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Can less be more in strategy games?
Compare two kinds of game , Chess and Diplomacy on the one hand and games like Civ on the other hand. The latter kind are immensely more complicated than the former with vastly more units,bigger maps,many techs etc than the former. That means that strategy in the latter will be richer than the former right? Wrong. Anyone who has played Dip or Chess knows that they can be just as complex and rewarding if not more as compared to Civ. This is precisely because the limited scope of the game means that you have to rely on exact calculation for pretty much every single move. OTOH often in Civ because things are so complex it is impossible to calculate everything exactly and you rely on general rules of thumb. This somehow tends to reduce the intensity that you get in smaller games at least for me.
Don't get me wrong, the super-complex strategy game is still a rewarding experience and from the pov. of role-playing much better than games like Chess. Still I wish game-makers would make a few more games of the Chess kind which have a smaller scope but make up for it with a more intense experience. Another big advantage is that those kinds of games would be shorter (many of us have time constraints and can't really afford the 10-20 hours for a full-fledged game of Civ or SMAC) and it would probably be easier to program a better AI.
This is related to one of my ideas for a "dream game" on Stefu's thread a kind of mini-Civ which would be roughly at the level of abstraction of Diplomacy or Risk but would have economic and technological decisions like in Civ. Would any of you enjoy such a game especially if it had a much better AI than Civ?
Anywat unfortunately it appears that the trend in game-making appears to be in the other direction with games becoming ever bigger and more complex.
[This message has been edited by Kautilya (edited May 09, 2001).]
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