>>5747582>>5760894A while back I read this article
https://www.eurogamer.net/can-you-make-an-anti-imperial-empire-gameabout some designers who tried to conceive of a 4X videogame without an empire. (The conclusion I got from reading that insanely long interview is... no. It sounds like a rather dull meandering anaesthetised game setting).
Similarly, I read some of Ursula LeGuin's essays that she wrote on fantasy, collected within her revised annotated 1993 edition The Language Of The Night, where she explained her reasoning behind trying to conceive of a fantasy society that eliminated gender differences, rape and war, ie literally the antithesis of this
>>5756465>>5742093>>5742072>>5741416Ursula LeGuin speculated in her novel that if you could eliminate gender differences, you could obviate war. Her analysis is quite intricate from an anthropological perspective but appears to entirely neglect the economic domain that underpins conflict. I don't remember her fiction too well, I read some of Earthsea (maybe the Tombs of Atuan?) as a child I remember the Ged Sparrowhawk and the boat thing but found the overall series a bit inconclusive. Also I read her Omelas parable (ahem borrowed from Dostoyevsky Karamazov hmmm). Just as with Tolkien and Beowulf I think maybe can sidestep LeGuin and access her source inspirations eg Laozi and Zhuangzi instead
Playing Master Of Orion 2, I can see it is a complex genre defining game, but I am not too fond of it. (Maybe I am just terrible lol) The game feels a bit formulaic in its worldview (what, you can just drag and drop people into any occupation? Set tax rates at whatever you want? Democracy makes spies worse?? Build a stock exchange and get instant wealth???) and counterintuitive, it seems like there is a set of complex strategies that must be adhered to and deviating from them results in very rapid and irretrievable defeat. Also what I found is that it feels a bit overeliant on the RNG of the initial galaxy, there are wandering monster encounters and random advisors, if you get a favourable set of starting conditions you can win without doing much at all. (The one time I won, I randomly spawned 6parsecs from the military aggressive cat people, they could not reach me. I just dithered around, then the computer factions somehow randomly voted me as Galactic Emperor, and I won???) Maybe I am superficial but another thing that massively annoyed me was the PICKAXES??? It is the future. There are starships, planetary colonies, tachyon physics, synthetic consciousness. Your UI interface displays pickaxes? Not even drills? aarghh
