From my experience with online games that have a similar concept I have noticed the following trends:

1) Often empires/sides are attacked when the controlling player/s are offline. Indeed often there will be organisation to cater for this very event!
2) Players quit often at the very height of their empire or success (they get bored) leaving a huge power vaccuum that can often spoil the entire game.
3) Many players will pick on new players because of the easy victories it gives them.

Possible solutions for Society.

1) Optional vassalage. Have players in established empires sign up for a "Help the Newbie" program. Have new players arrive as colonies/vassals of these players either on a new continent or right next to them. Additionally you can ask established players to offer their own territory for such a purpose and use the newbie as a kind of governor for those provinces! Once the newbie is ready to go they can be granted independence. Give players who help newbies bonuses.
2) Larger empires should have it so that the amount of manpower needed to keep control of larger empires (and stop revolting) should be exponential. For example 1000 men for 4 territories but 10,000 men for 10 (this is based on reality as well, the larger Rome got, the larger the army it needed). Also players who are further ahead should have a complancency penalty of up to 50% on research. For example, the need for America to push ahead technologically is reduced because nobody else can keep up. This means that research is slowed while at the same time others work harder to catch up. (As also happened to Britain in the 1800s when both America and Germany overtook Britain technologically by the start of WW1.)
3) Having it so that countries with 3 territories or more can't be conquered is just asking for a lot of 3 territory countries if you ask me! I'd suggest that players who attack newbies also attract significant 'bad luck' events to their empires (troop morale penalties, loss of soldiering skill due to ease of victories and resulting overconfidence, revolts etc) to discourage such behaviour.

I don't think the goal should be for new players to catch up to established ones as fast as possible. Otherwise there would be very little incentive to grow your society to thriving. Instead, the experience should be fun at every stage, whether just starting or well advanced.

With that said, I rather like your idea of giving new players a unique resource that is usable by other players. It would encourage both new players and established empires to interact with each other. It makes the new player to be in demand by other players, so empires will campaign for them to join.


On a separate note, looking over the Society website, I don't see any suggestion that technology limits will keep large empires from expanding; technology seems to be focused on maximizing use of certain resources. So although you may not have the technology to use a certain province as well as another player, you will still be able to use it to increase your power and potentially expand faster. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what it seems to be getting at.

I think the easiest way to solve this problem is expand the program beyond a galaxy but many many galxies...that way many empires are secluded to only a few opponents...when they advance far enough they can jump ships between galaxies and decide to either conquer the galaxies or protect them...that way you wouldn't have to deal with a really big empire unless they decide to come to your galaxy and conquer you...then some players could also become like gods...whose sole purpose is to protect galaxies (if they are proven worthy), then players who are gods can create something like a new religon and battle with other gods for more religon points or something...I don't know...im just rambling I guess...

I think sheer economics would be the most reasonable way to control any empire. The reason there's 250-something countries in the world is because (at the moment) there's no way to make a world empire work. Small, under-developed countries have a HUGE advantage that developed countries don't: lower quality of life. You know all those commercials about feeding the hungry kids of [insert country here]? Because of those conditions, labor and such is MUCH cheaper. This doesn't have anything to do with size (think India), just advancement (think US). I can't actually think of any games where a country/empire actually MADE things that could be traded.

If they DID make an economic model where empires actually produced things then "young" empries would have a HUGE advantage in that they would have labor that costs next to nothing. It would be a detriment to a more advanced empire to invade and take over because they would lose that source of cheap labor (if the US took over, say, Kenya, then Kenya would be subject to the same wage rates and labor laws that we are).

All of this basically means that the empire with all the weapons, technology, culture, blah blah blah would have an achilles heel: it couldn't actually afford to make hardly anything. It would have to import it all. Take over one of those little/non-advanced empires and they'd end up with a social rebellion when the people weren't able to either get what they were used to or if the empire couldn't afford to provide for the people anymore.

I'm not an econ major (yet) so I can't fill in all the details, nor am I a programer, so I can't say how you would do this in a game, but I can say for certain that the ONLY reason less advanced countries in real life are able to hold their own is because they can provide for larger, more developed countries. When they stop being useful, only THEN are they conquered outright (a la Iraq vs US or Sparta vs Athens way back when).

Phyziks, you have just put into words what I wanted to say! I knew there was some advantage newer countries could have. That's wonderful, I hope that's the way it works.

Pakele, I agree! You were rambling.

Camomilk, I like that you pointed out it should be fun at every level. However, a lot of people don't have fun if they're not competitive overall. I definitely like my idea because of the interaction, too. Of course, I can imagine a newbie signing in and having 5,000 messages from countries asking for the resource... Also, I think that games where every province you get helps you to get more faster are wrong. The bigger an empire, the slower it can react. I think what would happen is that an empire who continues to expand will eventually be attacked where its armies are not. So it will stop growing. Also, the resources required to keep an army of a large enough size should be very high, so that there must be some sort of sacrifice.

Waitingtoconnect, as for number 2, I think that's where the expanding and retracting falls down a bit. A player would get to the biggest, and then just give up. As for the 3 territory countries, I think that's what Society is looking for. They want a game more focused on diplomacy, and your people, than on war and territory.

