posted 05-07-99 06:44 AM ET     

By this I mean the following: on one of the thousands of posts, somebody characterized the game as a "shopping game". You always buy the the newest thing and the biggest gun. But really, social development isn't that simple. There are always tradeoffs to be made. The choice is 'guns or butter', but in SMAC it's 'guns, then butter, or maybe vice versa'. True there's the planet rating and its consequences, the drones and water levels, but really, just about everything you acquire in the game benefits you with little or no penalty. Even boreholes aren't that devastating. There are exceptions like genejack factories and punishment spheres but they are the exception.

In a game like the magic card game, for example, a lot of the big benefits come with big penalties and a large portion of the strategy rises from minimizing the penalties rather than just maximizing the benefits as in SMAC.