs to the moon? NOTHing.
It wouldn’t be easy to unify the planet. Even if you do, it is likely that mars would declare indipendence we colonise it.
But ftl is a crucial change. You could move between planets. And stars. There wouldn’t be communication time delays. You could hold more than one planet. And if you can have multiple planets’s resources, it would be very simple unifying your home planet. Imagine you are the Dutch, with your steam ships, and colonising Indonesia, except, the whole world is Indonesia. The first state to discover ftl would have a very big advantage. All the other countries, their supply lines would be easy targets. Space travel would be so easy. You could build everything in space right after mining them from asteroids. Most iron on earth is in earth’s core. It isn’t very helpful. Space is the future. Rockets are not. England couldn’t hold America. Speed makes countries large. Long travel times tear them apart. No railways, no Russia. Mongols immediately splintered. So did Latin America. They didn’t had roads in the jungle, darian gap, andes, etc. When lots of travel happens quickly in space, over the orbit, the “natural size” of countries would be larger than planets.