Empire Building and RPG Games

Empire building games present a unique set of challenges to developers. As often as not, the most important factor for the subset of gamers that enjoys these types of scenarios is the breadth of options available. This leads to a multitude of scaling issues, including both development aspects as well as fundamental design issues. The fact of the matter is that massive management type scenarios need to allow contradictory elements of customization and automation in order to make scenarios scalable, while at the same time not overloading gamers with features that create a grind fest. When the player is stuck spending all of their time on seemingly pointlessly small actions games can quickly turn into a drag.

When one wants to introduce elements of politics into their scenario things get even more convoluted. Historically, ais have just not had the power to do much more then follow a few prescripted options. Nowadays even with the raw computing power becoming available for complex decision trees the sheer programming expenses require for high powered decision making still pushes the option out of reach for most developers.

The obvious solution to these sorts of problems is to take advantage of the spread of mass communications. There is no reason to waste vast amounts of computing power and development time on AI development when its much simpler to create a social scenario where interacting with each with in a given set of rules creates that scenario that is vastly superior to what developers have been aiming at for years. Its really just common sense that the best way to create a interesting empire building game is to simply focus on rules of interaction while allowing people the freedom to interact with each other to create their own political scenario.

this is a test post to see if my site is working.

This is the inaugural post for my new blog on empire building games.   The purpose of the blog will be to report on the development and game theory of project “Feudal Empire Management RPG”.   There will be posts concerning other games and genres that fall under the broader category of minimal interface MMO’s.    I feel like the term Text Based Game is just a bit to narrow to define the current offerings scattered around the web.   Basically this blog will try to cover MMORPG like games, game development and game design that place their foundations in creating a conceptual universe for players to interact in with out using massive amounts of graphics and animation to advance stories plots or society.