Creative solution to the "end-game problem"?
Elemental Forums
Most TBS games share a flaw that manifests towards the end of a game: It becomes clear that one player is absolutely going to win, but you still have to continue playing without much excitement for hours before the victory actually happens. In multi-player games, the guy who knows he's gonna lose usually just quits - either leaving an imbalancing power vacuum in a game with multiple human players, or else detracting from the satisfaction of the winner actually getting to feel the satisfaction of seeing the victory screen. In single player games it usually means you have to keep playing for several hours when there is no challenge left if you want to see your score or feel like you really won.
An old computer game going all the way back to the Apple II computer had a great solution to this problem (Actually I think the board game called "Life" used a similar idea). The game was a TBS space conquest game (similar to Master of Orion) called Reach for the Stars, and that game was always fun to pay to the very end because of how it handled victory:
At the beginning of the game, you chose scoring multiples in various categories that were kept secret from everybody else but you until the end of the game. The game gave points in different categories like colonization, destruction, conquest, research, diplomacy, happiness, etc. (I forget the EXACT categories, but it was something like that). At the start of the game you would get points to distribute as multiples in the various categories to reflect what was important to your faction. For instance you could create a faction that got 4x the points earned during the game for destruction (killing, burning cities, etc.) but NO points for anything else. Or you could create a race that got double points for the happiness of its citizens and the technologies it researched, but nothing for anything else,or choose to get normal points in 4 different categories if you wanted a more rounded game, etc.
The point of this system is that no matter how well or badly it looked like you were doing at the end of the game, you never really knew for SURE who was going to win until the game actually ended and everyone's personal victory modifiers were calculated into each player's final score.
Not knowing who was really going to win always kept the game exciting and fun to play up until the very end.
It might be a cool idea to assign your victory points a little time into a game so you could assess your starting position before you chose which strategies you wanted to gain points for.
Stardock Forums
At least, nations of giving up players would probably become AI controlled, and that AI could thereafter form alliances. Civ4 had something working this way as a heavily beaten AI would often ask another AI (or human player) his protection, thus becoming a vassal state. Unfortunately, it often occured when they were so heavily beaten that they would be soon wiped out, and somtimes their protector was on another continent. It doesn't mean the idea was bad.
Also, i never told it was unrealistic, i just told i don't like random events that could play too big a role.
) so i can't talk about those in particular, but way too often i've seen events that can really break the game completely for someone, either because they occur too early, or they hit a player already in a bad situation.