Re: [FT] Avalanche's Imperium

> Well, you also get into "Sure, we can theoretically
> build 150 battleships, but we havn't got the senior
> and mid-level officers, nor the Petty officers to man
> them" and you start having to balance crew quality
> with naval size.  How much can you ramp up your
> training programs and how much with that cost?  Is it
> better to open a new school for engineering officers,
> or lay down a dreadnought?
>
> Also, capital warships have a stupidly long lead time
> to build, and I've never seen a game that adequately
> enforces that limitation on 'em.  Or how about "Look,
> we just invented the Uberbeam.  I want to retrofit it
> to my 90% complete battleship, but it's going to
> require redesigning the power distribution net from
> the ground up.  That'll take another year. . . "

Try the old Imperial StarFire; not the streamlined GSF.  Old Imperial
StarFire will show you why you really don't want to keep track of all
that
by pen and paper...  While it doesn't have engineering schools, it does
keep
track of how many personel your empire can have in service.

> Or maybe your people are just bloody sick of the draft
> requiring them to spend 5 years in space getting blown
> up.

Why follow the US Korea/Vietnam era incompetent draft policies.  Have
them
stay in the service tell it's won...

> Infrastructure investments are rarely handled well.  I
> mean, if you've got a big military, but crap education
> systems, health care, and other infrastructure, you
> start looking a lot like Iraq.
>
> Oh, and shall we discuss domestic politics?

Well, just as soon as you get about two dozen high end servers, a couple
of
hundred programers, designers, economists, mathmaticians, statisticians,
etc., to build this game; I'm sure it will be really awesome.  But
seeing
how I don't have the hardware to play it, I think I'll just stick with
games
that abstract all those things into something I can manage.  I.E., all
that
stuff is great, but what's the point if it is so unplayable that it
takes
two days to game 15 seconds...

ias