Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.
I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.
Stellaris suffers from a lot of simplification. The ethicsand civics lack nuance, and megacorps are just reskinned oligarchies etc etc I bet other people could come up with tons of other examples.
But that’s the goal. Stellaris is not a space civilization simulation game, it’s one half 4x one half roleplaying with a distinct style and flavour and kinda rigid mechanics.
Every time I touch Stellaris I realize that I’m severely disappointment with it.
A question I have in general to people on this post: how to do it “better”? Like how do you represent societal evolution on alien worlds? whatever “better” means
(On a side note, off topic too, I really dislike the species classes. They would work much better with a tag system. For a more realistic, less carbon chauvinist and maybe kinda cool approach, you could differentiate species by their biochemistry. But this is outside of Stellaris’ scope and I think I would enjoy a more esoteric and creative approach like in Endless Space 2
edit: Spore was worse lol)
one of the annoying parts about species in stellaris is how they are so linked with empires
like every empire has a primary species which kinda makes sense early game (when it’s so heavily linked to the homeworld) or for xenophobic empires. But later on, especially with plural xenophilic societies, it’s super weird to still have this thing just kinda being like “yeah this empire belongs to this species”
especially especially dumb with Broken Shackles where from the start there isn’t a majority species and it’s not even based around a homeworld. There is literally no reason to have a primary species (and there is no reasonable way to select one) other than the fact that the game is just set up that way 🤷♀️
also annoying me as I’m writing this, terms like ‘empire’, ‘settler’, ‘colony’ etc, which have fairly specific and moral meanings irl and are then used in this super generic and morally neutral way
There’s not really a good way to do it. If your aliens are humanlike in a vague sense, pre-communist and communist, I guess, with pre-communist being synonymous with a home planet centric economy.
You mention different biochemistries, but the issue there is that would require a lot of novel research. Like, what sort of fossil fuels could be produced by such biology? How would this affect technological development? How does class society proceed? Liberal developers aside, it’s no wonder games with aliens take place after all this annoying worldbuilding would have relevance. Creating real aliens is a massive undertaking.
tell that to my Sabotabbies, a mammalian worker coop that has that negative trait with the sabotabby icon