Hi ColdSteelRainYou have introduced some extremely interesting (and highly valid) points.
I will try to answer them (as best as I can):
"The user interface would need to be substantially changed in order for you to be able to manage more planets and more ships."If this is indeed necessary, I would then tend to agree that this is a potential "show stopper" as the hard-pressed Stardock designers certainly have other more important matters to address.
However, it should prove possible (albeit rather challenging) to play on a substantially larger "campaign map" (featuring the stars and their individual planets). Hopefully it might prove feasible to merely lengthen the list of planets controlled by the player to accommodate even greater numbers.
Perhaps a similar principle could be applied to other relevant components of the user interface.
"There would need to be more control and management features, possibly even sub-AIs assisting the player."I can certainly see how an enhanced level of automated play might well serve to assist the player by relieving some of the (potential) tedium associated with managing a huge array of planets. However, there just might be a few micromanagement fiends who would be happy to fine-tune the economic and industrial capacity of their individual planets.
I must admit that this is a tricky issue that might not appeal to most of the GC2 players.
Stardock would really need to set up some type of DL/DA Anonymous 12-step program to cope with massively increased addiction rates. Big games already take a long time, imagine the impact from playing 7 or 8 hundred hours. Maybe some free legal support to help with the divorce cases...I fully appreciate the underlying serious message. However, surely there must be other people who would truly relish the opportunity of playing at least one GC2 megascenario - I would imagine that this development would do wonders for the Metaverse (with the potential for multi-million point games).
This would surely represent the
ULTIMATE CHALLENGE (and correspondingly the ultimate "bragging rights") to the hard-core GC2 fan. I have read posts (in the metaverse forum) from some very competitive and hard-driven players ....
but the market would be so small that Stardock would never recover the investment, and the majority of users would lose out because other features wouldn't be implemented.As implied above, I certainly appreciate this fact and would most definitely not wish for Stardock to waste too much time with this endeavour. However, it would be great if something like this could be fairly easily incorporated into their next patch. After all, the ability to play really large (and complex) game scenarios is the reson detre behind TBS games ....
