Re: Ideas for the "Rich get richer" problem
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An observation I had while in the car is that this problem really has multiple facets.
1) Enabling the have-not empires to wage effective war
Without giving them free resources, which defeats the purpose of fighting for them
2) Motivating the have-not empires to fight back for territory instead of going to some other continent
The dominant empire will be motivated to stay to reap the rewards of their conquest, but the dominated empires have little reason to stay on the continent.
3) Maintaining the intensity of the battle
Essentially this means both sides of the battle need to be motivated to stay and fight. Penalizing conquest is a way to make the conquerors leave and discourage conquest and intensity, which would lead to some un-fun situations for everyone involved (ghost hacking a continent for the underdogs, not getting to reap the rewards of their conquest for the dominators).
4) Making it difficult to maintain a large amount of territory
This does not happen naturally in PS2 due to the adjacency system making it harder to lose a territory as you have more adjacent territory next to it. This is the mechanic that creates the "front" in PS2, but in extreme cases it can also help a dominant empire maintain their territory. A likely solution involves factoring in territory owned into the adjacency system's mechanics.
These 4 aspects sort of create constraints and show why there is no silver-bullet answer to address this problem. There's been good ideas but I think a combination of ideas is required to address all facets of the problem.
This thread has yielded some good ideas for each of these different aspects. I'm going to think on this more, I think some ideas are converging in my head which I need to put to paper.
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