Sovereign dynasties - genetics, reputation and eugenics

I like the Ideas on a Sovereign having a certain Reputation! ... Probably heroes, Mercenary Heroes, Assasins, Adventurers, and Family members can all have various reputations, which affect the armies they join and the cities they are posted in. As well as how others react to them.

Hm, eugenics by definition is only possible once you know genetics. If you don't, you are just following a gut instinct. Now, it is rather difficult to breed humans to reach a particular trait - we have long gestation periods and even longer time to reach adulthood. Not to mention you need a large population to see the results of your crossings, therefore it is unlikely to see substantial gains if you only cross King with Queen, Prince with Princess. Furthermore, many human traits aren't exactly inheritable in significant ways or have a heavy dose of environmental influence. For these reasons, I can't see how to apply it properly in this game unless, of course, in the looks of your King's children.

Reputation/Prestige is a different beast. Again (thrice today!) I bring forth EU III to the parlor. It has both Prestige (measuring how fantastic your country appears to be) and Reputation (how honorable or despicable you are). Prestige adds bonus to a lot of things, including espionage, number of merchants etc. Reputation is a thin line: you gain too much of it and you start to get bad looks from your neighbors. Prestige in Elemental can work the same way, with different conditions, of course: you kill a dragon, you gain prestige; you come to aid your ally, you gain prestige; you refuse to help the starving tribes on your borders, you lose some; you lose a war, you lose a lot of prestige. Reputation, however, is a little trickier because Elemental does not seem to have a casus belli system. I must ponder on it further.

well i would argue that a civilization wouldnt need to know genetics to in order to apply an intelligent eugenics breeding program to their lives. look at the breeding of animals, specifically dogs, they have been breed for thousands of years to accentuate specific traits.

while your environment does play a huge role in a persons life there are many traits beyond esthetics that could be transfered into the lineage, good and bad.

now as for humans, perhaps it would be a stretch or at the least impractical with the long gestation and maturation rates. as for how it would playout in the game im unsure as it was just an idea to extend the potential of a genetics system.

of all these ideas i would like to see the reputation system be implemented.

Heh I already made the argument long ago for a Bene Gesserit breeding program. Of course if it was as detailed as i would like it would totally overwhelm the rest of the game. but it is definitely a fun idea.

Yes to finneglot, IRL you do need to have a large number of crossbreedings to determine which traits dominate etc., but for game purposes it would not be hard to lay down some simple genetic rules of the probability of passing a given trait on and also for game puposes you could make it a given that  such traits could be (scryed, whatever) at the child's birth so you would not have to wait until adulthood to determine what the result was. We are not asking for an actual true to life genetics simulation here.

At any rate, I don't expect any type of genetics program to be in this game, I would just like one. i ahve about 5 games worth of ideas I would love to see in this game, but honestly if they all went in the game would probably be unplayable.

Hm, I still think adding any kind of genetics would be too complicated to the game. This can become a game on itself, screening magically the King and Queen to see all their traits, then play them out to see the chances of breeding a children with characteristics X, Y and Z - or better, choosing the right sperm and ovule to give the right characteristics. Ah, you might also need to screen all the wanna-be Kings or Queens pretenders to see if they are fit and then play out how the crossing would be. The emergence of new traits would also need to be included, or else you will just have clones after a while. This would be good for Genewars II, but beyond the point for Elemental IMO.

Might still be worth two or three expansion packs. I try to hide from ads, but the equate-spending-with-love season is here again, and I'm constantly reminded of how quickly yesterday's wonder-tech becomes today's taken-for-granted feature. Players can learn as long as they want to, and what with that wacky Moore's law and all, the hardware's mostly waiting on us when it comes to complexity in a Civ-style game.

This business of disliking something as a 'game in itself' has never really happened to me, but then I've never been able to have fun playing anything but really large maps, so I'm ignorant when it comes to 'TBS skirmishes' and whatnot. My hope for the larger TBS genre, if not necessarily for Elemental, is to see the games come to include a sort of grand modularity that lets players choose to include or exclude large chunks of complex functionality based on their individual tastes without worrying that they are crippling the AIs or giving them wild bonuses.

Hear hear GW!

If I really let myself go nuts I would love to see the abililty to implement complete government types - not talking abstracted "bonus this or negative that" but say in EWOM it would be cool to be able to groom your offspring to be somewhat independent minded city/state rulers - obedient to you but yet with their own personalities that they would try to accomplish what you want but THEIR way.

It would be great if you could in one game set up an heir that was pretty much a totalatarian subject only to you, in another game set up a council that ALL of your heirs would participate in (more ideas but also slower to act due to bureacracy and power plays, etc.

I would like to see a breeding system with a whole host of attributes and varying degrees within each attribute that you could fiddle with.

I would love to have to be torn between the choice of sending a heroic descendant out to fight but be torn because i also did not want to endanger his genes for the next round of the breeding program.

I'm not as big on the black ops/spymaster aspect, but I wish for those that did that there was an in depth spymasters desk.

I wish that every single resource in the game was a finite unit that you could either micromanage it from the point that it came out of the groun until it ended up in the trash heap, but also that you could let "market forces" move around as needed and that you could micro as much or as little as you wanted.

And about twenty other things. But I am honest enough to say that a game like this that had the amount of depth in all areas that I would like would probably be played and loved by maybe a few hundred people at best, and at worst even though I love the idea, I might hate the reality.

When I found out about this whole breeding thing my thoughts instantly went to Naruto. What if in Elemental there were a select few powerful abilities that could only be used by those with the right genes? In Naruto these were called bloodline limits. One of the most powerful of these was an eye technique called the Sharingan that allowed it's user to read his opponents movements and to copy any technique an opponent used. If a user had great enough genetic potential when he became skilled enough he could use the eye to cast powerful illusions and damaging spells (strange I know).

This is the kind of thing that you could build an entire stratedy around. Imagine at the start of the game you pay (in creation points) a hefty cost to have this ability. Your offspring would inherit it. So in battle your channelers could learn any spell they saw cast. And would be able to read their opponents casting greatly increasing the effects of counter-spells. But there's a catch(beyond the huge cost at the game start). Everyone would want this ability. So you would have to guard your family very carefully, marrying off your daughters would be dangerous especially if they were skilled with the technique as their children then could inherit it. Keeping the most skilled of your heroes loyal would be vital too because if they defected they could have children who could match your power. Imagine the awesomeness of having to hunt down a traitor before he could pass the power on to his offspring.

It hasn't happened to me as well, but towards your general point: fair enough.

denryu may have said it best.

i would love to play a game that has genetics and bloodlines but in the end may only muddle the spirit of elemental.