@Xivilization
First and foremost, I'm not a huge 4X player. I've enjoyed tactics, city-building, and RTS games in the past, but I never breached into 4X past some Civ 5 with friends, because it was the hot new thing at the time. I understand Civ 5 was more on the casual/entry-level side of the genre, so my opinions won't be super deep, but I think it should suffice for this. Since you're making a game like this, I can only assume you're pretty into the genre, so correct me where I'm wrong.
As I understand it, a major function of the genre is requiring the player to make informed decisions early on in order to spiral their little empire into the biggest, best empire in town. Domination, cultural victory, science victory, etc; there are many ways to become the best civ around. To these ends, there are many available resources and options to focus your attention on, some of them overlapping and some of them unique to their particular method of victory. The player needs to decide on a method of victory and then design a cohesive strategy to achieve it. In order to design that strategy the player needs information that tells them what their resources, tools, and options
do. This is where it gets rough in XXXiv, because I don't understand the effects of all of my options, and so I can't compare them and make an informed decision about what to pursue in order to achieve the method of victory I want. The difficulty of executing this plan should be in performing effectively and managing wrenches thrown into your plans by opposing civs. It should NOT be in not knowing what your options are. To think of it another way, your options here are essentially the controls of the game; would you want to play a fighting game where you don't know how to punch, or what a teep does? Sure, you could figure it out by fumbling your way around and being smashed in the face, but you probably won't get it until the rematch. No big deal in a fighting game, but the scale is MUCH larger in a 4X, so you can see how this is a problem.
So, I see that I have a Fear stat and sometimes it goes up and down, but what does it do for me to have high or low Fear? If I'm given the choice between raising my Fear stat or raising my Religiousness stat, which should I choose? I just don't know, because the information isn't present. That means the choice is arbitrary, and in the moment, it doesn't matter which one I pick. Imagine you're walking down a hallway and you come across two identical doors. There's no further information to allow you to make a meaningful decision about which door would be better to go through; you just pick one and hope it works out. The one you pick could lead you to your destination or it could loop back around to the start of the hallway, and you wouldn't be able to
intentionally (that word is important, because people feel better when they believe they're acting with purpose) make the correct choice until your second time through, so the decision is at best pointless or at worst pointless AND irritating. This arbitrary decision-making is something you really want to avoid when designing a game, because players generally don't care about meaningless decisions and they don't like trial-and-error. Good design flows in as smooth and intuitive of a way as possible, because it means your players will engage themselves, making your job much easier (like I said earlier, disinterested players will stop playing. The less energy you spent coddling their attention span, the better).
And it's not just Fear. If it were just one thing, the player could work it out easily. But when it applies to Fear and Defense and Reputation and Happiness and Religiousness, and I'm faced with a decision to raise (or lower, though I intuit that of those, only Fear could possibly be considered desirable when low) one of them, I'm at a loss because I don't know what they do and how they stack up compared to each other. My best option is to raise one of them en mass and try to figure out what it does, then go back and do the same to all of the others before finally comparing them. This brute forcing method is not fun, and I think it's unnecessary because you, as the developer, could have averted the situation altogether by informing the player before they had to commit to it.
Now, the gameplay loop has you choosing between all of your options at pretty much any time (if you have the energy for it, it's a viable selection). So the situation to choose between all of these under-descripted options exists
constantly. The player is always going to be shown a dozen or so options and asked to pick which one they want, but only half of them make it clear what they do. I know Faith is good, because I can spend it to pray for a bigger dick (though I don't know a bigger dick is useful for something beyond changing my character image until I do it, because the game lies about that during character creation), but Religiousness? It's just this big bar that goes up and down. I surmise the game ends if it empties out, but otherwise it's just kind of sitting there being mysterious. It could function as something very useful, but Hell if I know what it does.
There's a hastily-constructed ramble for you. I don't know exactly where the misunderstanding is, so please let me know what you'd like expanded on.
P.S. The Manage Government thing isn't bugged. I was selecting the same position for multiple followers, so it booted out the previous one. You can't have multiple Chief Scientists!
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