Montyphy wrote:While you are "nano"-managing that one unit what is happening to the rest of your forces? Will people be physically/mentally capable of macro, micro and nano managing all at once? Does the "nano"-managing happen at the same playback speed as the rest of the game i.e. the speed selected by the players?
Moreover, does the nano-management actually add anything to the game? If you take control of a sole fighter, can you really change the outcome when there are nukes crashing down around you?
The problem with a game at some many scales is that it is nearly impossible to create a game where the nano scale has any effect on the macro scale. You take control of one fighter, but what are the rest of your fighters doing? What about your fleets? Your silos? The reason that no one has made such a scalable game is that it just wouldn't work as a game.
Barbarossa wrote:...But its like the butterfly effect of chaotic systems, you never know if one small victory could turn the tide..
Chaotic dynamical systems are one of the most misunderstood pieces of mathematics in the history of the world. Mention of chaos theory and the butterfly effect by anyone who doesn't have an advanced degree in mathematics should be punishable by hanging. It is almost as bad as woo-woo mentions of quantum mechanics. Fuck you, Michael Crichton.
First off, chaotic dynamical systems, like the one in which a butterfly might be involved, are modeled using completely deterministic systems. You plug your inputs in, and the result you get will always be the same. There is nothing random about it. Second, such systems are very sensitive to initial conditions, so if the numbers that you put into the model are off by a very little bit, the outcome will be very different (but still entirely deterministic). So, for instance, if you did not take a butterfly into account at the beginning, you will get very different results. Third, it is impossible to predict the magnitude or direction of the variation in observed conditions as the system evolves. If you are making the claim that Real Defcon would be a chaotic dynamical system (the only kind of system in which the butterfly effect makes any kind of sense), then your actions at the low level would have apparently random effects on the outcome of the game (key word: apparently; the actual outcome would be deterministic). They might give you an advantage, but they would just as likely cause you to lose.
Does any of that make sense to you? It probably doesn't---I only have a bachelors in mathematics, and have only spent time studying chaotic dynamical systems in two classes (one of which was, admittedly, a graduate level course; but neither class actually focused on such systems). Even with that background, I don't claim to understand chaotic systems. I know enough that I know when to keep my fucking mouth shut.
Fucking "butterfly effect." Stab! Stab! Stabbity stab stab stab! >:(
xander