Also, the fact that people are attacked offline is okay in this game, because the AI is going to be good enough to give them a run for their money, and there can only be so many provinces in contention on a given turn, so you can't go to sleep with a 16 province territory and wake up with 3 provinces. You could wake up with 12, but that's not nearly as bad as the 0 you could have in most games.

Game "balance" is hard if not virtually impossible when you can have a massive empire with a huge army facing a new player who just starts out. One of the built in checks for new players to develope is the 3 provinces rule, so that they survive and can have some fun, but aside from that I don't see how a new player would ever be able to compete with a massive empire. This, I think is why Society calls those who only developes 3 provinces "traders" and those with more "conquerors". But what I believe will happen is that these two will probably be the same, they will all become "weapon dealers" and "conquerors" at the same time, here's what I mean:

In one of the society blogs, there is a brief mention of resources and technologies, and how one player may have one and another would have another, and the two countries would develope independantly in a technological sense. However, I believe what will ultimately happen is that each player will have several resources, but will only be able to focus down one line of technology for one of those resources, which ultimately makes the other resources pretty much useless. These resources, would then be sold or traded to someone who do use them.

Now, let's assume that there is two neighboring players, both has only one resource of steel, stone, and rice. The first decides to focus down the "steel" technology line and develope weapons of war, while the second decides to focus down the "rice" line and develope methods to feed larger populations. The two decides to become friends and trade steel for rice on a 1-to-1 basis. Then the two expand, however, since the "steel" player is limited by how much weapons he has (he only has 2 resources of steel), he can't conquer the entire gaming world, he needs more people to sell him steel so that he can do that. Similarly, the "rice" player can't expand very far either, because he needs more rice to feed his large population.

Don't get me wrong, there are all kinds of problem with the above scenario, such as how the "steel" player will feed his population, and how a "rice" player can expand (perhaps each has some very basic technology in both category, but since the steel player has better weapons, he don't need as many people to conquer, and the rice player can just send a large part of his population to counter his lack of good weaponry - who knows). One thing though, is the emergence of a very clear pattern, that is, one player will always need more steel to expand, and the other player will always need more rice.

So when a new player comes into this mix, next to these two empires that are now bigger than him, he can say, hmmm... well, I'll concentrate in stone buildings, defensive technologies and erm... stone golems? (lol), and trade steel for stone to the steel guy and trade rice for stone to the rice guy. That way, the three of them will work together. With a new source of steel, the steel player is able to expand a bit more, just like the rice player as well. The only question is, will there be any provinces left for the stone player when his erm... stone golems are ready to invade people.

With a balanced resource system like this, I can see it working out. Obviously there will have to be many resources, and balanced out somewhat as well, but if a mechanic was put into place where one player would always need more of a certain resource to expand, then I believe new players will always have a place in the game, even if there are no "free" territories to take over, he could still sell his resources away or something.

  I think Kalin has a point with the idea of several "nations" forming a kind of conglomorate in order to make themselves stronger by sharing resources as well as the idea of there being several resource types that give different options for tech advancement. I would go so far as to say that these kinds of alliances would be a natural part of any game that actually tries to simulate "world" politics and economies.

  I have 2 ideas on the matter.

  1. Why not make it possible to actually make nations? Russia, the US, Germany, Greece and even China all started as seperate and independent city-states or states (Germany was actually tribal, but close enough). All of these pre-nations were divided based on family lines except for the US, which was based on who originally settled a specific area (same principle though. "My great-great grandfather settled this land. That makes it MY land, not YOUR land.) I understand that the game world is going to be "run" by ruling families who serve as avatars for the player. Why not allow those families to create full blown nations? One ruling family would serve as the "federal" government from the strongest "state". The rest of the states would serve their own interests, but still be under the protection/rule/law/etc. of the nation as a whole. This is different from a simple alliance because allies have no ability to influence or control each other besides "if you don't do this then we're not allies". As any stategy gamer knows, this is hardly motivation to do or not do anything most of the time. If instead it were "if you don't do this then you're going to be one little tiny nation against who knows how many big nations" it would be pretty good reason to stick around. Until you just get fed up...which makes my next point.

  2. Thoughout history ruling parties within nations have changed. This can be by social reform (France: Viva La Revolution!), political backstabbing (Caesar), or full on civil war (well... just about every nation out there) to name a few methods. It's not hard to imagine one state grabbing up land, growing stronger, and then either turning on the ruling party directly or getting a good number of the states to back him/her up.  

  These ideas don't really conflict with my previous ones. The labor/quality of life advantage I talked about for new players wouldn't really apply if a player decided to cede from a nation. They would have the same QOL as the nation they split from (which would very likely be much higher than a new player's). The whole idea of this would be to make it REALLY hard to cede from a nation without that nation's blessing (like "yeah, you an leave, and we'll protect you for X number of turns/days/weeks"). It's a built in saftey measure against using the nation idea as an exploit (Join nation, get rich, get tech, ditch nation, try to conquer it or otherwise backstab). I mean, if I belonged to the United State's of Phyziks and one of Kalin's states decided to try the above, I'd be more than happy to pounce on that state and take it for my own (or if we're friends then assist in the retaking).

  Guess that's enough for one post. Got lots of historically based ideas for the politics of a virtual world, but can't really post them all at once.