Disclaimer 😳

This is a post that I have already done in another site forum.

Short version 😀

In a poker game the richest player always wins.

In a contemporary war the strongest economy always wins.

In the post-scarcity almost infinite-resource future the faction with the most computation capability (from now on CC) will always win.

Long version 😯

Information is power but as any power source it needs to be harnessed.

The future interstellar civilizations will need the capability to stock it, to retrieve it but even more to analyse it.

The quantity of data will be staggering and it will (it is already) impossible to let the raw informations been checked out by a human (or any other organic intelligent being) analyst.

I have the strong feeling that even the A.I.s will be bored to death doing this kind of job.

In the end the quality of the information you have on the universe should be dependent at the CC that you can assign to that task.

Your CC will impact your game in other ways also:

Cheapest is your CC more less expensive are all the related activities. As all the activities will be CC related that means that everything will be cheaper for you.

Any confrontation/conflict real or virtual will be always won by who can think about it more. The winner will just out compute the loser.

This means that any resource that can help you expand your empire CC is a strategic resource that merit attention, expansion, exploitation and even war.

What will be the ultimate CC expanding resources?

Black holes.

Please look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_computation

If it seems far-fetched welcome to modern physics, the modern physicists are so far-fetched that they are leaving the vast majority of the SciFi writers behind in the dust. This is where the future is being imagined and in some ways invented.

Now, in our 4X TBS/RTS space games, black holes can cover very different roles depending on your empire technological level: space hazards, research station locations, energy sources, ultimate computational devices.

As I don’t think that time travel has a place in our games I will leave that aside.

Coming back to the CC by herself I really think that this is a more interesting indicator of your empire capability than things like agricultural output. If your citizen are short on bread they can always eat croissant, but nobody nowadays and even less in the future can be left without internet.

Short version 😀

How and how efficiently we will be able to communicate between interstellar distance. The communication techs and their limitations will define how an interstellar empire will work more than anything else side of the ftl drive capability and the two can be the same in some scenarios.

Long version 😯

This clicking around the star map making everything follow our orders in real time is so unreal that it breaks every time my suspension of disbelieve.

The minimum would be to put at the game start some geordie-like gobbledigock to explain it.

Even better would be to manage the situation and make a problem become an asset of the game.

Order delayed or lost are the way of life now and in a game can make a boring strategic situation a tense race against the time.

Disrupt the enemy communication network can be a primary military (and intelligence) target.

Completely different way to communicate can make two civilization extremely different beast to manage and almost a different game to play (and a nightmare to A.I. unfortunately).

Nowadays it seems that just say tachion will solve everything, well think again, but not to make your developing life harder but to make a game much more interesting.

Short version 😀

Is that a dimension in your pocket or you are happy to see me?

Long version 😯

As we can somehow define the technological capability of an ancient civilization looking at the approximation of the Pi number they were using so it stand to reason that a good measure of the capability of future and/or alien civilization can be the number of dimensions they use in their day by day life.

We are quite used to our 3+1 dimensions but they are hopelessly inadequate to describe complex macro and micro phenomena.

The M-theory, an attempt to marry general relativity (read gravity and macro) and quantum mechanics (read all the other forces and micro) ask for eleven dimensions!

Of course that kind of measure will have to be married with the research system and at each new step meaningful developments will have to be provided but… if it was simple everybody would have already done that.

Some interesting posts here bertipa.

With communication, I think this could be implemented in a game to make it more realistic. But there would be a downside, the game would take forever to play and it would make head-2-head play with real players almost impossible. Because you have to keep game session times down to under an hour at the maximum to keep peoples interest.

On empire computation, i guess is loosely covered by the espionage options in some games. But I could see how if expanded to getting real intel on everything in the game this could be powerful or even have the ability to sell this knowledge to the NPC or real player. Or even have the ability to maybe send false info to see what transpires as well. Then on the other hand I think computation only really comes into play in larger games that take several hours or days to complete. This wouldn't be to viable for a 1-2hr long gaming session.

I'm looking to 4X Grand Strategy here, a game should last a few days 🙂